I’m helping out at the BSD Events website. If there’s upcoming BSD-linked events, please tell me. Speaking of which: the call for papers for EuroBSDCon 2014 is out, as is the BSDCan 2014 schedule.
I am late posting this: the most recent episode of BSDNow has, along with the regular array of items, an interview of Chris Buechler, of the commercial support company behind pfSense.
Read the first item, if nothing else.
- You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
- DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
- GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
- How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
- Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
- PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
- Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
- FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
- NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
- Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
- Power failure resistance.
- LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.
I was remiss in not posting this before it happened, but Issac (.ike) Levy of NYCBUG went to Tokyo to talk about the translation efforts for pfSense, on the 17th. He posted a summary of his talk and slides.
Normally I would be posting this in an “In Other BSDs” Saturday item, but the summary page includes links on Open Network Hardware, which .ike and I talked about at NYCBSDCon. I wanted to create a separate post for it, but he’s got all the links piled in with his talk summary already.
The hardware I want to see as a real product is the Intel ONP Switch Reference Design. (PDF) Having a device that looks like a switch but is actually a normal computer with a lot of network ports – that can run BSD – opens up a huge range of network possibilities.
Lots of links, yet again.
- Michael W. Lucas intends to have more BSD books out this year – at least 2. He goes into great detail on his plans. He hints at other authors with material on the way.
- BSD-linked Twitter accounts. I like finding accounts of individual developers, so you can see what projects people are working on. (plz suggest)
- The PC-BSD Weekly Digest 16 and number 17.
- The latest freebsdnews.net summary.
- Another BSD-based product I didn’t know about.
- FreeBSD has a new version of netmap.
- NetBSD and FreeBSD have brought in version 2.0 of ATF, the Automated Test Framework.
- FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s RNDIS framework.
- More cross-BSD fixes.
- Found through this OpenBSD sendmail upgrade: Sendmail, Inc., is now owned by a company called Proofpoint? A ‘security-as-a-service’ provider. I don’t know how to feel about this.
- OpenBSD has Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230, 2200/105/135 support.
- OpenBSD supports qle(4), the QLogic ISP24xx fibre channel HBA.
- First Impressions of FreeBSD 10 on Distrowatch. (via)
- The minimum acceptable OpenSSL for pkgsrc has been bumped up.
- Undeadly has several n2k14 hackathon reports.
- Ahem. (via Freenode #nycbug)
For BSDTalk 238, Will Backman has recordings from NYCBSDCon 2014. I think I’m in there, even though I haven’t listened to it yet.
BSDNow episode 24 is up, with a recap of NYCBSDCon’s events, an interview with Luke Marsden of hybridcluster.com, a chrooted SFTP tutorial, and of course more.
Here I think out loud about NYCBSDCon, presented from my cleaned-up notes taken on my phone during the event. Get ready, cause there’s a lot of words here.
The event was very popular, to the point of overflowing the venue, Suspenders. The venue was excellent, though. The entire bar/restaurant was turned over to the convention for the day, and it made it easy to eat and drink – especially with the drink tickets that came with admission. The food was fantastic.
New York City is a huge city with lots to see, so I imagine anyone visiting from out of town could bring along family and have the family be entertained while the conference is going on. I managed to sneak in a trip to The Compleat Strategist and Desert Island Comics on the day before the convention, for example.
There were enough “famous” BSD people here that having, say, the roof fall in would have been a serious community setback. One good explosion would have taken out the people behind this digest, BSDTalk, PC-BSD, BSDNow, etc.
The NYCBUG people are very open about how the whole process works, to the point of posting how the finances worked out. “Excess” money is getting split up between the various BSDs, too, to the tune of some hundreds of dollars. This was increased by Michael W. Lucas auctioning a signed copy of his Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition book, which ended up being bought for $500. I expect the financial results will be posted on the NYCBUG website at some point soon.
I nabbed a printed copy of the brand-new FreeBSD Journal, which just launched. George Neville-Neil said that this is the only printed version that will ever exist, because printing is awful – I completely agree. I need to cover this more in a separate post.
I experimented with not bringing my laptop and typing everything through my phone. It reduced my typing speed, but I was able to take notes and pre-write large chunks of this post as things happened. I have been thinking more and more in terms of setting things up with a tablet or phone as my ‘client’ and keeping.all useful data on my server, rather than work on a laptop with BSD installed. I’d like to be working in a BSD environment, but that’s hard to accomplish natively in a handheld format. Running things remotely from a BSD system might provide the equivalent, though. Not sure how well that would work – probably good content for another post.
