Dru Lavigne: Why Colocation America Uses FreeBSD

Published on May 2, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed
Albert Ahdoot, Director of Business Development, recently sent this testimonial regarding the use of FreeBSD by Colocation America and its customers:

Colocation America provides colocation, dedicated server, VoIP, and managed data center hosting services for businesses that are looking to host their servers in the United States. With 22 data center locations, Colocation America has become one of the leading providers of hosting services. Most of our customers depend on the FreeBSD operating system to provide them with a secure environment to host their network infrastructure. They praise FreeBSD for its ability to encrypt sensitive data and for the ZFS advanced file system that makes managing server files a breeze. Many of our corporate clients choose to use FreeBSD to operate their MySQL database systems and email servers due to the exceptional networking components of the operating system.

Developers that choose to colocate their servers with us also choose to install FreeBSD on their dedicated servers. The open source nature of the BSD license gives them the flexibility they need to develop innovative software. Plus, they have access to an enterprise level operating system that is free, has an active development community, and which lets them contribute their own skills to make the system better for their own development. We have asked several clients why they decided to use FreeBSD and the answer has always been the same: the cost and networking ability of the operating system rivals its commercial license competitors.

Our customers are not the only fans of FreeBSD. We use FreeBSD to manage our shared hosting servers due to the OS ability to manage firewalls and web applications while handling the server loads of several hosting accounts at once. With the WebHost Manager cPanel add-on for managing multiple web hosting accounts on a single dedicated server, our shared hosting server is able to provide customers looking for cheap website hosting. The community support of FreeBSD, along with its open source nature, provides a secure environment for our clients to host in. To find out more about the dedicated server hosting with the FreeBSD operating system, you can visit our FreeBSD dedicated server page.

Baptiste Daroussin: Fresh blood needed for LibreOffice

Published on May 1, 2012 in FreeBSD, libreoffice and Ports. Closed

For some time now, I have been maintaining pretty much alone the LibreOffice port for FreeBSD, trying to provide all the features LibrOffice has to our users.

I managed to port the 3.3.x series of LibreOffice to FreeBSD some time ago and tried to keep updating it as fast as possible as soon as new releases were out.

At the beginning I was thinking about maintaining 2 concurrent of LibreOffice at the same time: legacy and "normal" to reflect the upstream support. But this take too much time, I'll kill libreoffice-legacy in the next weeks.

The problem is that it is really time consuming, not that it is really complex, the LibreOffice upstream is really nice and really responsive, other maintainers from the BSD community, has also been really helpful.

Some time ago, I decided to create office@ to help maintaining every office related ports maintained on FreeBSD, it worked quite well, sunpoet@ taking good care for examples of the different hunspell/hyphen/mythes dictionnaries/thesaurus, pfg and maho taking care of Apache OpenOffice and all of us working on the third party libraries/fonts/etc needed by all those big office project.

But I'm still missing help on LibreOffice itself, I just committed 3.5.2 some days ago, and 3.5.3 is almost there.

We also still have known issues on 3.5.2:

  • Doesn't build on recent -HEAD (problem with clang 3.1): all the fixes are in the upstream git, but need to be tracked and backported.
  • Doesn't work propertly with base lpd.
  • Doesn't build using the WITH_DEBUG option
  • Doesn't build with gcc from ports (gcc from base is too old for libreoffice)

All the libreoffice work is done on redports svn

if you have an account and are willing to help tell me so that you can have access to the office svn on redports.

PC-BSD: 9.0 Users Handbook Translated to Indonesian

Published on May 1, 2012 in 9.0 and handbook. Closed

The 9.0 PC-BSD Users Handbook has been translated to Indonesian and is available for download in the following formats:

Thanks goes to Tri Mulya S for the translation.

Tigersharke is working on the HTML version which should show up here some time in the next few days.

There will not be a Kindle version as this language is not supported by Amazon Kindle.

FreeBSD News Flash: New committer: Isabell Long (doc/www)

Published on April 26, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

Alexander Leidinger: DTrace in GENERIC (-current)

Published on April 25, 2012 in Blog, current, dtrace, FreeBSD, generic kernel, hooks, kernel, Open Source, Software and Source. Closed

In case you have not noticed yet, KDTRACE_HOOKS is now in the GENERIC kernel in FreeBSD-current. This means you just need to load the DTrace modules and can use DTrace with the GENERIC kernel.

In case you do not know what you can do with DTrace, take the time to have a look at the DTrace blog. It is worth any minute you invest reading it.

Share

Bernhard Froehlich: BSD Boot Camp am Grazer Linux Tag 2012

Published on April 25, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

Wir freuen uns, dass auch heuer wieder das BSD Boot Camp am Grazer Linux Tag 2012 stattfindet.

