A brief interview with Adam Wright from No Starch Press, recorded by Micheal Dexter on behalf of BSDTalk. They talk about recent and future BSD books.
]]>See the following links for more information:
Cfengine is a policy-based configuration management system. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of computers, from a policy specification.
The cfengine project was started in 1993 as a reaction to the complexity and non-portability of shell scripting for Unix configuration management, and continues today. The aim was to absorb frequently used coding paradigms into a declarative, domain-specific language that would offer self-documenting configuration.
about the speaker:
Steven Kreuzer has been working with Open Source
technologies since as long as he can remember,
starting out with a 486 salvaged from a dumpster
behind his neighborhood computer store. In his spare
time he enjoys doing things with technology that
have absolutely no redeeming social value.
Okan Demirmen has been working with UNIX-like systems for as long as he can remember and has found OpenBSD to match some of the same philosophies in which he believes, namely simplicity and correctness, and reap the benefits of such.
]]>In this talk we reflect on the system architecture as documented in our BSDCon 2003 paper "Building a High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD" and our changes since that time. After a brief overview of the current cluster we revisit the architectural decisions in that paper and reflect on their long term success. We then discuss lessons learned in the process. Finally, we conclude with thoughts on future cluster expansion and designs.
Bio
Brooks Davis is an Engineering Specialist in the
High Performance Computing Section of the Computer
Systems Research Department at The Aerospace
Corporation. He has been a FreeBSD user since 1994,
a FreeBSD committer since 2001, and a core team
member since 2006. He earned a Bachelors Degree in
Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 1998.
His computing interests include high performance computing, networking, security, mobility, and, of course, finding ways to use FreeBSD in all these areas. When not computing, he enjoys reading, cooking, brewing and pounding on red-hot iron in his garage blacksmith shop.
]]>Bio: Jeffery Mau is a user experience designer with the leading business and technology consulting firm Sapient. He has helped clients create great customer experiences in the financial services, education, entertainment and telecommunications industries. With a passion for connecting people with technology, Jeff specializes in Information Architecture and Business Strategy. Jeff holds a Masters in Design from the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois.
]]>Febrary's NYCBUG meeting is a broad look at OpenSSH, the de facto method for remote administration and more. OpenSSH celebrated its 8th anniversary this past September, and we thought this would be a great opportunity to discuss OpenSSH, and for others to contribute their hacks and interesting applications.
]]>The increasing centralization of networked services places user data at considerable risk. For example, many users store email on remote servers rather than on their local disk. Doing so allows users to gain the benefit of regular backups and remote access, but it also places a great deal of unwarranted trust in the server. Since most email is stored in plaintext, a compromise of the server implies the loss of confidentiality and integrity of the email stored therein. Although users could employ an end-to-end encryption scheme (e.g., PGP), such measures are not widely adopted, require action on the sender side, only provide partial protection (the email headers remain in the clear), and prevent the users from performing some common operations, such as server-side search.
To address this problem, we present Secure Searchable Automated Remote Email Storage (SSARES), a novel system that offers a practical approach to both securing remotely stored email and allowing privacy-preserving search of that email collection. Our solution encrypts email (the headers, body, and attachments) as it arrives on the server using public-key encryption. SSARES uses a combination of Identity Based Encryption and Bloom Filters to create a searchable index. This index reveals little information about search keywords and queries, even against adversaries that compromise the server. SSARES remains largely transparent to both the sender and recipient. However, the system also incurs significant costs, primarily in terms of expanded storage requirements. We view our work as a starting point toward creating privacy-friendly hosted services.
Angelos Keromytis is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, and director of the Network Security Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Crete, Greece, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and co-author of more than 100 papers on refereed conferences and journals, and has served on over 40 conference program committees. He is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC). He recently co-authored a book on using graphics cards for security, and is a co-founder of StackSafe Inc. His current research interests revolve around systems and network security, and cryptography.
