Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, we are taking a look at a few different tutorials, including running your very own RPi web-server. (Come-on, you

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broken features aren't used

• This post from TedU talks about the difficulty of removing features from an operating system
• “One of the difficulties in removing a feature is identifying all the potential users. A feature here could be a program bundled with an operating system, or a command line option, or maybe just a function in a library. If we remove a feature, users that depend on it will be sad. Unfortunately, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I’ve never heard of anybody running ls -p but it’s not impossible that somebody does.”
• “The reasons why we want to remove an existing feature can vary. Sometimes it’s old code that interferes with maintenance. Sometimes a nearly complete rewrite can improve performance. In other cases, the feature in question is really more of a misfeature. It may have security implications, where the existence of the feature can be used to facilitate the exploitation of other vulnerabilities, and removing the feature will help mitigate the exploit.”
• “There’s no general test that can be used, but there is one test that works in many cases. Test that the feature works. If the feature doesn’t work, that’s compelling evidence that nobody is using it, because nobody can be using it. You don’t need to fix it. You can just remove it.”
• He makes some interesting comments about exhaustive unit tests and the push to keep everything working all the time. If you never break anything to see if someone complains, how do you know if it is still being used? ***

A Raspberry Pi FreeBSD Web Server

• Looking at a super-low power solution to host some webpages? If so, we have the tutorial for you.
• Specifically a walkthrough of getting FreeBSD up on a Pi, and setting up nginx, OpenNTPD, LibreSSL and friends.
• The walkthrough starts with grabbing a FreeBSD 11 snapshot for arm64 and doing the initial setup process to get to a bootable FreeBSD system.
• If you are an extreme noob, not to fear. The tutorial walks you through setting up usernames, timezones, even a larger /tmp directory on your new MiniBSD setup.
• The tedious part comes to play during the setup of packages. The author walks us through setting up LibreSSL and various other packages via ports (Since LibreSSL isn’t the default in FreeBSD). This will take some time to compile on your humble RPi device. (Go make a sandwich, walk the dog, fix the gutters, etc)
• When it’s all said and done, you’ll end up with a secure little web-server that you’ve configured all by yourself! (Wondering what the word-press performance would be like on that box) ***

Uber switches from PostgreSQL back to MySQL

• We often hear success stories of people switching to PostgreSQL and getting huge performance gains, but this stories is the reverse
• Uber’s engineering team has switched back to MySQL, because for their specific workload and design, MySQL’s innodb has better performance
• Of c