OpenBSD 5.6

OpenBSD 5.6 was released to the world today. The first things I noticed was a hint of better laptop support via an extra prompt from the installer, and the fact that they have finally ditched a functioning version of the apache fork in the base distribution, requiring users to rely on either nginx or the all-new relayd-based httpd, both of which are provided in OpenBSD 5.6. I've already updated the walk-through for OpenBSD/nginx/MySQL/PHP-FPM (ONMP Stack). As Apache is now out of the base distribution, I will transition the OAMP Stack page to cover Apache2 from the package repository. I plan on working out the details of getting MySQL/PHP working with the new httpd as well, but that could take a while.

Flexible operating systems

A while ago, John from TAOSSA mentioned something under his breath (or as much as one can do so with a keyboard) about Gentoo Linux. I replied with the fact that I learned the (very) hard way that if you think you want to play with Gentoo, you actually want to play with Arch Linux.

Gentoo is flexible -- perhaps maybe a bit too much so for most people. And it requires a lot of setup. Arch starts small, but it's not minimalist. There's a specific philosophy to most distribution families. It so happens that Arch Linux' philosophy is similar to that of another OS that I love: OpenBSD.

Arch values code correctness and cleanliness over convenience. They start you out with a small but powerful core that doesn't have a GUI or many fancy apps installed, but they provide you with everything you need in order to have your ideal setup running pretty quickly. While most Linux distributions make broad-sweeping assumptions about what the end-user will want or need to do. Flexible operating systems do no such thing. They might require a little bit more work to get set up, but what you end up with will be precisely what you want, not just something that you can make work.

Also, HiR got about 3.5 seconds of fame via Mubix on Hak 5 Episode 621 (a little after the 3:00 mark). Mubix mentioned most of what he was doing with FreeBSD was shell stuff. All of the BSDs require some work to get all configured and ready to use with a GUI, they don't go too overboard on assumptions.

For example, the things I do first on both ArchLinux and OpenBSD:

• Set up package repositories. In OpenBSD, set PKG_PATH to the URL of a package mirror. In Arch, un-comment some lines in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
• Install sudo and give the %wheel group sudo access.
• Create a user-level account, place it in the wheel group.
• Log off, log on with my user-level account
• Start adding packages and setting things up!

It's up to you to figure out what packages you want. X.org, a window manager, web browser, IM client, a word processor, and your favorite CLI tools are probably the first things you'll want to set up. Or maybe you just want an AMP web server. Flexible OSes do both of these things well and without much fanfare. Truly, you make your own distribution with every install.

Arch Linux is interesting in that there is no "release" schedule. You just perform "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all the packages to the latest stable version. Upgrading OpenBSD can be a bit more of a pain, so I genuinely like how Arch handles it.

Minimalist distributions (DSL, TinyCore and Puppy Linux come to mind) still make too many assumptions. Although they're tuned for systems that have limited resources and they can be tweaked and expanded quite a bit, you may find that the partitions aren't configured the way you want, that the organizer included applications that you don't need, or worse: they compete with the applications you'd rather be using.

Windows 7 on a MacBook: Kind of a pain to install

But it's sweet once it works with all the drivers installed

Let me step back a bit. I already had a license for Win7 Home Premium upgrade. That means I had to install it on top of Windows XP or Vista. So, I had to install XP Home first, which I also had a license for. Getting XP up and running was the root of my issues.

A while back ago, Apple pushed out an EFI update that supposedly removed the necessity to use BootCamp to install Windows or any other OS, really. With a spare partition on my hard drive, I decided to clobber Ubuntu, and install Windows XP over it. That ended up trashing the entire partition table, and bricking my MacBook.

