Episode Details

This week on BSD Now, we will be discussing a wide variety of topics including Routers, Run-Controls, the “Rule” of silence and some

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Headlines

Ports no longer build on EOL FreeBSD versions

• The FreeBSD ports tree has been updated to automatically fail if you try to compile ports on EOL versions of FreeBSD (any version of 9.x or earlier, 10.0 - 10.2, or 11 from before 11.0)
• This is to prevent shooting yourself in the food, as the compatibility code for those older OSes has been removed now that they are no longer supported.
• If you use pkg, you will also run into problems on old releases. Packages are always built on the oldest supported release in a branch. Until recently, this meant packages for 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 were compiled on 10.1. Now that 10.1 and 10.2 are EOL, packages for 10.x are compiled on 10.3.
• This matters because 10.3 supports the new openat() and various other *at() functions used by capsicum. Now that pkg and packages are built on a version that supports this new feature, they will not run on systems that do not support it. So pkg will exit with an error as soon as it tries to open a file.
• You can work around this temporarily by using the pkg-static command, but you should upgrade to a supported release immediately. ***

Improving TrueOS: OpenRC

• With TrueOS moving to a rolling-release model, we’ve decided to be a bit more proactive in sharing news about new features that are landing.
• This week we’ve posted an article talking about the transition to OpenRC
• In past episodes you’ve heard me mention OpenRC, but hopefully today we can help answer any of those lingering questions you may still have about it
• The first thing always asked, is “What is OpenRC?”

OpenRC is a dependency-based init system working with the system provided init program. It is used with several Linux distributions, including Gentoo and Alpine Linux. However, OpenRC was created by the NetBSD developer Roy Marples in one of those interesting intersections of Linux and BSD development. OpenRC’s development history, portability, and 2-clause BSD license make its integration into TrueOS an easy decision.

• Now that we know a bit about what it is, how does it behave differently than traditional RC?

TrueOS now uses OpenRC to manage all system services, as opposed to FreeBSD’s RC. Instead of using rc.d for base system rc scripts, OpenRC uses init.d. Also, every service in OpenRC has its own user configuration file, located in /etc/conf.d/ for the base system and /usr/local/etc.conf.d/ for ports. Finally, OpenRC uses runlevels, as opposed to the FreeBSD single- or multi- user modes. You can view the services and their runlevels by typing $ rc-update show -v in a CLI. Also, TrueOS integrates OpenRC service management into SysAdm with the Service Manager tool

• One of the prime benefits of OpenRC is much faster boot-times, which is important in a portable world of laptops (and desktops as well). But service monitoring and crash detection are also important parts of what make OpenRC a substantial upgrade for TrueO