Coming up this week, we’ll be talking with Adrian Chadd about all things wireless, his experience with FreeBSD on various laptop hardware and a whole lot more. As usual, we’ve got the latest news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.
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– Show Notes: –
Headlines
FreeBSD 10.1-BETA1 is out
- The first maintenance update in the 10.x series of FreeBSD is on its way
- Since we can’t see a changelog yet, the 10-STABLE release notes offer a glimpse at some of the new features and fixes that will be included in 10.1
- The vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, lots of drivers were updated, lots of bugs were fixed and bhyve also got many improvements from 11
- Initial UEFI support, multithreaded softupdates for UFS and many more things were added
- You can check the release schedule for the planned release dates
- Details for the various forms of release media can be found in the announcement
Remote headless OpenBSD installation
- A lot of server providers only offer a limited number of operating systems to be easily installed on their boxes
- Sometimes you’ll get lucky and they’ll offer FreeBSD, but it’s much harder to find ones that natively support other BSDs
- This article shows how you can use a Linux-based rescue system, a RAM disk and QEMU to install OpenBSD on the bare metal of a server, headlessly and remotely
- It required a few specific steps you’ll want to take note of, but is extremely useful for those pesky hosting providers
Building a firewall appliance with pfSense
- In this article, we learn how to easily set up a gateway and wireless access point with pfSense on a Netgate ALIX2C3 APU
- After the author’s modem died, he decided to look into a more do-it-yourself option with pf and a tiny router board
- The hardware he used has gigabit ports and a BSD-compatible wireless card, as well as enough CPU power for a modest workload and a few services (OpenVPN, etc.)
- There’s a lot of great pictures of the hardware and detailed screenshots, definitely worth a look
Receive Side Scaling – UDP testing
- Adrian Chadd has been working on RSS (Receive Side Scaling) in FreeBSD, and gives an update on the progress
- He’s using some quad core boxes with 10 gigabit ethernet for the tests
- The post gives lots of stats and results from his network benchmark, as well as some interesting workarounds he had to do
- He also provides some system configuration options, sysctl knobs, etc. (if you want to try it out)
- And speaking of Adrian Chadd…
Interview – Adrian Chadd – adrian@freebsd.org / @erikarn
BSD on laptops, wifi, drivers, various topics
News Roundup
Sendmail removed from OpenBSD
- Mail server admins around the world are rejoicing, because sendmail is finally gone from OpenBSD
- With OpenSMTPD being a part of the base system, sendmail became largely redundant and unneeded
- If you’ve ever compared a “sendmail.cf” file to an “smtpd.conf” file… the different is as clear as night and day
- 5.6 will serve as a transitional release, including both sendmail and OpenSMTPD, but 5.7 will be the first release without it
- If you still need it for some reason, sendmail will live in ports from now on
- Hopefully FreeBSD will follow suit sometime in the future as well, possibly including DragonFly’s mail transfer agent in base (instead of an entire mail server)
pfSense backups with pfmb
- We’ve mentioned the need for a tool to back up pfSense configs a number of times on the show
- This script, hosted on github, does pretty much exactly that
- It can connect to one (or more!) pfSense installations and back up the configuration
- You can roll back or replace failed hardware very easily with its restore function
- Everything is done over SSH, so it should be pretty secure
The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
- We mentioned when the pre orders were up, but now “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2nd edition” seems to be shipping out
- If you’re interested in FreeBSD development, or learning about the operating system internals, this is a great book to buy
- We’ve even had all three authors on the show before!
OpenBSD’s systemd replacement updates
- We mentioned last week that the news of OpenBSD creating systemd wrappers was getting mainstream attention
- One of the developers writes in to Undeadly, detailing what’s going on and what the overall status is
- He also clears up any confusion about “porting systemd to BSD” (that’s not what’s going on) or his code ever ending up in base (it won’t)
- The top comment as of right now is a Linux user asking if his systemd wrappers can be ported back to Linux… poor guy
Feedback/Questions
- 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 – we’d love to hear from you!
- Last week we mentioned that Ken was looking for help to port Lumina to other BSDs, and now it’s been done for OpenBSD and DragonFly – so now you can try it out there too
- Antoine Jacoutot sent a screenshot of Lumina on OpenBSD
- We’ll be at EuroBSDCon soon, so there will be a prerecorded episode next week
- When we’re not in Europe, you can usually watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)