Time Machine to the rescue. 3 hours later, I had restored my OS X partition from bare-metal to a point-in-time backup where the only thing I lost was 30 minutes of browser history. In other words: it worked perfectly. 45 minutes later, XP was installed, but the boot.ini file was pointing to the wrong partition. Using the XP recovery console to attempt a repair, I had whacked my partition table. AGAIN. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

You need XP SP2 or higher, as it turns out. I guess I should have read the entire Boot C(r)amp manual first. I used BootCamp Assistant to create the partition this time, instead of partitioning it during restoration with the OS X install CD. Once XP Home SP2 was installed, I was without any drivers. The OS X CD supposedly contains them, but it was showing up as a blank disk when inserted. I wasn't worried about video drivers, or audio, or anything other than getting it on the network so I could activate Windows and commence the upgrade to Windows 7. For that, I ended up using a Linksys USB wireless adapter (and the driver CD). Then it was home-free.

Windows 7 installed fine without a lot of problems. It had many of the drivers already built-in, including the wireless. The audio and touch-pad drivers were sub-par, though. Other things like the iSight had non-existent support. Again, the OS X DVD I have wasn't showing the drivers under Windows 7 either and the BootCamp download from Apple wouldn't even run. I finally found a BootCamp driver download on the Digiex forum. Of course, you will want to use third-party supplied drivers at your own risk, but it seems to be working pretty well.

All in all, I burned almost an entire waking day attempting to get Win7 installed on my MacBook. A good part of that was the initial install of XP. Going straight to Win7, at least once you have the drivers, is probably not too bad. I can't stress enough how important it is to have a good Time Machine backup before you start, though.

End result:


Let it never be said I'm completely bigoted when it comes to Microsoft. My wife has been using 7 for a few months, and I'm already digging it. This may be Microsoft's best Windows release since Windows 2000, which I also had plenty of good things to say about.

Time will tell as I put it through its paces, but usability is just as good as OS X now that all the drivers are working properly, and this is a rather comfortable operating system for daily use.

Guest Post: Setting up a Pfsense firewall

This is a guest post by BIOSshadow. You can follow him on Twitter and at his blog, Geek Crack.

Pfsense is a free, as in speech and beer, firewall for home, business, and any other purpose you can think of. It's based on FreeBSD, so it's very stable and has a very good TCP/IP stack. It has a serious feature list.

I have to explain how little PfSense needs in the hardware department. My setup is an old desktop computer that a client gave me because it "went bad." The power supply unit blew out during a lightning storm in the middle of the night. Anyway, it's a single core Intel processor, I am not sure what speed, with 512 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive. Now the only reason I have 40 gig is because it was easier to keep in there than fight the case, and put in a 10 gig I had around. So any basic computer you have around will work. But as with any computer, the more memory the better. I will get into that later.

You will need a video card/monitor and keyboard and of course a Pfsense CD. USB keyboard will work, a PS/2 won't need to load extra drivers. After the install and a little configuring is done, you can remove the video card/monitor and the keyboard, you can do everything through the web panel or SSH connection, if you turn it on.

Now onto the setup. (Note: For the screenshots I am using VirtualBox. This for the screenshots only). When it boots up to the bootloader, you want to boot with default, either by waiting for the timer to run out or by hitting enter.



Now if you have two NICs, which I recommend, you do not need to setup VLANs, but you can. If you only have one NIC, you need to setup at least two VLANs.


Now this is one of the great things about Pfsense that I can't find anywhere else: You unplug the ethernet cables, and it askes you to plug in the LAN cable into the LAN NIC. Then it does the same for the WAN cable and NIC. Now if you want to setup a DMZ with third NIC this where it do it.



Pfsense will ask you if you want to proceed and then build the config files and startup all the daemons, like the Web Panel and others. Congrats! You have running Pfsense firewall, but everything is in memory and running from the CD. If you want run it like this then you are set, but if the power goes out you will have to set it up again using a backup config file or from scratch. If you want to install to a hard drive you will need to type "99" and hit enter to continue.


The hard drive installation is menu-driven and easy to use. If you are having issues, feel free to edit the setting and accept when done.


Select "Install PfSense" and select the hard drive you want to use. Format the disk and select "use this Geometry".








