The Installfest

We\’ve got some special treats for you this week on the show. It\’s the long-awaited \”installfest\” segment, where we go through the installer of each of the different BSDs. Of course we also have your feedback and the latest news as well… and… we even have our very first viewer contest! There\’s a lot to get to today on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

$\"iXsystems\"$

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

FreeBSD\’s new testing infrastructure

A new test suite was added to FreeBSD, with 3 powerful machines available
Both -CURRENT and stable/10 have got the test suite build infrastructure in place
Designed to help developers test and improve major scalability across huge amounts of CPUs and RAM
More details available here
Could the iXsystems monster server be involved…?

OpenBSD gets signify

At long last, OpenBSD gets support for signed releases!
For \”the world\’s most secure OS\” it was very easy to MITM kernel patches, updates, installer isos, everything
A commit to the -current tree reveals a new \”signify\” tool is currently being kicked around
More details in a blog post from the guy who committed it
Quote: \”yeah, briefly, the plan is to sign sets and packages. that\’s still work in progress.\”

Faces of FreeBSD

This time they interview Isabell Long, a 19 year old female that\’s involved with FreeBSD
She\’s a volunteer staff member on the freenode IRC network
In 2011, she participated in the Google Code-In contest and became involved with documentation
\”The new committer mentoring process proved very useful and that, plus the accepting community of FreeBSD, are reasons why I stay involved.\”

pkgsrc-2013Q4 branched

The quarterly pkgsrc branch from NetBSD is out
13472 total packages for NetBSD-current/amd64 + 13049 binary packages built with clang!
Lots of numbers and stats in the announcement
pkgsrc works on quite a few different OSes, not just NetBSD
See our interview with Amitai Schlair for a bit about pkgsrc

OpenBSD on Google\’s Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a \”cloud computing\” platform similar to EC2
Unfortunately, they only offer poor choices for the OS (Debian and CentOS)
Recently it\’s been announced that there is a custom OS option
It\’s using a WIP virtio-scsi driver, lots of things still need more work
Lots of technical and networking details about the struggles to get OpenBSD working on it

This episode was brought to you by

$\"iXsystems$

We\’ll be showing you the installer of each of the main BSDs. As of the date this episode airs, we\’re using:
+ FreeBSD 10.0
+ OpenBSD 5.4
+ NetBSD 6.1.2
+ DragonflyBSD 3.6
+ PCBSD 10.0

News Roundup

Building an OpenBSD wireless access point

A neat write up we found around the internet about making an OpenBSD wifi router
Goes through the process of PXE booting, installing base, using a serial console, setting up networking and wireless
Even includes a puffy sticker on the Soekris box at the end, how cute

FreeBSD 4.X jails on 10.0

Blog entry from our buddy Michael Lucas
For whatever reason (an \”in-house application\”), he needed to run a FreeBSD 4 jail in FreeBSD 10
Talks about the options he had: porting software, virtualizing, dealing with slow old hardware
He goes through the whole process of making an ancient jail
It\’s \”an acceptable trade-off, if it means I don’t have to touch actual PHP code.\”

Unscrewed: a story about OpenBSD

Pretty long blog post about how a network admin used OpenBSD to save the day
To set the tone, \”It was 5am, and the network was down\”
Great war story about replacing expensive routers and networking equipment with cheaper hardware and BSD
Mentions a lot of the built in tools and how OpenBSD is great for routers and high security applications

PCBSD weekly digest

10.0-RC3 is out and ready to be tested
New detection of ATI Hybrid Graphics, they\’re working on nVidia next
Fixed an issue with detecting disk drives that take a LONG time to probe
Re-classifying Linux jails as unsupported / experimental (and all 4 people that use them wept)

Feedback/Questions

Daniel writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2uns1hMml
Erik writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2MeJNCCiu
SW writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21fBXkP2K
Bostjan writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20N9bfkum
Samuel writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20FU9wUO5

Contest

We\’re going to be having our first viewer contest!
We\’ll be giving away a handmade FreeBSD pillow – yes you heard right
All you need to do is write a tutorial for the show
Submit your BSD tutorial write-ups to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you want to email us your idea first, I can tell you if I already have a tutorial for that topic prewritten for the show in the backlog
Check bsdnow.tv/contest for all the rules, details, instructions and a picture of the pillow.

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
The OpenBSD router tutorial has gotten some improvements. It now includes an option to encrypt all your DNS lookups, as well as some cool utilities you can use for bandwidth monitoring, performance improvements and other fun router stuff
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
BSD Now got some unintended publicity at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (1:28:16 – 1:31:00 in the video)