Termin: 28. April 2012 an der FH Joanneum, Alte Poststraße 149 ab 09:00 Uhr

Beginn des BSD Tracks um 10:00 Uhr.

Das Programm des BSD Boot Camp findet man unter Agenda und das Programm des Grazer Linux Tages ist auch schon online.

Dru Lavigne: IPv6 Performance Analysis Project Completed

Published on April 24, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed
Earlier this year the FreeBSD Foundation announced that together with iXsystems it had awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to analyze the performance of FreeBSD's Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) stack.

FreeBSD is well known as a network stack reference and research platform. With the expanding installed base of IPv6 systems throughout the world, more focus was brought to making sure that the IPv6 subsystem remained at performance parity with its IPv4 counterpart.

"'IP feature parity' is what our users expect.  Closing the gap between IPv6 and IPv4 in terms of performance has become more important as IPv6 is seeing a significant increase in public deployments", says Bjoern Zeeb. "This will help to keep the resource usage at the same level as traffic patterns shift towards IPv6."

One feature that received special attention was hardware assisted offload support: Large/TCP Segment Offload (LSO/TSO) and Large Receive Offload (LRO).  Getting the basic support done was very important, as it allows FreeBSD, together with network card vendors, to further improve performance. IPv6 Extension Headers can be taken into account when defining new interfaces and improved basic network packet data types will ease offload implementations in all network card drivers in the future.

Having offload support in the network stack immediately helps loopback performance. Turning on "offloading" for IPv6 avoids expensive calculation and validation of upper layer (TCP and UDP) checksums.

With IPv6, TCP performance is now basically on par with IPv4 in the offloading case, allowing 10 Gbps line speed connections. This is a huge step forward.  UDP throughput has increased and is closer to the level of IPv4. Changes to locking allowing better parallelism, which is a step in the right direction.

Initial numbers showing the differences of the work can be found here.

"I'd love to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems for sponsoring the project and hope that it will help the community deploying IPv6" closes Bjoern.

PC-BSD: Booth at LinuxFest NorthWest

Published on April 24, 2012 in Events. Closed

LinuxFest NorthWest is this weekend at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. There will be a FreeBSD booth which will be handing out PC-BSD DVDs and cool swag. This is a free event, so if you’re in this part of the world, drop by and say hi!

Dru Lavigne: Auditdistd Project Completed

Published on April 23, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed
The auditdistd project is complete. Pawel Jakub Dawidek provides the following report regarding the project:

I'm happy to report that the auditdistd project I was working under sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation is complete.



FreeBSD in the Press: FreeBSD Gets A New X.Org With Intel KMS, phoronix, Michael Larabel

Published on April 23, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed
The FreeBSD team working on X support have announced a set of X.Org updates to bring the FreeBSD package support to X.Org 7.5.2, which now includes Intel KMS support.

Remko Lodder: DSPAM

Published on April 22, 2012 in FreeBSD. Closed

Since recent (with the very great help of Ion-Mihai Tetu, a fellow FreeBSD committer and developer for dspam) we (JR-Hosting) are running our anti-spam infrastructure on DSPAM. We stopped using SpamAssassin after some testing and resolving problems. The interesting fact is that we share most directories through nullfs so that both the webjail and the mailjail share data and our users are able to modify settings, see their stats etc. Very great and after overcoming our issues (local delivery was not OK in the beginning and the webjail was not able to properly use the MySQL database backend at first, which was odd because the main system WAS looking into it and the webjail wasn’t), it works just fine. Ofcourse it is still learning but it seems that it finds spam efficiently and quick, and it’s footprint is much much lower then SpamAssassin was. I might want to figure out how to run the daemonized version as per advise of Ion-Mihai, till then it works as a deliveryagent.

I am writing a ‘hosting environment howto’ (or something that will largely look like that) in which I will write about the setup as well.

Martin Wilke: [XORG-DEV] trunk is unstable

Published on April 22, 2012 in facebook, fb, FreeBSD, FreeBSD_EN, trunk, twitter and xorg. Closed

Dear All,
As I mentioned already in twitter/fb, our xorg-dev/trunk repo is currently
completely unstable because we are trying now to get xorg 7.7 RC ready. Our
wiki page will be updated soon. Testers and feedback are welcomed, but
please make sure you know what you are doing. If you like to discuss with
us directly, please join us on irc efnet/#freebsd-xorg.

- Martin

FreeBSD News Flash: New committer: Jeremie Le Hen (src)

Published on April 22, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

Martin Wilke: Please welcome Xorg 7.5.2

Published on April 21, 2012 in FreeBSD, FreeBSD_EN, Ports and xorg #hacking. Closed

The Xorg Team is pleased to announce the next round of Xorg updates.
The team created a new flag called WITH_NEW_XORG that users can include
in /etc/make.conf. This was created for the intel KMS work being done
althouthough It probably works for other chips. Unfortunately, the intel
KMS driver will only work on FreeBSD 9(RELENG|STABLE) or 10/HEAD users.
Older version of FreeBSD will not be supported. Intel users will need
to patch their source manually with Konstantin’s KMS kernel patch to get
the newer chips to work. Please carefully read UPDATING entry.

