NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

My Dog's Garage Runs OpenBSD

I was inspired by the April 2017 article in undeadly.org about getting OpenBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. My goal was to use a Raspberry Pi running OpenBSD to monitor the temperature in my garage from my home. My dog has his own little "apartment" inside the garage, so I want to keep an eye on the temperature. (I don't rely on this device. He sleeps inside the house whenever he wants.)

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EuroBSDcon 2021 Call for Papers

FreeBSD iostat

The state of toolchains in NetBSD

While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn't mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license, and the NetBSD Foundation's has issued a statement about its position on the subject.

• NetBSD’s statement ***

News Roundup

Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8

I will explain how to limit bandwidth on OpenBSD using its firewall PF (Packet Filter) queuing capability. It is a very powerful feature but it may be hard to understand at first. What is very important to understand is that it's technically not possible to limit the bandwidth of the whole system, because once data is getting on your network interface, it's already there and got by your router, what is possible is to limit the upload rate to cap the download rate.

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FreeBSD's ports migration to git and its impact on HardenedBSD

FreeBSD completed their ports migration from subversion to git. Prior to the official switch, we used the read-only mirror FreeBSD had at GitHub[1]. The new repo is at [2]. A cursory glance at the new repo will show that the commit hashes changed. This presents an issue with HardenedBSD's ports tree in our merge-based workflow.

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TrueNAS 12.0-U3 has been released

iXsystems is excited to announce TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released today and marks an important milestone in the transition from FreeNAS to TrueNAS. TrueNAS 12.0 is now considered by iXsystems to be a higher quality release than FreeNAS 11.3-U5, our previous benchmark. The new TrueNAS documentation site has also reached a point where it has more content and capabilities than FreeNAS. TrueNAS 12.0 is ready for mission-critical enterprise deployments.

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Beastie Bits

• Joyent provides pkgsrc for MacOS X
• Archives of old Irix documentation
• FreeBSD Developer/Vendor Summit 2021 ***

Tarsnap

• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

• Andre - splitting zfs array
• Bruce - Command Change
• Dan - Annoyances with ZFS

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

Headlines

DragonFlyBSD Project Update - colo upgrade, future trends

For the last week I've been testing out a replacement for Monster, our 48-core opteron server. The project will be removing Monster from the colo in a week or two and replacing it with three machines which together will use half the power that Monster did alone.

The goal is to clear out a little power budget in the colo and to really beef-up our package-building capabilities to reduce the turn-around time needed to test ports syncs and updates to the binary package system.

Currently we use two blades to do most of the building, plus monster sometimes. The blades take almost a week (120 hours+) to do a full synth run and monster takes around 27.5 hours. But we need to do three bulk builds more or less at the same time... one for the release branch, one for the development branch, and one for staging updates. It just takes too long and its been gnawing at me for a little while.

Well, Zen 2 to the rescue! These new CPUs can take ECC, there's actually an IPMI mobo available, and they are fast as hell and cheap for what we get.

The new machines will be two 3900X based servers, plus a dual-xeon system that I already had at home. The 3900X's can each do a full synth run in 24.5 hours and the Xeon can do it in around 31 hours. Monster will be retired. And the crazy thing about this? Monster burns 1000W going full bore. Each of the 3900X servers burns 160W and the Xeon burns 200W. In otherwords, we are replacing 1000W with only 520W and getting roughly 6x the performance efficiency in the upgrade. This tell you just how much more power-efficient machines have become in the last 9 years or so. > This upgrade will allow us to do full builds for both release and dev in roughly one day instead of seven days, and do it without interfering with staging work that might be happening at the same time.

Future trends - DragonFlyBSD has reached a bit of a cross-roads. With most of the SMP work now essentially complete across the entire system the main project focus is now on supplying reliable binary ports for release and developer branches, DRM (GPU) support and other UI elements to keep DragonFlyBSD relevant on workstations, and continuing Filesystem work on HAMMER2 to get multi-device and clustering going.

Resuming ZFS send

One of the amazing functionalities of ZFS is the possibility of sending a whole dataset from one place to another. This mechanism is amazing to create backups of your ZFS based machines. Although, there were some issues with this functionality for a long time when a user sent a big chunk of data. What if you would do that over the network and your connection has disappeared? What if your machine was rebooted as you are sending a snapshot?

For a very long time, you didn't have any options - you had to send a snapshot from the beginning. Now, this limitation was already bad enough. However, another downside of this approach was that all the data which you already send was thrown away. Therefore, ZFS had to go over all this data and remove them from the dataset. Imagine the terabytes of data which you sent via the network was thrown away because as you were sending the last few bytes, the network went off.

In this short post, I don't want to go over the whole ZFS snapshot infrastructure (if you think that such a post would be useful, please leave a comment). Now, to get back to the point, this infrastructure is used to clone the datasets. Some time ago a new feature called “Resuming ZFS send” was introduced. That means that if there was some problem with transmitting the dataset from one point to another you could resume it or throw them away. But the point is, that yes, you finally have a choice.

News Roundup

Realtime bandwidth terminal graph visualization

If for some reasons you want to visualize your bandwidth traffic on an interface (in or out) in a terminal with a nice graph, here is a small script to do so, involving ttyplot, a nice software making graphics in a terminal.

The following will works on OpenBSD. You can install ttyplot by pkg_add ttyplot as root, ttyplot package appeared since OpenBSD 6.5.

fixing telnet fixes

There’s a FreeBSD commit to telnet. fix a couple of snprintf() buffer overflows. It’s received a bit of attention for various reasons, telnet in 2019?, etc. I thought I’d take a look. Here’s a few random observations.

1. The first line is indented with spaces while the others use tabs.

2. The correct type for string length is size_t not unsigned int.

3. sizeof(char) is always one. There’s no need to multiply by it.

4. If you do need to multiply by a size, this is an unsafe pattern. Use calloc or something similar. (OpenBSD provides reallocarray to avoid zeroing cost of calloc.)

5. Return value of malloc doesn’t need to be cast. In fact, should not be, lest you disguise a warning.

6. Return value of malloc is not checked for NULL.

7. No reason to cast cp to char * when passing to snprintf. It already is that type. And if it weren’t, what are you doing?

8. The whole operation could be simplified by using asprintf.

9. Although unlikely (probably impossible here, but more generally), adding the two source lengths together can overflow, resulting in truncation with an unchecked snprintf call. asprintf avoids this failure case.

A Chapter from the FBI’s History with OpenBSD and an OpenSSH Vuln

Earlier this year I FOIAed the FBI for details on allegations of backdoor installed in the IPSEC stack in 2010, originally discussed by OpenBSD devs (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462 …) Today, I got an interesting but unexpected responsive record:

• Freedom of Information Act: FBI: OpenBSD
• GitHub Repo

Beastie Bits

• “Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition” open for tech review
• FreeBSD Journal: FreeBSD for Makers
• OpenBSD and NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2019 Nagoya
• FreeBSD 12.0: WINE Gaming
• Introduction to the Structure and Interpretation of TNF (The NetBSD Foundation)
• vBSDcon speakers announced

Feedback/Questions

• Pat - NYCBug Aug 7th
• Tyler - SSH keys vs password
• Lars - Tor-Talk

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

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon

• This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria
• They've got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present
• There will also be a tutorial section of the conference
• AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!
• All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted
• Check the link for all the details on the talks - if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers! ***

FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

• The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU
• This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router
• Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up
• It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don't want to use the ones rolled by someone else
• For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router
• Of course if you're more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too ***

Signed pkgsrc package guide

• We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up
• It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)
• He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them
• The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer ***

Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports

• Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI
• In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things
• In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara
• In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead - but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he's done
• In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things ***

Interview - Chris Buechler - cmb@pfsense.com / @cbuechler

pfSense

Tutorial

pfSense walkthrough

News Roundup

FreeBSD challenge continues

• Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey
• In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first
• In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he's starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again - concludes that ports are the way to go
• In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch
• In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails! ***

BSD books in 2014

• BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them
• In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014
• In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and...
• Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)
• Check the link for all the details ***

How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images

• Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post
• Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch
• You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI
• It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time around we discuss how you can become a developer
• Kris also details the length of supported releases
• Expect lots of new features in 10.1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Jake writes in
• Niclas writes in
• Steffan writes in
• Antonio writes in
• Chris writes in ***