In this BSD Now episode, hosts Allan Jude and Kris Moore talk about exciting changes headed to this show. Find out what they’re talking about by pressing the play button below!
BSD Now weekly content roundup: http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2017_03_16-exit_interview
Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/107556/exit-interview-bsd-now-185/
Recently, the FreeBSD Foundation announced a $250,000 donation from the computing giant Intel. This news follows a partnership between the open-source operating system, the Foundation behind it, and Intel to further improve FreeBSD support on Intel hardware.
We were thrilled to announce at AsiaBSDCon 2017 a collaborative effort and partnership with Intel. Intel has committed to a $250,000 donation to show their support for FreeBSD as a viable operating system, foster collaboration between Intel, the Foundation, and FreeBSD, and to improve the support of FreeBSD in Intel products and technologies. Find out more about the partnership here.
New Uranium Level Donation and Collaborative Partnership with Intel: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/latest-news/new-uranium-level-donation-and-collaborative-partnership-with-intel/
This guide by user nerdazoid will show you how to install and update FreeBSD 11.0 on a Raspberry Pi machine. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.
FreeBSD runs great on a Raspberry Pi, but the official images are all stable or current branches and there is no support for binary updates, i.e. freebsd-update. So I tried to figure out how to install the latest release version and keep it updated as well, without starting from scratch with a new image every time.
While it is possible to build a kernel and world on the Raspberry Pi itself, it takes about a week to finish (trust me, I tried) and you need a much larger /tmp on a disk or share for it to work in the first place. Since FreeBSD can also be cross-compiled, I decided to use my Xeon box to do the heavy lifting and then just install it on the Raspberry Pi.
Full tutorial: https://nerdazoid.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/installing-and-updating-freebsd-11-0-release-on-a-raspberry-pi/
This article by user osemotions details a FreeBSD 11 desktop installation, as a Linux user steering the wheel. Read about their trial using FreeBSD below, in addition to trying out TrueOS.
A Penguin tries FreeBSD 11.0 RELEASE on an old i386 PC as his main desktop operating system, for the first time, for a weekend.
The story begins, you guess, with the operating system installation using the FreeBSD i386 hybrid image in order to boot a USB key.
Installation
Installation went without problems and everything flowed as I expected. For a user who lives in the world of Debianized Penguins, being able to install the superb ZFS filesystem is somewhat interesting at least.
A Penguin tries out FreeBSD 11 as a desktop operating system: http://www.osemotions.com/a-penguin-tries-freebsd-as-a-desktop-operating-system/
A Penguin tries out TrueOS: http://www.osemotions.com/a-penguin-tries-out-trueos-formerly-pc-bsd/
This guide by user Rubénerd shows us how to get Ansible set up on FreeBSD. Ansible is a powerful open-source IT automation engine designed for efficient workflow. See the link below for the full set of instructions.
I use Ansible where possible at work; it’s really wonderful stuff for Linux. Unfortunately, its support for the BSDs has never been fantastic, evidenced by their zero-dependency claim when a Python interpreter is required!
Given the dearth of BSD Ansible material online, I thought I’d share some tips I’ve learned since trying it out. This is all valid as of Ansible 2.2.1.0.
Bootstrapping a fresh FreeBSD install
Since I wrote my first playbooks, the Ansible BSD docs now list a process using the “raw” method to bootstrap dependencies on a fresh FreeBSD install:
Full tutorial: https://rubenerd.com/ansible-on-freebsd/
Intel will be engaging with the FreeBSD Foundation and the FreeBSD Project more often to provide better support for Intel products and technologies rooted in FreeBSD. In the past, they have collaborated on individual technologies but now they are heading towards a more holistic approach. Read the rest by following the link at the bottom of the page!
Contributed by Bev Crair, Vice President, Software and Services Group, General Manager, Strategic Software Initiatives
As Imad Sousou mentioned in his blog, Intel will be more actively engaging with the FreeBSD Foundation and the FreeBSD Project to deliver more timely support for Intel products and technologies in FreeBSD. While Intel has been contributing to the BSD code base for some time, for example with the Intel® Intelligent Storage Acceleration Library (Intel® ISA-L) and iflib drivers for Intel® network interface controllers (NICs), thus far the efforts of Intel and the community have been fragmented. The focus has been on individual devices or technologies rather than taking a more holistic systems approach.
