Beginning on July 17, we hope you’ll join us for an expanded #FreeBSDFridays series of 101 classes. We’re building on our FreeBSD Day content to offer 1 hour live sessions every Friday, designed to get you started with FreeBSD. The program kicks off with Deb Goodkin’s Intro to FreeBSD class, followed by a two-part Installfest led by Roller Angel. The sessions will take place at 10am PDT at https://live.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/freebsdfriday/
Other classes include, Introduction to OpenZFS by Dan Langille, A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem by Kirk McKusick, and more.
This episode of BSD Now covers the application of the ARC algorithm, advancements in cloud-native containers on FreeBSD with Podman testing highlights, and running web browsers in a FreeBSD jail. It also discusses fixing pf to allow IPv6 traffic on FreeBSD, the history of Minitel in France, and why Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository.
This guide walks you through setting up a fault-tolerant reverse proxy using FreeBSD and HAProxy. It covers configuring CARP for failover, installing and setting up HAProxy, and adjusting firewall rules. This setup ensures high availability and reliability for your services, making it valuable for BSD users looking to enhance their network infrastructure.
This article delves into the key factors that influence network storage performance, focusing on protocols like SMB, NFS, and iSCSI. It highlights the importance of understanding these protocols and their unique challenges when testing NAS setups. The article provides insights into optimizing NAS configurations for accurate benchmarking, making it valuable for BSD users looking to enhance their network storage performance. It covers specific considerations for each protocol, including the use of tools like CrystalDiskMark and fio, and discusses the impact of multi-channel support and record sizes on performance.
The FreeBSD Foundation has initiated a project to deliver zero-trust builds starting January 2025. Commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency, this project aims to enhance the security of FreeBSD's build process by enabling release processes to run without root access and ensuring build artifacts are reproducible. The updates will simplify the build process and are expected to be completed before the release of FreeBSD 15.0. This initiative is part of a broader effort to advance Zero Trust builds, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), and other security improvements.
NixBSD fork for FreeBSD, GhostBSDCon 2025 announced, new FreeBSD Journal and more.
NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution.
The article details the challenges faced while setting up IPv6 on FreeBSD with Netcup as the VPS provider. The author migrated to Netcup for its performance and cost benefits but encountered issues with IPv6 connectivity. Despite initial success with manual configurations, the IPv6 connection dropped after about 10 minutes. Various troubleshooting steps, including disabling the firewall and adjusting subnet prefixes, were attempted. The author found partial solutions by switching gateways dynamically, but the setup remains unstable. The post invites further comments and suggestions for improvement. This resource is valuable for BSD users experiencing similar networking issues, offering insights into potential fixes and ongoing troubleshooting efforts.
A new BSD desktop conference, GhostBSDCon 2025, has been announced for March 29, 2025. This virtual event, hosted by the GhostBSD project, focuses on developing and using desktop systems based on any BSD variant. GhostBSD, a FreeBSD-derived OS with the MATE desktop, aims to provide a user-friendly BSD desktop experience. The conference is a significant event for BSD enthusiasts, offering a platform to discuss and advance desktop BSD technologies. More details can be found in the official Call For Papers.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.
This article provides a comprehensive guide to rendering graphics on a NetBSD system without using X11. It begins by comparing the NetBSD console with the EndBASIC console, highlighting the latter's ability to mix textual and graphical elements. The article then delves into the wscons framework, which abstracts hardware display and input devices, allowing for uniform treatment across different platforms. The wsdisplay and wskbd devices are explored in detail, explaining how to query framebuffer properties and draw to the framebuffer. The article also covers handling keyboard input using the wskbd device and the wsmux multiplexer.
It's 2025 and there are a few Myths around FreeBSD that still persist, so here are some of authors personal thoughts to counter them.