Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, we have an interview with Richard Yao, who will be telling us about the experience and challenges of porting ZFS to Linux. That plus the latest news and feedback is coming your way, on your place

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Headlines

Registration for MeetBSD 2016 is now Open

• “Beastie’s coming home!” This year, MeetBSD will be held at UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Campus
• November 11th and 12th, preceded by a two day FreeBSD Vendor/Dev Summit (Nov 9th and 10th)

MeetBSD can be traced back to its humble roots as a local workshop for BSD developers and users, hosted annually in Poland since 2004. Since then, MeetBSD’s popularity has spread, and it’s now widely recognized as its own conference with participants from all over the world.

• The US version runs every two years in California since 2008, and now trades off with the east coast vBSDCon which runs on the odd years.
• “MeetBSD 2016 uses a mixed unConference format featuring both scheduled talks and community-driven events such as birds-of-a-feather meetings, lightning talks, hackable presentations, stump the chumps, and speed geeking sessions. Speakers are to be determined – stay tuned for more information!”
• Register before September 30th, and get $30 off
• Kris and I will be there, along with lots of other FreeBSD Developers, Vendors, and Users.
• MeetBSD’s unconference style does a very good job of mingling users with developers and is one of my favourite conferences. ***

Dual Booting FreeBSD and Windows UEFI

• Looking to install FreeBSD alongside Windows 10? What happens if that that system is pre-installed and UEFI? Well you could run TrueOS, but if that isn’t your bag and you want vanilla FreeBSD we have you covered this week!
• Over on Kevin Bowling’s blog, we have a detailed article showing exactly how to do that.
• First up, as prep you’ll need to go into the Windows disk manager and shrink your existing NTFS partition.
• You’ll need to next boot FreeBSD 11 or later.
• From there the walkthrough takes us through disk partitioning using gpart, and setup of ZFS into a boot-environment friendly layout.
• Once you get through the typical FreeBSD setup / extraction, the tutorial gives us a nice bonus, showing how to setup “rEFInd” for a graphical boot-menu.
• A great walkthrough, and hopefully it encourages others to try out dual-booting “EFI-style”. ***

ZFS High-Availability NAS

• Interested in a DiY HA ZFS NAS? Edmund White (ewwhite on github) has posted a very detailed look at how he has custom-rolled his own Linux + ZFS + HA setup.
• Most of the concepts are already ones used in various other HA products, but it is interesting and informative to see a public detailed look at how ZFS and HA works.
• In particular this setup require some very specific hardware, such as dual-port SAS drives, so you will have to pre-plan according.
• The only bummer is this is a ZFS on Linux setup. Maybe this can serve as the guide / inspiration for somebody in our community to do their own FreeBSD + HA + ZFS setup and blog about