FreeBSD Foundation 2011 fund-raising a success

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Gerard

The FreeBSD Foundation announced on its Facebook page that it has raised $426,292, surpassing the $400,000 goal. This is even without the cheques they have received. Great result.

As you will know, the Foundation uses these donations to promote and protect FreeBSD, as well as funding FreeBSD related projects.

Two newly projects for 2012 announced on 31 December are:

  • auditdistd project (Pawel Jakub Dawidek)
  • IPv6 Performance Analysis project (Bjoern Zeeb)

I’m sure we’ll see more announcements this year about new projects.

Posted in FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation | Leave a comment

Happy New Year

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Gerard

Wishing you all a good and prosperous 2012.

Hopefully we’ll see FreeBSD 9 released soon and some exciting new projects announced to make FreeBSD and operating systems based on it, the best branch of operating systems available.

What would you like to see worked on or added to FreeBSD in 2012?

Posted in FreeBSD | 5 Comments

Interview with Adrian Chadd on 802.11n in FreeBSD

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Gerard

Adrian Chadd is the current FreeBSD net80211/ath driver maintainer and developer. He’s been working with a few others to get usable 802.11n support into FreeBSD.

OSNews did an interview with Adrian and the following was discussed.

  • What’s the state of 801.11n on FreeBSD?
  • So this isn’t just about getting FreeBSD-base PCs communicating over 802.11n. You’re talking about embedded FreeBSD installs on wifi router hardware?
  • Router hacking has a long and glorious history. What in particular are you trying to accomplish? What advanced features are you trying to enable?
  • So this is OSNews, so you know we say this with love, but why do it? What does FreeBSD bring to this sphere that, say, Linux can’t?
  • It looks like you’re drawing on work that the Linux community has done to produce drivers for chipsets and other hardware? How close does that work get you to where you want to be?
  • Can you see other opportunities to benefit from other initiatives in the Linux community in the same way?
  • If you had the chance to draw on some expertise from outside of your current group of collaborators, what kinds of skills or efforts do you need the most at this point?

You can read the whole interview here: Interview with Adrian Chadd on 802.11n in FreeBSD.

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pfSense 2.0.1, load balancing and pfSense Cookbook

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Gerard

 

pfSense is a powerful, open source, free and FreeBSD based firewall and security solution. The follwoing are three links you may be interested in if you use or would like to use pfSense.

pfSense 2.0.1 announcement

Chris Buechler has announced the release of pfSense 2.0.1. This is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since 2.0 release. This is the recommended release for all installations.

How To Use pfSense to load balance your Web Servers

This howto shows you how to configure pfSense 2.0 as a load balancer for your web servers. It is assumed that you already have a pfSense box and at least 2 Apache servers installed and running on your network, and that you have some pfSense knowledge.

How To Use pfSense To Load Balance Your Web Server

pfSense Cookbook

There’s a great pfSense reference book published earlier this year, pfSense 2 Cookbook. It’s great for network admins, but also the casuel pfSense user. It’s a preatical, example-driven guide to configure the simple and the most advanced features for pfSense.

The chapters in the book are:

  • Initial Configuratino
  • Essential Services
  • General Configuration
  • Virtual Private Networking
  • Advance Configuration
  • Redundancy, load balancing and fail over
  • Services and maintenance
  • Appendix 1 – Monitoring and logging
  • Appendix 2 – Determining hardware requirements

The book is full with screenshots, explaining all the different settings.

You can “look inside” book: pfSense Cookbook

Posted in pfSense | Leave a comment

FreeBSD quick news and links (GhostBSD, Centreon, FreeBSD Dev, iXsystems)

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Gerard

GhostBSD 2.5: A GNOME-ified FreeBSD 9.0

If you want to try out FreeBSD 9.0 this holiday but are not turned on by the actual FreeBSD 9.0 install and setup process, nor find the KDE desktop of PC-BSD 9.0 enjoyable, you may want to try out GhostBSD 2.5.

GhostBSD 2.5: A GNOME-ified FreeBSD 9.0


Centreon 2.3.3 on FreeBSD 9

This tutorial will guide the user to complete the installation of Centreon on FreeBSD. We will be using an installation on a FreeBSD 9.0-PRERELEASE kernel version, kernel version does not influence the tutorial.