If you are lucky enough to have a muilti-processor system or are using a embedded system, select those options. Now remember this is "muilti processor" not "muilti-core processor".


Now Pfsense is installed and ready to go. Just restart it and remove the disc.


After the reboot, we will need to setup local IPs and their ranges. Unless, of course, you have a separate DHCP server, then set it up to connect to the server.


The IP settings are all up to you, I used a normal home setup for the sanity of my family (networked printers, NAS, and etc.) just remember the IP you give Pfsense, because you will need it to access the Web Panel.










Now you are all set up. You can unplug the monitor and keyboard, and other stuff were using for set up.


Now back on your computer, open up a browser and go to the IP of Pfsense. The default username is "admin" and the default password is "pfsense".


Of course, you want to change the password and if you want, you can change the username as well. To do so on the red navigation bar at the top, hover over system and click on General.


To enable SSH, which I recommend, you need to go the the Advanced section of the System Menu.


If your ISP is like mine, your MAC address is tied to the account and if you use it, you don't get access to the Internet. To edit it Go to Interfaces and then WAN.



Now you have working Pfsense firewall, have fun!


There are a few things Pfsense lacks, like a Squid proxy and A/V scanner. But it makes it up with its packages. It has quite a few packages, but remember: the more packages, processes and packets it handles, the more memory it uses and the lag increases. But they have packages for Snort, Squid, SquidGuard, and an A/V scanner.






Well there it is: a completely setup and configured Pfsense, with A/V scanning, proxy and traffic monitor.

OpenBSD 4.5

With a release date of May 1, OpenBSD 4.5 is probably going to be hitting the mirrors later today -- maybe late tonight.

Notable features and enhancements:
* Enhanced support for the sparc64 platform
* Support for more hardware monitoring sensors
* Lots of new or improved drivers for miscellaneous hardware
* Reliability and security improvements from 4.4, which was fraught with a couple of critical issues.

Thanks to Venture37, I've already got my hot little paws on 4.5; I didn't get to pre-order it. I plan on upgrading my main workstation to 4.5 over the weekend, but for the time being, this looks like a release worth upgrading to!

If you're not familiar with OpenBSD, it uses a "text-adventure" style installation script with a couple of very straightforward options. The only tricky part is partitioning and formatting the disk for installation. The Installation Guide can help you set up the disks.

Once installed, OpenBSD is "secure by default" without any remote services running other than the ones you specify. The only ones you can enable during installation are ntp and ssh (but they default to disabled).

OpenBSD's minimalist nature means that you're left with a powerful but svelte platform upon which to build to suit your needs: whether that's a workstation, firewall/router or an Apache/MySQL/PHP (OAMP) web-hosting environment. The installation media comes with apache, Xenocara (which includes Xorg), GCC, perl, Suhosin PHP and a host of other open-source components, most of which have been audited, patched and hardened by the OpenBSD dev team.

Related Posts:

Xorg.conf for OpenBSD on MacBook / Parallels

OpenBSD 4.4 / Apache / MySQL / PHP

Operating System Junkie

Operating System Junkie

I've talked about the computers in the Lab-O-Ratory before. Today, the laboratory is really, really noisy -- more so than usual. I'm always working on something and I'm coming to realize that I'm pretty much a hopeless operating system junkie.

The photo is from a few months ago. The SparcStation 20 on the top of that photo used to be my OpenBSD 4.1 DMZ box until the hard drive died. I shelved it for a while and replaced it with a fresh install of OpenBSD 4.4 on one of the noisy 1U rackmount cluster servers from the startup I worked at in early '06. That 1U now sits in the SS20's old spot on top of the Sun Ultra 5 (which happens to be one of my primary workstations, running Solaris 10)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave me a pile of old SCA-80 hard drives -- 4GB, 9GB stuff that was going to get landfilled. I put some of them in the SS20 again, and decided to try NetBSD. I used this for the SSH Reverse Tunneling article. It's now on the top of the lower stack, below the FON and Jornada and on top of the beige low-profile server.

