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Yesterday I was reading an article about “Elevator Pitch” and thinking how could I use this idea to promote my consultant skills, my blog and other things too. Then it came into my mind how cool would be doing this for BSD followed by a small list of things people should know about it.

Well, I suppose it’s more funny this way…

First I will give you some highlights about interesting features you find in BSD’s and a simple explanation about each item. Then, just at the end of this post, I show you what I think to be a “rocky” “Elevator Pitch” for BSD’s.

1. BSD stands for…

Berkeley Software Distribution! Yes, from California, USA.

2. We call them flavours but we also have some distributions…

Because all major BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD) systems have different kernels, we can’t call them flavours. In our “world” a distribution is when a BSD is built upon some other BSD kernelland such m0n0wall, pfSense, FreeNAS, Askozia, FreeSBIE, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, VirtualBSD all are based on FreeBSD kernel.

3. MAC OS X is also FreeBSD Based!

“…Mac OS X Server includes the latest technological advances from the open source BSD community. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, the BSD distribution is the foundation of most UNIX implementations today. Mac OS X Server is based largely on the FreeBSD distribution and includes the latest advances from this development community…” [http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/unix.html]

4. NetBSD has XEN 3.3 support

Today operating systems must have the power to handle as many types of virtualization as possible. Well of course if the license allows that. It is known that Xen still is a very important “player”. Almost any Linux distribution can load an hypervised kernel (Dom0) and run guests on it (DomU). Well, so it does NetBSD and hard work is being done also on FreeBSD-Current. [http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto.html | http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/]


5. You can load multiple virtual kernels with DragonFly BSD

“…The idea behind the development of the vkernel architecture was to find an elegant solution to debugging of the kernel and its components. It eases debugging, as it allows for a virtual kernel being loaded in userland and hence debug it without affecting the real kernel itself. By being able to load it on a running system it also removes the need for reboots between kernel compiles…”
[http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/user/vKernelOverview/]

6. You can install applications under PC-BSD as you do in Mac OS X

PBI stands for “Pc-Bsd Installer” or “Push-Button Installer”. As the name says, imagine you want to install Firefox with Flash plugin. Just fetch it via [http://www.pbidir.com/bt/category/web], et voi lá. Click to install.

7. We call it install.cfg not ‘kickstart’

“Hi @include! So, can you mass deploy under BSD, remotely? Yes we can! [http://www.403forbidden.net/BSD/FBSD_Kickstart/fbsd_inst_4b_files.php] and better [http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/]

8. Almost every UNIX (or UNIX based) and Linux based operating systems uses code from OpenBSD

This one was just for kidding! But next time you type ssh in your keyboard, think twice!

9. ZFS is not loaded by FUSE. It’s a kernel module.

I think you can guess how many advantages we have by running this stressing feature near the kernel and not in the userland.

10. LiveCD’s and VMware Images for test drives

Do you want to got for a test drive? Do you want to test your hardware or even Jails/other nice BSD feature? Fetch it, burn it, load it and you are done.

The official slogan:

“FreeBSD, the power to serve”

So the elevator pitch I found to be cool for BSD is:

“Having BOFH nightmares? Use BSD and sleep tight during system updates in your company!”

Do you like the “Elevator Pitch” and the all the BSD features? Well, the list goes on and on down here with some other nice topics that are blowing in my mind. In fact I would love to see if my BSD friends can help me build a bigger list

1. Binary updates are a tremendous fast and secure way to update/upgrade your system
2. FreeBSD has 3 Firewall flavours
3. You can play with DTrace
4. Mandatory Access Control is a Modular Security Framework
5. GEOM is the Modular Disk transformation Framework
6. Hierarchical Jails
7. You can run Linux under FreeBSD via Linux compatible mode
8. You can run FreeBSD kernel under Linux via Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
9. …and the list goes on and on…

To end, 3 nice links for further reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_products_based_on_FreeBSD

Some weeks ago I have taken some spare time to test KVM on FreeBSD 7.2.

The result was so amazing that I took some screenshots and I have also written some documentation under KVM wiki website. Take a look if you are interested on FreeBSD/KVM.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/BSD

I have installed Microsoft Windows XP, Ubunto Desktop and FreeBSD 7.2 Guests. All perform very well under KVM.

