Then, my parents are moving over, they are (finally) leaving the bad neighborhood of Rotterdam-South (IJsselmonde) and will be living at a much more friendly place to live in. For the past weeks I am helping in getting things going in and around the house arranging that the internet lines are still there when they move over, and that the hardware for that is prepared. Today I will be bringing in the first boxes that will mark the beginning of the actual move. There is one thing left that needs to be done (well two actually if you see things as seperated actions): The kitchen needs to be placed, and the walls need to be finished in the kitchen. The walls will be done rather soon, and the kitchen will be brought at some point (some parts are scheduled to arrive this week). When that’s done, the move is complete. Next weekend we will start the final phase out of IJsselmonde and have some time left to do “remaining items” .

Yesterday I upgraded my home PFSense version, I lost some local modifications (stupid of me) but I still have the newer files alive so I can generate diffs again. One funny thing is that the route 0.0.0.0/1 was added to my WiFi, preventing me from accessing the internets. The people of the team are very great, on the dev list there are plenty of clueful people around that can assist with various problems and ofcourse enhance the setup. Personally I am trying to see whether I can finish the OSPF stuff that was recently brought in under my request. There are a few rough edges in the current code that I took out, but I also want the daemon to be able to listen on multiple interfaces, set specific interface options so that you can get something like the IPSEC configuration, have one master configuration, that can be altered per interface. That way I can add the node back into the OSPF-cloud that a couple of friends from Snow and I are running

Well that was the huge amount of updates, oh yeah, tommorrow I will be traveling to amsterdam to meet the team there and see how they work and the like.

I really applaud the way Cisco handled this, Luca, John, Daniel, Nico, all thank you very much for the support you have given, enduring patience, and professionalism! Other companies can learn something from this, not only big companies like this kind of attention, consumers as well

It seems to me that metereologic institutes are missing the boat a lot lately. Perhaps they want to keep up with the IPCC, who only misses items with a margin of 300 years.. A little mistake, thank you!

Currently I am checking the GRE and GIF interfaces, I am using them to create an OSPF network, and there are some oddities in them

So perhaps I can see why the oddities are there and if needed correct them (or myself when I am misbehaving )

You should test PFSense, it runs FreeBSD 8, and is awesome !

Er zal vast een reden zijn dat juist deze groep geraakt wordt, maar moeten daarvoor de consumenten de dupe worden? Er zit voor miljoenen in de garantiepot, nadat deze zo vol raakte dat er geen inleg meer nodig was.

Blijkbaar kan iedereen zonder meer lid worden van de SGR, vervolgens failliet gaan, en de SGR betaald uit. Zou het dan niet handiger zijn dat je aan de hand van strengere eisen de bedrijven lid laat worden? Ik zie niet zo snel een Arke Fly of TUI failliet gaan, deze blijven netjes lid, en ieder ander die lid wilt worden moet bijvoorbeeld aan een bepaalde voorwaarde voldoen. Net als dat geldt voor als je een hypotheek afsluit etc.

Het is allemaal zo simpel; maar feit is weer dat er een paar bedrijfseigenaren heel rijk geworden zijn (als ik de berichtgeving mag geloven is er iemand met het geld vandoor); en de consument draait ervoor op. Waar eindigt zoiets toch?

Dus als jij ook sneeuw in de straten hebt liggen, bedenk dan dat onze marketing stunt van http://snow.nl gelukt is!

In this article I will write about the latest release from FreeBSD, 8.0. This is a major version that offers new functionality and much improved parts of the code.

Why are major releases so special?

Major releases offer the possibility to include changes in the system that are not allowed in stable branches. This could be new applications or API/ABI interfaces, or serious changes to datastructures and things like that.

FreeBSD brings out major releases every 18 months. Ofcourse the 18 months may vary, depending on the amount of new features and problems found while preparing for the first .0 release. The schedule should guide as a reference on when to expect something new.

FreeBSD 8?

FreeBSD 8 will be the latest version of FreeBSD that is currently on the market, it was preceded by FreeBSD 6 and 7, where we found features like ZFS, Improved Jail support, the widely known Danish Axe was used to further take out the GIANT lock, and many more features that had been in the previous release.

What will FreeBSD 8 offer us?

FreeBSD 8 will offer us the following:

USB Storage hotplug removal

Previously it was not possible to take out lets say an USB storage device while the operating system was running, without crashing it. The system code is updated to make it possible to take out an USB storage device without the system crashing. This will make many people happy!