]]>
Bio
Gene Cronk, CISSP-ISSAP, NSA-IAM is a freelance
network security consultant, specializing in *NIX
solutions. He has been working with computers for
well over 20 years, electronics for over 15, and
IPv6 specifically for 4 years. He has given talks
on IPv6 and a multitude of other topics at DefCon,
ShmooCon and other "underground" venues.
Gene is from Jacksonville, FL. When not involved in matters concerning IPv6, he can be found gaming (Anarchy Online), helping out with the Jacksonville Linux User`s Group, being one of the benevolent dictators of the Hacker Pimps Security Think Tank, or fixing up his house.
]]>All are welcome - no previous experience with cryptography is required, and the techniques will be presented in a programming-language neutral format.
Nick Galbreath have been working on high performance servers and web security at various high profile startups since 1994 (most recently Right Media). He holds a Master degree of Mathematics from Boston University, and published a book on cryptography. He currently lives in the Lower East Side.
]]>We plan on covering the following topics:
About the Speaker
Marc Spitzer started as a VAX/VMS operator who
taught himself some basic scripting in DCL to help
me remember how to do procedures that did not come
up enough to actually remember all the steps, this
was in 1990. Since then he has worked with HPUX,
Solaris, Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, FreeBSD being
his favorite. He has held a variety of positions,
admin and engineering, where he has been able to
introduce BSD into his work place. He currently
works for Columbia University as a Systems
Administrator.
He is a founding member of NYCBUG and LispNYC and on the board of UNIGroup.
Most of his career has been building tools to solve operational problems, with extra effort going to the ones that irritated him personally. He takes a great deal of pride in not needing a budget to solve most problems.
]]>UNIX hackers, all standing on the shoulders of giants.
"...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected..." - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972
"Well, it was all Open Source, before anybody really called it that". - Brian Redman, 2003
UNIX is the oldest active and growing computing culture alive today. From it`s humble roots in the back room at Bell Laboratories, to today`s global internet infrastructure- UNIX has consistently been at the core of major advances in computing. Today, the BSD legacy is the most direct continuation of the most successful principles in UNIX, and continues to lead major advances in computing.
Why? What`s so great about UNIX?
This lecture aims to prove that UNIX history is surprisingly useful (and fun)- for developers, sysadmins, and anyone working with BSD systems.
About the speaker
Isaac Levy, (ike) is a freelance BSD hadker based
in NYC. He runs Diversaform Inc. as an engine to
make his hacking feed itself, (and ike). Diversaform
specializes in *BSD based solutions, providing `IT
special weapons and tatics` for various sized
business clients, as well as running a small
high-availability datacenter operation from lower
Manhattan. With regard to FreeBSD jail(8), ike was
a partner in the first jail (8)-based web hosting
ISP in America, iMeme, and has been developing
internet applications in and out of jails since
1999. Isaac is a proud member of NYC*BUG (the New
York City *BSD Users Group), and a long time member
of LESMUUG, (the Lower East Side Mac Unix Users
Group).
About the speaker
Steven Kreuzer is currently employed by Right Media
as a Systems Administrator focusing on building and
managing high transaction infrastructures around
the globe. He has been working with Open Source
technologies since as long as he can remember,
starting out with a 486 salvaged from a dumpster
behind his neighborhood computer store. In his spare
time he enjoys doing things with technology that
have absolutely no redeeming social value.
Amitai Schlair is a pkgsrc developer who has worked in such diverse areas as Mac OS X platform support and packages of software by Dan Bernstein. His full-time undergraduate studies at Columbia are another contributing factor to his impending insanity. He consults in software and IT.
]]>Ray is an OpenBSD developer who uses Subversion by day, CVS by night. Taking the phrase "complexity is the enemy of security" to heart, he believes that the beauty of UNIX`s security is in its simplicity.
]]>Security policies are a key component in protecting enterprise networks. But, while there are many diverse defensive options available, current models and mechanisms for mechanically-enforced security policies are limited to traditional admission-based access control. Defensive capabilities include among others logging, firewalls, honeypots, rollback/recovery, and intrusion detection systems, while policy enforcement is essentially limited to one-off access control. Furthermore, access-control mechanisms operate independently on each service, which can (and often does) lead to inconsistent or incorrect application of the intended system-wide policy. We propose a new scheme for global security policies. Every policy decision is made with near-global knowledge, and re-evaluated as global knowledge changes. Using a variety of actuators, we make the full array of defensive capabilities available to the global policy. Our goal is a coherent, enterprise-wide response to any network threat.
Biography
Matthew Burnside is a Ph.D. student in the Computer
Science department at Columbia University, in New
York. He works for Professor Angelos Keromytis in
the Network Security Lab. He received his B.A and
M.Eng from MIT in 2000, and 2002, respectively. His
main research interests are in computer security,
trust management, and network anonymity.
Ivan Ivanov is generally interested in Version Control Systems since his student years in Sofia University, Bulgaria, where he set up and maintained a CVS server for an academic project. When Subversion became a fact and proved to be "a better CVS" he researched it and last year deployed it for his NYC-based employer Ariel Partners (http://www.arielpartners.com/). He intergrated the Subversion repositories with Apache Web Server over https to enable a reliable and secure way to access them from any point.
]]>First and foremost, I would like to thank the unique presentation styles of Dick Hardt and Lawrence Lessig for inspiring me to create this presentation.
The following videos were created by exporting the original Keynote presentation slides into QuickTime video, then manually synchronizing them using iMovie HD with the audio recordings captured by Nikolai Fetissov. They were then exported into QuickTime, mpeg4 (H.264/AAC), and iPod movie formats. If you are having difficulties with the MP4 copy, and are unable to view QuickTime movies, please contact me and I'll try to assist.
]]>ATF es un proyecto autocontenido que funciona en multitud de plataformas (y no sólo BSD). Aún así, está centrado en NetBSD y las pruebas automatizadas para este sistema son específicas de él, no del proyecto ATF en sí.
]]>Part of FreeBSD's reputation for quality and reliability comes from the nature of its development organization -- driven by a hundreds of highly skilled volunteers, from high school students to university professors. And unlike most open source projects, the FreeBSD Project has developers who have been working on the same source base for over twenty years.
But how does this organization work? Who pays the bandwidth bills, runs the web servers, writes the documentation, writes the code, and calls the shots? And how can developers in a dozen time zones reach agreement on the time of day, let alone a kernel architecture?
This presentation will attempt to provide, in 45 minutes, a brief if entertaining snapshot into what makes FreeBSD run.
]]>Learn how to effectively protect not only your data but also your applications.
Most technologies and techniques intended for securing digital data focus on protection while the machine is turned on mostly by defending against remote attacks. An attacker with physical access to the machine, however, can easily circumvent these defenses by reading out the contents of the storage medium on a different, fully accessible system or even compromise program code on it in order to leak encrypted information. Especially for mobile users, that threat is real. And for those carrying around sensitive data, the risk is most likely high. This talk will introduce a method of mitigating that particular risk by protecting not only the data through encryption, but also the applications and the operating system from being compromised while the machine is turned off.
]]>Speaker: Robert Watson Robert Watson is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory investinging operating system and network security. Prior to joining the Computer Laboratory to work on a PhD, he was a Senior Principal Scientist at McAfee Research, now SPARTA ISSO, a leading security research and development organization, where he directed government and commercial research contracts for customers that include DARPA, the US Navy, and Apple Computer. His research interests include operating system security, network stack structure and performance, and windowing system structure. He is also a member of the FreeBSD Core Team and president of the FreeBSD Foundation.
]]>The first half of the talk will introduce Varnish and present some of the novel features it brings to the business of web-serving.
The second half of the talk, using Varnish as the example, will show ways to get the most performance out of modern hardware and operating systems.
(The English text starts at about 5 minutes in the stream)
]]>This song details the process that Ty has to go through to make the art and music for each OpenBSD release. Ty and Theo really do go to a (very specific) bar and discuss what is going on in the project, and then try to find a theme that will work...
For RSS readers: Please note that the download URL is an FTP site.
]]>In 1998 when a United Airlines plane was waiting in the queue at Washington Dulles International Airport for take-off to New Orleans (where a Usenix conference was taking place), one man stood up from his seat, demanded that they stop waiting in the queue and be permitted to deplane. Even after orders from the crew and a pilot from the cockpit he refused to sit down. The plane exited the queue and returned to the airport gangway. Security personnel ran onto the plane and removed this man, Richard Stallman, from the plane. After Richard was removed from the plane, everyone else stayed onboard and continued their journey to New Orleans. A few OpenBSD developers were on that same plane, seated very closeby, so we have an accurate story of the events.
This is the man who presumes that he should preach to us about morality, freedom, and what is best for us. He believes it is his God-given role to tell us what is best for us, when he has shown that he takes actions which are not best for everyone. He prefers actions which he thinks are best for him -- and him alone -- and then lies to the public. Richard Stallman is no Spock.
We release our software in ways that are maximally free. We remove all restrictions on use and distribution, but leave a requirement to be known as the authors. We follow a pattern of free source code distribution that started in the mid-1980's in Berkeley, from before Richard Stallman had any powerful influence which he could use so falsely.
We have a development sub-tree called "ports". Our "ports" tree builds software that is 'found on the net' into packages that OpenBSD users can use more easily. A scaffold of Makefiles and scripts automatically fetch these pieces of software, apply patches as required by OpenBSD, and then build them into nice neat little tarballs. This is provided as a convenience for users. The ports tree is maintained by OpenBSD entirely separately from our main source tree. Some of the software which is fetched and compiled is not as free as we would like, but what can we do. All the other operating system projects make exactly the same decision, and provide these same conveniences to their users.
Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it. Meanwhile, Richard has personally made sure that all the official GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows.
That man is a false leader. He is a hypocrite. There may be some people who listen to him. But we don't listen to people who do not follow their own stupid rules.
]]>Much of any operating system's usability depends on device support, and there are some very tempting alternative ways to support devices available to those who will surrender their moral code. A project could compromise by entering into NDA agreements with vendors, or including binary objects in the operating system for which no source code exists, or tying their users down with contract terms hidden inside copyright notices. All of these choices surrender some subset of the ideals, and we simply will not do this. Sure, we care about getting devices working, but not at the expense of our original goals.
Of course since "free to share with anyone" is part of our goals, we've been at the forefront of many licensing and NDA issues, resulting in a good number of successes. This success had led to much recognition for the advancement of Free Software causes, but has also led to other issues.
We fully admit that some BSD licensed software has been taken and used by many commercial entities, but contributions come back more often than people seem to know, and when they do, they're always still properly attributed to the original authors, and given back in the same spirit that they were given in the first place.
That's the best we can expect from companies. After all, we make our stuff so free so that everyone can benefit -- it remains a core goal; we really have not strayed at all in 10 years. But we can expect more from projects who talk about sharing -- such as the various Linux projects.
Now rather than seeing us as friends who can cooperatively improve all codebases, we are seen as foes who oppose the GPL. The participants of "the race" are being manipulated by the FSF and their legal arm, the SFLC, for the FSF's aims, rather than the goal of getting good source into Linux (and all other code bases). We don't want this to come off as some conspiracy theory, but we simply urge those developers caution -- they should ensure that the path they are being shown by those who have positioned themselves as leaders is still true. Run for yourself, not for their agenda.
The Race is there to be run, for ourselves, not for others. We do what we do to run our own race, and finish it the best we can. We don't rush off at every distraction, or worry how this will affect our image. We are here to have fun doing right.
]]>Most parts of the operating system (from low kernel, through to libraries, all the way up to X, and then even to applications) use fairly obvious interface layers, where the "communication protocols" or "argument passing" mechanisms (ie. APIs) can be understood by any developer who takes the time to read the free code. Device drivers pose an additional and significant challenge though: because many vendors refuse to document the exact behavior of their devices. The devices are black boxes. And often they are surprisingly weird, or even buggy.
