It is time again for MeetBSD California!

What: MeetBSD California

http://www.meetbsd.com/

When: November 5th-6th, 2010

Where: Mountain View, California, USA

Overview

Join other members of the BSD community November 5th and 6th (Fri. &
Sat.) for an amazing opportunity to learn and share BSD wisdom. Come
enjoy and engage your contemporaries in the BSD world at MeetBSD
California’s unconference of targeted discussions.

MeetBSD CA 2010 features a community-driven discussion format that gives
great minds from the BSD and open source communities the opportunity to
share ideas. Discussions in the form of breakout sessions will provide a
forum for a variety of open source development topics. Lightning talks
will allow attendees to share the status of their BSD projects quickly
with other community members, while stimulating conversation.  A handful
of selected speakers will also take part in the event, delivering
information on a number of BSD platforms.

MeetBSD CA ’10 will feature an afterparty on Saturday night to give
attendees a more relaxed environment to discuss and recount the topics
of the unconference. The afterparty will feature drinks, food,
and good company to keep the conversations going strong into the night.
Both MeetBSD CA 2010 and the afterparty will be held at Hacker Dojo in
the San Francisco Bay Area.

Register now for your spot at MeetBSD California 2010 for two
informative, engaging, and fun-filled days at

https://www.meetbsd.com/register.

For more information about Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California
visit http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/.

The official hotel of MeetBSD California 2010 is Hotel Avante, located
less than two miles from the event with direct shuttle service to and
from Hacker Dojo. Reserve a room at Hotel Avante at:

https://reservations.ihotelier.com/crs/g_reservation.cfm?groupID=471344&hotelID=5604.

Sponsorship Opportunities

If you or your company would be interested in sponsoring this year’s
MeetBSD California event, please visit https://www.meetbsd.com/sponsors
for a listing of sponsorship packages. You may also e-mail any inquiries
about sponsoring MeetBSD to info@meetbsd.com.

Thank you to our current sponsors: Marvell, iXsystems, FreeBSD
Foundation, BSD Fund, and Intuix.

Hope to see you in November!

–
The MeetBSD California 2010 Team

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

FreeBSD Foundation Turns to NYI for East Coast US Mirror

Deployment Adds Enterprise-Grade Redundancy for Improved Reliability,
Reduced Latency, High-Speed Backups and Other Efficiencies

BOULDER, CO, August 10, 2010—The FreeBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3)
non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and
community, today announced that NYI (www.nyi.net), a New York City-based,
mission-critical data services provider, will be mirroring key West coast
infrastructure at NYI’s 999 Frontier Road data center in Bridgewater, New
Jersey, a recently opened 40,000 square foot facility.

In addition to providing enterprise-grade redundancy and reliability for
the Project’s
infrastructure, the East coast mirror will reduce latency during heavy
download times, distribute load between the two coasts, and allow for
up-to-date backups of all Project data that can be synchronized via
high-speed Internet connections.

“Having a well-connected, secondary site with NYI’s amenities to host
FreeBSD project infrastructure means that we can move services between
sites when doing scheduled maintenance to improve reliability for FreeBSD
developers and users,” said Simon L. Nielsen, FreeBSD.org administrative
team. He added, “The new site also enables us to expand significantly the
available hardware for FreeBSD package building, allowing the FreeBSD ports
team to perform QA test builds and quickly produce binary FreeBSD packages
for end-users.”

“We are long-time open-source advocates,” said Phillip Koblence, VP
Operations, NYI. “The FreeBSD Foundation in particular represents
everything that got us into technology in the first place. With this
deployment, we take our commitment to a new level in the hope that what we
are doing lays the foundation for next-generation data centers built around
FreeBSD. As many people in the community know, NYI’s 999 Frontier Road
facility features many of the Project’s efforts, as everything from PDUs to
the servers run FreeBSD.”

The East coast mirror at 999 Frontier is also notable because it replaces
aging and inadequate hardware; provides dual-configuration so that
experimental vs. production runs can be separated out, allowing changes to
the ports system to be evaluated continuously rather the interrupting
production flow; deploys to multiple sites, providing resiliency in the
event of a failure; provides build capacity required to support the ports
ABI changes required to improve the foundations for binary package support
while maintaining ports-stable regression testing.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to have been able to fund the purchase of
the hardware. Brad Davis, Mark Linimon, and Simon Nielsen from the FreeBSD
Project worked on the configuration, along with key members of the NYI
team.

About The FreeBSD Foundation
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to
supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. The Foundation gratefully
accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund and
manage projects,
sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to
FreeBSD developers. In addition, the Foundation represents the FreeBSD
Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal
arrangements that require a
recognized legal entity. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely supported by
donations. More information about The FreeBSD Foundation is available on
the web at http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org.

About NYI
Established in 1996, NYI is headquartered in the heart of the Wall Street
area and owns and maintains its own data centers, including 999 Frontier, a
newly opened 40,000 square foot facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The
company’s core services include colocation, dedicated servers, web and
email hosting, and managed services, as well as turnkey disaster recovery
and business continuity solutions from its Bridgewater location. With
high-bandwidth connectivity partners AboveNet, Verizon Business, Optimum
Lightpath, and AT&T, NYI specializes in mission-critical data services for
the financial services industry, in addition to customers from a broad
range of industries, including media, law, fashion, architecture, life
sciences and real estate. NYI is SAS 70 Type II-compliant, in addition to
being both PCI and HIPAA compliant. For more information, visit
www.nyi.net.

