We've just released the third beta of BSDanywhere 4.3 - enlightenment at your fingertips, including lots of bug fixes, new features and foremost, the first amd64 flavour for 64bit PC architectures.
Though the complete Changelog is available, I'd like to dig into some major highlights of the third beta release. Actually, for us it feels like a final release, but that's exactly why one should have a 'last' beta, right? ;)
amd64 flavour
When we started with this project we've always wanted to have an amd64 flavour in our planning - once. Of course, OpenBSD already runs perfectly for years on amd64, and packaging it on a CD shouldn't cause any trouble.
However, we had to learn that 64bit executables are 'bigger' than 32bit ones and thus the ready-to-reuse i386 image was just ways to large to fit on a cd ...
on-the-fly decompression
We therefore had to find a way to squeeze the whole stuff to make it fit. Gzexe came to the rescue, which - in beta3 - compresses all binaries >100k into self-extracting archives. Actually, this 'trick' even improves the overall speed, since cdrom reads are slow - on the other hand more CPU cycles are needed to extract the binaries (which should not be an issue on half-decent hardware).
syncsys
syncsys has already been on beta2, actually, but we didn't mention it until now, where we believe it is really usable. Actually, the whole power of syncsys is only limited by your imagination :) What it basically does is to scan through /etc, /var, and /root to find modified files and stores them on a device, for instance a USB stick or an internal hard disk.
Thus, BSDanywhere can now be used for any kind of application, that needs a custom config. Your firewall disk just crashed? Boot BSDanywhere instead, rsync all files in /etc from your backup to the BSDanywhere machine, run syncsys on a USB stick (to save the config locally) and you have your machine replaced in seconds.
Ever heard of an "OpenBSD Firewall CD"? You don't need it any longer ... ;)
mkbackup
In addition to syncsys, that synchronizes the entire system to a device, we have now also mkbackup in the 'live' home directory. It allows you to only backup the data of the live account - in case you started some work and need to reboot/continue elsewhere. No magic, but useful for some of us.
building
Building a BSDanywhere image is now safer for everyone. We've introduced a number of checks of the build environment, so it should't wipe out your machines' root file system any longer ([wink] René ;-) In addition, we've redesigned the build script and split it into several template files. Actually, you can now just checkout the svn code and run cat build.sh | ksh to generate a complete image.
Please give this release a spin and report any issues using the bug tracker. We really hope this is the last beta for 4.3.
Report your feedback/questions/comments to our newly created mailing list, please.
Thanks,
Stephan
