SpamStick is RootBSD’s new spam filtering service for domains.  It is a hosted filter service that will filter all the e-mail addresses for your domain.  It does not require any installation or changes to your existing mail setup for your domain.  There is a control panel which allows you to easily administer the settings.  SpamStick is ideal for SMBs with their own mail server.  The only change that will need to be made is your DNS MX records.  Once that is changed and we have confirmed your account is setup, you’re ready to start utilizing the service.

Benefits

Our SpamStick filter recognizes on average 99.98% of all spam correctly.  It protects your users and e-mail accounts from e-mail based virus attacks or phishing attempts.  All questionable messages are put in a quarantine in case a message is incorrectly identified as spam.  This allows you to login to the web-based control panel and review any messages that may have been quarantined.  You may also activate a daily or weekly PDF report which summarizes the results of messages sent to quarantine and the ability to release any valid messages with a single click.

How do I get started?

1.  Send an email to support@rootbsd.net telling us the domain you want filtered.

2.  Switch the domain MX records to poin to our  SpamStick servers (we can help with this).

3.  Enjoy!

First 30 days free to any customer who wishes to give SpamStick a test drive.  Simply submit a support ticket with your domain and tell us you wish to add it to SpamStick.  After 30 days, billing will start at $10 per month per domain.  If you don’t wish to keep the service for any reason, no problem, you won’t owe a dime for it.

Screenshots

Let’s start off by looking at, what we believe is, the biggest difference in the two.
First off, Linux itself is a kernel, not an OS!   Distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Suse and others) provide the installer and bundle lots of other open source software.  There are easily well over 300 different Linux distributions. While this gives you a lot of choices, the existence of so many distributions also makes it difficult to use different distros since they are all a little bit different. Distributions don’t just differ in ease-of install and available programs; they also differ in directory layout, configuration practices, default software bundles, and most importantly the tools and prorcedures for software updates and patches.

FreeBSD is a complete operating system (kernel and userland) with a well-respected heritage grounded in the roots of Unix development. Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. Security vulnerabilities can also be addressed quickly by the security team. When new utilities or kernel features are added, the user simply needs to read one file, the Release Notes, which is publicly available on the main page of the FreeBSD website.

Now, lets look at performance.
With constant development of both Linux and FreeBSD, performance has come a long way with both.  In many applications, a FreeBSD server will use less RAM than a Linux server running the same applications and load.  FreeBSD’s network performance is also bar none, as one would expect since BSD networking code has been used by many other vendors including Juniper to make the foundation of their network operating system JUNOS.  Companies such as Yahoo!, Qwest, and many others utilize FreeBSD simple because of it’s ability to handle heavy network traffic with high performance and rock solid reliability.

One of the most important issues for an OS today is Security.
FreeBSD supports access control lists (ACLs) and mandatory access control (MAC) modules. The latter is of course accessible only to systems administrators and managers, but it enables small businesses to run networks with fine-grained security measures that apply to subsets of the system exposed to the outside world. UFS V2 has excellent ACL support via extended attributes; you must configure UFS V1 separately if ACLs are a requirement. Both FreeBSD and Linux have very robust packet filtering firewall systems, with FreeBSD’s version including intrusion detection tools.

FreeBSD Ports Collection.
The FreeBSD ports system uses Makefiles laid out in a directory hierarchy so software can be built, installed and uninstalled with the make command. When installing an application, very little (if any) user intervention is required after issuing a beginning command such as make install or make install clean in the ports directory of the desired application. In most cases the software is automatically downloaded from the Internet, patched and configured if necessary, then compiled, installed and registered in the package database. If the new port has needed dependencies on other applications or libraries, these are installed beforehand automatically.  This gives many benefits in being able to easily install software and also customize it as needed.

Most ports are already configured with default options which have been deemed generally appropriate for most users. However, these configuration options can sometimes be changed with the make config command before installation or through an ncurses interface allowing the user to graphically select the desired options.

Each port (or software package) is maintained by an individual person called a port maintainer who is responsible for staying current with the latest software developments. Anyone is welcome to become a port maintainer by contributing their favorite piece of software to the collection, currently there are over 20,000 ports.

In summary, many users find that the FreeBSD operating system is the best Unix OS for a server environment since it is one centrally managed project with consistency through all aspects of the kernel and userland.

RootBSD is pleased to announce that FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE is now available on all of our Xen VPS Products. If you are an existing customer and need help upgrading to the latest release, please let us know, we will be happy to assist you with the upgrade.

Don’t forget we are still running several promotions on our products page.

Right now we have active customers in 47 countries.  I look forward to seeing FreeBSD users and businesses from even more countries on our roster this year.

Here is a big thank-you to all of our customers in:

Russia
Brazil
United States
Ukraine
Germany
Romania
Denmark
Australia
United Kingdom
United Arab Emirates
Austria
Canada
Spain
Sweden
Mexico
Japan
Norway
Greece
Serbia
Israel
Chile
New Zealand
India
Slovakia
Hungary
France
Netherlands
Switzerland
China
Kuwait
Belarus
South Africa
Singapore
Taiwan
Poland
Ireland
Aruba
Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech Republic
Uganda
Italy
Lebanon
Macedonia
Thailand
Malaysia
Iceland

We would like to expand our knowledgebase to include more in-depth information as well as new information that could be of use to our customers. We’d love to hear about your thoughts and ideas as to what would be good to have articles about, as well as how we can improve any existing content. Feel free to leave a comment on this post or, if you’d prefer, just open a support ticket with us to share your opinions.