When vendor documentation does not exist, the development process can become extremely hairy. Groups of developers have found themselves focused for months at a time, figuring out the most simple steps, simply because the hardware is a complete mystery. Access to documentation can ease these difficulties rapidly. However, getting access to the chip documentation from vendors is ... almost always a negotiation. If we had open access to documentation, anyone would be able to see how simple all these devices actually are, and device driver development would flourish (and not just in OpenBSD, either).
When we proceed into negotiations with vendors, asking for documentation, our position is often weak. One would assume that the modern market is fair, and that selling chips would be the primary focus of these vendors. But unfortunately a number of behemoth software vendors have spent the last 10 or 20 years building political hurdles against the smaller players.
A particularly nasty player in this regard has been the Linux vendors and some Linux developers, who have played along with an American corporate model of requiring NDAs for chip documentation. This has effectively put Linux into the club with Microsoft, but has left all the other operating system communities -- and their developers -- with much less available clout for requesting documentation. In a more fair world, the Linux vendors would work with us, and the device driver support in all free operating systems would be fantastic by now.
We only ask that users help us in changing the political landscape.
]]>While tests of the release binaries are done by developers around the world, Theo and some developers from Calgary or Edmonton (such as Peter Valchev or Bob Beck) test that the discs are full of (only) correct code. Ty Semaka works for approximately two months to design and draw artwork that will fit the designated theme, and coordinates with his music buddies to write and record a song that also matches the theme.
Then the discs and all the artwork gets delivered to the plant, so that they can be pressed in time for an official release date.
This release, instead of bemoaning vendors or organizations that try to make our task of writing free software more difficult, we instead celebrate the 10 years that we have been given (so far) to write free software, express our themes in art, and the 5 years that we have made music with a group of talented musicians.
OpenBSD developers have been torturing each other for years now with Humppa-style music, so this release our users get a taste of this too. Sometimes at hackathons you will hear the same songs being played on multiple laptops, out of sync. It is under such duress that much of our code gets written.
We feel like Pufferix and Bobilix delivering The Three Discs of Freedom to those who want them whenever the need arises, then returning to celebrate the (unlocked) source tree with all the other developers.
For RSS readers: Please note that the download URL is an FTP site.
]]>Her presentation slides are a great introduction to the various ham utilities which are available, including both descriptions and screenshots of the utilities in action.
]]>iSCSI is not an Apple appliance.
The i in iSCSI stands for internet, some say for insecure, personally I like to think interesting. I'll try to share the road followed from RFC-3720 to the actual working driver, the challenges, the frustrations.
]]>pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.
This tutorial is being presented by the founders of the pfSense project, Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich.
The session will start with an introduction to the project, hardware sizing and selection, installation, firewalling concepts and basic configuration, and continue to cover all the most popular features of the system. Common usage scenarios, deployment considerations, step by step configuration guidance, and best practices will be covered for each feature. Most configurations will be demonstrated in a live lab environment.
Attendees are assumed to have basic knowledge of TCP/IP and firewalling concepts, however no in-depth knowledge in these areas or prior knowledge of pfSense or FreeBSD is necessary.
]]>The Bacula project started in January 2000 with several goals, one of which was the ability to backup any client from a Palm to a mainframe computer. Bacula is available under a GPL license.
Bacula uses several distinct components, each communicating via TCP/IP, to achieve a very scalable and robust solution to backups.
Kern is one of the original project founders and still one of the most productive Bacula developers.
]]>FreeBSD now runs on the MIPS platform. FreeBSD/mips supports MIPS-32 and MIPS-64 targets, including SMP for multicore support.
FreeBSD/mips is targeted at the embedded MIPS marketplace. FreeBSD has run on the MIPS platform for many years. Juniper ported FreeBSD to the Mips platform in the late 1990's. However, concern about intellectual property issues kept Juniper from contributing the port back to FreeBSD until recently. The contributed port was a 64-bit mips port.
