can someone ELI5 why #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD don't share package manager? I get that they need need different binaries, but why each has their own way to package install?
My SO made me the lovely diamond painting attached to this Toot.
I was asked (some moons ago) to join the EuroBSDcon board - which I humbly accepted.
My talk for EuroBSDcon 2023 in Coimbra, Portugal was accepted.
I feel so incredibly honored to serve the BSD community that I fall short of words. Thank you all, really - from the bottom of my h3art (pun intended) :flan_heart:
I'll be giving #OpenBSD a fair go this weekend on my X201 (posting from that machine right now!). Running my patched suckless programs and I'm quite happy so far...
Can any OpenBSD person help me with this error? I am trying to install OpenBSD 7.4 and it always fails to install the bootloader. I could install OpenBSD 7.3 (when it was released) but now I can't install 7.4. Should I email misc@? I'd appreciate if somebody could help me.
Today, something odd happened to me, slightly concerning but which, fortunately, ended on a positive note and with deep reflection.
They're doing some renovations in my office, so I sat down at a café table to work. I had with me an old HP laptop running FreeBSD. Ferrara is generally a peaceful city, but lately, some groups of youngsters have been causing trouble, going around bothering people, and in extreme cases, starting fights.
Today, it was my turn.
As they roamed around trying to provoke others, two of them approached me and began touching my laptop. They mocked me, jesting (not so playfully) about how ancient my computer was and how "they needed a computer," picking it up and examining it. Politely, I told them I needed it for work and it had all my files, so I couldn't just hand it over. It was broad daylight, but no one else was around at that moment. One of them noticed something unusual - "Where's the Windows menu? Is this Linux?"
"No, it's FreeBSD. Have you ever heard of it?" Their surprised expressions said it all. The entire group gathered, sat on the ground, and listened intently for about 15 minutes. I stalled, hoping for other people to arrive, so I wasn't alone.
Eventually, they got up, told me I was "old" but cool, and that they would immediately try out the BSDs (they were particularly intrigued by OpenBSD's security features - which they didn't grasp fully but saw as "professional hacker stuff"). They gave me a high-five, peacefully, without bothering anyone further.
Now, I'm left wondering: did they leave me alone because they learned something intriguing from me, because other people arrived, or are they just bored teenagers causing issues to pass the time - and got engrossed in something new, hence shifting their focus temporarily? All I know is I was relieved to get back to my office and from there, hear the rain outside, which usually deters these boys from troubling others.
I can say that today, FreeBSD saved me from very different problems than it usually does 😃
I've been playing with #OpenBSD recently and I love it. Things just work! Enable HTTPS on Httpd (webserver) and PF (firewall) opens 443. Magic!
Long story short: https://test.sapka.me. There are a few things I still need to fix, like broken chain of trust between Relayd and Httpd but I will move https://michal.sapka.me there eventually. I still really like #FreeBSD, but it seems #OpenBSD is simply easier.
This is a 2013 #Apple#MacBook Pro Retina - born unlucky, it has encountered many hardware issues - but it has been serving in the office for handling some minor tasks. #MacOS is now outdated, so I've decided to install a #BSD on it.
However, I'm still unsure about which one to choose. I might experiment with all of them on four external disks and evaluate their performance.
Well this was a failure and not as much fun as I'd hoped. Manually bootstrapping wifi and installing firmware packages first thing because of licensing issues took the wind right out of my sails. Gave up after 2 hours.
Am I right in thinking that, in the year 2024, the only file system that #Windows#MacOS#Linux#FreeBSD and #OpenBSD can all read and write on, without installing additional software is ExFAT? E.g. if I want to format a HDD to share large files with less technical relatives, that's my best choice?
How OpenBSD is dealing with the xz problem (as seen on the OpenBSD.ports mailing list). This package is not in the base system (it is on my laptop, though):
Sharing some technical details about how I'm setting up the hosted email service. It will not be a service of BSD Cafe but tied to my own business. It will run entirely on BSD systems and on bare metal, NOT on "cloud" VPS. It will use FreeBSD jails or OpenBSD or NetBSD VMs (but on bhyve, on a leased server - I do not want user data to be stored on disks managed by others). The services (opensmtpd and rspamd, dovecot, redis, mysql, etc.) will run on separate jails/VMs, so compromising one service will NOT put the others at risk. Emails will be stored on encrypted ZFS datasets - so all emails are encrypted at rest - and only dovecot will have access to the mail datasets. I'm also considering the possibility of encrypting individual emails with the user's login password - but I still have to thoroughly test this. The setup will be fully redundant (double mx for SMTP, a domain for external IMAP access that will be managed through smart DNS - which will distribute the connections on the DNS side and, in case of a server down, will stop resolving its IP, sending all the connections to the other. Obviously, everything will be accessible in both ipv4 and ipv6 and in two different European countries, on two different providers. Synchronization will occur through dovecot's native sync (extremely stable and tested). All technical choices will be clearly explained - the goal of this service is to provide maximum transparency to users on how things will be handled.