From zippy1981 at gmail.com  Fri Aug  6 14:50:14 2010
From: zippy1981 at gmail.com (Justin Dearing)
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 14:50:14 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] FreeNAS as a windows domain controller,
	and off the shelf FreeNAS 	devices
Message-ID: <AANLkTikJrrMxGcU_JM8_HvCHuyZeUPH6de6LJ3CUR8nN@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

I'm considering FreeNAS. My main concern is windows domain controller
support.

I know it runs Samba, so it can be made to work as a domain controller. The
question is, does it work out of the box, where I can click an LDAP check
box, a Samba Checkbox, and have a windwos domain controller. If thats not
the case, I might as well just install a stock BSD on the server.

Finally, has anyone bought a device with FreeNAS preinstalled?

Justin Dearing
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From mark.saad at ymail.com  Fri Aug  6 17:28:32 2010
From: mark.saad at ymail.com (Mark Saad)
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 14:28:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] FreeNAS as a windows domain controller,
	and off the shelf FreeNAS  devices
Message-ID: <781183.41016.qm@web35303.mail.mud.yahoo.com>


Justin

--- On Fri, 8/6/10, Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com>
Subject: [nycbug-talk] FreeNAS as a windows domain controller, and off the shelf FreeNAS  devices
To: "talk" <talk at lists.nycbug.org>
Date: Friday, August 6, 2010, 6:50 PM

Hi,
I'm considering FreeNAS. My main concern is windows domain controller support.?
I know it runs Samba, so it can be made to work as a domain controller. The question is, does it work out of the box, where I can click an LDAP check box, a Samba Checkbox, and have a windows domain controller. If that's not the case, I might as well just install a stock BSD on the server.
 
I don't believe that FreeNAS has a ldap server built in. I think the ldap options are there for you to have the built in samba use ldap auth from an external server. 

Gutting FreeNAS to make a LDAP appliance would be a cool idea , anyone interested ?


Finally, has anyone bought a device with FreeNAS preinstalled?
Justin Dearing

While I have not personally purchased one I know iXSystems uses it on their higher-end nas devices.   




--
Mark Saad
mark.saad at ymail.com



From nikolai at fetissov.org  Fri Aug  6 21:54:39 2010
From: nikolai at fetissov.org (Nikolai Fetissov)
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 21:54:39 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] August 2010 meeting audio
Message-ID: <b1f39cb684c3f8450a63a084d8b78cc9.squirrel@www.geekisp.com>

Folks,

Audio of Ivan's OpenSSL talk is available at:
http://www.fetissov.org/public/nycbug/nycbug-08-04-10.mp3

Cheers,
--
 Nikolai



From zippy1981 at gmail.com  Sat Aug  7 12:45:00 2010
From: zippy1981 at gmail.com (Justin Dearing)
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 12:45:00 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] FreeNAS as a windows domain controller,
	and off the 	shelf FreeNAS devices
In-Reply-To: <781183.41016.qm@web35303.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <781183.41016.qm@web35303.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTimf2G7f3mv7QcLr+fSbLiaEZGbjOLw8xs2FYvr0@mail.gmail.com>

Hey,

Thanks everyone for all the on and off list help.

I looked into iXsystems.  First some clarification. I actually want this for
my house, not for an employer/client. I want domain based authentication for
my two laptops, my fiancee's two computers, and anything else I bring into
the house that speaks LDAP. So I want a small appliance not a 1 or 2 unit
rack mount system. Something like a drobo

I'm an absolute nut about centralized authentication. Set samba 3 up
manually on old towers when I was younger and had more time to waste. I want
some of the heavy lifting done for me this time.

So the idea it to recreate this as follows:

   - Samba running with LDAP in Windows 2003 domain controller mode. This
   means any other unix machines in the house can auth against iit via pam
   ldap.
   - Small, energy efficient new appliance instead of old tower
   - Appliance disto of a BSD where most things work, but I can ssh in for
   the 1% of things that don't.
   - Bittorrent server on the NAS since thats the popular thing to do these
   days with NAS OSes



On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Mark Saad <mark.saad at ymail.com> wrote:

>
> Justin
>
> --- On Fri, 8/6/10, Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From: Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [nycbug-talk] FreeNAS as a windows domain controller, and off the
> shelf FreeNAS  devices
> To: "talk" <talk at lists.nycbug.org>
> Date: Friday, August 6, 2010, 6:50 PM
>
> Hi,
> I'm considering FreeNAS. My main concern is windows domain controller
> support.
> I know it runs Samba, so it can be made to work as a domain controller. The
> question is, does it work out of the box, where I can click an LDAP check
> box, a Samba Checkbox, and have a windows domain controller. If that's not
> the case, I might as well just install a stock BSD on the server.
>
> I don't believe that FreeNAS has a ldap server built in. I think the ldap
> options are there for you to have the built in samba use ldap auth from an
> external server.
>
> Gutting FreeNAS to make a LDAP appliance would be a cool idea , anyone
> interested ?
>
>
> Finally, has anyone bought a device with FreeNAS preinstalled?
> Justin Dearing
>
> While I have not personally purchased one I know iXSystems uses it on their
> higher-end nas devices.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark Saad
> mark.saad at ymail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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From zippy1981 at gmail.com  Sun Aug  8 00:05:37 2010
From: zippy1981 at gmail.com (Justin Dearing)
Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 00:05:37 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] FreeNAS as a windows domain controller,
	and off the 	shelf FreeNAS devices
In-Reply-To: <781183.41016.qm@web35303.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <781183.41016.qm@web35303.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikO+g8qR2+G57nPWbakptbPDGq==hX7obbkq8b8@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Mark Saad <mark.saad at ymail.com> wrote:

>
> Gutting FreeNAS to make a LDAP appliance would be a cool idea , anyone
> interested ?
>
>
Well I don't want to "gut" FreeNAS. I'd want to add it as a feature. I'd
also want the thing to serve files and all the other fun stuff it does.

Anyway, I'm going to install FreeNAS on virtualbox and see what it does out
of the box. Then I can see what needs to be modified.

Justin
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From mspitzer at gmail.com  Tue Aug 10 13:58:20 2010
From: mspitzer at gmail.com (Marc Spitzer)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:58:20 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
Message-ID: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>

Hello all,

I am looking for a simple remote disk trending software package.
There used to be something called sargent(sp?) that was simple and I
think did what I want but I have a unique ideas about spelling
sometimes or the other guy does and it is not showing up in my google
search.

here is my short list:
1: monitor multiple servers, snmp or agent based
2: some nice graphs and basic trending
3: web reporting and it would be nice if it had some grouping functions.

thanks,

marc
-- 
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
--Albert Camus

?The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people's money.
--Margaret Thatcher


From zippy1981 at gmail.com  Tue Aug 10 14:07:01 2010
From: zippy1981 at gmail.com (Justin Dearing)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:07:01 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd:  disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=GXN4AbtO9AcHYKkLFsDH3WHKiN_aJRt4Nv4uN@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
	<AANLkTi=GXN4AbtO9AcHYKkLFsDH3WHKiN_aJRt4Nv4uN@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=+WvzGyOUhubnjyEZg=CFgdGQ65iZ3-81jtep6@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 2:06 PM
Subject: Re: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
To: Marc Spitzer <mspitzer at gmail.com>


Well cacti does a little more than disk usage, but why not that its simple
to setup.

Its SNMP based btw.


On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Marc Spitzer <mspitzer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am looking for a simple remote disk trending software package.
> There used to be something called sargent(sp?) that was simple and I
> think did what I want but I have a unique ideas about spelling
> sometimes or the other guy does and it is not showing up in my google
> search.
>
> here is my short list:
> 1: monitor multiple servers, snmp or agent based
> 2: some nice graphs and basic trending
> 3: web reporting and it would be nice if it had some grouping functions.
>
> thanks,
>
> marc
> --
> Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
> --Albert Camus
>
>  The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
> of other people's money.
> --Margaret Thatcher
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Tue Aug 10 14:08:16 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:08:16 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C619590.5020705@ceetonetechnology.com>

On 08/10/10 13:58, Marc Spitzer wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am looking for a simple remote disk trending software package.
> There used to be something called sargent(sp?) that was simple and I
> think did what I want but I have a unique ideas about spelling
> sometimes or the other guy does and it is not showing up in my google
> search.
>
> here is my short list:
> 1: monitor multiple servers, snmp or agent based
> 2: some nice graphs and basic trending
> 3: web reporting and it would be nice if it had some grouping functions.
>

Are you just monitoring disk info?  And just usage?

Public or private network?

The recent 'ike method' is scripted df and du outputs over pub key auth.

Pipe to rrdtool.

No agent, no installs except pub keys.

If you just need output from the standard Unix tools, that route makes 
the most sense IMHO.

