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The missing EuroBSDCon videos

• Some of the missing videos from EuroBSDCon 2014 we mentioned before have mysteriously appeared
• Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD, looking forward to another 10 years
• Lourival Viera Neto, NPF scripting with Lua
• Kris Moore, Snapshots, replication and boot environments
• Andy Tanenbaum, A reimplementation of NetBSD based on a microkernel
• Kirk McKusick, An introduction to FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS
• Emannuel Dreyfus, FUSE and beyond, bridging filesystems
• John-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI performance
• Unfortunately, there are still about six talks missing… and no ETA ***

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro (or two)

• We've got a couple posts about running FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro this week
• In the first one, the author talks a bit about trying to run Linux on his laptop for quite a while, going back and forth between it and something that Just Works™
• Eventually he came full circle, and the focus on using only GUI tools got in the way, instead of making things easier
• He works on a lot of FreeBSD-related software, so switching to it for a desktop seems to be the obvious next step
• He's still not quite to that point yet, but documents his experiments with BSD as a desktop
• The second article also documents an ex-Linux user switching over to BSD for their desktop
• It also covers power management, bluetooth and trackpad setup
• On the topic of Gentoo, "Underneath the beautiful and easy-to-use Portage system lies the same glibc, the same turmoil over a switch to a less-than-ideal init system, and the same kernel-level bugs that bring my productivity down"
• Check out both articles if you've been considering running FreeBSD on a MacBook ***

Remote logging over TLS

• In most of the BSDs, syslogd has been able to remotely send logs to another server for a long time
• That feature can be very useful, especially for forensics purposes - it's much harder for an attacker to hide their activities if the logs aren't on the same server
• The problem is, of course, that it's sent in cleartext, unless you tunnel it over SSH or use some kind of third party wrapper
• With a few recent commits, OpenBSD's syslogd now supports sending logs over TLS natively, including X509 certificate verification
• By default, syslogd runs as an unprivileged user in a chroot on OpenBSD, so there were some initial concerns about certificate verification - how does that user access the CA chain outside of the chroot?
• That problem was also conquered, by loading the CA chain directly from memory, so the entire process can be run in the chroot without issue
• Some of the privsep verifcation code even made its way into LibreSSL right afterwards
• If you haven't set up remote logging before, now might be an interesting time to try it out ***

FreeBSD, not a Linux distro

• George Neville-Neil gave a presentation recently, titled "FreeBSD: not a Linux distro"
• It's meant to be an introduction to new users that might've heard about FreeBSD, but aren't familiar with any BSD history
• He goes through some of that history, and talks about what FreeBSD is and why you might want to use it over other options
• There's even an interesting "thirty years in three minutes" segment
• It's not just a history lesson though, he talks about some of the current features and even some new things coming in the next version(s)
• We also learn about filesystems, jails, capsicum, clang, dtrace and the various big companies using FreeBSD in their products
• This might be a good video to show your friends or potential employer if you're looking to introduce FreeBSD to them ***

Long-term support considered harmful

• There was recently a pretty horrible bug in GNU's libc (BSDs aren't affected, don't worry)
• Aside from the severity of the actual problem, the fix was delayed for quite a long time, leaving people vulnerable
• Ted Unangst writes a post about how this idea of long-term support could actually be harmful in the long run, and compares it to how OpenBSD does things
• OpenBSD releases a new version every six months, and only the two most recent releases get support and security fixes
• He describes this as both a good thing and a bad thing: all the bugs in the ecosystem get flushed out within a year, but it forces people to stay (relatively) up-to-date
• "Upgrades only get harder and more painful (and more fragile) the longer one goes between them. More changes, more damage. Frequent upgrades amortize the cost and ensure that regressions are caught early."
• There was also some discussion about the article you can check out ***

Interview - Andrew Tanenbaum - info@minix3.org / @minix3

MINIX's integration of NetBSD

News Roundup

Using AFL on OpenBSD

• We've talked about American Fuzzy Lop a bit on a previous episode, and how some OpenBSD devs are using it to catch and fix new bugs
• Undeadly has a cool guide on how you can get started with fuzzing
• It's a little on the advanced side, but if you're interested in programming or diagnosing crashes, it'll be a really interesting article to read
• Lots of recent CVEs in other open source projects are attributed to fuzzing - it's a great way to stress test your software ***

Lumina 0.8.1 released

• A new version of Lumina, the BSD-licensed desktop environment from PCBSD, has been released
• This update includes some new plugins, lots of bugfixes and even "quality-of-life improvements"
• There's a new audio player desktop plugin, a button to easily minimize all windows at once and some cool new customization options
• You can get it in PCBSD's edge repo or install it through regular ports (on FreeBSD, OpenBSD or DragonFly!)
• If you haven't seen our episode about Lumina, where we interview the developer and show you a tour of its features, gotta go watch it ***

My first OpenBSD port

• The author of the "Code Rot & Why I Chose OpenBSD" article has a new post up, this time about ports
• He recently made his first port and got it into the tree, so he talks about the whole process from start to finish
• After learning some of the basics and becoming comfortable running -current, he noticed there wasn't a port for the "Otter" web browser
• At that point he did what you're supposed to do in that situation, and started working on it himself
• OpenBSD has a great porter's handbook that he referenced throughout the process
• Long story short, his browser of choice is in the official ports collection and now he's the maintainer (and gets to deal with any bug reports, of course)
• If some software you use isn't available for whatever BSD you're using, you could be the one to make it happen ***

How to slide with DragonFly

• DragonFly BSD has a new HAMMER FS utility called "Slider"
• It's used to easily browse through file history and undelete files - imagine something like a commandline version of Apple's Time Machine
• They have a pretty comprehensive guide on how to use it on their wiki page
• If you're using HAMMER FS, this is a really handy tool to have, check it out ***

OpenSMTPD with Dovecot and Salt

• We recently had a feedback question about which mail servers you can use on BSD - Postfix, Exim and OpenSMTPD being the big three
• This blog post details how to set up OpenSMTPD, including Dovecot for IMAP and Salt for quick and easy deployment
• Intrigued by it becoming the default MTA in OpenBSD, the author decided to give it a try after being a long-time Postfix fan
• "Small, fast, stable, and very easy to customize, no more ugly m4 macros to deal with"
• Check it out if you've been thinking about configuring your first mail server on any of the BSDs ***

Feedback/Questions

• Christopher writes in (handbook section)
• Mark writes in
• Kevin writes in
• Stefano writes in
• Matthew writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Not that interested actually
• This guy again
• Yep, this is the place ***

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Even more BSD presentation videos

• More videos from this year's MeetBSD and OpenZFS devsummit were uploaded since last week
• Robert Ryan, At the Heart of the Digital Economy
• FreeNAS & ZFS, The Indestructible Duo - Except for the Hard Drives
• Richard Yao, libzfs_core and ioctl stabilization
• OpenZFS, Company lightning talks
• OpenZFS, Hackathon Presentation and Awards
• Pavel Zakharov, Fast File Cloning
• Rick Reed, Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users
• Alex Reece & Matt Ahrens, Device Removal
• Chris Side, Channel Programs
• David Maxwell, The Unix command pipeline
• Be sure to check out the giant list of videos from last week's episode if you haven't seen them already ***

NetBSD on a Cobalt Qube 2

• The Cobalt Qube was a very expensive networking appliance around 2000
• In 2014, you can apparently get one of these MIPS-based machines for about forty bucks
• This blog post details getting NetBSD installed and set up on the rare relic of our networking past
• If you're an old-time fan of RISC or MIPS CPUs, this'll be a treat for you
• Lots of great pictures of the hardware too ***

OpenBSD vs. AFL

• In their never-ending security audit, some OpenBSD developers have been hitting various parts of the tree with a fuzzer
• If you're not familiar, fuzzing is a semi-automated way to test programs for crashes and potential security problems
• The program being subjected to torture gets all sorts of random and invalid input, in the hopes of uncovering overflows and other bugs
• American Fuzzy Lop, in particular, has provided some interesting results across various open source projects recently
• So far, it's fixed some NULL pointer dereferences in OpenSSH, various crashes in tcpdump and mandoc and a few other things
• AFL has an impressive list of CVEs (vulnerabilities) that it's helped developers discover and fix
• It also made its way into OpenBSD ports, FreeBSD ports and NetBSD's pkgsrc very recently, so you can try it out for yourself ***

GNOME 3 hits the FreeBSD ports tree

• While you've been able to run GNOME 3 on PC-BSD and OpenBSD for a while, it hasn't actually hit the FreeBSD ports tree.. until now
• Now you can play with GNOME 3 and all its goodies (as well as Cinnamon 2.2, which this also brings in) on vanilla FreeBSD
• Be sure to check the commit message and /usr/ports/UPDATING if you're upgrading from GNOME 2
• You might also want to go back and listen to our interview with Joe Marcus Clark about GNOME's portability ***

Interview - Brendan Gregg - bgregg@netflix.com / @brendangregg

Performance tuning, benchmarks, debugging

News Roundup

DragonFlyBSD 4.0 released

• A new major version of DragonFly, 4.0.1, was just recently announced
• This version includes support for Haswell GPUs, lots of SMP improvements (including some in PF) and support for up to 256 CPUs
• It's also the first release to drop support for i386, so it joins PCBSD in the 64 bit-only club
• Check the release notes for all the details, including networking and kernel improvements, as well as some crypto changes ***

Can we talk about FreeBSD vs Linux

• Hackernews had a recent thread about discussing Linux vs BSD, and the trolls stayed away for once
• Rather than rehashing why one is "better" than the other, it was focused on explaining some of the differences between ecosystems and communities
• If you're one of the many people who watch our show just out of curiosity about the BSD world, this might be a good thread to read
• Someone in the comments even gave bsdnow.tv a mention as a good resource to learn, thanks guy ***

OpenBSD IPSEC tunnel guide

• If you've ever wanted to connect two networks with OpenBSD gateways, this is the article for you
• It shows how to set up an IPSEC tunnel between destinations, how to lock it down and how to access all the machines on the other network just like they were on your LAN
• The article also explains some of the basics of IPSEC if you're not familiar with all the terminology, so this isn't just for experts
• Though the article itself is a few years old, it mostly still applies to the latest stuff today
• All the tools used are in the OpenBSD base system, so that's pretty handy too ***

DragonFly starts work on IPFW2

• DragonFlyBSD, much like FreeBSD, comes with more than one firewall you can use
• Now it looks like you're going to have yet another choice, as someone is working on a fork of IPFW (which is actually already in its second version, so it should be "IPFW3")
• Not a whole lot is known yet; it's still in heavy development, but there's a brief roadmap page with some planned additions
• The guy who's working on this has already agreed to come on the show for an interview, but we're going to give him a chance to get some more work done first
• Expect that sometime next year, once he's made some progress ***

Feedback/Questions

• Michael writes in
• Samael writes in
• Steven writes in
• Remy writes in
• Michael writes in ***