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FreeBSD and OpenBSD in GSOC2014

• The Google Summer of Code is a way to encourage students to write code for open source projects and make some money
• Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted, and we'd love for anyone listening to check out their GSOC pages
• The FreeBSD wiki has a list of things that they'd be interested in someone helping out with
• OpenBSD's want list was also posted
• DragonflyBSD and NetBSD were sadly not accepted this year ***

Yes, you too can be an evil network overlord

• A new blog post about monitoring your network using only free tools
• OpenBSD is a great fit, and has all the stuff you need in the base system or via packages
• It talks about the pflow pseudo-interface, its capabilities and relation to NetFlow (also goes well with pf)
• There's also details about flowd and nfsen, more great tools to make network monitoring easy
• If you're listening, Peter... stop ignoring our emails and come on the show! We know you're watching! ***

BSDMag's February issue is out

• The theme is "configuring basic services on OpenBSD 5.4"
• There's also an interview with Peter Hansteen (oh hey...)
• Topics also include locking down SSH, a GIMP lesson, user/group management, and...
• Linux and Solaris articles? Why?? ***

Changes in bcrypt

• Not specific to any OS, but the OpenBSD team is updating their bcrypt implementation
• There is a bug in bcrypt when hashing long passwords - other OSes need to update theirs too! (FreeBSD already has)
• "The length is stored in an unsigned char type, which will overflow and wrap at 256. Although we consider the existence of affected hashes very rare, in order to differentiate hashes generated before and after the fix, we are introducing a new minor 'b'."
• As long as you upgrade your OpenBSD system in order (without skipping versions) you should be ok going forward
• Lots of specifics in the email, check the full thing ***

Interview - Will Backman - bitgeist@yahoo.com / @bsdtalk

The BSDTalk podcast, BSD advocacy, various topics

Tutorial

Tracking and cross-compiling -CURRENT (NetBSD)

News Roundup

X11 no longer needs root

• Xorg has long since required root privileges to run the main server
• With recent work from the OpenBSD team, now everything (even KMS) can run as a regular user
• Now you can set the "machdep.allowaperture" sysctl to 0 and still use a GUI ***

OpenSSH 6.6 CFT

• Shortly after the huge 6.5 release, we get a routine bugfix update
• Test it out on as many systems as you can
• Check the mailing list for the full bug list ***

Creating an OpenBSD USB drive

• Since OpenBSD doesn't distribute any official USB images, here are some instructions on how to do it
• Step by step guide on how you can make your very own
• However, there's some recent emails that suggest official USB images may be coming soon... oh wait ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• New PBI updates that allow separate ports from /usr/local
• You need to rebuild pbi-manager if you want to try it out
• Updates and changes to Life Preserver, App Cafe, PCDM ***

Feedback/Questions

• espressowar writes in
• Antonio writes in
• Christian writes in
• Adam writes in
• Alex writes in ***

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Secure communications with OpenBSD and OpenVPN

• Starting off today's theme of encryption...
• A new blog series about combining OpenBSD and OpenVPN to secure your internet traffic
• Part 1 covers installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption (which we'll be doing later on in the show)
• Part 2 covers the initial setup of OpenVPN certificates and keys
• Parts 3 and 4 are the OpenVPN server and client configuration
• Part 5 is some updates and closing remarks ***

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

• The December 2013 semi-annual newsletter was sent out from the foundation
• In the newsletter you will find the president's letter, articles on the current development projects they sponsor and reports from all the conferences and summits they sponsored
• The president's letter alone is worth the read, really amazing
• Really long, with lots of details and stories from the conferences and projects ***

Use of NetBSD with Marvell Kirkwood Processors

• Article that gives a brief history of NetBSD and how to use it on an IP-Plug computer
• The IP-Plug is a "multi-functional mini-server was developed by Promwad engineers by the order of AK-Systems. It is designed for solving a wide range of tasks in IP networks and can perform the functions of a computer or a server. The IP-Plug is powered from a 220V network and has low power consumption, as well as a small size (which can be compared to the size of a mobile phone charger)."
• Really cool little NetBSD ARM project with lots of graphs, pictures and details ***

Experimenting with zero-copy network IO

• Long blog post from Adrian Chadd about zero-copy network IO on FreeBSD
• Discusses the different OS' implementations and options
• He's able to get 35 gbit/sec out of 70,000 active TCP sockets, but isn't stopping there
• Tons of details, check the full post ***

Interview - Damien Miller - djm@openbsd.org / @damienmiller

Cryptography in OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Tutorial

Full disk encryption in FreeBSD & OpenBSD

News Roundup

OpenZFS office hours

• Our buddy George Wilson sat down to take some ZFS questions from the community
• You can see more info about it here ***

License summaries in pkgng

• A discussion between Justin Sherill and some NYCBUG guys about license frameworks in pkgng
• Similar to pkgsrc's "ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES" setting, pkgng could let the user decide which software licenses he wants to allow
• Maybe we could get a "pkg licenses" command to display the license of all installed packages
• Ok bapt, do it ***

