Software that's only available as x86 binaries and a whole system that needs 16 gigs of memory? It's not surprising that it comes from the corporate world and not the open source world.
I respect the fact that the Sentry people are honest about their teetering tower.
Regarding OpenBSD: I don't know if 32 bit PowerPC support will be around for all that long, if one considers how many platforms have been dropped from OpenBSD in the last few years.
Also, it doesn't look like OpenBSD has binary packages for 32 bit PowerPC:
7.7 isn't out yet, and frequently port builds take a while, so this is unsurprising and shouldn't be taken as a lack of support or impending discontinuation.
OpenBSD still supports the Alpha, which is an even older and rarer (albeit 64-bit) architecture.
It’s wild that OpenBSD still supports the architectures it does. I literally learned how to program on a G4 Mac running OpenBSD back in 2000. I think it was version 3.0 but I don’t really remember. It was a wonderful experience, and I chose OpenBSD because it was the only UNIX-like OS I could get to boot on that machine (I struggled to understand Debian’s esoteric instructions for weeks before I gave up). OpenBSD, by contrast, had essentially the same install program it has to this day. At the time, there were no printed books for OpenBSD, but I read the (surprisingly good) man pages and supplemented with a used copy of the FreeBSD handbook I bought on eBay. Good times.
At least one of the more obscure platforms openbsd supports are often due to someone(one person) willing to step up and do the builds.
I love reading when the luna88k maintainer comes out of the woods a month or two after release to announce that the packages are done building. Realisticly I expect there are a few 88k users. But based on the radio silence I see on the lists it feels like there is one heroic user who really likes openbsd and is willing to make it happen. I find it very inspiring.
Using off-the-shelf ARM boards beats the heck out of designing, building and writing firmware for an ARM system. It makes upgradability much, much easier, although I doubt that companies that sell devices like this audio processor consider this a good thing.
I spoke to one of the engineers on the floor at NAB, and he said they intentionally chose standard off-the-shelf power supplies and tried to do the same for any component possible.
I've seen Orban audio processors from 30+ years ago still in service, there are still companies out there that favor standard, repairable parts, especially when you have an audience of engineers who favor not having to drive out to remote studios or tower sites multiple times to get something fixed.
The MOS 6532 RAM-I/O-Timer chip used by the 2600 (and KIM-1 and others) has 128 bytes of RAM. Game cartridges could add 256 bytes more, along with the program ROM.
For an experience today closer to these machines, you can get a $0.10 CH32V003 microcontroller with 2k RAM and 16k flash.
Here's a 1 Euro retro-computer kit using one that has included in that price support for PS/2 keyboard and VGA video output, all included in the 1 Euro -- even the connectors! All from one 8 pin microcontroller chip:
Oh! I expected it to be cheaper shipping within Europe. I live on completely the other side of the world (antipodes of Spain or Casablanca to be precise)and it was a similar price. I took 18, which doubled the overall cost compared to getting just 1 (shipping was 30.92 EUR).
I've installed Windows 98 via DMF images using a FlashFloppy flashed Gotek on an Amiga 3000 running PC-Task, in part just to see if I could. The Gotek made it worlds easier than if I had been using real floppy disks, I'm sure.
I keep a machine which has sshd listening on the IMAPS port (993) for when I'm traveling. It's amazing how many free networks don't allow ssh, but with -J and sshd on port 993, that really doesn't matter.
"Should you ever operate your recursive resolver on only one network? Specifically, should it be limited to the IPv4 or IPv6 network? The general answer for the year 2025 is: NO, you shouldn't."
I wholeheartedly disagree. When given the choice between our ISP's DNS, DNS served by a for-profit company that wants to be a monopoly (such as Cloudflare or Google), or running your own DNSSEC enabled, fully recursive DNS server, you should absolutely run your own, if you're even slightly technical.
If your network is only IPv6, then you already have plenty of issues with general Internet use and should know your caveats. If you're using only IPv4, then you know to run BIND with "-4".
Either way, if you only have one or the other, then you have much more control over what happens when you run your own recursive resolver, regardless of whether it's BIND, Unbound or something else.
