Welcome to the (Free)BSD leftovers for week 6. In this post we have a mix of news snippets, quick links, howto’s, links ’n software/package updates. Just a round up of those little things I saved up this week. Previous weeks’ roundups can be found here.

FreeBSD News

1. FreeBSD & Google Summer of Code 2010
   FreeBSD Project is participating in Google’s Summer of Code programme for a sixth year. Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to apply for a grant to spend the summer improving the FreeBSD operating system! More information available on the FreeBSD Summer of code page.
   Students may now apply to participate at http://socghop.appspot.com/. Before applying you may wish to discuss your project ideas on the freebsd-hackers mailing list or on the #freebsd-soc IRC channel on EFNet. Project ideas can be found at: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode.html
   
2. Have you ever expressed your gratitude to a FreeBSD developer?
   You like FreeBSD and/or operating systems based on it, but have you have ever dropped that developer that maintains/implemented the feature that’s so important to you a note, saying “thank you”?
   Brandon Gooch, a system administrator at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, recently wrote the FreeBSD Foundation to express his gratitude towards FreeBSD developers in general and the recent wireless work in particular.

FreeBSD 9 developments (via):

1. UFS journalling committed
   Jeff Roberson has committed soft-updates journalling to 9-CURRENT. It enables a small file system journal which works in combination with soft-updates to eliminate boot fsck’s. It is different from most other implementations of file system journalling in that it doesn’t journal raw blocks but sort of meta-data about meta-data
2. GEOM disk IO scheduler framework
   A GEOM IO scheduler framework has been committed! The framework allows for multiple IO schedulers to be installed on top of GEOM providers (usually disk drives). As a consequence, potentially different schedulers can be installed on different drives. The work was done by Luigi Rizzo and Fabio Checconi.
3. FreeBSD PowerPC 9.0 snapshot available (for testing)

• Instructions Page
• Download link

FreeBSD Ports

1. Can the current Ports directory and building of it be improved?
   “There has been some discussion lately about if and how to “revamp” the ports system to make it more usable by general users. (…) Unfortunately there has been very little feedback from users themselves – which is probably a mistake, but also – there was very little feedback from the population (not a particularily small one) that is the cross-section of users and developers. Some ideas were presented, but at the end it all started revolving around banding the gaps and smaller improvements that will, I think, be practically invisible to the end-users.”
   Ivan Voras has noted down his ideas in this post: of ports and of men.

Releases

1. m0n0wall
   m0n0wall 1.32 is out, and it finally fixes the annoying Ethernet link state bug on ALIX boards (and others that use VIA network chips). Some more work has been done on IPv6 support, the DNS forwarder and the hardware monitor.
2. NanoBSD
   NanoBSD on ALIX in iX 05/2010. This article  ago will appear on page 146 of ix magazine (DE) issue 05/2010

Websites / Social Media

1. PC-BSD
   As far as i’m aware this page is not officially supported by PC-BSD  / iXsystems, but there is a Facebook PC-BSD page. There’s already quite a popular and active Facebook PC-BSD Group.
2. iXsystems website
   As of this week iXsystems has a new website. I like the new version as it’s a lot cleaner and makes finding the right server easier. iXsystems is the corporate sponsor behind PC-BSD and FreeNAS.

Guides & Howto’s

1. Setting up a headless torrent daemon in FreeBSD
   “I have FreeBSD running as a home server for a while now. One of the things I wanted the server to take care of is downloading torrents, so I could shut down my PC whenever I am downloading stuff. With transmission-daemon (net-p2p/transmission-daemon from ports) this is really simple.”  (tweakblogs.net)
2. Run FreeNAS in Windows for Network Serving and Sharing
   Many of the popular servers are open source and usually are more widely supported for Linux and other Unix-like systems. However, most can be run right inside Windows. This is especially great for temporary solutions or for new or amateur administrators (serverwatch.com)

(Free)BSD Events

1. Solution Linux 2010
   Last month   “Solutions Linux” took place in Paris, one of the major professional open source events in France. Here are some pictures of the BSD booths : http://www.bebik.net/cgi-bin/album.pl?album=2010SL
2. A new BSDA Certification session will be held in Nantes, France on 1 June 2010 at BSDay Nantes. Check the BSD Certification calendar for events near you.
3. BSD Professional Certification Exam Update
   A short progress report on what’s happening with the BSD

New FreeBSD Committers

Over the last few weeks a few more people have been given commit rights. It’s always good to see more people join the FreeBSD project.

1. Ports

• Sahil Tandon
• Rene Ladan
• Giuseppe Pilichi
• Bernhard Fröhlich

1. Source Code

• Randi Harper
• Ryan Stone
• Ana Kukec

BSD / Unix Family News

1. DragonFly BSD 2.6: towards a free clustering operating system
   This article gives in introduction into the background and history of DragonFlyBSD, its HAMMER filesystem, new features etc
   “The ultimate goal of DragonFly BSD is to allow programs to run across multiple machines as if they are running on one system. The operating system is still far from that goal, but Dillon has done a great deal of rewriting in nearly every subsystem of the kernel to lay the foundations for future work. Much of the rationale behind the design goals is explained on the project’s web site. It’s an interesting read, because it shows how they want to tackle an ambitious vision with a realistic plan…” continues (lwn.net)
2. DragonFly BSD 2.6.1 with new swapcache released
   DragonFly BSD, the FreeBSD fork, has been updated to version 2.6.1 and incorporates a added a number of new features whilst updating the components of the clustering oriented operating system. A new swapcache has been incorporated which allows the swap space to also retain clean filesystem data and meta-data rather than just memory. (more)
3. Why OpenBSD’s Release Process Works
   “Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success”  (via)
   
   
4. AIX 7.1 is coming
   IBM plans to deliver the next version of the AIX® operating system, AIX 7, and new releases of PowerVM™ and PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX. These new offerings are designed to help companies reduce cost, improve service and lower the risk of deploying and migrating applications to AIX on Power® Systems.The new capabilities planned for AIX 7 are designed to expand the scalability, reliability and manageability of AIX and the applications running on AIX. Key features will provide greater vertical scalability of up to 1024 threads or 256 cores in a single partition, a clustering infrastructure designed to provide highly availability applications with PowerHA SystemMirror and to simplify management of scale-out workloads. Additional AIX 7 will include new management capabilities based on IBM Systems Director that are designed to simplify the management of AIX system configuration. Finally AIX 7 will support the ability to run AIX 5.2 inside of a Workload Partition to allow consolidation of old workloads on new systems (source & more)
5. IBM Prunes Low-Cost AIX Rev
   IBM has radically improved the bang for the buck on its Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blade servers this week, and is expected to soon deliver similarly priced entry rack and tower servers. And now it has a new, lower-cost AIX 6.1 Express Edition that will match the less expensive hardware and therefore help Big Blue’s AIX platform better compete against Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris alternatives. The new AIX Express Edition takes the special low-cost pricing that was available only on JS series blade servers and now makes it available across the Power Systems line, including logical partitions on the largest Power 595 (and before too long Power 595) servers.