Interacting with FreeBSD – Learning the Fundamentals of the FreeBSD Shell
The time of the CLI might seem over given the plethora of UIs these days, however, any experienced sysadmin knows just how necessary a powerful CLI like the FreeBSD shell can be. In FreeBSD 14, the default root shell is changing, and in this article we talk about the background and motivations for this change and what implications and advantages this change brings.
Improving Replication Security With OpenZFS Delegation
OpenZFS privilege delegation is an extremely powerful tool that enables system administrators to carefully provide unprivileged users the ability to manage ZFS datasets and zvols at an extremely precise level —with much finer control than would be possible with generic security tools like sudo or doas.
Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS
Let’s talk about building your own NAS on FreeBSD. The first step – researching hardware. When it comes to researching NAS hardware, it’s easy to get lost in the dizzying array of technologies, vendor datasheets touting performance and reliability stats.
While we can’t tell you what hardware to buy in an article, we can discuss some of the factors to consider as you research which hardware best meets your storage requirements.
Unix Philosophy: A Quick Look at the Ideas that Made Unix
Early on, developers working on Unix created a set of ideals that acted as a roadmap for the programs they wrote. They didn’t always follow these ideals, but they set the tone for the Unix project. Keep programs simple, design programs to work together, test early and often – are only some of these ideals. To this day, the Unix Philosophy impacts many projects.
UNIX: On the Path to BSD
We continue our series of articles on the history of Unix with the events led to the creation of BSD. Find out about the first Unix editions, how C evolved, and how Unix was first licensed.
Modern inetd in FreeBSD
The inetd ‘super-server’ is a special application that ties incoming network connections to locally-run commands. While it is not a common part of deployments today, it still has potential to be useful in production environments, and definitely has a place in the future of FreeBSD.
FreeBSD Periodic Scripts
FreeBSD can report on the health of the system and perform various routine maintenance tasks using its own built-in mechanism for periodically running scripts. Learn about the periodic system and how to find available scripts, write your own scripts and where and how to apply them.
The Birth of UNIX
In his 1999 book In the Beginning… Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson said the following about Unix: “Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.”
Read more about how the story of UNIX actually goes.
Packet Scheduling with Dummynet and FreeBSD
Let’s talk Dummynet! A traffic manager, bandwidth manager and link emulator, Dummynet is a powerful part of FreeBSD. Dummynet gives us the tools to control how traffic at bottlenecks is treated and can be used to make reservations on our hosts so they remain reachable when under high packet load.
UNIX Wars – The Battle for Standards
UNIX’s history was marred by power struggles and fights over its direction and core. This meant that at some point in time, different factions went to war to control the future of UNIX. As part of our recent write-up, we’re taking a look at the wars that shaped UNIX’s future and the events that followed.
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