What is the Centreon? Centreon is a powerful tool for monitoring hosts and services, it is a frontend that works on top of Nagios, adding many features for viewing and alert history, status, etc. ..

Centreon 2.3.3 on FreeBSD 9


Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Gets Ready For FreeBSD 9.0

It’s not only the FreeBSD and PC-BSD camps gearing up for the imminent release of FreeBSD 9.0, but Debian developers have already been gearing up for the major update of this leading BSD distribution as they prepare to pull in its new kernel.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Gets Ready For FreeBSD 9.0


Top 6 Linux and BSD graphical installation programs

PC-BSD’s installation setup is one of them: Top 6 Linux and BSD graphical installation programs.


FreeBSD Development over 13 Years

This video shows the visual development of FreeBSD with its committers.

iXsystems Haiku Contest

Do you have the creativity/humor/love for FreeBSD and PC-BSD? Then submit an original haiku poem.

Here at iXsystems we always love hearing what you have to say, and what better way to celebrate the upcoming PC-BSD 9.0 release than indulging in some creative writing? We’ll gladly give away a PC-BSD shirt to the winner, and immortalize his/her haiku up on our Facebook and Google+ sites. (via)

bsdtalk210 – James Nixon from iXsystems

Interview with James Nixon from iXsystems at the LISA 2011 conference in Boston.

bsdtalk210 – James Nixon from iXsystems


BSDs ‘lost’ just because of this phone number 1-800-ITS-UNIX

BSD ‘lost’ because of a phone number? Nonsense.

Four of the BSD guys had just formed a company to sell BSD commercially. They even had a nice phone number: 1-800-ITS-UNIX. That phone number did them and me in. AT&T sued them over the phone number and the lawsuit took 3 years to settle. That was precisely the period Linux was launched and BSD was frozen due to the lawsuit

Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum


5 FreeBSD Security Advisories

PAM, PAM_ssh, telnetd, chroot, and bind.

Posted in FreeBSD Security Advisories, GhostBSD, iXsystems, pfSense | Leave a comment

GhostBSD 2.5 RC2 available for testing

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Gerard

The second release candidate (RC) for the upcoming GhostBSD 2.5, which is based on FreeBSD 9.0-RC2, is now available for download.

Notable changes from RC1 include:

  • added WiFi Network Manager for easier wireless connection configuration; additionally, the WiFi card is now being configured during live medium boot-up,
  • added Florence virtual keyboard for future touch screen development,
  • added e2fsprogs to support ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystem.

GhostBSD lite (CD medium) will be a little late this time. We have decided to swap GNOME for LXDE desktop in that version.

More details regarding this release, known issues and bug reporting can be found in the announcement: GhostBSD 2.5 RC2 available for testing

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FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter – December 2011

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Gerard

The FreeBSD Foundation has published its semi-annual newsletter.

The half yearly updated contains updates on this year’s projects and fundraising campaign, testimonials from TaxiMagic and the Apache Software Foundation, and the Q1-Q3 balance sheet.

In this Edition:

You can read the newsletter here.

Posted in FreeBSD Foundation | 2 Comments

PC-BSD 9.0-RC3 available

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Gerard

Following the release of FreeBSD 9.0-RC3, PC-BSD 9.0-RC3, a Unix-like, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD, is ready for testing.

This release contains numerous bug fixes and enhancements, and can also be downloaded as VMware and VirtualBox images.

Some of the changes and improvements are:

  • Fixed the default KDE wallpaper / desktop theme
  • Add option to skip performing system upgrades at bootup, in case the user doesn’t have the time to wait.
  • Fix bug starting the port jail from rc.d
  • Make sure we clear any KDE cache during upgrade
  • Fixed bugs installing some PBIs from AppCafe causing seg faults
  • Load ext2fs automatically
  • Default LXDE clock to AM/PM time
  • Add default openbox wallpaper / menus
  • Load the “iir” raid driver on install media
  • Add extra meta-pkg for VMware guest support
  • Reduce CPU usage while checking for system updates on the tray
  • Add new graphical boot loader enabled by default
  • Updated the handbook for 9.0
  • Speed up the download process of system upgrades
  • Add patch for GDM which corrects issues with auto-login

Via: PC-BSD 9.0-RC3 now available (PC-BSD blog)

Posted in PC-BSD | 1 Comment