Episode Details

Today on the show, we are going to be talking to Jim Brown (of BSD Cert Fame) about his home-brew sprinkler system… Wait for it…

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Distrowatch reviews OpenBSD and PCBSD's live upgrade method

• Upgrading… The bane of any sysadmin! Distrowatch has recently done a write-up on the in-place upgrading of various distros / BSDs including PC-BSD and OpenBSD.
• Lets look first at the PC-BSD attempt, which was done going from 9.2 -> 10.

“I soon found trying to upgrade either the base system or pkg would fail. The update manager did not provide details as to what had gone wrong and so I decided to attempt a manual upgrade by following the FreeBSD Handbook as I had when performing a live upgrade of FreeBSD back in May. At first the manual process seemed to work, downloading the necessary patches for FreeBSD 10 and getting me to resolve conflicts between my existing configuration files and the new versions. Part way through, we are asked to reboot and then continue the upgrade process using the freebsd-update command utility. PC-BSD failed to reboot and, in fact, the boot loader no longer found any operating systems to run.”

• Ouch! I’m not sure on the particular commands used, but to lose the boot-loader indicates something went horribly wrong. There is good news in this though. After the pain experienced in the 9.X upgrade process, 11.0 has been vastly improved to help fix this going forward. The updater is also self-updating, which means future changes to tools such as package can be accounted for in previously released versions.
• Moving on to OpenBSD, Jesse had much better luck: > “The documentation provided explains how to upgrade OpenBSD 5.8 to version 5.9 step-by-step and the instructions worked exactly as laid out. Upgrading requires two reboots, one to initiate the upgrade process and one to boot into the new version of OpenBSD. Upgrading the base operating system took approximately ten minutes, including the two reboots. Upgrading the third-party packages took another minute or two. The only quirk I ran into was that I had to manually update my repository mirror information to gain access to the new packages available for OpenBSD 5.9. If this step is not done, then the pkg_add package manager will continue to pull in packages from the old repository we set up for OpenBSD 5.8. “
• A good read, and they covered some Linux distros such as Mint and OpenMandriva as well, if you want to find out how they fared. ***

A curated list of awesome DTrace books, articles, videos, tools and resources

• The website awesome-dtrace.com compiles a list of resources, including books, articles, videos, tools, and other resources, to help you get the most out of DTrace
• The list of books includes 2 open source books that are available on the web, and of course Brendan Gregg’s official DTrace book
• There are also cheat sheets, one-liner collections, and a set of DTrace war stories
• A breakdown of different PID providers and the userspace statically defined tracepoints
• The videos from DTrace.conf 2008, 2012, and soon 2016
• And links to the tools to start using DTrace with your favourite programming language, including Erlang, Node.JS,