That's an IBM RS/6000 Model 250 -- 80 MHz (yes, really) with 256MB of RAM and a 36GB SCSI hard drive. Initially made to run IBM's AIX 3.x operating system, it still runs AIX 5.1 quite well as long as you keep the GUI from trying to start. After AIX 5.1, IBM dropped all support for Micro-Channel Architecture. Still, having AIX 5 to tinker with is beneficial to me. I have to deal with AIX (as well as Linux and Solaris) at my real job. Don't forget all the cool freeware that's been ported to AIX and Solaris!

The Dell PowerEdge server below it was going to be an AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) server for a client of mine who never ended up needing it. It gets re-purposed whenever I need a reasonably powerful machine or one with a lot of storage to test something on. I just installed FreeBSD 7 on it last night. This one's even more noisy than the 1U cluster server.

My wife bought a 4U rackmount case from Frogman back in the day, and it was originally built up as a telnet MUD server. Now, it's kind of the communal Windows 2000 test box. It's the HiR OpenArena server for the time being.

Then, there's the Dell Optiplex mini-tower out of frame that's still running BackTrack -- although after Mubix wrote about it, I plan on downloading Sumo very soon!

With so many of my own little projects going on and utilizing all these boxes, I'm currently running all of this in my apartment's second-bedroom-turned-laboratory:

• OpenBSD 4.4 / x86
• Solaris 10 / ultrasparc
• jLime Linux (Mongo) / arm
• Openwrt Linux 7.09 / mips
• NetBSD 4.0.1 / sparc
• AIX 5.1 / ppc
• FreeBSD 7.0 / x86
• Backtrack Linux 3 / x86
• Windows 2000 SP4 / x86

That's not even considering that my wife's laptop is running Vista, and I'm running Mac OS Leopard on my own. I'm no stranger to lesser-known OS's either. I've written about OpenSolaris before. I used to run BeOS as my main platform at work. I've used Plan 9 before (in the late 90s) and I even helped a little bit with the now-defunct V2OS project in 2001.

What's next? I think I need to mix it up with ReactOS (Windows clone) or Haiku (BeOS clone) or perhaps try Plan 9 again...

OpenBSD 4.4 is hitting the mirrors now!

OpenBSD 4.4 is scheduled to be officially released November 1, 2008 (that would be tomorrow as of writing). It's already on some of the FTP mirror sites, though.

I am installing this TONIGHT. I may try Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex that was released this week as well, but I'm really more excited about OpenBSD. I'm a little bit of a fanboy, if you can't tell.

JLime Linux - WiFi Scanning, New Userland, etc...

Almost all of the problems I was initially having with jlime were due to the fact that when I downloaded it, they were in the middle of a big update with an experimental kernel and an old base userland image. After pulling down the new userland and going to a known-stable kernel, everything seems to be rockin' and rollin' with jLime on my Hewlett Packard Jornada 720.

Case and point, X now has a decent interface, desktop icons, and Torsmo status monitor works great (finally!)


I was also having problems with package management. Those were also resolved by installing fresh from the current userland image. The packages are also pretty up-to-date with a quite extensive list of things to choose from. Want nmap? MySQL? OpenSSH? No problem! Kismet for War-driving? Just say the word! Here's my J720 running Kismet with a Senao Engenius 200mW Long-range 802.11b card attached to a pair of 19dBi omni-directional magnet mount antennae.



And a close-up of the screen:


All this, and my battery lasts for hours upon hours, even with the wireless card installed. I actually have nothing left to complain about at all aside from the fact that 32MB of RAM and 206 MHz is still a somewhat anemic machine for web browsing. For light-weight stuff like checking e-mail, managing servers via SSH and the like, this seems to be just about the most handy thing I've seen in a very long time.

