Pablo Carboni runs FreeBSD

I’m Pablo Carboni. 41 years old from Argentina. Have been working and having fun for the latest two decades as a {Unix,DNS,Net} admininistrator. I’m in amateur Unix coding and little bit of infosec.

In particular, I worked with FreeBSD as my main platform and the core of this story.

Started with Unix by learning Linux at university, then quickly moved to FreeBSD (2.2.x) due to my first paid job.

First times were tough, because of differences from what I’d learned before. (No, I don’t like those silly OS wars). Then I realized that everything is at the same place in a file system, in the same directories. I mean, binaries, configs, third party software (ports and packages: no matter what version, maintainer).

Things that caught my attention from FreeBSD at the earliest years:

• By default, the CLI doesn’t have colors (csh, sh). The included vi(1) is nvi (has no colors too).
• The base install— the whole OS—is one thing.
• A file system layout comes in an uniform fashion.
• No additional services installed and started by default.
  
• Rock solid? Yes, in part because of planned releases, in part because of a well tested code.
• Good network performance.

Let me tell you a story how I recovered an old Compaq Proliant with FreeBSD.
Same in Spanish

There was an international geek 3-day event, Nerdearla, which takes place every year: tech talks and workshops, coworking places, challenges, and much more!

This time, one of those challenges, was to boot old Compaq Proliant G1, donated by Museo de la informática, where they had a booth inside the event.

CD reader was ok. Memory check ok. RAID 1 was ok.

However, everyone who attended the event during the first and second days tried to recover the server by using Linux CDs with no success at all. See the note about CD reader speed.

When I attended the third (last) day, I had a couple of CDs and hardware to donor to this museum through the booth, I find out about the challenge.

What was my thought? The hardware is working fine. Why not to give a try by booting with my FreeBSD 4.x CDs?

Then, inserted those CDs, and it’s booted immediately! In particular, the CD reader lens was not clean enough for installing X Window System (CRC error), but the whole installation went fine, including networking, Lynx accessing Google Search. :-)

Note about CD reader speed: I think that my CDs worked fine because they were burnt with 2x or 4x speeds—maximum for this oldie Compaq— and those Linux CDs, I guess, were written at 8x or higher. ;-)

Things I developed in the past, just to have fun and learn FreeBSD.

• Some (non-official) ports because I needed them. One port was meant to be official, but needed a little polish with poudriere.
• An Apache module for my job.
• A Socks v4 PoC, pthreads only. Unfortunately, no kqueue or libevent.
• A LKM module PoC.
• My latest piece of code was for Net-SNMP: it enables support for multi-core CPU usage (merged with 5.7.3): on OID HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrProcessorLoad.

I provided services based on FreeBSD, with high performance in mind like: for example, setup, tweak, fine-tune Unbound DNS resolver to hold 54Kqps per box.

Find me on Twitter and Mastodon

11 Aug 2018

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