Multi-IP/IPv6 jails

With FreeBSD 8 it will be possible to assign multiple IPv4 addresses to a jail, as well as assigning IPv6 addresses. People that offer hosting services can greatly enjoy these features, a jailed webserver for example can now use many more addresses and do proper SSL virtualhosting.

NFSv4 support

NFSv4 support is added to the FreeBSD Operating System, while this is still experimental, it gives you a NFSv4 client, as well as a server that can service NFSv4 nodes. NFSv4 gives you better security access control’s, a stateful protocol, performance improvements, etc.

Enhanced ULE scheduler

The ULE scheduler is much improved for FreeBSD 8, this allows even better scheduling and responses to systems running FreeBSD 8, especially when used with SMP systems. Systems running the FreeBSD 8 operating system, have this scheduler enabled by default.

DTrace

DTrace is a suite of applications imported from Solaris. DTrace will assist you in profiling your system and applications, data which you can use to make the system perform even better under your specific configuration. Every key developer needs a tool like this.

Wireless Mesh Networking

The Wireless Mesh Networking (802.11s) is an experimental feature and early adoption framework that gives the ability to setup a Meshed Wireless network. Currently most Wireless networks are build around one central access points, with leaf nodes / bridges / repeaters attached to them. This experimental feature offers the ability to ‘perfectly’ roam accross the network, without being tied to one specific Access Point.

VIMAGE

VIMAGE, is an network virtualisation project that aims in delivering multiple networking related instances. So for example you can give your jails, their own vimage, enabling them to run IPSEC, Packet filter(s), setting their own routing tables etc. So this actually makes your jails, more or less independant servers.

Multiple routing tables

Multiple routing tables, enable you to select different routing tables for different services. For example you can setup different routes for your webserver(s) and mailserver(s). The “setfib” utility is added to provide a management layer for these FIB’s (Routing tables).

Equal Cost multipath routing

Equal-Cost Multi-Path Routing (ECMP) is a new feature under FreeBSD 8, that enables the administrator to loadbalance traffic by equally balancing traffic over various routes. In theory this could increase the bandwidth that you can use, so be sure to check this out!

FreeBSD ports Parallel building

The FreeBSD ports framework is adopted to that multiple ports can be build at once. People with multi core systems will definitly see significant improvements in this region. While this update is not limited to the 8.0 release itself, it is the first release that will have this feature onboard. (after fetching the ports tree ofcourse).

MPSafe TTY

The TTY subsystem is one of the last sections of the entire operating system that had not been rewritten or massively updated in the last decade or two. FreeBSD 8 will have a replaced version that no longer uses the GIANT lock. That reduces the impact of the lock even more and will assist with fine grained multiprocessor capabilities. It is also more modular and will make it easier to hook into the new layer. This will help in lagging console and X.org sessions.

Procstat

Procstat is a new application, eliminating the need for procfs(4), it gives the user information about processes, command line arguments, kernel thread stacks, and many other functions that could assist people in troubleshooting and debugging.

Textdumps

Textdumps had been written to make it much easier to get coredump information back from the Operating System after fatal events occured.

The application had been setup to generate a tar archive that includes several text files with valuable troubleshooting information. Users that send this tar file to one of the appropriate lists, make a much better chance in getting their problem fixed. Before this tool one needed to do this manually, often making this an impossible step for the average user. Not only will this help the user that is facing problems, but also the bugbusters that will have all required information available without needing to explain on how to get the information there.

Experimental AHCI driver

An experimental AHCI driver had been added to the tree, which gives direct and native AHCI commands through the CAM layer. This includes the NCQ feature (Native Command Queueing).

Gvinum v2

Gvinum had been updated and reworked, making it much more production ready and usable then before.

Disk utility upgrades

Several disk utility applications had been updated, or adjusted to become the default. For example the GEOM_PART utility becomes the defacto standard for disk slicing. One should pay attention when this comes in to play though, since the labels might be read differently with GEOM_PART your devices might be enumerated in a different way then before. Make sure you are actively involved with the upgrade and make sure you have serial access to the machine in case of problems!

Beyond that GPT partitions are now capable of being boot from, and the bsdlabel utility supports up to 26 partitions now.

