FreeBSD

Presenting for FreeBSD

On December 14, 2008, In FreeBSD, Weblog, by Remko

Yesterday gave I a talk for FreeBSD, my first ever for FreeBSD. The aim and goal was to inform people how “easy” you can become an official member of the FreeBSD development team. Okay it costs time to invest, but you can help a very decent community

Just before the presentation, while preparing mentally for the presentation. I noticed by best friend coming in (Rik! thanks for being there) but even more surprises were around the corner. My father also found the way to Utrecht and he visited my presentation, which was very cool to see. The presentation for mine was a bit over his head, but he liked my presentation . Sadly he and Rik needed to go immediatly after the presentation, but it was good to see them both! Thanks Dad and Rik!

The presentation was in dutch and the feedback that I got was positive! I had some points for improval but overall it was nice. You can see the presentation below (warning, typo’s and dutch language is included);

You can find it here, or via the download section here

Together with Wim vd Putte, Cor Hilbrink and Paul Schenkeveld I filled the chairs for the next meetup in this style. We have a few ideas, and I will try my best with the guys to make it happen again. Thanks to the NLLGG Linux Community for letting us share the resources. Marcel / Fabrice thanks a lot!

Bjoern commits multi-address capable jails

On November 29, 2008, In FreeBSD, by Remko

Bjoern Zeeb from the FreeBSD Development team (and collegue security team member); just committed an important addon/featureset for “FreeBSD jails“. This featureset is scheduled to be part of FreeBSD 7.2 and ofcourse 8.x and beyond.

If you want to run it, you need to run -CURRENT at the moment.

The changelog that Bjoern used to do the commit (including credits):

This enhances the current jail implementation to permit multiple
addresses per jail. In addtion to IPv4, IPv6 is supported as well.
Due to updated checks it is even possible to have jails without
an IP address at all, which basically gives one a chroot with
restricted process view, no networking,..

SCTP support was updated and supports IPv6 in jails as well.

Cpuset support permits jails to be bound to specific processor
sets after creation.

Jails can have an unrestricted (no duplicate protection, etc.) name
in addition to the hostname. The jail name cannot be changed from
within a jail and is considered to be used for management purposes
or as audit-token in the future.

DDB ’show jails’ command was added to aid debugging.

Proper compat support permits 32bit jail binaries to be used on 64bit
systems to manage jails. Also backward compatibility was preserved where
possible: for jail v1 syscalls, as well as with user space management
utilities.

Both jail as well as prison version were updated for the new features.
A gap was intentionally left as the intermediate versions had been
used by various patches floating around the last years.

Bump __FreeBSD_version for the afore mentioned and in kernel changes.

Special thanks to:
– Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd) for his multi-IPv4 patches
and Olivier Houchard (cognet) for initial single-IPv6 patches.
– Jeff Roberson (jeff) and Randall Stewart (rrs) for their
help, ideas and review on cpuset and SCTP support.
– Robert Watson (rwatson) for lots and lots of help, discussions,
suggestions and review of most of the patch at various stages.
– John Baldwin (jhb) for his help.
– Simon L. Nielsen (simon) as early adopter testing changes
on cluster machines as well as all the testers and people
who provided feedback the last months on freebsd-jail and
other channels.
– My employer, CK Software GmbH, for the support so I could work on this.

Tagged with: FreeBSD • freebsd jails • jails

The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project

On November 2, 2008, In FreeBSD, FreeBSD Doc, by Remko

The project is doing rather well recently. Mostly that is because Rene had done a lot of work (and Wouter also started joining us) on translating and updating the current versions. I am running a little behind on his updates because of busy days, which seems to happen more often. So I decided to take the opportunity and request a commit bit for Rene. The Documentation team reported that they had received the request so far, but no progress had been yet there. Hopefully they will agree with the bit so that I have a bit more time and options to work on different things.

Will keep you posted about this!

Tagged with: docnl • FreeBSD

FreeBSD Ports Tree Unfrozen

On September 23, 2008, In FreeBSD, Weblog, by Remko

Today the Port management team released the FreeBSD Ports Tree. The Tree is still in a Slush state (no sweeping changes) like the Documentation Tree has, but the tagging for the release is done. Currently the cluster is building the required packages that will be accompanied on the -RELEASE distributions. The next major things is the build of the -RELEASE-CANDIDATE’s which could start any moment ( I am not aware of the most recent planning for them, I will post more info when I know them)

Tagged with: 6.4 • 7.1 • FreeBSD • Ports Tree • RELEASE-CANDIDATE • Releases • Slush

Getting better

On September 20, 2008, In Weblog, by Remko

So, after being ill for almost a week, and that continuing down the drain, I slowly start to feel better. My stomach was sore for more then a week, and I am periodically getting stalked by headaches which aren’t a real pleasure. But slowly they appear to be slowing down and putting me back into shape again. I started translating again and wrote some scripts that I needed to write for JR-Hosting, so progress is upcoming again. In the future night and tommorrow where possible I will continue scripting, translating and finding a few low hanging fruits for FreeBSD so that I can show that I am still alive. I am a regular slacker lately and that’s not something I actually like. So… lets get this ball rolling again!