The FreeBSD challenge continues

• Checking in with our buddy from the Linux foundation...
• The switching from Linux to FreeBSD blog series continues for his month-long trial
• Follow up from last week: "As a matter of fact, I did check out PC-BSD, and wanted the challenge. Call me addicted to pain and suffering, but the pride and accomplishment you feel from diving into FreeBSD is quite rewarding."
• Since we last mentioned it, he's decided to go from a VM to real hardware, got all of his common software installed, experimented with the Linux emulation, set up virtualbox, learned about slices/partitions/disk management, found BSD alternatives to his regularly-used commands and lots more ***

Ports gets a stable branch

• For the first time ever, FreeBSD's ports tree will have a maintained "stable" branch
• This is similar to how pkgsrc does things, with a rolling release for updated software and stable branch for only security and big fixes
• All commits to this branch require approval of portmgr, looks like it'll start in 2014Q1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• John writes in
• Spencer writes in
• Campbell writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Clint writes in ***

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More faces of FreeBSD

• Another installment of the FoF series
• This time they talk with Reid Linnemann who works at Spectra Logic
• Gives a history of all the different jobs he's done, all the programming languages he knows
• Mentions how he first learned about FreeBSD, actually pretty similar to Kris' story
• "I used the system to build and install ports, and explored, getting actively involved in the mailing lists and forums, studying, passing on my own limited knowledge to those who could benefit from it. I pursued my career in the open source software world, learning the differences in BSD and GNU licensing and the fragmented nature of Linux distributions, realizing the FreeBSD community was more mature and well distributed about industry, education, and research. Everything steered me towards working with and on FreeBSD."
• Now works on FreeBSD as his day job
• The second one covers Brooks Davis
• FreeBSD committer since 2001 and core team member from 2006 through 2012
• He's helped drive our transition from a GNU toolchain to a more modern LLVM-based toolchain
• "One of the reasons I like FreeBSD is the community involved in the process of building a principled, technically-advanced operating system platform. Not only do we produce a great product, but we have fun doing it."
• Lots more in the show notes ***

We cannot trust Intel and Via’s chip-based crypto

• We woke up to see FreeBSD on the front page of The Register, Ars Technica, Slashdot and Hacker News for their strong stance on security and respecting privacy
• At the EuroBSDCon dev summit, there was some discussion about removing support for hardware-based random number generators.
• FreeBSD's /dev/random got some updates and, for 10.0, will no longer allow the use of Intel or VIA's hardware RNGs as the sole point of entropy
• "It will still be possible to access hardware random number generators, that is, RDRAND, Padlock etc., directly by inline assembly or by using OpenSSL from userland, if required, but we cannot trust them any more" ***

OpenSMTPD 5.4.1 released

• The OpenBSD developers came out with major a new version
• Improved config syntax (please check your smtpd.conf before upgrading)
• Adds support for TLS Perfect Forward Secrecy and custom CA certificate
• MTA, Queue and SMTP server improvements
• SNI support confirmed for the next version
• Check the show notes for the full list of changes, pretty huge release
• Watch Episode 3 for an interview we did with the developers ***

More getting to know your portmgr

• The portmgr secretary, Thomas Abthorpe, interviews... himself!
• Joined as -secretary in March 2010, upgraded to full member in March 2011
• His inspiration for using BSD is "I wanted to run a webserver, and I wanted something free. I was going to use something linux, then met up with a former prof from university, and shared my story with him. He told me FreeBSD was the way to go."
• Mentions how he loves that anyone can contribute and watch it "go live"
• The second one covers Baptiste Daroussin
• The reason for his nick, bapt, is "Baptiste is too long to type"
• There's even a video of bapt joining the team! ***

Interview - Santa Clause - josh@ixsystems.com / @freenasteam

FreeNAS 9.2.0

Note: we originally scheduled the interview to be with Josh Paetzel, but Santa showed up instead.

Tutorial

FreeNAS walkthrough

News Roundup

Introducing configinit

• CloudInit is "a system originally written for Ubuntu which performs configuration of a system at boot-time based on user-data provided via EC2"
• Wasn't ideal for FreeBSD since it requires python and is designed around the concept of configuring a system by running commands (rather than editing configuration files)
• Colin Percival came up with configinit, a FreeBSD alternative
• Alongside his new "firstboot-pkgs" port, it can spin up a webserver in 120 seconds from "launch" of the EC2 instance
• Check the show notes for full blog post ***

OpenSSH support for Ed25519 and bcrypt keys

• New Ed25519 key support (hostkeys and user identities) using the public domain ed25519 reference code
• SSH private keys were encrypted with a symmetric key that's just an MD5 of their password
• Now they'll be using bcrypt by default
• We'll get more into this in next week's interview ***

The FreeBSD challenge

• A member of the Linux foundation blogs about using FreeBSD
• Goes through all the beginner steps, has to "unlearn" some of his Linux ways
• Only a few posts as of this time, but it's a continuing series that may be helpful for switchers ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• GNOME3, cinnamon and mate desktops are in the installer
• Compat layer updated to CentOS 6, enables newest Skype
• Looking for people to test printers and hplip
• Continuing work on grub, but the ability to switch between bootloaders is back ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in
• Jason writes in
• John writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Alexy writes in ***