I'm working on getting a data cable for my new GPS so that I can really put this thing to the test when it comes to war-driving. I haven't ever used kismet for serious network location. I'm more of a Mac OS X and BSD guy at heart, so KisMAC and BSD-Airtools are my typical weapons of choice.

It's simply amazing to me, though, to see this kind of development happening for a family of portable computers that's been more or less dead for the better part of a decade. Where I was once drooling over the OLPC and EEePC, I'm now finding that I have all of the ultra-mobile goodness I really need right here in a package that's admittedly slower but also lighter, smaller and longer lasting.

Trying this... Posting from jlime

Thanks to a tip from a jlime forum denizen, I found out that an older kernel would work better on my Jornada 720. Suspend works, WiFi works, even the Torsmo status app works better. Minimo didn't like Blogger, but the Dillo browser seems to be working albeit in a really minimalistic way like you'd expect in a phone's browser.

In short, this is actually a completely functional networked Linux PDA right now. I'll keep this around and do some periodic reviews as I further use this platform.

UNIX variants on HP Jornada Palmtops

We covered this a bit at the 2600 meeting last night. I don't have a lot of time to go into detail, but here's a quick breakdown.

Asmodian X got me hooked on Windows CE Palmtops back in late 1997. I picked up a floor model HP 300LX for cheap, and actually used it as my main computer (including Dialup BBS, Telnet, Mail, and web browsing) for quite a while. It was more than sufficient for typing my papers for class and interfacing with the UNIX servers. Asmo also had a Casio Cassiopeia running CE, so we tinkered with this stuff a LOT back in the day.

Later, at DefCon 6, we'd run into a guy with an HP 620LX. That thing had a full color screen and a significant boost in memory, not to mention sound recording ability. This all sounds cheesy now, but it blew away the devices we had with their four or 16-color greyscale screens.

As time has progressed, I've also acquired an HP 320LX (same as 300LX but with a backlit screen and more RAM), a Jornada 680e (Refurbished Dutch Railways model) and a Jornada 720.

The HP300's are currently packed away somewhere, but the Jornadas are alive and well.

I was considering NetBSD and Linux for this project, but I found out that the NetBSD project for these pretty much died once they could say "it boots!" You have to use a serial cable for the console. In other words, it's useless until someone ports wscons and some device drivers. So, I chose JLime Linux, which is still in active development -- the kernel build on my 720 (Mongo branch) is less than two weeks old!

To install JLime, you need a CF card that's at least 128MB. You create 3 partitions:

1. FAT partition usable from within Windows CE
2. ext2 partition for Linux to run from
3. Swap partition for virtual memory

You copy the bootloader, boot configuration file and zImage (kernel, etc) to the FAT partition, and then uncompress the jLime userland onto the ext2 partition. Since the files were compressed with bzip2 and BSD's tar utility doesn't know what to do with that, I had to uncompress it before using tar. Make sure you run tar as root (or with sudo) and with "xpf" or "xvpf" to retain the file permissions and ownership of the userland image.

Once you insert the card into the PDA and run the boot loader, all of the PDA's memory will be completely wiped, so all files and data on it will be lost. Windows CE stays in ROM so when you reboot, Windows CE will be back in initial setup mode.

I actually put the boot loaders and zimages for both the J680e and the J720 on the FAT partition, created two different ext2 partitions, and left one shared swap partition on my 2GB CF card. Had I been thinking, I would have made a third ext2 for a shared home directory between the two PDAs.

Right now, here's the status of them:
Jornada 680 running jLime (Donkey):

• Boots Linux, loads fine.
• The keymap is completely trashed (dutch keyboard layout) so I can't login.
  
• Apparently, the J680 can "suspend" while running jLime.
  

