Skip to content

Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale Logo Fediverso

Social Forum federato con il resto del mondo. Non contano le istanze, contano le persone

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm thankful for the BSD projects, particularly FreeBSD & OpenBSD.

Uncategorized
1 1 2

Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
Post suggeriti
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    0 Views
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today it's OpenSMTPD¹.In the past I've tried to set up Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail at various junctures, but found them all unwieldy in their configuration syntax. Macros and compiling them, or digging through dozens of config files for relevant settings. Lots of "here are thousands of settings, but don't change them unless you really know what you're doing." It drove me a bit crazy.Then OpenBSD folks created OpenSMTPD.The configuration syntax was sensible and simple. It didn't try to do everything, just adequate SMTP serving with some privsep. It was easy to point it at certificates that acme-client(1) obtains for me via httpd(8) interactions scheduled in cron(8), all within the base system.It's the MTA with OpenBSD's fingerprints of simplicity & security all over it.⸻¹ https://opensmtpd.org/
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    0 Views
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's ZFS. It gives me• all in one volume management (no volume-groups and logical volumes and manually resizing partitions on those logical volumes with a dozen different commands, no playing the "oof, need more space on partition A and have too much free space on partition B, back up all the files, nuke both, shuffle partition-sizes/locations, restore the files" dance)• transparent file compression• transparent volume encryption• fast and effectively free snapshots and clones (you start paying the cost if they diverge or deleting files that remain in a snapshot, but that's to be expected)• same-disk redundancy with copies=2 to help prevent against bitrot, and multi-disk redundancy with effectively zero effort• the CoW means no need for fsck(8) horribly slowing my boots or finding orphaned fragments of files and shunting them into a lost+found/ directory (my biggest frustration with OpenBSD's FFS2) in the event of an abrupt power loss• efficient send/receive (beats rsync hands down in terms of speed)• fine-grained quota/reservation control• utilities make scripting easy with output-formatting options• cross-OS support in a way that very few other filesystems provide (other than FAT 😆)I'm sure there are additional reasons that didn't percolate to the top of my brain, but it's just so much more pleasant than any other disk management I've done on any OS.
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    3 Views
    Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry: ledger(1) & hledger(1)I primarily use ledger use for my #plaintextaccounting purposes¹ but try to mostly keep my data-files in a form that hledger can process them too.Getting started involved a crash-course in accounting terms, but the use of positive/negative numbers (rather than "debits" and "credits" which always bugged me; though both have ways of specifying that output should be in credit/debit format) eased the transition.While it started a little tedious, a few helper-scripts and shell-functions simplified adding new common entries and gave me lazy access to common reports.I still struggle a little bit with closing the books (I though I'd figured it out, and documented it², but had some hiccups so I'll need to revisit my documentation in January)But it's been incredibly helpful to see and track our household net worth, spot trends, keep tabs on gift-card balances that would otherwise get forgotten, track invoices sent to clients, and it simplifies balancing the checkbook monthly.⸻¹ http://plaintextaccounting.org/² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/closing-out-the-books-in-ledger/
  • Today it's awk(1)

    Uncategorized freesoftwareadvent
    1
    0 Votes
    1 Posts
    3 Views
    Today it's awk(1)I use it almost daily—from simple column-extraction (specifying column separators and mashing together various columns feels easier with awk than with sort(1)), to summing and running totals, to aggregating counts of data, to reformatting text, etc…so many little uses pop up.It's available on every POSIX platform making it easy to write cross-platform utilities without having to install additional run-times like Python/Ruby/Node and the heavy dependencies that come with them.I've even written cgi-bin/ scripts in awk, allowing dynamic data processing on my stock OpenBSD systems with httpd+SlowCGI without non-stock software in the chroot.https://blog.thechases.com/categories/awk/#FreeSoftwareAdvent