From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Jul 7 21:58:54 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93ABB509; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 21:58:54 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd-list@nuos.org) Received: from cargobay.net (cargobay.net [174.136.100.98]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 69E07186E; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 21:58:54 +0000 (UTC) Received: from leonidas.ccsys.com (unknown [65.35.151.3]) by cargobay.net (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 66532D1F; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 21:57:50 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 21:58:49 +0000 From: "Chad J. Milios" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130624 Thunderbird/17.0.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org, freebsd-user-groups@freebsd.org, freebsd-rc@freebsd.org Subject: Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 21:58:54 -0000 PLEASE reply to this only in freebsd-chat. I have posted this announcement to five freebsd mailing lists, I hope I am not overstepping. Hello everybody. My name's Chad J. Milios. Long-time lurker, sparse rare sporadic poster. TL;DR? -- Skip below to our summary of features in an outline format then grab it at http://nuos.org . I would like to enthusiastically announce the release of an open-source project of much pride and passion of my good friend Scott C. Ziegler and myself which we have brought forth thanks to the support and contributions of about 15 others. I believe it is solidly ready to be shared with the world in the hopes that others may help build out the software and community in a way that promotes quality, innovation and collaboration much like FreeBSD has led the open-source community at doing. The nuOS project ( http://nuos.org ) is about bringing back the power to the people! Currently, technical software, hardware and networking power. Ultimately, the power of personal communication and community self-organization. Currently made by geeks/nerds/hackers for geeks/nerds/hackers, our intent is to create an entirely new software ecosystem that promotes quality, easy to use software that is for any-and-every man woman and child yet without lassoing us all into one herd of sheeple. ;) Simple, common things should always be EASY. Complex, amazing or never-before imagined things should always be POSSIBLE. We have a live image for download from our site. (Fully functional at 189 MB, just cat or dd to your 4 GB or larger usb drive or select it as a flat-file virtual disk in your hypervisor of choice. It is not an ISO and nuOS does not work well from optical media.) Or grab our source (currently hosted by GitHub at https://github.com/CropCircleSys/nuOS ) and build the entire system from any FreeBSD 9.1 system with one simple yet deeply customizable command. (We only build/test on amd64 and would like that to change in the future.) It is my belief that our software is PRODUCTION READY with our new beta release. It might just be the answer to the management headaches you may be having. Take the plunge tonight and find yourself breezing through your day-job with "nu"-found ease tomorrow morning. If you're the comfortable yet cautious type, watch the discussion for a week or two first instead. Either way, we intend to cause a positive large and lasting motion in the FreeBSD community. I hope you will give nuOS a look and offer your assessments and ask any questions you have. Please tear it and us apart in discussion with the goal of a better FreeBSD for us all! Documentation is one area that is sorely lacking though it is mostly because Scott and I consider most of our code clear enough to have been pretty self-documenting [for our purposes we've had until now]. It is our hope that with the community's help we will bring more and more of this platform to the high standard of quality that FreeBSD is known for. We aren't trying to create our own new garden. We offer this code with hopes that it, in part or in whole, might be some day included in canonical FreeBSD releases. We have NO intention on forking FreeBSD and are instead developing a very lightweight suite of tools which hopefully capture and collect modern best practices while providing a testing and proving ground for advanced FreeBSD features. We want to bring computing to more people, bring more computer users to open source, bring more high-value and responsible open-source users to FreeBSD and bring more current FreeBSD users guidance and enlightenment regarding advanced features in the face of FreeBSD's typical adherence to maximal backward compatibility, legacy support and solid ground yet sometimes daunting array of intimately detailed configuration choices. We do not seek to limit those choices or to shift the ground beneath current FreeBSD users' feet. We seek to offer an alternative flavor of default system for those interested in taking a step back from their current perspective in order to take a giant flying leap forward. This doesn't mean giving up anything in terms of compatibility or configurabilty, quite the contrary. Throughout our evolution, we seek to always maintain the environment that FreeBSD users have come to know and love while reducing the issues that sometimes irk them. We simply seek to provide a better way to structure, provision and maintain production systems and development processes. Outline of features: Extends plain old FreeBSD 9.1 (RELEASE or STABLE) and maintains total compatibility We seek to remain nimble Expect a production-ready seal of approval to lag behind releases by no more than a week or two and prebuilt images and packages e.g. releases like 9.2 and 10.0, et al Someone should be able to build it and use all applicable features on 8.4 with ease we simply haven't the time or inclination to even try Default full ZFS filesystem layout, completely legacy-free Boot from ZFS, boot to ZFS If you'd like use all 100.0% of all your drives for one large zpool Use one large zpool for all of your filesystems block volumes alternate boot