Even more simply, there's a disk space script at cyberciti.biz.

g


From zippy1981 at gmail.com  Tue Aug 10 14:15:00 2010
From: zippy1981 at gmail.com (Justin Dearing)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:15:00 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <4C619590.5020705@ceetonetechnology.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
	<4C619590.5020705@ceetonetechnology.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=-g5OmgCXau+7-O3ztBWy0MVObBDFxoswnsB_g@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 2:08 PM, George Rosamond <
george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:

> The recent 'ike method' is scripted df and du outputs over pub key auth.
>
>
On that note, if df and du don't match up by a lot, you some sort of alert
should be sent out to check for an open file handle to an inode without
without a file name.
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From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Tue Aug 10 14:17:49 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:17:49 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=-g5OmgCXau+7-O3ztBWy0MVObBDFxoswnsB_g@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>	<4C619590.5020705@ceetonetechnology.com>
	<AANLkTi=-g5OmgCXau+7-O3ztBWy0MVObBDFxoswnsB_g@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C6197CD.1090006@ceetonetechnology.com>

On 08/10/10 14:15, Justin Dearing wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 2:08 PM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com <mailto:george at ceetonetechnology.com>> wrote:
>
>     The recent 'ike method' is scripted df and du outputs over pub key auth.
>
>
> On that note, if df and du don't match up by a lot, you some sort of
> alert should be sent out to check for an open file handle to an inode
> without without a file name.
>

Yeah. . .the point is that your needs are the limit, but avoiding 
complex applications that you don't need if you can.

g


From siraaj at khandkar.net  Tue Aug 10 14:25:32 2010
From: siraaj at khandkar.net (Siraaj Khandkar)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:25:32 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <DF0C2891-C192-4967-85E2-87938CE0F16D@khandkar.net>

On 10 Aug 2010, at 13:58, Marc Spitzer wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am looking for a simple remote disk trending software package.
> There used to be something called sargent(sp?) that was simple and I
> think did what I want but I have a unique ideas about spelling
> sometimes or the other guy does and it is not showing up in my google
> search.
> 
> here is my short list:
> 1: monitor multiple servers, snmp or agent based
> 2: some nice graphs and basic trending
> 3: web reporting and it would be nice if it had some grouping functions.

symon:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon/

It's agent-based. You can monitor as much or as little as you want. Presentation pages are easily customized in its simple layout language. Been great to me on BSD systems, but not so much on Linux.

-- Siraaj Khandkar



From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Tue Aug 10 14:39:54 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:39:54 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] FBSD Foundation colocation
Message-ID: <4C619CFA.7030004@ceetonetechnology.com>

FYI. .. this is great stuff:

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/081010_NYI_Provides_FreeBSD_Project_with_East_Coast_Mirror


From mspitzer at gmail.com  Tue Aug 10 17:13:46 2010
From: mspitzer at gmail.com (Marc Spitzer)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:13:46 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTimaRkhy6Cyi6JYwsQ1LNnWHnH7AkdhOtQ+VvcJb@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Marc Spitzer <mspitzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am looking for a simple remote disk trending software package.
> There used to be something called sargent(sp?) that was simple and I
> think did what I want but I have a unique ideas about spelling
> sometimes or the other guy does and it is not showing up in my google
> search.
>
> here is my short list:
> 1: monitor multiple servers, snmp or agent based
> 2: some nice graphs and basic trending
> 3: web reporting and it would be nice if it had some grouping functions.
>
> thanks,
>
> marc
> --

Thanks for the responses, but I was not clear enough.

1: unfortunately I do not work in a BSD shop, AIX, Solaris and OSX
2: I really need trending for the boss, something simple like least
squares curve fitting would be fine with 3, 6, 12 month projected
curve for budgeting purposes.

if cacti does trending I did not see it, might be a plugin I missed.


Are you just monitoring disk info?  And just usage?

for this yes

Public or private network?

private

thanks,

marc

-- 
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
--Albert Camus

?The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people's money.
--Margaret Thatcher


From mark.saad at ymail.com  Wed Aug 11 12:04:41 2010
From: mark.saad at ymail.com (Mark Saad)
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:04:41 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] syncml
Message-ID: <229727.47388.qm@web35302.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hey Talk
  Has anyone ever setup a syncml server . I was looking at using http://www.funambol.com/solutions/enterprises.php

Its opensource and has clients for most of the phones we have here.

Can anyone make any recommendations other then use google or exchange for contacts and calender sync to blackberries and iphones. 

--
Mark Saad
mark.saad at ymail.com


From tekronis at gmail.com  Wed Aug 11 12:47:59 2010
From: tekronis at gmail.com (H. G.)
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:47:59 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] disk usage trending package
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinLsQW4bkOFhq08ng54=XHa3xJrcGZNHnxRpXhO@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTik_=JF5gJ9+XDo1jc_vAtUQokhEOdq073vi-t4Y@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Marc Spitzer <mspitzer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am looking for a simple remote disk trending software package.
> There used to be something called sargent(sp?) that was simple and I
> think did what I want but I have a unique ideas about spelling
> sometimes or the other guy does and it is not showing up in my google
> search.
>
> here is my short list:
> 1: monitor multiple servers, snmp or agent based
> 2: some nice graphs and basic trending
> 3: web reporting and it would be nice if it had some grouping functions.
>
> thanks,
>
> marc
> --
> Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
> --Albert Camus
>
>  The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
> of other people's money.
> --Margaret Thatcher
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>



Maybe try Zabbix (www.zabbix.com).
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From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Mon Aug 16 21:48:58 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:48:58 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OpenSolaris dead
Message-ID: <4C69EA8A.90901@ceetonetechnology.com>

If anyone hadn't heard about this:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2010-August/059310.html

Obviously a big deal on a number of levels.

I have not read the whole document, but certainly there's open questions 
about ZFS (which I have heard is a full, irrevocable fork), dtrace, etc.

Certainly has other wide implications for the BSD Community, and not 
just in terms of ported technologies.

I'd assume that there's a wide audience of developers and users who will 
be looking for a new home. . .

g


From zippy1981 at gmail.com  Mon Aug 16 22:06:13 2010
From: zippy1981 at gmail.com (Justin Dearing)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:06:13 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OpenSolaris dead
In-Reply-To: <4C69EA8A.90901@ceetonetechnology.com>
References: <4C69EA8A.90901@ceetonetechnology.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTim6uD4FUtSk4nkxv+zgOnRVqTGSV9MkijwRGrZ2@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:48 PM, George Rosamond <
george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:

>
>
> I have not read the whole document, but certainly there's open questions
> about ZFS (which I have heard is a full, irrevocable fork), dtrace, etc.
>

If its a full fork, and non Sun/Oracle employees have been porting it to
FreeBSD, whats the big deal there?

>
>
> I'd assume that there's a wide audience of developers and users who will be
> looking for a new home. . .
>
> Solaris was only open source for a few years. Other than those that jumped
on the Solaris band wagon after the open sourcing, I'm not sure who feels
they are in need of a new home. Also, thats only a big deal for kernel and
some core userland developers.

Don't get me wrong, things are getting interesting from here, but I don't
think its going to be that big of a deal in retrospect. The only big deal
outcome is if Oracle ends up re open sourcing it. If Oracle increases
Solaris's popularity after close sourcing it, it proves Oracle is a better
business than Sun, not that Close source is a better business model than
Open Source. You have Linux and the BSDs proving the viability of Open
Source OS development.


Justin
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From jason at dixongroup.net  Mon Aug 16 22:33:41 2010
From: jason at dixongroup.net (Jason Dixon)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:33:41 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd: Re:  OpenSolaris dead
In-Reply-To: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>
References: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>
Message-ID: <c25027d83c78a96f316ac8448d062d2a@localhost>

> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:48 PM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com <mailto:george at ceetonetechnology.com>>
wrote:
> 
>      I have not read the whole document, but certainly there's open
>      questions about ZFS (which I have heard is a full, irrevocable
>      fork), dtrace, etc.
> 
> If its a full fork, and non Sun/Oracle employees have been porting it to
> FreeBSD, whats the big deal there?
> 
>      I'd assume that there's a wide audience of developers and users who
>      will be looking for a new home. . .
> 
> Solaris was only open source for a few years. Other than those that
> jumped on the Solaris band wagon after the open sourcing, I'm not sure
> who feels they are in need of a new home. Also, thats only a big deal
> for kernel and some core userland developers.

You're vastly underestimating the number of Solaris/OpenSolaris users and 
companies looking for an exit path.  They were enticed into OpenSolaris
and 
SXCE thanks to exciting projects like Crossbow and bleeding-edge features
in
ZFS.  Now many of their systems are backwards-compatible with anything
that
Oracle will support now or in the future.

> Don't get me wrong, things are getting interesting from here, but I
> don't think its going to be that big of a deal in retrospect. The only
> big deal outcome is if Oracle ends up re open sourcing it. If Oracle
> increases Solaris's popularity after close sourcing it, it proves Oracle
> is a better business than Sun, not that Close source is a better
> business model than Open Source. You have Linux and the BSDs proving the
> viability of Open Source OS development.

This is not a closed-versus-open source issue.  For OpenSolaris users,
it's
having a predictable support path and roadmap.  For the BSD community (in
particular, FreeBSD), it's an opportunity to a) embrace new users and b)
show
off the capabilities and innovation available within BSD.

I've had countless discussions with other Solaris users over the last few
months.  FreeBSD is a popular topic of discussion, particularly as a
favored
alternative to Linux.  But there are still a lot of questions these folks
have,
and I think this is a good time to reach out and demonstrate why BSD
software
(and the associated communities) are a great option to wayward Solaris
users.