The author may've made some money being slightly passive aggressive about running BIND and pretending to not know about "-4", but that's more a self own than a slight on BIND, in my opinion.
Same. There are plenty of example configurations for less technical people to stand up their own server. As a bonus they can learn from it with time and also help family members block some malicious sites.
My Unbound daemon talks to the root servers. I keep some DoT I also run on standby and various VPS and rental server providers just in case. Having my own daemon I can log to a ramdisk all the responses and see when apps are doing something dodgy. Despite popular belief here on HN it is trivial to block all the DoH servers despite being on HTTPS 443. Another perk of running my own server is I have full control over caching and blocking of domains. For most sites my response time is sub 0ms.
Sending all the DNS traffic to the big corporate capture servers is bonkers in my view. That allows both the ISP via SNI and the big government created sites to capture everything. ECH support is still very limited outside of Cloudflare. People claim that ISP's tamper with DNS but very few do in first world countries. I empathize with the people that have crap ISP's but mine will behave properly. I also only use IPv4 on my ISP. Even on VPS and rental servers the only role I also use IPv6 is my public authoritative DNS servers. Web and others are just IPv4. It's much easier to block bots having to only deal with one version.
For completeness sake I should also add that Unbound has options to mimick the BIND 8, BIND 9 or Unbound prefetch and retry algorithms.
FUD? No. There are plenty of people on plenty of sites asking, "How do I do this very simple thing using systemd?", along with plenty of answers which depend on which distro it is, how recent it is, et cetera.
For instance, DNS handling and NTP keep coming up over and over, and it's almost becoming a meme. Why? Because it's the Microsoft mentality - we (the systemd people) know better than you (you're just the machine's owner and administrator), and we'll take care of this. You want to? Not without a fight.
So no, it's not FUD when reasonable people can't give reasonable answers for how to do something that's otherwise reasonably simple.
1. Plenty of sites ask all kinds of questions that depend on which distro is it, how recent is it, etc. This doesn't mean that systemd is bad because the answers change over time.
2. DNS handling and NTP comes up over and over...for who exactly? I work with Linux as a full-time job and this has never come up as a pain point.
3. This "Microsoft mentality" thing is such a 2014 argument about systemd. Basically because systemd didn't perfectly conform to "the UNIX philosophy," we are assuming that they are evil bastards like Microsoft. E.g., journalctl had the gall to make a queryable logging system, and because that concept has some passing similarties the Windows Event Viewer it must be bad. If Linux Torvalds has a strong opinionated design on something and refuses a contribution to the Linux kernel, that's cool because he's Enlightened Tech Jesus, but if systemd's maintainers dare to have opinionated design they are draconian Microsoft employees. And again no significant controversial event has happened since that 2014/2015 era of systemd when, really, the software was much older and less mature at that time so disagreements were understandable.
4. Again you claim there are no reasonable answers for how to do "something," when really there are. If nobody knew the answers it wouldn't be the init system for pretty much every big name Linux distro out there (Ubuntu...Red Hat...Fedora...Amazon Linux...Oracle...Arch...SteamOS...)
> I have also seen many people refusing to learn modern tools
One of the reasons I prefer NetBSD (and the BSDs in general) is that they don't change gratuitously. The ifconfig / ip example you use is good: Why? If we look at the reasoning given, it was that they didn't want to make big changes to ifconfig, so they made a whole new set of commands, even though the BSDs have extended ifconfig many times.
So that ends up meaning that how-tos just don't work any more. Imagine if you want to write a how-to these days where you're telling people how to do something using standard ifconfig and now also need to add ip. This is how you do DNS on standard Unix(like) systems, and now you have to explain multiple iterations of systemd. This is how you add software, but now you need to have separate instructions for apt, yum, dpkg.
Having administered Ubuntu for others, even going from version 18 to 20 or 22 means that how-tos no longer work, scripts need to be modified, systemd handling has to be updated, et cetera.
This is why I will always choose a BSD if given a chance. Pointing to a less messy Linux (like Void because it doesn't use systemd) isn't good enough when clean, well thought out systems already exist.
I respect the fact that the Sentry people are honest about their teetering tower.
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