Episode Details

Coming up this week, we'll be talking with Adrian Chadd about an infamous reddit thread he made. With a title like "what would you like to see in FreeBSD?" and hundreds of responses, well, we've got a lot to cover...

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Headlines

OpenBSD, from distribution to project

• Ted Unangst has yet another interesting blog post up, this time covering a bit of BSD history and some different phases OpenBSD has been through
• It's the third part of his ongoing series of posts about OpenBSD removing large bits of code in favor of smaller replacements
• In the earliest days, OpenBSD collected and maintained code from lots of other projects (Apache, lynx, perl..)
• After importing new updates every release cycle, they eventually hit a transitional phase - things were updated, but nothing new was imported
• When the need arose, instead of importing a known tool to do the job, homemade replacements (OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD, etc) were slowly developed
• In more recent times, a lot of the imported code has been completely removed in favor of the homegrown daemons
• More discussion on HN and reddit ***

Remote ZFS mirrors, the hard way

• Backups to "the cloud" have become a hot topic in recent years, but most of them require trade-offs between convenience and security
• You have to trust (some of) the providers not to snoop on your data, but even the ones who allow you to locally encrypt files aren't without some compromise
• As the author puts it: "We don't need live synchronisation, cloud scaling, SLAs, NSAs, terms of service, lock-ins, buy-outs, up-sells, shut-downs, DoSs, fail whales, pay-us-or-we'll-deletes, or any of the noise that comes with using someone else's infrastructure."
• This guide walks you through setting up a FreeBSD server with ZFS to do secure offsite backups yourself
• The end result is an automatic system for incremental backups that's backed (pun intended) by ZFS
• If you're serious about keeping your important data safe and sound, you'll want to give this one a read - lots of detailed instructions ***

Various DragonFlyBSD updates

• The DragonFly guys have been quite busy this week, making an assortment of improvements throughout the tree
• Intel ValleyView graphics support was finally committed to the main repository
• While on the topic of graphics, they've also issued a call for testing for a DRM update (matching Linux 3.16's and including some more Broadwell fixes)
• Their base GCC compiler is also now upgraded to version 5.2
• If your ha