-- 
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net


From jason at dixongroup.net  Mon Aug 16 22:38:26 2010
From: jason at dixongroup.net (Jason Dixon)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:38:26 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd: Re:  OpenSolaris dead
In-Reply-To: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>
References: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>
Message-ID: <20100817023826.GU26663@dixongroup.net>

(Sorry for the ill-formatted version, resending)

> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:48 PM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com <mailto:george at ceetonetechnology.com>>
wrote:
> 
>      I have not read the whole document, but certainly there's open
>      questions about ZFS (which I have heard is a full, irrevocable
>      fork), dtrace, etc.
> 
> If its a full fork, and non Sun/Oracle employees have been porting it to
> FreeBSD, whats the big deal there?
> 
>      I'd assume that there's a wide audience of developers and users who
>      will be looking for a new home. . .
> 
> Solaris was only open source for a few years. Other than those that
> jumped on the Solaris band wagon after the open sourcing, I'm not sure
> who feels they are in need of a new home. Also, thats only a big deal
> for kernel and some core userland developers.

You're vastly underestimating the number of Solaris/OpenSolaris users and 
companies looking for an exit path.  They were enticed into OpenSolaris
and SXCE thanks to exciting projects like Crossbow and bleeding-edge
features in ZFS.  Now many of their systems are backwards-compatible with
anything that Oracle will support now or in the future.

> Don't get me wrong, things are getting interesting from here, but I
> don't think its going to be that big of a deal in retrospect. The only
> big deal outcome is if Oracle ends up re open sourcing it. If Oracle
> increases Solaris's popularity after close sourcing it, it proves Oracle
> is a better business than Sun, not that Close source is a better
> business model than Open Source. You have Linux and the BSDs proving the
> viability of Open Source OS development.

This is not a closed-versus-open source issue.  For OpenSolaris users,
it's having a predictable support path and roadmap.  For the BSD
community (in particular, FreeBSD), it's an opportunity to a) embrace new
users and b) show off the capabilities and innovation available within
BSD.

I've had countless discussions with other Solaris users over the last few
months.  FreeBSD is a popular topic of discussion, particularly as a
favored alternative to Linux.  But there are still a lot of questions
these folks have, and I think this is a good time to reach out and
demonstrate why BSD software (and the associated communities) are a great
option to wayward Solaris users.

-- 
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net


From spork at bway.net  Tue Aug 17 00:40:52 2010
From: spork at bway.net (Charles Sprickman)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:40:52 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd: Re:  OpenSolaris dead
In-Reply-To: <20100817023826.GU26663@dixongroup.net>
References: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>
	<20100817023826.GU26663@dixongroup.net>
Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1008170018370.90200@hotlap.local>

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010, Jason Dixon wrote:

> (Sorry for the ill-formatted version, resending)
>
>> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:48 PM, George Rosamond
>> <george at ceetonetechnology.com <mailto:george at ceetonetechnology.com>>
> wrote:
>>
>>      I have not read the whole document, but certainly there's open
>>      questions about ZFS (which I have heard is a full, irrevocable
>>      fork), dtrace, etc.
>>
>> If its a full fork, and non Sun/Oracle employees have been porting it to
>> FreeBSD, whats the big deal there?
>>
>>      I'd assume that there's a wide audience of developers and users who
>>      will be looking for a new home. . .
>>
>> Solaris was only open source for a few years. Other than those that
>> jumped on the Solaris band wagon after the open sourcing, I'm not sure
>> who feels they are in need of a new home. Also, thats only a big deal
>> for kernel and some core userland developers.
>
> You're vastly underestimating the number of Solaris/OpenSolaris users and
> companies looking for an exit path.  They were enticed into OpenSolaris
> and SXCE thanks to exciting projects like Crossbow and bleeding-edge
> features in ZFS.  Now many of their systems are backwards-compatible with
> anything that Oracle will support now or in the future.

I've noticed that the Linux folks are also quite excited about this - it's 
an opportunity to push btrfs pretty hard.  I do think many of them are 
overestimating how close to production use it is though.

There is also quite a bit of talk on more linux-centric boards about zfs 
being a poor performer compared to just about any linux fx paired with 
lvm/md.  This I'm not so sure about - Phoronix seems to be the go-to place 
now for benchmarks, and some of their methods are... odd to say the least.

Slightly OT, I'm looking for a benchmark that deals more with iops rather 
than throughput and has a fairly simple output - just something that 
sweeps through various sizes and then spits out a summary of how many io 
operations/second it recorded.

>> Don't get me wrong, things are getting interesting from here, but I
>> don't think its going to be that big of a deal in retrospect. The only
>> big deal outcome is if Oracle ends up re open sourcing it. If Oracle
>> increases Solaris's popularity after close sourcing it, it proves Oracle
>> is a better business than Sun, not that Close source is a better
>> business model than Open Source. You have Linux and the BSDs proving the
>> viability of Open Source OS development.
>
> This is not a closed-versus-open source issue.  For OpenSolaris users,
> it's having a predictable support path and roadmap.  For the BSD
> community (in particular, FreeBSD), it's an opportunity to a) embrace new
> users and b) show off the capabilities and innovation available within
> BSD.
>
> I've had countless discussions with other Solaris users over the last few
> months.  FreeBSD is a popular topic of discussion, particularly as a
> favored alternative to Linux.  But there are still a lot of questions
> these folks have, and I think this is a good time to reach out and
> demonstrate why BSD software (and the associated communities) are a great
> option to wayward Solaris users.

I am somewhat concerned about FreeBSD in general and specifically what the 
plans are there for ZFS (both in general and  the impact of oracle perhaps 
not ever releasing any additional code).  I've seen lots of folks 
experimenting with FreeBSD just for ZFS, many that have never given 
FreeBSD a second thought.  They seem to avoid the official mailing lists 
and work with each other to tune and debug things either on the FBSD 
forums or other general tech forums, so I don't know how aware the core 
group of FBSD developers are of this growing group of users coming to FBSD 
strictly for ZFS (and finding a pretty decent OS to go along with it).

It seems like even with ZFS now being offically labelled as 
production-ready on FBSD, there's very little documentation popping up, 
and the few people that understand the internals are not really available 
to help out those who want to document it.  The classic case is the whole 
issue of running ZFS on i386 - tuning it to not panic is not easy, and the 
manpages are still just straight rips from open solaris - there's no 
FreeBSD-specific info in there.  The wiki (http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS) is 
somewhat dated and does not really explain the i386 tuning issue well. 
It's also not open to editing.  There are a few tricks to getting i386 
stable, but it's not readily apparent.  The biggest hint I found (and I've 
heard this may have changed) is that the arc_max value is NOT a hard 
limit, but a high water mark where a thread to flush the arc to disk kicks 
off.  On slower/older hardware with unpredictable disk load, the time it 
takes for that thread to do what it needs to can fall behind the rate at 
which some process is writing data that lands in the ARC.  When that 
happens, boom!  I had much better luck tuning this once I realized that I 
could routinely load the box in a way that the arc could grow to double 
it's "max" size.  In some cases that meant just going with better hardware 
(and 64-bit, where zfs is very stable), and in others it could be worked 
around by setting the ARC max very low - in essence giving the flush to 
disk thread a little bit of a head start.

There's also the issue of sysinstall, especially if you want to do a zfs 
on root setup.

And there's currently a show-stopper bug in 8.1 where a raidz1 array 
that's degraded cannot be booted from because some regression was 
introduced into the zfs bootloader.

Anyhow, yeah this could be a great opportunity, but I think there has to 
be some sort of meeting of whoever is "in charge" of the FreeBSD project 
to get some kind of leadership/management going on this front.  Docs would 
actually be an excellent start, but beyond that I think there needs to be 
more ownership of ZFS amongst the development team - right now I think 
there's essentially two people involved in what could be one of the 
biggest features FreeBSD has ever introduced.

BTW, if anyone wants to start a general zfs thread, I love to talk about 
it. :)  I'm in the midst of migrating a bunch of 4.11 boxes to 8.1 w/zfs 
on root.

Charles


> -- 
> Jason Dixon
> DixonGroup Consulting
> http://www.dixongroup.net
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>


From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Tue Aug 17 13:21:35 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:21:35 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] spamd and large providers
Message-ID: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>

For spamd users, how are you dealing with the normal delays associated 
with large providers with varying and multiple pools of SMTP servers?

White listing the appropriate networks?

Real hassle with Yahoo, Mac.com, XO. . .

g


From edlinuxguru at gmail.com  Tue Aug 17 13:45:27 2010
From: edlinuxguru at gmail.com (Edward Capriolo)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:45:27 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] spamd and large providers
In-Reply-To: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>
References: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTimx9iKyq=5BTCpMY+BjavE2rEN60So7przYh-4h@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 1:21 PM, George Rosamond
<george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
> For spamd users, how are you dealing with the normal delays associated with
> large providers with varying and multiple pools of SMTP servers?
>
> White listing the appropriate networks?
>
> Real hassle with Yahoo, Mac.com, XO. . .
>
> g
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>

George,

I hope this is relevant. Years back we had clusters of spam scrubbing
servers running declude. We found that the majority of spam was headed
to accounts that did not exist. However we were processing all
messages (wasting CPU) even though these end result was a failed
delivery regardless.

Do you have this type of checking? As in pre-checking if the user
exists before spam filtering.

Regards,
Edward


From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Tue Aug 17 15:06:49 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:06:49 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] spamd and large providers
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimx9iKyq=5BTCpMY+BjavE2rEN60So7przYh-4h@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>
	<AANLkTimx9iKyq=5BTCpMY+BjavE2rEN60So7przYh-4h@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C6ADDC9.8020402@ceetonetechnology.com>

On 08/17/10 13:45, Edward Capriolo wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 1:21 PM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com>  wrote:
>> For spamd users, how are you dealing with the normal delays associated with
>> large providers with varying and multiple pools of SMTP servers?
>>
>> White listing the appropriate networks?
>>
>> Real hassle with Yahoo, Mac.com, XO. . .
>>
>> g
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>
>
> George,
>
> I hope this is relevant. Years back we had clusters of spam scrubbing
> servers running declude. We found that the majority of spam was headed
> to accounts that did not exist. However we were processing all
> messages (wasting CPU) even though these end result was a failed
> delivery regardless.
>
> Do you have this type of checking? As in pre-checking if the user
> exists before spam filtering.

Thanks for the reply Ed.

These are legitimate accounts, so that solution wouldn't apply.

We don't have a lot of non-existent accounts as the destination, and not 
really an issue with wasted cpu cycles. . .

g


From marco at metm.org  Tue Aug 17 16:19:31 2010
From: marco at metm.org (Marco Scoffier)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:19:31 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] spamd and large providers
In-Reply-To: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>
References: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>
Message-ID: <4C6AEED3.7050101@metm.org>

On 08/17/2010 01:21 PM, George Rosamond wrote:
> For spamd users, how are you dealing with the normal delays associated
> with large providers with varying and multiple pools of SMTP servers?
>
> White listing the appropriate networks?
>
> Real hassle with Yahoo, Mac.com, XO. . .
>
I think you are asking about how large providers react to greylisting?

I maintain a pretty large whitelist

spamd -a <ip>

And have scripts to read spf records for a few large domains an
automatically update the main white list

#!/bin/sh
# called from a cron-job to update the white and black lists
# update whitelist this is a bypass in pf.rules
for domain in _spf.google.com aol.com facebookmail.com
in.constantcontact.com bluehost.com
do
  /bin/echo \#$domain;
  /usr/bin/dig $domain TXT +short | tr "\ " "\n" | grep ^ip4: | cut -d: -f2;
done >/usr/local/etc/spamd/mywhite
cat /usr/local/etc/spamd/whitelist_ip.txt >>/usr/local/etc/spamd/mywhite
# reload the rules
/sbin/pfctl -t spamd-mywhite -T replace -f /usr/local/etc/spamd/mywhite

you can also whitelist a block
eg:

76.13.9         # yahoo
66.163.169      # yahoo
98.136.45       # yahoo

It seems most providers have adapted to retrying with the same server. 

I haven't updated this in quite a while so hopefully someone has a more
recent solution.

Marco


From george at ceetonetechnology.com  Tue Aug 17 17:13:41 2010
From: george at ceetonetechnology.com (George Rosamond)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:13:41 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] spamd and large providers
In-Reply-To: <4C6AEED3.7050101@metm.org>
References: <4C6AC51F.8020103@ceetonetechnology.com>
	<4C6AEED3.7050101@metm.org>
Message-ID: <4C6AFB85.702@ceetonetechnology.com>

On 08/17/10 16:19, Marco Scoffier wrote:
> On 08/17/2010 01:21 PM, George Rosamond wrote:
>> For spamd users, how are you dealing with the normal delays associated
>> with large providers with varying and multiple pools of SMTP servers?
>>
>> White listing the appropriate networks?
>>
>> Real hassle with Yahoo, Mac.com, XO. . .
>>
> I think you are asking about how large providers react to greylisting?

More how small provider react to large providers when using greylisting :)

>
> I maintain a pretty large whitelist
>
> spamd -a<ip>
>
> And have scripts to read spf records for a few large domains an
> automatically update the main white list
>
> #!/bin/sh
> # called from a cron-job to update the white and black lists
> # update whitelist this is a bypass in pf.rules
> for domain in _spf.google.com aol.com facebookmail.com
> in.constantcontact.com bluehost.com
> do
>    /bin/echo \#$domain;
>    /usr/bin/dig $domain TXT +short | tr "\ " "\n" | grep ^ip4: | cut -d: -f2;
> done>/usr/local/etc/spamd/mywhite
> cat /usr/local/etc/spamd/whitelist_ip.txt>>/usr/local/etc/spamd/mywhite
> # reload the rules
> /sbin/pfctl -t spamd-mywhite -T replace -f /usr/local/etc/spamd/mywhite
>
> you can also whitelist a block
> eg:
>
> 76.13.9         # yahoo
> 66.163.169      # yahoo
> 98.136.45       # yahoo
>

Right. . . that's what I figured as stated above.

> It seems most providers have adapted to retrying with the same server.
>

Right for one email delivery session. . . but not necessarily the next time.

> I haven't updated this in quite a while so hopefully someone has a more
> recent solution.

That's really what I'm seeking. . . white listing blocks is 
straight-forward enough. . . the question is there anything else?

g


From pete at nomadlogic.org  Thu Aug 19 12:57:49 2010
From: pete at nomadlogic.org (Pete Wright)
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:57:49 +0000
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd: Re:  OpenSolaris dead
In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1008170018370.90200@hotlap.local>
References: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>
	<20100817023826.GU26663@dixongroup.net>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.1008170018370.90200@hotlap.local>
Message-ID: <20100819165746.GD62529@pv.nomadlogic.org>

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 12:40:52AM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Aug 2010, Jason Dixon wrote:
> 
> Slightly OT, I'm looking for a benchmark that deals more with iops rather 
> than throughput and has a fairly simple output - just something that 
> sweeps through various sizes and then spits out a summary of how many io 
> operations/second it recorded.
> 

netapp's postmark might be worth taking a look.  also iozone is pretty
decent.  netapp pulled the technical report that details the reasoning
behind postmark, but the source should still be available in the ports tree.  

> 
> I am somewhat concerned about FreeBSD in general and specifically what the 
> plans are there for ZFS (both in general and  the impact of oracle perhaps 
> not ever releasing any additional code).  I've seen lots of folks 
> experimenting with FreeBSD just for ZFS, many that have never given 
> FreeBSD a second thought.  They seem to avoid the official mailing lists 
> and work with each other to tune and debug things either on the FBSD 
> forums or other general tech forums, so I don't know how aware the core 
> group of FBSD developers are of this growing group of users coming to FBSD 
> strictly for ZFS (and finding a pretty decent OS to go along with it).

IANAL - but I would reckon that the CDL bits of zfs (and dtrace for that
matter) will continue to be released to the community.  

as I read the posting on the opensol mailing list was that oracle wanted
to ensure they could capitalize fully on solaris (and support) and
ensure that features being developed in opensol are made into official
products (solairs 11 for exaple) more quickly.

i think oracle is moving in the direction of creating appliances built
on Sun hardware, OS's and bundling that layer on top of Oracle application 
frameworks and databases.  i think the "exadata" product is a good
example of this thinking.  it is a datawarehousing applaince build on
sun hardware (including their cool flash disk modules), run's solairs 10
and hosts an oracle database.

another example that comes to mind is the openstorage platform.

i guess what i am saying is that the memo seemed to me to try to focus
the development effort of solaris into products that oracle can make
money on.

> 
> It seems like even with ZFS now being offically labelled as 
> production-ready on FBSD, there's very little documentation popping up, 
> and the few people that understand the internals are not really available 
> to help out those who want to document it.  The classic case is the whole 
> issue of running ZFS on i386 - tuning it to not panic is not easy, and the 
> manpages are still just straight rips from open solaris - there's no 
> FreeBSD-specific info in there.  The wiki (http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS) is 
> somewhat dated and does not really explain the i386 tuning issue well. 
> It's also not open to editing.  There are a few tricks to getting i386 
> stable, but it's not readily apparent.  The biggest hint I found (and I've 
> heard this may have changed) is that the arc_max value is NOT a hard 
> limit, but a high water mark where a thread to flush the arc to disk kicks 
> off.  On slower/older hardware with unpredictable disk load, the time it 
> takes for that thread to do what it needs to can fall behind the rate at 
> which some process is writing data that lands in the ARC.  When that 
> happens, boom!  I had much better luck tuning this once I realized that I 
> could routinely load the box in a way that the arc could grow to double 
> it's "max" size.  In some cases that meant just going with better hardware 
> (and 64-bit, where zfs is very stable), and in others it could be worked 
> around by setting the ARC max very low - in essence giving the flush to 
> disk thread a little bit of a head start.
>

I agree the freebsd specific documentation certainly needs some help,
but fortunately there is decent documentation on the internals of ZFS
published by sun, which I have found quite helpful in the past.