Changes:

– libdrm 2.4.31 (including KMS support)
– mesa 7.11.2
– xorg-server 1.10.6
– a lot of new Graphic Drivers.

I would like to thank:

Koop Mast
Eitan Adler
Niclas Zeising
and all helpers and testers from x11@.

PC-BSD: 9-STABLE-20120418 Testing Snapshot Available

Published on April 19, 2012 in 9.1, new features and testers. Closed

Kris has just announced the availability of the first testing snapshot for the upcoming 9.1 release. This snapshot can be downloaded from here.

NOTE: This snapshot is only available for 64-bit systems. Also, if you need the new GEM/KMS support provided in the previous snapshot, do not install this new snapshot on your main system as that support has been removed, pending its commital to FreeBSD. If you need that support and would like to test the new snapshot, test it in a virtual environment.

The wiki is gradually being updated with the new installer and Warden information and those sections will change over the next few days to match the capabilities of this snapshot.

From the announcement:

The PC-BSD team is pleased to make available the first public 9-STABLE snapshot for 64bit systems!

This snapshot provides both users and developers a means to test out new features in the upcoming PC-BSD 9.1 release. This snapshot may contain buggy code and features, so users are encouraged to run it only on non-critical systems.

Highlights

  • FreeBSD 9-STABLE from 4-11-2012
  • New system installer! Greatly simplified for desktop and server installs.
  • New “PC-BSD Serverâ€? installation option. Includes command-line utilities like pbi-manager, warden, metapkgmanager and more.
  • Support for ZFS mirror / raidz(1,2,3) during installation.
  • Support for SWAP on ZFS, allowing entire disk ZFS installation.
  • Support for setting additional ZFS data-set options, such as compression, noexec, etc.
  • Warden jail management integrated into system. Allows creating jails via GUI, adding packages and other administration.
  • First boot setup wizard allows OEM installs to be easily performed.
  • New Bluetooth paring tray / GUI utilities.
  • New AppCafe improvements and preferences.
  • Improvements to wifi utility.
  • Fixed bug causing untranslated strings to show up empty.
  • Numerous bug-fixes to PC-BSD related utilities.

Errata

  • There is a bug installing to boot-camp partitions which will be fixed in next snapshot.
  • The warden rc.d script is not enabled by default. Add ‘warden_enable=“YES“‘ to /etc/rc.conf to enable.
  • The i386 image was not built for this snapshot, however it will available in the upcoming weeks.
  • The installer will not correctly start on systems with < 512MB of ram, which will be fixed in upcoming snapshots.
  • This snapshot does NOT contain the upcoming Intel GEM/KMS video driver support. This will be available in a future snapshot.

FreeBSD in the Press: The story of BSD and open-source Linux, Software Development Times, Alex Handy

Published on April 18, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed
A brief history of the BSD family of operating systems.

FreeBSD News Flash: New committer: Devin Teske (src)

Published on April 18, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

FreeBSD News Flash: FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE Available

Published on April 18, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE is now available. Please be sure to check the Release Notes and Release Errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 8.3. More information about FreeBSD releases can be found on the Release Information page.

Alexander Leidinger: Linuxulator progress

Published on April 15, 2012 in amd64, dtrace, eol, expiration date, FreeBSD, kernel, kernel module, kernel panic, linux base, linux module, Linuxulator, Open Source, Ports, probes, Software, Source, stable and Userland. Closed

This weekend I made some progress in the linuxulator:

  • I MFCed the reporting of some linux-syscalls to 9-stable and 8-stable.
  • I updated my linuxulator-dtrace patch to a recent -current. I already compiled it on i386 and arundel@ has it compiled on amd64. I counted more than 500 new DTrace probes. Now that DTrace rescans for SDT probes when a kernel module is loaded, there is no kernel panic anymore when the linux module is loaded after the DTrace modules and you want to use DTrace. I try to commit this at a morning of a day where I can fix things during the day in case some problems show up which I did not notice during my testing.
  • I created a PR for portmgr@ to repocopy a new linux_base port.
  • I set the expiration date of linux_base-fc4 (only used by 7.x and upstream way past its EoL) and all dependent ports. It is set to the EoL of the last 7.x release, which can not use a later linux_base port. I also added a comment which explains that the date is the EoL of the last 7.x release.

Share

FreeBSD News Flash: New committer: Armin Pirkovitsch (ports)

Published on April 15, 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed