Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 09:50:52 -0800 From: David Muir Sharnoff <muir@idiom.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: An ISP's Wishlist... Message-ID: <199602141750.JAA16327@idiom.com>
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I know you've seen such things before, so I'm sending mostly to keep the feedback coming. First off, a hearty: Keep up the good work! FreeBSD is great and I'm really happy to have it. Here's my wishlist. ** Things that were so import that I've cobbled together solutions to the following. If someone wants what I've done, contact me. Idle time for kernel PPP sessions or at least an idle timeout. Automatic getty detection of incoming PPP connects. Ability to set all PPP parameters based on PAP login information. Efficient wtmp/utmp/lastlog tracking of PAP-authorized login sessions. Ability to add a route (not a default route) with pppd. A better (doens't have to use /etc/passwd) POP server in ports. (There seems to be one in the mh distribution) ** Things that are really important working & useful ipfw. The filter sorting has been removed, so this fix is in the pipeline. fixed boca16 driver so that it doesn't hang once a week. (No current urgency -- I bought a pair of Cyclades 16e's to use until the boca driver is fixed) Better performance on ip aliases. A friend of mine has some proprietary mods that allow ifconfig'ing to a netmask. A web server that doesn't have be restarted when new virtual hosts are added. A named that didn't die or at least restarted automatically. Lack of a nameserver can be a problem. My guess is that the named problems stem from having a system that is constantly running ifconfig... It doesn't seem to like to have the addresses that it binds to change. ** Things that would ve very nice It would be very nice to be able to have a separate configuration for each port that named might bind to. There are times when I want to serve different information to different nets. This is particularly handy when building firewalls. Memory efficiency. The most expensive part of putting a system together at the moment is memory. automatic reboot and report of diagnostics when the system hangs in disk wait. Getty should track modem disconnect codes, reset the modem, and notice incoming faxes. I've already modified the default getty to notice PPP connects, but that's needed here too. Support for Win95 PPP modes that to autoconfigure DNS server During major disk activity on disks 1 & 2, (tar | tar), small accesses to disk 3 seem to pause for a long time. Since the tar|tar is a news filesystem, most of the time spent is doing synchronous writes to disk 2. Such writes should not cause delays to reading disk 3. Environment: 2.1-STABLE, ncr53c810, disks are 7200rpm'ers from Seagate & Micropolis. A port of 'ofiles' or 'lsof' SMP. Sometimes more CPU is needed. Real layered filesystems. In particular, I want to layer system configurations over a read-only root filesystem that is replicated to all my computers. Reliable and secure NFS. I haven't tried it myself, but I've been told that using NFS will cause instability. Reliable and secure NIS or an equivelent. Randomization to prevent TCP sequence number guessing. ** Things that would make my life easier, but don't have to do with the fact that I'm an ISP Pkg_manage enhancements to show what has been installed. I typically install about 90% of the packages and it's a real pain to remember what's been installed. And don't mention that useless unsorted list on the right. Better support for CDROM changers: it would be nice if it figured out a mount point by looking at the disk the way that Solaris does. sysconfig should control the startup of xdm Better and easier OS emulation support. In order of importance: Win3.1, Win95, Solaris, Macintosh (emulated), BSDI, Linux, WinNT, DOS, Sys5.4, and SCO. I would like to be able to call up Frame and say, please send me a copy for ??? without worrying that it won't work. Better filesystem compatability. In order: DOS (improved), Linux (can be handled by SysV filesystem support because Linux also has it). Much less important: all the rest (Win95, WinNT, OS/2, SCO, Linux native, UMSDOS) ** Things that would be way-cool, but aren't required Go faster. This is in this category because FreeBSD is already very fast. SGI's XFS. It dynamically allocates inodes. It keeps directories in btrees (so you can used big directories without dying). It goes really really fast. Netscape commerce server style sysadmin interface. (Have you installed netscape's server lately?). Very good for the system as a whole, for various daemons: apache, samba, inetd, named, innd, sendmail (well, maybe not), gated, etc. Appletalk support. disks, printers, Apple Remote Access. Netware support. Linux has it. ** Things that appear to have been fixed by installing 2.1 Fix of whatever bug locks up my disks sometimes. (NCR53c810 + 2 Barracudas). Problem last seen on 2.0.5,
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