 
> There's also the issue of sysinstall, especially if you want to do a zfs 
> on root setup.
>
pcbsd makes this easy - although I am personally not convinced of the
benefit of running ZFS on a root filesystem.  I'm a big fan of keeping
things simple and easy to fix when things go south - I find that UFS is
fast and well understood.  its more of a personal preference not really
based on any data though...

having said that I *do* see the utility of running ZFS on data volumes
:)


-pete

 
--
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org



From dan at langille.org  Thu Aug 19 21:57:41 2010
From: dan at langille.org (Dan Langille)
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:57:41 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd: Re:  OpenSolaris dead
In-Reply-To: <20100819165746.GD62529@pv.nomadlogic.org>
References: <4C69F230.60209@ceetonetechnology.com>	<20100817023826.GU26663@dixongroup.net>	<alpine.OSX.2.00.1008170018370.90200@hotlap.local>
	<20100819165746.GD62529@pv.nomadlogic.org>
Message-ID: <4C6DE115.4050200@langille.org>

On 8/19/2010 12:57 PM, Pete Wright wrote:

> having said that I *do* see the utility of running ZFS on data volumes
> :)

Agreed.  I create my 11TB server from completely commodity hardware. 
The OS boots off two gmirrored HDD.  The rest is a 7x2TB raidz2 array. 
Love it.

I'll leave the jumping-through-hoops-for-booting to the more adventurous.

-- 
Dan Langille - http://langille.org/


From matt at atopia.net  Fri Aug 20 18:22:58 2010
From: matt at atopia.net (Matt Juszczak)
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:22:58 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>

Hi folks,

I'm curious to know if anyone knows of any good Cloud server providers 
that support FreeBSD.  The two that I am most experienced with, Rackspace 
Cloud and EC2, do not natively support FreeBSD (I assume this is because 
of the Xen compatability issues).  Terremark does, but isn't an option for 
me.

I currently have a few boxes at rootbsd.net, which works great, but isn't 
really an advanced Cloud provider - server launches aren't instant, and 
there's no API.

Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace 
Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions 
are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports 
collection?).

Thanks,

-Matt


From max at laiers.net  Fri Aug 20 20:56:09 2010
From: max at laiers.net (Max Laier)
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 02:56:09 +0200
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <201008210256.10014.max@laiers.net>

On Saturday 21 August 2010 00:22:58 Matt Juszczak wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm curious to know if anyone knows of any good Cloud server providers
> that support FreeBSD.  The two that I am most experienced with, Rackspace
> Cloud and EC2, do not natively support FreeBSD (I assume this is because
> of the Xen compatability issues).  Terremark does, but isn't an option for
> me.
> 
> I currently have a few boxes at rootbsd.net, which works great, but isn't
> really an advanced Cloud provider - server launches aren't instant, and
> there's no API.
> 
> Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace
> Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions
> are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports
> collection?).

Have a look at http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-04-05-FreeBSD-EC2.html - 
maybe Colin has news?

Cheers,
  Max


From pete at nomadlogic.org  Sun Aug 22 21:31:09 2010
From: pete at nomadlogic.org (Pete Wright)
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:31:09 -0700
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <6459B640-9FA5-4859-A7A0-6FD4F627D513@nomadlogic.org>


On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm curious to know if anyone knows of any good Cloud server providers that support FreeBSD.  The two that I am most experienced with, Rackspace Cloud and EC2, do not natively support FreeBSD (I assume this is because of the Xen compatability issues).  Terremark does, but isn't an option for me.
> 
> I currently have a few boxes at rootbsd.net, which works great, but isn't really an advanced Cloud provider - server launches aren't instant, and there's no API.
> 
> Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).


i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for.  but i think there are two possible solutions.  IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...

on a related note, if you feel like rolling-your-own cloud I think eucalyptus supports VMware, but only on their commercial product:

http://www.eucalyptus.com/

I have done some research into these guys a while back and it looks pretty promising.  I guess their thing is that they have created a amazon ec2 compatibility layer.  so one could take ec2 created AMI's and run them on eucalyptus.

anywho, if anyone has a ton of money they'd like to throw at a *BSD friendly cloud startup give me a call b/c this might be a fun project :)

-pete

ps -> oh, looks like free and openbsd are supported as guests on a kvm hypervisor:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status



From scottro at nyc.rr.com  Sun Aug 22 22:50:44 2010
From: scottro at nyc.rr.com (Scott Robbins)
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:50:44 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
In-Reply-To: <6459B640-9FA5-4859-A7A0-6FD4F627D513@nomadlogic.org>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
	<6459B640-9FA5-4859-A7A0-6FD4F627D513@nomadlogic.org>
Message-ID: <20100823025044.GA61659@mail.scottro.net>

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 06:31:09PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
> 
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> 
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).
> 
> 
> i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for.  but i think there are two possible solutions.  IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...
> 

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's definitely there--just took
a quick look, on a CentOS 5.5 machine, at their virt-manager (the GUI
setup program for a kvm-qemu guest) and if you choose Unix, FreeBSD 6
and 7.x are listed as choices.  When I play with kvm-qemu on CentOS, I
tend to do it by command line, and I've setup an 8.1 guest with no
problem. 

I suspect the Linux that Matt is discussing is Gentoo, which was
developed by Daniel Robbins, who had worked on Free (and, IIRC, Open)BSD
before developing it.  

There's also ArchLinux, which is BSD like in many ways, but primarily
uses binary packages.  (However, you can use their abs system if you
need to customize and do a portslike installation.)

There's also Crux which has ports and its own BSD like handbook, but I
haven't heard much about it lately, and haven't used it in years.  Of
the three, Arch will take the least time to setup. 

Of the three, Arch seems to be the most active, and is probably the
quickest to set up, while still allowing you great flexibility.

The advantage of CentOS is that it's usually pretty stable, sort of a
set it and forget it type system, leaving you more time to concentrate
on the apps.

The disadvantage is that its packages are often out of date, and
(TOTALLY subjective impression) probably a bit slower.  It's considered
to be binary compatible with RHEL.  


-- 
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

Giles: In order...to be worthy...you must perform the
ritual...in a tutu. Pillock!
Angel: All right, someone get the chain saw.


From chris.townsend at gmail.com  Mon Aug 23 10:04:56 2010
From: chris.townsend at gmail.com (Chris Townsend)
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:04:56 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
In-Reply-To: <20100823025044.GA61659@mail.scottro.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
	<6459B640-9FA5-4859-A7A0-6FD4F627D513@nomadlogic.org>
	<20100823025044.GA61659@mail.scottro.net>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=r1LkVxnECU9fWTPCcf26UQ_uH6C5mbcwU0qbL@mail.gmail.com>

You might want to look at arpnetworks.  No API as mature as rackspace/
Amazon EC but certainly scriptable, it's a Xen.

Open and Net support is good in my experience.

-cpt

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 06:31:09PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
>>
>> > Hi folks,
>> >
>> >
>> > Thanks for any input! ?I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).
>>
>>
>> i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for. ?but i think there are two possible solutions. ?IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...
>>
>
> Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's definitely there--just took
> a quick look, on a CentOS 5.5 machine, at their virt-manager (the GUI
> setup program for a kvm-qemu guest) and if you choose Unix, FreeBSD 6
> and 7.x are listed as choices. ?When I play with kvm-qemu on CentOS, I
> tend to do it by command line, and I've setup an 8.1 guest with no
> problem.
>
> I suspect the Linux that Matt is discussing is Gentoo, which was
> developed by Daniel Robbins, who had worked on Free (and, IIRC, Open)BSD
> before developing it.
>
> There's also ArchLinux, which is BSD like in many ways, but primarily
> uses binary packages. ?(However, you can use their abs system if you
> need to customize and do a portslike installation.)
>
> There's also Crux which has ports and its own BSD like handbook, but I
> haven't heard much about it lately, and haven't used it in years. ?Of
> the three, Arch will take the least time to setup.
>
> Of the three, Arch seems to be the most active, and is probably the
> quickest to set up, while still allowing you great flexibility.
>
> The advantage of CentOS is that it's usually pretty stable, sort of a
> set it and forget it type system, leaving you more time to concentrate
> on the apps.
>
> The disadvantage is that its packages are often out of date, and
> (TOTALLY subjective impression) probably a bit slower. ?It's considered
> to be binary compatible with RHEL.
>
>
> --
> Scott Robbins
> PGP keyID EB3467D6
> ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
>
> Giles: In order...to be worthy...you must perform the
> ritual...in a tutu. Pillock!
> Angel: All right, someone get the chain saw.
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>


From james at uncryptic.com  Mon Aug 23 11:53:24 2010
From: james at uncryptic.com (James Polera)
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:53:24 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
Message-ID: <ejg3gt1g6he0b16a3kif7a5b.1282578763987@email.android.com>

Seconded.  Arp Networks is great!

