BSD news with operational consequences attached.
BSD Now is a technical news-and-commentary show centered on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenZFS, and adjacent Unix systems. It favors practical consequences over gloss, moving from headlines into the reliability, tooling, and maintenance details that matter in production.
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BSD Now treats BSD as current working infrastructure rather than a museum piece. Recent episodes move across FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenZFS, jails, firewalls, desktop projects, package management, observability, and unusual hardware ports. The show is technical from the first few minutes. It assumes the audience can follow terms like ZFS scrub, SELinux labels, Podman, native jails, Prometheus exporters, and firewall migration without slowing everything into beginner copy. Still, it is not sealed off from ordinary consequences. A storage story becomes a question about independence, snapshots, monitoring, and support. A desktop release becomes a test of whether the stated polish matches the actual system behavior. A filesystem workaround becomes a discussion of what happens during upgrades, relabeling, and support conversations. That pattern gives the show its identity. It reads the news, then checks the operational invoice. The style is conversational and lightly messy. Named speakers interrupt themselves, correct phrasing, joke about audio failures, compare desk noise, and wander briefly before pulling the topic back to systems work. Those detours make the show feel recorded by people who use machines, not by a marketing department describing them. The skepticism is often dry. The enthusiasm is specific. Jails for NetBSD, OpenZFS monitoring, OpenBSD on SGI, WireGuard on OpenBSD, and FreeBSD 15 details get attention because they change what a user or administrator can actually do. The show also keeps one foot in history, with stories about Telnet, ProPolice, older architectures, and long-lived Unix habits. It is best for listeners who like technical claims examined line by line. It is less suited to anyone looking for high-level open source headlines without the caveats. BSD Now's value is the combination of news flow, operator judgment, and a willingness to say when the word mostly is doing too much work.
Made for: BSD users, Unix administrators, storage-minded engineers, and open source listeners who want technical news tested against real systems practice. It is especially useful for people who care about reliability, support boundaries, and tooling behavior.
What sets it apart: BSD Now stands apart by treating every headline as an implementation problem. It connects community news to the admin details: filesystems, jails, monitoring, migrations, hardware support, and the hidden cost of keeping systems dependable.
Created by three guys who love BSD, we cover the latest news and have an extensive series of tutorials, as well as interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community. It also serves as a platform for support and questions. We love and advocate FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and TrueOS. Our show aims to be helpful and informative for new users that want to learn about them, but still be entertaining for the people who are already pros.The show airs on Wednesdays at 2:00PM (US Eastern time) and the edited version is usually up the following day.
BSD Now turns boot tunables and storage trade-offs into the shop talk you actually wanted.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Storage choices, support boundaries, and upgrade risk give this BSD hour its sharpest edge.
The episode keeps its focus on storage choices with real operational consequences: ZFS versus BTRFS, Red Hat on ZFS root, and a roundup that keeps circling back to what still works once support, packaging, and upgrade paths matter.
A BSD round-up where Sydney migration friction and HelloSystem 0.8's desktop work meet everyday maintenance reality.
BSD Now episode 652 starts with the practical friction behind systems work, then broadens into release and security coverage. Jason Tubman's Sydney networking trip gives the show its clearest field note: after a 2000k round trip, only one of three sites could be migrated, and…
A FreeBSD conversation that treats marketing as a problem of communication, not spin.
BSD Now uses its Berlin Hackathon conversation with Mark Phillips to make a simple point: technical marketing works best when the people building the product and the people selling it are actually talking.
BSD Now links technical independence to review costs, production pressure, and the trust needed to stop flawed work.
BSD Now 658 treats technical independence less as a slogan than as a cost structure. FreeBSD and OpenZFS sit alongside a sharper argument about review layers, production pressure, and responsibility moving downstream when work slows or defects escape.
Loose tech talk with real builders.
Open source health, measured with context.
Real hardware, live from the desk.
Open source builders on code, licenses and money.
BSD Now episode 658 discusses technical independence in storage architecture using FreeBSD and OpenZFS.
BSD Now interviews Mark Phillips, Technical Marketing Manager at the FreeBSD Foundation, recorded at the Berlin Hackathon in July 2025.
This episode covers a near-catastrophic OpenZFS bug, the crawler plague and web fragility, CDE coming to OpenBSD, DMARC policy inheritance gotchas, and other tech news.
OpenBSD's GEFS preview is explicitly not production-ready: its author warns that data loss is expected, especially on errors.
BSD Now episode 673 examines a 54-day SSH honeypot that collected 317 megabytes of logs, 255,566 login attempts, and 48,102 unique passwords.
BSD Now episode 672 covers Unix pipe buffering, including Linux's 64-kilobyte default pipe buffer and the memory costs of barrier stages such as sort.
BSD Now hosts Jason Tubner and Ruben Shade examine technology frustrations through a selection of 40 complaints, including unreliable one-time passcodes, CAPTCHA prompts, car touchscreens, streaming services, search advertising, surveys, and forced updates.
The hosts discuss how Wayland has set the Linux desktop back by 10 years, reflecting on its development and promises.
This episode of BSD Now covers FreeBSD and OpenZFS for technical independence, OpenBSD on Motorola 88000, and vibe-coded EXT4 for OpenBSD.
This episode of BSD Now covers technology dependence, FreeBSD 15 features, firewall configuration, and NetBSD utilities porting.
This episode of BSD Now covers OpenZFS storage design, the end of Telnet, PyDP 1170, OpenBSD on SGI, terminal color palettes, and FreeBSD tribal knowledge.
This episode of BSD Now covers Jails for NetBSD, the anatomy of BSD-RD, and exploring Docker containers on FreeBSD.
ZFS on RHEL gets the sharpest look.
BSD Now episode 652, "Ghostly Graphics," covers OpenZFS monitoring, HelloSystem 0.8, and GhostBSD's planned move toward XLibre.
Tom and Ruben discuss ZFS scrubs, data integrity, ProPolice, and review each other's desks on BSD Now.
This episode of BSD Now covers articles on FreeBSD's software bill of materials and log-in-free infrastructure, followed by an interview.
Interview with Mark Phillips, Technical Marketing Manager at the FreeBSD Foundation, discussing his role and how he got started with Unix and BSDs.
Tom Jones interviews Deb Goodkin and Justin Gibb from the FreeBSD Foundation about their 25th anniversary and the foundation's role in supporting the FreeBSD project.