NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

Tinkering with Manjaro and NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro: a crumbs-in-the-forest tutorial & review

News Roundup

OpenSMTPD 7.5.0p0 Released

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

Book 8088

Custom Prometheus dashboards using Console templates

FreeBSD Foundation March 2024 Partnerships Update

Ray tracing made possible on 42-year-old ZX Spectrum: 'reasonably fast, if you consider 17 hours per frame to be reasonably fast'

Tarsnap

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NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

NetBSD 9.2 Released

DragonFly 6.0 is out!

• Release Notes *** ### EuroBSDCon 2021 will be online *** ## News Roundup ### Home Network Monitoring using Prometheus > This blog post describes my setup for monitoring various devices on my home network suh as servers, laptops/desktops, networking gear etc. The setup and configuration is squarely geared towards small/medium sized network monitoring. A similar setup might work for large networks, but you will need to plan your compute/storage/bandwidth capacities accordingly. I’m running all the monitoring software on FreeBSD, but you can run it on your choice of OS. Just make sure to install the packages using your OS’s package manager. *** ### Preventing FreeBSD to kill PostgreSQL (aka OOM Killer prevention) > There are a lot of interesting articles on how to prevent the Out of Memory Killer (OOM killer in short) on Linux to ruin your day, or better your night. One particularly well done explanation about how the OOM Killer works, and how to help PostgreSQL to survive, is, in my humble opinion, the one from Percona Blog. *** ### Customizing Emacs for Git Commit Messages >I do a lot of commits to the FreeBSD project and elsewhere. It would be nice if I could setup emacs in a custom way for each commit message that I'm editing. > Fortunately, GNU Emacs provides a nice way to do just that. While I likely could do some of these things with git commit hooks, I find this to be a little nicer. *** ### Deleting old FreeBSD boot environments > I like boot environments (BE) on FreeBSD. They were especially handy when building the AWS host for FreshPorts, since I had no serial console. I would create a BE saving the current status, then make some changes. I’d mark the current BE as boot once, so I could boot back in the known good BE. Worst case, I could mount the storage onto a rescue EC2 instance and adjust the bootfs value of the zpool. ***

Always be quitting

A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job. But act as if you might leave on short notice. Counterintuitively, this will make you a better engineer and open up growth opportunities.

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Tarsnap

• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

• Christopher - zfs question
• Chris - two questions
• Vas - zpools and moving to FreeBSD 13

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Follow-up about FreeBSD jail advantages

I’ll admit I ran a lot of justifications together into a single paragraph because I wanted to get to configuring the jails themselves. They’re also, by and large, not specific to FreeBSD’s flavour of containerisation, though I still think it’s easily the most elegant implementation. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best one.

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History of FreeBSD part 4: TCP/IP

• How TCP/IP evolved and BSDs special contribution to the history of the Internet ***

FreeBSD: Install Prometheus, Node Exporter and Grafana

FreeBSD comes out of the box with three great tools for monitoring. If you need more info about how these tools work, please read the official documentation. I’ll explain the installation only and creating a simple dashboard.

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News Roundup

Calibrate your touch-screen on OpenBSD

I didn’t expected it but my refurbished T460s came with a touch-screen. It is recognized by default on OpenBSD and not well calibrated as-is. But that’s really simple to solve.

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Lets all shed a Tear for 386

FreeBSD is designating i386 as a Tier 2 architecture starting with FreeBSD 13.0. The Project will continue to provide release images, binary updates, and pre-built packages for the 13.x branch. However, i386-specific issues (including SAs) may not be addressed in 13.x. The i386 platform will remain Tier 1 on FreeBSD 11.x and 12.x.

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OPNsense 21.1 Marvelous Meerkat Released

For more than 6 years, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.

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NomadBSD 1.4-RC1

We are pleased to present the first release candidate of NomadBSD 1.4.