In the mean time, many efforts were made to bring FreeBSD to the mips platform. The first substantial effort to bring FreeBSD to the Mips platform was done by Juli Mallet. This effort made it to single user, but never further than that. This effort was abandoned due to a change in Juli's life. The port languished.
Two years ago at BSDcan, as my involvement with FreeBSD/arm was growing, I tried to rally the troops into doing a FreeBSD/mips port. My efforts resulted in what has been commonly called the "mips2" effort. The name comes from the choice of //depot/projects/mips2 to host the work in perforce. A number of people worked on the earliest versions of the port, but it too languished and seemed destined to suffer the same fate as earlier efforts. Then, two individuals stood up and started working on the port. Wojciech A. Koszek and Oleksandr Tymoshenko pulled in code from the prior efforts. Through their efforts of stabilizing this code, the port to the single user stage and ported it to three different platforms. Others ported it to a few more. Snapshots of this work were released from time to time.
Cavium Networks picked up one of these snapshots and ported it to their multicore mips64 network processor. Cavium has kindly donated much of their work to the comminuty.
In December, I started at Cisco systems. My first job was to merge all the divergent variants of FreeBSD/mips and get it into shape to push into the tree. With luck, this should be in the tree before I give my talk.
In parallel to this, other advances in the embedded support for FreeBSD have been happening as well. I'll talk about new device drivers, new subsystems, and new build tools that help to support the embedded developer.
]]>PC-BSD provides a user-friendly desktop experience, for experts and casual users alike. PC-BSD is 100% FreeBSD under the hood, while providing desktop essentials, such as a graphical installation system, point-n-click package-management using the PBI system, and easy to use system management tools; All integrated into an easy to use K Desktop Environment (KDE).
The PBI (Push Button Installer) format is the cornerstone of the PC-BSD desktop, which allows users to install applications in a self-contained format, free from dependency problems, and compile issues that stop most casual users from desktop adoption. The PBI format also provides power and flexibility in user interaction, and scripting support, which allows applications to be fine-tuned to the best possible user experience.
This talk would go over in some detail our new PBI building system, which converts a FreeBSD port, such as FireFox, into a standalone self-contained PBI installer for PC-BSD desktops.
The presentation will be divided into two main sections:
The Push Button Installer (PBI) Format
Building PBIs from Ports "Auto-magically"
At Appalachian State University, we utilize an open source VPN to allow faculty, staff and vendors secure access to Appalachian State University's internal network from any location that has an Internet connection. To implement our virtual private network project, we needed a secure VPN that is flexible enough to work with our existing network registration and LDAP authentication systems, has simple client installation, is redundant, allows multiple VPN server instances for special site-to-site tunnels and unique configurations, and can run on multiple platforms. Using OpenVPN running on OpenBSD, we met those requirements and added a distributed administration system that allows select users to allow VPN access to specific computers for external users and vendors without requiring intervention from our network or security personnel. Our presentation will start with a quick overview of OpenVPN and OpenBSD and then detail the specifics of our VPN implementation.
Dissatisfied with IPSec for road warrior VPN usage we went looking for a better solution. We had hopped that we could find a solution that would run on multiple platforms, was flexible and worked well. We found OpenVPN and have been pleased. Initially we ran it on RHEL. We migrated to OpenBSD for pf functionality and general security concerns. ...and because we like OpenBSD.
Our presentation will focus on the specifics of our VPN implementation. We will quickly cover the basics of OpenVPN and the most used features of OpenBSD. Moving along we will cover multiple authentication methods, redundancy, running multiple instances, integration with our netreg system, how pf has extended functionality, embedding in appliances, and client configuration. The system has proven helpful with providing vendor access where needed and we'll cover this aspect as well. Time permitting we will cover current enhancement efforts and future plans.
