Hello there, old friend.

In 2010 I left my job as a Solaris admin. Sixteen years later I’m back at a zonecfg prompt, and it feels like coming home.

The muscle memory never left. OmniOS “bloody” on ZFS, a fresh zone with its own network stack, and my old companion DTrace, quietly watching every exec inside the zone from the global zone.

Some things you never really leave behind. 🌅

#OmniOS #illumos #Solaris #DTrace #ZFS #Unix

Alt...

Two terminals side by side. Left: inside the zone, neofetch shows OmniOS r151059 and a ping to 8.8.8.8 succeeds. Right: in the global zone, a DTrace one-liner prints every process started in the zone with a timestamp, including neofetch’s internal calls and the zlogin login sequence.

Alt...

Terminal on OmniOS: a new zone “test” is configured with zonecfg (lipkg brand, exclusive IP, VNIC on vioif0, static address and resolver), then installed with zoneadm (387 packages, done in about 6 minutes), booted, and entered with zlogin.

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@midtsveen/117331278381810538

Let’s not talk about Fedora 31, which was released on this day seven years ago! 🙃

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Unix #Linux #BSD #Meme #Memes #Humor #SpongeBob

An Evening with Berferd: In Which a Cracker is Lured, Endured, and Studied (1992) https://lobste.rs/s/7bbzjf #pdf #security #unix
https://www.cheswick.com/ches/papers/berferd.pdf

New blog post in my series about using the HumanWare BrailleNote Apex with #FreeBSD! This time, I explore USB communication in USB Client mode.

https://alfonsosiciliano.gitlab.io/posts/2026-10-26-freebsd-usb-apex.html

#FreeBSD #Accessibility #A11y #UNIX #OpenSource #Braille #DeviceDrivers #AssistiveTechnology

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲/𝟭𝟬/𝟮𝟲 (Valuable News - 2026/10/26) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/10/26/valuable-news-2026-10-26/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

I like finding and fixing bugs in 52-year-old software, especially when all later versions retain the bug.

#unix #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

Whew! I just finished porting 2,852 lines of PDP-11 assembly to C by hand over the past week!

This is for form/fed, a form letter editor and generator with template substitutions, introduced in 1971. It's the largest UNIX utility that was never ported to C, and has since been forgotten.

1/6

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #reverseengineering

Most notably, the oldest list of UNIX licensees was produced from a form letter database.

Ken Thompson used form/fed to simplify mailing to early users: rather than hand- or typewriting messages, this fancy tool would substitute each recipient and the date. In 1975, when UNIX News was starting up, he used this form letter database to dump the list of contacts that served as the initial subscriber list.

The circumstances of the UNIX V4 tape found at the University of Utah are still somewhat unclear, as it was apparently not used for research and only sparse traces of its acquisition survived. But some letters to Martin Newell are in that form letter database and I hope to recover more information through forensic analysis.

2/6

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

You've heard of Y2K and the 2038 problem, but what about the 1975 problem?

The UNIX form letter generator converts the current date to a string, but it only handles 1974. Why isn't it more general?

Well, the form utility was written around 1971 when UNIX used a different unit for time, jiffies (60ths of a second) since the current year instead of seconds since 1970. This 60× precision caused times to overflow a signed 32-bit integer every 13.6 months, so the epoch was bumped yearly. This yearly ritual of modifying the kernel meant it wasn't worth generalizing to support any year.

An earlier version of form uses jiffies since a 1972 epoch. The version from UNIX V4–V6 does the bare minimum to update it to the new system of seconds since 1970, while keeping the yearly overflow.

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

Genuine question - for desktop use, how far off is NetBSD from FreeBSD?

I've just bought a second hand laptop to have as a permanent BSD machine. I've played with both OS's before on other laptops and Raspberry Pi's but from my limited testing , NetBSD is more at home as a server OS, albeit still behind FreeBSD, but a solid option all the same.

I will test both OS's on it and I know NetBSD has seen a jolt in interest lately, due to its anti AI stance, but ultimately, I will probably stick with FreeBSD ,until NetBSD can offer the same experience. I may stay with FreeBSD permanently, if they decide to take a firm stance and not strandle the fence with AI.

Again all this based from my limited testing and experience and a large amount of fediverse posts on the subject.

Any advice from the BSD crowd.

(I know this seems hypocritical about AI, especially as I rely heavily still on cachyOS for a gaming PC and Alpine Linux for my servers but I really hope the future is bright for BSD's and a complete move of everything, eventually may be an option )

#netbsd
#freebsd
#unix

@stefano I thought, silently, of many things when I moved from the Cafe.

A single-user instance was amongst my thoughts. It's a possibility, however I can't imagine it becoming a priority.

I'm more interested in spending my "IT" time on stuff that's directly related, or adjacent, to FreeBSD.

#Mastodon #FreeBSD #UNIX #Linux

#Unix #FOSS #Linux #RunBSD

There's a difference between simply using an operating system and truly understanding it.

Slackware encourages you to take that extra step.

Its simplicity isn't about hiding complexity behind layers of abstraction. It's about giving you the freedom to explore, understand, and control your system.

That's one of the reasons I've stayed with Slackware for over 20 years.

#Slackware #Linux #Unix