Juli is coming to an end so there should be a new article on the Eerie Linux blog! Here it is. It’s not about a single technical topic, though. More of a “meta” article. Im writing about what I’d like to be writing about soon! No, I haven’t been on vacation or anything. Sometimes things just don’t work out as planned. More on that in a second.

Illumos!

Have you noticed that I changed the header graphic? In 2016 I added beastie and puffy. And now there’s also the Illumos phoenix. Being a Unix lover, I’ve long felt that I’m really missing something in knowing next to nothing about the former Sun platform. Doing just a little bit of experimentation, I’ve become somewhat fascinated with the Solaris / Illumos world.

It’s Unix, so I know my way around for the most basic things. But it’s quite different from *BSD and Linux that I work with on a daily base – and from what I can say so far, definitely not for the worse. The system left an impression on me of being well engineered and offering interesting or even beautiful solutions for common problems! I can’t remember the last time when something in Linux-space struck me as being beautifully crafted – which is no wonder given the fact that all the tools are developed separately and are only bundled together to form a complete operating system by the distributions. While it usually works, the aspect of a consistent OS with a closely coordinated userland was one of the strong points that drew me towards *BSD. Obviously the same is true for the various Illumos distributions.

Since I’m really just starting my journey, I don’t have that much to say, yet. I plan on doing an interview with an OmniOS user who has switched over from FreeBSD not too long ago and hope that I’ll be able to arrange something. Other than that I’ll have to do some reading and will probably visit the official Solaris, too, even though I’m all for Open Source. When I feel capable of writing something remotely useful, I plan on presenting the various Illumos distributions and their strong points. Might take me some time, though, but from now on several Solaris/Illumos topics are on my todo list.

Illumos people reading this: If you’d like me to write about your OS, please help me by making some suggestions of topics for beginners! That would be very much appreciated.

BSD router

The article series about the custom-built BSD router is still the most popular one on my blog. Given that so many people are interested in this topic, I wanted to write a follow-up for quite some time now. Since the newest version of OPNsense (19.7) was released this month, I decided to finally pick that topic. Would have been nice to do a fresh reinstall and cover what has changed.

Also there have been many new firmware releases for the APU2 since I covered it. I was rather excited when I learned (in January or so) that they had finally enabled the ECC feature for the RAM! Other stuff happened, too, so I’d definitely have something to play with and to write about.

There’s only one problem… As of exactly this month, I don’t have a working APU2 anymore. If you have children, keep your stuff out of their reach! It doesn’t make that great a toy, anyway.

So this topic has to be postponed due to lack of hardware. But I will get a new one sometime and then write about it. I already have some ideas on what to there for a second mini series.

Ravenports

Another thing that I’d have liked to write about is my favorite packaging system, Ravenports. There’s a pretty big thing coming soon (I hope), but it’s not there, yet. So no new issue of the “raven report” this month!

Other than that big change, I still have the other issue on my todo list: Re-bootstrap on FreeBSD i386. I’ve done that once (before the toolchain update to gcc 8) and will do it again as I find the time. Of course right now it makes sense to wait for the anticipated new component to land first!

I’ve also been thinking about writing a bootstrap script. Probably I’ll give it a shot – and if it can do i386, I’ll have that covered, too.

HardenedBSD

This has been on my list for over a year now, too. I took a quick look at that project and like what they do very much. It’s basically FreeBSD with lots and lots of security enhancements, built and maintained by a small team of people dedicated to make FreeBSD more secure. Why a separate project, then? For the simple reason that FreeBSD is a huge project where several parties have various interests in the OS and where getting very invasive changes in is sometimes not that easy. So HardenedBSD is developed in parallel to give the developers all the freedom to make changes as they please.

Except for all the security related stuff there are a few things where the system is different from upstream FreeBSD, too. I’ll need to explore this a little more and start actually doing stuff with HardenedBSD. Then I’ll definitely write about it here on the blog.

Ports and packages

In 2017 I wrote about package management and Ports on FreeBSD in a mini series of articles. It ended with building software from ports. Actually it wasn’t meant to end right there, as I had at least two more articles in the pipe. I’ll be concentrating on this one and hope to have a blog post out in early August.

Other stuff

My interest in the ARM platform has not vanished and I want to do more with it (and then probably blog about it, too). Also I want to revisit FreeBSD jails and still have to get my series on email done… And I’m not done with the “power user” series, either.

So there’s more than enough topics and far too little time. Let’s see what I can get done this year and what will have to wait!