It’s been couple months since we announced the bytemine appliance and back when we announced the hardware, we said, it is the building block for a new product line. Here comes the next step!

The bytemine openbsd appliance!

It is built on OpenBSD 4.5 and includes a whole lot of additions, such as:

• ba-update(8) – a software-updater to update your installation with security- and bugfix updates provided by bytemine
• an extended bootloader to support the LCD
• software to make use of the LCD from within the operating system
  • lcdssd(8) to display status information
  • lcdexec(8) to interact with the keypad and execute commands from the keypad
  • mlcd(8), lcdinfo(8) and lcdalert(8) to display various data on the display
• rescue.rd – a rescue system which can be booted via the keypad
• printed manual and documentation of all extensions in man-pages

Through the above mentioned “ba-update” command you can easily update the appliance to always have the latest updates we release.

And for the german folks, here is a poster we did for the bytemine openbsd appliance release bbq last thursday:

The last two days I spent at the amoocon 2009 in Rostock. Stefan Wintermeyer (Founder of Amooma GmbH and Author of the Asterisk Book) organized the conference and asked me to give an OpenBSD talk. It was a get-together of quite a few big names of the VoIP scene.

The conference started with a keynote by Marc Spencer (Original Author of Asterisk and head of Digium, Inc.. Throughout the day the talks were very well done. The conference took place at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Rostock and Stefan and his team from Amooma did an excellent job organizing it. The quality and level of talks was good and the sourrounding made it fun to be a speaker. I was a bit surprised that this was the first conference sind 2005 were I actually did not know anyone (well, except for the person that got me there), but I guess there is not a whole lot of crossover inbetween the OS and VoIP scenes.

I was quite happy to hear that John Todd, community manager at Digium, is a big OpenBSD user. He uses OpenBSD all around his house with asterisk trunk on it. nice. Lenz Grimmer from MySQL (I’ll spare you the obvoious jokes about the “renaming” of his employer) gave two very interesting talks. One on MySQL HA and the other on Securing and backing up MySQL.

Today I gave my talk on OpenBSD in VoIP environments (on german). Apparently they made videos of all the talks, so I will link to that at some point. The slides for my talk are available here.

Well, if you have not gotten the news by now, shame on you :) OpenBSD has released its new version, OpenBSD 4.5. All the new things that are part of this release are covered pretty well in the release announcement, which is also linked from the corresponding Undeadly article!

Of course, this release is available from ftp.bytemine.net.

Enjoy!

Last weekend we’ve spent in Chemnitz at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2009. We took the chance and presented the bytemine appliance for the first time to a broader audience. A few of our customers already had the chance to call one of these babies their own.

I have to say that the the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are a very well organized community conference. Not only they offer every help possible for exhibitors, but they also managed to put up a very interesting conference programm, that is targeted at the typical audience of such an event.

We arrived Friday night and as such had to put up our booth as well as the OpenBSD booth (which was located in the community area, and bravely guarded by Bernd) on Saturday morning. Our booth was right next to the Zarafa, which made it possible to even further establich our relationship with them (but more on that in a seperate blog post, I promise!)

As you can see from the picture, we even displayed our bytewear! We actually sell these hooded sweaters and t-shirts too :)

Saturday was finished up with a nice social event accompanied by a wonderful buffet! Here is a picture of 3/4 of the miners present in Chemnitz.

We’ve had many interesting talks with visitors as well as other exhibitors and I’m inclined to say:

See ya in Chemnitz 2010!

By the way, you should check out the list of “upcoming events” on our blog, we go many places and love to exchange ideas!

I guess, I will be speaking at the Amoocon 2009. Amoocon is a conference on Voice over IP on the 4th and 5th of May in Rostock, Germany. I will be giving a talk on OpenBSD in VoIP-Environments.

Maybe I will see you in Rostock?

Some days ago Felix got interviewed by Tim Pritlove for Chaosradio Express.

They talked about OpenBSD’s technical features as well as the development culture within the OpenBSD project. So if you’re interested in OpenBSD and want to learn something about it, this podcast is for you.

The interview got released today. Have fun!

Where are you going to be the upcoming saturday? Well, we are definitly supporting the local Oldenburg event, 3. Linux Info-Tag Oldenburg. There will be an OpenBSD-related talk by myself, titled: Commercial deployment of OpenBSD.

Of course we will have a bytemine booth as well as an OpenBSD booth. We will have OpenBSD 4.4 CD-Release Sets and all the fan-boy stuff available!

If you feel like hanging out with the byteminers while meeting with other unix/linux people from Oldenburg, join the event!

Finally the schedule for OpenCON 2008 got published. What you can listen to and experience on the last Weekend of November in Venice you can see here.

Like every year quite a few of the OpenBSD developers are giving talks.

OpenCON is a conference solemnly dedicated to OpenBSD. If you have the chance, come to Venice!

Another half year went by and OpenBSD 4.4 has been released today. Of course this has been already covered by Undeadly as well.

Like every release, it is a big thing to us and Bernd and I are proud to be part of the development team and at the same time want to congratulate Theo and the rest of the OpenBSD team. As with the previous releases there is a theme to this release, you can read more about Trial of the BSD Knights on the lyrics page.

Of course OpenBSD 4.4 is available through our mirror as well. You can order the 4.4 Release CD Set through Soekris ordering page. Please remember that buying the CD sets helps the OpenBSD project!

We will have CD sets and T-Shirts at our booth at the 3. Linux-Info Tag Oldenburg for sale as well.

Puffy shot first and see ya for OpenBSD 4.5 in half a year!

Some miners are currently driving towards Kiel on the A1 autobahn. The Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage exhibition will start tomorrow, featuring a nice bytemine booth. ;) We’re looking forward to meet you there!