Currently the LISA ’07 Conference (Texas) is on where PC-BSD is represented by Matt Olander. 2 pictures here.
If you know any more pictures please let me know.
When it comes to firewalls, most people are fine with a consumer grade solution like a Linksys, Netgear or D-Link “router,” but these devices lack in features. With a Pentium II 200MHz processor and 1GB of RAM, you can create a firewall that’s way more powerful than the standard cable/DSL router you get from a computer shop, and thanks to free software it has features those other devices can only dream about. Here, is a quick and small comparison between Smoothwall Express 3.0 (based on Linux) and M0n0wall 1.231 (based on FreeBSD).
Hardware
Both Smoothwall and M0n0wall run on low end hardware just fine. For both systems, you’ll want at least a Pentium 2 and 128MB of RAM. Smoothwall requires more hard drive space than M0n0wall, which only needs about 8MB! Machines like this are available at auction sites, flea markets and garage sales for next to nothing. Keep in mind that these machines will use more power than a consumer “router,” but M0n0wall does have an option to turn off the hard drive after a few minutes of being idle. Now, on to the feature comparison.
Features
Smoothwall offers many more features than M0n0wall, including a caching web proxy server, DNS server, intrusion detection system, instant messenger logging, NTP server and email virus scanning.
By design, M0n0wall is only a firewall. It keeps to the Unix programming concept of doing one thing very well. If you want things like a proxy server, IDS or DNS, you’ll want to use Smoothwall. If you want things like 1:1 NAT, M0n0wall is your best choice. Both systems offer web based management and traffic shaping.
Final Word
The bottom line is that both of these systems are excellent firewalls. Smoothwall has more features, but requires higher-end hardware, while M0n0wall’s web management of firewall rules and traffic shaping seemed to be easier to use.
This is a summary of a post found on Linux Brain Dump
The pfSense team have now released version 1.2-RC3. A lot of new improvements and features have been added to this version, a list of which can be found here. Here’s an upgrade note.
The DesktopBSD project is now also providing weekly snapshots for i386 computers, in addition to the AMD64 snapshots.
Like AMD64 snapshots, they are built every Saturday from the latest DesktopBSD Tools, the most recent FreeBSD 6-STABLE sources and an up-to-date ports collection. Additionally, the i386 snapshots include the Nvidia video driver.
Recently I came across a fairly new project called TrueBSD, a FreeBSD LiveCD based on XFCE.
There’s not a great deal of information on the TrueBSD website as to what the goals of the project are, how their project differs from FreeSBIE (another FreeSBIE Live CD based on XFCE), if they’re planning to branch off etc etc etc. This is all the info on the frontpage:
“TrueBSD is a LiveCD operating system based on FreeBSD with many useful applications. All oen programs will keep working even when you eject LiveCD (using command cdcontrol eject) in order to get some data from your own CDs. Just don’t forget to insert the LiveCD again before starting any other programs. TrueBSD is distributed under BSD license, but some of the included software can be covered by some other license..
I have emailed the lead developer about a month ago for more information and background regarding TrueBSD, but all I received back was an email saying he doesn’t speak English. I’ve also tried to contact other members of the team, but, unfortunately, no reply (as yet).
So, the main reason for trying to contact members of the TrueBSD team was to find out some more background info and to see if I should track them on this blog etc.
Does any of you guys you know anything about this project? If, so it would be great if you could drop me a line.
Ken Smith has announced the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-BETA2:
The 7.0-BETA2 builds have completed and are on many of the FreeBSD mirror sites. If you want to update an existing machine using cvsup, use RELENG_7 as the branch tag. Instructions on using FreeBSD Update to perform a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 6.x to 7.0-BETA2 will be provided via the freebsd-stable list when available.
On a related note, the first beta build of FreeBSD 6.3 has also been released:
The 6.3-BETA1 builds got delayed a bit by a last minute MFC (Merged From -Current) causing some undesired ABI breakage. That has been fixed and the 6.3-BETA1 builds for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 have completed.
These are the final figures from BSDstats.org for October 2007 showing the use of *BSD operating systems:
PC-BSD is #1 for a few months now, but that can be explained since bsdstats pinging is on by default. I’m pretty sure there are many more FreeBSD servers out there, but without the BSDstats port installed. This port can be installed from /usr/ports/sysutils/bsdstats/
Spread the word about this port and install it on your own PC/Server (the pinging is done anonymously).
The BSD Community must be a lot bigger than 13,940 PCs/Servers ;-) Let’s prove how strong the *BSD community is.
This is an interesting blog post looking at the BSD as a viable alternative to Linux. The BSDs are less hyped and are in some areas superior to Linux:
“The BSDs have been around for a long time – longer than Linux. But they have received much less attention than Linux in the press because they have fewer noisy supporters. Nevertheless, they continue to thrive, because of their similarities to, and differences from, Linux. Like Linux, the BSDs are free, fast and have a variety of software available for them. In addition, BSD kernels tend to be more stable than Linux kernels, BSDs run on a wider variety of hardware and have fewer security issues.
But where the BSDs tend to really shine is in networking. TCP/IP speed tests run on identical hardware often show the BSDs to be faster than Linux. While the Linux community has focused on enabling Linux to use more esoteric hardware, the BSD community has worked on making the network infrastructure faster and easier to extend. This has caused a number of network hardware vendors to use customized versions of BSDs, particularly NetBSD, as the internal operating systems of their commercial products.
As the lesser-known players in the free operating system market, the BSD development groups have had more opportunity to work on the core of their products. FreeBSD has the largest market of the BSDs and gets the most development interest. NetBSD runs on an incredible variety of CPUs, including some systems that leave even the fastest Intel chips in the dust. OpenBSD’s main focus is security, and it attracts developers for whom that is the main concern.
…
It is well known that many large Internet service providers use one of the BSDs (FreeBSD) to run their production mail and Web servers. It is common to find BSD-based Internet servers that have not crashed or been rebooted in years.
… any shop that is considering Linux should also take a look at the BSDs, particularly if they want stability and less excitement in their operating system.”
Source: ravisblog.com (01/11/2007)
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