PF Sense Book.

Michael Lucas wrote an interesting review of the PF Sense book.  I use PFSense for my corporate firewall and really like it.  I have it installed on two servers and set it up to fail over using CARP.  The best part is that it works.  I've been using FreeBSD for years and all of my servers are FreeBSD, so I feel comfortable using PFSense because it runs FreeBSD underneath.

Command Line Too Long

I spent the weekend writing scripts to handle various situations where a very long command line was necessary. Usually it was handling one command that had to be repeated for each file in a directory.

For example, pkg_add on FreeBSD doesn't handle more than 200 packages at a time on the command line. So I spent the first part of the evening writing little scripts like:

# sh
 for pkg in *
 do
 pkg_add $pkg
 done

Those scripts work, but later I found a utility designed just for this particular difficulty: xargs. 

According to the man page:

The xargs utility reads space, tab, newline and end-of-file delimited arguments
from the standard input and executes the specified utility with them as
arguments.

Basically it means you pipe a list of "arguments" to xargs. Xargs sucks up the list and then feeds them back one (or more) at a time to the specified program until they are all gone. For my application, this worked like a charm. My already small script was reduced to:

ls | xargs  -n1 pkg_add

bsdtalk199 - PC-Sysinstall with John Hixson

Also Available via Phone: +1 (210) 957-5481

John Hixson has been hacking on the PC Sysinstall from PC-BSD to make it work on FreeBSD.  He has also been working on a curses based front end to it for both PC-BSD and FreeBSD.  The new changes for this front end work will allow any front end to work with the PC Sysinstall backend.  He is also working on implementing PC Sysinstall into FreeNAS.

FreeBSD Sysinstall works as an admin tool, but PC Sysinstall isn't quite ready to be used as a sysadmin tool to reconfigure a system.  However, support for that is in the plans.  There are also plans for creating scripted install support for installing on an identical setup on multiple machines and netbooting.

PC Sysinstall handles many more disk setups during install than the traditional FreeBSD sysinstall.  It also supports installs over FTP.

ISO image installers are not available yet, but should be soon.

You can currently install FreeBSD using the graphical installer from PC Sysinstall.

FreeBSD's sysinstall is pretty dated and ugly.  There has been a lot of features added to FreeBSD that aren't supported by sysinstall.  So this new installer is long over due for FreeBSD.

Dynamic Routing with Opensips

Opensips is a Sip Express Router software. It lets you route phone calls to different media servers. The solutions discussed in this tutorial uses a MySQL database to route phone calls based on rules loaded in a DB table.

Opensips is the example here, but Kamalio, another Sip Express Router software solution can be substituted with only a very few modifications.

The most important features of this solutions are:
1) Easily modified routes.
2) Fail over in case a route goes down.

This solution doesn't cover load balancing. This guide also assumes that you have Opensips and MySQL already installed and working.
Setting up either is outside the scope of this article. Its best to add dynamic routing to your setup after you have tested that the routes work, otherwise you may be fighting unresolved NAT or other issues and not know it.

Ramon Tancinco - meetBSD 2010 Welcome Intro

Marko Zec - Network emulation using the virtualized network stack in Fre...

Kris Kennaway - New features in FreeBSD 7

New Features in FreeBSD 7.0
The main new feature has to do with multi-processor support.
Multi-processor support began back in FreeBSD 5.0 and is finally finished in 7.0.
The performance graphs for 7.0 with the new scheduler for 8 Processors look very nice.
He recommends switching to the ULE scheduler by recompiling your kernel, because it will not be the default scheduler.

Process Isolation for NetBSD and OpenBSD, Kristaps Dzonsons

AsiaBSDCon 2009:The OpenBSD Release Process: A Success Story

FreeBSD Kernel Internals, Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick

A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem, Kirk McKusick

A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick