Podcast Episode Details

125: DevSummits, Core and the Baldwin

This week on the show, we will be talking to FreeBSD developer and former core-team member John Baldwin about a variety of topics, including running a DevSummit, everything you needed or wanted to know. Coming up right now on BSDNow, the place to B...SD.

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Headlines

FreeBSD server retired after almost 19 years

• We’ve heard stories about this kind of thing before, that box that often sits under-appreciated, but refuses to die. Well the UK register has picked up on a story of a FreeBSD server finally being retired after almost 19 years of dedicated service.

“In its day, it was a reasonable machine - 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive's a Seagate, for those of you looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.

• This system in particular had been running FreeBSD 2.2.1 over the years. Why not upgrade you ask? Ross has an answer for that:

“It was heavily firewalled and only very specific services were visible to anyone, and most only visible to our directly connected customers,” Ross told Vulture South. “By the time it was probably due for a review, things had moved so far that all the original code was so tightly bound to the operating system itself, that later versions of the OS would have (and ultimately, did) require substantial rework. While it was running and not showing any signs of stress, it was simply expedient to leave sleeping dogs lie.”

• All in all, an amazing story of the longevity of a system and its operating system. Do you have a server with a similar or even greater uptime? Let us know so we can try and top this story. ***

Roundup of all the BSDs

• The magazine LinuxVoice recently did a group test of a variety of “BSD Distros”.
• Included in their review were Free/Open/Net/Dragon/Ghost/PC
• It starts with a pretty good overview of BSD in general, its starts and the various projects / forks that spawned from it, such as FreeNAS / Junos / Playstation / PFSense / etc
• The review starts with a look at OpenBSD, and the consensus reached is that it is good, but does require a bit more manual work to run as a desktop. (Most of the review focuses on desktop usage). It ends up with a solid ⅘ stars though.
• Next it moves into GhostBSD, discusses it being a “Live” distro, which can optionally be installed to disk. It loses a few points for lacking a graphical package management utility, and some bugs during the installation, but still earns a respectable ⅗ stars.
• Dragonfly gets the next spin and gets praise for its very-up to date video driver support and availability of the HAMMER filesystem. It also lands at ⅗ stars, partly due to the reviewer having to use the command-line for management. (Notice a trend here?)
• NetBSD is up next, and gets special mention for being one of the only “distros” that doesn’t do frequent releases. However that doesn’t mean you can’t have updated packages, since the review mentions pkgsrc an

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  Published on 9 years, 11 months ago