There’s tons to say about iX™ when Valentine’s Day comes along. Our love for open source and FreeBSD grows with every passing day. So what better way to express that love than with an internal celebration and a BAFUG meetup in our main lounge?
Jeff: “This one’s mine. Mine. This one too. And this one over here. And that one in your hand. And this one as well…”
Our HR department passed out homemade cupcakes and Rice Krispie treats in the morning. In the afternoon, our team members rushed to the break room after an email regarding chocolate-dipped strawberries was sent out.
During the evening, our office welcomed BAFUG members for their monthly meeting. Pizza and soda were provided, as always. After everyone settled down with their food, Ben Milman gave a quick summary of the major release format changes for PC-BSD as outlined by Kris Moore. More details on that can be found here: link
Later he handed it over to Alfred Perlstein, the new project lead for FreeNAS development. Alfred enthusiastically expressed his future expectations for the project. One of the major developments he is pushing forward is the integration of FreeNAS to FreeBSD 9.1. This allows the team to integrate features of TrueNAS, the enhanced, enterprise storage solution based off of FreeNAS, back to FreeNAS, allowing more users to enjoy those features for free. Users can look forward to disk encryption for ZFS in the upcoming FreeNAS releases. No other open source project has accomplished that although Oracle has come close with block-based encryption.
While we were on the topic of FreeNAS, Doug White took the opportunity to show off one of our in-house FreeNAS Minis to the crowd. The group discussed the major pros and cons as well as a NAS competitor, Drobo. Alfred immediately joked that Drobo is the automatic vacuum cleaner that bumps around on the floor. We’d like to think that’s all it does too.
Luigi Rizzo then talked about some optimizations he made to KVM to increase performance of virtualized network devices, and discussed his plans to bring them to
BHyVe (BSD Hypervisor), sparking a great deal of interest. The numbers “5 million packets per second” and “40 gigabits” got thrown around.
Overall, this meeting was productive and informational with great ideas bouncing around in each discussion. We hope to see everyone again next month!
Lisa Liang
Marketing Assistant
