101: I'll Fix Everything

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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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