AirPorts & Packages | BSD Now 40

chris

8 years ago

On this week\’s episode, we\’ll be giving you an introductory guide on OpenBSD\’s ports and package system.

There\’s also a pretty fly interview with Karl Lehenbauer, about how they use FreeBSD at FlightAware.

Lots of interesting news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

Headlines

More presentations and trip reports are still being uploaded
Ingo Schwarze, New Trends in mandoc
Vsevolod Stakhov, The Architecture of the New Solver in pkg
Julio Merino, The FreeBSD Test Suite
Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM
There\’s also a trip report from Michael Dexter and another (very long and detailed) trip report from our friend Warren Block that even gives us some linkage, thanks!

Michael W Lucas (who, we learn through this video, has been using BSD since 1986) gave a \”webcast\” last week, and the audio and slides are finally up
It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, managing to touch on a lot of OpenBSD topics
Some of those topics include: what is OpenBSD and why you should care, the philosophy of the project, how it serves as a \”pressure cooker for ideas,\” briefly touches on GPL vs BSDL, their \”do it right or don\’t do it at all\” attitude, their stance on NDAs and blobs, recent LibreSSL development, some of the security functions that OpenBSD enabled before anyone else (and the ripple effect that had) and, of course, their disturbing preference for comic sans
Here\’s a direct link to the slides
Great presentation if you\’d like to learn a bit about OpenBSD, but also contains a bit of information that long-time users might not know too

Another blog post covering something people seem to be obsessed with – FreeBSD vs Linux
This one was worth mentioning because it\’s very thorough in regards to how things are done behind the scenes, not just the usual technical differences
It highlights the concept of a \”core team\” and their role vs \”contributors\” and \”committers\” (similar to a presentation Kirk McKusick did not long ago)
While a lot of things will be the same on both platforms, you might still be asking \”which one is right for me?\” – this article weighs in with some points for both sides and different use cases
Pretty well-written and unbiased article that also mentions areas where Linux might be better, so don\’t hate us for linking it

One of the things people love the most about FreeNAS (other than ZFS) is their cool plugin framework
With these plugins, you can greatly expand the feature set of your NAS via third party programs
This page talks about a few of the more popular ones and how they can be used to improve your NAS or media box experience
Some examples include setting up an OwnCloud server, Bacula for backups, Maraschino for managing a home theater PC, Plex Media Server for an easy to use video experience and a few more
It then goes into more detail about each of them, how to actually install plugins and then how to set them up

FreeBSD at FlightAware, BSD history, various topics

In most of the BSDs, changes need to be reviewed by more than one person before being committed to the tree
This article describes Phabricator, an open source code review system that we briefly mentioned last week
Instructions for using it are on the wiki
While not approved by the core team yet for anything official, it\’s in a testing phase and developers are encouraged to try it out and get their patches reviewed
Just look at that fancy interface!!

Sneaky MWL somehow finds his way into both our headlines and the news roundup
He gives us an update on the next BSD books that he\’s planning to release
The plan is to release three (or so) books based on different aspects of FreeBSD\’s storage system(s) – GEOM, UFS, ZFS, etc.
This has the advantage of only requiring you to buy the one(s) you\’re specifically interested in
\”When will they be released? When I\’m done writing them. How much will they cost? Dunno.\”
It\’s not Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition…

If you\’re running a cluster or a group of servers, you should have some sort of failover in place
But the question comes up, \”how do you load balance the load balancers!?\”
This video goes through the process of giving more than one machine the same IP, how to set up CARP, securing it and demonstrates a node dying
Also mentions DNS-based load balancing as another option

This time in PCBSD land, we\’re getting ready for the 10.0.2 release (ISOs here)
AppCafe got a good number of fixes, and now shows 10 random highlighted applications
EasyPBI added a \”bulk\” mode to create PBIs of an entire FreeBSD port category
Lumina, the new desktop environment, is still being worked on and got some bug fixes too

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you want to come on for an interview or have a tutorial you\’d like to see, let us know
Just a reminder, if you\’re using vnd (vnconfig) on OpenBSD for encryption, it\’s being retired for 5.7 – start planning to migrate your data to softraid
There were also some security advisories for FreeBSD recently, make sure you\’re all patched up
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)