OpenVPN has been called the "Swiss army knife" of VPN solutions. We hope our presentation leaves participants with that feeling.
]]>The "finstall" project, sponsored by Google as a Summer of Code 2007 project, is an attempt to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD, with enough strong technical features to appeal to the more professional users. A long term goal for it is to be a replacement for sysinstall, and as such should support almost all of the features present in sysinstall, as well as add support for new FreeBSD features such as GEOM, ZFS, etc. This talk will describe the architecture of "finstall" and focus on its lesser known features such as remote installation.
"finstall" is funded by Google SoC as a possible long-term replacement for sysinstall, as a "LiveCD" with the whole FreeBSD base system on the CD, with X11 and XFCE4 GUI. In the talk I intend to describe what I did so far, and what are the future plans for it. This includes the installer GUI, the backend (which has the potential to become a generic FreeBSD configuration backend) and the assorted tools developed for finstall ("LiveCD" creation scripts). More information on finstall can be found here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall.
]]>The new Danish Air Traffic Control system, CASIMO, prompted the development on a modular and general software platform for data collection, control and monitoring of "weird hardware" of all sorts.
The talk will present the "measured" daemon, and detail some of the uses it has been put to, as an, admittedly peripheral, component of the ATC system.
Many "SCADA" systems suffer from lack of usable interfaces for external access to the data. Measured takes the opposite point of view and makes real-time situation available, and accepts control instructions as ASCII text stream over TCP connections. Several examples of how this can be used will be demonstrated.
Measured will run on any FreeBSD system, but has not been ported to other UNIX variants yet, and it is perfect for that "intelligent house" project of yours.
I believe I gave a WIP presentation of this about two years ago.
]]>LLVM is a suite of carefully designed open source libraries that implement compiler components (like language front-ends, code generators, aggressive optimizers, Just-In-Time compiler support, debug support, link-time optimization, etc.). The goal of the LLVM project is to build these components in a way that allows them to be combined together to create familiar tools (like a C compiler), interesting new tools (like an OpenGL JIT compiler), and many other things we haven't thought of yet. Because LLVM is under continuous development, clients of these components naturally benefit from improvements in the libraries.
This talk gives an overview of LLVM's design and approach to compiler construction, and gives several example applications. It describes applications of LLVM technology to llvm-gcc (a C/C++/Objective C compiler based on the GNU GCC front-end), the OpenGL stack in Mac OS/X Leopard, and Clang. Among other things, the Clang+LLVM Compiler provides a fully BSD-Licensed C and Objective-C compiler (with C++ in development) which compiles code several times faster than GCC, produces code that is faster than GCC in many cases, produces better warnings and error messages, and supports many other applications (e.g. static analysis and refactoring).
]]>
The traditional closing...
with some new and interesting twists. Sleep in if
you must, but don't miss this session.
In this talk, I will briefly discuss some general ways Google's Open Source Team contributes to the wider community. The rest of the talk will explore some highlights of the Google Summer of Code program, our initiative to get university students involved in Open Source development.
I will cover the program's inception, lessons learned over time and tips for success in the program for both mentors and students. In particular, the talk will detail some experiences of the *BSD mentoring organizations involved in the program as a case study in successfully managing the program from the Open Source project's perspective. Any Google Summer of Code participants in the audience are welcome and encouraged to chime in with their own insights.
]]>SUN's ZFS file system became part of FreeBSD on 6th April 2007. ZFS is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.
ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.
All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS file system, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.
]]>In the embedded world U-Boot is a de facto standard for an initial level boot loader (firmware). It runs on a great number of platforms and architectures, and is open source.
This talk covers the development work on integrating FreeBSD with U-Boot-based systems. Starting with an overview of differences between booting an all-purpose desktop computer vs. embedded system, FreeBSD booting concepts are explained along with requirements for the underlying firmware.
Historical attempts to interface FreeBSD with this firmware are mentioned and explanation given on why they failed or proved incomplete. Finally, the recently developed approach to integrate FreeBSD and U-Boot is presented, with implementation details and particular attention on how it's been made architecture and platform independent, and how loader(8) has been bound to it.
