Category: FreeBSD

The discussion about the logo contest leaked to slashdot.
This resulted in the first nominations. I like this one :-):

This one is nice too:

     // BSD \
|| Free  |
||  At   |
|| Last  |
\||/\/\//\|/   

I think a new logo is necessary because the daemon is somehow copyrighted by Kirk McKusick, which makes it difficult to use it. For example an image was deleted from the “FreeBSD” entry in the german Wikipedia, because Kirk’s license is not compatible with the Wikipedia GNU FDL.

One year ago i decided to do a “make world” on my server. Since then it is running continously.

$ uname -a
FreeBSD huckfinn 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #0: Mon Feb  9 21:55:40 CET 2004
arved@sauna.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/local/home2/source/RELENG_4/src/sys/HUCKFINNipf  i386
$ uptime
12:00AM  up 365 days,  8:31, 4 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The following URL was posted by the usual troll to the FreeBSD current mailinglist: Gregory McGarry compared NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 by running several benchmarks.
Just yesterday i downloaded NetBSD 2.0 to upgrade Olga today. I was curious if the new version felt more speedier than NetBSD 1.6.2.
What I like about NetBSD is their Installer which looks a lot better than sysinstall and supports localization (Currently English, French, German and Polish).
Unfortunately it lacks a mergemaster like functionality. A serious bug: while upgrading i noticed that the installer does not check if there is enough free space on the hard disk. tar failed to extract all files, but the installer claimed “selected distribution sets unpacked successfully”.

The heise publishing company restored their reputation. After the “not so good” article in the c’t magzine, the january issue of the iX magazine contains a FreeBSD 5.3 and OpenBSD 3.6 article by Lukas Grunwald. It is available online (but in german). Although parts are a breathless accumulation of catchwords, the author mentions the new features and wrote about his personal expierience.
He complained about the incomplete mirrors at the time of writing, that the ext3 journal was destroyed, when he mounted his linux partition with mount_ext2 and that the RNG sometimes slows down booting, because it needs more entropy. He also mentions that SMPng is not yet as good as SMP in Linux 2.6.
But his summary is positive, “FreeBSD is easy to install”, “FreeBSD can be considered as a Linux alternative”.
Unfortunately the new c’t issue contains only one letter to the editor by Oliver Fromme, which contains a daemon vs. devil comment and a pointer to Lehmann’s FreeBSD edtion.

Yesterday both of my EPIA routers running FreeBSD 5-STABLE freezed. After I rebooted them i updated the world because a lot of bugs have been fixed in the last month, but today the Firewall EPIA freezed again 🙁
Both times I was not at home, so i don’t know if something mysterious happend. My other Systems didn’t crash, so it can’t be a powerfailure, and heating problems are very unlikely as there are -3�C outside and around 18�C inside.
I have now built a debug kernel on the firewall and additional disabled SACK TCP and the MPsafe network subsystem.
I hope this increases the stability, that i don’t have to reenable the old gateway running FreeBSD 4-STABLE (which btw last week hit the 300 days uptime mark) for the chrismas holidays.
If you have any other ideas how to increase stability, please let me know.

In the last three years I made 52 new ports and maintained them over certain time periods (At the moment i maintain 18 ports).

Continue reading “My new ports”

Today I received the latest c’t magazine. It featured a two pages article about FreeBSD 5.3 by Bj�rn K�nig. Unfortunately the article is very bad. Even myself as a developer had problems understanding what the author was talking about. The content of the article is basically a mixture of BSD History, excerpts from the official press release and some passages from the handbook plus a wrong BSD Family tree and the standard daemon image. Although the author posts to BSD Newgroups and Mailinglist frequently, he didn’t wrote anything about his personal experience with FreeBSD, did he even tried to install version 5.x? As a FreeBSD Newbie I am missing information about the installation (screenshots :-), as a FreeBSD 4.x user I am missing information about the differences between 4.x and 5.x. And as a hacker i am missing information about new features in the kernel.
I tried to find a better article on the web, but unfortunately the press section of the FreeBSD website is two months out of date. And the articles on news.google.com were all not more than excerpts from the press release.
Same with the blogosphere. Some FreeBSD users saying “Cool!” and “Finally!”, but nothing substantial.
Can any of my readers point me to a good professional neutral review of FreeBSD 5.3? Or is FreeBSD really dying?

There is now another article on ONLamp about EuroBSDCon, Inside EuroBSDCon by Federico Biancuzzi.
Since writing comments to the article seems to be broken, he gets a Trackback.
Federico, I think at the moment the target audience is quite clear, people that care enough about BSD to spend at least 600 Euro to attend a BSD conference. This includes developers and interested users and companies. And I prefer to listen to talks of developers like rwatson at EuroBSDCon.
But I agree, that there are possibilities to save money. E.g. IMHO there is no need for the conference to take place in a 4+ stars hotel. For most people a three stars hotel is enough. And the conference rooms could as well be in a university, school or education company.
Of course EuroBSDCon should not replace local conferences targeting newtobsd users.

Next to the three large BSDcon in Europe, US and Asia, many countries have local BSD conferences, e.g. Italy, Canada and of course Japan.
On #bsdaustria, Aleksander Fafula just pointed me to MeetBSD, Krak�w on November 27.
Unfortunately I don’t speak polish :-(.
But why is there nothing similar in Austria or even Germany? I know it is a lot of work, so are we just too lazy?
BTW, would you buy an Operating System from these guys?

After the release of FreeBSD 5.3 i upgraded my gateway from 5.2.1 to 5.3. Because of the upgrade-risk i migrated the webserver that runs this blog to jim.arved.de.
There were a few problems I had to solve, that caused a few hours downtime. First i had to add an IP alias for my public IP to lo0, because otherwise the webserver would not answer on requests (I need more public IPs, so I can stop using NAT). Then I had to patch MT to work with perl 5.8.4. I hope this was the only necessary patch, as I don’t have the time to switch to another blogging software.
The FreeBSD upgrade went flawless. Now there are only two machines left on my network that run 5.2.x.