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FreeBSD 4th Quarter 2016 Status Report

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The developers of FreeBSD have released their status report for the 4th Quarter of 2016. Here you will find detailed reports from the Release Engineering Team, Ports Collection, FreeBSD Core Team, and FreeBSD Foundation. Projects highlighted are Ceph on FreeBSD, OpenBSM, Sysctl Exporter for Prometheus, the Graphics Stack, FreeBSD Hyper-V and Azure, and many more.

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Another year has passed (and another has gotten well underway, while we worked to assemble this report). Over the past two years that I have been part of the monthly@ team that assembles these reports, it has been enlightening to watch the individual entries pass through my emacs and/or vim. These reports give me a picture of what is going on with FreeBSD that I could not get just from reading commit mail; I hope that is also true for our readers.

This quarter brings the usual mix of continuations of many stalwart projects and entires of new participants, as well as the return of some items after a few quarters’ hiatus. Enjoy and be enlightened!

—Benjamin Kaduk

Original announcement: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2017-February/001781.html

Official status report: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-10-2016-12.html

Work on FreeBSD as they ended out 2016 included finalizing 11.0-RELEASE, expanding the Ports Tree to now more than 27,000 packages, better supporting Azure and Hyper-V for virtualization, improve ARM and ARM64 support, advance their reproducible builds support so that about 80% of the ports tree can now be built reproducibly, made progress on LLVM’s LLD linker as their system linker, continued porting the LXQt desktop to FreeBSD, and more.

Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-Q4-2016-Report

[How-To] Virtual Private Network with FreeBSD

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This guide by Virtualisation Works shows us how to get a VPN set up with FreeBSD. See the links below for both parts of the tutorial.

vpnWith inexpensive and agile cloud services, it is not unusual for a service to have multiple points of presence around the globe.  In each point of presence, there is usually a per-tenant private network for internal (and confidential) system communications.  One can go further and combine these internal networks together with virtual links. Here I explain the steps how this can be achieved with FreeBSD without relying extra networking services from the cloud vendors.

Virtual Private Network with FreeBSD (Part 1)

If you are following the guide in FreeBSD handbook, you must be frustrated because of the complicated configurations.  Those configurations are good in the sense it restricts the IPsec to particular IP pairs but they are also too tough for purpose of connecting just two routers.  In this example, I break these assumptions and go as minimal as possible so the readers can have a smoother learning curve.  I protect the private ports from unsolicited connections with the help of PF firewall instead of the IPsec configuration.

Virtual Private Network with FreeBSD (Part 2)

BSDNow.TV Episode 180: Illuminating the desktop

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In this BSD Now episode, host Allan Jude interviews Ken Moore while is brother is out of town, regarding the latest of BSD desktop computing and Lumina Desktop Environment. Press play below to tune in:

BSD Now weekly content: http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2017_02_08-illuminating_the_desktop

Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/106756/illuminating-the-desktop-bsd-now-180/

Steam on TrueOS via playonbsd

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It looks like running Steam on TrueOS is becoming easier, as reported by Michael Larabel of Phoronix and Josh Smith of TrueOS. Steam can be run using playonbsd, which is based on Wine and can be downloaded from the AppCafe. Check out the link below for the full story and instructions.

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We’ve done a couple of tutorials in the past on using Steam and Wine with PC-BSD, but now with the addition of playonbsd to the AppCafe library, you have more options than ever before to game on your TrueOS system.  We’re going to have a look today at playonbsd, how it works with TrueOS, and what you can expect if you want to give it a try on your own system.  Let’s dive right in!

The first thing you’ll want to do is grab playonbsd from the AppCafe library.  Open up AppCafe and do a quick search.  It should come right up.  Click the download button on the right side to grab and install it on your local system.

Steam on TrueOS: https://www.trueos.org/blog/playonbsd-trueos-getting-steamy-ive-much-/wine

Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=TrueOS-AppCafe-Steam

 

Convincing A Linux Guy To Use FreeBSD

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Host Bryan Lunduke invites George Neville-Neil, author and longtime FreeBSD advocate, to discuss FreeBSD. Neville-Neil tries to convince him on how FreeBSD is better than Linux. Click play below to tune in to the Lunduke Hour:

Like what I do? Want the audio podcast RSS feed version of this show?
https://www.patreon.com/bryanlunduke

My free e-books, DRM-free, under the Creative Commons license:
http://lunduke.com/book-store/

Original post: https://thechroniclesofrenard.blogspot.com/2017/02/convincing-linux-guy-to-use-freebsd.html

Bryan Lunduke’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkK9UDm_ZNrq_rIXCz3xCGA

Galera Cluster Packages support for FreeBSD available from Codership

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Codership has announced Galera Cluster Packages support for FreeBSD. Galera Cluster Packages is an open-source database cluster for MySQL high availability, allowing for scaling out or scaling in when needed. You can try it out for FreeBSD by viewing a short tutorial at the link below.

galera_replication1Galera Cluster on FreeBSD

Galera Cluster for MySQL already runs on FreeBSD in large organizations that handle mission-critical and security-sensitive data. With Galera 3.20, we are now providing compilation fixes, ports scripts and binary packages for FreeBSD.