Jornada 720 running jLime (Mongo)

• Boots Linux
• Runs X with IceWM
• Various X Apps work fine (MiniMO Browser, aterm, etc)
• Recognizes PCMCIA Ethernet and 802.11b/g wireless cards
• Can't seem to use the network, even when configured properly (dhcp doesn't get an address, wireless cards can't associate to open, unencrypted networks, etc)
• Cannot go into suspend mode properly. The backlight stays on, limiting battery life.
• After halting, the PDA can't reboot without a hard reset (removal of main and backup battery at the same time)

So, it looks like jLime has a little ways to go yet, but it's a functional UNIX environment, at least on my Jornada 720. I just wish I could get the networking piece to work properly. I could almost live without a suspend mode, since many of my other laptops don't particularly like to suspend, either.

It's official: Leopard = No network for OpenSolaris Indiana VMs

Lukas got it working on Parallels 3.0 under OS X Tiger, but two different HiR guys failed to get networking to work on OpenSolaris Indiana DP2 on parallels 2.5, 3.0 and VMWare Fusion when running Mac OS X Leopard.

Oh well. Like I said, maybe I'll give it a crack on a real computer when I have a lab machine ready to use.

More FreeBSD love and some fun stuff

I'm working on a fun project for HiR that involves a little bit of CAD (computer aided design/drafting) work. QCAD Community Edition is the GPL version of RibbonSoft's inexpensive QCAD software. It comes without RibbonSoft's technical support and lacks certain features that they reserve for QCAD Professional.

RibbonSoft claims that QCAD is usable right out of the gate even by people who have never used CAD before. I haven't touched CAD since I tinkered with AutoCAD Lite back in 8th grade shop class. I'd like to think I'm technically minded as well. QCAD is NOT easy to get the hang of. Maybe compared to AutoCAD or CADKey, but you can ask my wife and she'll tell you I've spent the better part of three whole days just getting my bearings straight with QCAD. I think I've got it mostly figured out now, though.

By the way, QCAD is available as a binary package or in the Ports tree for both FreeBSD 6.2 and OpenBSD 4.2. I've been using it on both platforms. FreeBSD works really well with QCAD despite my somewhat anemic workstation. My Logitech Revolution VX is a life-saver for precision CAD work. With its smooth-scrolling wheel and high-resolution laser optical tracker, it fits the bill perfectly. I'm really glad that FreeBSD and XOrg play nice with this mouse.

As for the project I'm working on, I'll just say it's mischievous and delightfully fun. I'll release the .DXF file for this project when the time comes.

Indiana + Parallels 2.5 = No Network For You!

I know, I should probably fork over the cash for Parallels 3.0. The reasons I have not are as follows:

1. As far as I can tell, there won't be much difference with OpenBSD as a guest OS which is primarily what I use Parallels for.
2. Windows 2000, which I use only for VPN access to work a few times per month, works fine under Parallels Desktop 2.5.
3. I don't like spending money.

With that out of the way, here's my OpenSolaris Indiana experience in a nutshell:

• The Live-CD functionality is a breeze. Once it's up, it's fairly responsive considering the fact that it's running Gnome. I really don't like Gnome, but it gets the job done.
• Installation is a breeze if you are willing to dedicate a whole hard drive to it. No word on how easy a multi-boot system is to configure.
• Once installed, it's surprisingly nimble and smooth, with the caveat that it doesn't like NE2000-based ethernet cards (or their emulated analog via Parallels)

Now, Parallels Desktop comes with a CD image full of useful stuff just for this occasion. Included are drivers (Solaris 10 binary as well as source code) for the NE2000 card. As this release of Indiana doesn't ship with a compiler, I followed these instructions for installing the binary drivers on Developer Preview 1, but to no avail. "Network Auto-Magic" did nothing, and a reboot didn't bring the interface to life, either.

This was my first real brush with OpenSolaris. I use Solaris daily as part of my job, and one of my main desktops at home is a Sun workstation running Solaris 10 (I opted for the CDE interface at home due to the slower processor). As such, I'm certainly no stranger to Solaris. Despite being unable to bring the network to life, I can honestly say that OpenSolaris looks, feels, and smells an awful lot like Sun's enterprise UNIX operating system. If you know Solaris, you know OpenSolaris.

