Within Reason: Category FreeBSD

Book Review: Network Administration with FreeBSD 7

Ceri Davies — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:31:00 +0000

I was approached some time ago by Packt Publishing with a request to review Network Administration with FreeBSD 7, a new book by Babak Farrokhi who is a FreeBSD committer among other things.

Right from the Preface it seemed clear that neither the author nor any of the editorial staff were native English speakers which, being the way that I am, made it very difficult to get into. Somewhere around chapter three, this improved drastically however, and I could finally manage to concentrate on the content. Which is good news, because the content is excellent.

Network administrators at any scale, from LAN to WAN, will find something useful. Routing protocols such as OSPF and BGP are covered, and there’s a good chapter on IPsec (and non-IPsec) tunnels which was directly useful to me personally while I was reading. Also welcome was information on IPv6 and a chapter on kernel tuning.

With multi-core systems such as Sun’s X4450 behemoth and the fine-grained locking in the network stack that FreeBSD enjoys now that GIANT is pretty much a distant memory, using FreeBSD on an off-the-shelf system to run hardcore bits of the network is practical, and this book works really well as a way to find out what the system is capable of and how to get started. Short chapters on getting familiar with FreeBSD and basic administration are also included, so there’s really no excuse not to take a look!

NetBeans on FreeBSD

Ceri Davies — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:36:00 +0000

Quick recipe for getting NetBeans running on FreeBSD.

Not that it’s difficult, but just so that I remember.

Download and unpack the NetBeans 5.5.1 tgz archive from http://dlc.sun.com/netbeans/download/551/fcs/200704122300/netbeans-551.tar.gz.

# fetch http://dlc.sun.com/netbeans/download/551/fcs/200704122300/netbeans-551.tar.gz # tar xf netbeans-551.tar.gz^[1]
Install a JDK. The native one at java/diablo-jdk15 is a good bet.
```
# cd /usr/ports/java/diablo-jkd15; make install clean
```

Run it, passing it the jdkhome option just to be sure.

# ./netbeans/bin/netbeans --jdkhome=/usr/local/diablo-jdk1.5.0

[1] With lesser tars, you will need to perform the “gzip -dc netbeans-551.tar.gz | tar xf -” dance, but bsdtar does automatic format detection and does the right thing. Even with .iso files.

LDoms nearly ready

Ceri Davies — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:16:00 +0000

While I’m on the subject of Sun, it looks like LDoms is reaching the release date. Cool.

Note that this document says that the only operating system that will currently run in a logical domain is Solaris 10 11/06 (aka Update 3), but I know that Kip Macy has been working for some time on getting FreeBSD working and I believe that it does.

BSD Today

Ceri Davies — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:50:00 +0000

One hell of a good day for BSD people today.

In FreeBSD, we got journalling support, both at a block and UFS level, courtesy of Pawel Dawidek. Andrew Thompson also added 802.1w support in the bridge code. Also, 6.2-BETA3 was released (ok, that was yesterday).

OpenBSD 4.0 was released, with a great feature set. See the release notes for more details.

FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1 and Win4BSD

Ceri Davies — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:13:00 +0000

I had most of a day spare today, so I though that I’d try out the FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1 image. Having recently read about the Win4BSD beta from the Win4Lin people , I figured that this would be a good application to try out on the new FreeBSD install.

FreeBSD 6.2 is looking to be great, of course :) I wouldn’t mind seeing the release notes start to get pulled together though, as I can’t remember what’s happened to RELENG_6 in the last six months.

I didn’t have high hopes for Win4BSD in honesty, as the User’s Guide mentioned kqemu and I thought it was just going to be like QEMU, which I’ve used before, but had problems with. However, I liked the way that with Win4BSD the “Documents and Settings” were stored in the FreeBSD filesystem and shared back into the Windows guest, thus allowing them to backed up normally and shared between multiple guests. The same is done with printers.

From a dirt clean installation of FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1, here’s all I did. Note that that clean installation should include the source distributions.

Mirror, mirror...

Ceri Davies — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:49:00 +0000

Now that’s funny.

tcpdrop for Solaris

Ceri Davies — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 19:29:00 +0000

Some guy asked on comp.unix.solaris for a tool for Solaris that could drop a TCP connection without killing the associated process.

I pointed out that we had tcpdrop(8) from OpenBSD which did this, whereupon Casper Dik informed me of the existence of the TCP_IOC_ABORT_CONN ioctl which does the same job on Solaris.

So I did a dirty port of tcpdrop(8) which you can download if you want.

It’s been tested on Solaris 9, but might not even compile on other versions. You get to keep both pieces if it breaks.

FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE released

Ceri Davies — Tue, 09 May 2006 08:09:00 +0000

The shackles are finally off, and the FreeBSD Project can finally announce FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE!

See the release notes for the full skinny. I updated the USB stick images.

The new logo is released too, although it currently looks a little weird on the website:

Update: this was fixed about 20 minutes later. Way to go.

In other news, Sun have confirmed that ZFS will be in the 6/06 Solaris 10 update.

Finally, I promise to post some reason to bother your arse coming here sometime ;-)

FreeBSD 6.1-RC2 out

Ceri Davies — Fri, 05 May 2006 00:32:00 +0000

I was going to make a new image for FreeBSD on USB 6.1-RC2, but I decided that with the actual release really close now, there wasn’t much point. The usual instructions will work just fine if you really want one.

One thing to mention regarding this release candidate is that binary upgrades don’t work; this was patched in -HEAD today, and will be fixed for 6.1-RELEASE.

John Birrell has the syscall provider for Dtrace working.

There was something else too, which I forgot.

Brief news

Ceri Davies — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 19:57:00 +0000

Our T2000 arrived. We went for the 8-core 1.0GHz, 16GB version to allow us to use the Solaris resource management tools to carve it up in various configurations.

So far I’ve used it to great effect to test out an Oracle Data Guard configuration that I’m building, and particularly to understand how you are supposed to set up your clients in order to benefit from the redundancy goodness — some notes on that will be forthcoming real soon as I couldn’t find a single useful document on that.

Michael Bushkov’s Summer of Code project, cached(8), which adds caching for nsswitch along with enabling nsswitch for the services, protocols and rpc databases finally got committed today. This is really interesting work, similar to nscd(1M) on Solaris¹, but with each user having their own cache.

Also, I discovered that a post on BSDNews is a good way to saturate a crappy cable modem link. :-)

Oh yeah, and John Birrell is making superb progress on a DTrace port to FreeBSD.

¹ Yes, nscd(1M) has a bad reputation, but I strongly believe that’s because people don’t understand how to work it.