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
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