Episode 012: Collecting SSHells

2013-11-20

Headlines

The FreeBSD foundation is publishing articles on different FreeBSD developers
This one is about Colin Percival (cperciva@), the ex-security officer
Tells the story of how he first found BSD, what he contributed back, how he eventually became the security officer
Running series with more to come

EuroBSDCon 2013 dev summit videos, AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos, MWL's presentation video
Most of us never get to see the dev summit talks since they're only for developers
AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos also up finally
List of AsiaBSDCon presentation topics here
Our buddy Michael W Lucas gave an "OpenBSD for Linux users" talk at a Michigan Unix Users Group.
He says "Among other things, I compare OpenBSD to Richard Stallman and physically assault an audience member. We also talk long long time, memory randomization, PF, BSD license versus GPL, Microsoft and other OpenBSD stuff"
Really informative presentation, pretty long, answers some common questions at the end

FOSDEM 2014 will take place on 1–2 February, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium
Just like in the last years, there will be both a BSD booth and a developer's room
The topics of the devroom include all BSD operating systems. Every talk is welcome, from internal hacker discussion to real-world examples and presentations about new and shiny features.
If you are in the area or want to go, check the show notes for details
NYCBSDCon is also accepting papers.
It'll be in New York City at the beginning of February 2014
If anyone wants to give a talk at one of these conferences, go ahead and send in your stuff!

The FreeBSD foundation has been supporting the FreeBSD project and community for over 13 years
As of today they have raised about half a million dollars, but still have a while to go
Donations go towards new features, paying for the server infrastructure, conferences, supporting the community, hiring full-time staff members and promoting FreeBSD at events
They are preparing the debut of a new online magazine, the FreeBSD Journal
Typically big companies make their huge donations in December, like a couple of anonymous donors that gave around $250,000 each last year
Make your donation today over at freebsdfoundation.org, every little bit helps
Everyone involved with BSD Now made a donation last year and will do so again this year

The NetBSD Foundation, pkgsrc, future plans

Note: there was a mistake in the video version of the tutorial, please consult the written version for the proper instructions.

Sony's Playstation 4 is finally released
As previously thought, its OS is heavily based on FreeBSD and uses the kernel among other things
Link in the show notes contains the full list of BSD software they're using
Always good to see BSD being so widespread

Free monthly BSD magazine publishes another issue
This time their topics include: Configuring a Highly Available Service on FreeBSD, IT Inventory & Asset Management Automation, more FreeBSD Programming Primer, PfSense and Snort and a few others
PDF linked in the show notes

NetBSD's pbulk tool is similar to poudriere, but for pkgsrc
While working on updating the documentation, a developer cleaned up quite a lot of code
He wrote a script that automates pbulk deployment and setup
The whole setup of a dedicated machine has been reduced to just three commands

Over 200 PBIs have been populated in to the PC-BSD 10 Stable Appcafe
Many PC-BSD programs received some necessary bug fixes and updates
Some include network detection in the package and update managers, nvidia graphic detection, security updates for PCDM