Chris Townsend <chris.townsend at gmail.com> wrote:

>You might want to look at arpnetworks.  No API as mature as rackspace/
>Amazon EC but certainly scriptable, it's a Xen.
>
>Open and Net support is good in my experience.
>
>-cpt
>
>On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 06:31:09PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
>>>
>>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
>>>
>>> > Hi folks,
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Thanks for any input! ?I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).
>>>
>>>
>>> i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for. ?but i think there are two possible solutions. ?IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...
>>>
>>
>> Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's definitely there--just took
>> a quick look, on a CentOS 5.5 machine, at their virt-manager (the GUI
>> setup program for a kvm-qemu guest) and if you choose Unix, FreeBSD 6
>> and 7.x are listed as choices. ?When I play with kvm-qemu on CentOS, I
>> tend to do it by command line, and I've setup an 8.1 guest with no
>> problem.
>>
>> I suspect the Linux that Matt is discussing is Gentoo, which was
>> developed by Daniel Robbins, who had worked on Free (and, IIRC, Open)BSD
>> before developing it.
>>
>> There's also ArchLinux, which is BSD like in many ways, but primarily
>> uses binary packages. ?(However, you can use their abs system if you
>> need to customize and do a portslike installation.)
>>
>> There's also Crux which has ports and its own BSD like handbook, but I
>> haven't heard much about it lately, and haven't used it in years. ?Of
>> the three, Arch will take the least time to setup.
>>
>> Of the three, Arch seems to be the most active, and is probably the
>> quickest to set up, while still allowing you great flexibility.
>>
>> The advantage of CentOS is that it's usually pretty stable, sort of a
>> set it and forget it type system, leaving you more time to concentrate
>> on the apps.
>>
>> The disadvantage is that its packages are often out of date, and
>> (TOTALLY subjective impression) probably a bit slower. ?It's considered
>> to be binary compatible with RHEL.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Scott Robbins
>> PGP keyID EB3467D6
>> ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
>> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
>>
>> Giles: In order...to be worthy...you must perform the
>> ritual...in a tutu. Pillock!
>> Angel: All right, someone get the chain saw.
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>
>_______________________________________________
>talk mailing list
>talk at lists.nycbug.org
>http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

From matt at atopia.net  Tue Aug 24 11:19:44 2010
From: matt at atopia.net (Matt Juszczak)
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:19:44 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=r1LkVxnECU9fWTPCcf26UQ_uH6C5mbcwU0qbL@mail.gmail.com>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
	<6459B640-9FA5-4859-A7A0-6FD4F627D513@nomadlogic.org>
	<20100823025044.GA61659@mail.scottro.net>
	<AANLkTi=r1LkVxnECU9fWTPCcf26UQ_uH6C5mbcwU0qbL@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008241119370.88342@venus.atopia.net>

Thanks for everyone's replies!  I'm checking out Arp Networks.

-Matt

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010, Chris Townsend wrote:

> You might want to look at arpnetworks.  No API as mature as rackspace/
> Amazon EC but certainly scriptable, it's a Xen.
>
> Open and Net support is good in my experience.
>
> -cpt
>
> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 06:31:09PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
>>>
>>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi folks,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for any input! ?I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).
>>>
>>>
>>> i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for. ?but i think there are two possible solutions. ?IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...
>>>
>>
>> Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's definitely there--just took
>> a quick look, on a CentOS 5.5 machine, at their virt-manager (the GUI
>> setup program for a kvm-qemu guest) and if you choose Unix, FreeBSD 6
>> and 7.x are listed as choices. ?When I play with kvm-qemu on CentOS, I
>> tend to do it by command line, and I've setup an 8.1 guest with no
>> problem.
>>
>> I suspect the Linux that Matt is discussing is Gentoo, which was
>> developed by Daniel Robbins, who had worked on Free (and, IIRC, Open)BSD
>> before developing it.
>>
>> There's also ArchLinux, which is BSD like in many ways, but primarily
>> uses binary packages. ?(However, you can use their abs system if you
>> need to customize and do a portslike installation.)
>>
>> There's also Crux which has ports and its own BSD like handbook, but I
>> haven't heard much about it lately, and haven't used it in years. ?Of
>> the three, Arch will take the least time to setup.
>>
>> Of the three, Arch seems to be the most active, and is probably the
>> quickest to set up, while still allowing you great flexibility.
>>
>> The advantage of CentOS is that it's usually pretty stable, sort of a
>> set it and forget it type system, leaving you more time to concentrate
>> on the apps.
>>
>> The disadvantage is that its packages are often out of date, and
>> (TOTALLY subjective impression) probably a bit slower. ?It's considered
>> to be binary compatible with RHEL.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Scott Robbins
>> PGP keyID EB3467D6
>> ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
>> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
>>
>> Giles: In order...to be worthy...you must perform the
>> ritual...in a tutu. Pillock!
>> Angel: All right, someone get the chain saw.
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>

From drulavigne at sympatico.ca  Wed Aug 25 08:42:52 2010
From: drulavigne at sympatico.ca (Dru Lavigne)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:42:52 +0000
Subject: [nycbug-talk] looking for reviewers
Message-ID: <BAY143-W217929C7A38CA60315B4EEAC840@phx.gbl>


Hello all,

The BSDP exam objectives are in their final draft and we're in the final review push in order to publish them next Monday.



If anyone has time to read through the document by Saturday morning, ping me and I'll send you the review copy.



We're looking to catch any remaining typos, grammos, and formatting errors as well as a sanity check on the technical items.



Cheers,



Dru
 		 	   		  
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From matt at atopia.net  Wed Aug 25 16:03:11 2010
From: matt at atopia.net (Matt Juszczak)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:03:11 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
	experience?)
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>

Hi folks,

I need to choose a standard Linux distribution for a project I'm working 
on.  Most of my experience is FreeBSD, but Linux is required here.

The available options are:

     * Debian
     * Ubuntu
     * Centos
     * Arch
     * Gentoo
     * Fedora

While I like CentOS, I don't like the lack of packages native to the OS. 
For instance, MongoDB and PHP and other packages are super old versions 
(if they exist at all).

Ubuntu is good, because it has all the latest software packages, but I 
don't like how much automation it tries to do.  For instance - install a 
package, and shockingly, the package will start automatically at the end 
of the install!  Too much automation, and too heavy.  Perhaps I'm letting 
this bother me too much?

Last I heard, Debian was a good choice, and had a "testing" version with a 
lot of good packages.  I used it once about 6 years ago, not sure where it 
is now.

No experience with Gentoo or Arch, though I hear Gentoo has a good ports 
system implementation.  Arch seems to be good too, with lots of up to date 
packages.

Fedora... I know nothing about, other than it's EOL pretty quickly.

Any suggestions?  Anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks!

-Matt




From pete at nomadlogic.org  Wed Aug 25 16:19:16 2010
From: pete at nomadlogic.org (Pete Wright)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:19:16 +0000
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <20100825201913.GI62529@pv.nomadlogic.org>

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 04:03:11PM -0400, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I need to choose a standard Linux distribution for a project I'm working 
> on.  Most of my experience is FreeBSD, but Linux is required here.
> 
> The available options are:
> 
>     * Debian
>     * Ubuntu
>     * Centos
>     * Arch
>     * Gentoo
>     * Fedora
> 
> While I like CentOS, I don't like the lack of packages native to the OS. 
> For instance, MongoDB and PHP and other packages are super old versions 
> (if they exist at all).
> 
yea that is one thing that tends to bother people with RHEL/CentOS.
Although redhat does this for a good reason IMHO.  They make a good
effort to maintain ABI and KBI compatibility from w/in their major
releaases (5.x.x for example).  This helps with third party software and
hardware vendors getting a non-moving target to develop products
against.  In my industry (vfx, animation and video) this is super
helpful since we tend to rely on 3rd parties for not only software
(autodesk maya for example) but also for hardware drivers (graphics
drivers, along with not-to-common IB and other network adapters).

having said that...check out these two resources for more up to date
packages for RHEL/CentOS distrobutions:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/


> Ubuntu is good, because it has all the latest software packages, but I 
> don't like how much automation it tries to do.  For instance - install a 
> package, and shockingly, the package will start automatically at the end 
> of the install!  Too much automation, and too heavy.  Perhaps I'm letting 
> this bother me too much?

i worked at a shop that was heavilly using ubuntu for our server
systems.  some people seemed to like it, imho your assesment is correct
- it tries to do too much automagically making it hard to manage.

granted i came from a large rhel install and had grown accustomed to
redhat kickstarts and building rpm and stuff like that - so i was most
likely being grumpy :)
> 
> Fedora... I know nothing about, other than it's EOL pretty quickly.
> 

fedora is now basically like FreeBSD-CURRENT.  this is were cutting edge
development happens and they do not provide any long-term support for
releases w/in it.  the idea is to flesh out new emerging tech before
including it into RHEL/CentOS releases.

the EPEL link above is a good bridge b/w those two worlds though.

> Any suggestions?  Anyone have any recommendations?
>

personally speaking - use centos.  it has good hardware support from
most vendors, they are quite involved in getting KVM working and usefull
if you are into virt. stuff.  and the cobbler/koan provisioning system
is kick-ass and just works on redhat platforms.

https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/

-pete
 
--
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org



From matt at atopia.net  Wed Aug 25 16:29:59 2010
From: matt at atopia.net (Matt Juszczak)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:29:59 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
 experience?)
In-Reply-To: <20100825201913.GI62529@pv.nomadlogic.org>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
	<20100825201913.GI62529@pv.nomadlogic.org>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251625140.8950@venus.atopia.net>

Hi Pete,

> yea that is one thing that tends to bother people with RHEL/CentOS.
> Although redhat does this for a good reason IMHO.  They make a good
> effort to maintain ABI and KBI compatibility from w/in their major
> releaases (5.x.x for example).  This helps with third party software and
> hardware vendors getting a non-moving target to develop products
> against.  In my industry (vfx, animation and video) this is super
> helpful since we tend to rely on 3rd parties for not only software
> (autodesk maya for example) but also for hardware drivers (graphics
> drivers, along with not-to-common IB and other network adapters).