I need to get another bunch of time to perform some benchmarks about networking and aio. I don’t know yet if either KVM or KVM under FreeBSD both are ready for production. For now I can say three things:

1 – KVM developers are getting their hands very nasty because they really work hard;
2 – FreeBSD well you know … FreeBSD is awesome and getting better form release to release.

3 – Manage to get KVM working under FreeBSD is as simple as you can see.

Did you know FreeBSD now has something called Hierarchical Jails Go figure! (Jails on asteroids )

These guys PC-BSD are ‘giving money’ to these guys!

“…
We are really happy to announce and saymany thanks
to Kris Moore and his Team.

Hardware facts:

Model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
CPU Speed 2.67 GHz
Processors 8
Memory 6GB
…”

(Kris Moore, the founder of PC-BSD)

Thanks guys! ah, and I do like very much your PBI’s (more on this here keep the good work!

From the 7-STABLE Branch FreeBSD guys just release this new fresh version with some great improvements.

• ULE (manpage) (the man) is now the default scheduler for amd64 abd i386 kernels;
• Dtrace was imported from OpenSolaris. They say it’s a “comprehensive” but I don’t agree with this because imho it has a interesting learning curve;
• NFS (much-improved) I will see this in action;
• Great KDE and Gnome upgrades but I will not test this on my VMs or Servers;

I’m very happy because things on FreeBSD Community are getting more and more visibility and many persons are now interested on FreeBSD. I think our guys are trying to get closer to the people. http://forums.freebsd.org/ is a live example of that. While for many year the plaintext mailing lists were the main spot for exchange emails, now forums get a live and fresh update to how FreeBSD interacts with it’s community. I think this is very nice too.

Hey boys take care! Women are taking over the ship!

“…Deanna Phillips, an OpenBSD developer, recently started a BSD Women LinkedIn group… The group is also open to men in the BSD community who would like to show their support for women who hack BSD. …”

In a deep digging over some of my backups, I found this foto taken by me with an old webcam when I was 20 years old and started working as UNIX SysAdmin here in Lisbon, great days … An young rebel BSD addited to the bones BOFH who loves to remove luser accounts massively ahahah

I still the same person but now I dress some “as they call” “smart casual clothes” and yes I still love to remove those accounts haahah

Today I’m working with some legacy systems and I just remembered when I had my hands on systems like Irix, SCO and Netware…funny days and stressing too :/

 Great news for FreeBSD and virtualization fans!

Innotek which was recently acquired by Sun,  is looking for developers to help porting VirtualBox to FreeBSD. I’m not to much worried because I “abuse” of FreeBSD Jails and I have no need to virtualize any other operating system under any of my FreeBSD Box. (well, until now) But in fact I think is always a plus to have as many options as others have!

The community already has a simple port of it but that must be completed they say!

Jojannes Kretzschmar has made some great Tux and Beastie drawings for The Chemnitzer Linux Tag 2008.

more nice pics here. Images under a Creative Commons license.

Como um relógio Suíço aqui temos o FreeBSD Quartly Status Report à maneira!

De entre os inúmeros tópicos, irei salientar e comentar aqueles que pela sua importância ou porque de alguma forma estão mais ligados ao meu dia-a-dia, me parecem mais interessantes.

