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FreeBSD and OpenBSD Picks
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Mariusz Zaborski ☛ Suricata, Jumbo Frames, and netmap
One of my FreeBSD machines sits between the Internet and the rest of my network.
I wanted Suricata to monitor traffic arriving on four of the machine's interfaces and complain when something looks wrong.
I started with one interface, `mce1`, and planned to add the other three after capture worked.
The capture interfaces are backed by Mellanox ConnectX adapters handled by the mlx5en driver, and they use a jumbo-frame MTU of 9000 bytes.
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Minsoo Choo ☛ I'm now a FreeBSD committer
On July 24th, I received an email from srcmgr@ informing me that I had been granted a src commit bit. After that, the FreeBSD accounts team created a freefall.FreeBSD.org account and a FreeBSD email address (mchoo@) for me. Then, I created patches for src and doc to complete the steps for new committers. They landed in the FreeBSD repositories yesterday (src, doc).
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Rafael Sadowski ☛ Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8)
For many years, I wrote modern C++ code professionally. Eventually, I moved away from development work and focused on solution architecture, platform engineering, and building teams. I wrote little actual code, mostly declarative YAML. The only coding I did was reading and porting code for OpenBSD ports(7).
Then LLMs arrived. As tech bros claimed “coding is solved”. I realized something: I wanted to challenge myself to code again. I think that at a time when this knowledge is being outsourced, it’s more important than ever to have it! C has always been the language that intimidated me most. C++ and Rust handle the hard thinking for you. C doesn’t. That’s exactly what I wanted: that kind of challenge.
So I decided to start contributing to relayd(8) and httpd(8)().
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Make Use Of ☛ I installed FreeBSD expecting a Linux alternative and discovered something completely different
When it comes to UNIX-like operating systems, two come to mind: the better-known Linux and the often-overlooked Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD has a few “variants”, and FreeBSD is one of the more popular versions out there.
FreeBSD is a very different experience compared to Linux, and I was nowhere near mastering it. Which is why I chose to install it onto a virtual machine first, and after spending a few days with it, I might just be considering a switch, but for another machine.