This week in the big show, we'll be interviewing Benedict Reuschling of the FreeBSD documentation team, and he has a special surprise in store for Allan. As always, answers to your questions and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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Headlines
- Historically, FreeBSD has used the old GNATS system for keeping track of bug reports
- After years and years of wanting to switch, they've finally moved away from GNATS to Bugzilla
- It offers a lot of advantages, is much more modern and actively maintained and
- There's a new workflow chart for developers to illustrate the new way of doing things
- The old "send-pr" command will still work for the time being, but will eventually be phased out in favor of native Bugzilla reporting tools (of which there are multiple in ports)
- This will hopefully make reporting bugs a lot less painful
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- We previously covered this blog last year, but the 2014 edition is up
- More of a hardware-focused article, the author details the parts he's using for a budget NAS
- Details the motherboard, RAM, CPU, hard drives, case, etc
- With a set goal of $500 max, he goes just over it - $550 for all the parts
- Lots of nice pictures of the hardware and step by step instructions for assembly, as well as software configuration instructions
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- Justin announced the availability of DragonflyBSD 3.8.0
- Binaries in /bin and /sbin are dynamic now, enabling the use of PAM and NSS to manage user accounts
- It includes a new HAMMER FS backup script and lots of FreeBSD tools have been synced with their latest versions
- Work continues on for the Intel graphics drivers, but it's currently limited to the HD4000 and Ivy Bridge series
- See the release page for more info and check the link for source-based upgrade instructions
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- There was an OpenZFS conference held in Europe recently, and now the videos are online for your viewing pleasure
- Matt Ahrens, Introduction
- Michael Alexander, FhGFS performance on ZFS
- Andriy Gapon, Testing ZFS on FreeBSD
- Luke Marsden, HybridCluster: ZFS in the cloud
- Vadim Comănescu, Syneto: continuously delivering a ZFS-based OS
- Chris George, DDRdrive ZIL accelerator: random write revelation
- Grenville Whelan, High-Availability
- Phil Harman, Harman Holistic
- Mark Rees, Storiant and OpenZFS
- Andrew Holway, EraStor ZFS appliances
- Dan Vâtca, Syneto and OpenZFS
- Luke Marsden, HybridCluster and OpenZFS
- Matt Ahrens, Delphix and OpenZFS
- Check the link for slides and other goodies
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Interview - Benedict Reuschling - bcr@freebsd.org
BSD documentation, getting commit access, unix education, various topics
News Roundup
- "It is my pleasure to introduce Steve Wills, the newest member of the portmgr team"
- swills is an all-round good guy, does a lot for ports (especially the ruby ports)
- In this interview, we learn why he uses FreeBSD, the most embarrassing moment in his FreeBSD career and much more
- He used to work for Red Hat, woah
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- This time on BSDTalk, Will interviews Chris Buechler from pfSense
- Topics include: the heartbleed vulnerability and how it affected pfSense, how people usually leave their firewalls unpatched for a long time (or even forget about them!), changes between major versions, the upgrade process, upcoming features in their 10-based version, backporting drivers and security fixes
- They also touch on recent concerns in the pfSense community about their license change, that they may be "going commercial" and closing the source - so tune in to find out what their future plans are for all of that
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- Lots of us have old hardware lying around doing nothing but collecting dust
- Why not turn that old box into a modern file server with FreeNAS and ZFS?
- This article goes through the process of setting up a NAS, gives a little history behind the project and highlights some of the different protocols FreeNAS can use (NFS, SMB, AFS, etc)
- Most of our users are already familiar with all of this stuff, nothing too advanced
- Good to see BSD getting some well-deserved attention on a big mainstream site
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- After a discussion on the VAX mailing list, something very important came to the attention of the developers...
- You can't boot NetBSD on a VAX box with 16MB of RAM from the CD image
- This blog post goes through the developer's adventure in trying to fix that through emulation and stripping various things out of the kernel to make it smaller
- In the end, he got it booting - and now all three VAX users who want to run NetBSD can do so on their systems with 16MB of RAM...
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