FreeBSD – the unknown Giant

FreeNAS 0.69.1 (Omnius) released

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Gerard

Volker Theile has announced the release of FreeNAS 0.69.1 (Omnius), an updated version of the FreeBSD-based operating system providing free Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services.

Majors changes:

Upgrade Samba to 3.0.34.
Upgrade ProFTPD to 1.3.2.
Upgrade mDNSResponder to 1.08.6.
Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.22.
Upgrade cdialog to 1.1.20080819.
Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.4.
Upgrade nut to 2.4.1.
Upgrade transmission to 1.51.
Upgrade fusefs-ntfs/ntfs-3g to 2009.2.1.
Upgrade 3Ware serial ATA RAID controller driver to 9.5.1.
Upgrade bash to 4.0.10.

Minors changes:

Add ‘SSL/TLS only’ on ‘Services|FTP’ page to allow TLS/SSL connections only.
Add ‘Reverse DNS lookup’ on ‘Services|FTP’ page. This and the ‘Ident protocol’ option are disabled per default because they may slow down or break the user login to the FTP server in some situations.
Add ‘Authentication’ checkbox on ‘Services|BitTorrent’ page to enable/disable authentication for TransmissionBT WebGUI.
Add checkbox to enable WOL on ‘Network|Interfaces|LAN’ and ’Interfaces|Optionalx’ pages. Please note that WOL only works for nfe, nve, sis, vr, xl.
Add traceroute6 command.
Add *.iso support to Fuppes UPnP.
Move ‘m2ts’ video file extension to ‘default’ section.
Add ‘Remote monitoring’ to ‘Services|UPS’ to allow adding remote monitors that monitor the local installed UPS in slave mode.
Use WebGUI administrator password for the NUT user ‘root’.
Add ability to mount UDF ISO images.
Disable download feature in Quixplorer because there are misc. (PHP and system) limitations that makes this feature senseless.
Prevent generation of core dump files (BR 2662404). Can be enabled via ’System|Advanced|sysctl.conf’.
Add ability to enable/disable sysctl variables in ’System|Advanced|sysctl.conf’.
Add XMLRPC services that are available via http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xmlrpc.php, e.g. system.getInfo.
Add ability to configure ProFTPD module mod_ban via WebGUI.
Add device I/O statistics to ‘Status|Disks’ page.
Replace msntp with FreeBSD’s ntpdate.
Allow setting TransmissionBT WebGUI user name.
Allow to set the following TransmissionBT settings via WebGUI: peer port, port forwarding, pex, encryption mode and max. upload/download bandwidth.

For bug fixes and restrictions/known problems, check the announcement.

Links:

Changelog | Download | Announcement | Website

Posted in FreeNAS | Leave a comment

SysInfo script to document FreeBSD box settings – Test

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Gerard

Daniel Geržo is looking for people to test his SysInfo script. This project is part of his thesis and it automatically documents the settings of a FreeBSD box.

I would greatly appreciate if you guys could test it in your environment and provide some feedback. I would also like to hear your opinions on what kind of information would you be interested in, in the above described situation. If your ideas happen to be reasonable, I will gladly implement them and include in the next release of SysInfo.

Posted in FreeBSD | Leave a comment

PicoBSD update

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Gerard

Luigi Rizzo has put sent a message to one of the FreeBSD mailinglist with an update on picoBSD. PicoBSD is like NanoBSD, TinyBSD and Evoke as set of scripts to create a minimal FreeBSD installation.

Note to self: need to add picoBSD to the FreeBSD Systems page.

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Gnome 2.26 available for FreeBSD

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Gerard

The FreeBSD GNOME team has announced the release of GNOME 2.26.0 for FreeBSD.

The official release notes can be found at http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.26/.

For suggestions on installing or upgrading to 2.26, check the FreeBSD Gnome page

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New jail based FreeBSD hosting: BSD Cell

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Gerard

In “FreeBSD Land” we have Jails, Wardens, Inmates, but now there’s also a Cell, BSD Cell.

BSD Cell provide Freebsd jails/vps which are hosted at gigeservers behind state of the art ddos protection. IRC is allowed, and reverse dns can be done by a support ticket.

Currently two plans are available: Jail 01 and Jail 02.

The website looks quite bare at the moment, without telephone contact numbers or address details. Hopefully the site will be made to look more professional to attract buyers….

It’s interesting to notice increased hosting on FreeBSD: RootBSD (XEN VPS), BSD VM (Jail VPS) and now BSD Cell

Posted in FreeBSD Hosting | 1 Comment

BitDefender anti-virus/anti-spyware for FreeBSD

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Gerard

BitDefender have released their anti-virus software for Unices (Linus & FreeBSD)

BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices is a versatile on-demand scanner built for Linux and FreeBSD systems. It provides antivirus and antispyware scanning for both UNIX-based and Windows-based partitions.

BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices is highly customizable and capable of script and extension-based integration with various applications such as file managers and mail clients.

Licensing

BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices may be used free of charge at home or on your personal computer. In case you want to use BitDefender Antivirus for Unices for business purposes, a registration key must be purchased through the BitDefender Online Store or from BitDefender certified partners.

Check the website for the features, benefits and system requirements.

Posted in FreeBSD | 4 Comments

m0n0wall 1.3b16 released

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Gerard

It’s been exactly 6 months since the last release (1.3b15), but m0nowall is not dead: beta 1.3b16 is now available.

The developers have been busy with a kernel security bugfix (arc4random), support for Broadcom BCM5722 NICs, and IPv6 (DHCPv6, IPv6 webGUI access).

Detailed change log and downloads can be found at m0n0.ch/wall/beta.php

Regarding future development, 1.3 is planned to be released anytime soon, but the developers are looking for some help with the following. If you can help them out, just contact them:

replacing the legacy BRIDGE with if_bridge
improving captive portal reliability and performance (e.g. by introducing SQLite to replace the various flat text files and corresponding lockfiles)
adding support for address/network groups in firewall rules (via ipfilter’s ippool feature)

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PC-BSD 7.1 brings FreeBSD Warden to the desktop (update)

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Gerard

A number of online resources have writen about PC-BSD 7.1 referring to its speed, simplicity and ease-of-use. Internetnews.com writes how the Warden Project (FreeBSD Jails Management) can be used on PC-BSD.

The Warden is a powerful, yet easy to use tool which makes creating / managing jails easy. The Warden has features such as exporting / importing jails, automatic startup, and easy installation of packages or “Inmates”.

The Warden includes a GUI for PC-BSD desktops, as well as a command-line menu / syntax for remote administration via SSH. Inmate packages, such as AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and others may be also downloaded from PBIDir and installed into jails managed by The Warden.

Though this feature may not be directly be used by home-users, it will be handy for admins of small companies that want the power and stability of FreeBSD and the easy PBI package installation of PC-BSD.

According to iXysystems (which since 2006 has ‘owned’ PC-BSD), “The Warden makes jail creation and management accessible to a greater number of users, and provides a secure and isolated environment for all sorts of uses, such as a mail server, database server, or webserver, to name a few. Warden configurations, called Inmates, can be used to instantly load pre-configured jails into the Warden.”

That’s pretty neat in my opinion and could be the use case that helps to but PC-BSD 7.2 on more enterprise desktops as an admin tool for FreeBSD servers.

Internetnews.com article

Posted in iXsystems, PC-BSD | Leave a comment