]]>Just like every other piece of software, the FreeBSD kernel has bugs. Debugging a kernel is a bit different from debugging a userland program as there is nothing underneath the kernel to provide debugging facilities such as ptrace() or procfs. This paper will give a brief overview of some of the tools available for investigating bugs in the FreeBSD kernel. It will cover the in-kernel debugger DDB and the external debugger kgdb which is used to perform post-mortem analysis on kernel crash dumps.
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility originally developed for Solaris that can be used by administrators and developers on live production systems to examine the behavior of both user programs and of the operating system itself. DTrace enables users to explore their system to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior. DTrace lets users create their own custom programs to dynamically instrument the system and provide immediate, concise answers to arbitrary questions you can formulate using the DTrace D programming language.
This talk discusses the port of the DTrace facility to FreeBSD and demonstrates examples on a live FreeBSD system.
The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. The development work is being done in conjunction with the freedesktop.org community. The X.Org Foundation is the educational non-profit corporation whose Board serves this effort, and whose Members lead this work.
The X window system has been changing a lot in the recent years, and still changing. This talk will present this evolution, summarizing what has already been done and showing the current roadmap for future evolutions, with some focus on how *BSD kernels can be affected by the developments done with Linux as the primary target.
]]>This talk will look at issues which face the modern network application developer, from the point of view of poorly-designed examples. This will cover internal code structure and dataflow, interaction with the TCP stack, IO scheduling in high and low latency environments and high-availability considerations. In essence, this presentation should be seen as a checklist of what not to do when writing network applications.
Plenty of examples of well designed network applications exist in the open and closed source world today. Unfortunately there are just as many examples of fast network applications as there are "fast but workload specific"; sometimes failing miserably in handling the general case. This may be due to explicit design (eg Varnish) but many are simply due to the designer not fully appreciating the wide variance in "networks" - and their network application degrades ungracefully when under duress. My aim in this presentation is to touch on a wide number of issues which face network application programmers - most of which seem not "application related" to the newcomer - such as including pipelining into network communication, managing a balance between accepting new requests and servicing existing requests, or providing back-pressure to a L4 loadbalancer in case of traffic bursts. Various schemes for working with these issues will be presented, and hopefully participants will walk away with more of an understanding about how the network, application and operating systems interact.
]]>In this talk we present Aerosource, an initiative to bring Open Source Software development methods to internal software developers at The Aerospace Corporation.
Within Aerosource, FreeBSD is used in several key roles. First, we run most of our tools on top of FreeBSD. Second, the ports collection (both official ports and custom internal ones) eases our administrative burden. Third, the FreeBSD project serves as an example and role model for the results that can be achieved by an Open Source Software projects. We discuss the development infrastructure we have built for Aerosource based largely on BSD licensed software including FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Trac. We will also discuss our custom management tools including our system for managing our custom internal ports. Finally, we will cover our development successes and how we use projects like FreeBSD as exemplars of OSS development.
]]>This talk will introduce the attendee into the interesting world of SCTP.
We will first discuss the new and different features that SCTP (a new transport in FreeBSD 7.0) provide to the user. Then we will shift gears and discuss the extended socket API that is available to SCTP users and will cover such items as:
This talk covers the development work on porting the FreeBSD/ARM to Marvell Orion family of highly integrated chips.
ARM architecture is widely adopted in the embedded devices, and since the architecture can be licensed, many implementation variations exist: Orion is a derivative compliant with the ARMv5TE definition, it provides a rich set of on-chip peripherals.
Present state of the FreeBSD support for ARM is explained, areas for improvement highlighted and its overall shape and condition presented.
The main discussion covers scope of the Orion port (what integrated peripherals required new development, what was adapted from existing code base); design decisions are explained for the most critical items, and implementation details revealed.
Summary notes are given on general porting methodology, debugging techniques and difficulties encountered during such undertaking.
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