I seriously urge you to switch to Mac if you care about your productivity and performance.

1- You need to know accurately when you should go for lunch or back home
2- You need accurate time in your event log files for further analysis
3- Many programs need to have the correct date and time to function (e.g. MTA)
4- You need correct timestamps on your files

Given above facts, you will need to enable NTP on your hosts and keep your system clock in sync with public time servers.

First you should make sure that your timezone setting is correct. The latest timezone information can be updated by installing “zoneinfo” port from /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo:


# cd /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo/
# make install clean


and run tzsetup(8) to make sure you have selected the correct timezone.

Now, to enable automatic time sync during system startup, you need to add a few lines to your /etc/rc.conf file:

ntpdate_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="-b pool.ntp.org"


This will make your system to sync the clock upon startup. I use NTP pool at “pool.ntp.org” that suggests a NTP server from a large pool of available time servers. However you may use your favorite/local NTP server.

You can also synchronize your time manually by invoking ntpdate(8) from command line, passing an NTP server address to it:

# ntpdate time.nist.gov


I redirected the old feed URLs to the new one, but I suggest you update your links and let me know if you are having difficulties accessing content on this website.

I would really appreciate your feedbacks on the current book and suggestions for future editions.

This book is something that I have been looking for since I started with FreeBSD back in 1997. I needed a practical book with working examples of how to optimize my FreeBSD installations for various types of applications. And I never found that book, until I recently decided to write one.

“Network Administration with FreeBSD 7” is unique in several ways:

• I tried to cover the exciting new features and improvements introduced in FreeBSD 7
• It is full of tips and tricks on how to optimize your installation from optimizing disk I/O, network, virtual memory, etc.
• It covers IPv4 and IPv6 configuration as well and bridging and routing in FreeBSD
• It has working examples of different IPSec, GRE, PPP and GIF scenarios
• I tried to cover Jail virtualization in working real world examples
• Keeping your system up to date and customizing system for specific applications is thoroughly covered

I tried to stop telling stories in the book and give more real world examples instead, so reading this book would not make you smile

An article named Tunneling with FreeBSD (taken from book) is also available on PACKT website.

Update: The book has its own website at http://freebsdbook.com

Kudos to WebKit team for their great browser!

The upcoming release of FreeBSD 7 is a major milestone for all FreeBSD developers and users. It is the most amazing release I have ever had the chance to play with. There are plenty of new features and many improvements, especially in networking (which is my area of interest).
I have had this chance to play with MySQL 5.1 running on FreeBSD 7 on top of 8 cores of Xeon processor in 64-bit mode. My impression was that it was almost as fast as kris’s benchmarks and totally kicked linux 2.6 in threading and SMP performance.

This is something I expected to see in FreeBSD 6. However FreeBSD seems to be catching up with linux again.

The project needs help from community to test and report issues back to the developer in order to improve the software. However it is worth giving a try on your Ubuntu box.

On a related note, I was thinking of porting this into the package repository of various Linux distributions.

So here you are: The new theme. I will definitely update it in a few days to make it look better.

Create Instruments with DTrace

Monitor system activity from high-level application behavior down to the operating system kernel, all thanks to the power of DTrace and the instrument builder.

Sounds familiar? Yes, its the same DTrace you know from Solaris (also in FreeBSD). It would be very interesting for system developers to get the best out of OS X core system. Of course, there is an eye-candy interface for using DTrace called Xray.

Self-Tuning TCP

Let Leopard adjust TCP buffer size automatically. Get optimum application performance, especially in high-bandwidth/high-latency environments.

Using a BSD kernel, OS X already enjoys a fine-grained TCP/IP protocol stack, which supports latest enhancements and extensions. This self-tuning feature will definitely improve the network throughput in many situations. However I hope this can be disabled since some expert users prefer to configure the low level TCP/IP parameters based on their experience.

Application-Based Firewall

Gain more control over the built-in firewall. Specify the behavior of specific applications to either allow or block incoming connections.

This one was really missing in previous releases and many people were relying on Little Snitch to achieve this feature. Of course I believe brilliant people in Apple were smart enough to make it so it does not annoy users like windows firewall does.

Sandboxing

Enjoy a higher level of protection. Sandboxing prevents hackers from hijacking applications to run their own code by making sure applications only do what they’re intended to do. It restricts an application’s file access, network access, and ability to launch other applications. Many Leopard applications — such as Bonjour, Quick Look, and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed so hackers can’t exploit them.

Something that I am sure has equivalent in Windows, almost like running an application in a chrooted environment. However it sounds more complicated. This will hopefully improve the security in application level and reduce application level exploits (buffer overflow,…) risks.

Multicore Optimized

Take full advantage of modern architectures with multiple processor cores with improved scheduling, memory management, and processor affinity algorithms.

OS X was obviously not optimized for multi-core systems (despite the fact that apple has been shipping multi-core systems for more than a year). This enhancement will definitely improve the core system performance by getting the most out of processor power.

Conclusion

After using OS X for more than a year now, its my favorite Desktop environment. I like the eye-candy user interface while enjoying enterprise grade FreeBSD system core. I cannot wait to upgrade to the latest release, but I am certain that it is worth to wait a few days more.