Published January 22, 2020

To BSD, or not to BSD: that is the question and this week's topic. We also cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

To BSD, or not to BSD

Last week brought a bit of controversy on different community websites, after article called "Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD" has been shared around. It is a opinionated blog post discussing Linux problems and presenting reasons to switch to BSD.

There is an interesting response "Should you migrate from Linux to BSD? It depends". While author agrees, that there may be reasons to migrate to BSD, they think, that mentioned article lists the wrong reasons. Then they take a look at the points, one by one.

BSDSec

Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. Execution Unit state was not cleared on context switch with Intel Gen9 graphics hardware. Binary updates for the amd64 and i386 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. Source code patches can be found on the respective errata page: https://www.openbsd.org/errata65.html and https://www.openbsd.org/errata66.html. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.

News

The first report from the just concluded u2k20 hackathon (OpenBSD) comes from Alexandr Nedvedicky (sashan@).

With the relaunch of a certification for BSD professionals, the Linux Professional Institute wants to help support and raise awareness of the BSD projects. Watch the talk "LPI and BSD Working Together" by G Matthew Rice (from LCA 2020) and learn what's next for this undertaking and share your ideas in how LPI can make it valuable to the free software community.

Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand. This the first FreeBSD conference in Australia. Videos from the event are available as well.

There's a new server for BSDs on Discord. Discord itself doesn't seems to have a client version for BSD, but you can use browser or mobile version of their app.

How much Unix trivia do you know? Test your knowledge.

Tutorials

A FEMP stack, which is akin to a LEMP stack on Linux, is a collection of open-source software that is typically installed together to enable a FreeBSD server to host dynamic websites and web applications. FEMP is an acronym that stands for FreeBSD (operating system), Nginx (HTTP server), MySQL (database server), and PHP (programming language to process dynamic PHP content). In this tutorial, we'll set up components of a FEMP stack on a FreeBSD 12.1 server using pkg , the FreeBSD package manager.

Last week, we have talked about why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of FreeBSD based infrastructure. Today, we can learn how to run syslog-ng in jail with help of BastilleBSD. There is even more simple way using a prepared template.

Planning to upgrade FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1? There is a set of notes while cranking through upgrading about 30 machines from 11.3 to 12.1 since they are not specific and this process isn't very well documented.

ZFS pools can be made with a single disk, then turned into a mirror after the fact by adding additional drives. This is especially useful for staging or homelabs, where you might not have the money upfront to buy both drives, or want to test it before spending time resilvering.

FreshPorts runs on a FreeBSD server which hosts multiple jails. Two of these jails run PostgreSQL server. When upgrading from one version of PostgreSQL to another, they run pg_dump in the new jail, and load the backup into that database server. Learn step by step how they do this process.

WireGuard is quickly gaining popularity in the VPN marketplace due to its speed, simplicity, and modern cryptography standards. Starting with FreeNAS version 11.3-RC1, it is possible to connect your NAS directly to a WireGuard network with a few easy steps.

Forgot Swap? With this quick video tutorial you can learn how to add a Swap to your FreeBSD install.

More

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2019, Wireguard on OpenBSD Router, Amazon now has FreeBSD/ARM 12, pkgsrc-2019Q4, The Joys of UNIX Keyboards, OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, and more..

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to providing summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. The latest is from 2020-01-20.

In Other BSDs for 2020/01/18 is out, too.

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