FreeBSD Release Documentation Snapshot Page

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Gerard

I came accros this interesting page that holds snapshots of the FreeBSD release documentation, for the most recent versions back to version 4.5.

This page holds snapshots of the FreeBSD release documentation. The first released version of FreeBSD to use RELNOTESng was 4.4-RELEASE.

For each release, this page holds HTML, TXT, and PDF renderings for all supported architectures. These files generally contain the same content as what can be found on the various released distributions (e.g. floppy, CD-ROM, or FTP areas), except that the errata file has been updated to the latest version applicable to each release.

Snapshots of the release documentation (also in HTML, TXT, and PDF) for the CURRENT, 7-CURRENT, 6-STABLE, 5-STABLE, and 4-STABLE development branches are also provided here. Almost by definition, they are continually changing; typically they track the state of developments to within a week or so. The snapshots here are manually regenerated from the heads of the respective CVS branches on an irregular, but fairly frequent, basis.

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Creating and Managing A Jailed Virtual Host in FreeBSD

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Gerard

It is possible to spawn a completely jailed second (or many!) operating system within a modern FreeBSD install. Doing so can be tricky, but here I will document the method that I have found works for me. The first most important resource about jails, is the man page, and many of the examples that you will see are basically straight following of the man page. Once you are done, each jail will operate as if its a complete independant operating system.

Scope Of This Document

This Howto article is intended to be a practical example, and I will start my host system with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE. The Install will be of the “minimal” variety, and for the first part of this document, we will not update the system with buildworld. After a jail is created, we will then update the host, and then update the jail. This will demonstrate a practical example of how to build, and then maintain a jail thru critical security releases.

Further instructions

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Using daemontools (supervise) on FreeBSD

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Gerard

What is daemontools?

From the daemontools website:

daemontools is a collection of tools for managing UNIX services.

supervise monitors a service. It starts the service and restarts the service if it dies. Setting up a new service is easy: all supervise needs is a directory with a run script that runs the service.

At first when I was introduced to this tool at work, I thought “What a typical Linux-admin. FreeBSD’s rc. system is superior.” Despite my personal preferences, whatever software is used at work is what I have to use and learn to use, too. After getting a little more familiar with supervise, and installing it on a FreeBSD server, I was finally convinced that this may also have a place on FreeBSD machines.

Have you ever needed to know that a process is 100% sure to be running no matter what? Well, some of our applications need that extra little safety net, and you might too. Just right of the bat I can mention things like httpd, sshd, denyhosts, and syslog(-ng). While the theoretical risk of these applications crashing randomly and still being able to run again without any direct editing of some configuration file seems to be very low, in a production environment where loads are extremely high and all processes are pushed into a stage where their theoretical load-handling capacity is on the edge with what has practically been tested, this may happen to you – and you can’t afford the service being down until you figure out a way to fix it permanently.

Either way, if some application crashes in a recoverable manner, it’s most likely that either 1) supervise is still running and will try to revive the process or 2) your box is so broken, it doesn’t even matter that supervise is still running. It’s all about that extra little factor of reliability.

Convinced? Here’s the walkthrough

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Portsnap; 3 years old. Happy birthday

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Gerard

Three years ago today, Colin Percival announced the availability of the first version of FreeBSD Portsnap. Almost a year later, in August 2005, Portsnap was added to the FreeBSD base system, and since then it has grown to four official mirrors and now supports almost 40 thousand users. Happy birthday Portsnap!

CVSup is slow, insecure, and a memory hog. However, until now it’s been the only option for keeping an up-to-date ports tree, and (thanks to all of the recent work on vuxml and portaudit) it has become quite obvious that keeping an up-to-date ports tree is very important.

To provide a secure, lightweight, and fast alternative to CVSup, I’ve written portsnap. As the name suggests, this is a system for building, *signing*, and distributing compressed snapshots of the ports tree, which can then be extracted into /usr/ports as needed.

Portsnap is:

  • Lightweight. It’s a 15kB shell script which uses under 50kB of other binaries.
  • Designed for frequent updating. Unlike CVSup, it doesn’t need to transmit a complete list of files in the ports tree each time it runs; in fact, if there are no updates available, it only needs to fetch a single file of 256 bytes.
  • Secure. Using code from FreeBSD Update, the ports snapshots are signed using a 2048-bit RSA key.
  • HTTP-only. That’s right, you don’t need to beg your network maintainer to allow outgoing connections on port 5999 any more. :-)

FreeBSD handbook chapter on how to use portsnap can be found here.

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Small pfSense updates

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Gerard

Chris Buechler put two posts on the pfSense blog – one about using the “console upgrade” (there’s a bug in Lighttpd) and the other on how to change the summer to winter time change manually.

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Absolute FreeBSD – Auction

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Gerard

Absolute BSDThe FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the kicking off of the 2007 Fall Fundraising campaign by auctioning off the first copy of the book Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition. You can be the first one to own this book, while helping the FreeBSD Project and community. This book was generously donated by Michael Lucas, the author, and he will include a signed authentic laser-printed Certificate of Authenticity, and a signed bookplate.To bid on this phenomenal guide to FreeBSD go to: ebay.com.

All proceeds will go to the Foundation. If you’re not interested in bidding on the book you can still support the FreeBSD Foundation by donating.

Source

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pfSense hackathon wrap up

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Gerard

The third annual pfSense hackathon has been a great success. There was a lot of cleaning up code and cleaning up the many new features that are already in the development branches, rather than adding more new features. This leaves pfSense in a better position to get out future releases.

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FreeBSD 7 – a taste of things to come

Posted on October 24, 2007 by Gerard

Kris Kennaway from the FreeBSD project has created an interesting 37-page PDF showing some of the good things to come with FreeBSD 7.0. (including some much promising graphs!). Especially the speed of MySQL on a FreeBSD server is impressive. It now even beats Linux!

This is the table of contents:

Introducing FreeBSD 7.0

Part I: The SMPng project: A 7 year journey

  • Multi processor support, old and new: FreeBSD 4.x
  • Multi processor support, old and new: The SMPng project
  • SMPng and the Universal Development Model
  • SMPng, step 1: First, make it work; FreeBSD5.x
  • SMPng, step 2: Then make it work well; FreeBSD 6.x
  • SMPng, step 3: Then make it fast; FreeBSD7.0
  • A case study: SQL database performance
  • FreeBSD PostgreSQL performance: 5.5, 6.2 and 7.0
  • Performance of PostgreSQL
  • FreeBSD7.0: Scaling with varying number of CPUs
  • FreeBSD MySQL performance: 5.5, 6.2 and 7.0
  • Understanding MySQL performance
  • FreeBSD vs other operating systems: PostgreSQL
  • FreeBSD vs other operating systems: MySQL
  • Comments onother operating systems

Part II: New features debuting in FreeBSD7.0

  • Filesystem and storage subsystem changes
  • Storage subsystem changesNetwork stack changes
  • Network drivers
  • Wireless (802.11) ; much improved in 7.0
  • New CPU architectures
  • Security subsystems
  • User-level changes
  • Growth of FreeBSD Ports Collection
  • Performance
  • Other kernel changes
  • Developer tools/internals

Part III: What the future holds for FreeBSD
Summary

FreeBSD 7.0 brings FreeBSD back to the forefront of OS performance on modern hardware (it’s good to be back).

These and some other features can also be found on the “What’s cooking for FreeBSD 7 page“

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