This book is something that I have been looking for since I started with FreeBSD back in 1997. I needed a practical book with working examples of how to optimize my FreeBSD installations for various types of applications. And I never found that book, until I recently decided to write one.

"Network Administration with FreeBSD 7" is unique in several ways:

• I tried to cover the exciting new features and improvements introduced in FreeBSD 7


• It is full of tips and tricks on how to optimize your installation from optimizing disk I/O, network, virtual memory, etc.


• It covers IPv4 and IPv6 configuration as well and bridging and routing in FreeBSD


• It has working examples of different IPSec, GRE, PPP and GIF scenarios


• I tried to cover Jail virtualization in working real world examples


• Keeping your system up to date and customizing system for specific applications is thoroughly covered

I tried to stop telling stories in the book and give more real world examples instead, so reading this book would not make you smile ;-)

An article named Tunneling with FreeBSD (taken from book) is also available on PACKT website.

Kudos to WebKit team for their great browser!

The upcoming release of FreeBSD 7 is a major milestone for all FreeBSD developers and users. It is the most amazing release I have ever had the chance to play with. There are plenty of new features and many improvements, especially in networking (which is my area of interest).
I have had this chance to play with MySQL 5.1 running on FreeBSD 7 on top of 8 cores of Xeon processor in 64-bit mode. My impression was that it was almost as fast as kris's benchmarks and totally kicked linux 2.6 in threading and SMP performance.

This is something I expected to see in FreeBSD 6. However FreeBSD seems to be catching up with linux again.

The project needs help from community to test and report issues back to the developer in order to improve the software. However it is worth giving a try on your Ubuntu box.

On a related note, I was thinking of porting this into the package repository of various Linux distributions. :-)

So here you are: The new theme. I will definitely update it in a few days to make it look better.

Create Instruments with DTrace
Monitor system activity from high-level application behavior down to the operating system kernel, all thanks to the power of DTrace and the instrument builder.

Sounds familiar? Yes, its the same DTrace you know from Solaris (also in FreeBSD). It would be very interesting for system developers to get the best out of OS X core system. Of course, there is an eye-candy interface for using DTrace called Xray.

Self-Tuning TCP
Let Leopard adjust TCP buffer size automatically. Get optimum application performance, especially in high-bandwidth/high-latency environments.

Using a BSD kernel, OS X already enjoys a fine-grained TCP/IP protocol stack, which supports latest enhancements and extensions. This self-tuning feature will definitely improve the network throughput in many situations. However I hope this can be disabled since some expert users prefer to configure the low level TCP/IP parameters based on their experience.

Application-Based Firewall
Gain more control over the built-in firewall. Specify the behavior of specific applications to either allow or block incoming connections.

This one was really missing in previous releases and many people were relying on Little Snitch to achieve this feature. Of course I believe brilliant people in Apple were smart enough to make it so it does not annoy users like windows firewall does.

Sandboxing
Enjoy a higher level of protection. Sandboxing prevents hackers from hijacking applications to run their own code by making sure applications only do what they’re intended to do. It restricts an application’s file access, network access, and ability to launch other applications. Many Leopard applications — such as Bonjour, Quick Look, and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed so hackers can’t exploit them.

Something that I am sure has equivalent in Windows, almost like running an application in a chrooted environment. However it sounds more complicated. This will hopefully improve the security in application level and reduce application level exploits (buffer overflow,...) risks.

Multicore Optimized
Take full advantage of modern architectures with multiple processor cores with improved scheduling, memory management, and processor affinity algorithms.

OS X was obviously not optimized for multi-core systems (despite the fact that apple has been shipping multi-core systems for more than a year). This enhancement will definitely improve the core system performance by getting the most out of processor power.

Conclusion

After using OS X for more than a year now, its my favorite Desktop environment. I like the eye-candy user interface while enjoying enterprise grade FreeBSD system core. I cannot wait to upgrade to the latest release, but I am certain that it is worth to wait a few days more.

# uname -a
FreeBSD shaun.farrokhi.net 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #10: Sun Oct 14 11:33:16 IRST 2007     root@shaun.farrokhi.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SERVER  i386

Enough for an introduction to roundcube.

I have been the maintainer of this project in FreeBSD ports tree for more than a year now, and tried to keep the port up to date using the snapshots I make once in a while.
Using ports, you can easily install and update roundcube on a FreeBSD server.

If you are interested, there are a few tutorials on the net that can help you installing roundcube on your server and get the most out of it:

- Setup Roundcube on FreeBSD
- HOWTO: Install Roundcube Webmail from SVN (was CVS) on FreeBSD
- HOW TO: Setup RoundCube Webmail on Your Server

I have been lazy in updating the ports I maintain in ports tree recently. However a number of patches are ready to be tested and committed once I find sometime during next weekend.

$ host -tAAAA www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
$ host -tAAAA www.l.google.com
www.l.google.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo.com
www.yahoo.com is an alias for www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net
www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA lb1.www.ms.akadns.net
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.paypal.com
www.paypal.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.cisco.com
www.cisco.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.juniper.net
www.juniper.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.ietf.org
www.ietf.org has IPv6 address 2610:a0:c779:b::d1ad:35b4

$ host -tAAAA www.iana.org
www.iana.org has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.arin.net
www.arin.net has IPv6 address 2001:500:4:1::80

$ host -tAAAA www.runningipv6.net
www.runningipv6.net has IPv6 address 2001:1af8:2:5::2

$ host -tAAAA playground.sun.com
playground.sun.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6forum.com
www.ipv6forum.com has IPv6 address 2001:a18:1:20::22

$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6tf.org
www.ipv6tf.org has IPv6 address 2001:7f9:1000:1::103

1- Safari is a very nice and polished browser, but has major problems with internationalized pages and crashes once in a while. Does not support plug-ins. Not my preferred browser at all. Excellent for simple searches and general web browsing. However, the development builds (Webkit nightly builds) shows there are numerous improvements I hope we see soon in next releases.

2- Firefox was my favorite browser in windows. But in OS X it is far from perfect. Its very slow, and is a different beast in comparison with other OS X softwares. It is excellent to have all those nice plug-ins I had on Windows, here on a Mac. Firefox in OS X is very slow and is no way like its windows version. Firefox is a software which is designed for Windows, not for Mac.

3- Camino is the little sister of Firefox, using the same engine with a Mac interface. It is something between Safari and Firefox. So far I had the best web browsing experience with this browser on Mac. However, It is almost as unstable as safari. And no plug-in support. But its very fast and feels much more like a OS X native software than Firefox.

4- Other browsers including Opera, Shiira, SeaMonkey, ... . I would suggest you do not waste time on these browsers (on Mac). They seem to lost their goal. People want to enjoy web browsing. I really don't want to switch from one browser to other on my daily browsing journey.

I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (which is now free) at home because it is very light-weight and runs FreeBSD 7 very well. But at work I get the most out of VMWare Server ( free, too! ). VMWare is much bulkier and heavier, but gives you fine control over virtual machines. And officially supports FreeBSD and Solaris (my favorite ones) and has vmware-tools package for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Netware. However vmware-tools does not work on my fbsd7 installation (dumps core), but I don't care because I don't run X and use if_le driver and do fine tuning manually.

If you have limited resources, I strongly suggest Microsoft Virtual PC. Though it does not officially support non-microsoft operating systems, I have several FreeBSD installation on it without any problem. Excellent for trying out system for a limited time. But if you are planning to make serious use of your virtual FreeBSD, VMware would be your only choice as it officially supports FreeBSD (even runs 64-bit edition, but I never tried that) and runs X very well.

If you are thinking of running FreeBSD on VMWare, Ivan Voras' article has some very useful that would make life much easier.

First of all, if you are looking for 3D effects (Beryl and xgl) stuff, just go away and use Fedora or OpenSUSE. PC-BSD is not loaded with such stuff. Its only a functional and usable desktop, loaded with all necessary stuff. If you feel you need more packages than the pre-installed ones, feel free to take a look at PBIDIR for a pre-compiled package of most major open-source softwares.

Only a few things I noticed during the installation and using PC-BSD:

- Graphical installer is easy and powerful
- System configures a simple firewall which is enough for desktop use.
- There is a automatic online update mechanism in place. Excellent for novice users.
- It asks if you are installing a Server or Desktop during installation. So you can use it as server if you are interested.
- Window Manager is KDE 3.5.5 which looks good and easy to use as desktop
- All these stuff are running on FreeBSD 6.1
- HAL works very good. I tried a few removable stuff like external DVD-RW and USB thumb drivers, and it was as easy as just plugging in the hardware.
- It looks for SMP hardware, so no kernel re-compile is needed.

Conclusion: If you are looking for a hassle-free deskop OS that works on your old hardware, and you don't want blazing 3D effects, PCBSD is a very good choice for you.