For those who haven’t noticed the announcement on the ports mailinglist, or noticed the flood of commits that started already before the announcement, the ports tree has been thawed, with the usual restrictions.
Interesting note:
Please also take into account that the 7.0 release won’t be for several weeks yet, so we really need you all to be careful about what you commit as we tags might need to be slipped later.
Full announcement (11/12/2007)
Genesis Software engineers design, manufacture and customise computer equipment connected to radar receivers for research institutions and universities. The radars measure wind speed and meteor flux and these scientific radar systems are exported around the world.
This blog is not about radars or weather science, but the interesting fact is that FreeBSD is the operating system of choice for Adelaide company Genesis Software’s radar systems. FreeBSD has been used ever since research and development on the radars began eight years ago.
Computerworld Australia has interviewed software and network engineer Daniel O’Connor about the use of FreeBSD as their system of choice.
These are some interesting quotes from the article:
Some systems rely on modem access for connectivity and FreeBSD allows us to log in remotely. It’s very stable and we’ve had boxes up for more than two years. It’s free so you can experiment with it and it’s easy to develop for. We’ve used FreeBSD from the beginning since about 1996 and it has served us well.
There are other companies that make research radars but we’re probably unique worldwide. The software we develop gets information from the receivers and processes it. It’s also used for monitoring the systems. Skiymet meteor radar measures thousands of meteors every day.
Most radars can be configured via the command line or a GUI application but most of it is network administration which the customers don’t need to touch. We’re working on a more sophisticated version which will mark the beginning of automatic configuration.
Genesis Software also takes advantage FreeBSD’s “ports” system for software updates:
The radars might dial up once or twice a day and for updates we use a subset of the ports tree and make a customer release tree.
Internally, Genesis Software uses FreeBSD for network services including mail and file serving with developers using it on their workstations:
It’s effective, secure, easy to set up, and has lots of software available. It’s a mistake to trim everything to ‘one size fits all’ which is the same thing as Microsoft. The more diverse systems are, the less likely you are to end up with the monoculture effect where one virus wipes out your whole office. It doesn’t matter what choice it is but just one is not good.
Read the whole article here
LinuxReality.com (a site with Linux related podcasts – similar to the BSD focused bsdtalk.blogspot.com) has posted a podcast (episode 84) that focuses on Linux and (network) security. In this episode Paul Asadoorian and Larry Pesce of the Pauldotcom Security Weekly Podcast are interviewed.
Amongst the many things discussed, M0n0wall and pfSense are also mentioned.
Download the podcast: MP3 or OGG
Sergei Mozhaisky has announced the third beta release of Frenzy 1.1, a portable toolkit for system and network administrators based on FreeBSD 6.2. More info on Frenzy here.
These are most important changes since the 1.0-release:
You can download the ISO here.
If you come across any bugs or problems or you want feedback, just drop a message on the Frenzy Forum.
The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off the End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive! The FreeBSD Project is not a company and to keep functioning it is dependent upon financial support from users and supporters. So far, $221,808 has been raised – short of the $250,000 target for this year. To find out what the money is used for please check the homepage.
Please contribute to keep FreeBSD free. Click here to donate (any amount will help).
At Statistics for FTP FreeBSD mirrors Edwin Groothuis has made an overview of how good the FreeBSD FTP mirrors are. It’s tot a full overview (just for the ISO images directories) but it will give an indication of the quality of the mirroring.
For Australia, for instance, it shows that at this moment in time ftp3.au.freebsd.org, or mirror.pacific.net.au, is the only one who is nicely mirroring everything, the rest is running behind or doing partly mirroring.
There’s some encouraging news about running Windows applications on WINE on FreeBSD 7. More and more native Windows application can now be run on FreeBSD without too much tweaking. Wine-Review has recently been testing, running and benchmarking the installation of native Windows applications through WINE:
If you want to read up on some background info re WINE read this quick intro.
The FreeBSD betas are coming out, one after the other. The 7.0-BETA4 builds are now available. If you would like to download an ISO image to install from they are available here (MD5 checksums here).
If you would like to use cvsup to update an older machine the branch tag to use is still RELENG_7.
For users of FreeBSD Update due to some last-minute bumps in system libraries, installed third-party applications must be recompiled as per normal for a “major” upgrade, even if upgrading from an earlier 7.0 BETA.
Announcement (05/12/207)
Check out our cheap hosting packages for FreeBSD based webhosting. Hosting done BSD style: stable, secure, flexible and friendly.
Keep up with our latest news by signing up to receive updates via RSS, comments feed or get my posts delivered by email.
Email: contact[at]freebsdnews[dot]net
Mobile: 0044 776 419 9344