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Your problem is outdated. (Well, kind of.)

There is a DVD installer and there is this commit that is supposed to fix excessive disk swapping: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-stable/2008-October/000079.html

(It is in 6-STABLE, 7-STABLE, and 8-CURRENT. It will be in every upcoming REALSE including 7.1. 6.4 barely got missed, but who does new installs from 6.X anyhow?)

I don't have a specific example for Linux, but back in the day I used to work for Specialix (they've since then been acquired). They had a multi-head serial port card that was supported by the si driver in the FreeBSD kernel.

The card had an embedded coprocessor on it and RAM that was shared between the coprocessor and the host. The first thing the driver did was copy a chunk of code for the coprocessor over to the RAM and reset the coprocessor. The binary code chunk was in the form of a const char[] = { 0x1, 0x2.....}; with
a license that allowed free redistribution in binary form (that file was considered a binary form even though it was actually C source code per se), with an embargo on decompilation or reverse engineering.

The actual host driver was in C and had a BSD license. The result of compiling it was either that it was part of the entire kernel, or a loadable .ko module.

Yes, it's been implemented in FreeBSD the day of publication of the RFC, just to be removed the day after :

Implementation
Removal

Credit : Wikipedia ... so, yes, it's just a joke RFC (april fool's day RFC)

FYI, the IP over avian carrier RFC1149 has also been implemented.

Yes, it's been implemented in FreeBSD the day of publication of the RFC, just to be removed the day after :

Implementation
Removal

Credit : Wikipedia ... so, yes, it's just a joke RFC (april fool's day RFC)

FYI, the IP over avian carrier RFC1149 has also been implemented.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates
http://www.debian.org/security/
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories.html
http://www.netbsd.org/support/security/

Don't be a pretentious prick. Every OS out there has to have security updates.

Launchd was ported to FreeBSD as a Summer of Code project a few years ago. The license was changed to the ASL 2.0 in order to encourage its adoption. Last I checked, Launchd could not replace init as PID 1, but it could do all of the post-launch stuff. The main reasons why it hasn't been integrated into the FreeBSD base system are that it doesn't provide much compelling over RCng as an init replacement (although it replaces a lot more than just init) and it would mean rewriting the RC scripts for a huge number of ports.

If only Windows ran on ZFS :(

Us Solaris peeps do *exactly* this. Take a snapshot immediately after install, take another snapshot after configuring the system, take any additional snapshots later...

I would post an output from zfs list showing all the snapshots taken on the root filesystem, but unfortunately slashdot's lameness filter REFUSES to cooperate telling me to use fewer junk characters :(

FreeBSD http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS and MacOSX http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/ will soon have proper ZFS with boot support.... and Linux's ZFS-Fuse Implementation is great. Hell, it won't be long before Windows will be the only (worthwhile) OS that will be without ZFS soon.... maybe Microsoft should abandon WinFS (oh yeah, they did) and just port ZFS over.

That is, rather than storing the files somewhere on a server where things can get lost or moved, sometimes having a physical CD is just a better option.

Because we all know that a server getting lost and moved is so many times more probable than a CD being... oh, wait.

And I guess having the people back up the data themselves after downloading is out of the question, if the data is so important to them? That would also let them choose their favourite backup strategy.

I'm just asking, because I'm not getting at all what you're saying. If you're responsible for availability of the data, leave it online at the same URI eternally, and if you're not, why bother? Do they pay your time and expenses (CD's don't grow on trees)?

To sum it up, I don't see any scenario where delivering CD's would be preferable to putting things onto a server. Do you have an example?

i use freebsd on a laptop with a 500Mhz amd k6, 128M on RAM. it runs gnome, vlc and can even run winXP on qemu pretty acceptable

other businesses have this same questionable practice. for example, walmart requires special packaging from its suppliers that is not normally afforded to other retailers. broadcomm, microsoft, and nvidia likely have a few cozy agreements that are exclusive and hushed. a possible example here might be the ACPI standard and how it seems to "just work" in windows but struggle in some cases with *nix.

it certainly gives google a cost advantage, and i can imagine why they vehemently deny it in TFA as i glance over the justice department article. although whatever gains google makes up for in cooling, they may just as easily have lost in a more power-hungry architecture overall:

http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster.pdf has experienced it, and his 2007 update also confirms.

im left wondering what AMD might do for its biggest customers?

Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix.

Oops!
http://www.hu.freebsd.org/hu/arch/2001/Jun/2413.html
And here we have testimony of the vast similarities between the BSD stack and NT's TCP stack. It's a good summary of a long discussion on the mailing list - read the mails leading up to it if you need more facts.

Or why not cut straight to the chase: http://research.microsoft.com/invisible/include/winsock.h.htm

You may notice things like

This file includes parts which are Copyright (c) 1982-1986 Regents * of the University of California. All rights reserved. The * Berkeley Software License Agreement specifies the terms and * conditions for redistribution

in there. Or read a whopping 20ish lines down to see

Basic system type definitions, taken from the BSD file sys/types.h.

And that we can thank our Dear RMS for.

Where do you get this "we" crap white boy?

1)http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
2)The inotify API is Linux specific. Some other systems provide similar mechanisms, e.g., FreeBSD has kqueue, and Solaris has /dev/poll
You don't need to format to upgrade either. I could go on but you're trolling so just read.

The FreeBSD HandBook and a FreeBSD install cd.

Read-it end to end. Yes, i know it's huge. You won't regret spending the time to read it. Install FreeBSD (even in a VM) and use it. Even if you'll use other operating systems in the furture it's a good read and you'll learn a lot.

If you can use something other than Linux, then ZFS is the winner. Take a look at the FreeBSD ZFS Quick Start, particularly the examples. That's possibly the coolest filesystem demo I've ever seen.

http://www.debian.org/
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.opensuse.org/
http://www.slackware.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/

ZFS is at the top of so many folks' list that I figure I should throw this out just for reference:

ZFS is an available option in FreeNAS.

I'm guessing by extension that it's available in the general FreeBSD distribution too.

-Matt

I see 3 install ISOs. Debian has 21 images, but you only really need the first one to install with a GUI. IIRC, openSUSE 10.1 required a minimum of 3 discs out of 5. So tell me: Which ISOs do I need to have KDE installed at boot? My ISP doesn't like it when I download CD images, so I want to avoid downloading all three if at all possible. Unfortunately, I am not connected to the Internet by a wire, so unless one can use a WPA2 wifi connection during the installation, a netinstall is out of the question. Thanks.

Not widely known, but the RFC was actually implemented, at least once: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2003-April/001098.html :)

FreeBSD 7.0 has experimental support for ZFS ( http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/announce.html ).

That means CDDL doesn't give BSD-licensed systems any problems. Obviously ZFS also works on OpenSolaris which is fully open source as well.

Yeah - ZFS. It really is that nice. Check out the FreeBSD wiki for an example of how cool it can be.

SVN is more complicated than CVS, and less functional (depending on how you view things).

Many will disagree with me, of course, but I've been developing for years and I've yet to see a compelling reason to move to SVN.

CVS has a simpler back end. Keeping things simple when involving several people is key.

Set up an internal website with little scripts that automate functions, such as setting up a new CVS account, or running CVSweb, or other management type functions.

As your team grows in size having automated tools that generate templates and such will make administration much easier.

Just my thoughts (you'll have to find your own way in this, of course).

It's owner-<foo>, not the other way around. So the aliases example should read:

joe: joe-example@gmail.com
owner-joe: joe

See the aliases man page for further details.

Using the patches in the TrueCrypt 5 port, TrueCrypt 6 builds and appears to run fine on FreeBSD \o/

Clear, irrefutable proof that BSD is dying.

I know, it seems like only nine years ago it was a four-clause license, now all three major BSDs have gone to two-clause licenses. Within a decade it'll be a zero-clause license and BSD will finally die...

I thought core FreeBSD developers used Perforce: http://perforce.freebsd.org./ Is that not the case?

"it is dissapointing from my point of view!"

