Published on August 12, 2010
Now that the press release is out, I am finally able to talk freely about a project I have working on for almost close to a year now.
Pretty much since the time that The NYC BSD Users Group was formed, The NY Internet Company have donated a full cabinet and a 10 Mb internet connection to NYCBUG. We used that space to host our website and mailing lists, hardware for developers and mirrors for all the major BSD projects.
In October of 2009, I received an email inviting me to a grand opening party at NYI’s new state of the art data center located in Bridgewater, NJ. I asked some folks on core@ if they thought it would be worthwhile to approach NYI to see if they would be willing to donate a few cabinets so we could build out a FreeBSD mirror on the east coast. gnn, jhb and I had a very informal meeting with Phil from NYI and after asking him if they would be willing to provide us with a few cabinets, some power and bandwidth, without thought or hesitation he said yes. The possibility of putting a mirror of FreeBSD.org on the east coast quickly became possible.
Fast forward to today, with very generous donations from NYI, iX systems, Juniper Networks and Exatrol we are pleased to announce the FreeBSD east coast mirror.
We now have a fully distributed infrastructure that allows us to remain online in the event of a disaster at the west coast facility, spread our traffic among two different locations, provides us to enough power and bandwidth to scale out our packing building cluster and also puts an official FreeBSD mirror much closer to people in Europe.
However, I feel that the most impressive and interesting feature of this datacenter is that it is composed entirely of products based on FreeBSD in some way shape or form.
The number of companies choosing to use FreeBSD in their products when they care about performance, reliability and scalability are growing. We are now at the point where you can deploy an entire datacenter without having to deal with non unix like operating systems. Not only does this east coast mirror add necessary and critical infrastructure to continue to development of FreeBSD, but it can also become a model for future data centers you deploy.
In the near future, I plan to write more about the build out of this mirror as well as some of the technology behind it. Stay tuned.
Published on July 5, 2010
I keep a copy of the FreeBSD source and ports repository locally on disk so its possible for me to work offline and still be able to review the revision history of a file or views diffs. I have been running csup from root’s crontab at night to keep my local copy fairly up to date.
However, I rewrote the script to be a job that is executed by periodic and then have the output of csup included with the “daily run output” emails I get each morning so I can quickly see what was committed to the tree.
Place a copy of 600.csup into /usr/local/etc/periodic/daily (you may have to create this directory if it does not exist)
To enable the script, add the following to /etc/periodic.conf.local (which may need to be created if it doesn’t exist)
daily_csup_enable=”YES”
daily_csup_supfile=”/home/skreuzer/cvsup/freebsd-cvs-supfile”
One thing to keep in mind is that all scripts the get executed by periodic daily are run at 3:01am localtime so it will cause a huge spike in traffic if you have lots of machines connecting to the same csup server all at the same time.
Published on July 1, 2010
The New York City BSD Conference (NYCBSDCon) is the main technical conference on the US East Coast for the BSD community to get together to share and gain knowledge, to network with like-minded people, and to have fun. This event is organized by members of the New York City *BSD Users Group (NYC*BUG).
The NYCBSDCon program committee is accepting submissions for imaginative, embryonic and energizing presentations surrounding the BSD operating systems. We are looking to attract a wide range of speakers and attendees; therefore, topics of interest range from the esoteric to development to practical, everyday sysadmin life. Of course, original topics are preferred in most cases.
Each talk is expected to be 45-50 minutes, including a few minutes for questions and answers. All presentations will be recorded for audio and video. Presenters will have audio/visual and network connectivity.
Abstracts for presentations are due July 31, 2010.
Authors of accepted submissions should be able to provide the full presentation for publication on NYCBSDCon sponsored mediums. Further
instructions will follow notification of acceptance. Submissions accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement or a product advertisement will be rejected.
Abstract submissions should be emailed to cfp@nycbsdcon.org in text, ps or pdf format.
Conference Location: Cooper Union, New York, NY
Conference Dates: November 12-14, 2010
Important Milestones:
Jul 01 CFP Released
Jul 31 CFP Deadline
Aug 15 Notification of Accepted and Rejected Presentations
Do not let travel and accommodation concerns get in the way of your submissions; we may have some opportunities to subsidize speakers, but it is too early to provide any definitive answers.
We encourage you to join the public mailing list at http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/nycbsdcon to keep abreast of conference happenings.
For questions, concerns or comments, please contact us here: info@nycbsdcon.org.
Published on June 21, 2010
We recently hit some big milestones in regards to the planning of NYCBSDCon 2010.
