pfSense 1.2

It's official! pfSense 1.2 has now been released.

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.

This project started in 2004 as a fork of the m0n0wall project, but focused towards full PC installations rather than the embedded hardware focus of m0n0wall.

Live DVD for Linux Games

I'm currently researching for information on how to build BSD systems that are small enough to fit inside a CF card with enough space left for user data. This is for an embedded application project that would magically transform packets through some magical incantation.

As I was googling, however, I came across a Linux project for Linux games. The project is live.linuX-gamers.net, "a collection of games [that would run directly] from DVD without the user in need to know about Linux or care about his system." Its motto is "boot 'n play."

Very cool. I might try it some time.

Xen on NetBSD amd64

I'm trying to install Xen hypervisor on our amd64 box with NetBSD-4.0. I'm getting a couple of errors on getting it to run. The friendly folks at #netbsd told me that I either need to use i386 kernel or use the bleeding edge NetBSD-CURRENT. They suggested that I setup a wiki page to document my progress. I've created an account at http://wiki.netbsd.se/ and I'll see how it goes. I hope this small contribution would benefit others who need to use Xen/NetBSD on x86_64 hardware.

UPDATE: Here's the wiki page-- http://wiki.netbsd.se/Xen_3.1_on_x86_64

NetBSD 4.0

Okidoki, I finally had time to install NetBSD 4.0. As expected, NetBSD was able to support a box with ICH9 chipset. Impressive. I was about to assign almost 250GB to my / partition (I hate having to assign fixed space among multiple partitions, and I don't find dangerously-dedicated partitions particularly dangerous anyway), but I've stumbled upon an online discussion stating that Xen has some issues with a large root partition (yeah, yeah... I often find myself stumbling upon something that I wasn't looking for pretty lately. I seem to have this thing with serendipity). It also has a few issues on non FFSv1-formatted partitions as well. Oh well, I guess I just have to take their word for it. The box is humming steadily as it downloads the necessary packages.