71: System Disaster

This time on the show, we'll be talking to Ian Sutton about his new BSD compatibility wrappers for various systemd dependencies. Don't worry, systemd is not being ported to BSD! We're still safe! We've also got all the week's news and answers to your emails, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Introducing OPNsense, a pfSense fork

OPNsense is a new BSD-based firewall project that was recently started, forked from the pfSense codebase
Even though it's just been announced, they already have a formal release based on FreeBSD 10 (pfSense's latest stable release is based on 8.3)
The core team includes a well-known DragonFlyBSD developer
You can check out their code on Github now, or download an image and try it out - let us know if you do and what you think about it
They also have a nice wiki and some instructions on getting started for new users
We plan on having them on the show next week to learn a bit more about how the project got started and why you might want to use it - stay tuned ***

Code rot and why I chose OpenBSD

Here we have a blog post about rotting codebases - a core banking system in this example
The author tells the story of how his last days spent at the job were mostly removing old, dead code from a giant project
He goes on to compare it to OpenSSL and the hearbleed disaster, from which LibreSSL was born
Instead of just bikeshedding like the rest of the internet, OpenBSD "silently started putting the beast into shape" as he puts it
The article continues on to mention OpenBSD's code review process, and how it catches any bugs so we don't have more heartbleeds
"In OpenBSD you are encouraged to run current and the whole team tries its best to make current as stable as it can. You know why? They eat their own dog food. That's so simple yet so amazing that it blows my mind. Developers actually run OpenBSD on their machines daily."
It's a very long and detailed story about how the author has gotten more involved with BSD, learned from the mailing lists and even started contributing back - he says "In summary, I'm learning more than ever - computing is fun again"
Look for the phrase "Getting Started" in the blog post for a nice little gem ***

ZFS vs HAMMER FS