FreeBSDNews.com

Thank you so much

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If there were no (regular) readers interested in this website, there would be no point for me maintaining it. Without readers and a community one may as well stop spending time and resources on maintaining a digital presence.

As you can see on the right hand side, there are now over 1800 RSS subscribers. This, for the first time ever.  Can you help us to get to 2000? Tell your friends about this site, mention it on Facebook or other social networks, tweet about it or submit to Stumble Upon)

Apart from readers there are also many website owners and maintainers that have linked to this site over the last 2 years. As a result, freebsdnews.net is now listed on page 1 (place 10)  on Google.com when you search for FreeBSD.

Thank you for all your regular feedback, the links to news articles / blog posts that you submitted, and your request to mention your BSD related products.

FreeBSD 7.3-RC2 Available

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The second Release Candidate build for the FreeBSD-7.3 release cycle is now available. Ken Smith announced FreeBSD 7.3 RC yesterday:

The third and what should be last of the test builds for the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, 7.3-RC2, is available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. [more]

The target schedule, the current status and things yet to be done before the final release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.3TODO

BSD Magazine (2010-03) available: BSD as a desktop (free)

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A new issue (free PDF) of BSD Magazine is available now.

Table of contents:

Buil Your Own FreeBSD Update Server

Experienced users or administrators responsible for several machines or environments, know the difficult demands and challenges of maintaining such an infrastructure. The article outlines the steps involved in creating an internal FreeBSD Update Server.

Using OpenBSD and PF as a Virtual Firewall for Windows

The Windows firewall, by default, has many open ports to the local network, like the file and print sharing service ports, which are the source of many security holes. How to protect a Windows host with a basic configuration of an OpenBSD virtual machine with PF as a NAT router and firewall?

Keeping FreeBSD Applications Up-To-Date

An important system administration task, and a principle of running a defensible network, is keeping operating systems and applications up-to-date. In this article you will find multiple ways how to complete this task.

Spam Control with a stock OpenBSD install

Ever since e-mails became ubiquitous unwanted e-mails or spam also known as UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) or UBE (Unsolicited Bulk E-mail) also became popular. Any chance to control this? OpenBSD has an excellent method to fight spam and this article is about it.

Choosing and Installing a Window Manager with FreeBSD

Step by Step installing with comments and advice. One of the many attractive features of BSD is that the end-user is not tied to a particular desktop or windowing environment.

BSD Live Desktops

Last week Zafer Aydogan, founder of Jibbed, and Stefan Rinkes, founder of GNOBSD, agreed to talk with Jesse Smith about their projects (from which BSD community will surely benefit), themselves and BSD.

BSD goes to the Office: Can BSD compete in a real life consulting workplace?

A reminder on our last issue topic- an article about an experiment to determine a viability of BSD desktop in a real world high pressure consulting engagement. There are many articles that expound on the succes of Linux as desktop, and quite a few accounts of using a Linux desktop in this case or that case. But this one is written not from a perspective of a journalist or home user, but from a system administration and consulting perspective.

Website: BSDmag.org | Download Previous Issues

Most reliable webhosts – February 2010

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According to last months Netcraft webhost reliability report, two web hosts in the top 10 run FreeBSD as their operating system.

After an email conversation with one of the guys from RootBSD last month, I realised that these statistics are useless. He writes:

Netcraft is not an impartial source for measuring uptime.  The problems with Netcraft for picking a webhost:

  • Hosts where their data collectors are located are obviously favored due to best latency and reliability — not having to cross over Internet paths
  • Only hosts who pay them 1200 GBP / year are included.
  • They are only measuring the web host’s website, which may not even be hosted on the same infrastructure as customer sites.

You see, I wasn’t aware that only paying webhosters were included. So it’s mainly the big ‘boys’ with big marketing budgets that are willing to pay for this service.

As this is not giving a true picture of the reliability and the use of FreeBSD within the hosting community, I will not refer to the monthly Netcraft report going forward.

RootBSD prefers webhostingstuff.com to show their reliability and uptime.

About RootBSD:

RootBSD was established with one goal in mind: provide reliable, flexible, and supported BSD-based hosting services to professionals and businesses. Originally we were searching for a quality service provider to work with us on providing hosting. A lengthy search yielded many providers that only offer BSD as a haphazard option to their packages designed for Linux or providers who simply don’t meet the business requirements in reliability and stability for which we were looking.RootBSD gives you the power to innovate and scale on top of the BSD operating systems. Our services are rock solid; in fact, you might call us the BSD hosting solution.

Find out more about RootBSD’s FreeBSD VPS Hosting (virtual private server)

RootBSD was established with one goal in mind: provide reliable, flexible, and supported BSD-based hosting services to professionals and businesses. Originally we were searching for a quality service provider to work with us on providing hosting. A lengthy search yielded many providers that only offer BSD as a haphazard option to their packages designed for Linux or providers who simply don’t meet the business requirements in reliability and stability for which we were looking.

