Blogging All About BSDs

Late last year, the developer of FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based NAS system, decided to move onto CoreNAS, a Debian based NAS system. Developers at iXsystems didn't want to see FreeNAS go by the wayside and have been hard at work on the next FreeNAS version which incorporates a new core design that will allow for modularity.

Well, technically not ripped out, just serialized roughly.  This means if you update your DragonFly 2.7 machine in the next few days, the wireless drivers may not work, except for (I think) ath(4).  They should return, better, by next week.

A user pointed out today that FreeBSD Forums posts include a Thanks button to thank the poster. We thought that was a great idea so the PC-BSD forums now include that functionality as well.

If you find the information in a post helpful, take a moment to press the Thanks button to let the original poster know. Note that you

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It has been said that Marco Peereboom (marco@) has been reinventing the Internet since 2000. Indeed, he has done a tremendous amount of work to help improve OpenBSD in various areas besides creating a slew of very useful Open Source applications. He is a fan of Finite-state Machine and has a passion for doing things the OpenBSD way.

Read

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Having a searchable list/database of supported hardware is always a good thing and something we don’t currently have. This recent thread in the Advocacy forum suggests a layout similar to Haiku’s hardware page.

We can add a similar page to the PC-BSD website, but definitely need your help researching information to include. Beyond the FreeBSD Hardware list and the

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Apparently the recently committed support for Areca RAID cards came with some help directly from Areca, facilitated by Venkatesh Srinivas.  Perhaps next time you’re searching for a RAID card, consider Areca in light of the effort they are willing to contribute for an open-source project…

Dru Lavigne has an interview in Distrowatch.  Some of it is generic “talk about BSD licensing and etc. only in relation to Linux” style questions, but her answers are well thought-out.  (via)

The FreeBSD Foundation will be represented at the *BSD booth during Ohio Linuxfest this upcoming Saturday in Columbus, Ohio. This conference is free, but you need to register by midnight this Wednesday.

The *BSD booth will be available from 8:30 to 19:30 and we'll have Foundation pamphlets and swag available and can accept cash donations. As always, donations will be

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How to configure 3G modems comes up fairly frequently in the forums and, most recently, in this mailing list thread.

Since PC-BSD already provides a GUI for PPP/PPPoE configuration in System Settings -> System Network Configuration, it makes sense to add the necessary knobs here so that a user can easily setup their 3G modem. The problem is that

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Jesse Smith of DistroWatch recently collected questions from readers for me to answer regarding PC-BSD. The questions and answers are in this week's edition of Distrowatch. Topics include BSD vs GPL licensing, differences between BSD and Linux, package management, ZFS, and boot loaders.

Jesse Smith from DistroWatch (who himself has written about PC-BSD for BSD Mag and who has submitted many PBIs) recently asked DistroWatch readers to submit questions about PC-BSD for me to answer. The questions and answers appear in this week’s issue of Distrowatch.

A smaller set of links, but still the same volume of reading material.

• Samuel Greear linked to this lengthy writeup on how to have both the consistency of ACID and the scaling of NoSQL.  Astute observers may notice the similarities between the plan described and the way HAMMER works.
• Joerg Sonnenberger pointed out to me, after my works on

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Dear readers,

With this post, I would like to announce the availability of the atf tutorial published on the wiki!

This new document intends to aid NetBSD developers in writing atf-based tests for the NetBSD source tree. It does so by providing a description of the basic concepts behind the atf design and listing what the necessary steps are

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The latest version of the BSD Certification Study DVD is now available. Besides being a handy study reference, the DVD is a useful tool as it contains the latest versions of the 4 BSDs plus their documentation. From the announcement:

I’m on the latest BSD Show! podcast.  I haven’t listened to it yet – hope I came through OK.