The first presentation was ZFS/PC-BSD/FreeNAS, from Dru Lavigne. The PC-BSD Life Preserver application is a really nice way to view filesystem snapshots. ZFS is really feature-rich, though it has high resources requirements compared to Hammer. (of course I would say that.) Dru Lavigne’s ZFS presentation slides are already up.
Ray Percival came all the way from Dallas to present “Interconnections with BSD”. Ray pointed out at dinner the night before that he is effectively able to autodeploy a firewall or other network device by remotely installing a BSD. From Ray’s presentation : “Network engineers are discovering automation and calling it software defined networking.” That is talking about the configuration side only though, not control plane, as an audience member pointed out. I still like the idea. Ray made this point about support: you can buy expensive support from commercial vendors and talk to hit or miss support. With open source, you can usually talk directly to the person who makes the software itself. That doesn’t happen with vendors.
Something I took away from that and from the conference in general: BSD helps you avoid vendor lock-in. I was worried about having UNIX-familiar workers as backup at work, but: it doesn’t get better with proprietary tools.
Andrew Wong’s presentation about ZFS+FreeBSD+PostGres is from a software engineer point of view, not a sysadmin view. He described himself as “the enemy”.
Scott Long gave some details about how much traffic NetFlix pushes out (about a third of the Internet) and how much of it is on FreeBSD (almost all of it, yeesh). The NetFlix plan is to deploy multiple relatively low-end FreeBSD systems out to ISPs to act as local content caches. No virtualization, a light set of management tools through AWS, and when a box goes bad, they just take it out; no RAID or ZFS or other fancy steps. They have 5 people managing 1000 machines.
Scott made the point that they are aggressively talking to hardware vendors about support, and getting good responses back. If you’re involved in some commercial venture with FreeBSD, talk to George Neville-Neil about the BSD hardware consortium; they’re working on a coordinated conversation with vendors to make sure BSD (probably FreeBSD only, but that’s a start) gets treated as a first-class citizen.
Jeff Rizzo described the many ways that NetBSD can be build, on most any supported platform and even not on NetBSD. It sounds like the up-front work of getting build.sh to work in every circumstance has saved a lot of labor, later.
Michael Lucas had a very entertaining talk about DragonFly where he managed to name-drop DragonFly. One of the points he made: when you write out a detailed justification for using open source products at your workplace, share it with the world, please.
I bought the lower-priced-than-they-needed-to-be shirts and stickers they had available, and managed to not win one of the cool PCEngines PFSense systems, with a fancy etched case.
There was also a number of demos going on during the afternoon break, though the only one I took any notes on was the one that I need to replicate at work: a PF /CARP failover setup. They look like this on the inside.
Like I said for the last NYCBSDCon in 2010, it’s totally worth going. I now have a long, long list of things I want to do and ideas to try, all from meeting people face to face and talking about what we can do. It’s energizing, far more than meeting over IRC. A third of the people there had no prior BSD experience. George Rosamond mentioned that he was thinking they could do this perhaps every 6 months.
The NYCBSDCon event is being livestreamed right now. I encourage watching them if you can’t make it there in person. If you don’t have time to watch the live streams, they should be available as recordings later. I will of course link to the recordings as soon as I know where they are.
As you read this, I’m at NYCBSDCon – or at least should be.
- FOSDEM 2014 videos are up. The second item listed is about the new version of ports, which includes dports. (via)
- Crochet-FreeBSD, a system for building bootable FreeBSD images for a variety of platforms including x86, ARM, and VM. (via Markus Pfieffer on IRC, indirectly)
- Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures. Seen previously at BSDCan. ‘Greytrapping’, mentioned in the article, is new to me.
- Email delivery headaches. Mailing many people is somehow almost always a low-level irritation.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/03 roundup.
- Another n2k14 hackathon report. DragonFly uses that DHCP client he’s talking about.
- PC-BSD on eWeek.
- bsd-cloudinit – FreeBSD on OpenStack. (via)
- OpenBSD gained some VAX hardware. The only VAX hardware I ever saw was 6 feet tall; I can’t imagine these are easy to ship.
- OpenBSD updated to ldns 1.6.17.
- Seen via a pkgsrc list: Berlios.de is closing down its hosting, so this may affect you if you usually grab your pkgsrc packages from there.
- The proper way to break the FreeBSD ABI.
