BSD Now

Onboard Scheduler for the Mars 2020 Rover, Practical Guide to Storage of Large Amounts of Microscopy Data, OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS, NextCloud on OpenBSD, MySQL Transactions - the physical side, TrueNAS 12.0-U2.1 is released, HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union, and more

NOTES

So you talk to a database, doing transactions. What happens actually, behind the scenes? Let’s have a look.

Lessons learned from a 27 years old UNIX book, Finally dRAID, Setting up a Signal Proxy using FreeBSD, Annotate your PDF files on OpenBSD, Things You Should Do Now, Just: More unixy than Make, and more

NOTES

One of the Amazon reviewers of "Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet" gave it 3/5 stars. While still a nice introduction, the book by Adrian Cockcroft has become dated — claimed Roland in 2003, which believe it or not was 18 years ago...

Admins will often use wide RAID stripes to maximize usable storage given a number of spindles. RAID-Z deployments with large stripe widths, ten or larger, are subject to poor resilver performance for a number of reasons. Resilvering a full vdev means reading from every healthy disk and continuously writing to the new spare. This will saturate the replacement disk with writes while scattering seeks over the rest of the vdev. For 14 wide RAID-Z2 vdevs using 12TB spindles, rebuilds can take weeks. Resilver I/O activity is deprioritized when the system has not been idle for a minimum period. Full zpools get fragmented and require additional I/O’s to recalculate data during reslivering. A pool can degenerate into a never ending cycle of rebuilds or loss of the pool Aka: the Death Spiral.

With the events that the private messaging app Signal has been blocked in Iran, Signal has come up with an “proxy” solution akin to Tor’s Bridges, and have given instructions on how to do it.

On my journey to leave macOS, I regularly look to mimic some of the features I use. Namely, annotating (or signing) PDF files is a really simple task using Preview. I couldn’t do it on OpenBSD using Zathura, Xpdf etc. But there is a software in the ports that can achieve this: Xournal.

Describes things you should do now when building software, because the cost to do them increases over time and eventually becomes prohibitive or impossible.

I think it's in the do-one-thing-well spirit of Unix, because it's just a command runner, no build system at all. Just has a bunch of nice features:

Just doesn't replace Make, or any other build system, but it does replace reverse-searching your command history, telling colleagues the weird flags they need to pass to do the thing, and forgetting how to run old projects.

Special Guest: Dan Langille.

FreeBSD 13 BETA Benchmarks, FreeBSD Jails Deep Dive by Klara Systems, FreeBSD Foundation looking for a Senior Arm Kernel Engineer & OSS Project Coordinator, macOS-Inspired BSD Desktop OS by helloSystem, A Trip into FreeBSD and more.

NOTES

In recent years, containers and virtualization have become a buzzword in the Linux community, especially with the rise of Docker and Kubernetes. What many people probably don’t realize is that these ideas have been around for a very long time. Today, we will be looking at Jails and how they became part of FreeBSD.

Special Guest: Dan Langille.

Follow-up about FreeBSD jail advantages, Install Prometheus, Node Exporter and Grafana, Calibrate your touch-screen on OpenBSD, OPNsense 21.1 Marvelous Meerkat Released, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1, Lets all shed a Tear for 386, find mostly doesn't need xargs today on modern Unixes, OpenBSD KDE Status Report, and more.

NOTES

I’ll admit I ran a lot of justifications together into a single paragraph because I wanted to get to configuring the jails themselves. They’re also, by and large, not specific to FreeBSD’s flavour of containerisation, though I still think it’s easily the most elegant implementation. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best one.

FreeBSD comes out of the box with three great tools for monitoring. If you need more info about how these tools work, please read the official documentation. I’ll explain the installation only and creating a simple dashboard.

I didn’t expected it but my refurbished T460s came with a touch-screen. It is recognized by default on OpenBSD and not well calibrated as-is. But that’s really simple to solve.

FreeBSD is designating i386 as a Tier 2 architecture starting with FreeBSD 13.0. The Project will continue to provide release images, binary updates, and pre-built packages for the 13.x branch. However, i386-specific issues (including SAs) may not be addressed in 13.x. The i386 platform will remain Tier 1 on FreeBSD 11.x and 12.x.

For more than 6 years, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.

We are pleased to present the first release candidate of NomadBSD 1.4.

I've been using Unix for long enough that 'find | xargs' is a reflex. When I started and for a long time afterward, xargs was your only choice for efficiently executing a command over a bunch of find results.

OpenBSD has managed to drop KDE3 and KDE4 in the 6.8 -> 6.9 release cycle. That makes me very happy because it was a big piece of work and long discussions. This of course brings questions: Kde Plasma 5 package missing.

Did Linux kill Commercial Unix, three node GlusterFS setup on FreeBSD, OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano (1st Gen), NetBSD on EdgeRouter Lite, TLS Mastery first draft done

NOTES

Sales of commercial Unix have fallen off a cliff. There has to be something behind this dramatic decline. Has Linux killed its ancestor by becoming a perfectly viable replacement, like an operating system version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

GlusterFS (GFS) is the open source equivalent to Microsoft's Distributed Filesystem (DFS). It's a service that replicates the contents of a filesystem in real time from one server to another. Clients connect to any server and changes made to a file will replicate automatically. It's similar to something like rsync or syncthing, but much more automatic and transparent. A FreeBSD port has been available since v3.4, and (as of this post) is currently at version 8.0 with 9.0 being released soon.

