The BeaST Grid as a Share-nothing Highly Available Storage

Mikhail E. Zakharov just announced a preliminary version of the BeaST Grid, a share-nothing highly available storage. The BeaST Grid is the FreeBSD based reliable storage system concept. It utilizes two commodity servers into a pair of redundant active-active/asymmetric storage controllers which use iSCSI protocol (Fibre Channel in the future) to provide clients with simultaneous …

FreeBSD on Fujitsu LifeBook E746

Recently, I wanted to use FreeBSD in bare-metal environment. I had been looking for a decent second-hand Lenovo ThinkPad like T480, on a nearby online mall. But I realised Fujitsu LifeBook is less expensive, even if I ship it from USA... In my work, I had been educated that Fujitsu LifeBook E7 series is a …

Playing with Additional Block Devices on Vultr for FreeBSD

Having only one block device for each virtual machine is boring. Virtual hosting services that support additional block devices were either expensive or do not support remote management console. Thankfully, as a beta service, it is now possible to have additional block devices on Vultr (affiliate link) on the New Jersey site. Vultr reportedly uses …

Installing and Operating FreeBSD over an iPad

The time has silently come. It is now possible to install and operate FreeBSD (and maybe other OS) on Vultr (affiliated) with an iPad. (Note: 100 USD of credit may be available for you upon registration.) From time to time, I insist to install the operating system myself rather than using the prebuilt images by …

Minecraft on OpenBSD

My friend asked me for a new Minecraft Server.  It is time to revisit how to do it.  To make it fun, I picked another operating system, OpenBSD.  As usual, I picked Vultr (affiliated link) for spawning the system. Preinstalled Environment With a few mouse clicks, one can get a virtual machine running OpenBSD uneventfully.  There …

FreeBSD 12 is Coming

As you may have heard elsewhere, FreeBSD 12 is coming. Two of the features are getting my interest... Parallel NFS: FreeBSD 12 will be able to provide NFS through the pNFS protocol. In essence, there will be one metadata node and multiple object data storage nodes. (It sounds too similar to an L word with …

Systems, Science, and FreeBSD

Here is a presentation by Neville-Neil about Systems, Science, and FreeBSD. Here are two of my most interested ideas: Netmap.  By mapping the NIC to a process memory space, user-space applications can send and receive Ethernet (?) frames directly.  This avoids going through the operating system network stack for every and single frame, and this …

Console Graphics

Do you ever miss the good-old child times where you get BASIC or LOGO, and a screen for whatever you like to draw?  Here is how you can do it with SVGAlib.  In addition to FreeBSD, the code can be run elsewhere, I mean hmm...  So now you can program without even using X11. Installing …

Some FreeBSD Package Commands

Modern FreeBSD comes with the pkg(8) package manager which is handy for installing precompiled binary packages.  Like package managers elsewhere, the manager here is also very versatile.  Here are some of the commands I use for daily purposes. I use pkg-rquery(8) and pkg-query(8) whenever possible.  The former queries the database in the repository and the latter queries …

LVDS Display with Industrial Motherboard

I am one step closer to build an all-in-one Computer, without using prefabricated cases.  I got an industrial ThinITX motherboard from ToStar (China).  The special thing about this motherboard is that one can install an memory module and a hard drive without any cables.  There is a built-in power converter so that it only takes …