- Robert Watson’s privilege ideas.
- How to switch between mfi(4) and mrsas(4) on FreeBSD. mrsas(4) sounds like MRSA to me, which is a bit more worrisome
- FreeBSD supports MegaRAID Fury cards.
- The plan for ATF removal in NetBSD.
- DragonFly takes the FreeBSD patch(1) updates, and that’s fine, because FreeBSD made those changes to an import of DragonFly’s patch(1). Hooray for cross-pollination!
Michael W. Lucas is selling his work at a temporary discount during NYCBSDCon, which means you have today and tomorrow to get 3 books (Sudo Mastery, DNSSEC Mastery, and SSH Mastery) for $20 total, $7 less than normal. Head to his site to get the coupon code. He’s speaking at NYCBSDCon tomorrow, too – you should go.
Episode 023 of BSDNow is up, with an interview of Ted Unangst about the new signing mechanism in OpenBSD, a NTP server tutorial, and of course more.
I managed to miss this because of reasons: BSDNow is running a contest. Come up with a tutorial that can be used ‘on-air’, and you can win a custom-made pillow showing the boot screen of the BSD of your choice. It’s bizarre but cool.
Edit: the body text of the contest notes that the contest ends January 31st. Hmm… might be too late for a winning entry.
For once, I got this mostly done before late Friday night!
- OpenBSD on the Beaglebone Black.
- DiscoverBSD’s January 28th roundup.
- Automated FreeBSD Panic Reporting. More people need to do this.
- A report from the n2k14 OpenBSD hackathon.
- New to me: CHERIBSD. Capsicum, implemented in hardware, is a rough summary.
- Python is going to 3.x by default in pkgsrc.
- OpenSSH 6.5 is out.
- PC-BSD 10 is out. (release announcement)
- FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Final.
- Sendmail is moved to 8.14.8, and bmake to 20140101 in FreeBSD.
- NetBSD has announced several 5.x and 6.x patch level changes.
- Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower, 2014 Edition.
The latest BSDNow video is up, with the normal array of recent events and an interview of George Neville-Neil. The interview is about the new FreeBSD Journal, which should be out… today? The site says “Coming in January”, so it must be soon.
There’s a (rescheduled) BSD installfest happening in an impromptu fashion at Suspenders Bar in New York City, tonight at 6:45. You can also buy tickets for NYCBSDCon there, for less than the online price since it’s direct. There’s another chance to buy them for less on Wednesday at Ear Inn, nearby. (See first link for details.)
Back to relatively normal volume, this week.
- FreeBSD 10 is out.
- OpenBSD got electrical funding, and is now holding a funding drive.
- new openssh key format and bcrypt pbkdf. A new key format for OpenSSH, and how to switch to it – only available in OpenBSD as of this writing.
- I did not know this: There’s a pfSense store, with shirts, preloaded USB sticks, and various appliances – I have one of the Netgate FW-7541 models, notable in that I’ve never had to do anything with it after initial setup; it just runs and runs. There’s a pfSense hangout/webcast for paid support customers this Friday the 24th, too.
- Open Source FreeBSD 10 Takes on Virtualization. From a saved Google search.
- Undeadly has an explanation of the new signed packages setup for OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/01/14 roundup.
- FreeBSD now has OpenSSL 1.0.1f.
- NetBSD now has a wscons/Intel GMA driver.
- PC-BSD 10 is almost out, and here’s their weekly digest talking about it. Also, apparently PC-BSd and GhostBSD share some installer code? I’m not clear on this.
- CBSD – FreeBSD jail management. (via)
- Slides and audio from Brian Callahan’s recent OpenBSD presentation at NYCBUG are up.
- OpenBSD has a qla(4) driver, for Qlogic fiber channel HBAs, and ubcmtp(4), a Macbook touchpad driver.
Episode 21 of BSDNow is up, with the usual variety of material. There’s an interview with Colin Percival, known for work on FreeBSD and Tarsnap, along with other content.
If you happen to have a laptop, some flavor of BSD on media, and are near New York City tomorrow night, there’s an impromptu installfest happening at Suspenders at 6:30. NYCBSDCon tickets will be available there, and you can now register online.
Update: canceled!
I missed this for the “In Other BSDs” section yesterday, so I’m adding it today. It’s time dependent. BSDCan 2014 is happening May 14-17 at the University of Ottawa, with those first two days being tutorials. If you want to get a paper in, you have to do it today.