On the workstation, Solaris 10 is actually very feature-rich out of the box. OpenSolaris takes this a step further. Until you hit the command-line interface, it feels very much like an older version of Ubuntu Linux. I haven't bothered to see if Java is as deeply integrated into OpenSolaris as it is in the commercial OS, but if it is, that's yet another boon.

I may have another HiR writer check out OpenSolaris on a newer build of Parallels to see if we can get the network up and running. Otherwise, I'll probably shelve Indiana for a bit until I have somewhat capable lab machine available to test it on. Preferably, I'd like to test it as a desktop system (not as a server host), which means that I'll need an extended period of a month or so to really give it the kind of attention it needs.

OpenSolaris Indiana (Developer Preview 2) Available

OpenSolaris Indiana is a project that's creating a binary distribution based on OpenSolaris source code that's both easy to install and use. It's worth checking out. I'm currently installing it within Parallels Desktop on my MacBook, and will also be playing with it some more when I get the free time to do so. Developer Preview 2 was released this week. A Live-CD distro similar to Ubuntu Desktop Edition is available. You can use it from the Live-CD or install it on a hard drive once the interface is up and running.

Giving FreeBSD another shot

I fell in love with FreeBSD for the first time around the early part of 1998. Although I'd heard of FreeBSD before, my roommate, Xeroline, introduced me to it formally. I'd been tinkering with Red Hat Linux and had grown tired of both the wild-goose-chase of RPM dependencies as well as the patchwork of software compiles that often had their own dependency problems. FreeBSD seemed, at the time, to be the answer to my prayers.

FreeBSD 2.2.8 was lean, mean, and very basic. It also brought with it the concept of the Ports system: a skeletal tree of software directories where one could simply utter the words "make install" and then sit back -- often for a very long time -- and watch software compile automatically and usually error-free. Initially, that's all I wanted. It was FreeBSD that pried me away from my Linux addiction, and I'd say that it's also FreeBSD that shaped much of what I've come to expect from a UNIX desktop OS. In short, I didn't want an easy, graphical install. I wanted an OS that would get up and running quickly, be quick on its toes, and give me as clean of a slate as possible from which to begin my adventures. I wanted a system that could be wrought from bare metal.

As time passed, FreeBSD got better, then worse. I had been using OpenBSD for servers since early 1999, and Shortly after the 5.x series came out, I got sick of FreeBSD and switched to OpenBSD 3.2 on the desktop and some of my laptops. That was more than 5 years ago. I seriously haven't touched FreeBSD since February of 2003. Until now.

I almost messed with FreeBSD 6.2 a few months ago. I downloaded the ISO images but never got around to burning them. The target install environment was going to be my Pentium 3 lab box, but at the time I was using it to do research for my Linux LVM2 article. The very same machine, in fact, kept getting re-purposed for various HiR research projects. The time has come, though, for me to square off against my quondam favorite desktop OS.

I've only been tinkering with it for about a day now, so I still have a way to go before I'm ready to give this a full review. All I can say is to stay on the lookout for some more FreeBSD love. I can immediately tell that they've worked out some of the major kinks in their package installation tools. The installation doesn't seem like it's changed much since the 4.x releases. For that, I'm thankful. It's just friendly enough for almost anyone to figure out, but not made of bloated graphics like the Ubuntu installer that takes forever to load.

I have a feeling I might start really liking FreeBSD again. Did anyone else feel alienated by the 5.x series, only to come back and try 6.2 or 6.3 and really like it?

Apple Releases OS X Tiger 10.5.2 Update

Just in case you haven't read it anywhere else (or everywhere else, as the case may be), Leopard users can now get Mac OS X 10.5.2, the much-awaited update to Apple's latest operating system.

The MASSIVE update, and links to more info can be found on the Mac OS X 10.5.2 page. Alternatively, you can just fire up Software Update and twiddle your thumbs for quite a while. It should be worth the wait.

