February 19, 2014

25: A Sixth pfSense

1 hour 7 minutes

We have a packed show for you this week! We'll sit down for an interview with Chris Buechler, from the pfSense project, to learn just how easy it can be to deploy a BSD firewall. We'll also be showing you a walkthrough of the pfSense interface so you can get an idea of just how convenient and powerful it is. Answers to your questions and the latest headlines, here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon

This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria

They've got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present

There will also be a tutorial section of the conference

AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!

All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted

Check the link for all the details on the talks - if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers!

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FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU

This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router

Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up

It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don't want to use the ones rolled by someone else

For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router

Of course if you're more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too

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Signed pkgsrc package guide

We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up

It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)

He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them

The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer

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Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports

Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI

In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things

In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara

In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead - but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he's done

In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things

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Interview - Chris Buechler - [email protected] / @cbuechler

pfSense

Tutorial

pfSense walkthrough

News Roundup

FreeBSD challenge continues

Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey

In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first

In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he's starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again - concludes that ports are the way to go

In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch

In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails!

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BSD books in 2014

BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them

In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014

In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and...

Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)

Check the link for all the details

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How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images

Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post

Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch

You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI

It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward

***

PCBSD weekly digest

This time around we discuss how you can become a developer

Kris also details the length of supported releases

Expect lots of new features in 10.1

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Feedback/Questions

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By JT Pennington

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