Tagged with: development • FreeBSD • Ill • Progress • Translating

FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project

On September 14, 2008, In FreeBSD, Weblog, by Remko

After a long time I am pleased to announce a new FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project update. René Ladan has been working very hard on finishing his translation and updating the handbook, while I am struggling with the PPP and Slip chapter. It’s at 62% currently and is the last chapter to be finished before we have an entire translation available. Once that’s in play, René and I can hopefully keep the situation under control and see for further translations that we can do. We have a range of articles that we are interested in into translating, as well as the webpages which have some initial work from Siebrand Mazeland.

Personally I am looking into the Checkpoint article so that it it is up to date again (I am working with the materials quite often) and I am willing to see how we can add a Juniper article (or merge the two) so that we have some big players into the documentation base again.

Ofcourse I have several PR’s still open to improve the PPP and SLIP chapter, mostly with regard to the console setup and things like that. While translating I found several areas that need improvement (it’s a mess wrt. style, but that’s a different topic)

I hope that the next message will be that I finished the translation of the final chapter so that I can help René with translating the updates that still need work. Some chapters are really hard to improve after they had major improvements

Thanks René!

Tagged with: docnl • Documentation • FreeBSD • FreeBSD Documentation

FreeBSD Ports tree Frozen by Erwin Lansing

On September 9, 2008, In FreeBSD, Weblog, by Remko

Today Erwin Lansing froze the FreeBSD Ports tree in preparation for the 6.4 and 7.1 releases. That basically means that no one can commit to the ports tree without prior approval from the Ports Management team.

The freeze is done to give the machines in the build cluster the time to build packages for both releases, which can be included on the CD’s and uploaded to the various FTP-mirrors so that you (The end user) can use them when you install the versions.

Certain people will get a blanket from the Ports Management team, so that they can improve the current ports and document Security Vulnerabilities where needed, and ofcourse update the packages if that is required.

Stay Tuned

Tagged with: 6.4 • 7.1 • Erwin Lansing • FreeBSD • freeze • ports • security • vulnerabilities

Trying to setup a tinderbox for sparc64

On September 9, 2008, In FreeBSD, Weblog, by Remko

Tonight I spend most of my time waiting. Waiting for the installation of a “standalone” tinderbox on the Sparc64 platform. The basic idea that I currently have is to see whether it would work at all. So currently the box installed MySQL, perl, php, apache and some more things that are required for the Tinderbox. It only forgot to install the mod_php info so I am rebuilding that at the moment.

When that completes I will test whether it actually does something usefull, and I already found Ion-Mihai to see whether we can setup a QAT for sparc64.

There is one limitation for now. It will only run during daytime. I appreciate my sleep

Tagged with: FreeBSD • MySQL • Perl • PHP • tinderbox

ZFS paritions recreated

On September 7, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, Weblog, by Remko

This weekend I didn’t invest as much time as I wanted for FreeBSD and the like. I was recreating my ZFS partitions. Why? They worked fine right? Yes they did. Though they were controlled by a highpoint controller, offering a pseudo raid setup (software). Ed Schouten recently told me (something I already knew but started me thinking) that ar0 is uncapable of supporting raid-5 in the first place. So my raid configuration might not have been a raid configuration after all.

This made me feel like: do my periodic backup on DVD (backing up this much data is interesting on DVD, I can tell you that ) and I copied over all data to my workstation (which almost has the same storage capabilities, only that’s just two disks, not doing redundancy at all), and burned the beasts on DVD (still am actually).

I destroyed my old ZFS pool (just a disk ‘ar0′) and in the highpoint controller bios I disabled Raid-5 and restarted with just 4 disks. I recreated my ZFS storage with “zfs create raidz data ad14 ad15 ad16 ad17“ which fired up the storage area again. After that I started copying back the data. I copied almost 500GB this weekend already and its still going (and will be for the rest of the night I think). I liked the idea of having my data backupped on my workstation as well, so I’ll probably rsync the storage area every period of time. Probably during the day when I am not home at all, so that the gig’s of data can flow over the wire without doing harm (gbit network). At least its saves a little and I can turn down my machines where needed.

I will also restart my /storage/nfs folders so that I might be able to have my ultrasparc (donated by Robert Blacquiere) do much nicer things again by using networking storage (only fastethernet here (100mbit) but that doesn’t kill the pleasure ).

So yes not much activity for FreeBSD itself; but laying the foundation to be able to do something like that more again (ultrasparc tindy perhaps?)….

Tagged with: FreeBSD • NFS • Storage • tinderbox • ultrasparc • ZFS

PF statistics script updated (MRTG)

On September 7, 2008, In Weblog, by Remko

I Just released version 2.0 of the script pf-to-mrtg.pl. I was bored with the old script and it annoyed me that it looked so darned ugly. I rewrote it to match some more current scripts that I use, better options handling, better usage instructions, better usage of the options and information (we might be able to use the information multiple times without using pfctl -si multiple times itself). This also prepares for a potential cacti alike script. Check it out

Tagged with: FreeBSD • MRTG • Perl • PF

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