# # #

Media Contact:

Bill Lessard
Publicist
NYI

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Shteryana Shopova has been awarded a grant to make improvements to BSNMP.

This project includes several enhancements to the existing FreeBSD
SNMP framework, including SNMPv3-compliant user authentication, packet
encryption and view-based access control. In addition, the project
also includes a new module that will allow full SNMP management and
monitoring of the FreeBSD wireless networking stack. When the
project is completed, FreeBSD should be the OS of choice when building
open source-based embedded wireless appliances due to the advanced
capabilities of its wireless network stack, and the light-weight,
secure and complete management solution that bsnmpd(1) will provide
out of the box. Existing FreeBSD installations that use bsnmpd(1) for
monitoring will also benefit from the added security and finer-grained
access-control to SNMP data.

“SNMP is the defacto standard for network monitoring,” said Shteryana
Shopova, FreeBSD developer. She also added, “SNMP is used
everywhere – in network servers, switches,  routers, firewalls,
workstations, ip phones, printers, UPSs, all sorts of embedded
appliances. I am happy to have the opportunity to work on several
additions to bsnmpd(1) that have been requested by the FreeBSD
community.”

This project will be completed in October 2010.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation

Published the following announcement earlier this morning   on the FreeBSD Announce mailing list.

OpenSVC has is now available for FreeBSD

OpenSVC is a GPLv2 project automating the low-level operations needed 1) to bring up system resources (virtual machine container, ip, disk groups, filesystem mounts, application launchers) on a node and 2) to replicate data to secondary nodes (in local or remote sites). OpenSVC can be coupled to a tiers heartbeat daemon to form a full failover clustering stack.

OpenSVC offers a simple service start/stop/status/sync* command line interface.

OpenSVC can be deployed to drive all types of service on all major operating systems, and drive best-of-breed replication strategies available on users’ sites : rsync+snap, zfs, netapp, emc, drbd.

Generalized usage of OpenSVC brings easy group-actions in an heterogeneous datacenter, like those needed for disaster recovery plan activation, or a more localized outage.

The FreeBSD port is fresh and done by newcomers in this world, so community comments are welcome, particularly on the following topics:

1. ‘tbz’ packaging.
2. Only zfs pools are supported as “disk group” resources. Support for GEOM disk aggregations might be added, if there is Community interest.
3. Jail support. OpenSVC does not care about provisioning, but I hope I got the start/stop stuff right.
4. Opensvc startup script.
5. The port has been done on FreeBSD 8.

Feedback on what breaks on older release is welcome. More information is available on the OpenSVC site.

The ClangBSD project has reach the self-hosting point and the system is stable enough for general beta-testing. ClangBSD is a project fork of FreeBSD that is working to replace gcc with clang by completely integrating this BSD licensed C/C++ compiler. The project has achieved self-compiling of itself and all of FreeBSD world on the i386 & amd64 platforms.

Roman Divacky announced the open call for beta-testers on April 16th.

To learn more about Clang and FreeBSD read their wiki.

Recently a page claiming to be the Official Fan Page of PC-BSD was setup on Facebook. While there are only a few fans and the PC-BSD developers have yet to acknowledge the page, it is probably a good idea for projects like this to have fan pages. Social media is playing such a huge part in the grow of businesses and open source projects that it will soon be difficult to survive without embracing it.

Let’s hope that the fan page admins stay true to the project.

Dear FreeBSD Community,

Today is the last day to submit your travel grant application for BSDCan 2010!

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel
grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit
the Travel Grant Request Application at by April 9, 2010 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers,
documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc).  In some
cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community
members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of
travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations
(conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your
employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our
budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to
cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct
request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek
reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our
overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to
the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on
travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical
costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that
funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project.
Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank
transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel
your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may
show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our
semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something
about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions.
The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can
spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers
get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and
advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation

Notable in this release are the fully supported 64 bit edition, enhancements to the HAMMER file system and USB disk key booting in lieu of DVD ISO previously available. It is worth noting that the GUI version of the USB image is only available for the 32 bit version. The developers promise to release the 64 bit version of the GUI USB image as soon as possible.

Recently a call for testers of the latest X.org version 7.5 went out specifically for FreeBSD users. There have been numerous driver updates that require testing. X.org is the default x11 windowing system for FreeBSD.

If you are interested in helping the project along please see the original notice.

To read more about the project please refer to the official wiki.

For those who are unfamiliar BSDCan is a BSD Conference held in Ottawa, Canada typically during the second week of May. This year’s conference will run from May 13th & 14th and is preceded by two days of conferences on the 11th & 12th.  As this year’s conference approaches the organizers have published a list of events. The schedule of events and speakers is available as a color coded web table or down loadable in various formats including iCal, xCal and even XML.

The conference has continued it’s steady growth and the list of speakers this year is formidable. The following is a short list of examples;

If you are able to attend BSDCan you should as it is fast becoming one of the largest BSD conferences worldwide.