ProPolice Stack Protector

The ProPolice SSP framework is added to the builds, protecting the kernel and userland (where configured) from being stack-smashed. This will make it harder to exploit stack based buffer overflows.

ZFS

ZFS is updated to version 13, and sees several improvements. The experimental warning is removed, making it a production ready filesystem which you can use with very large datapools. Make sure you have enough memory when playing with it though!

Wireless Virtual AP

The Wireless code is updated to support Virtual AP’s. Within the /etc/rc.conf file you are now able to clone the ‘direct hardware interface’ like ath0 into a wlan device. If you clone this more often you will be able to support more SSID’s and things like that. For small companies or freaky home users, you can setup your own protected SSID, and a guest SID which visitors can use and is protected differently.

VirtualBox Host support

The FreeBSD ports tree saw VirtualBox added to the tree, making FreeBSD 8 one of the possible candidates for Virtual Machines delivered through VirtualBox. This makes it a good alternative for VMWare.

NULL-pointer dereferences made harder

The FreeBSD Security Team included a little rewrite of the NULL pointer handling within FreeBSD. Programs are no longer able to make use of the NULL pointer by default and will be stacked on a random address location. This feature makes FreeBSD a bit safer against NULL pointer dereference vulnerabilities.

lukemftpd build disabled by default

Personally I axed the build of lukemftpd. This is one of the two ftp daemons that we have in the base system, and was opted for removal a long time ago. That had happened and the daemon is no longer available by default on the latest version of FreeBSD. Further removal of the lukemftpd software will be investigated to see what consequences will popup because of that.

How to upgrade?

Now that we spoiled you with all the new features in FreeBSD 8, there is probably interest in how one can upgrade to the FreeBSD 8 release.

Before explaining the process of upgrading the system, I expect that you already have a FreeBSD system running on 7.2 or 7-STABLE, if you are unsure on how to get that going, please refer to my previous article in BSDMag which explains this in great detail (and it includes pictures too!).

Ofcourse it is also be possible to install FreeBSD 8 from CD/DVD, please browse to ftp://ftp.langcode.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-yourarchitecturehere/8.0
and fetch the proper media. All you have to do is follow the instructions that are printed on screen. If you need more details about this, there is an excellent handbook that will guide you through it, or again my previous article will assist you. The FreeBSD handbook can be found here:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en/books/handbook/

In some cases there are localised versions, like the Dutch Handbook:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/nl/books/handbook

replace ‘/nl’ by ‘/yourlangcode’ to see whether your version also exists.

As mentioned we will be upgrading a running 7.2 / 7-STABLE system to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE.

We use “csup” for this, which will fetch our source code. This will lead up to a new system and new kernel.

For the instructions that follow, you will need “root” access, if you do not have this access, please consult your system administrator and ask him for help on how to upgrade FreeBSD as “root”.

Copy over the example csup file to /root and begin editing:

# cp /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile /root/8-release
# vi /root/8-release

Navigate to the line which mentions ‘default host’, and change it to a server near you, so for example in the Netherlands you would use:

*default host=cvsup.nl.FreeBSD.org

Now find the part that has ‘default release’ mentioned. We need to update that as well. Change the contents of the tag parameter to RELENG_8_0. Thus the line would look like something as:

*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_8_0

Note that there is another tag that will give you the actual release bits (RELENG_8_0_0_RELEASE), but this will not get updated for Errata Notice’s and Security Advisories, making it an unwanted tag to use.

After making sure the above updates were done, we will need to update our tree. If you are a survivor of my previous article you will have an old tree and old objects tree which you might want to save for future reference.

# mv /usr/src /usr/src.releng7
# mv /usr/obj /usr/obj.releng7

Now we can download / update the new tree.

# csup /root/8-release

Wait for it to finish, and after that we can build a new kernel and world. We will not do modifications to the kernel and world this will be very straightforward.

# cd /usr/src
# make buildworld && make buildkernel

This will generate both a new world, and a new kernel, which we will use later on.

When this had been done, we will update the configuration files by issueing:

# mergemaster -p

This will update the configuration files that are needed before the new release can be started at all. If no output is given then the current configuration is sufficient to start the 8.0 version later on.

Configuration had been updated, so we can start by installing the kernel, after which we need to reboot the system:

# make installkernel
# reboot

The system will restart, when the bootloader starts, press a key and/or start the system in single user mode. In case you do not have the menu; you should issue “boot -s” on the command line so that the system starts in single user mode.