If you are a FreeBSD user, please give those scripts and packages a try! We welcome all feedback at info [&] galeracluster.com .

Binary Packages

You can find Galera Cluster binary packages for FreeBSD in our package repository.

Using the Galera Cluster Ports …

Galera Cluster Packages for FreeBSD – http://galeracluster.com/2017/01/galera-cluster-packages-and-support-for-freebsd-are-now-available-from-codership/

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 – Blast from the past by eerielinux

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User eerielinux posts about updating their FreeBSD 4.11 machine. The version was released in 2005 and was end-of-life’d in 2007. Nonetheless, this article documents an interesting journey of updating a near decade old system. Check out the links below to read this blog series spanned across four posts.

eerie319

Ah, weekend. And it’s a nice day, too: The sun shines on the snowy landscape! A perfect day to go out with the children – or to embark on a vastly different kind of adventure… Yes, you read that title right. This is not about four FreeBSD 11 machines. It’s about one FreeBSD 4.11 machine in 2017!

Legacy systems in general

Why even bother with FreeBSD 4.11 today? Well, most people would probably respect historical interest and in fact I was keen on tinkering with a legendary old 4.x release and see if you can have some fun with it (spoiler: Oh yes, you can!). But this would be a task for times when I have absolutely nothing else to do. So it’s fairly obvious that there’s another reason.

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (1/4) – Blast from the past

This post is about the first part of updating this fresh 4.11 system to a state that’s a bit less catastrophic. Remember: FreeBSD 4.11 was released in 2005 – however the ABI of each release is carved in stone with a .0 release. Which means that the software in the base system is from 4.0 and thus we venture back into the last millenium: 1999!

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (2/4) – Digging up old graves

This post will cover installing newer software.

Any bets?

So far we have a pkgsrc tree from mid 2007 and things seem to be working. However that’s pretty close to 4.11’s release in 2005 and thus not too amazing. Working with such an old system there are plenty of cases which mean “game over”.

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (3/4) – Neophyte’s notorious necromancy

This post details some more updates until we reach the final state that’s possible with such an old system (without resorting to extreme means).

Planting a new tree

So far we’ve built some packages from 2013 and before. Using a current pkgsrc tree won’t work – the various pkgsrc tools that our system has are too old. It might not be too big a step but we can use a tree from the second half of 2014.

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (4/4) – Reflecting radical resurrection

Minio, Google Go-powered object storage server

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Google-Go object storage server Minio is an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services. Minio offers object storage and supports FreeBSD, and is compatible with existing Amazon Web Service S3 tools. Read more at the link below.open_cloud_app-100586535-primary.idge

There’s a new object storage server that has been introduced as an open source alternative to Amazon S3 and other API-compatible services.

Minio, written in Go and available under the Apache license, allows unstructured data (up to 5TB per object) to be stored on a pool of drives of your choosing. Included in the box are protections against data loss and an event-notification system that can be used to build AWS Lambda-like functionality.

Simple and sturdy wins the race

A guiding principle of the service is to keep things simple, because “only simple things scale,” Minio says. The standalone binary for Minio’s 64-bit Windows server is 23.5MB; the client is 10MB. It can run on a single node or can gang together pools of drives across a cluster of machines. The service runs on a variety of OS platforms: Linux, MacOS, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, and—in theory—any other platform that supports the Go runtime.

Minio can be accessed using the program’s own command-line utility or any Amazon S3-compatible CLI or SDK. The documentation for Minio outlines various recipes for using the server in conjunction with other services or clients. Those running FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based storage system that supports ZFS, can run Minio directly on FreeNAS by way of the FreeBSD version of the server.

Original article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3163433/cloud-storage/google-go-powered-object-storage-server-offers-open-source-aws-alternative.html

FreeBSD Foundation – January 2017 Projects Update

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Ed Maste, Director of Project Development at the FreeBSD Foundation, updates us with the project initiatives so far in 2017. Read more on their ideas, selection, and development process at the Foundation website below.

freebsd_foundationHappy new year and welcome to 2017! In this update, I’ll take the opportunity to look at how the FreeBSD Foundation identifies, reviews, and chooses projects to be undertaken by paid development staff and by recipients of project development grants.

The Foundation chooses projects based on a variety of factors, but one common theme is that we try to identify gaps in work taken on by FreeBSD committers, contributors, and developers employed by companies building products on top of FreeBSD. Our goal is never to supplant development that is already happening in the community, but to augment and complement it. For staff development, we will take on projects that are of broad interest, but require too much effort for individual contributors to justify. We also act as a liaison, coordinating shared effort from multiple parties with a common goal of improving FreeBSD in some manner.

FreeBSD Foundation January 2017 Projects Update: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/january-2017-projects-update/