18: Eclipsing Binaries

JT Pennington — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 08:00:00 -0500

Put away the Christmas trees and update your ports trees! We're back with the first show of 2014, and we've got some catching up to do. This time on the show, we have an interview with Baptiste Daroussin about the future of FreeBSD binary packages. Following that, we'll be highlighting a cool script to do binary upgrades on OpenBSD. Lots of holiday news and listener feedback, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Faces of FreeBSD continues

Our first one details Shteryana Shopova, the local organizer for EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sophia
Gives some information about how she got into BSD
"I installed FreeBSD on my laptop, alongside the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn't booted the other two operating systems in months. So I wiped them out."
She wrote bsnmpd and extended it with the help of a grant from the FreeBSD Foundation
We've also got one for Kevin Martin
Started off with a pinball website, ended up learning about FreeBSD from an ISP and starting his own hosting company
"FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community." ***

OpenPF?

A blog post over at the Dragonfly digest
What if we had some cross platform development of OpenBSD's firewall?
Similar to portable OpenSSH or OpenZFS, there could be a centrally-developed version with compatibility glue
Right now FreeBSD 9's pf is old, FreeBSD 10's pf is old (but has the best performance of any implementation due to custom patches), NetBSD's pf is old (but they're working on a fork) and Dragonfly's pf is old
Further complicated by the fact that PF itself doesn’t have a version number, since it was designed to just be ‘the pf that came with OpenBSD 5.4’
Not likely to happen any time soon, but it's good food for thought ***

Year of BSD on the server

A good blog post about switching servers from Linux to BSD
2014 is going to be the year of a lot of switching, due to FreeBSD 10's amazing new features
This author was particularly taken with pkgng and the more coherent layout of BSD systems
Similarly, there was also a recent reddit thread, "Why did you choose BSD over Linux?"
Both are excellent reads for Linux users that are thinking about making the switch, send 'em to your friends ***

Getting to know your portmgr

This time in the series they interview Bryan Drewery, a fairly new addition to the team
He started maintaining portupgrade and portmaster, and eventually ended up on the ports management team
Believe it or not, his wife actually had a lot to do with him getting into FreeBSD full-time
Lots of fun trivia and background about him
Speaking of portmgr, our interview for today is... ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

The future of FreeBSD's binary packages, ports' features, various topics

News Roundup

pfSense december hang out

Interview/presentation from pfSense developer Chris Buechler with an accompanying blog post
"This is the first in what will be a monthly recurring series. Each month, we’ll have a how to tutorial on a specific topic or area of the system, and updates on development and other happenings with the project. We have several topics in mind, but also welcome community suggestions on topics"
Speaking of pfSense, they recently opened an online store
We're planning on having a pfSense episode next month! ***

BSDMag December issue is out

The free monthly BSD magazine gets a new release for December
Topics include CARP on FreeBSD, more BSD programming, "unix basics for security professionals," some kernel introductions, using OpenBSD as a transparent proxy with relayd, GhostBSD overview and some stuff about SSH ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Binary Star”