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find mostly doesn't need xargs today on modern Unixes

I've been using Unix for long enough that 'find | xargs' is a reflex. When I started and for a long time afterward, xargs was your only choice for efficiently executing a command over a bunch of find results.

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OpenBSD KDE Status Report

OpenBSD has managed to drop KDE3 and KDE4 in the 6.8 -> 6.9 release cycle. That makes me very happy because it was a big piece of work and long discussions. This of course brings questions: Kde Plasma 5 package missing.
After half a year of work, I managed to successfully update the Qt5 stack to the last LTS version 5.15.2. On the whole, the most work was updating QtWebengine. What a monster! With my CPU power at home, I can build it 1-2 times a day which makes testing a little bit annoying and time intensive.

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Tarsnap

• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

• Karl - Firefox webcam audio solution
• Michal - openzfs
• Dave - bufferbloat

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

FreeBSD on Power

The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc.

The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs.

This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users.

Dragonfly 5.8

DragonFly version 5.8 brings a new dsynth utility for building your own binary dports packages, plus significant support work to speed up that build - up to and including the entire collection. Additional progress has been made on GPU and signal support.

The details of all commits between the 5.6 and 5.8 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.8.0rc1 and 5.8.0. Also see /usr/src/UPDATING for specific file changes in PAM.

• See article for rest of information

2nd HamBUG meeting recap

• The second meeting of the Hamilton BSD Users Group took place last night
• The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd Tuesday of the month, April 14th 2020

News Roundup

FreeNAS/TrueNAS Brand Unification

FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been separate-but-related members of the #1 Open Source storage software family since 2012. FreeNAS is the free Open Source version with an expert community and has led the pursuit of innovations like Plugins and VMs. TrueNAS is the enterprise version for organizations of all sizes that need additional uptime and performance, as well as the enterprise-grade support necessary for critical data and applications.

From the beginning at iXsystems, we’ve developed, tested, documented, and released both as separate products, even though the vast majority of code is shared. This was a deliberate technical decision in the beginning but over time became less of a necessity and more of “just how we’ve always done it”. Furthermore, to change it was going to require a serious overhaul to how we build and package both products, among other things, so we continued to kick the can down the road. As we made systematic improvements to development and QA efficiency over the past few years, the redundant release process became almost impossible to ignore as our next major efficiency roadblock to overcome. So, we’ve finally rolled up our sleeves.

With the recent 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained parity with FreeNAS on features like VMs and Plugins, further homogenizing the code. Today, we announce the next phase of evolution for FreeNAS and TrueNAS.

OpenBSD versus Prometheus (and Go).

We have a decent number of OpenBSD machines that do important things (and that have sometimes experienced problems like running out of disk space), and we have a Prometheus based metrics and monitoring system. The Prometheus host agent has enough support for OpenBSD to be able to report on critical metrics, including things like local disk space. Despite all of this, after some investigation I've determined that it's not really sensible to even try to deploy the host agent on our OpenBSD machines. This is due to a combination of factors that have at their root OpenBSD's lack of ABI stability

FreeBSD removed gcc from base

As described in Warner's email message[1] to the FreeBSD-arch mailing list we have reached GCC 4.2.1's retirement date. At this time all supported architectures either use in-tree Clang, or rely on external toolchain (i.e., a contemporary GCC version from ports).

GCC 4.2.1 was released July 18, 2007 and was imported into FreeBSD later that year, in r171825. GCC has served us well, but version 4.2.1 is obsolete and not used by default on any architecture in FreeBSD. It does not support modern C and does not support arm64 or RISC-V.

Beastie Bits

• New Archive location for Dragonfly 4.x
• A dead simple git cheat sheet
• Xorg 1.20.7 on HardenedBSD Comes with IE/RELRO+BIND_NOW/CFI/SafeStack Protections

Feedback/Questions

• Niclas writes in Regarding the Lenovo E595 user (episode 340)
• Lyubomir writes about GELI and ZFS
• Peter writes in about scaling FreeBSD jails

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv