VX weblog

My current dedicated server provider in Europe is the german company Hetzner. They support FreeBSD but use a non-standard network configuration. It is not very well documented how to properly configure network settings on FreeBSD to have a fully functional IPv4 and IPv6 network. In this article I am giving an example how to configure it properly just with the /etc/rc.conf file. Continue reading "FreeBSD network configuration on Hetzner servers" »

In my last article, I have introduced my new smartphone Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and mentioned the open source SSH client ConnectBot. It is a great application but it was by far not optimized for the hardware keyboard of my smartphone. I have also tried the alternative solution Irssiconnectbot, which was little better but still not really usable - important keys were missing.

So I decided to fork, add some features from Irssiconnectbot, add ssh agent from Roberto Tyley, fix several bugs, add some tweaks by myself and optimize for Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and Xperia mini pro. The new application is named VX ConnectBot. Continue reading "VX ConnectBot" »

My well-proven companion Nokia N810 used for remote administration of FreeBSD servers was getting old, slow and outdated. It was my mobile SSH device for the last 4 years (probably one of the best solutions at time of purchase). Unfortunately, it was lacking phone functions (Bluetooth and WiFi only).

So I decided to go for a new device. I needed a smartphone with a decent screen, a hardware keyboard and an acceptable operating system (I need a SSH client). There are not many devices with an acceptable hardware keyboard on the European market. After a long decision process I chose the Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and it am happy with my choice. Continue reading "My new Android smartphone" »

This year's Central European BSD_day will be on November 5th, 2011 in my home city Bratislava, Slovakia. The one-day event is intended for everyone interested in BSD operating systems and is organized by me (Martin Matuška, mm@), Gábor Páli (pgj@) and YNET. Several BSD developers will give a talk, including myself. Entry is free.

More information at the event homepage: http://bsdday.eu/2011
Social network links: Facebook, LinkedIn

The BSDA certification exam will be offered at the event.

A new article of mine with the title "mfsBSD – The Swiss Army Knife for FreeBSD system administrators" was published in the August issue of the free online publication BSD Magazine. The target group of this magazine are users and friends of BSD operating systems.

The article contains an introduction to mfsBSD and two tutorials:
1. Installing ZFS-on-root FreeBSD with mfsBSD
2. Setting up network boot with mfsBSD (pxeboot or PXELINUX)


Link to the free issue: BSD Magazine 08/2011

In my past article "Tutorial: native ZFS on Ubuntu and Fedora Linux" I have given a tutorial how to install ZFS on Linux from the KQ Infotech github repository. This tutorial can be considered obsolete as the company KQ Infotech has been acquired by STEC, Inc (company with focus on SSD). Their ZFS on Linux project was assumably closed, as there is no more serious activity at their github repository. Continue reading "Native ZFS for Linux: development continues at..." »

The version 28 of the ZFS filesystem has been merged to FreeBSD 8-STABLE as of revision 222741 (June 6th, 2011). There are many FreeBSD users of 8.2-RELEASE (RELENG_8_2) which may want to take advantage of the new ZFS version (v28) before 8.3-RELEASE.
For these users I am providing a patch against the RELENG_8_2 source tree, updated kernel module and binaries and mfsBSD ISO images for testing and rescue. Continue reading "ZFS v28 for FreeBSD 8.2" »

In this tutorial I am going to show how mfsBSD can be booted over the network. This tutorial expects the DHCP server (ISC) and TFTP server to be on a i386/amd64 FreeBSD machine using the same IP adress. If this is not the case, configuration may be different.

What do you need:

• a boot server (DHCP, TFTP) with FreeBSD sources
• mfsBSD (ISO from webpage or self-built)
• some files from a installed sysutils/syslinux port (if you want pxelinux)
• a network bootable (virtual) machine

Continue reading "Tutorial: FreeBSD network boot with mfsBSD (and..." »

Many FreeBSD users (e.g. server admins) are interested in having their binaries run as fast as possible. There many options of improving the speed of the binaries - we can use different compilers and for each compiler different optimizations. But what combination is best for which processor?

We have benchmarked the perl binary compiled with gcc from the FreeBSD base system against gcc from ports and the new clang compiler. We have tested different optimizations on 8 different processors, all on the amd64 platform. The benchmark software we used is the perlbench benchmark running on Perl 5.12.3 on top of FreeBSD 8.2. This benchmark can also be used as a reference for users using other scripting languages (e.g. PHP, Python or Ruby) as these use similiar structures and methods.

We are benchmarking speed of the generated binaries, not the speed of compiling, as this is most important for us. "Compile once, run many." Continue reading "FreeBSD Compiler Benchmark: gcc-base vs...." »

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE was announced on February 24, 2011.

As we have been experiencing some problems we had to install several patches that didn't make it into the release but I consider them important or useful. Most annoying was the swap panic problem, followed by two ZFS problems (page activation if using sendfile(2) and clock_t overflow), so we had to backport these patches to 8.2-RELEASE. Continue reading "Backported patches for FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE" »