BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Edgebsd”

31: Edgy BSD Users

JT Pennington — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 08:00:00 -0400

This week we'll be talking to Richard Stallman about the upcoming GPLv4 and how it will protect our software from being stolen. After that, we'll show you how to recover from those pesky ZFS on Linux corruption issues, as well as some tips on how to explain to your boss that all the production boxes were compromised. Your questions and all the latest GNUs, on Linux Now - the place to Lin.. ux.

This episode was brought to you by

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Preorders for cool BSD stuff

The 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is up for preorder
We talked to GNN briefly about it, but he and Kirk have apparently finally finished the book
"For many years, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System has been recognized as the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure. Now, this definitive guide has been extensively updated to reflect all major FreeBSD improvements between Versions 5 and Versions 11"
OpenBSD 5.5 preorders are also up, so you can buy a CD set now
You can help support the project, and even get the -release of the OS before it's available publicly
5.5 is a huge release with lots of big changes, so now is the right time to purchase one of these - tell Austin we sent you! ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 CFP

This year's pkgsrcCon is in London, on June 21st and 22nd
There's a Call For Papers out now, so you can submit your talks
Anything related to pkgsrc is fine, it's pretty informal
Does anyone in the audience know if the talks will be recorded? This con is relatively unknown ***

BSDMag issue for March 2014

The monthly BSD magazine releases its newest issue
Topics this time include: deploying NetBSD using AWS EC2, creating a multi-purpose file server with NetBSD, DragonflyBSD as a backup server, more GIMP lessons, network analysis with wireshark and a general security article
The Linux article trend seems to continue... hmm ***

Non-ECC RAM in FreeNAS

We've gotten a few questions about ECC RAM with ZFS
Here we've got a surprising blog post about why someone did not go with ECC RAM for his NAS build
The article mentions the benefits of ECC and admits it is a better choice in nearly all instances, but unfortunately it's not very widespread in consumer hardware motherboards and it's more expensive
Regular RAM also has "special" issues with ZFS and pool corruption
Long post, so check out the whole thing if you've been considering your memory options and weighing the benefits ***

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

EdgeBSD (slides)

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD desktop

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr-lurkers

This week we get to hear from Frederic Culot, colut@
Originally an OpenBSD user from France, Frederic joined as a ports committer in 2010 and recently joined the portmgr lurkers team
"FreeBSD is also one of my sources of inspiration when it comes to how organizations behave and innovate, and I find it very interesting to compare FreeBSD with the for-profit companies I work for"
We get to find out a little bit about him, why he loves FreeBSD and what he does for the project ***

NetBSD on the Playstation 2

Who doesn't want to run NetBSD on their old PS2?
The PS2 port of NetBSD was sadly removed in 2009, but it has been revived
It's using a slightly unusual MIPS CPU that didn't have much GCC support
Hopefully a bootable kernel will be available soon ***

The FreeBSD Challenge update

Our friend from the Linux Foundation continues his FreeBSD switching journey
This time he starts off by discovering virtual machines suck at keeping accurate time, and some ports weren't working because of his clock being way off
After polling the IRC for help, he finally learns the difference between ntpdate and ntpd and both of their use cases
Maybe he should've just read our NTP tutorial! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

The mount tray icon got lots of updates and fixes
The faulty distribution server has finally been tracked down and... destroyed
New language localization project is in progress
Many many updates to ports and PBIs, new -STABLE builds ***

Feedback/Questions

25: A Sixth pfSense

JT Pennington — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

We have a packed show for you this week! We'll sit down for an interview with Chris Buechler, from the pfSense project, to learn just how easy it can be to deploy a BSD firewall. We'll also be showing you a walkthrough of the pfSense interface so you can get an idea of just how convenient and powerful it is. Answers to your questions and the latest headlines, here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon

This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria
They've got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present
There will also be a tutorial section of the conference
AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!
All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted
Check the link for all the details on the talks - if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers! ***

FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU
This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router
Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up
It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don't want to use the ones rolled by someone else
For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router
Of course if you're more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too ***

Signed pkgsrc package guide

We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up
It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)
He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them
The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer ***

Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports

Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI
In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things
In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara
In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead - but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he's done
In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things ***

Interview - Chris Buechler - cmb@pfsense.com / @cbuechler

pfSense

Tutorial

pfSense walkthrough

News Roundup

FreeBSD challenge continues

Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey
In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first
In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he's starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again - concludes that ports are the way to go
In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch
In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails! ***

BSD books in 2014

BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them
In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014
In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and...
Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)
Check the link for all the details ***

How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images

Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post
Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch
You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI
It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward ***

PCBSD weekly digest

This time around we discuss how you can become a developer
Kris also details the length of supported releases
Expect lots of new features in 10.1 ***

Feedback/Questions

20: Bhyve Mind

JT Pennington — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 08:00:00 -0500

It's our big 20th episode! We're going to sit down for a chat with Neel Natu and Peter Grehan, the developers of bhyve. Not familiar with bhyve? Our tutorial will show you all you need to know about this awesome new virtualization technology. Answers to your questions and all the latest news, here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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OpenBSD automatic installation

A CFT (call for testing) was posted for OpenBSD's new automatic installer process
Using this new system, you can spin up fully-configured OpenBSD installs very quickly
It will answer all the questions for you and can put files into place and start services
Great for large deployments, help test it and report your findings ***

FreeNAS install guide and blog posts

A multipart series on YouTube about installing FreeNAS
In part 1, the guy (who is possibly Dracula, with his very Transylvanian accent..) builds his new file server and shows off the hardware
In part 2, he shows how to install and configure FreeNAS, uses IPMI, sets up his pools
He pronounces gigabytes as jiggabytes and it's hilarious
We've also got an unrelated blog post about a very satisfied FreeNAS user who details his setup
As well as another blog post from our old pal Devin Teske about his recent foray into the FreeNAS development world ***

FreeBSD 10.0-RC5 is out

Another, unexpected RC is out for 10.0
Minor fixes included, please help test and report any bugs
You can update via freebsd-update or from source
Hopefully this will be the last one before 10.0-RELEASE, which has tons of new features we'll talk about
It's been tagged -RELEASE in SVN already too! ***

OpenBSD 5.5-beta is out

Theo updated the branch status to 5.5-beta
A list of changes
Help test and report any bugs you find
Lots of rapid development with signify (which we mentioned last week), the beta includes some "test keys"
Does that mean it'll be part of the final release? We'll find out in May.. or when we interview Ted (soon) ***

Interview - Neel Natu & Peter Grehan - neel@freebsd.org & grehan@freebsd.org

BHyVe - the BSD hypervisor

Tutorial

Virtualization with bhyve

News Roundup

Hostname canonicalisation in OpenSSH

Blog post from our friend Damien Miller
This new feature allows clients to canonicalize unqualified domain names
SSH will know if you typed "ssh bsdnow" you meant "ssh bsdnow.tv" with new config options
This will help clean up some ssh configs, especially if you have many hosts
Should make it into OpenSSH 6.5, which is "due really soon" ***

Dragonfly on a Chromebook

Some work has been done by Matthew Dillon to get DragonflyBSD working on a Google Chromebook
These couple of posts detail some of the things he's got working so far
Changes were needed to the boot process, trackpad and wifi drivers needed updating...
Also includes a guide written by Dillon on how to get yours working ***

Spider in a box

"Spiderinabox" is a new OpenBSD-based project
Using a combination of OpenBSD, Firefox, XQuartz and VirtualBox, it creates a secure browsing experience for OS X
Firefox runs encapsulated in OpenBSD and doesn't have access to OS X in any way
The developer is looking for testers on other operating systems! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

PCBSD 10 has entered into the code freeze phase
They're focusing on fixing bugs now, rather than adding new features
The update system got a lot of improvements
PBI load times reduced by up to 40%! what!!! ***