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By Babak Farrokhi, January 30, 2008 8:54 am

Colin Percival (The original author of freebsd-update and binary diff), spent a few hours to resurrect the dead Depenguinator from ashes.
Using Depenguinator 2.0, you can remotely upgrade a happily living Linux system to the latest version of FreeBSD. To me its extremely useful when upgrading a Linux box to FreeBSD in a hosting facility that does not offer any FreeBSD servers.

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.

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By Babak Farrokhi, November 13, 2007 4:31 pm

Yes, Finally I did it. I was quite unhappy with the old theme, and I was also not using the cutting edge features such as Tags, Widgets, etc.

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

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By Babak Farrokhi, October 16, 2007 7:59 pm

Now that Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is due to be released in 26 October, everyone is curious to see what is new in this version and upgrade as soon as its released.
Among the many new features, there has been a few of them that seemed interesting to me:

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.

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By Babak Farrokhi, October 14, 2007 8:59 pm

Finally RELENG_7 is born and the HEAD is now 8.0-CURRENT. I just finished upgrading two of my development boxes to the latest HEAD:

# uname -a
FreeBSD shaun.farrokhi.net 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #10:
Sun Oct 14 11:33:16 IRST 2007     root@shaun.farrokhi.net:
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SERVER  i386

Viva FreeBSD!

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By Babak Farrokhi, August 20, 2007 10:50 pm

If you haven’t seen roundcube webmail yet, it’s an eye-candy web based email client based on IMAP protocol. The project has not released version 1.0 yet after two years but being actively developed. If you are interested, there is also a trac website available for the project.
I used to create nightly snapshots from the cvs since 2005, however the project recently announced they are publishing nightly snapshots on their website (finally!).

Enough for an introduction to roundcube.

I have been the maintainer of this project in FreeBSD ports tree for more than a year now, and tried to keep the port up to date using the snapshots I make once in a while.
Using ports, you can easily install and update roundcube on a FreeBSD server.

If you are interested, there are a few tutorials on the net that can help you installing roundcube on your server and get the most out of it:

- Setup Roundcube on FreeBSD
- HOWTO: Install Roundcube Webmail from SVN (was CVS) on FreeBSD
- HOW TO: Setup RoundCube Webmail on Your Server

I have been lazy in updating the ports I maintain in ports tree recently. However a number of patches are ready to be tested and committed once I find sometime during next weekend.

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By Babak Farrokhi, July 18, 2007 11:40 pm

IPv6 has been around for a few years now. Your Windows, Mac OS X, [put your favorite OS name here] supports IPv6 very well. Everyone knows IPv6 is cool! It solves your problems.
From an engineering point of view, IPv6 is an excellent protocol. It is well suited for our today internet. But it is rarely used.

The story begins. Some people are rambling about hardware upgrade headaches, other about learning curve, and some people about application transition issues.

As a home user, it is highly unlikely that your service provider offers you native IPv6 connectivity. I tell you, it is highly unlikely that your service provider even have native IPv6 connectivity to its upstream, and in most cases, ISPs even do not have their own IPv6 allocation yet. So if you are that type of geek who wants to see how IPv6 works, you should get an IPv6 tunnel from tunnel brokers.

Forget about hardware upgrades and training courses for now. Let’s see what an IPv6 connectivity will offer you. I am doing some basic DNS AAAA record lookups here. If you are not familiar with that, it means the DNS query for IPv6 address of a host, to see which web sites are offering you services over IPv6.

I start from major websites you will mostly use on a daily basis:

$ host -tAAAA www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
$ host -tAAAA www.l.google.com
www.l.google.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo.com
www.yahoo.com is an alias for www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net
www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA lb1.www.ms.akadns.net
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.paypal.com
www.paypal.com has no AAAA record

So far so good. None of major web sites support IPv6. What about people who sell you pricey IPv6 gear? Lets see:

$ host -tAAAA www.cisco.com
www.cisco.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.juniper.net
www.juniper.net has no AAAA record

Interesting. None of them support IPv6 too. And the people who encourage you to use IPv6:

$ host -tAAAA www.ietf.org
www.ietf.org has IPv6 address 2610:a0:c779:b::d1ad:35b4

$ host -tAAAA www.iana.org
www.iana.org has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.arin.net
www.arin.net has IPv6 address 2001:500:4:1::80

$ host -tAAAA www.runningipv6.net
www.runningipv6.net has IPv6 address 2001:1af8:2:5::2

$ host -tAAAA playground.sun.com
playground.sun.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6forum.com
www.ipv6forum.com has IPv6 address 2001:a18:1:20::22

$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6tf.org
www.ipv6tf.org has IPv6 address 2001:7f9:1000:1::103

The result is very interesting. Most services on internet are only available on IPv4. Most service hosting providers have no native IPv6 connectivity. And most ISPs do not offer native IPv6 connectivity to customers.

