December 03, 2014

66: Conference Connoisseur

1 hour 22 minutes

This week on the show, we'll be talking with Paul Schenkeveld, chairman of the EuroBSDCon foundation. He tells us about his experiences running BSD conferences and how regular users can get involved too. We've also got answers to all your emails and the latest news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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More BSD presentation videos

The MeetBSD video uploading spree continues with a few more talks, maybe this'll be the last batch

Corey Vixie, Web Apps in Embedded BSD

Allan Jude, UCL config

Kip Macy, iflib

While we're on the topic of conferences, AsiaBSDCon's CFP was extended by one week

This year's ruBSD will be on December 13th in Moscow

Also, the BSDCan call for papers is out, and the event will be in June next year

Lastly, according to Rick Miller, "A potential vBSDcon 2015 event is being explored though a decision has yet to be made."

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BSD-powered digital library in Africa

You probably haven't heard much about Nzega, Tanzania, but it's an East African country without much internet access

With physical schoolbooks being a rarity there, a few companies helped out to bring some BSD-powered reading material to a local school

They now have a pair of FreeNAS Minis at the center of their local network, with over 80,000 books and accompanying video content stored on them (~5TB of data currently)

The school's workstations also got wiped and reloaded with FreeBSD, and everyone there seems to really enjoy using it

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pfSense 2.2 status update

With lots of people asking when the 2.2 release will be done, some pfSense developers decided to provide a status update

2.2 will have a lot of changes: being based on FreeBSD 10.1, Unbound instead of BIND, updating PHP to something recent, including the new(ish) IPSEC stack updates, etc

All these things have taken more time than previously expected

The post also has some interesting graphs showing the ratio of opened and close bugs for the upcoming release

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Recommended hardware threads

A few threads on caught our attention this week, all about hardware recommendations for BSD setups

In the first one, the OP asks about mini-ITX hardware to run a FreeBSD server and NAS

Everyone gave some good recommendations for low power, Atom-based systems

The second thread started off asking about which CPU architecture is best for PF on an OpenBSD router, but ended up being another hardware thread

For a router, the ALIX, APU and Soekris boards still seem to be the most popular choices, with the third and fourth threads confirming this

If you're thinking about building your first BSD box - server, router, NAS, whatever - these might be some good links to read

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Interview - Paul Schenkeveld - [email protected]

Running a BSD conference

News Roundup

From Linux to FreeBSD - for reals

Another Linux user is ready to switch to BSD, and takes to Reddit for some community encouragement (seems to be a common thing now)

After being a Linux guy for 20(!) years, he's ready to switch his systems over, and is looking for some helpful guides to transition

In the comments, a lot of new switchers offer some advice and reading material

If any of the listeners have some things that were helpful along your switching journey, maybe send 'em this guy's way

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Running FreeBSD as a Xen Dom0

Continuing progress has been made to allow FreeBSD to be a host for the Xen hypervisor

This wiki article explains how to run the Xen branch of FreeBSD and host virtual machines on it

Xen on FreeBSD currently supports PV guests (modified kernels) and HVM (unmodified kernels, uses hardware virtualization features)

The wiki provides instructions for running Debian (PV) and FreeBSD (HVM), and discusses the features that are not finished yet

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HardenedBSD updates and changes

a.out is the old executable format for Unix

The name stands for assembler output, and was coined by Ken Thompson as the fixed name for output of his PDP-7 assembler in 1968

FreeBSD, on which HardenedBSD is based, switched away from a.out in version 3.0

A restriction against NULL mapping was introduced in FreeBSD 7 and enabled by default in FreeBSD 8

However, for reasons of compatibility, it could be switched off, allowing buggy applications to continue to run, at the risk of allowing a kernel bug to be exploited

HardenedBSD has removed the sysctl, making it impossible to run in ‘insecure mode’

Package building update: more consistent repo, no more i386 packages

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Feedback/Questions

Boris writes in

Alex writes in (edit: adding "tinker panic 0" to the ntp.conf will disable the sanity check)

Chris writes in

Robert writes in

Jake writes in

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