It’s Thursday, and that means a new BSDNow episode. The interview is with David Maxwell, who gave a talk about Unix pipelines at MeetBSD 2014. There’s the usual amount of discussion of recent topics, too, and I see they have a new sponsor.
Normally if I talk about a filesystem here, I talk about Hammer, which is not a surprise. However, I often read and review Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-oriented books, and he has written FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials. I’m reviewing it here because it’s obviously BSD-related, and some portions are directly relevant for other BSDs.
Disk setup and layout isn’t something that normally consumes much attention past the initial install – until something goes wrong, or until a system needs a new configuration. Installers tend to hide that initial layout, anyway.
Vendors take advantage of this. Much of the specialized storage vendors out there are selling you a computer with disks in it – something you can build yourself. You don’t (or at least I hope you don’t) buy a firewall when you can do the same with pf or ipfw; the same goes for disk management.
There’s plenty of coverage of GEOM, GELI, GDBE, and the other technologies specific to FreeBSD. I for one did not know how GEOM worked, with its consumer/producer model – and I imagine it’s complex to dive into when you’ve got a broken machine next to you. If you are administering FreeBSD systems, especially ones that deal with dedicated storage, you will find this useful. He doesn’t go into ZFS, but he does hint at a book on it later…
If you’re not a FreeBSD user, there’s also material that’s common to any BSD – an explanation of disk architecture, of UFS, RAID, and SMART. Knowing what SMART is and does is essential, in my opinion. You may be able to cobble this material together from other sources online, but it’s packaged nicely here, with Lucas’s easy writing style.
It’s a self-published book, and as such the download nets you three different formats. It’s currently $10 and DRM-free, directly from the author. You can also order physical versions, if you like paper.
Lots of material this week.
- New Update GUI for PC-BSD / Automatic Updates.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.0 Released.
- (side note) I see these PC-BSD items in src updates, but these published summaries are so complete it’s better to wait and post them instead. Other software orgs, take note.
- A week of pkgsrc, #6.
- Making the switch.
- Configuring X forwarding between BSD and Windows. (via)
- The 4th quarter 2014 FreeBSD report is out.
- Digital Ocean now supports FreeBSD.
- Using TrueOS as a IPFW based home router.
- Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD. (via)
- pfSense University classes are available online.
- Jetpack, a FreeBSD-based app container, i.e. Docker, etc. (via)
- No more install floppies for NetBSD, at least on amd64.
- OpenBSD adds binary patching, at least on amd64.
- Lid suspension is now on by default in OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD on an Intel Galileo.
- Security: OpenBSD vs FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD added Data Center TCP (DCTCP).
- FreeBSD’s new page clustering strategy.
- FreeBSD has a new MINIMAL kernel config.
- FreeBSD has multiboot support for Xen Dom0.
- Yay, cross-pollination!
As promised last week, the BSDNow show has an interview with Jos Schellevis of OPNSense, along with the normal array of stories and links.
I managed to miss this last week because of issues with my RSS feeds, but the 71st episode of BSDNow is/has been up. It’s “systemd isaster”, cause the interview is with Ian Sutton talking about BSD replacements for systemd dependencies. There’s a number of at-least-slightly DragonFly-related things in there, including OPNSense, pkgng, and Hammer mentions.
I got this done early, for once.
- Dissecting OpenBSD’s divert(4). (via)
- Running ownCloud with httpd on OpenBSD (via)
- OpenBSD 2014 by the numbers. (via)
- Code rot & OpenBSD. Many comments at the original link. (via)
- Accessing radio hardware switches in NetBSD.
- What does this Etherswitch framework do?
- FreeBSD now has Elf Tool Chain utilities, which appears to be BSD-licensed versions of binutils; possibly more?
- FreeBSD is now on Gnome 3.
- BSDCan 2015’s Call For Papers is out.
- NYCBUG is meeting January 13th at a new location for “Designing Versatile Unix Utilities“, presented by Eric Radman.
- There’s a new BSD user group in the Albany, NY area.
- BSD Magazine for December 2014 is out. (via)
That’s Virtual Private Server, if you don’t know the term. I mentioned VPSs and BSD before in a In Other BSDs article, but “Ed” found an article specifically about installing DragonFly on Vultr.
There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)
Remembered to do this all at the last minute, after I got the new server up.
- LibertyBSD, an OpenBSD fork with no non-free firmware.
- OPNSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall that is new to me.
- OpenBSD projects that aren’t OpenBSD.
- Broken build tracker for pkgsrc. (via)
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 is out.
- pkgviews is gone from pkgsrc.
- NetBSD can now record MIDI files from /dev/music.
- How to see hidden pf tables.
- The OpenBSD Foundation met their fundraising goal for 2014.
- Typing in Japanese in OpenBSD. (via)
- Tor relay issues on OpenBSD, in two slightly munged threads.
- OpenBSD and syslog, over TCP.
- FreeBSD has updated to Unbound 1.5.1 and clang/llvm/lldb to 3.5.0.
- bhyve on FreeBSD has an improved Real Time Clock.
- GNU texinfo is out of FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD’s asr(4) driver is gone too.
- pcc 1.1.0 was recently released. (via)
The BSDNow people aren’t slowing down for the holidays, as there’s another episode this week. The interview is with Dan Langille, about the 2015 BSDCan conference. He’s also the person behind freebsddiary.org, which served as partial inspiration for the Digest. There’s also more video presentation links, news items, and so on.