Assuming that nothing went wrong and the system starts normally into the single user mode, we can continue by installing the new world.

# cd /usr/src
# make installworld

Next we need to run a new mergemaster, but this time without any additional flags, so that “optional” configuration files will get updated.

# mergemaster

Walk through all differences and make updates where you think they are appropriate. Be carefull though, if you update passwd and group, you might no longer be able to login remotely. I have been there, done it and got the t-shirt. Again I’d assume you made all the changes you wanted to, without messing up with the system itself. We need to reboot one more time before we can be a happy 8.0 user.

# reboot

And the system will reboot and restart all services under the new world order.

Updating the jails:

In my previous article we also installed jails, that will do our hosting needs, without compromising the host machine. They are not updated through the way described above. Though a fairly simple way of doing that is by installing the new world over the old jail-world. For this you need to stop the jails, because otherwise the system might not be able to update essential files because they are in use.

Once again navigate to the usr/src tree so that we can start by updating the jails. I’d assume you have stopped the jails already so we are safe to go.

# cd /usr/src

Next, update the jails master infrastructure:

# make installworld DESTDIR=/home/j/mroot

However, please do note that it might be possible that certain ports need to be rebuild. Carefully inventorize what kind of applications you currently use, and check whether they might be using libraries that are no longer provided. After you did this you are free to cleanup old libraries:

# cd /usr/src
# make delete-old-libs
# make delete-old

Again this is at your own risk. If you fail to update bash for example to use the new libraries, you are no longer able to restart it if you relogin. Again I have been there, done it and, got a nice second t-shirt!

Conclusion:

So now you are running a fresh and modern 8 system, which you can use to do various kind of (new) things. Not only did we update your base system, we also updated your jail infrastructure and you also updated several ports so survive this cleanup. You also got an impression about what new features you can use under FreeBSD, so I’d suggest you start playing with them now. In case you find problematic things, please consider sending an email to the various mailing lists of FreeBSD, located at http://lists.FreeBSD.org

In case of a more serious problem, which cannot be resolved by the various mailing lists, please consider sending in a bug report so that the developer crew can act accordingly and if there is enough information available resolve the problem you are facing.

Do realise though: Most people working on FreeBSD is a volunteer, who all work for bosses or are being hired for different projects. They also have families, kids, and a social life that demand attention. Please take care when sending in a problem report. Make the report as detailed as possible, send in the textdump if that is available, and give people time to respond. Most often a gentle prod works better then bashing around.

References:

I used Ivan Voras’ list of “Whats cooking for FreeBSD 8″ as my main source for new and improved updates. You can find the list at the following URL:

http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html

About the Author:

Remko Lodder is a 26 year old FreeBSD enthusiast, in his spare time he likes being with his son and girlfriend, playing with FreeBSD systems, and wearing various FreeBSD hats to help the community. In his professional life Remko is an Unix Engineer for Snow B.V. in the Netherlands mostly focussing on Firewalls and Security (Checkpoint/Juniper etc.). You can contact him by sending an email to: remko@FreeBSD.org, or if you want to hire him send an email to Remko.Lodder@Snow.nl or check out their website on: http://snow.nl

I still deeply miss Freddy, I would have loved to see the band in action, live. Sadly I cannot and will never ever be able to see it. Hopefully you are still resting in piece, and rocking the stars!

Zijn er meer mensen die door dit rare bedrijf benaderd zijn ondanks dat er ingeschreven is bij het bel-me-niet register? Overigens raad ik dan aan om bij consuwijzer een klacht te deponeren; en als je wilt hier een berichtje achter te laten… dankjewel

Somewhat later I traveled to Alternate, and ordered 100m patchcable and new connectors. I took out the old (prefab) cable, and pulled the new one through it (as an experiment actually because the TV cable was unable to get back upstairs again, grmbl). I tried putting on a connector, and without much hassle this worked in < 5 minutes. So I went downstairs and tried to make the second connection, which took me a bit longer because the wires weren't coorporating, but within 20 minutes I had wired the cable; and connectors! I now have working ethernet downstairs without needing to drill. The PS3 had been connected to it, as well as the telephone (or actually the ADSL line, because that was living in my bedroom first). No more blinking lights when I am heading to bed, just a few wires here and there.

Now the next challenge is to bring back TV to the first and second floor (it’s splitted in my bedroom). Lets see how we can arrange that!