51–60 of 376 posts
Not shown: the bewildering choices made for various tools. sed * The `-i` flag - In the absence of a file extension given, I should not have to specify with `''` that I want the original file over-written. The flag is called in-place for a reason. * BSD sed doesn't support ANSI-C escape sequences, so you have to fall back to your shell quoting them for you. xargs * Why is there no `-d` flag for BSD? There are others…
I've considered migrating my NAS to openbsd few times, but one thing I was not sure about is with that to replace the filesystem with. I'm currently running btrfs and I like it. Few things I would like to have in a replacement: 1. copy-on-write and snapshots 2. checksums that are automatically verified on reads 3. btrfs' version of RAID1 (meaning I don't have to buy identical HDDs only) What would be my options?
I believe zfs fulfills all those requirements. I’m running freebsd on my NAS and it’s been great.
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I guess calling POSIX modern is a point of view, unless a language runtime is bound to Linux specific syscalls, any UNIX like OS will run "modern" web backends. From that point of view, you can even do "modern" web backends on IBM and Unisys mainframes, using their POSIX environments. And yes, they do actually support everything on that list, by the way, mainframes invented noSQL databases before SQL was a thing, hav…
Very, very few things depend on Linux-specific syscalls. There are two reasons for this: first, they are unportable, so you need another code path for everything !Linux anyway, and even when you only care about Linux you can't assume those syscalls are available, because you first need to get them into the kernel, then into glibc, which is a separate project, and then you need to ship them in the distro, which in som…
In any case, in what concerns "modern" Web development, z/OS has you covered,
https://www.ibm.com/products/open-enterprise-sdk-go-zos
I have tried learning FreeBSD occasionally, mostly for nostalgia because I learned Unix on BSD 4.3 (or 4.4?) on MicroVaxes many years ago. But I get stuck on some very basic things: - My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but the driver doesn't work. - The console terminal defaults to 80x25, I don't know how to resize it. - I can't figure out how to start X Windows. - If I run it in a VM (e.g. Virtu…
FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are for servers, appliance servers and embedded devices mostly. You can use them as a desktop, but that's not where their strengths are. If you want to learn or use FreeBSD in this case I strongly suggest setting up a home server and learn as much as possible.
You do need to be sure your desktop machine is well-suited for OpenBSD. This means supported Intel or AMD graphics (Nvidia won't work well if at all, and not all AMD will either) and network/wifi card.
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Just wanted to say that in linux you have extended attributes on files, check the man page on chattr. I believe the -i option makes files immutable. I picked this little trick up watching a red team discuss how they set themselves persistence on the target system by making /etc/shadow immutable this way.. Fun bit is, root can't even remove the file until the flag is removed, and you can't see the immutable flag on th…
FreeBSD has the concept of a 'security level'. You can increase it at runtime, which disables more functionality, but you can't decrease it without a reboot. At security level 1, the immutable and append only attributes on files can't be removed, so even chattr -i would be useless.
You could literally hand out root shell to people, and they wouldn’t be able to make much mess out of it.
There are SELinux policies to prevent disabling selinux too, of course.
You probably wouldn’t even need chattr.
How are things these days with graphics (well, NVIDIA and maybe intel, I don't care about amd) drivers, CUDA, ML? How's support in general for latest hardware like CPUs, mobos/wifi?
Basic usage with Nvidia drivers works ok. Nvidia disables CUDA and NVENC/NVDEC on FreeBSD. CPUs/motherboards work great, at least in x86 (arm64 probably works well, too, but I'm less familiar). Wifi is very behind the curve. If you have a supported card (including some 802.11AC cards), 802.11N probably works -- but last I heard, AC does not.
how does the kernel compare these days? pre-cfq i remember the scheduler was far better than linux, but what about raw performance for single and multithread/process workloads with lots of i/o going through the kernel? raw cve counts seem meaningless without a denominator to me. those numbers should be normalized by estimated install base if they're going to be compared.
There's probably a niche for freebsd but unless you know exactly what it is and how to exploit that niche, you're not going to find it by accident.
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On the desktop, Linux is going to be challenging anyway. Many people love that challenge and make it work, and that's cool. But my point is that if you can make it work on desktop Linux you will make it work on FreeBSD as well, given some decent skill.
Desktop Linux is pretty comfortable and intuitive, actually. There's no challenge involved.
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The recent WireGuard debacle left a bad taste about this. As it actually turns out, sometimes there is zero technical review for very important patches and a few blessed developers can (and sometimes do) just throw their stuff directly into trunk. This seems like a misunderstanding of the FreeBSD development model. Yes, immature code landed in HEAD, but it was removed before the next release . In general in FreeBSD t…
> (Yes, Netflix runs FreeBSD HEAD. I think they're nuts.) Sounds like chaos engineering to me ;)
The reason I think they're nuts isn't stability but rather security. I guess since they're shipping these boxes around the world there's nothing really sensitive on them; but still, if I were in their shoes I would be worried about security bugs being introduced.
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read the handbook... it's the second chapter in this webpage.
...or pick an operating system where you don't need to read the handbook to get working WiFi.
Does this mean WiFI is only for Win/Mac?