Lenovo has finally made a smaller version of its X1 Carbon, something I’ve been looking forward to for years.

NetBSD-current now has pre-built octeon bootable images (which will appear in NetBSD 10.0) for the evbmips port, so I decided to finally give it a try. I've been happily running OpenBSD/octeon on my EdgeRouter Lite for a few years now, and have previously published some notes including more detail about the CPU.

A week with Plan 9, Exploring Swap on FreeBSD, how to create a FreeBSD pkg mirror using bastille and poudriere, How to set up FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS, Creating Comfy FreeBSD Jails Using Standard Tools, and more.

NOTES

I spent the first week of 2021 learning an OS called Plan 9 from Bell Labs. This is a fringe Operating System, long abandoned by it’s original authors. It's also responsible for a great deal of inspiration elsewhere. If you’ve used the Go language, /proc, UTF-8 or Docker, you’ve used Plan 9-designed features. This issue dives into Operating System internals and some moderately hard computer science topics. If that sort of thing isn’t your bag you might want to skip ahead. Normal service will resume shortly.

On modern Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, “swapping” refers to the activity of paging out the contents of memory to a disk and then paging it back in on demand. The page-out activity occurs in response to a lack of free memory in the system: the kernel tries to identify pages of memory that probably will not be accessed in the near future, and copies their contents to a disk for safekeeping until they are needed again. When an application attempts to access memory that has been swapped out, it blocks while the kernel fetches that saved memory from the swap disk, and then resumes execution as if nothing had happened.

This a short how-to for creating a FreeBSD pkg mirror using BastilleBSD and Poudriere.

How do I install, set up and configure a FreeBSD 12 jail with VNET on ZFS? How can I create FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with /etc/jail.conf to run OpenVPN, Apache, Wireguard and other Internet-facing services securely on my BSD box?

Docker has stormed into software development in recent years. While the concepts behind it are powerful and useful, similar tools have been used in systems for decades. FreeBSD’s jails in one of those tools which build upon even older chroot(2) To put it shortly, with these tools, you can make a safe environment separated from the rest of the system.

FreeBSD Q4 2020 Status report, a must-have security tool from OpenBSD, Bastille Port Redirection and Persistence, FreeBSD Wall Display Computer, etymology of command-line tools, GhostBSD 21.01.15 Release Notes, and more.

NOTES

Pf-badhost is a very practical, robust, stable and lightweight security script for network servers.

Bastille supports redirecting (rdr) ports from the host system into target containers. This port redirection is commonly used when running Internet services such as web servers, dns servers, email and many others. Any service you want to make public outside of your cluster will likely require port redirection (with some exceptions, see below).

I've recently added a wall mounted 30" monitor for Grafana in my home. I can highly recommend doing the same, especially in a world where more work from home is becoming the norm.

I am happy to announce the availability of the new ISO 21.01.15. This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button's restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.

GNN's tips for surviving Cabin Fever and Coding from Home, Self-host a password manager on OpenBSD, Preliminary OpenBSD Support added to OBS, Dan's CURL tip of the Day, List of some Shell goodies for OpenBSD, and more

NOTES

Forgive me if this seems off topic, but I was wondering if you had any advice for the majority of us who are now KFH (koding from home). I don't know how KV works day to day, but it seems pretty clear that the status quo has changed at most workplaces in the last several months, and it's hard to know if there are things we could be doing to stay productive while we're all at home, ordering delivery, and microwaving our mail. Does KV have any good guidance?

I’ve been using Rubywarden to store and access my passwords from OpenBSD workstations and iOS toys. But recent redondant failures from the iOS App and rubywarden not being maintained anymore led to the need for a new solution.

I'm sharing here some practices I'm following and some small tips/tools which facilitate my usage of OpenBSD in my day to day.

Routing and Firewalling VLANS with FreeBSD, FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS howto, pkgsrc-2020Q4 released, FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 4 With 4GB of RAM, HardenedBSD December 2020 Status Report, and more

NOTES

In this article we are going to look at and integrate two network isolation technologies, VLANs and VNET. VLANs are common place, and if you have done some network management or design then you are likely to have interacted with them. The second are FreeBSDs VNET virtual network stacks, a powerful network stack isolation technology that gives FreeBSD jails super powers.

How do I install, set up and configure a FreeBSD 12 jail with VNET on ZFS? How can I create FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with /etc/jail.conf to run OpenVPN, Apache, Wireguard and other Internet-facing services securely on my BSD box?

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 69th quarterly release

This is the story of how I managed to get FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, though I think the setup story is pretty similar for those with 2GB and 8GB.1

Happy New Year! On this the last day of 2020, I submit December's status report.

Description: History of FreeBSD: Early Days of FreeBSD, mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard, FreeBSD Foundation Sponsors LLDB Improvements, Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD, and more.

NOTES

In this third part of our series on the history of FreeBSD, we start tracing the early days of FreeBSD and the events that would eventually shape the project and the future of open source software.

WireGuard is a new coming to OpenBSD 6.8 and it looks like a simple and efficient way to connect computers.

With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Moritz Systems improved LLDB support for FreeBSD

In this article I will explain how to deploy your own Cryptpad instance with OpenBSD. Cryptpad is a web office suite featuring easy real time collaboration on documents. Cryptpad is written in JavaScript and the daemon acts as a web server.