Happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work, building a FreeBSD fileserver, Kubernetes on FreeBSD bhyve, NetBSD 9 RC1 available, OPNSense 20.1 is here, HardenedBSD’s idealistic future, and more.
Headlines
The happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work (https://drewdevault.com//2020/01/21/Stress-and-happiness.html)
In the past few days, several free software maintainers have come out to discuss the stresses of their work. Though the timing was suggestive, my article last week on the philosophy of project governance was, at best, only tangentially related to this topic - I had been working on that article for a while. I do have some thoughts that I’d like to share about what kind of stresses I’ve dealt with as a FOSS maintainer, and how I’ve managed (or often mismanaged) it.
February will mark one year that I’ve been working on self-directed free software projects full-time. I was planning on writing an optimistic retrospective article around this time, but given the current mood of the ecosystem I think it would be better to be realistic. In this stage of my career, I now feel at once happier, busier, more fulfilled, more engaged, more stressed, and more depressed than I have at any other point in my life.
The good parts are numerous. I’m able to work on my life’s passions, and my projects are in the best shape they’ve ever been thanks to the attention I’m able to pour into them. I’ve also been able to do more thoughtful, careful work; with the extra time I’ve been able to make my software more robust and reliable than it’s ever been. The variety of projects I can invest my time into has also increased substantially, with what was once relegated to minor curiosities now receiving a similar amount of attention as my larger projects were receiving in my spare time before. I can work from anywhere in the world, at any time, not worrying about when to take time off and when to put my head down and crank out a lot of code.
The frustrations are numerous, as well. I often feel like I’ve bit off more than I can chew. This has been the default state of affairs for me for a long time; I’m often neglecting half of my projects in order to obtain progress by leaps and bounds in just a few. Working on FOSS full-time has cast this model’s disadvantages into greater relief, as I focus on a greater breadth of projects and spend more time on them.
Building a FreeBSD File Server (https://www.vmwareblog.org/building-freebsd-file-server/)
Recently at my job, I was faced with a task to develop a file server explicitly suited for the requirements of the company. Needless to say, any configuration of a kind depends on what the infrastructure needs. So, drawing from my personal experience and numerous materials on the web, I came up with the combination FreeBSD+SAMBA+AD as the most appropriate. It appears to be a perfect choice for this environment, and harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since FreeBSD + SAMBA + AD enables admins with the broad range of possibilities for access control. However, as nothing is perfect, this configuration isn’t the best choice if your priority is data protection because it won’t be able to reach the necessary levels of reliability and fault tolerance without outside improvements.
Now, since we’ve established that, let’s move on to the next point. This article’s describing the process of building a test environment while concentrating primarily on the details of the configuration. As the author, though, I must say I’m in no way suggesting that this is the only way! The following configuration will be presented in its initial stage, with the minimum requirements necessary to get the job done, and its purpose in one specific situation only. Here, look at this as a useful strategy to solve similar tasks. Well, let’s get started!
Report from the first Hamilton BSD Users Group Meeting (https://twitter.com/hambug_ca/status/1227664949914349569)
February 11th was the first meeting of this new user gro