Interview with der Mouse
by Emmanuel Dreyfus

Hard disk tends to be one of the weakest points in today's machines. This is a shame because this is the piece of hardware that holds your data.

If you can afford it, RAID setups will address that problem. But they require duplicate hard disks. If you have a lot of machines, this gets expensive. And if you cannot afford it, you probably cannot afford a NAS or a SAN either. The poor man's solution is to regularly back up the information from one disk to another. Of course if your disk dies between two backups, you lose.

der Mouse is a Canadian open source developer who produced a bunch of valuable software ranging from anti-spam tools to a PPPoE implementation. At the BSDCan 2005 conference, he presented an innovative solution to hard disk replication. In this interview, der Mouse explains his idea and how he implemented it to us. Read More

The Design of OpenBGPd
by Henning Brauer

I started OpenBGP two years ago, after getting completely fed up with Zebra, which we were running before. There were lots of bugs, bad configuration language, performance problems, and since I don't speak Japanese - I had problems understanding the documentation. Zebra makes heavy use of cooperative threads, which leads to it's main problem: Combined with the central event queue, Zebra can lose sessions while busy. This is because the keepalive events can be way down in the queue, so if something else simultaneously consumes all the CPU power - Zebra just doesn't process the keepalives until the peer resets the session. Zebra successor, Quagga, caught up and apparently fixed many of the bugs. However, they still used the Zebra's design, which I think is wrong. So, the issues are kind of unfixable. Read More

Book Review: Virtualization with VMware ESX Server
by Mikel King

A brief overview of the book Virtualization with VMware ESX Server (ISBN: 1-59749-019-9). The review touches on many of the books key chapters to give you a good feel for this publication. Whether you are a VMware veteran or newbie you'll find information in this volume quite useful. Read More

Interview with Theo de Raadt
by Chris Silva

Every release we place "Puffy" (our mascot) in a different thematic situation based on issues which we see are being faced (or ignored) by the free/open source community. Most of these issues have been about where a freedom is being impinged by some vendor, or sometimes even more sadly, some hypocritical open source project. We try to always use some sort of well known story which we can allegorically twist to be like the situations that we feel we are facing. Ever since 3.0, we have also been lucky to have some local Calgarian musician Ty Semaka (and his gang of friends) to also set music to each of the stories. Readers can go visit http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html to see the cartoon and the lyrics that accompany each release. But more importantly the left column comments on the reason for the theme, and the issue we feel the larger community needs to be aware of, and face head on. Read More