environments, including one called "rescue" which is included NO partitions, not some tiny /, not even a /boot Just ZFS datasets in their infinite flexibility /etc is now a ZFS dataset of its own How did we do it? Decades of conventional wisdom says /etc must be on /. Check it out, discuss the whys and the trade-offs. nu_jail - provision all sorts of jails No guesswork Yet no cookie-cutter limitations Clean-room jails provisioned almost instantly ZFS clone of /etc and /var give you almost no storage overhead nullfs and/or unionfs mounts of /, /usr, /usr/local give you almost no memory overhead Run 1,000 jails and 10,000 Apache instances they safely access the same executable memory pages they securely know not of one-another's existence Advanced intra-host networking with VIMAGE kernel by default, simplified Made for developers who want robustness, power and flexibility streamlined for Unlimited development, testing, staging and production environments Uses all of the new jail and vnet features of FreeBSD 9.1 We cleaned out all of the cruft left over from earlier versions That is just a taste of the features that we consider complete enough for use in your PRODUCTION systems. There are many more features production ready, our approach to package management for instance is in the early stages and provides simple functionality but does so in a way that is predictable, reliable and SOLID. It is also our strong commitment that we will never cram any of these features down your throat. You may take some a la carte without penalty and you may bring your own tools like pkg-ng, portupgrade or portmaster. We never store data in strange places or formats, we use the standard editable text configuration files and other sanctioned FreeBSD ways-of-doing-things as a single source of truth. ALL of the nuOS system is manageable from the command line and those utilities have no external dependencies, just sh, sed, awk and make from the base FreeBSD system. APIs still being built atop our core utilities and being packaged for open-source release expose interfaces such as HTTP REST, SNMPv3 and Mailman and may do so using advanced software packages from the ports collection. Functionality will NOT be introduced in APIs, web-apps or GUIs that is not equally usable, first-class, from the command line. Not even curses GUIs. Curse curses! All that being said, the project is in it's infancy. Just breaching the birth-canal, quite literally, with this announcement. It's not going to do your work for you or cook you dinner just yet. What it offers is clean and complete. Incomplete areas will be clearly marked with orange cones and yellow tape. They will not impede your path should you decide to avoid them. It should be noted that the nuOS project is a loose not-for-profit association currently sponsored by a for-profit corporation, Crop Circle Systems, Inc. ( http://ccsys.com ) of which I am a founder. (A corporation with a market cap of about that of a used Yugo, but a for-profit corporation nonetheless.) All code released from the project is and shall be covered by either the Simplified BSD license or Mozilla Public License v2.0 if it is not simply placed into the public domain. WARNING: It should be noted that the live boot image includes three user accounts with default names and passwords. "joe": He's your normal barely-privileged user, employee of business or all-around troublemaker; this would be your boss. "ninja": That's you, technical sword for honor and/or for hire. "sumyungai": That's me, your distributor. (Or you, when you disseminate nuOS to other ninjas along with your value-added contribution/support.) All of this is easily customizable with a few command line options when you stage a real deployment. On the live boot image the root account has no password and the local ttys are assumed physically secured, as per FreeBSD default, so you can just log in as root from the local console and change the account passwords and/or add one for root if you like. sshd is the one service already enabled but the network is not configured by default. Uncommenting a line in /etc/rc.conf.local is all it takes to enable auto-dhcp on every interface though most admins will want to add an appropriate line for their preferred interface. Thank you from Scott and myself for reading. Hopefully I'll be thanking you for trying, discussing and contributing! --Chad J. Milios From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Jul 7 22:27:07 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D482414A for ; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 22:27:07 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from bright@mu.org) Received: from elvis.mu.org (elvis.mu.org [192.203.228.196]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B5C911984 for ; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 22:27:07 +0000 (UTC) Received: from Alfreds-MacBook-Pro-9.local (c-67-180-208-218.hsd1.ca.comcast.net [67.180.208.218]) by elvis.mu.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 405F81A3C65 for ; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 15:27:07 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <51D9EB3B.3090008@mu.org> Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 15:27:07 -0700 From: Alfred Perlstein User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130620 Thunderbird/17.0.