FreeBSD 6.1 Released

nbritton writes "FreeBSD 6.1 has been released! This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. Of note are the major improvements to the filesystem and SATA code, possibly making FreeBSD the number one choice for SATA RAID implementations. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes, errata list, Bittorrent Downloads, Mirrors, Hardware Notes, and Installation Guide."

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this was probably intended as a trollish comment, yes, it does run Linux [freebsd.org].

Re:Errata list?

[archen]

6.0 has been very stable for me, and I now run it in production. To tell you the truth I never had much luck with 4x and it was usually a bitch for me to get running for some reason. I really liked the way 5.x did a lot of things but of course there were the stability issues.

6x is a good branch (so far so good anyway) and MUCH better than 5. Performance is okay, not as good as Linux in some scenarios but not bad either. On my Sokris 4801 (233Mhz pentium class) it seems rather slow, but Freebsd 4x on my 133Mhz Pentium seems to be about the same - so I'd say not a big difference. If you need the most out of older hardware that is already running 4x I'd probably stick with it.

Hopefully I'll be able to figure this new bridging scheme out and be able to better evaluate performance.

Debian FreeBSD port

[Douglas Simmons]

What is very much alive is the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project [debian.org]. Get the best of both worlds baby.

FreeBSD 6 + pf

[afternoon_nap]

I use FreeBSD 6 because of the overload table option available when using pf:
## for SSHD from other hosts
pass in log on $ext_if inet proto tcp from any to $ext_if:network \
              port 22 flags S/SA keep state \
              (max 5, source-track rule, max-src-nodes 5, \
                max-src-states 10, tcp.established 60, tcp.closing 5, \
                max-src-conn-rate 3/30, overload flush global) \
              label "SSHD_IN_$if"

If some sshd scanner hits my host more than three times in 30 seconds his packets go to an overload table and his states flushed. Any address or net listed in the badhosts table is blocked outright. It works as advertised and I couldn't be happier.

pf+altq really does give me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Re:BSD and clusters

[agent dero]

I'm not sure how this got modded up, just a quick Google search reveals that FreeBSd clustering is very doable.

Check out LAM/MPI [lam-mpi.org] or see pages by people who've done it [und.edu]

Re:FreeBSD 6 + pf

[Daniel_Staal]

Ah, yes, the port of PF from OpenBSD...

Re:Number one choice for SATA RAID?

[AKAImBatman]

According to nobody. The summary said:

possibly making FreeBSD the number one choice for SATA RAID implementations

That's "possibly". As in, it hasn't been proven yet but the developers feel that it's ahead of the rest of the market. Therefore it may "possibly" be the number one choice.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD uses the WPA supplicant thing (which is just a config file). I would say it's hard, but it is a big pain in the ass. About the same as Linux so I've heard.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[JianTian13]

So, presumably part of the reason you like Gentoo is for Portage, right? USE flags, compiling from source, etc?

But if my experience with Gentoo and Portage is any guide, then you've probably also been bitten by Portage -- Masked ebuilds, ~arch, whatever: the build you want is masked, and unmasking and building creates an amazing cascade of broken packages, right?

Maybe I'm not being fair; I tried Gentoo for the last time maybe two years ago. I *loved* the flexibility and built-from-scratchness. But at some point I got hooked into FreeBSD's ports, and AFAICT, there's no comparison, at least in terms of stability/QA. FreeBSD ports just work.

Anyway, just my $0.02.

Something similar with iptables

[Rescate]

## throttles SSH connnection requests to 3/minute from same IP
## $RED_DEV is Internet-connected interface, CUSTOMFORWARD is the chain being processed

iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \
         -m state --state NEW -m recent --set

iptables -A CUSTOMFORWARD -i $RED_DEV -p tcp --destination-port 22 \
         -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP

Re:Any reason to switch?

