Whee!
- Which would be better as a free desktop; PC-BSD or OpenBSD?
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/02.
- M0n0wall alternatives at DiscoverBSD.
- BSD Magazine for February. (I think.)
- A preview of PC-BSD’s upcoming 10.1.2 release.
Whee!
Well, this week just sort of took off for BSD links.
A late update: NYCBUG’s upcoming meetings and presentations, with the next one on March 4th, this week. If you have a local BSD user group, I would like to know about it!
There’s some DragonFly material in here, though I normally confine that to the rest of the week. It’s inextricable from the rest of the links.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Your not-BSD BSD link of the week: Badass Space Dragon.
If you’re in/near New York City, NYCBUG has a meeting tonight with Issac (.ike) Levy presenting “Life with an OpenBSD Laptop“.
I’m not sure how I ended up with so much BSD material this week, but hey, we all benefit!
Your extended read: scaling linux-based router hardware recommendations, from the NANOG operators list. Follow the thread. It’s theoretically about Linux, but people name BSD solutions all through it. Hmm…
Short week this week, mostly due to a lack of interesting source changes.
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
Lots of material this week.
I got this done early, for once.
Remembered to do this all at the last minute, after I got the new server up.
I’m going to dive right in with an anecdote: As is normal for anyone in systems administration, I’m busy at work. I’ve been short an employee for some time, and I brought in a managed service provider to do some work. This included a revamping of the network equipment and layout, as it has been growing organically rather than in a planned fashion.
I received the formal assessment from the provider a few weeks ago, and it mentioned that we were using a non ICSA-certified firewall: pf, in the form of pfSense. This was accompanied by some rather drastic warnings about how open source was targeted by hackers! and implied that ICSA certification was a mark of quality rather than a purchasable certification. All bogus, of course.
The reason I’m starting this review with this little story is to note that while open source has become well-accepted for system and application software, there’s still a lot of people that expect commercial hardware to be exclusively handling data once it leaves the server. That’s been valid for a long time, but software like pf represents a realistic option, or even an improvement, over many commercial and proprietary options. Since pf exists in one form or another on all the BSDs, it’s a tool you should be at least somewhat familiar with.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has written about pf first online, and then in printed form, for some time. The Book of PF is in its third edition, and that’s what I have to read. (Disclosure: No Starch Press gave me the book free, without requirements)
The book is excellent, and easier to read than I expected for a book about network processing. It can be read in linear form, as it takes the reader from simple to more complex network layouts. It works as a reference book, too, as it focuses on different tools around pf and what they are used for.
It covers the different pf version in OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, and DragonFly gets at least a partial mention in some portions of the book. For example, OpenBSD recently removed ALTQ, but the other BSDs still use it. With- and without-ALTQ scenarios are covered every place it applies. You’re going to get the most mileage out of an OpenBSD setup with it, though.
The parts where the book shines are the later chapters; the descriptions of greylisting and spamd, the traffic shaping notes, and the information on monitoring pf will be useful for most anyone. It’s quite readable; similar in tone to Peter’s blog. If you enjoy his in–depth online articles, the book will be a pleasant read.
It’s available now from Amazon and directly from No Starch Press. It’s linked in the book slider currently running on the right side of this site, too.
The list is shorter this week; I blame the Christmas holiday.
I sort of lost a day this week because of an accidental 20-hour workday, but I still have the links:
Note: corrected VPS hosting link.
Get ready for some reading.
I have been building up quite the variety this week.
Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.
I actually got this started early, for once, instead of completing in a panic on Friday night.
Totally last minute.
Snow finally hit my area yesterday, which makes me happy.