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork References: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> In-Reply-To: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 22:27:07 -0000 On 7/7/13 2:58 PM, Chad J. Milios wrote: > PLEASE reply to this only in freebsd-chat. I have posted this > announcement to five freebsd mailing lists, I hope I am not overstepping. > > Hello everybody. My name's Chad J. Milios. Long-time lurker, sparse > rare sporadic poster. > > TL;DR? -- Skip below to our summary of features in an outline format > then grab it at http://nuos.org . > > I would like to enthusiastically announce the release of an > open-source project of much pride and passion of my good friend Scott > C. Ziegler and myself which we have brought forth thanks to the > support and contributions of about 15 others. I believe it is solidly > ready to be shared with the world in the hopes that others may help > build out the software and community in a way that promotes quality, > innovation and collaboration much like FreeBSD has led the open-source > community at doing. > > The nuOS project ( http://nuos.org ) is about bringing back the power > to the people! Currently, technical software, hardware and networking > power. Ultimately, the power of personal communication and community > self-organization. Currently made by geeks/nerds/hackers for > geeks/nerds/hackers, our intent is to create an entirely new software > ecosystem that promotes quality, easy to use software that is for > any-and-every man woman and child yet without lassoing us all into one > herd of sheeple. ;) Simple, common things should always be EASY. > Complex, amazing or never-before imagined things should always be > POSSIBLE. > > We have a live image for download from our site. (Fully functional at > 189 MB, just cat or dd to your 4 GB or larger usb drive or select it > as a flat-file virtual disk in your hypervisor of choice. It is not an > ISO and nuOS does not work well from optical media.) Or grab our > source (currently hosted by GitHub at > https://github.com/CropCircleSys/nuOS ) and build the entire system > from any FreeBSD 9.1 system with one simple yet deeply customizable > command. (We only build/test on amd64 and would like that to change in > the future.) > > It is my belief that our software is PRODUCTION READY with our new > beta release. It might just be the answer to the management headaches > you may be having. Take the plunge tonight and find yourself breezing > through your day-job with "nu"-found ease tomorrow morning. If you're > the comfortable yet cautious type, watch the discussion for a week or > two first instead. Either way, we intend to cause a positive large and > lasting motion in the FreeBSD community. > > I hope you will give nuOS a look and offer your assessments and ask > any questions you have. Please tear it and us apart in discussion with > the goal of a better FreeBSD for us all! Documentation is one area > that is sorely lacking though it is mostly because Scott and I > consider most of our code clear enough to have been pretty > self-documenting [for our purposes we've had until now]. It is our > hope that with the community's help we will bring more and more of > this platform to the high standard of quality that FreeBSD is known > for. We aren't trying to create our own new garden. We offer this code > with hopes that it, in part or in whole, might be some day included in > canonical FreeBSD releases. > > We have NO intention on forking FreeBSD and are instead developing a > very lightweight suite of tools which hopefully capture and collect > modern best practices while providing a testing and proving ground for > advanced FreeBSD features. We want to bring computing to more people, > bring more computer users to open source, bring more high-value and > responsible open-source users to FreeBSD and bring more current > FreeBSD users guidance and enlightenment regarding advanced features > in the face of FreeBSD's typical adherence to maximal backward > compatibility, legacy support and solid ground yet sometimes daunting > array of intimately detailed configuration choices. > > We do not seek to limit those choices or to shift the ground beneath > current FreeBSD users' feet. We seek to offer an alternative flavor of > default system for those interested in taking a step back from their > current perspective in order to take a giant flying leap forward. This > doesn't mean giving up anything in terms of compatibility or > configurabilty, quite the contrary. Throughout our evolution, we seek > to always maintain the environment that FreeBSD users have come to > know and love while reducing the issues that sometimes irk them. We > simply seek to provide a better way to structure, provision and > maintain production systems and development processes. > > Outline of features: > > Extends plain old FreeBSD 9.1 (RELEASE or STABLE) and maintains total > compatibility > We seek to remain nimble > Expect a production-ready seal of approval to lag behind releases > by no more than a week or two > and prebuilt images and packages > e.g. releases like 9.2 and 10.0, et al > Someone should be able to build it and use all applicable > features on 8.4 with ease > we simply haven't the time or inclination to even try > Default full ZFS filesystem layout, completely legacy-free > Boot from ZFS, boot to ZFS > If you'd like use all 100.0% of all your drives for one large > zpool > Use one large zpool for all of your > filesystems > block volumes > alternate boot environments, including one called "rescue" > which is included > NO partitions, not some tiny /, not even a /boot > Just ZFS datasets in their infinite flexibility > /etc is now a ZFS dataset of its own > How did we do it? > Decades of conventional wisdom says /etc must be > on /. > Check it out, discuss the whys and the trade-offs. > nu_jail - provision all sorts of jails > No guesswork > Yet no cookie-cutter limitations > Clean-room jails provisioned almost instantly > ZFS clone of /etc and /var give you almost no storage overhead > nullfs and/or unionfs mounts of /, /usr, /usr/local give you > almost no memory overhead > Run 1,000 jails and 10,000 Apache instances > they safely access the same executable memory pages > they securely know not of one-another's existence > Advanced intra-host networking with VIMAGE kernel by default, > simplified > Made for developers who want robustness, power and flexibility > streamlined for > Unlimited development, testing, staging and production > environments > Uses all of the new jail and vnet features of FreeBSD 9.1 > We cleaned out all of the cruft left over from earlier versions > > That is just a taste of the features that we consider complete enough > for use in your PRODUCTION systems. There are many more features > production ready, our approach to package management