[Zemplar]

"GNU bashing"? Hardly, you've misunderstood. I'll be the first to say that GNU is the glue that most FOSS uses to actually get any work done. My point was only that the central control and design of FreeBSD and GNU together versus the tacking on of GNU plus a Linux kernel as often apparent on some distro-of-the-week.

Re:Journaling Filesystem

[BasharTeg]

This is a troll. "Background FSCK" isn't BSD's answer to journaling. Soft updates is Dr. McKusick's implementation to maintain filesystem integrity in the event of a system failure. BSD doesn't need journaling, it has soft udpates. You need to read:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/usenix2000/general/seltzer.html [usenix.org]

http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/ [mckusick.com]

Working Great!

[Ramjet350]

I was out on Freebsd.org last night looking at documentation and noticed that 6.1 was listed as the current release. I grabbed it and installed right away (probably not the best idea) but it works great so far. Very stable and all my hardware is detected and working perfectly.

If you haven't tried it, get an old box and give it a shot. More experience with Unix never hurt anyone!

Re:Any reason to switch?

[rhavenn]

you're point #2 is now void. Go to the freebsdfoundation page, download the JDK or JRE for 6.0 and then do a pkg_add and you're done. Viola! Java!

Re:Any reason to switch?

[value_added]

This is probably one of the most absurd and ill-informed posts I've read in a while.

I tried in vain to setup FreeBSD 6.0 as a SATA software raid machine. I was using a more recent motherboard with graphics, network and SATA integrated on-board. I think they are all VIA chipsets. I eventually hit the eject on FreeBSD as I couldn't even get X up and running.

I bought a new motherboard without thinking too much about what I was buying and tried to install an operating system about which I knew just as little. Instead of taking the opportunity to make up for my obvious deficiencies, I quit when I realised my approach wouldn't work, but made a mental note to tell everyone about it when I had the chance.

I then tried Debian. All-in-all it was another less than positive experience. Both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel versions of Sarge had problems with my hardware.

I popped in another CD and see what would happen, hoping that doing the same thing again would yield different results. It didn't.

I decided to explore Gentoo.

Despite, the fact that some people consider doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a mark of insanity, I popped in yet another CD

Its working great with SATA and EVMS.

I was surprised that it worked.

It did require some source level tweaks

Well, it didn't really work, but someone told what I should be doing.

but part of the coolness I found with Gentoo is the very active user/support community and the tons of HowTos and guides.

Instead of visiting the FreeBSD website, where I could have found that FreeBSD offers a bewildering collection of well-written documentation in almost every imaginable format, I decided that The Handbook [freebsd.org],
the Books and Articles Online section [freebsd.org], Publications [freebsd.org], Web Resources [freebsd.org], A Section For Newbies [freebsd.org] or The Documentation Project [freebsd.org], or reading the documentation in /usr/share/doc, manpages (also available online [freebsd.org], or subscribing to the mailing list or reading its online archives, or the newsgroups, didn't fit with the way I do things. Instead, I found some forum using Google's I'm Feeling Lucky that has little or nothing to do with FreeBSD but is definitely better than all those places I didn't visit.

Unless they've made a quantum leap in improvements, FreeBSD would NOT be my choice for a SATA raid server.

I firmly believe my anecdotal experience qualifies me to offer non-sequitors with hyperbole but without embarassment.

Re:Journaling Filesystem

[nbritton]

FreeBSD has journaling ufs2 in the works:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2005-December/059079.html [freebsd.org]

Scott Long also touches on the subject in a interview he did for the bsdtalk podcast show:
http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2006/02/bsdtalk017-int erview-with-freebsd.html [blogspot.com]

Rebuilding world

[nubbie]

Besure to check out http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/makeworld.html [freebsd.org] on how to rebuild world. No need to reinstall when you can rebuild the OS yourself.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[sp0rk173]

Interesting. When i first set up my SATA-RAIDable box, i was a big Gentoo fan and a big FreeBSD fan. I first tried to install gentoo on it, but had nothing but headaches. I wanted to have the entire system, all paritions, striping, which means the installer had to detect both drives as identical and RAIDable. Gentoo didn't do that. So i grabbed my FreeBSD install CD (it was 5.x at the time), fired that puppy up. In the dmesg output on boot i noticed that it found both my SATA drives, created an arX device (the device used for disk arrays), and i was able to partition and install the OS across both the drives as if they were one without any problems at all. Gentoo was not this simple of a process, so it lost out to FreeBSD.

Differing experiences, eh? But I guess mine was hardware raid, afterall, and that is a difference for sure. Though, I have software raid setup on my FreeBSD file server, which was extremely easy after reading this page [freebsd.org]. I guess if you don't know where to look, things are difficult? Good thing all the FreeBSD documentation is centralized and easy to browse, eh?

I guess it also helps that i'm well-versed in ports. Though, getting X up and running in FreeBSD is EXACTLY THE SAME (not similar, EXACTLY THE SAME -THEY ARE THE SAME SET OF PROGRAMS!) as it is in Gentoo, after you get X installed. The process there is pretty similar, though.

Re:Journaling Filesystem

[Anonymous Coward]

You still have to run fsck, and yes, it can run in the background, but it *still has to run*.

Actually it doesn't need to run. The file system is consistent and you can start using it right away at boot. The only issue an background fsck would clear up is that there may be some freed space (via rm(1) or rmdir(1)) that is still marked as allocated, so it isn't available.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[ffflala]

I write this as a FreeBSD user who just about went crazy trying to configure X the first time (ah, the XFree86 menu...) The documentation CAN be improved, as often you won't know precisely what you need to look up to solve your problems. Not to insult you further with accusations of not following instructions, but did you also try this:

# xorgcfg -textmode

You didn't mention using this line:

# Xorg -config xorg.conf.new

To test your X configuration after you configured X using this line.

# Xorg -configure

After this I find I have to add the whichever of the following lines are missing in 'Section "Screen"' to the xorg.conf.new file:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

The

xorgcfg -textmode

option above lets you do so interactively instead of manually editing xorg.conf.new. Anyway all of those examples were in the FreeBSD handbook section on X-11 Configuration (Chapter 5.4). http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/x-config.html [freebsd.org] While the documentation (particularly the indexing) can be much improved, I've found that particularly in terms of initial setup I initially read right over the solutions the first time through. In my experience, getting FreeBSD up and running has far outweighed the initial investment of a bit of patience required for the learning process.

Re:Any reason to switch?

[The OPTiCIAN]

Interesting. I switched *to* freebsd a couple of weekends ago - 6.1RC1 and was stunned when it picked up my raid controller in the installation process. It's a piece of shit promise controller that the manufacturers claimed supported linux when I bought it but of course only supported 2.4 for people running long-obsolete versions redhat or suse. Yet freebsd just picked it up and everything has worked as expected. I can remove a disk and it complains, put it back and it syncs (RAID1).

I had some troubles getting X working properly as well but did in the end. It's a bit stupid the hoops you have to jump through to set up X in 2006 but there ya go. I did a quick writeup here: http://stable.cowoh.org/2006/05/05/linux-users-adj usting-to-in-freebsd-or-solaris/ [cowoh.org] If you think of any more commands I should mention in my list let me know.

Re:BSD and clusters

[synthespian]

Building a High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD
Brooks Davis, Michael AuYeung, Gary Green, Craig Lee
The Aerospace Corporation
El Segundo, CA
{brooks,lee,mauyeung} at aero.org, Gary.B.Green at notes.aero.org
© 2003 The Aerospace Corporation
Presented at BSDCon 2003, September 8-12 2003.

http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon200 3/ [freebsd.org]

Grid Computing with FreeBSD
Brooks Davis
The Aerospace Corporation
El Segundo, CA
{brooks,lee} at aero.org
© 2004 The Aerospace Corporation
Presented at the UseBSD SIG of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 27 - July 2, 2004, Boston, MA.

http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/usebsd200 4/ [freebsd.org]