First, as a company which provides FreeBSD VPSs running on Xen the support for running FreeBSD as a paravirtualized guest in Xen is of major interest to us. We currently run our VPSs using Xen’s support for full virtualization (known as HVM mode in Xen lingo). This mode allows unmodified guest operating systems to run in Xen and is, most familarly, how Windows is support in Xen. Paravirtualized guests however, are ported to run within the Xen hypervisor, and since the guest is designed to operate in Xen and cooperate with the hypervisor the guest can run much more efficiently and quickly. To our customers the greatest boost in performance will be seen in disk and network throughput so we are eagerly anticipating this support in FreeBSD 8.

By the looks of it there will be other improvements in almost every part of FreeBSD. The ULE scheduler which first appeared in FreeBSD 7.0 and became the default with 7.1 has received a number of improvements which will boost performance particularly for the SMP configurations that ULE was designed to handle. The inclusion of stack-smashing protection also gives FreeBSD an edge in security by protecting the system from a number of common exploits used to attack software vulnerabilities. Light weight kernel threads are also to appear in FreeBSD 8 which will mean that kernel threads will consume less resources and be less resource intensive to create and destroy.

Seems like FreeBSD 8 will be another great release for our favorite operating system. For a look at all the other features planned for FreeBSD 8 see the original post at http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html

A time-limited demo is available for free download and a single copy sells for 39 euros. Versions has been in public beta since June of 2008. You can view the press release here or read more at the Unofficial Apple Weblog.

The registration system for Versions is hosted on a FreeBSD Virtual Private Server at RootBSD.  The flexibility that RootBSD’s VPS service offers allowed administrators to upgrade their VPS in a matter of minutes to handle increased server load at the release date.

Buildasearch.com is a new website that lets anyone quickly build their own customized search engine.  By signing up for a free account, users can quickly configure and customize their own search engine that can be used to search a predefined list of websites.

Besides just harvesting the power of big search engines, Buildasearch.com lets users easily customize the look and feel of their search engine.  An easy-to-use AJAX web interface allows users to tailor the search engine’s color scheme and logo to blend in with an existing website.  When it comes to integrating the search engine, a webmaster can either link to it on Buildasearch.com’s server or use a sample PHP API to include it on a standalone website.

Buildasearch.com is powered by a FreeBSD VPS provided by RootBSD.  “The RootBSD service has been excellent, and the Xen-powered VPS has handled our site’s load very well,” said Diego Montalvo, creator of Buildasearch.

• Iota VPS ($19.97/mo) is upgraded from 5GB disk to 10GB disk
• Lambda VPS ($29.97/mo) is upgraded from 15GB to 20GB disk

All customers that are currently on either of these plans will see the upgrade immediately.   Enjoy!

Unfortunately for some reason the Music Player Daemon (mpd henceforth) is set up to not compile with support for libshout which is needed for it to play with Icecast. Luckily as long as you have libshout (/usr/ports/audio/libshout) installed getting mpd to install with support for it is fairly simple. Navigate to /usr/ports/audio/musicpd and open up the Makefile in your favorite editor. Somewhere around line 40 should be a line that reads ‘CONFIGURE_ARGS= –disable-shout’, change this to read ‘CONFIGURE_ARGS= –enable-shout’ and it should compile just fine. Why this option is explicately disabled I do not know but hopefully it will be fixed in the near future. If you go poking around in the Makefile and aren’t able to fine the line to change they may have already fixed it.

Anyway, install musicpd now followed by Icecast (/usr/ports/audio/icecast2). I also installed phpMp, a web interface for mpd to manage the stream and playlists. It can be found in /usr/ports/www/phpmp. After everything is installed go to /usr/local/etc/ to do the configuring. Along with this post are two example configuration files, mpd.cond and icecast.xml for their respective applications. In my mpd.conf I have created a user to place all the required files under. If you use the web interface this users home directory will really only have a database file used by mpd in it along with a log. If you wanted you could create a public_html for the user and run phpMp out of it. In the configuration file for mpd you will need to update the paths if they are different, the stream name if you so desire, and connection information for Icecast (host, port, password). The password and other connection details you choose should be specified the same in icecast.conf. Working from the top down in icecast.xml you should first change/specify the source and relay passwords under authentication (the one used for mpd should also be used here), the administrative username and password, the hostname for the server, and the port to run on. Unless you need to change logging information the rest should be alright.

Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the lines ‘icecast_enable=”YES”‘ and ‘musicpd_enable=”YES”‘. Then do ‘/usr/local/etc/rc.d/icecast start’ followed by ‘/usr/local/etc/rc.d/musicpd start’. If Icecast started correctly you should be able to load the status page at http://hostname:portnumber. Once you have verified that Icecast is running correctly test mpd by executing ‘mpc add <some>’ and then loading /stream.ogg from Icecast. If you can hear the music playing then congratulations, you have properly set up Icecast and musicpd.Musicpd Configuration
Icecast Configuration