for instance is > in the early stages and provides simple functionality but does so in a > way that is predictable, reliable and SOLID. It is also our strong > commitment that we will never cram any of these features down your > throat. You may take some a la carte without penalty and you may bring > your own tools like pkg-ng, portupgrade or portmaster. > > We never store data in strange places or formats, we use the standard > editable text configuration files and other sanctioned FreeBSD > ways-of-doing-things as a single source of truth. ALL of the nuOS > system is manageable from the command line and those utilities have no > external dependencies, just sh, sed, awk and make from the base > FreeBSD system. APIs still being built atop our core utilities and > being packaged for open-source release expose interfaces such as HTTP > REST, SNMPv3 and Mailman and may do so using advanced software > packages from the ports collection. Functionality will NOT be > introduced in APIs, web-apps or GUIs that is not equally usable, > first-class, from the command line. Not even curses GUIs. Curse curses! > > All that being said, the project is in it's infancy. Just breaching > the birth-canal, quite literally, with this announcement. It's not > going to do your work for you or cook you dinner just yet. What it > offers is clean and complete. Incomplete areas will be clearly marked > with orange cones and yellow tape. They will not impede your path > should you decide to avoid them. > > It should be noted that the nuOS project is a loose not-for-profit > association currently sponsored by a for-profit corporation, Crop > Circle Systems, Inc. ( http://ccsys.com ) of which I am a founder. (A > corporation with a market cap of about that of a used Yugo, but a > for-profit corporation nonetheless.) All code released from the > project is and shall be covered by either the Simplified BSD license > or Mozilla Public License v2.0 if it is not simply placed into the > public domain. > > WARNING: It should be noted that the live boot image includes three > user accounts with default names and passwords. "joe": He's your > normal barely-privileged user, employee of business or all-around > troublemaker; this would be your boss. "ninja": That's you, technical > sword for honor and/or for hire. "sumyungai": That's me, your > distributor. (Or you, when you disseminate nuOS to other ninjas along > with your value-added contribution/support.) All of this is easily > customizable with a few command line options when you stage a real > deployment. > > On the live boot image the root account has no password and the local > ttys are assumed physically secured, as per FreeBSD default, so you > can just log in as root from the local console and change the account > passwords and/or add one for root if you like. sshd is the one service > already enabled but the network is not configured by default. > Uncommenting a line in /etc/rc.conf.local is all it takes to enable > auto-dhcp on every interface though most admins will want to add an > appropriate line for their preferred interface. > > Thank you from Scott and myself for reading. Hopefully I'll be > thanking you for trying, discussing and contributing! > > --Chad J. Milios Chad, this is great stuff! Thanks for choosing FreeBSD as your base OS. Look forward to checking things out. I'm hoping we can get some cross pollination with FreeBSD, PCBSD and TrueOS. -- Alfred Perlstein VP Software Engineering, iXsystems From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Jul 7 23:06:11 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 13ED434F; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 23:06:11 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd-list@nuos.org) Received: from cargobay.net (cargobay.net [174.136.100.98]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E394C1AE5; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 23:06:10 +0000 (UTC) Received: from leonidas.ccsys.com (unknown [65.35.151.3]) by cargobay.net (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 1CCEAD58; Sun, 7 Jul 2013 23:05:07 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <51D9F45E.2050000@nuos.org> Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:06:06 +0000 From: "Chad J. Milios" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130624 Thunderbird/17.0.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22C=2E_Bergstr=F6m=22?= Subject: Re: Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork References: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> <51D9E641.5020905@pathscale.com> In-Reply-To: <51D9E641.5020905@pathscale.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:06:11 -0000 On 07/07/13 22:05, "C. Bergström" wrote: > > omg you've created Solaris > > ------------ > If you're going to spam commercial stuff with absolutely no > technically interesting details - please keep it brief at the least. > > Generally people will be curious about > What are you actually adding to the ISO which FBSD-current can't do? > If it's not upstream already - will it be contributed upstream? > Please reply further on freebsd-chat, I'd like to consolidate any discussion this may garner. This doesn't provide anything to the core OS that can't already be done, albeit with many more keystrokes and the peril of possible confusion and misconfiguration. The main thing here is a collaboration of what we consider best practices and consolidating the more useful configurations into consistent recipes with useful simplification of parameters. We don't mean to add yet another layer in the name of simplicity that obscures or hides the real nuts and bolt beneath and limits your options. We want to make things more flexible and easier at the same time by using the sanctioned FreeBSD ways of doing things, simply allowing the ones with most merit to rise to the top, hopefully through community involvement. We've had a lot of success using this in our production deployments and hope that we don't have to be the only ones to maintain it forever. It is an open offer of contribution to The FreeBSD Project but it