Episode Details

This week on BSDNow. Allan and I are back from MeetBSD! A good time was had by all, lots to discuss, so let’s jump right into it on your place to B...SD!

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Build a FreeBSD 11.0-release Openstack Image with bsd-cloudinit

We are going to prepare a FreeBSD image for Openstack deployment. We do this by creating a FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE instance, installing it and converting it using bsd-cloudinit. We'll use the CloudVPS public Openstack cloud for this. Create an account there and install the Openstack command line tools, like nova, cinder and glance.

A FreeBSD image with Cloud Init will automatically resize the disk to the size of the flavor and it will add your SSH key right at boot. You can use Cloud Config to execute a script at first boot, for example, to bootstrap your system into Puppet or Ansible. If you use Ansible to manage OpenStack instances you can integrate it without manually logging in or doing anything manually.

Since FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE there is an rc script which, when the file /firstboot exists, expands the root filesystem to the full disk. While bsd-cloudinit does this as well, if you don't need the whole cloudinit stack, (when you use a static ssh key for example), you can touch that file to make sure the disk is expanded at the first boot

• A detailed tutorial that shows how to create customized cloud images using the FreeBSD install media
• There is also the option of using the FreeBSD release tools to build custom cloud images in a more headless fashion
• Someone should make a tutorial out of that ***

iXsystems Announces TrueOS Launch

• As loyal listeners to this show, you’ve no doubt heard by now that we are in the middle of undergoing a shift in moving PC-BSD -> TrueOS.
• Last week during MeetBSD this was made “official” with iX issuing our press release and I was able to give a talk detailing many of the reasons and things going on with this change.
• The talk should be available online here soon(ish), but for a quick recap:
• TrueOS is moving to a rolling-release model based on FreeBSD -CURRENT
• Lumina has become the default desktop for TrueOS
• LibreSSL is enabled top to bottom
• We are in the middle of working on conversion to OpenRC for run-control replacement
• The TrueOS pico was announced, which is our “Thin-Client” solution, right now allowing you to use a TrueOS server pared with a RPI2 device. ***

Running FreeBSD 11 on Raspberry Pi

• This article covers some of the changes you will notice if you upgrade your RPI to FreeBSD 11.0
• It covers some of the changes to WiFi in 11.0
• Pro Tip: you can get a list of WiFi devices by doing: sysctl net.wlan.devices
• There are official binary packages for ARM with 11.0, so you can just ‘pkg install’ your favourite apps
• Many of the LEDs are exposed via the /dev/led/ interface, which you can just echo 0 or 1 to, or use morse(6) to send a message
• gpioctl can be used to control the various GPIO pins
• The post