40: AirPorts & Packages

JT Pennington — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 08:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, we'll be giving you an introductory guide on OpenBSD's ports and package system. There's also a pretty fly interview with Karl Lehenbauer, about how they use FreeBSD at FlightAware. Lots of interesting news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan 2014 talks and reports, part 2

More presentations and trip reports are still being uploaded
Ingo Schwarze, New Trends in mandoc
Vsevolod Stakhov, The Architecture of the New Solver in pkg
Julio Merino, The FreeBSD Test Suite
Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM
There's also a trip report from Michael Dexter and another (very long and detailed) trip report from our friend Warren Block that even gives us some linkage, thanks! ***

Beyond security, getting to know OpenBSD's real purpose

Michael W Lucas (who, we learn through this video, has been using BSD since 1986) gave a "webcast" last week, and the audio and slides are finally up
It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, managing to touch on a lot of OpenBSD topics
Some of those topics include: what is OpenBSD and why you should care, the philosophy of the project, how it serves as a "pressure cooker for ideas," briefly touches on GPL vs BSDL, their "do it right or don't do it at all" attitude, their stance on NDAs and blobs, recent LibreSSL development, some of the security functions that OpenBSD enabled before anyone else (and the ripple effect that had) and, of course, their disturbing preference for comic sans
Here's a direct link to the slides
Great presentation if you'd like to learn a bit about OpenBSD, but also contains a bit of information that long-time users might not know too ***

FreeBSD vs Linux, a comprehensive comparison

Another blog post covering something people seem to be obsessed with - FreeBSD vs Linux
This one was worth mentioning because it's very thorough in regards to how things are done behind the scenes, not just the usual technical differences
It highlights the concept of a "core team" and their role vs "contributors" and "committers" (similar to a presentation Kirk McKusick did not long ago)
While a lot of things will be the same on both platforms, you might still be asking "which one is right for me?" - this article weighs in with some points for both sides and different use cases
Pretty well-written and unbiased article that also mentions areas where Linux might be better, so don't hate us for linking it ***

Expand FreeNAS with plugins

One of the things people love the most about FreeNAS (other than ZFS) is their cool plugin framework
With these plugins, you can greatly expand the feature set of your NAS via third party programs
This page talks about a few of the more popular ones and how they can be used to improve your NAS or media box experience
Some examples include setting up an OwnCloud server, Bacula for backups, Maraschino for managing a home theater PC, Plex Media Server for an easy to use video experience and a few more
It then goes into more detail about each of them, how to actually install plugins and then how to set them up ***

Interview - Karl Lehenbauer - karl@flightaware.com / @flightaware

FreeBSD at FlightAware, BSD history, various topics

Tutorial

Ports and packages in OpenBSD

News Roundup

Code review culture meets FreeBSD

In most of the BSDs, changes need to be reviewed by more than one person before being committed to the tree
This article describes Phabricator, an open source code review system that we briefly mentioned last week
Instructions for using it are on the wiki
While not approved by the core team yet for anything official, it's in a testing phase and developers are encouraged to try it out and get their patches reviewed
Just look at that fancy interface!! ***

Upcoming BSD books

Sneaky MWL somehow finds his way into both our headlines and the news roundup
He gives us an update on the next BSD books that he's planning to release
The plan is to release three (or so) books based on different aspects of FreeBSD's storage system(s) - GEOM, UFS, ZFS, etc.
This has the advantage of only requiring you to buy the one(s) you're specifically interested in
"When will they be released? When I'm done writing them. How much will they cost? Dunno."
It's not Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition... ***

CARP failover and high availability on FreeBSD

If you're running a cluster or a group of servers, you should have some sort of failover in place
But the question comes up, "how do you load balance the load balancers!?"
This video goes through the process of giving more than one machine the same IP, how to set up CARP, securing it and demonstrates a node dying
Also mentions DNS-based load balancing as another option ***

PCBSD weekly digest

This time in PCBSD land, we're getting ready for the 10.0.2 release (ISOs here)
AppCafe got a good number of fixes, and now shows 10 random highlighted applications
EasyPBI added a "bulk" mode to create PBIs of an entire FreeBSD port category
Lumina, the new desktop environment, is still being worked on and got some bug fixes too ***

Feedback/Questions

24: The Cluster & The Cloud

JT Pennington — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

This week on BSD Now... a wrap-up from NYCBSDCon! We'll also be talking to Luke Marsden, CEO of HybridCluster, about how they use BSD at large. Following that, our tutorial will show you how to securely share files with SFTP in a chroot. The latest news and answers to your questions, of course it's BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10 as a firewall

Back in 2012, the author of this site wrote an article stating you should avoid FreeBSD 9 for a firewall and use OpenBSD instead
Now, with the release of 10.0, he's apparently changed his mind and switched back over
It mentions the SMP version of pf, general performance advantages and more modern features
The author is a regular listener of BSD Now, hi Joe! ***

Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

Really long blog post, based on a BSDCan presentation, about fighting spam with OpenBSD
Peter Hansteen, author of the book of PF, goes through how he uses OpenBSD's spamd and other security features to combat spam and malware
He goes through his experiences with content filtering and disappointment with a certain proprietary vendor
Not totally BSD-specific, lots of people can enjoy the article - lots of virus history as well ***

FreeBSD ASLR patches submitted

So far, FreeBSD hasn't had Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR is a nice security feature, see wikipedia for more information
With a giant patch from Shawn Webb, it might be integrated into a future version (after a vicious review from the security team of course)
We might have Shawn on the show to talk about it, but he's also giving a presentation at BSDCan about his work with ASLR ***

Old-style pkg_ tools retired

At last the old pkg_add tools are being retired in FreeBSD
pkgng is a huge improvement, and now portmgr@ thinks it's time to cut the cord on the legacy toolset
Ports aren't going away, and probably never will, but for binary package fans and new users that are used to things like apt, pkgng is the way to go
All pkg_ tools will be considered unsupported on September 1, 2014 - even on older branches ***

Interview - Luke Marsden - luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

BSD at HybridCluster

Tutorial

Filesharing with chrooted SFTP

News Roundup

FreeBSD on OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud computing project
It consists of "a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API."
Until now, there wasn't a good way to run a full BSD instance on OpenStack
With a project in the vein of Colin Percival's AWS startup scripts, now that's no longer the case! ***

FOSDEM BSD videos

This year's FOSDEM had seven BSD presentations
The videos are slowly being uploaded for your viewing pleasure
Not all of the BSD ones are up yet, but by the time you're watching this they might be!
Check this directory for most of 'em
The BSD dev room was full, lots of interest in what's going on from the other communities ***

The FreeBSD challenge finally returns!

Due to prodding from a certain guy of a certain podcast, the "FreeBSD Challenge" series has finally resumed
Our friend from the Linux foundation picks up with day 11 and day 12 on his switching from Linux journey
This time he outlines the upgrade process of going from 9 to 10, using freebsd-update
There's also some notes about different options for upgrading ports and some extra tips ***

PCBSD weekly digest

After the big 10.0 release, the PCBSD crew is focusing on bug fixes for a while
During their "fine tuning phase" users are encouraged to submit any and all bugs via the trac system
Warden got some fixes and the package manager got some updates as well
Huge size reduction in PBI format ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Keynote”

40: AirPorts & Packages

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Karl Lehenbauer - karl@flightaware.com / @flightaware

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

24: The Cluster & The Cloud

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Luke Marsden - luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions