Announcement: Two new projects funded by the FreeBSD Foundation

Published on June 19, 2009 in FreeBSD Foundation. 0 Comments

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced they have accepted two project proposals!

AVR32 - 32-bit MIPS Architecture

Arnar Mar Sig has been awarded a grant to develop AVR32 support for FreeBSD. AVR32 is a 32-bit MIPS architecture targeted for low power high throughput embedded applications. The target platform is the NGW100 reference design board from Atmel.

“This work will advance the MIPS support in FreeBSD and our capabilities in building embedded applications,”

said Sam Leffler, The FreeBSD Foundation, Director.

“I’m excited to be able to work on bringing FreeBSD to another architecture and pushing it farther into the embedded market,”

said Arnar Mar Sig, FreeBSD developer.

The project will be completed by August 2009.

FreeBSD Problem Reporting System

Mark Linimon has been awarded a grant to prototype a new problem reporting system for the FreeBSD project.  This project will allow Mark to define the features, look-and-feel, and architecture of a future replacement of the project’s current GNATs based system.  Once the prototype is complete, it will be used to garner input from the FreeBSD community before a production system is implemented.

Mark holds two positions within FreeBSD: one on the Ports Management team (portmgr) and one on the Problem Report Database administration team (bugmeister). He has also written the Ports Monitoring System to correlate data from the package building cluster, the Problem Report Database, the source control repository check-ins, and other sources.

“One of the most frequently requested improvements from the FreeBSD developer community is an improved bug tracking system,”

said Mark Linimon. He also added,

“The design goals of this prototype are to incorporate such features as markedly improved workflow, better categorization, customizable email notifications, and redesigned web pages to make searching and browsing easier. Once the prototype is completed,” Mark added, “it will be circulated amongst the developer community for feedback. I am happy to have the Foundation’s support to work on this project.”

“Problem reporting software is a critical tool for getting feedback from the FreeBSD user community, recording information about defects and missing features in the system, and making our volunteer developers productive,”

said Justin Gibbs, Founder of the FreeBSD Foundation.

“Mark has used manpower and sheer will to overcome the deficiencies in the current problem reporting system, and to make it work for the project.  But our GNATs isn’t fully utilized because of missing features and a clumsy user interface. We’re very excited to help address these problems in a core piece of the FreeBSD project’s infrastructure.”

This project will be completed by the end of June.

I’m sure everybody will join me to congratulate Mark and Arnar on their successful applications. We’re looking forward to AVR32 support for FreeBSD and a new FreeBSD bug reporting system.

Monitis adds support for FreeBSD

Published on June 17, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Monitis Inc., a leading provider of affordable easy-to-use enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today announces release of monitoring agent for FreeBSD.
Monitis monitoring agent is downloadable software, which runs on clients’ machines and collect performance and configuration metrics both for the machine on which they were installed as well as for the whole network. Monitis main application takes measures towards detecting and preventing agent failure. By regularly sending messages from the agents Monitis can determine whether or not there is a problem. If a problem exists, measures will be taken to correct it. Agents don’t ever use local storage, so any data that is collected is filed in a separate database on the main server.

Monitis Linux and Windows agents are widely used by large Monitis community (up to 50,000 users) and now with FreeBSD addition, users may monitor truly heterogeneous and distributed infrastructure. By combining the robustness of agent-based technology with the simplicity of agentless technology Monitis enables effortless systems management for its customers.

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management platform. Monitis Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health. Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities. Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solution. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure. Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, visit http://www.monitis.com

Source (information-online.com)

FreeBSD News on Floss.pro

Published on June 16, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

My friend Karl has added the FreeBSD News feed to his site Floss.pro.

Floss.pro is a blogging platform, based on the open-source engine Laconica. There are many micro blogging sites available such as Twitter, Jaiku etc, but Floss.pro is different in that’s set up to promote and blog about open-source software.

If you’re on Twitter you can find me and my feeds @gvanessen

Creating a Network Attached Storage VMware using FreeNAS

Published on June 15, 2009 in FreeBSD and FreeNAS. 0 Comments

This Tutorial will give you a run down on how to create a VMware using FreeNAS. The tutorial comes with screenshots and covers installation of FreeNAS, setting up an iSCSI target and connecting to it from Windows.

AskoziaPBX - project update

Published on June 15, 2009 in AskoziaPBX. 1 Comment

askozia-pbx logo 100x100Askozia has set up a shop for components and pre-built appliances, with a percentage of all sales going into further development of AskoziaPBX.

AskoziaPBX: Porting to Linux, Going for Mainstream

We’re currently in the process of porting Askozia®PBX (an Open Source PBX solution based on Asterisk) to use Linux as its base operating system. This allows us to support architectures other than x86 and take advantage of Asterisk features not available on FreeBSD.

Many manufacturers have expressed interest in having a turn-key software solution available for their hardware offerings. Auerswald, a large German telephony equipment manufacturer, has sponsored our initial port to Linux and the Blackfin CPU architecture, now offering AskoziaPBX as an alternate firmware for their upcoming COMpact 3000 VoIP device.

What is needed for Asterisk based distributions to become as mainstream as a FRITZ!Box?

Asterisk’s flexibility lets it be tailored to different markets; which ones are laying undiscovered?

Watch the video or listen to MP3

New Release : 1.0.3

Another small update to the 1.0 series has been released adding a French localization (submitted by Jean-Pierre Lozano) as well as updating the Japanese and German localizations.

Also, the last few hard-coded AskoziaPBX strings have been made customizable for our branding customers. Your updated versions are also available for download.

Setup FreeBSD Jail with ezjail

Published on June 15, 2009 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments Tags: .

PC-BSD has the Warden GUI to install and maintain jails. Setting these up can also, and I’m sure many would prefer this way, be set up from the console.  Cyberciti.biz has published a useful and extensive guide:

How do I setup operating system-level virtualization that allows me to partition my FreeBSD-based server system into several independent mini-systems called jails.? I’d like to set one jail for mail and another for web server via 2 public IP address.

Each jail under FreeBSD virtual environment runs on the host machine with its own files, processes, user and superuser accounts. From within a jailed process, the environment is almost indistinguishable from a real system. The easiest way to set, create and modify jails is using a framework called ezjail.

Setup FreeBSD Jail with ezjail

Install FreeBSD 8.0 from USB memory stick

Published on June 15, 2009 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments Tags: .

Martin Wilke has a useful step-by-setp guide (via bsdgroup.de) to install FreeBSD 8.0 (stable version yet to be released) from a USB pendrive:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1k count=1
bsdlabel -Bw da0 auto
newfs -L FreeBSD /dev/da0a
mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 8.0-HEAD-20090609-JPSNAP-i386-dvd1 -u 0 && mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt/iso
mount /dev/da0a /mnt/USB-Stick
copy all files from your mounted cd in to your USB-Stick, after that you need to create a fstab for your USB-Stick
vi /mnt/USB-Stick/etc/fstab and put following in:
/dev/ufs/FreeBSD / ufs ro 0 0

FreeBSD Security Advisories (ntp, ipv6, pipe)

Published on June 15, 2009 in FreeBSD Security Advisories. 0 Comments

The FreeBSD Security Team has issued the following security warnings:

For background info, problem description, impact, workaround and solutions, have a look at the individual advisory pages.

Virtualbox available in FreeBSD ports

Published on June 15, 2009 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

Martin Wilke reports that VirtualBox is now available in the FreeBSD Ports directory:

Today Virtualbox was committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. After a lot of work we had a good discussion today about how stable Virtualbox is, and after the CTF with take6 we got a lot of good feedback, so it was time to commit. Please READ the pkg-messages carefully, as well as the wiki page.

BSDTalk interview with Kris Moore (PC-BSD)

Published on June 15, 2009 in BSD Talk and PC-BSD. 0 Comments

Podcast LogosBSDTalk has a 16 minute interview with Kris Moore (PC-BSD founder)

BSDTalk 174 - Listen to the podcast: MP3 | OGG