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FreeBSD 6.1 Released
nbritton writes "FreeBSD 6.1 has been released! This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. Of note are the major improvements to the filesystem and SATA code, possibly making FreeBSD the number one choice for SATA RAID implementations. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes, errata list, Bittorrent Downloads, Mirrors, Hardware Notes, and Installation Guide."
Yeah, but does it run solitaire?
I don't see it listed in the release notes, but does it finally support SATA NCQ?
today is spelling optional day.
Although this was probably intended as a trollish comment, yes, it does run Linux.
FreeBSD has always been great with RAID in my experience. I frequently load it up on servers and don't need additional drivers for my RAID cards (which is more then I can say for W2K3 on the same boxes). Since switching to FreeBSD on my desktop I haven't swapped OS's out (something I tend to do at least once every couple of months). It's been roughly a year now, so I think it's safe to call it "home." If you're into linux and want to try a BSD, now's the time. At least now that VMWare Server Beta is free you can install an instance of this and dust the file with no harm if you don't like it. Although a lot of my linux peeps are quick to criticize, not one of them has complained after actually trying BSD of some sort, and while they're not all converts they grow to understand why someone would choose BSD over linux. Yes there are differences, and no you probably won't notice them in a desktop environment.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
6.0 has been very stable for me, and I now run it in production. To tell you the truth I never had much luck with 4x and it was usually a bitch for me to get running for some reason. I really liked the way 5.x did a lot of things but of course there were the stability issues.
6x is a good branch (so far so good anyway) and MUCH better than 5. Performance is okay, not as good as Linux in some scenarios but not bad either. On my Sokris 4801 (233Mhz pentium class) it seems rather slow, but Freebsd 4x on my 133Mhz Pentium seems to be about the same - so I'd say not a big difference. If you need the most out of older hardware that is already running 4x I'd probably stick with it.
Hopefully I'll be able to figure this new bridging scheme out and be able to better evaluate performance.
What is very much alive is the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project. Get the best of both worlds baby.
I tried in vain to setup FreeBSD 6.0 as a SATA software raid machine. I was using a more recent motherboard with graphics, network and SATA integrated on-board. I think they are all VIA chipsets. I eventually hit the eject on FreeBSD as I couldn't even get X up and running. I then tried Debian. All-in-all it was another less than positive experience. Both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel versions of Sarge had problems with my hardware. I decided to explore Gentoo. Its working great with SATA and EVMS. It did require some source level tweaks but part of the coolness I found with Gentoo is the very active user/support community and the tons of HowTos and guides. Unless they've made a quantum leap in improvements, FreeBSD would NOT be my choice for a SATA raid server.
I use FreeBSD 6 because of the overload table option available when using pf:
## for SSHD from other hosts
pass in log on $ext_if inet proto tcp from any to $ext_if:network \
port 22 flags S/SA keep state \
(max 5, source-track rule, max-src-nodes 5, \
max-src-states 10, tcp.established 60, tcp.closing 5, \
max-src-conn-rate 3/30, overload flush global) \
label "SSHD_IN_$if"
If some sshd scanner hits my host more than three times in 30 seconds his packets go to an overload table and his states flushed. Any address or net listed in the badhosts table is blocked outright. It works as advertised and I couldn't be happier.
pf+altq really does give me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
I'm not sure how this got modded up, just a quick Google search reveals that FreeBSd clustering is very doable.
Check out LAM/MPI or see pages by people who've done it
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Yes! Its about time, been waiting for ages for this one. Signed,
Doctor Octavius
I tried out FreeBSD last year and loved it. Until I couldn't manage to get an oracle client installed on it, which pretty much killed its usability within my company. Supposedly I could have done it with some hard work and diligence and the Linux Compatibility port, but I just wasn't up for the challenge.
That's the only problem I ran into though.
oo
Any notable reasons to try FreeBSD?
Because it's there, Dude. Because it's there. Honestly, what kind of a geek are you?
I do, however, feel duty bound to point out that the man famous for saying that ended up dead shortly thereafter.
If you do manage to survive getting it installed though, what will you have conquered?
None but yourself, Dude. None but yourself.
KFG
Yes! I've been saying the same thing about CP/M and DOS 6.1 for years now.
No, I wasn't being rude to you either.
The Jackass Project http://jackass.homelinux.org/ on Gentoo fixes a lot of the ebuild and portage problems.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
## throttles SSH connnection requests to 3/minute from same IP
## $RED_DEV is Internet-connected interface, CUSTOMFORWARD is the chain being processed
iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \
-m state --state NEW -m recent --set
iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \
-m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP
I've been a Linux user for the last 10 years or so... Debian for the latter half. I recently took a new job where they used FreeBSD servers rather than Linux. Instead of using my position to push a migration to Linux, I decided to just learn to use FreeBSD.
I can't say that I am particularly impressed with FreeBSD. There's nothing WRONG with it, per se, but there is also nothing amazing either. The only redeeming value I can think of off hand is having bleeding edge software available all the time through ports. Where with Debian I would get "stuck" with package versions dated from whenever the last stable release was and mixing unstable packages was not a good idea. Coming from Gentoo, I know you have something like ports and you are used to compiling every darn package you want to run (I hate it). You should probably give FreeBSD a try. You might like it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
This is a troll. "Background FSCK" isn't BSD's answer to journaling. Soft updates is Dr. McKusick's implementation to maintain filesystem integrity in the event of a system failure. BSD doesn't need journaling, it has soft udpates. You need to read:
d ings/usenix2000/general/seltzer.html
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/procee
http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/
Some of what you say I find interesting - implying that the Gentoo community is more active than the FBSD group. I know you didn't actually say that; and maybe you didn't even imply as much; so you diserve the benefit of the doubt.
Anyway, I have never seen documentation as thorough (although still somewhat incomplete) as:h andbook/index.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
The mailing lists are really helpful:
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo
And there is usually very good help to be found at usenet:b sd.misc?hl=en
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.bsd.free
There is not a free OS that "just works" with everything I want to do. There are many things that need a little customizing. If you are willing to source-level tweak Gentoo you should be able to get what you want done accomplished with FreeBSD.
I used Gentoo for a while - a year ago - for a couple months. Here's what I liked:
- The Linux Alsa audio system is pretty nice and works
with more audio equipment than you'll find working on
FreeBSD.
- Portage is almost as nice and the FreeBSD ports
system.
- More ported applications.
- More current ports.
Here's what I didn't like:>This is a troll. "Background FSCK" isn't BSD's answer to journaling. Soft
>updates is Dr. McKusick's implementation to maintain filesystem integrity in
>the event of a system failure. BSD doesn't need journaling, it has soft
>udpates.
Uhm, no. softupdates is a nice (and performant) way to get quick restarts when something crashes, but it isn't close to journalling at all. You still have to run fsck, and yes, it can run in the background, but it *still has to run*.
If you're looking at Terabytes of data, this is very painful and takes ages, whereas a journalling filesystem has no need to do this.
There are certainly important applications where journalling is a must. Just because most home users or small servers don't need it, doesn't mean that softupdates removes the need for it entirely.
I'm actually pretty sure FreeBSD will switch to journalling eventually.
Is it just me or does the insecurity of the FreeBSD community shine through here in blinding fashion?
I'm giving you a first-timer user experience with both FreeBSD and Gentoo. Say what you want about the "top notch" FreeBSD support forms but I found them to be limited, out of date and more often than not no help. In my opinion there appears to be a whole lot more work put into installation and setup guides of Gentoo in comparison with FreeBSD.
As far as the X setup goes: /etc/X11/xorg.conf
# Xorg -configure
# cp xorg.conf.new
Yeah, when all goes well this works perfectly. If you honestly think that 1) I didn't try this and 2) that this will work perfectly all the time than you are one naive mofo.
I'd love to sit here and re-live the week of my life I wasted trying to get FreeBSD and Debian up and running on this hardware but honestly I am trying to get past it.
Let me just sum up with this. My goal was to get Software RAID-5 on four SATA drives on a A8V-MX motherboard running some form of unix/linux including X-Windows. I gave FreeBSD more than a fair shake. In the end, what got the job done was Gentoo. The only snag was the VT8251 chipset support with AHCI. I found a Gentoo forum where some guys had worked this issue out. Their fix was not in the kernel source tree yet but the patch applied, compiled and enabled my SATA drives.
I am not trying to hurt anybody's feelings. This was just my experience. YMMV.
> I don't use Ubuntu, but I'm curious: how does it handle the case where a config file's format has changed for the software you are upgrading?
Debian packages typically use dpkg-reconfigure to configure upgrades. Each package "knows" its config format and provides helpers for dpkg-reconfigure to merge in any format changes. Basically, it doesn't try to merge in the changes as a text diff, it programmatically does so, offering you a choice of GUIs or even a batch mode. If you changed an option yourself, it offers that as the default when reconfiguring. I'm a big fan of ports (not so much portage), but debian's approach at handling config files is phenomenal.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
FreeBSD has journaling ufs2 in the works:t /2005-December/059079.html
t erview-with-freebsd.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-curren
Scott Long also touches on the subject in a interview he did for the bsdtalk podcast show:
http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2006/02/bsdtalk017-in
A good reason would be to learn more about the various other unices out there and the various ways things are done amongst kernels and distros. Other than that, and the really cool ports system, I can't see it being worth the hassle for the typical home user.
:)
I would not deter you from trying, and you might end up loving it, but it's not just another linux distro.
FreeBSD excels not on the single user systems but, in my opinion, where you have multiple users or services running on the same piece of hardware. If you're hosting virtual domains for people and want to make sure that one of your users doesn't disturb things for another, it's great. It's things like login.conf(5) that just come with the OS. I haven't personally run any linux boxen in about 5 years (maybe more) since I started playing with FreeBSD; but some years ago, providing similar functionality in linux was not trivial. It's a stable, feature-filled OS. I'd even suggest it for learning on - like learning to drive on a manual transmission vehicle w/o power steering vs. an automatic. It's great but takes some setting up and might frusturate faster than most linux distros. More powerful, and more knobs. More like pro-audio equipment vs. a typical home-audio component CD player. Less flash, more business.
"The Power to Serve" is the tagline for this excellent OS. That's what it does best - serve - not hold you by the hand. If you're not interested in getting dirt under your fingernails and instead want point-and clicky interfaces to system administrative functions, do look elsewhere. (Spoken to other readers, not necessarily yourself.)
Do not mess with this OS without looking to the FreeBSD Handbook. A quick read will give you a feel of the power and it's something you should have close at hand when starting to play with it for the first time.
Give it a try but be ready for a time investment to get it like you want. Maybe put it on a "closet machine" and let it serve files or web for you so you can take down your regular box for dual-booting, running xine, or the reboots you're sure to have more often with linux than the beastie
It's a great platform, but doesn't come pre-configured.
Interesting. I switched *to* freebsd a couple of weekends ago - 6.1RC1 and was stunned when it picked up my raid controller in the installation process. It's a piece of shit promise controller that the manufacturers claimed supported linux when I bought it but of course only supported 2.4 for people running long-obsolete versions redhat or suse. Yet freebsd just picked it up and everything has worked as expected. I can remove a disk and it complains, put it back and it syncs (RAID1).
j usting-to-in-freebsd-or-solaris/ If you think of any more commands I should mention in my list let me know.
I had some troubles getting X working properly as well but did in the end. It's a bit stupid the hoops you have to jump through to set up X in 2006 but there ya go. I did a quick writeup here: http://stable.cowoh.org/2006/05/05/linux-users-ad
Believe with me, my saplings.