Yup, I agree.  I understand the reasons they do it - it's just not my cup 
of tea.  For companies I work at, it's a different story... many of them 
do automated updates, and if RHEL/CentOS were constantly including newer 
versions of packages, that automated update process would have more 
problems than it already does.

I remember a few months ago, a box that used sudo tied into LDAP had sudo 
updated to an newer version, which required an entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf 
for sudo.  That broke a lot of things :)

> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
> http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/

I always use EPEL, plus iuscommunity: http://www.iuscommunity.org.  Not a 
huge deal to add the additional repos, but it's nice to have the latest 
and greatest out of box if needed :)

> personally speaking - use centos.  it has good hardware support from
> most vendors, they are quite involved in getting KVM working and usefull
> if you are into virt. stuff.  and the cobbler/koan provisioning system
> is kick-ass and just works on redhat platforms.

Ok, thanks Pete.  Just so you know, the only reason I'm using Linux versus 
FreeBSD for this project is because I need to use Rackspace Cloud, which 
doesn't yet support FreeBSD.  Perhaps there'd be an option to use another 
provider, such as flexiscale, but probably not worth the effort of 
building custom images, etc.

-Matt


From matt at atopia.net  Wed Aug 25 16:41:35 2010
From: matt at atopia.net (Matt Juszczak)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:41:35 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
 experience?)
In-Reply-To: <20100825203838.GA90158@mail.scottro.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
	<20100825203838.GA90158@mail.scottro.net>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251640500.9229@venus.atopia.net>

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the reply/comments.

I'm very much trying to decide at this point between Arch and CentOS. 
Gentoo seems exciting because of the ports, but other than that, it sounds 
like it's not what I'm looking for.  Ubuntu+Fedora are too hand holding 
for me.

Which would you choose between Arch and CentOS?

-Matt


From dave at donnerjack.com  Wed Aug 25 16:47:46 2010
From: dave at donnerjack.com (David Lawson)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:47:46 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251640500.9229@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
	<20100825203838.GA90158@mail.scottro.net>
	<alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251640500.9229@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <BF0E3223-2064-4163-829E-184D5CA0AAD9@donnerjack.com>


On Aug 25, 2010, at 4:41 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:

> Hi Scott,
> 
> Thanks for the reply/comments.
> 
> I'm very much trying to decide at this point between Arch and CentOS. Gentoo seems exciting because of the ports, but other than that, it sounds like it's not what I'm looking for.  Ubuntu+Fedora are too hand holding for me.
> 
> Which would you choose between Arch and CentOS?

I'll second or third Pete's recommendation for CentOS.  It may not be what I'd run personally, but in terms of deploying to production, it'd be my first choice.  I've got a large CentOS deployment and what little annoyances I've had with software being behind current, I can usually get around by snagging an RPM or rolling one myself.

--Dave



From scottro at nyc.rr.com  Wed Aug 25 16:50:07 2010
From: scottro at nyc.rr.com (Scott Robbins)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:50:07 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on
	FreeBSD	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251640500.9229@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
	<20100825203838.GA90158@mail.scottro.net>
	<alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251640500.9229@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <20100825205006.GC90245@mail.scottro.net>

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 04:41:35PM -0400, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> Hi Scott,
>
> Thanks for the reply/comments.

Yeah, I brilliantly used the wrong address in replying--I blame it on
George or whoever set the mailing list defaults, as otherwise, I'd have
to accept responsibility.  :)


>
> I'm very much trying to decide at this point between Arch and CentOS.  
> Gentoo seems exciting because of the ports, but other than that, it 
> sounds like it's not what I'm looking for.  Ubuntu+Fedora are too hand 
> holding for me.
>
> Which would you choose between Arch and CentOS?


Wow.  For a BSD-er without that much experience of Linux, Arch.  CentOS
will frustrate you too much with lack of docs--though the unofficial
CentOS folks do a great job, better than RH.  

Arch will be far more familiar to you, IMHO.  CentOS is good in many
ways, mostly what we use at work, but as was said, some of the packages
are quite old.  This can be troublesome. 

Arch has an excellent wiki, and their forums are far more active than
the CentOS ones. 

This being said, at work we use CentOS and Fedora, though a developer an
d I just put Ubuntu on a VM, and will probably put Arch on another--AND,
and new boss told me set up a BSD box, which of course, was excellent
news. 

For stability as the main criterion (and possibly vendor support),
CentOS has to get the vote--as it's binary compatible with RH, most
vendors that support RH--and most of them do--will also support
CentOS--Zimbra being one of the exceptions. 

Arch for a more flexible system with up-to-date, possibly not as well
tested, packages, better docs, speed (COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE), and
actually, I've been so busy that I actually haven't run Arch, save on a
netbook, for a year. 


-- 
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6



From scottro at nyc.rr.com  Wed Aug 25 17:49:05 2010
From: scottro at nyc.rr.com (Scott Robbins)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:49:05 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on
	FreeBSD	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <20100825205006.GC90245@mail.scottro.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
	<20100825203838.GA90158@mail.scottro.net>
	<alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251640500.9229@venus.atopia.net>
	<20100825205006.GC90245@mail.scottro.net>
Message-ID: <20100825214905.GA90858@mail.scottro.net>

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 04:50:06PM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
> 

Re CentOS, I should add that in addition to the standard repos
available, and the well-known rpmforge (which has a lot of extras),
there is also the elrepo people who provide a lot of drivers for newer
hardware. 

For what it's worth, these days, I use CentOS at home as
server-cum-workstation, and am able to do just about everything I need
with it, having figured out various workarounds for the older packages.
(But, I don't make many demands of it either.)


-- 
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

Oz: We survived. 
Buffy: Yeah, it was some battle. 
Oz: I meant high school. 



From matt at atopia.net  Wed Aug 25 19:06:56 2010
From: matt at atopia.net (Matt Juszczak)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:06:56 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD
In-Reply-To: <201008210256.10014.max@laiers.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008201820360.35846@venus.atopia.net>
	<201008210256.10014.max@laiers.net>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251906190.11220@venus.atopia.net>

Looks like, very soon, FreeBSD may be on Rackspace Cloud if this feedback 
page keeps up with the issue and they follow the requests.  I didn't even 
create the initial request, so looks like there's some demand:

http://feedback.rackspacecloud.com/forums/71021-product-feedback/suggestions/989519-create-a-freebsd-image

-MJ

On Sat, 21 Aug 2010, Max Laier wrote:

> On Saturday 21 August 2010 00:22:58 Matt Juszczak wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I'm curious to know if anyone knows of any good Cloud server providers
>> that support FreeBSD.  The two that I am most experienced with, Rackspace
>> Cloud and EC2, do not natively support FreeBSD (I assume this is because
>> of the Xen compatability issues).  Terremark does, but isn't an option for
>> me.
>>
>> I currently have a few boxes at rootbsd.net, which works great, but isn't
>> really an advanced Cloud provider - server launches aren't instant, and
>> there's no API.
>>
>> Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace
>> Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions
>> are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports
>> collection?).
>
> Have a look at http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-04-05-FreeBSD-EC2.html -
> maybe Colin has news?
>
> Cheers,
>  Max
>


From akosela at andykosela.com  Thu Aug 26 03:56:11 2010
From: akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela)
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:56:11 +0200
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=F82gc8_yT94BHL7qz8c0mbEEinDq+4jxdEUzh@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:03 PM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>
> Any suggestions? ?Anyone have any recommendations?
>
> Thanks!

If you are coming from the *BSD side of doing things then Slackware or
Crux/Arch Linux will be the most familiar to you.  This could be not
exactly what you want though.  RPM infrastructure has been really
polished throughout all these years and now it's pretty stable, so the
natural choice for a production server would be RHEL/CentOS which is
basically an enterprise standard these days.  I started messing with
Linux when RPM was synonymous to 'dependency hell' in the 90s, so
Slackware was my top choice back in the days.  Patrick Volkerding was
and still is doing an excellent job to maintain it.

Avoid also Debian based distributions -- they can be good for a
desktop, but definetly they are too heavy and 'automated' for a
server.  Their text configuration files are a mess too.

Good luck,
Andy


From edlinuxguru at gmail.com  Thu Aug 26 11:36:02 2010
From: edlinuxguru at gmail.com (Edward Capriolo)
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:36:02 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on FreeBSD
	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=F82gc8_yT94BHL7qz8c0mbEEinDq+4jxdEUzh@mail.gmail.com>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
	<AANLkTi=F82gc8_yT94BHL7qz8c0mbEEinDq+4jxdEUzh@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTin5uDGVhu1PZeFNxGEXvOOM718Oi9j7=-9oTfsm@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:03 PM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>>
>> Any suggestions? ?Anyone have any recommendations?
>>
>> Thanks!
>
> If you are coming from the *BSD side of doing things then Slackware or
> Crux/Arch Linux will be the most familiar to you. ?This could be not
> exactly what you want though. ?RPM infrastructure has been really
> polished throughout all these years and now it's pretty stable, so the
> natural choice for a production server would be RHEL/CentOS which is
> basically an enterprise standard these days. ?I started messing with
> Linux when RPM was synonymous to 'dependency hell' in the 90s, so
> Slackware was my top choice back in the days. ?Patrick Volkerding was
> and still is doing an excellent job to maintain it.
>
> Avoid also Debian based distributions -- they can be good for a
> desktop, but definetly they are too heavy and 'automated' for a
> server. ?Their text configuration files are a mess too.
>
> Good luck,
> Andy
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>



I have been a long time CentOS user. I have not looked at RHEL
6/CENT6. But I will say that the RHEL5 line, and the binary
compatibility is getting long in the tooth. There was definitely a
"golden age" for RHEL5 but it is over for me. I am quite sick of using
kernel 2.6.18_245972495 , which is really closer to 2.6.32 then
2.6.18. Also RHEL freezes things like BerkelyDB since lots of code
links to it. PITA when you want to build open ldap which wants to link
to berkelydb and RHEL only has a super old one as an option.

