news
BSD: NYCBUG, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD
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DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2026/10/04
I remain upbeat! NYCBUG social meeting (i.e. no presentation) on October 7th. A ‘clamp’ power strip. I like the design. (via) GIMP, The Movie. (not really) An in-depth explainer of SSH certificates, which are much nicer than… every other security certificate system I’ve ever used, now that I think about it.
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Undeadly ☛ Headers Up! What's New in httpd and relayd
Among the notable additions are expanded and improved filtering and pattern matching features which make it harder to make a case for putting something like nginx in front of your httpd(8) and relayd(8) setups.
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Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ FreeBSD Foundationals: rc.d - The Service Framework That Fits in Your Head
This is the fourth article in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. The first covered Jails, the second covered ZFS, and the third covered the boot process. The boot article promised that packages and ports would come next. I changed the order, because rc.d is the direct continuation of the boot story, and because nearly every FreeBSD article on this blog ends with “and here’s the rc.d script” without ever explaining how rc.d works. Packages are next, I promise.
rc.d is also one of the best arguments for FreeBSD’s design approach. The whole service framework is a few thousand lines of POSIX shell that you can read in an afternoon. When something goes wrong, the answer is in a file you can open with less, not hidden in a binary.
By the end of this article you’ll understand how rc decides what starts and in what order, where configuration really comes from, what rc.subr does for you, how to write a service script that behaves correctly on start, stop, status and shutdown, and which handful of mistakes account for most broken rc.d scripts I’ve seen.