The list is shorter this week; I blame the Christmas holiday.
- OpenBSD now has position-independent executables for some architectures. That may mean changing your upgrade strategy. (5.6 upgrade guide here)
- FreeBSD now has frequency/voltage control on the Raspberry Pi.
- There’s a lot of v7 ARM architectures. I can see why people are waiting for AARMv8.
- FreeBSD has a new NFS client/server.
- RamNode is another VPS provider that supports BSD. (via)
- Also, cloudspin.me.
- [ is a binary program.
BSDNow isn’t slowing down for Christmas, cause there’s a new episode up. There’s two interviews this time – Erwin Lansing, about BSD in Europe, and Cristina Vintila, about BSD conferences. The rest of the episode is a bunch of “How did you get into BSD?” stories from viewers, both in text (i.e. read out from email) and the occasional video answer.
BSDTalk 249 is an 11 minute interview with Scott Long, who is involved with Netflix’s FreeBSD-based local caching appliances. This conversation is from MeetBSD 2014, though I heard Scott talk about the same subject at the last NYCBSDCon – it’s an astounding amount of data flowing through those machines.
BSDNow 068 has a large number video links to various BSD conference videos, a bunch of other article links,, and an interview of Michael W. Lucas about his new FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials book.
Get ready for some reading.
- There’s some packages moving from pkgsrc-wip to pkgsrc proper.
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 branching is planned for Monday the 15th.
- PC-BSD now has an automatic package/security patch upgrade mechanism.
- Steam on PC-BSD. Holy grail, there.
- PC-BSD needs testers for the new Update Manager, for moving from 10 to 10.1
- NetBSD has imported BIND 9.10.1-P1.
- OpenBSD has added skgpio(4), a driver for the Soekris net6501 GPIO port and LEDs.
- OpenBSD has updated Unbound to 1.5.1.
- Some Japanese input methods for OpenBSD that may work on other BSDs, too.
- pfqstat, a replacements for pfstat designed to work with Charted.
- I don’t know what the ‘BERI Virtio Networking Frontend’ is, but FreeBSD’s got it.
- fstyp(8), the filesystem detector.
- FreeBSD has added AES-ICM and AES-GCM modes to OpenCrypto.
- If you’re stopping in NYC, NYCBUG would like to hear you talk on a topic of interest.
- The case for distributed operating systems in the data center. Sounds like DragonFly’s original charter. (via)
- BSDNow wants to hear your getting-into-BSD story.
- OpenBSD libc version 78.
- There’s a lot of FreeBSD systems at NYI.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is now in physical print.
- “Networking for System Administrators” is next to come out.
- And “Tarsnap Mastery” is next to be written.
- …We’re all benefiting from Michael Lucas going full-time on writing.
BSDNow’s episode this week focuses on the just-released Bitrig 1.0, and has an interview with Patrick Wildt of that project. There’s also coverage of other topics, including the new poudriere release – that’s the tool that bulk builds packages for DragonFly and FreeBSD, though I don’t know if it’s unified across both operating systems yet.
I have been building up quite the variety this week.
- Bitrig 1.0 has been released.
- Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell. (PDF, via)
- ruBSD 2014, happening December 13th in Moscow. (via)
- How to configure full disk encryption in PC-BSD 10.1. (via)
- BSD Magazine for November 2014. (via) Why don’t they put new issue announcements in their RSS?
- A week of pkgsrc #5.
- FreeBSD Foundation’s 2014 year-end fundraising.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is hitting the printers. There’s a quiet mention of the next two books in that series, too.
- Two new kernel errata for OpenBSD.
- BSDCan 2015 (June 2015) has opened up its call for papers, now through Jan 19th, 2015. (via)
- A conversation about UTF-8, Unicode, and file systems.
- A conversation about random vs. phrase passwords.
- New Directions in Operating Systems conference notes. Lots of BSD stuff in there. (via)
- nih-0.13.0 is out for pkgsrc.
- BSD presentations (including DragonFly) at the X Developers Conference. I mentioned the event itself before, but that link wasn’t open to non-subscribers until later, as pointed out to me.
- Coreboot on the BSDs.
- More talk about embedded OpenBSD on cheap machines, including thin client machines repurposed into routers.
- Noticed in that previous link: <$100 Ubuquiti EdgeRouter-Lites can run OpenBSD? FreeBSD too, apparently.
- Is it time to give BSDs a try?
- Fixing PC-BSD upgrade issues.
The 66th BSDNow episode has an interview with Paul Schenkeveld about BSD conferences, and of course the usual variety of news, including something about a BSD-powered library in Africa; something that is entirely out of the blue to me.
Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.
- BSD on Mini ITX.
- Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/24.
- pkgsrc and i386 may have issues on partial rebuild. Or not? Follow the thread.
- lang/guile16 is leaving pkgsrc soon.
- check-update, a script for finding what packages in pkgsrc need to be updated.
- FreeBSD now has libgpio, I think for those general purpose I/O connectors on small ARM boards that are all the rage.
- FreeBSD has switched to mandoc.
- Your SGI hardware running OpenBSD will now tell you via LCD.
- Tools for checking for updated packages on OpenBSD. (read the whole thread)
- Conversations about a home PF-based router. “APU units run hot but are OK” seems to be the thread consensus.
This week’s BSDNow episode, 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops, includes an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix, along with more recent convention video links. It also mentions GNOME3 working on FreeBSD – it’s working on DragonFly too.