I am not advocating the Fedora Core line for servers, but I really
enjoy the platform more. CentOS 5 "stability" means I could not get
recent sound, video, or gnome for my laptop. Also I am missing RPM's
for cool things I like to play with without having to build myself.

There was a point where RHEL5 was great because it was a stable/recent
kernel with stable/recent userspace. Now it is still +stable but
-recent.

Edward


From bonsaime at gmail.com  Fri Aug 27 18:03:53 2010
From: bonsaime at gmail.com (Jesse Callaway)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:03:53 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] Fwd: Re: OpenSolaris dead - storage benchmarks
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=-g=T-4zX2zpSqXcmUD5VL_iPQ8t_tneW-sgur@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 12:40 AM, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Aug 2010, Jason Dixon wrote:
>
>> (Sorry for the ill-formatted version, resending)
>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:48 PM, George Rosamond
>>> <george at ceetonetechnology.com <mailto:george at ceetonetechnology.com>>
>>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> ? ? I have not read the whole document, but certainly there's open
>>> ? ? questions about ZFS (which I have heard is a full, irrevocable
>>> ? ? fork), dtrace, etc.
>>>
>>> If its a full fork, and non Sun/Oracle employees have been porting it to
>>> FreeBSD, whats the big deal there?
>>>
>>> ? ? I'd assume that there's a wide audience of developers and users who
>>> ? ? will be looking for a new home. . .
>>>
>>> Solaris was only open source for a few years. Other than those that
>>> jumped on the Solaris band wagon after the open sourcing, I'm not sure
>>> who feels they are in need of a new home. Also, thats only a big deal
>>> for kernel and some core userland developers.
>>
>> You're vastly underestimating the number of Solaris/OpenSolaris users and
>> companies looking for an exit path. ?They were enticed into OpenSolaris
>> and SXCE thanks to exciting projects like Crossbow and bleeding-edge
>> features in ZFS. ?Now many of their systems are backwards-compatible with
>> anything that Oracle will support now or in the future.
>
> I've noticed that the Linux folks are also quite excited about this - it's
> an opportunity to push btrfs pretty hard. ?I do think many of them are
> overestimating how close to production use it is though.
>
> There is also quite a bit of talk on more linux-centric boards about zfs
> being a poor performer compared to just about any linux fx paired with
> lvm/md. ?This I'm not so sure about - Phoronix seems to be the go-to place
> now for benchmarks, and some of their methods are... odd to say the least.
>
> Slightly OT, I'm looking for a benchmark that deals more with iops rather
> than throughput and has a fairly simple output - just something that sweeps
> through various sizes and then spits out a summary of how many io
> operations/second it recorded.
>

bonnie++, i've used this one
iozone, i haven't used it, but it looks good

>>> Don't get me wrong, things are getting interesting from here, but I
>>> don't think its going to be that big of a deal in retrospect. The only
>>> big deal outcome is if Oracle ends up re open sourcing it. If Oracle
>>> increases Solaris's popularity after close sourcing it, it proves Oracle
>>> is a better business than Sun, not that Close source is a better
>>> business model than Open Source. You have Linux and the BSDs proving the
>>> viability of Open Source OS development.
>>
>> This is not a closed-versus-open source issue. ?For OpenSolaris users,
>> it's having a predictable support path and roadmap. ?For the BSD
>> community (in particular, FreeBSD), it's an opportunity to a) embrace new
>> users and b) show off the capabilities and innovation available within
>> BSD.
>>
>> I've had countless discussions with other Solaris users over the last few
>> months. ?FreeBSD is a popular topic of discussion, particularly as a
>> favored alternative to Linux. ?But there are still a lot of questions
>> these folks have, and I think this is a good time to reach out and
>> demonstrate why BSD software (and the associated communities) are a great
>> option to wayward Solaris users.
>
> I am somewhat concerned about FreeBSD in general and specifically what the
> plans are there for ZFS (both in general and ?the impact of oracle perhaps
> not ever releasing any additional code). ?I've seen lots of folks
> experimenting with FreeBSD just for ZFS, many that have never given FreeBSD
> a second thought. ?They seem to avoid the official mailing lists and work
> with each other to tune and debug things either on the FBSD forums or other
> general tech forums, so I don't know how aware the core group of FBSD
> developers are of this growing group of users coming to FBSD strictly for
> ZFS (and finding a pretty decent OS to go along with it).
>
> It seems like even with ZFS now being offically labelled as production-ready
> on FBSD, there's very little documentation popping up, and the few people
> that understand the internals are not really available to help out those who
> want to document it. ?The classic case is the whole issue of running ZFS on
> i386 - tuning it to not panic is not easy, and the manpages are still just
> straight rips from open solaris - there's no FreeBSD-specific info in there.
> ?The wiki (http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS) is somewhat dated and does not
> really explain the i386 tuning issue well. It's also not open to editing.
> ?There are a few tricks to getting i386 stable, but it's not readily
> apparent. ?The biggest hint I found (and I've heard this may have changed)
> is that the arc_max value is NOT a hard limit, but a high water mark where a
> thread to flush the arc to disk kicks off. ?On slower/older hardware with
> unpredictable disk load, the time it takes for that thread to do what it
> needs to can fall behind the rate at which some process is writing data that
> lands in the ARC. ?When that happens, boom! ?I had much better luck tuning
> this once I realized that I could routinely load the box in a way that the
> arc could grow to double it's "max" size. ?In some cases that meant just
> going with better hardware (and 64-bit, where zfs is very stable), and in
> others it could be worked around by setting the ARC max very low - in
> essence giving the flush to disk thread a little bit of a head start.
>
> There's also the issue of sysinstall, especially if you want to do a zfs on
> root setup.
>
> And there's currently a show-stopper bug in 8.1 where a raidz1 array that's
> degraded cannot be booted from because some regression was introduced into
> the zfs bootloader.
>
> Anyhow, yeah this could be a great opportunity, but I think there has to be
> some sort of meeting of whoever is "in charge" of the FreeBSD project to get
> some kind of leadership/management going on this front. ?Docs would actually
> be an excellent start, but beyond that I think there needs to be more
> ownership of ZFS amongst the development team - right now I think there's
> essentially two people involved in what could be one of the biggest features
> FreeBSD has ever introduced.
>
> BTW, if anyone wants to start a general zfs thread, I love to talk about it.
> :) ?I'm in the midst of migrating a bunch of 4.11 boxes to 8.1 w/zfs on
> root.
>
> Charles
>
>
>> --
>> Jason Dixon
>> DixonGroup Consulting
>> http://www.dixongroup.net
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>



-- 
-jesse


From jbaltz at 3phasecomputing.com  Mon Aug 30 14:04:40 2010
From: jbaltz at 3phasecomputing.com (Jerry B. Altzman)
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:04:40 -0400
Subject: [nycbug-talk] OT: Favorite Linux Distro (based on
	FreeBSD	experience?)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008251558530.8463@venus.atopia.net>
Message-ID: <4C7BF2B8.2030606@3phasecomputing.com>

Sorry to be late to the game, I'm catching up a bit.

on 8/25/2010 4:03 PM Matt Juszczak said the following:
> I need to choose a standard Linux distribution for a project I'm working
> on. Most of my experience is FreeBSD, but Linux is required here.
> The available options are:
> * Debian
> * Ubuntu
> * Centos
> * Arch
> * Gentoo
> * Fedora
> While I like CentOS, I don't like the lack of packages native to the OS.
> For instance, MongoDB and PHP and other packages are super old versions
> (if they exist at all).

For production *servers*, I prefer CentOS; it's easier to pare down and 
relatively painless to keep up, although the fact that the RPM/Yum 
libraries tend to be several minor version numbers behind the leading 
edge has caused a bit of pain, but remember, this is RH you're tracking, 
who has a good reason to be conservative.

For desktops, I like Ubuntu, and it appears Ubuntu likes desktops. I'm 
not crazy about it for servers. I have put Ubuntu on servers and, like 
you, been (ahem) surprised a bit when things are automatically 
started/preconfigured etc. (which is a bit of a shock coming from a more 
OpenBSD-minded "don't just stand there, do nothing" viewpoint.)

> -Matt

//jbaltz
-- 
jerry b. altzman  jbaltz at 3phasecomputing.com  +1 718 763 7405 x112
http://www.linkedin.com/in/lorvax	    twitter: @jbaltz3phase