I am not sure if I am actually helping this transition, but I started using IPv6 at home. My excellent super efficient IPv6 is tunneled over the deficient and weakly designed IPv4. Without IPv4 my IPv6 will not even work. And I am still visiting google.com on IPv4.

This was a rant from an end-user’s point of view. The IPv6 is far from the wide adoption. A hard 10 years is ahead of users and service providers, and 10 good years for network hardware vendors.

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By Babak Farrokhi, July 14, 2007 10:16 am

Ivan Voras has done a very good job by putting together a FreeBSD 7.0 based LiveCD.
The CD contains a very recent 7.0 installation + ZFS patches (usable!) and XFCE 4.2.
I spent half an hour to try the LiveCD and it worked fine for me on two different boxes.
I am sure Ivan is planning to bundle a firefox with the LiveCD, along with the graphical installer.

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By Babak Farrokhi, May 11, 2007 2:40 pm

For a while, I have been switching browsers on Mac on a daily basis.

1- Safari is a very nice and polished browser, but has major problems with internationalized pages and crashes once in a while. Does not support plug-ins. Not my preferred browser at all. Excellent for simple searches and general web browsing. However, the development builds (Webkit nightly builds) shows there are numerous improvements I hope we see soon in next releases.

2- Firefox was my favorite browser in windows. But in OS X it is far from perfect. Its very slow, and is a different beast in comparison with other OS X softwares. It is excellent to have all those nice plug-ins I had on Windows, here on a Mac. Firefox in OS X is very slow and is no way like its windows version. Firefox is a software which is designed for Windows, not for Mac.

3- Camino is the little sister of Firefox, using the same engine with a Mac interface. It is something between Safari and Firefox. So far I had the best web browsing experience with this browser on Mac. However, It is almost as unstable as safari. And no plug-in support. But its very fast and feels much more like a OS X native software than Firefox.

4- Other browsers including Opera, Shiira, SeaMonkey, … . I would suggest you do not waste time on these browsers (on Mac). They seem to lost their goal. People want to enjoy web browsing. I really don’t want to switch from one browser to other on my daily browsing journey.

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By Babak Farrokhi, February 22, 2007 9:09 am

I have always been an ATI fan since nVidia did not exist. And so far it served well on my workstations. I don’t even care that they are part of AMD now.
However, something that was annoying me for a while was ATI’s driver which seems to not as good as nVidia’s in *nix, especially for their newer and high-end cards. I am not sure why ATI does not care much about their non-windows drivers, but I am sure that they are loosing lots of faithful customers and a good market share for just the same reason.

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By Babak Farrokhi, February 13, 2007 12:42 am

I have very limited resources at home to test new stuff (However I am planning to make a well equipped home lab like the one scott morris has soon). But I make good use of virtual machines on my Windows XP workstation.

I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (which is now free) at home because it is very light-weight and runs FreeBSD 7 very well. But at work I get the most out of VMWare Server ( free, too! ). VMWare is much bulkier and heavier, but gives you fine control over virtual machines. And officially supports FreeBSD and Solaris (my favorite ones) and has vmware-tools package for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Netware. However vmware-tools does not work on my fbsd7 installation (dumps core), but I don’t care because I don’t run X and use if_le driver and do fine tuning manually.

If you have limited resources, I strongly suggest Microsoft Virtual PC. Though it does not officially support non-microsoft operating systems, I have several FreeBSD installation on it without any problem. Excellent for trying out system for a limited time. But if you are planning to make serious use of your virtual FreeBSD, VMware would be your only choice as it officially supports FreeBSD (even runs 64-bit edition, but I never tried that) and runs X very well.

If you are thinking of running FreeBSD on VMWare, Ivan Voras‘ article has some very useful that would make life much easier.