RootBSD gives you the power to innovate and scale on top of the BSD operating systems. Our services are rock solid; in fact, you might call us the BSD hosting solution.

Released: FreeNAS 0.7.1

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The FreeNAS developers have released a small update/bugfix vresion, version 0.7.1:

Majors changes:

  • Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.9
  • Upgrade istgt to version 20100125
  • Upgrade msmtp to 1.4.19
  • Upgrade transmission to 1.76
  • Upgrade PHP to 5.2.12
  • Upgrade fuppes to 0.660
  • Upgrade rsync to 3.0.7
  • Upgrade inadyn-mt to 02.18.08
  • Upgrade netatalk to 2.0.5
  • Upgrade bash to 4.0.35
  • Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.25
  • Upgrade proftpd to 1.3.2c

Minors changes:

  • Modify Samba default buffer size
  • Modify Tuning values
  • Add new MIB in System|Advanced|sysctl.conf
  • Add UTF-8 with English menu in File Manager (quixplorer)
  • Restrict NFS sharing directory with alldirs
  • Add serial console support

[Read more…]

FreeNAS 0.8 Roadmap

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Olivier Cochard-Labbé has added a roadmap page to the FreeNAS website: FreeNAS 0.8 roadmap.

We can already see a positive impact from iXsystem‘s takeover of the  FreeNAS project: “Refactor the build system” and the “one click binary installs”. Two features that PC-BSD (another iXsystems project) already has. PC-BSD has the Push Button GUI installer and iXsystems also provides the hardware for the build servers.

From the roadmap:

Blocking Features

  • Development on FreeBSD RELENG_8. Release, depending on timeframe may be based on a RELENG_8 snapshot or 8.1-RELEASE
  • Migrate off m0n0wall
  • Migrate GUI to django
  • Add support for ada and ahci SATA drivers
  • Add optional SoftUpdates + Journaling support to UFS2 filesystems
  • Migration path/tool for previous releases and configurations
  • Preservation of all existing features of the current FreeNAS release
  • Refactor FreeNAS build system to allow building FreeNAS without affecting the host environment

Non-Blocking Features

  • FreeNAS package support. Binary one click installs that modify the GUI dynamically.

We’re looking forward to the first iXsystems FreeNAS release.

FreeBSD and the GPL

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Every so many months the never ending discussion about the BSD vs GPL license heats up. Supporters for either license have their thoughts and opinions to why one license is better than the other. Some say that these discussions are a waste of time. Whichever license you defend/promote, if you’re interested in reading (and joining in) the discussions, have a look at these two sites:

1 FreeBSD and the GPL (IT Pro – itpro.com)

Linus Torvalds has said Linux wouldn’t have happened if 386BSD had been around when he started up. We trace the history of FreeBSD and how it’s affected the open source world.

The first free Unix-like operating systemavailable on the IBM PC was 386BSD, of which Linus Torvalds said in 1993: “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened.”

386BSD was a direct descendant of Bill Joy’s Berkeley Software Distribution, which was the core of SunOS and other proprietary Unix distributions. 386BSD and the patchkit for the port to the Intel chip formed the basis for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, which have carried the torch for BSD and open source Unix to this day.

Read the whole article (BSD history and BSD/GPL license)

2 osnews.com dissussion

Read the discussion

BSD Router Project: New Kern, New Protocols

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The BSD Router Project (BSDRP) has released version 0.32 of its free embedded router distribution (previously mentioned here)

BSD Router Project (BSDRP) is an embedded open source router distribution based on FreeBSD with Quagga and XORP that fit on a 512Mb Compact Flash/USB.

Based on FreeBSD 8.0-Release-p2, the release comes with the new options ”show memory” and ”show traffic”, RCS revisioning for the configuration file and upload/download of data via SCP. Further new features include DHCP relay, NetFlow probes, the Link-Layer Discovery Protocol, (in OpenLLDP) and the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). A Userland variant has replaced the CARP implementation in the kernel and the Quagga routing software has been updated to version 0.99.15 (source)

Images for the BSD Router Project 0.32 will fit on a 512Mb Compact Flash/USB. The router distribution under the BSD license is available for download on the BSDRP homepage.

BSDRP Project Website | Features | Download

iXsystems team and new office (fotos)

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A few months ago iXsystems (the corporate sponsor behind FreeNAS and PC-BSD) moved into a new and larger office.

Time for some pictures of the building, the team and the assembly halls.

See the rest of the pictures here

iXsystems is the all-around FreeBSD company that builds FreeBSD certified servers and storage solutions, runs the FreeBSD Mall, and is the corporate sponsor of the FreeNAS and the PC-BSD Projects. We also provide FreeBSD Hardware Support and Professional Enterprise Grade FreeBSD and PC-BSD Support.