Projects

• Dtrace – Querida Cisco System, Inc. Obrigado pelo suporte. . Sim, é graças a estes senhores Sun Microsystems que pelo seu projecto OpenSolaris, FreeBSD pode contar com este framework. Depois de alguns meses parado, está de volta o seu desenvolvimento. Atenção que até ao momento isto ainda está disponível no kernel para apenas arquitecturas amd64 e i386!
• TCP ECN – O nosso Tuga Rui Paulo anda mesmo muito entretido a ‘brincar’ com RFC’s, mais um comit ( http://people.freebsd.org/~rpaulo/tcp_ecn.diff ) ‘Força nisso Rui!’.
• TrustedBSD Audit – Pois, é a primeira “production release” do OpenBSM 1.0. Seus ‘hackarus’ be afraid. Foram corrigidos alguns bugs, aumentada a performance na detecção ‘live’ de intrusos, aumentada ainda (mais?) a granulidade no registo e correspondência de dados, e muito mais…
• Xen – Ainda no outro dia se falou nisto numa lista e hoje ‘voi lá’, e as novidades depois disso ainda não são muito animadores, pois ainda só temos um guest (domU). Bem… ‘who needs Xen when we have Jails!”
• Performance Monitor Project – FANTÁSTICO! Erik Cederstrand, para sua tese, tese a brilhante ideia de montar uma framework para monitorizar a evolução da performance do -CURRENT ao longo do tempo, ao longo do seu desenvolvimento. Os benchmarks são produzidos e publicados para que os developers possam ver os resultados dos seus comits e o impacto na performance do BSD numa perspectiva geral. Eric promete novas funcionalidades. http://littlebit.dk:5000/
• FreeBSD Installer – Não sei porque vou escrever algo sobre isto, pois para mim e para os fãs do “o que está perfeito não precisa ser mexido”, mas ok. o FIN é uma tentativa para humm (mandar para o lixo) o sysinstall do FreeBSD, mas pronto o interessante é ver mesmo os movimentos que o código tem. Vindo do bsdinstaller.org, já suporta várias límguas, instalação remota, etc etc, mas ainda falta muito para se conseguir fazer tudo o que o old-friend sysinstall fez durante anos (15) e fará

Kernel

• Coda – foram corrigidos muitos bugs no entanto o man page ainda diz que este módulo é experimental. Caros, eu não usaria isto ainda para montar sistemas de ficheiros distribuídos!
• LVM Geom – Nome de código ‘glvm’ ou melhor, nome da classe que por sua vez é também o nome do comando usado para ler a metadata vinda de um LVM2 (Linux Volume Manager). Isto ainda está em testes!
• TCP Code Cleanup – Já há muito que se vinha a falar disto, mas agora há links que apontam concretamente para o que está a ser feito. (ver status completo). Por agora basta dizer que isto está a trazer limpeza ao código que se tornará mais fácil de seguir, manter e estender. Nisto tudo há também o interesse de se adicionar algumas ‘coisas’ novas no código, trabalhar em conformidade com RFC’s e aumentar performance na stack.

Userland

• procstat – e depois perguntam “ah porque dizem que procfs é inseguro?”, porque é e porque não precisamos!
  “.. allows detailed inspection and printing of process properties, including file descriptors, threads, kernel thread stacks, credentials, and virtual memory mappings of processes…” Através de uma data de sysctls isto é recolhido da framework stacks(9). Nada vem do procfs

Ports

• Ports 2.0 – ‘Re-engineer/Modernize’ e eu pergunto pq! ok ok concordo com o que dizem sobre a flexibilidade das dependências a qual podia ser um pouco mais inteligente ao instalar/desinstalar ports. A documentação que também querem dar um ‘revamp’ a meu ver está optima, sendo que a secção para Port Maintainers é bastante maçadora, e depois há tipos como este ( sufixo.com ) que se atrasa a lançar os patchs .. (cof cof)
• Ports Collection – A barra está a bater neste momento nos 18.000 ports. As novidades neste campo são mesmo o KDE 4.0 que já está a ser testado, como sabem normas da ‘QA process’ da FreeBSD

E claro, nota-se que fico contente sempre que acabo de lêr um Status destes!

‘Long live *BSD’

PS: Ao que parece há Tugas em várias branchs de BSD’s

Rui Paulo – FreeBSD e NetBSD (se não estou em erro)

Nuno Antunes – DragonFly

“Run and Hide” or you will lose your Linux box without notice

Tudo começou há coisa de 3 anos quando este senhor Colin Percival lançou este email para uma das muitas listas de correio do FreeBSD .

“As you are all aware, many computer systems around the world are possessed by evil penguins. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult if we don’t have physical access to the machines in question.”

Basicamente com apenas uma floppy disk e uma mão de comandos na consola, podesmo “matar” o nosso querido Linux remotamente e no próximo restart, “voi lá” FreeBSD in the house!

“há coisas fantásticas não há?!”

Bem depois de tanto tempo parado os updates estão ai para poder “falar” com a nova estrutura do sistema do FreeBSD, que entretanto tinha mudado no decorrer das versões.

E por fim o Depenguinator 2.0 e a antiga versão apenas para registo Depenguinator.

Boa matança!!