Benedict Reuschling

In diesem Workshop wird die Installation und Basiskonfiguration von FreeBSD betrachtet. Nach einem kurzen Einstieg in BSD gehen wir gemeinsam die Installation durch, wobei an jeder Stelle wichtige Informationen vermittelt werden, an denen sich die BSDs von anderen Unixen unterscheiden. Nach der Installation besuchen wir die wichtigsten Konfigurationsdateien, richten das Netzwerk ein, und installieren Programme. Zum Schluss werden wir noch Boot Environments betrachten, das mit der OpenZFS-Unterstützung in FreeBSD vorhanden ist. Auf Fragen wird dabei jederzeit eingegangen und gewünschte Schwerpunkte der Teilnehmer steuern die Ausrichtung des Workshops (Anfänger, Fortgeschrittene).

FreeBSD ist ein modernes, Unix-basiertes Open Source Betriebssysteme für Server, Desktops und Embedded Geräte. Mit sehr guter Integration von OpenZFS, DTrace, einem performanten Netzwerkstack (u.a. bei Netflix im Einsatz), Jails, und ohne systemd hat dieses Betriebssystem eine Menge zu bieten. Wer gerne einmal über den Tellerrand des eigenen Unix-Systems blicken möchte oder an einen Umstieg denkt, sollte sich diesen Workshop genauer ansehen. Dabei kann die Installation gerne am eigenen Gerät (oder VM) mitverfolgt werden. Dabei werden während der Installation an vielen Stellen Hintergrundinformationen vermittelt, z.B. anderslautende Gerätenamen. Nach der Installation (und einer kleinen Verschnaufpause) melden wir uns am System an, richten das Netzwerk ein und installieren unsere Lieblingspakete. Wir erstellen Boot Environments und sehen, dass dadurch z.B. vermurkste Systemupgrades der Vergangenheit angehören, da wir mehrere Versionen unseres Betriebssystems über das Dateisystem erhalten. Und wer direkt nach der Installation merkt, dass /var/log durch die aktivierte lz4-Kompression von ZFS nur noch halb so groß ist, wird feststellen, dass FreeBSD eine Menge zu bieten hat.

This talk will cover the on-going process of migrating a big data cluster from a Linux-only system to a mixed OS environment using more and more BSD. I'll cover how the cluster started, what it is used for and the current setup (hardware and software). Particular focus will be put on the migration of the fileserver that has been successfully migrated from a hardware RAID configuration using Linux to an OpenZFS-based FreeBSD setup. I'll detail how it was done, the planning, preparation, and important learnings I too away from the experience. The talk closes with an outline of what steps will follow in the future. The talk is intended for people interested in such setups, migration strategies, steps to take and pitfalls to avoid.

I manage the Big Data cluster of the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany as system administrator. As such, I'm responsible for providing the compute resources to researchers and teachers during the semester, as well as students doing projects and thesis work on the cluster nodes. When I took over the cluster a couple of years ago, it was a Linux-only system. I've managed to convert more and more nodes to using FreeBSD and OpenZFS. My talk will focus on the how and why, elaborating benefits of the approach and rough edges that still need to be worked on. In the summer of 2018, I took on one of the biggest tasks yet: the migration of the central file server for the cluster. This fileserver provides the home directories to each node via NFS. I was successful in migrating it from a pure hardware RAID setup to a FreeBSD-based OpenZFS software RAID solution. This provides the usual benefits associated with OpenZFS such as compression, quotas and reservation, as well as data protection on various levels. My talk will detail the preparation that I took before the migration and provide some insight into how the setup works now. Future work is discussed and I hope to gather some feedback from the audience about topics like monitoring, backup, and outstanding work.

I've been teaching an undergraduate "Unix for Software Developers" class at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany for a number of years now. The last three years of them in English to allow exchange students to participate as well. I am using FreeBSD in my class and the lab exercises. Topics of the class include an introduction to the Unix shell, editors, filesystems (with a big focus on ZFS), shell programming, grep/sed/awk and since 2017, I also added Ansible. In this talk, I want to reflect on what I learned interacting with the students of various (Unix) backgrounds. I also want to discuss with the audience how to improve the class with relevant topics so that the students get the most out of the class and for their later Unix careers. I'll provide an insight into my labs and what we do there with FreeBSD, too.