I'm not surprised. Check out the kernel it's running on.

guest@goosh.org:/web> uname -r
    1) uname
The uname() function shall return a string naming the current system in the character array sysname. Similarly, nodename shall contain the name of this node ...
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/uname.html

    2) uname 1

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uname&sektion=1

    3) uname function.
uname is NOT in the ANSII library but is handy for getting system information. It will return handy things like:. System type (name). Host name (Nodename). ...
http://www.space.unibe.ch/comp_doc/c_manual/C/FUNCTIONS/uname.html

    4) Unix man pages: uname (2)
UNAME(2) Linux Programmer's Manual UNAME(2) NAME uname - get name and information about current kernel SYNOPSIS #include int uname(struct ...
http://www.rt.com/man/uname.2.html

$ uname -a 1) uname 1 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uname&sektion=1

Or BSD desktop?

*ducks*

FreeBSD doesn't fit the profile

Open Solaris - http://opensolaris.org/

FreeBSD - http://freebsd.org/ (excellent bridged IPless firewall capability)

NetBSD - http://netbsd.org/

That's a different bug.

That's a different bug.

Samba could have reported it, but perhaps when they noticed in 2005, they also noticed that the July 2003 discussion on freebsd-hackers already acknowledged the existance of the bug, but never actually fixed it.

Samba could have reported it, but perhaps when they noticed in 2005, they also noticed that the July 2003 discussion on freebsd-hackers already acknowledged the existance of the bug, but never actually fixed it.

Samba could have reported it, but perhaps when they noticed in 2005, they also noticed that the July 2003 discussion on freebsd-hackers already acknowledged the existance of the bug, but never actually fixed it.

Unless you are married to Linux already for some reason, you'll want TrustedBSD. Built on top of/as extension to FreeBSD, it had a substantial head-start...

My home servers are in screaming need of ZFS (A NetApp Filer for home use). I want ZFS implemented in Linux, like everyone else. Moving to a OpenSolaris based distribution just feels awkward and wrong, especially when ZFS has made it into FreeBSD 7.0 as an experimental feature.

I'm eyeballing the FreeNAS project daily. Sooner or later we will have a ZFS appliance, free as in beer at least. Sun have to work harder to win me over but things look promising. (Ubuntu on Sun hardware [+], trying to release Java under an Open Source license [+], closing some MySQL features [-])

You won't get a more robust worked out solution than a IETF standard......

I don't have a mac, and I'm not experienced enough with *BSD to know exactly what to tell you, my explanation on Debian GNU/Linux will have to do.

First, let me tell you that this is not my first line of defense, I also use ssh pubkeys and I definitely do not log on public terminals. OPIE is just there in case someone pwns one supposedly trusted terminal.

What I do is I creatively use PAM. I installed PAM-OPIE on my system. It comes with a few userland apps (a password changing program and a one time password calculator) and an authentication module.

The next thing to do is to modify the pam configuration so it calls pam_opie.so as an authentication. I set it up so that inputting the correct one time password grants access, while leaving the regular password system as a fallback only when used on the local terminal.



# Sets up user limits, please uncomment and read /etc/security/limits.conf
# to enable this functionality.
# (Replaces the use of /etc/limits in old login)
# session required pam_limits.so

#Sistema hibrido opie-password

auth sufficient pam_opie.so
auth required pam_securetty.so
auth required pam_unix.so


The text above is part of my pam configuration for su. Basically, I tell pam that answering correctly to pam_opie grants access, no matter what. If I fail S/KEY (opie), the system checks whether I'm on the terminal or remotely. If I'm not on the terminal, no matter what password I use, it'll never grant access.

On the userland, OPIE has a program, called opiekey, that calculates the next set of one time passwords you will need. That's what you should use to generate your set of 100 passwords. I don't use it since I have a calculator with me (the PDA). In order to set your long time password, you use another program, called opiepasswd, pretty much like the normal passwd program.

I don't know what you're planning to use to access your system (I hope ssh or something secure), but you should change pam's configuration for that program so it does something like the example above.

Let's say you use SSH. You change /etc/pam.d/sshd (or your OSX equivalent) to something like the example above. Then you set sshd to ALLOW keyboard-interactive logon and nothing else (or better, keyboard-interactive AND pubkey at the same time). When you connect the ssh client should open a secure connection and the server should issue the challenge, and you send the correct response.

No need to use perl or anything, PAM is part of the basic authentication system (I think it is on BSDs except OpenBSD). You might need to download a copy of pam_opie, though (thanks to APT, that's trivial in debian, check with your package manager).

That's pretty much it. I've put pointers to the freebsd docs, and it can't be that different from linux. I guess it should be pretty similar in mac too (would have pointed you to the mac docs, but I don't know where to find them).

If you have any doubts, don't hesitate to ask.

BTW, while on vacation the only thing I concentrate on is getting a nice sun tan. The other posters are right telling you not to log on a public terminal and not logging in while on vacation. That's my advice.

You won't get a more robust worked out solution than a IETF standard......

I don't have a mac, and I'm not experienced enough with *BSD to know exactly what to tell you, my explanation on Debian GNU/Linux will have to do.

First, let me tell you that this is not my first line of defense, I also use ssh pubkeys and I definitely do not log on public terminals. OPIE is just there in case someone pwns one supposedly trusted terminal.

What I do is I creatively use PAM. I installed PAM-OPIE on my system. It comes with a few userland apps (a password changing program and a one time password calculator) and an authentication module.

The next thing to do is to modify the pam configuration so it calls pam_opie.so as an authentication. I set it up so that inputting the correct one time password grants access, while leaving the regular password system as a fallback only when used on the local terminal.



# Sets up user limits, please uncomment and read /etc/security/limits.conf
# to enable this functionality.
# (Replaces the use of /etc/limits in old login)
# session required pam_limits.so

#Sistema hibrido opie-password

auth sufficient pam_opie.so
auth required pam_securetty.so
auth required pam_unix.so


The text above is part of my pam configuration for su. Basically, I tell pam that answering correctly to pam_opie grants access, no matter what. If I fail S/KEY (opie), the system checks whether I'm on the terminal or remotely. If I'm not on the terminal, no matter what password I use, it'll never grant access.

On the userland, OPIE has a program, called opiekey, that calculates the next set of one time passwords you will need. That's what you should use to generate your set of 100 passwords. I don't use it since I have a calculator with me (the PDA). In order to set your long time password, you use another program, called opiepasswd, pretty much like the normal passwd program.

I don't know what you're planning to use to access your system (I hope ssh or something secure), but you should change pam's configuration for that program so it does something like the example above.

Let's say you use SSH. You change /etc/pam.d/sshd (or your OSX equivalent) to something like the example above. Then you set sshd to ALLOW keyboard-interactive logon and nothing else (or better, keyboard-interactive AND pubkey at the same time). When you connect the ssh client should open a secure connection and the server should issue the challenge, and you send the correct response.

No need to use perl or anything, PAM is part of the basic authentication system (I think it is on BSDs except OpenBSD). You might need to download a copy of pam_opie, though (thanks to APT, that's trivial in debian, check with your package manager).

That's pretty much it. I've put pointers to the freebsd docs, and it can't be that different from linux. I guess it should be pretty similar in mac too (would have pointed you to the mac docs, but I don't know where to find them).

If you have any doubts, don't hesitate to ask.

BTW, while on vacation the only thing I concentrate on is getting a nice sun tan. The other posters are right telling you not to log on a public terminal and not logging in while on vacation. That's my advice.

Only at that point could I install it. And I didn't even want Java in the first place!

you can browse it online at:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

or download an English version from:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en/books/handbook

Other find manuals of relative interest to the Unix community can be found there, too.

you can browse it online at:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

or download an English version from:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en/books/handbook

Other find manuals of relative interest to the Unix community can be found there, too.

Yes, some of my secret data may or may not be held in a volume hidden inside of the free space of a filesystem within a file hidden away and encrypted with Serpent-Twofish-AES. (TrueCrypt).

Of course, the only information I have held in there is the kind of stuff I wont even describe.

I keep all my porn in a file-backed device encrypted using geli (FreeBSD Handbook page on disk encryption) using a key located inside of an encrypted partition on a usb key so that the USB key must be present to mount the drive.

ND

Specifically, the closed-source software vendors.

Consider: No matter how much marketing you have, it is ultimately up to the end user of a product to decide if they've gotten the value they expected to get. If said user finds that the closed-source product they paid (possibly) big bucks for isn't worth the media it was recorded on, they're going to cut their losses and try something else.

Alternatively, there are many small businesses that simply can't afford the kinds of prices that closed-source vendors often charge. I know this for a fact, because I'm one of those tiny businesses! If not for FreeBSD, Apache, and Postfix, to say nothing of the surplus hardware market, I would never have been able to get my Internet presence off the ground.

It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage? Hex Workshop is, I think, a great example.

If that $60 billion figure is accurate, the commercial software vendors have no one but themselves to blame. Oh, there are some good values Out There, yes, but I think they've been largely drowned out by the flood of questionable products that are turned out with far more marketing than quality engineering.

Happy tweaking.

Now, I'm no Unix guru, but I think this is a good point.
Using the FreeBSD handbook I was able to go from zero POSIX experience to a comfortable use of the system, while taking care of the installation & setup process by myself. You just need to come up with some excercises and let the students figure them out using the #1 UNIX Principle: RTFM.

Really? tbh, I havent researched this much, but its smooth sailing on my thinkpad T23. Sure its an older notebook, so the drivers have had longer to stabilize, but I get all my power management junk. -It properly drops the processor into sleep modes (confirmed by powertop) -It parks the HDD after a set time -It suspends/sleeps/resumes fine, including bringing wifi back -I get 3 hours out of it, which is exactly what the specs say I should get. So I'm not so sure the situation is as abysmal as you suggest.

Two things:

1. You did not mention CPU speed throttling. With newer, faster CPUs this is vital to long battery life. I run FreeBSD 7.0 on a Dell Latitude D830, with dual core CPU. The OS sees and uses both CPUs automatically, but CPU speed control is, so far, strictly manual. Gnome has a panel thingy called "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" that I can use to set the speed as low was 800MHz with little apparent affect. What I want is for this to be automatic, with the CPU barely ticking over when there is nothing to do.

2. The success of ACPI is dependent on the BIOS. In turn, BIOS suppliers tend to make ACPI code which works with Windows without consideration for the standard, and Microsoft does not follow the standard. ACPI as implemented on Linux and the BSDs begins at strict conformance. The fiddle mentioned in another post is the process of getting a broken BIOS working with a "correct" ACPI implementation. Since every manufacturer comes up with their own version, there is some variety in what is broken.

Speaking of broken, on my D830 sleep mode works fine in Windows XP, but in FreeBSD it never wakes up. If I were to fiddle enough I might get it working, but I have other things to do.

More at FreeBSD Handbook ACPI Overview.

FreeBSD support for xen hasn't been merdged into mainline just yet (acutally, last time I looked there was a patchset for FreeBSD 7 that was broken by xen 3.0.3 that had been idle for a while.. looking again, Kip Macy looks to have updated it to work with FreeBSD-Current: http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen, so maybe I'll look into it again when I get a chance.)

NetBSD/Xen is quite stable on i386/non-PAE and netbsd-current has i386-PAE and x86-64 support for xen... If you like OpenBSD, NetBSD might be a better choice than Free (OpenBSD is very close to NetBSD) Any xen provider that can handle i386-non-PAE should be able to give you good NetBSD images. (I won't have a non-PAE box available for 3 weeks or so)

Within the context of ec2, last time I looked ec2 was i386-PAE, so you should be able to run netbsd-current (or even freebsd-current according to the above link) on it.

E-mail me if you want to continue this discussion within the context of my hosting company.

In what universe is the BSD license less free than the GPL, of any version???

BSD - Basically, do whatever you want, just include the credits of previous contributors. http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html/

GPL - Basically, as basically as it can be stated, if you modify the code source, " . . .However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work." If you start in gpl, you're stuck in gpl. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html/