67: Must Be Rigged

Coming up this week on the show, we've got an interview with Patrick Wildt, one of the developers of Bitrig. We'll find out all the details of their OpenBSD fork, what makes it different and what their plans are going forward. We've also got all the week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Bitrig 1.0 released

If you haven't heard of it, Bitrig is a fork of OpenBSD that started a couple years ago
According to their FAQ, some of their goals include: only supporting modern hardware and a limited set of CPU architectures, replacing nearly all GNU tools in base with BSD versions and having better virtualization support
They've finally announced their first official release, 1.0
This release introduces support for Clang 3.4, replacing the old GCC, along with libc++ replacing the GNU version
It also includes filesystem journaling, support for GPT and - most importantly - a hacker-style console with green text on black background
One of the developers answered some questions about it on Hacker News too ***

Is it time to try BSD?

Here we get a little peek into the Linux world - more and more people are considering switching
On a more mainstream tech news site, they have an article about people switching away from Linux and to BSD
People are starting to get even more suspicious of systemd, and lots of drama in the Linux world is leading a whole new group of potential users over to the BSD side
This article explores some pros and cons of switching, and features opinions of various users ***

Poudriere 3.1 released

One of the first things we ever covered on the show was poudriere, a tool with a funny name that's used to build binary packages from FreeBSD ports
It's come a long way since then, and bdrewery and bapt have just announced a new major version
This new release features a redesigned web interface to check on the status of your packages
There are lots of new bulk building options to preserve packages even if some fail to compile - this makes maintaining a production repo much easier
It also introduces a useful new "pkgclean" subcommand to clean out your repository of packages that aren't needed anymore, and poudriere keeps it cleaner by default as well now
Check the full release notes for all the additions and bug fixes ***

Firewalling with OpenBSD's pf and pfsync

A talk by David Gwynne from an Australian conference was uploaded, with the subject matter being pf and pfsync
He uses pf to manage 60 internal networks with a single firewall
The talk gives some background on how pf originally came to be and some OpenBSD 101 for the uniniti

Published on 11 years ago