66: Conference Connoisseur

This week on the show, we'll be talking with Paul Schenkeveld, chairman of the EuroBSDCon foundation. He tells us about his experiences running BSD conferences and how regular users can get involved too. We've also got answers to all your emails and the latest news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

BSD-powered digital library in Africa

You probably haven't heard much about Nzega, Tanzania, but it's an East African country without much internet access
With physical schoolbooks being a rarity there, a few companies helped out to bring some BSD-powered reading material to a local school
They now have a pair of FreeNAS Minis at the center of their local network, with over 80,000 books and accompanying video content stored on them (~5TB of data currently)
The school's workstations also got wiped and reloaded with FreeBSD, and everyone there seems to really enjoy using it ***

pfSense 2.2 status update

With lots of people asking when the 2.2 release will be done, some pfSense developers decided to provide a status update
2.2 will have a lot of changes: being based on FreeBSD 10.1, Unbound instead of BIND, updating PHP to something recent, including the new(ish) IPSEC stack updates, etc
All these things have taken more time than previously expected
The post also has some interesting graphs showing the ratio of opened and close bugs for the upcoming release ***

Recommended hardware threads

A few threads on caught our attention this week, all about hardware recommendations for BSD setups
In the first one, the OP asks about mini-ITX hardware to run a FreeBSD server and NAS
Everyone gave some good recommendations for low power, Atom-based systems
The second thread started off asking about which CPU architecture is best for PF on an OpenBSD router, but ended up being another hardware thread
For a router, the ALIX, APU and Soekris boards still seem to be the most popular choices, with the Published on 11 years ago