probably doesn't exactly belong there yet. It's a layer above, so to speak, and we think we have a place in the community working side by side. It's a distro around FreeBSD, think picoBSD or maybe FreeNAS. It's not going to be a fork like PC-BSD or Dragonfly. I'm hoping we can be a proving ground for the more advanced features of FreeBSD, by allowing more users to jump on board with them sooner, and then offer the applicable bits and pieces back upstream while continually pushing the innovation envelope in a way that more people and companies can participate in. The tool nu_install is basically sysinstall on steroids. It doesn't do all the things that sysinstall does and you may still use sysinstall to configure a system or a jail you've provisioned with nu_install or nu_jail. nu_install automates a process of building a ZFS only FreeBSD system and offers a default dataset layout featuring best practices we've deduced from using ZFS on FreeBSD since its infancy and reading and considering many various differing and conflicting ZFS on root how-tos. For instance, many ZFS on root tutorials use a UFS /boot partition and/or mountpoint=legacy and entries in /etc/fstab. We suffer neither of those holdovers. Another feature I've not yet found in any tutorial is /etc having its own dataset. nu_jail creates cloned datasets and jail.conf entries along the school of thought set out by our nu_install base system. Jails in FreeBSD allow many use cases that were never dreamed of on other platforms and we don't seek to force any particular cookie-cutter way of provisioning a jail, just simplifying the uses that we've found most common. We wanted ease and simplicity but refused to give up less-common possibilities or give up the simplicity just to tweak something a little differently to do something that's never been done. Thank you for reading and offering your thoughts. LOL @ the Solaris comment, as I am a long-time Solaris user and fan but always been a bigger fan of the BSDs and FreeBSD mostly in particular for the last decade. In short, we seek to do with FreeBSD something like what Joyent has done with illumos in their SmartOS but then continue further with that idea. From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 8 00:15:36 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B0CEC66 for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 00:15:36 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jordan.hubbard@gmail.com) Received: from mail-pa0-x22d.google.com (mail-pa0-x22d.google.com [IPv6:2607:f8b0:400e:c03::22d]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2431E1CBA for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 00:15:36 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-pa0-f45.google.com with SMTP id bi5so3758211pad.18 for ; Sun, 07 Jul 2013 17:15:35 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20120113; h=content-type:mime-version:subject:from:in-reply-to:date:cc :message-id:references:to:x-mailer; bh=60EaR5MSFmRy6bSHbX+8LYn2nyCMbB+NbIAeycc/xIA=; b=XETgzAxFegZQx4F2ke5THKTe1roTahLbOAxIvpnsIch/wxOA4tsUiLGrBo5mPTf6Ju i4omL4l9uFApTXCQebUy5krwKVRFLT1ltnobzBRYT1y28GCQyn56Qd8RMj7TOytlp1aC fCGUAIyrax9RX1Wf6zWn+sOf3maYxW+ZVXUOMJxuXTdtsE0kCG9EYCDfHIWHMdA8+ysO p12P63BQVNKhfoqdRLpw3VaEDFZN4/uYUdB8OYWZC49Vm/qHJAp0RKo81uhkbhn426my 73+aKKVDXExeM23C5xrq585riC0Ea+R6YZMYAaPee3GRAS139rUvjJwHXVPp3nBQ/0QE R12g== X-Received: by 10.66.16.197 with SMTP id i5mr20099283pad.51.1373242535819; Sun, 07 Jul 2013 17:15:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [10.20.30.70] (75-101-82-48.static.sonic.net. [75.101.82.48]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPSA id i16sm20622787pag.18.2013.07.07.17.15.33 for (version=TLSv1 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA bits=128/128); Sun, 07 Jul 2013 17:15:35 -0700 (PDT) Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 6.6 \(1510\)) Subject: Re: Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" In-Reply-To: <51D9F45E.2050000@nuos.org> Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2013 17:15:32 -0700 Message-Id: <8045C2AE-1A20-44AD-A5D8-15E879FED6FE@turbofuzz.com> References: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> <51D9E641.5020905@pathscale.com> <51D9F45E.2050000@nuos.org> To: "Chad J. Milios" X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1510) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.14 Cc: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22C=2E_Bergstr=F6m=22?= , freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 00:15:36 -0000 On Jul 7, 2013, at 4:06 PM, "Chad J. Milios" = wrote: > This doesn't provide anything to the core OS that can't already be = done, albeit with many more keystrokes and the peril of possible = confusion and misconfiguration. The main thing here is a collaboration = of what we consider best practices and consolidating the more useful = configurations into consistent recipes with useful simplification of = parameters. We don't mean to add yet another layer in the name of = simplicity that obscures or hides the real nuts and bolt beneath and = limits your options. >=20 > We want to make things more flexible and easier at the same time by = using the sanctioned FreeBSD ways of doing things, simply allowing the = ones with most merit to rise to the top, hopefully through community = involvement. We've had a lot of success using this in our production = deployments and hope that we don't have to be the only ones to maintain = it forever. It is an open offer of contribution to The FreeBSD Project = but it probably doesn't exactly belong there yet. It's a layer above, so = to speak, and we think we have a place in the community working side by = side. [ As requested - removing freebsd-hackers and retaining only = freebsd-chat ] I, for one, am happy to see folks willing to strike out in new = directions with the FreeBSD code base. After 20 years of fairly gradual = evolution, I think it's fair to say that any major conceptual leaps are = probably going to happen outside the project, and not necessarily = eternally but just until they've proven themselves. That said, I see some flaws with the project as currently constituted: 1. Too much buzz-wordy mission statement, too little emphasis on = technical goals and/or specific points of differentiation. The nuos.org = web site is a veritable wall of (green!) text that is so verbose as to = be unreadable. If there's a purpose to the project, it's so obscured by = high-concept statements that it's essentially opaque. If you can't = reduce both the mission statement and the key points of technical = differentiation of your project to 6 one-sentence bullets or less, = you're doing something wrong! 2. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too when you create a new = project with a new name then say things like "it's not a fork" and = "we're going with the sanctioned FreeBSD way of doing things". If you = just wanted to create a "distro", you could have done it in far less = heavy-weight fashion with some special build tools that could be run = against a FreeBSD source tree to spit out a custom installation image, = just many other BSD variants currently doing (to good effect). FreeNAS = and pfSense are great examples of where a distinct brand was necessary. = nuOS is not, at least not yet. Call it what it is: A fork. That doesn't mean it has to be a fork in = perpetuity, but that's what it is now. Furthermore, you're not going to = attract many people by being just a couple of standard deviations away = from FreeBSD. If you're going to create any compelling reason to run = "nuOS" at all, it has to be more ambitious. Just shuffling everything = into ZFS filesystems by default has been done - check out a PC-BSD = distribution sometime. The whole configuration / startup management = picture that you claim to want to preserve from FreeBSD, on the other = hand, is really showing its age. 3. You've put the cart before the horse in emphasizing donations and = soliciting bitcoin to such a strong degree at the very outset of the = project, before it's proven its value to anyone. That runs the real = risk of a lot of folks in the community dismissing you as "just the = latest in a long line of wanna-be profiteers." First you attract a user = community THEN you look for donations to keep development going, if and = as necessary. That's not just a nice-to-have item, it's pretty crucial = to any success the project may have. - Jordan From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 8 17:31:20 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C7A65DC5 for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 17:31:20 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd-list@nuos.org) Received: from cargobay.net (cargobay.net [174.136.100.98]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9D1061E10 for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 17:31:20 +0000 (UTC) Received: from leonidas.ccsys.com (unknown [65.35.151.3]) by cargobay.net (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id A37A9F11; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 17:30:10 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <51DAF753.5050203@nuos.org> Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 17:30:59 +0000 From: "Chad J. Milios" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130624 Thunderbird/17.0.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Subject: Re: Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork References: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> <51D9E641.5020905@pathscale.com> <51D9F45E.2050000@nuos.org> <8045C2AE-1A20-44AD-A5D8-15E879FED6FE@turbofuzz.com> In-Reply-To: <8045C2AE-1A20-44AD-A5D8-15E879FED6FE@turbofuzz.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.14 Cc: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22C=2E_Bergstr=F6m=22?= , freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 17:31:20 -0000 On 07/08/13 00:15, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > On Jul 7, 2013, at 4:06 PM, "Chad J. Milios" > wrote: > >> This doesn't provide anything to the core OS that can't already be >> done, albeit with many more keystrokes and the peril of possible >> confusion and misconfiguration. The main thing here is a >> collaboration of what we consider best practices and consolidating >> the more useful configurations into consistent recipes with useful >> simplification of parameters. We don't mean to add yet another layer >> in the name of simplicity that obscures or hides the real nuts and >> bolt beneath and limits your options. >> >> We want to make things more flexible and easier at the same time by >> using the sanctioned FreeBSD ways of doing things, simply allowing >> the ones with most merit to rise to the top, hopefully through >> community involvement. We've had a lot of success using this in our >> production deployments and hope that we don't have to be the only >> ones to maintain it forever. It is an open offer of contribution to >> The FreeBSD Project but it probably doesn't exactly belong there yet. >> It's a layer above, so to speak, and we think we have a place in the >> community working side by side. > > [ As requested - removing freebsd-hackers and retaining only > freebsd-chat ] > > I, for one, am happy to see folks willing to strike out in new > directions with the FreeBSD code base. After 20 years of fairly > gradual evolution, I think it's fair to say that any major conceptual > leaps are probably going to happen outside the project, and not > necessarily eternally but just until they've proven themselves. > > That said, I see some flaws with the project as currently constituted: > > 1. Too much buzz-wordy mission statement, too little emphasis on > technical goals and/or specific points of differentiation. The > nuos.org web site is a veritable wall of (green!) > text that is so verbose as to be unreadable. If there's a purpose to > the project, it's so obscured by high-concept statements that it's > essentially opaque. If you can't reduce both the mission statement > and the key points of technical differentiation of your project to 6 > one-sentence bullets or less, you're doing something wrong! > > 2. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too when you create a > new project with a new name then say things like "it's not a fork" and > "we're going with the sanctioned FreeBSD way of doing things". If > you just wanted to create a "distro", you could have done it in far > less heavy-weight fashion with some special build tools that could be > run against a FreeBSD source tree to spit out a custom installation > image, just many other BSD variants currently doing (to good effect). > FreeNAS and pfSense are great examples of where a distinct brand was > necessary. nuOS is not, at least not yet. > > Call it what it is: A fork. That doesn't mean it has to be a fork in > perpetuity, but that's what it is now. Furthermore, you're not going > to attract many people by being just a couple of standard deviations > away from FreeBSD. If you're going to create any compelling reason to > run "nuOS" at all, it has to be more ambitious. Just shuffling > everything into ZFS filesystems by default has been done - check out a > PC-BSD distribution sometime. The whole configuration / startup > management picture that you claim to want to preserve from FreeBSD, on > the other hand, is really showing its age. > > 3. You've put the cart before the horse in emphasizing donations and > soliciting bitcoin to such a strong degree at the very outset of the > project, before it's proven its value to anyone. That runs the real > risk of a lot of folks in the community dismissing you as "just the > latest in a long line of wanna-be profiteers." First you attract a > user community THEN you look for donations to keep development going, > if and as necessary. That's not just a nice-to-have item, it's > pretty crucial to any success the project may have. > > - Jordan > > Thank you Jordan for your response. All useful insights. I'd like to address your enumerated concerns, which im sure are shared by many, in a different order if I may: 2: We don't want to fork FreeBSD. There's seriously nothing we would change about the software or the project. We understand why our chosen defaults are not the way everyone lays out a disk by default and why our settings arent already in /etc/defaults/rc.conf. Maybe someday some of them will be but we know we are better off releasing something separate for now rather than trying to convince everyone to see it our way. We target a certain subset of the users which i think will find our distro makes their life easier. 2 still: we are NOT creating a new OS. nuOS is not a new computer operating system. The message behind our brand is that _FreeBSD_ IS the "NEW" computer operating system (and nuOS as a software package and a project are about a new way of operating business, building on stable free technology and avoiding proprietaryizm). I obviously failed to convey that and it was easily lost on my fellow die-hards who've been on board for most of its 20 years and couldnt consider such a robust stable platform to be new. FreeBSD is "new" because it's time has come in the world just as it's coming of age. Most people still don't know what it is or how it's going to benefit them in their business and personal future. Yes, I know it's always been here. I've been a devout fan since 4.2.0. 2. In my professional experience, many many of CCSys's customers are "forking" FreeBSD in proprietary ways to embed it in their products. nuOS doesn't want to be CCSys's proprietary fork. It is and will be maintained as a kind of "reference implementation" for a distro/minimal-fork, kept right there at the armpit close to the trunk of the project where it can keep up or even stay ahead of changes that would put less-organized forks in maintenance hell. I've seen it. I support poor saps who built businesses on FreeBSD 5 or 6 or 7 and their profiteering wasn't sustainable because they didn't give the technology maintenance and the technical debt the were creating beside their assets the due respect at the time. Always driven by that bottom line and pushed by stakeholders and bean counters. In their defense, they didnt have the options they do now to "stay close" to the canonical source. FreeBSD wasn't 20 years mature 10 years ago, obviously. Is FreeBSD 10 going to break or obsolete much of nuOS's "way" of doing things? Probably. I hope so, because that's progress. I think you'll see when our project gets a little further along that we will be pretty well poised to take advantage of 9.2's and 10's and 11's and 12's progress. 2. nuOS is a minimum deviation of a distro. is the culmination of years of supporting them through the trials and tribulations of maintaining their "secret sauce" upon FreeBSD. Yes, i've seen most of these "special build tools" you mention to be "lightweight". I decided to go with /bin/sh and /usr/bin/make instead. :) We didn't find any build tools that reached our ends that actually brought more in power than they cost us in flexibility. 2. To make the naysayers happy, last night I committed the -B argument to nu_install to easily omit the branding changes and motd spam. I only added that rebranding to /boot very recently for nuOS, like i said, as an example, a reference implementation of rebranding because its something many who are making products around FreeBSD want to know how to do easily. For a decade at work i'd almost always just set beastie_disable="YES" on my customers' stuff (while setting it to the color beastie version on my own boxes) after the first time i had to explain i'm not a devil worshiper. (yes i know the loader_logo has changed more than once since then to be more corporate friendly) 3. We arent emphasizing or soliciting any donations at this point. We believe we have a healthy enough sponsorship to at least ensure the continuance of the project. That footer of association keys is actually automatically generated by some other tools for rolling out small business infrastructures, not just technical, but organizational, accounting and legal. (associations have odd numbers of root keys and companies have an even number, that functionality will be explained much later) In our file named PLANNING there are a plethora of addresses