41: Commit This Bit

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. This episode was brought to you by Headlines FreeBSD moves to Bugzilla 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 *** DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2014 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 *** DragonflyBSD 3.8 released 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 *** OpenZFS European conference 2014 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 *** Interview - Benedict Reuschling - [email protected] BSD documentation, getting commit access, unix education, various topics News Roundup Getting to know your portmgr, Steve Wills "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 *** BSDTalk episode 242 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 *** Turn old PC hardware into a killer home server 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 *** Unbloating the VAX install CD 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... *** Feedback/Questions Thomas writes in Reynold writes in Bostjan writes in Paul writes in John writes in ***