PC-BSD 9.1 Review (Jupiter Broadcasting – video)

Jupiter Broadcasting has an episode reviewing PC-BSD

The PC-BSD 9.1 review starts at 39:50.

Notes and Summary

Your choice of Desktop Environments, Installer automatically adjusts the defaults depending on how much ram you have installed
Your options: KDE, Gnome, LXDE or XFCE
Another option is TrueOS, a console based server, FreeBSD with the CLI version of Warden, the PBI system, ZFS Boot Environments and other utilities
The install also offers vanilla FreeBSD Server
PC-BSD allows you to do a full ‘root on ZFS’ install (only recommended if you have 4 or more GB of ram), including creating many different datasets with different settings such as compression for optimal use of space
You have the option of the Basic Wizard, the Advanced Wizard, or the FreeBSD CLI partitioning system
The advanced Wizard also allows you to setup more complex ZFS mirror or RAIDZ
You can choose to optionally encrypt your hard disk using GELI
Warden is a Graphical and Command Line based manager for FreeBSD’s Jails feature
In FreeBSD a jail is a secondary installation of the OS files, which is then started in a chroot, and the processes, network and user/group IDs are separate
Allows you to manage three types of jails:
Traditional Jail – run internet applications in a container, if compromised, the attacker only gains access to the jail, not the host OS
Ports Jail – less secure version if jails, allows you to install applications from the FreeBSD ports tree without interfering with the PBI package manager in the host OS
Linux Jail – install Debian or Gentoo in a jail, and run your linux applications in a full linux environment
Warden also allows you to stop a jail, pack it up, and move it to a different physical machine
Warden also allows you to install meta-packages into the jails with a single click, allowing you to deploy apache+php+mysql in no time
Warden can back your jails storage with ZFS, allowing you to take advantage of ZFS features such as snapshots, clones (writable snapshots), revert to a previous snapshot, etc