people can donate to, put their money where their mouth is so to speak, regarding features that they/their business would benefit from. Its a way of voting that becomes public record in the peer to peer blockchain. Topics of debate get an address automatically even if the business/association votes and funds in a more traditional way and I assure everyone those TODO items are fully backed already and the project will progress without any "panhandling". That being said, :) a project of our currently small size and purportedly grand scope can benefit greatly from even small amounts of help from interested community members and we think that we offer enough benefit already to be appreciated by some who give our software a look. Donations give Scott and I that much more equipment and hours of free reign to act in the interests of nuos.org because ccsys.com has different interests. Think of ccsys like our boring day job and nuos is us after hours doing it how we'd rather being doing it. 1. Buzzword-laden nebulous project with mystery and doubt abound. :) We aren't ready or even interested in explaining too much of our vision or goals yet. I hope they will unfold in due time and are becoming apparent to those reading and trying our code. The ugly site is currently almost "meant" to be uninviting because we are at such an early stage for nerds and hackers only, even though our goals state "ease of use", that will come eventually. Sometimes you have to take a step back to take a leap forward. (and currently we're about ease of developers' use anyway). The site's an homage to old green-screen terminals. For now i'm going to shut up, talk less and let the code speak for itself. I just wanted to address the fork thing: See, we use mercurial and git which is from a different era and has a different way of think, while a project the size and maturity of FreeBSD was born out of a more RCS/CVS/Subversion way of think. Please everyone don't worry so much that i'm "forking" your precious BSD "away" from the community. :) We're not. I had to know and expect at least some backlash. I TOO BELIEVE to "FORK" a project is the absolute last resort, its like civil war. We arent forking like a big branch, think of us more like a vine winding around the trunk. 1. the nuOS project will slowly reveal a scope far wider than just tweaking FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a means to a different end. We have no interest in really affecting FreeBSD in one direction or the other because we think it is on a great course. Further, forward and upward is the only direction we seek to push it. We seek to continue to utilize it, as it is and as it will be, as it evolves organically. We maintain our own build and provisioning tools because our higher level components require the richer features that have only recently become nailed down in FreeBSD, and we wanted to use them in a systematic and programmatic way. We released them so that our work wouldn't have to remain proprietary, that is it. We hate all things proprietary but we don't think GNU/GPL is the right way to "enforce" cooperation. We think BSD promotes smart business to share for the right reasons. Proprietary-land is sometimes where innovation occurs and without the freedom to run our business the way we have for 15 years these "improvements" (or alternatives, to be more accurate) never would have seen the light of day at least not from us. Everyone is made stronger with more options and more flexibility. I think as we make more of The [FreeBSD] Foundation's infrastructure redundant, it will be for everyone's security. For now, their infrastructure as a project is completely trusted by us and project redundancy is the least of our concerns/goals. We hope that the FreeBSD community will accept us for what we are rather than reject us for what we aren't. :) Thank you for reading and sharing your ideas. From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 8 17:50:46 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24E0019D for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 17:50:46 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from db@db.net) Received: from diana.db.net (diana.db.net [66.113.102.10]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0D47B1EC7 for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 17:50:45 +0000 (UTC) Received: from night.db.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by diana.db.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93D732AA443; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 11:50:37 -0600 (MDT) Received: by night.db.net (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 2BEF41CC0E; Mon, 8 Jul 2013 12:50:30 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2013 12:50:30 -0500 From: Diane Bruce To: "Chad J. Milios" Subject: Re: Announcing: nuOS 0.0.9.1b1 - a whole NEW FreeBSD distro, NOT a fork Message-ID: <20130708175030.GA11921@night.db.net> References: <51D9E499.103@nuos.org> <51D9E641.5020905@pathscale.com> <51D9F45E.2050000@nuos.org> <8045C2AE-1A20-44AD-A5D8-15E879FED6FE@turbofuzz.com> <51DAF753.5050203@nuos.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <51DAF753.5050203@nuos.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Cc: "\"C. Bergstr?m\"" , "Jordan K. Hubbard" , freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 17:50:46 -0000 On Mon, Jul 08, 2013 at 05:30:59PM +0000, Chad J. Milios wrote: > On 07/08/13 00:15, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > On Jul 7, 2013, at 4:06 PM, "Chad J. Milios" > > wrote: > > > >> This doesn't provide anything to the core OS that can't already be tldr; well I read enough. To be blunt. I don't care what you guys do as long as it brings more users to BSD and to FreeBSD in specific. FreeBSD is _FREE_ that said, you might make a contribution to the foundation when you can afford it or, uy some of us a beer or coffee or, buy a struggling university kid who is a developer a new computer or disk or something. > Thank you for reading and sharing your ideas. Good luck with it. - Diane -- - db@FreeBSD.org db@db.net http://www.db.net/~db