AIX 6 goes General Availability

AIX 6.1 was released earlier this week. During the initial beta phase, they were considering calling it AIX 5.4.  There was no AIX 5.4, nor was there a 6.0.  They're debuting AIX 6 as version 6.1. 

AIX is IBM's enterprise UNIX offering for their pSeries servers, which replaced the old RS/6000 line years ago. New features include:

• Improved RBAC (Role Based Access Control) functionality
• Workload Partition (WPAR) virtualization - multiple virtual environments within one AIX instance, versus Logical Partition (LPAR) virtualization, which is multiple AIX instances on one system.
• Support for Encrypted Journaling file systems (JFS2/EFS)
• Trusted Computing Base - An optional secure-by-default installation
• AIX Security Expert - a template-based console for setting up security options
• Concurrent kernel updates - no reboot needed for certain types of kernel upgrades
• First-failure data capture functionality to aid in troubleshooting or reproducing obscure faults
• System routines that can gracefully recover from certain kernel crashes

I've had some time to use AIX 6 while it was in beta, and I must say that I'm impressed by the enhancements that I've been able to use so far.  Built-in virtualization is slick and seems to be working well in the general available release of AIX 6.1 now that it's out of beta.  You won't likely be playing with AIX on your next workstation, but you'll start to see it rolling out to an enterprise environment near you.

Technical OS review round-up

I ran across some awesome, highly technical reviews on some of the recently released operating systems. Both go in-depth with the new features, and are definitely a step up on the geek scale from the reviews written for mere mortals.

OnLAMP did a thorough interview of some developers to get information on the new features, performance enhancements and bug fixes that went into OpenBSD 4.2.

ArsTechnica is a great source of hardware and software reviews. Their coverage of the new stuff in Leopard is second to none.


Both are excellent reading material for those of us who are really interested in the more technical aspects of operating systems.

Operating systems out the wazoo!

In a matter of two weeks, we've seen a plethora of new OS releases:

• Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) (Oct 18th, 2007)
• MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Oct 26th, 2007)
• OpenBSD 4.2 (Nov 1, 2007)

I know that I am currently playing with all three:

I'm currently working with a fresh, clean install of Gutsy Server, building an end-all, be-all shared host for a client of mine who wishes to give dozens of end-users their own web space and e-mail domains. I haven't messed with Gutsy on the desktop yet. In due time.

I did an in-place upgrade to Leopard on my MacBook, and it's everything I expected and then some. There are a few minor annoyances, but I'll chalk them up to Apple making an attempt to match and/or exceed Vista's user-interface flair. Unfortunately, I feel that the UI changes in Leopard traded friendliness and clarity for sex appeal. It looks slick, but the graphical changes are skin deep. Functionally, Leopard is still lean and mean. I don't feel like it took a performance hit, and there are boat-loads of new feaures - some of them long overdue (like Spaces, and QuickLook which I'm already a fan of). Things I'm looking forward to testing out: ZFS Support (which requires a developer download to fully implement on Desktop Leopard), Time Machine, and the new "Firewall."

I also did an in-place upgrade to OpenBSD on the virtual machine that I use most often. At first glance, it's the same deal as usual. More hardware support, more robust drivers for certain devices, and some new functionality. I haven't gotten to test it yet, but I'm eager to see the new features in pkg_add, which has never, ever worked the way I would like -- so much so that I actually wrote (and released) a set of scripts to make installing software a breeze in OpenBSD. Finally, I'm interested in seeing how sensorsd works in its new zero-configuration mode on my 1U servers, which have always given OpenBSD's sensorsd some trouble.

I'm sure that HiR will revisit some of these in more detail after really giving them a good shake down.

If you're in or around Kansas City, come join us at the 2600 meeting tonight, Friday October 2nd, 2007 in the Food Court at Oak Park Mall - half a mile east of I-35 on 95th street. The "Official" start time is 5:00PM, but people generally show up as their schedule allows. Look for laptops. That will be us.