September 17, 2014

55: The Promised WLAN

1 hour 19 minutes

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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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

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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

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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

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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...

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Interview - Adrian Chadd - [email protected] / @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)

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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

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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

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Feedback/Questions

Brad writes in

Ben writes in

Mathieu writes in

Steve writes in

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