BSD After Midnight

Coming up this week, we'll be chatting with Lucas Holt, founder of MidnightBSD. It's a slightly lesser-known fork of FreeBSD, with a focus on easy desktop use. We'll find out what's different about it and why it was created. Answers to your emails and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Zocker, it's like docker on FreeBSD

• Containment is always a hot topic, and docker has gotten a lot of hype in Linux land in the last couple years - they're working on native FreeBSD support at the moment
• This blog post is about a docker-like script, mainly for ease-of-use, that uses only jails and ZFS in the base system
• In total, it's 1,500 lines of shell script
• The post goes through the process of using the tool, showing off all the subcommands and explaining the configuration
• In contrast to something like ezjail, Zocker utilizes the jail.conf system in the 10.x branch ***

Patrol Read in OpenBSD

• OpenBSD has recently imported some new code to support the Patrol Read function of some RAID controllers
• In a nutshell, Patrol Read is a function that lets you check the health of your drives in the background, similar to a zpool "scrub" operation
• The goal is to protect file integrity by detecting drive failures before they can damage your data
• It detects bad blocks and prevents silent data corruption, while marking any bad sectors it finds ***

HAMMER 2 improvements

• DragonFly BSD has been working on the second generation HAMMER FS
• It now uses LZ4 compression by default, which we've been big fans of in ZFS
• They've also switched to a faster CRC algorithm, further improving HAMMER's performance, especially when using iSCSI ***

FreeBSD foundation May update

• The FreeBSD foundation has published another update newsletter, detailing some of the things they've been up to lately
• In it, you'll find some development status updates: notably more ARM64 work and the addition of 64 bit Linux emulation
• Some improvements were also made to FreeBSD's release building process for non-X86 architectures
• There's also an AsiaBSDCon recap that covers some of the presentations and the dev events
• They also have an accompanying blog post where Glen Barber talks about more sysadmin and clusteradm work at NYI ***

Interview - Lucas Holt - questions@midnightbsd.org / @midnightbsd

MidnightBSD

News Roundup

The launchd on train is never coming

• Replacement of init systems has been quite controversial in the last few years
• Fortunately, the BSDs have avoided most of that conflict thus far, but there have been a few efforts made to port launchd from OS X
• This blog post details the author's opinion on why he thinks we're never going to have launchd in any of the BSDs
• Email us your thoughts on the matter ***

Native SSH comes to… Windows

• In what may be the first (and last) mention of Microsoft on BSD Now...
• They've just recently announced that PowerShell will get native SSH support in the near future
• It's not based on the commercial SSH either, it's the same one from OpenBSD that we already use everywhere
• Up until now, interacting between BSD and Windows has required something like PuTTY, WinSCP, FileZilla or Cygwin - most of which are based on really outdated versions
• The announcement also promises that they'll be working with the OpenSSH community, so we'll see how many Microsoft-submitted patches make it upstream (or how many donations they make) ***

Moving to FreeBSD

• This blog post describes a long-time Linux user's first BSD switching experience
• The author first talks about his Linux journey, eventually coming to love the more customization-friendly systems, but the journey ended with systemd
• After doing a bit of research, he gave FreeBSD a try and ended up liking it - the rest of the post mostly covers why that is
• He also plans to write about his experience with other BSDs, and is writing some tutorials too - we'll check in with him again later on ***

Feedback/Questions

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• Josh writes in ***