Headlines

FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available for XFCE and KDE

The Q2 2020 images are not a visible leap forward but a functional leap forward. Most effort was spent creating a better out of box experience for automatic Ethernet configuration, working WiFi, webcam, and improved hypervisor support.

Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux

Since I wrote my article "Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD" I have been wanting to write something about the technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux and while I cannot possibly cover every single reason, I can write about some of the things that I consider worth noting.

News Roundup

+ Not actually Linux distro review deux: GhostBSD

When I began work on the FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE review last week, it didn't take long to figure out that the desktop portion wasn't going very smoothly.

I think it's important for BSD-curious users to know of easier, gentler alternatives, so I did a little looking around and settled on GhostBSD for a follow-up review.

GhostBSD is based on TrueOS, which itself derives from FreeBSD Stable. It was originally a Canadian distro, but—like most successful distributions—it has transcended its country of origin and can now be considered worldwide. Significant GhostBSD development takes place now in Canada, Italy, Germany, and the United States.

“TLS Mastery” sponsorships open

My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on.

This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books.

JT (our producer) shared his Open Source Retail Box Collection on twitter this past weekend and there was a nice response from a few in the BSD Community showing their collections:

• JT's post: https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1251194823589138432

  • High Resolution Image to see the bottom shelf better: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-9QTs2RR/0/f1742096/O/i-9QTs2RR.jpg
  • Closeup of the BSD Section: https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1251294290782928897

• Others jumped in with their collections:

  • Deb Goodkin's collection: https://twitter.com/dgoodkin/status/1251294016139743232 & https://twitter.com/dgoodkin/status/1251298125672660992
  • FreeBSD Frau's FreeBSD Collection: https://twitter.com/freebsdfrau/status/1251290430475350018
  • Jason Tubnor's OpenBSD Collection: https://twitter.com/Tubsta/status/1251265902214918144

Do you have a nice collection, take a picture and send it in!

Tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals - malloc(3)

Hi there,

It's been a very long time I haven't written anything after my last OpenBSD blogs, that is,

OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space.

OpenBSD: Introduction to execpromises in the pledge(2)

pledge(2): OpenBSD's defensive approach to OS Security

So, again I started reading OpenBSD source codes with debugger after reducing my sleep timings and managing to get some time after professional life. This time I have picked one of my favourite item from my wishlist to learn and share, that is, OpenBSD malloc(3), secure allocator

How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

my home FreeNAS runs two pools for data. One RAIDZ2 with four spinning disk drives and one mirror with two SSDs. Toying with InfluxDB and Grafana in the last couple of days I found that I seem to have a constant write load of 1 Megabyte (!) per second on the SSDs. What the ...?

So I run three VMs on the SSDs in total. One with Windows 10, two with Ubuntu running Confluence, A wiki essentially, with files for attachments and MySQL as the backend database. Clearly the writes had to stop when the wikis were not used at all, just sitting idle, right?

Well even with a full query log and quite some experience in the operation of web applications I could not figure out what Confluence is doing (productively, no doubt) but trust me, it writes a couple of hundred kbytes to the database each second just sitting idle.

My infrastructure as of 2019

I've wanted to write about my infrastructure for a while, but I kept thinking, "I'll wait until after I've done $next_thing_on_my_todo." Of course this cycle never ends, so I decided to write about its state at the end of 2019. Maybe I'll write an update on it in a couple of moons; who knows?

For something different than our usual Beastie Bits… we bring you…

We're all quarantined so lets install BSD on things! Install BSD on something this week, write it up and let us know about it, and maybe we'll feature you!

• Installation of NetBSD on a Mac Mini

• OpenBSD on the HP Envy 13

• Install NetBSD on a Vintage Computer

• BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC

• Allan started a series of FreeBSD Office Hours

BSDNow is going Independent

• After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.

Feedback/Questions

• Todd - LinusTechTips Claims about ZFS

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Headlines

Rethinking OpenBSD Security

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.
I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.

FreeBSD 2020 Q1 Quarterly report

Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.

News Roundup

The Notion of Progress and User Interfaces

One trait of modern Western culture is the notion of progress. A view claiming, at large, everything is getting better and better.

How should we think about progress? Both in general and regarding technology?

Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses

I was recently pointed at a web page on Thomas E. Dickeys site talking about NetBSD curses. It seems initially that the page was intended to be a pointer to some differences between ncurses and NetBSD curses and does appear to start off in this vein but it seems that the author has lost the plot as the document evolved and the tail end of it seems to be devolving into some sort of slanging match. I don't want to go through Mr. Dickey's document point by point, that would be tedious but I would like to pick out some of the things that I believe to be the most egregious. Please note that even though I am a NetBSD developer, the opinions below are my own and not the NetBSD projects.

Making Unix a little more Plan9-like

I’m not really interested in defending anything. I tried out plan9port and liked it, but I have to live in Unix land. Here’s how I set that up.

A Warning

The suckless community, and some of the plan9 communities, are dominated by jackasses. I hope that’s strong enough wording to impress the severity. Don’t go into IRC for help. Stay off the suckless email list. The software is great, the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned, but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.

Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE

This month's Linux distro review isn't of a Linux distribution at all—instead, we're taking a look at FreeBSD, the original gangster of free Unix-like operating systems.

The first FreeBSD release was in 1993, but the operating system's roots go further back—considerably further back. FreeBSD started out in 1992 as a patch-release of Bill and Lynne Jolitz's 386BSD—but 386BSD itself came from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD itself goes back to 1977—for reference, Linus Torvalds was only seven years old then.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge something up front—our distro reviews include the desktop experience, and that is very much not FreeBSD's strength. FreeBSD is far, far better suited to running as a headless server than as a desktop! We're going to get a full desktop running on it anyway, because according to Lee Hutchinson, I hate myself—and also because we can't imagine readers wouldn't care about it.

FreeBSD does not provide a good desktop experience, to say the least. But if you're hankering for a BSD-based desktop, don't worry—we're already planning a followup review of GhostBSD, a desktop-focused BSD distribution.

Beastie Bits

• Wifi renewal restarted
• HAMMER2 and a quick start for DragonFly
• Engineering NetBSD 9.0
• Antivirus Protection using OPNsense Plugins
• BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC

BSDNow is going Independent

• After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. LinuxAcademy is now under new leadership, and we understand that cutbacks needed to be made, and that BSD is not their core product. That does not mean your favourite BSD podcast is going away, we will continue and we expect things will not look much different. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.

Feedback/Questions

• Jordyn - ZFS Pool Problem

  • debug - https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/raw/master/episodes/347/feedback/dbg.txt

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv