The arrow of time

It's that time of the year again - time for the biggest, bestest gathering of BSD geeks from around the world - BSDCan 2013. It was great to see old friends and new faces, exchange ideas and talk about the bright future.

I've (finally) tried both FreeNAS and NAS4free and I'd like to share some thoughts and experiences. Both of these are "NAS-in-a-box" products intended to be installed on computers with a large number of drives, which they will export to the world in a variety of protocols. Both are based on FreeBSD, both fully support ZFS and they even share a common history.

The tl;dr of this post would be something like "yes, they are similar enough to be interchangable, BUT...", as I actually cannot give a more specific advice. Read on for why.

There's been a lot of maturing of technology for FreeBSD 10 - lots of new features which make this release the most exciting one in years. Here are some of my personal highlights.

Kickstarter is a great thing - it allows projects which limited appeal to be succesfully financed, which helps them succeed. One such project is the Parallela. It is basically an ARM-based highly-NUMA computer with 16-64 cores which can be used both to teach parallel programming and actually do some useful work with very little electrical power. The numbers cited as on the on the order of 45 GFLOPS/watt for the maximum configuration. As the Kickstarter deadline is approaching, I think it is a good time to use this opportunity to call on all enthusiasts to help fund this cool project!

I have been using pkgng on a few machines now and I'd like to share some thoughts about how it behaves in real-world situations. Overall, I'm very happy with it and it's immensely better than what we had before. There are some rough edges which need to be solved but those are mostly a property of the ports system itself rather than pkgng.

Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon (and that's Moon with the capital M, it's its name) on July 21st 1969. He was 38 years old.

That is way before my time. I'm 30 now and I didn't, couldn't witness it myself. My father, though, is of the generation which did witness it, in a live stream - what they used to call "world-wide broadcasts" before Internet made it obsolete - and he told me about it.

FreeBSD (and BSDs in general) traditionally have source-based upgrades and installs which extends to the third party software collections - ports or pkgsrc and similar. This is all fine and offers unprecedended flexibility when tailoring system to specific needs, but sometimes this flexibility is less important than ease of use or time savings which can only be achieved with binary packages. Enter pkgng, the next-generation binary package management system by Baptiste Daroussin and others, which replaces the old-style ports and packages system.

SSL is good, SSL is great, SSL does a lot of things for a lot of people, but sometimes you just need a secure login method without the overhead of using SSL. As a first step, I've created a simple library, rsalogin, which uses a JavaScript RSA implementation and allows the client and the server to exchange data in a relatively secure manner.  It borrows the approach of verifying server keys from SSH: the first time a server is accessed, its key is stored locally in the browser using HTML5 and verified on later access.