The contract with the Cooper Union has been signed so we officially have a venue and date for the conference. The conference will be held on November 12th-14th 2010. A more formal announcement will go out sometime this week and the call for papers will open on July 1st.
An unmoderated mailing list for conference-related discussion has been created. It can be a forum for coordinating housing, transportation/car-pooling, etc. We recommend all potential attendees subscribe to the list.
Finally, we will be having an organizing meeting in mid July, with details to be announced. As in years past, we want to have a broad layer of people involved in organizing and running the conference.
Published on June 1, 2010
On May 24th, 2010, License support files (bsd.licenses.mk and bsd.licenses.db.mk) from Google Summer of Code 2008/2009 were committed. Unfortunately, the Porters Handbook has not been updated to reflect this change.
For information on how to incorporate these new KNOBs into your ports, please review the Ports License Auditing Infrastructure page on the FreeBSD Wiki.
Published on May 26, 2010
The site for NYCBSDCon 2010 is now live although we have not made a public announcement yet. Whats different about this year is that it will be held at Manhattan’s prestigious Cooper Union on November 12-14, 2010.
We are going to announce the call for papers on July 1st so stay tuned.
Published on March 11, 2010
Today marks my 1 year anniversary as a FreeBSD developer. I opened my first Problem Report in 2006 and after roughly three years of hacking on the ports system, wxs@ offered to mentor me and on March 11th, 2009 I received an email saying that the port-mgr@ team approved his request for a commit bit for me. I happened to be on vacation in Mexico when I got the email, and just like that a good day turned even better.
The first port I ever created was for mail/p5-WWW-Hotmail. I was working for an Internet Startup and I took the job simply because they were using FreeBSD and I never had an opportunity to use FreeBSD in a production environment. One of the tasks that landed in my lap was to automate the process of checking to make sure that our newsletter was not being delivered to the spam folder of the 3 big emails providers. I took a day or so to learn how to make ports and packages to make it easier for me to roll out all the perl modules I needed.
I wasn’t too happy working at that company, and after a while hacking on ports became a form of therapy for me and I started to get more and more involved with the FreeBSD project and I eventually ended up here.
In the past year I managed to make 148 commits and introduced several new ports into the tree. As of today, there are 21,636 ports available, and it feels pretty good to be a small part of that. While I would have liked to have been able to dedicate more time, other things kept getting in the way. My 1 year resolution is to figure out a way to better manage my time and try and set aside a few hours per week to hack on ports.
I want to say thank you to wxs@, because without him, I wouldn’t be a part of this. I was the first person he mentored, and I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten the chance to work with him. He is extremely bright and very patience and just an all around good guy. Even today when I paint myself into a corner, I can always ask him for help and every time he has managed to guide me in the direction I wanted to go. I owe a great deal to him and consider him to be a very valuable addition to the FreeBSD developer community as a whole.
Published on March 6, 2010
Thanks to a generous donation by Nathan Whitehorn, a Sun SunFire v210 is sitting on the floor of my office waiting to have FreeBSD installed on it. Since this is the fastest sparc64 machine we have, Mark Linimon and I are planning on using it as a package building machine. However, if there is any other developer who would like to use it as a reference platform, please get in touch with me and I will set you up with access.
In the past, due to our limited access to the sparc64 platform, we were not able to support this architecture as well as we would have liked to. Packages available for sparc64 have fallen behind packages for other architectures such as i386 and amd64. However, once this machine is up and running, I have a strong feeling it will become a valuable resource to the FreeBSD developers working on making sparc64 a Tier-1 architecture
Published on February 16, 2010
One of the things that has been on my TODO list for quite some time was to port the Arduino IDE over to FreeBSD. Fortunately, Warren Block took the time to sit down work on a port and he is please to announce that a preliminary version of it is ready for testing.
I’ll be testing it out over the next few days and I encourage you to do the same. As always, any feedback or patches will be much appreciated. If all goes well, I will be committing it to the tree in the very near future.
The port can be found on GitHub: http://github.com/wblock/Arduino-port-for-FreeBSD
Published on January 23, 2010
Every once and a while the topic of coding bounties will come up, usually by someone who needs a specific feature added but doesn’t have the know how to do so.
As of today, the best way to go about this is to contact the developer directly. Unfortunately, The FreeBSD Foundation is unable to assist since they cannot accept targeted donations.
iX Systems has created a simple web based application for posting bounties, getting developers and sponsors on board, posting the committed code in a browser
viewable format, and then handle final payout upon completion.
They are looking for PHP developers interested in helping develop the site. In addition, they are looking for a team leader that could make sure developing contributors are actually involved so that the final payoff can be shared accordingly.
If you are interested in getting involved, contact Matt Olander
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