Original article: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/systems-thinking-intel-and-the-freebsd-project/
It has arrived. iXsystems released FreeNAS Corral, the new name and brand for FreeNAS 10. FreeNAS Corral extends the capabilities of FreeNAS’ enterprise-grade storage by adding virtual machine and Docker container management. Along with these expansions, FreeNAS Corral brings even more to the table. Follow the link below to learn about all the new enhancements that come with FreeNAS Corral.
FreeNAS Corral, the latest version of FreeNAS, combines sophisticated storage, virtualization, containers, and GUI management in a brand new interface
iXsystems, the industry leader in storage and servers driven by Open Source, today released FreeNAS 10 and unveiled the FreeNAS Corral brand. With FreeNAS Corral (formerly FreeNAS 10), iXsystems introduces the next generation of the world’s most popular Open Source software-defined storage software. FreeNAS Corral extends FreeNAS’ enterprise-grade storage capabilities by adding virtual machine and Docker container management. FreeNAS Corral enables the integration of software-defined storage into VMs and provides persistent storage for Docker containers. These enhancements are provided through a re-designed graphical user interface (GUI) and a powerful command line interface (CLI), making FreeNAS both easier to use and more capable than ever. The new Corral name represents what this release does best: corralling data, virtual machines, containers, and storage services under one management interface.
Original article: https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/ixsystems-launches-freenas-corral-open-source-solution-building-hyper-converged-infrastructures/
The January/February issue of the FreeBSD Journal is out now! This journal features a wide range of articles from The FreeBSD Translation Tools to FreeBSD, FlightAware, and much more!
The 2017 January/February issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available! The latest issue features articles on: The FreeBSD Translation Tools, FlightAware and FreeBSD, FreeBSD Powered LCD Advertising Display, plus much more!
Apologies for the delayed release of your January-February issue. An ill-timed convergence of technical difficulties and inclement weather in the Northeast held up production. Your March-April issue will release on schedule.
Reminder! Don’t miss an issue of FreeBSD Journal.
Original link: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/the-janfeb-2017-issue-of-the-freebsd-journal-is-here/
Suscribe here: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/past-issues/globally-accessible-freebsd/
This tutorial by user shows us how to set up an iSCSI connection between two FreeBSD servers. The article then shows you how to use Windows Server to verify that the iSCSI target and initiator works. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions. 
This article will cover a very basic setup where a FreeBSD server is configured as an iSCSI Target, and another FreeBSD server is configured as the iSCSI Initiator. The iSCSI Target will export a single disk drive, and the initiator will create a filesystem on this disk and mount it locally. Advanced topics, such as multipath, ZFS storage pools, failover controllers, etc. are not covered. Please refer to the following documentation on iSCSI for more information:
- RFC 3720 – Internet Small Computer Systems Inferface (iSCSI)
- FreeBSD Handbook – iSCSI Targets and Initiators
- Mikhail E. Zakharov’s excellent article in BSD Magazine titled “FreeBSD Based Dual-Controller Storage System Concept”
Now to get started…
iSCSI Target Test Setup
The disk drive which should be shared on the network is /dev/ada0, a 5G SATA disk created in VMWare that I attached to the system before starting it up. With FeeBSD, iSCSI is controled by the ctld daemon, so this needs to be enabled on the system. While at it, why not go ahead and enable it at boot time too?
Full tutorial: https://globalengineer.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/applied-freebsd-basic-iscsi/
This tutorial by user 0r0 will show us how to get qutebrowser set up on TrueOS or FreeBSD. Qutebrowser is a minimal GUI browser that focuses on keyboard. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.
qutebrowser (http://qutebrowser.org/3) is a lightweight browser with vim-like keybindings and userscript support. Before I discovered it, I found most other browsers that I tried to be bloated, slow, or poorly maintained and out-of-date. Now I rarely use any other browser.
Unfortunately, qutebrowser is not (yet) in the FreeBSD ports tree. I worked out how to install it, and thought I would share my notes here in case they are of use to someone else. If you want to try qutebrowser before going through the steps below, there are binary packages available for OpenBSD, OSX, Windows and many flavors of Linux (see https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/INSTALL.asciidoc1).
As noted below there are a couple of steps that take a while, but they can be unattended (ie, you can be doing something else). Overall it’s fairly easy once you know the steps. qutebrowser can run with with either a webkit or (not yet fully-featured) webengine backend, but because the latter requires PyQt5 5.7 or higher, these steps will give you a webkit-only browser until that FreeBSD port is upgraded.
Full tutorial: https://discourse.trueos.org/t/how-to-install-qutebrowser-on-trueos-freebsd/965