NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2023

Our 2023 Recommended Summer Reads 2023

News Roundup

How to install Kanboard on OpenBSD

A bit of Unix history on 'su -'

Some hints for splitting commits

Live from OpenBSD in Amsterdam

In memoriam

In Memoriam: Hans Petter William Sirevåg Selasky

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

• Agbo - Using BSD for a business

• Chris - Desktop BSD systems

• Dane - Use another OS

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

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Interview with Michael W. Lucas

SNMP Book
The Networknomicon
Sponsor the TLS Book
Cashflow for creators
Book sale

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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.

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

Special Guest: Michael W Lucas.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

OpenBSD 6.8

Released Oct 18, 2020. (OpenBSD's 25th anniversary)

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NetBSD 9.1 Released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.1, the first update of the NetBSD 9 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.

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OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020

As with most other conferences in the last six months, this year’s OpenZFS Developer’s Summit was a bit different than usual. Held via Zoom to accommodate for 2020’s new normal in terms of social engagements, the conference featured a mix of talks delivered live via webinars, and breakout sessions held as regular meetings. This helped recapture some of the “hallway track” that would be lost in an online conference.
• After attending the conference, I wrote up some of my notes from each of the talks
• Part 2

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ZFS and FreeBSD Support

Klara offers flexible Support Subscriptions for your ZFS and FreeBSD infrastructure, simply sign up for our monthly subscription! What's even better is that for the month of October we are giving away 3 months for free, for every yearly subscription, and one month free when you sign up for a 6-months subscription! Check it out on our website!

News Roundup

BastilleBSD - native container management for FreeBSD

Some time ago, I had the requirement to use FreeBSD in a project, and soon the question came up if Docker and Kubernetes can be used.
On FreeBSD, Docker is not very well supported, and even if you can get it running, Linux is used in a Docker container. My experience with Docker on FreeBSD is awful, and so I started looking for alternatives.
A quick search on one of the most significant online search engines led me to Jails and then to BastilleBSD.

Tarsnap – cleaning up old backups

I use Tarsnap for my critical data. Case in point, I use it to backup my Bacula database dump. I use Bacula to backup my hosts. The database in question keeps track of what was backed up, from what host, the file size, checksum, where that backup is now, and many other items. Losing this data is annoying but not a disaster. It can be recreated from the backup volumes, but that is time consuming. As it is, the file is dumped daily, and rsynced to multiple locations.

MWL - BookSale

For those interested in such things, I recently posted my 60,000th tweet. This prodded me to try an experiment I’ve been pondering for a while.
Over at my ebookstore, two of my books are now on a “Name Your Own Price” sale. You can get git commit murder and PAM Mastery for any price you wish, with a minimum of $1.

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Beastie Bits

• Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #109
• The UNIX Time-Sharing System - Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson - July 1974
• Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal *** ###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

• lars - infosec handbook
• scott - zfs import
• zhong - first episode

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

Interview - Michael Lucas

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

Special Guest: Michael W Lucas.

###Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwl@mwl.io / @mwlauthor
FreeBSD Mastery: Jails

• BR: Welcome back to the show and congratulations on your latest book. How many books did you have to write before you could start on FreeBSD Mastery: Jails?
• AJ: How much research did you have to do about jails?
• BR: The book talks about something called ‘incomplete’ jails. What do you mean by that?
• AJ: There are a lot of jail management frameworks out there. Why did you chose to write about iocage in the book?
• BR: How many jails do you run yourself?
• AJ: Can you tell us a bit about how you handle book sponsorship these days?
• BR: What other books (fiction and non-fiction) are you currently working on?
• AJ: Which talks are you looking forward to attend at the upcoming BSDCan conference?
• BR: How is the BSD user group going?
• AJ: Anything else you’d like to mention before we release you from our interview jail cell?

• 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

BSDCan 2014 talks and reports, part 2

• More presentations and trip reports are still being uploaded
• Ingo Schwarze, New Trends in mandoc
• Vsevolod Stakhov, The Architecture of the New Solver in pkg
• Julio Merino, The FreeBSD Test Suite
• Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM
• There's also a trip report from Michael Dexter and another (very long and detailed) trip report from our friend Warren Block that even gives us some linkage, thanks! ***

Beyond security, getting to know OpenBSD's real purpose

• Michael W Lucas (who, we learn through this video, has been using BSD since 1986) gave a "webcast" last week, and the audio and slides are finally up
• It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, managing to touch on a lot of OpenBSD topics
• Some of those topics include: what is OpenBSD and why you should care, the philosophy of the project, how it serves as a "pressure cooker for ideas," briefly touches on GPL vs BSDL, their "do it right or don't do it at all" attitude, their stance on NDAs and blobs, recent LibreSSL development, some of the security functions that OpenBSD enabled before anyone else (and the ripple effect that had) and, of course, their disturbing preference for comic sans
• Here's a direct link to the slides
• Great presentation if you'd like to learn a bit about OpenBSD, but also contains a bit of information that long-time users might not know too ***

FreeBSD vs Linux, a comprehensive comparison

• Another blog post covering something people seem to be obsessed with - FreeBSD vs Linux
• This one was worth mentioning because it's very thorough in regards to how things are done behind the scenes, not just the usual technical differences
• It highlights the concept of a "core team" and their role vs "contributors" and "committers" (similar to a presentation Kirk McKusick did not long ago)
• While a lot of things will be the same on both platforms, you might still be asking "which one is right for me?" - this article weighs in with some points for both sides and different use cases
• Pretty well-written and unbiased article that also mentions areas where Linux might be better, so don't hate us for linking it ***

Expand FreeNAS with plugins

• One of the things people love the most about FreeNAS (other than ZFS) is their cool plugin framework
• With these plugins, you can greatly expand the feature set of your NAS via third party programs
• This page talks about a few of the more popular ones and how they can be used to improve your NAS or media box experience
• Some examples include setting up an OwnCloud server, Bacula for backups, Maraschino for managing a home theater PC, Plex Media Server for an easy to use video experience and a few more
• It then goes into more detail about each of them, how to actually install plugins and then how to set them up ***

Interview - Karl Lehenbauer - karl@flightaware.com / @flightaware

FreeBSD at FlightAware, BSD history, various topics

Tutorial

Ports and packages in OpenBSD

News Roundup

Code review culture meets FreeBSD

• In most of the BSDs, changes need to be reviewed by more than one person before being committed to the tree
• This article describes Phabricator, an open source code review system that we briefly mentioned last week
• Instructions for using it are on the wiki
• While not approved by the core team yet for anything official, it's in a testing phase and developers are encouraged to try it out and get their patches reviewed
• Just look at that fancy interface!! ***

Upcoming BSD books

• Sneaky MWL somehow finds his way into both our headlines and the news roundup
• He gives us an update on the next BSD books that he's planning to release
• The plan is to release three (or so) books based on different aspects of FreeBSD's storage system(s) - GEOM, UFS, ZFS, etc.
• This has the advantage of only requiring you to buy the one(s) you're specifically interested in
• "When will they be released? When I'm done writing them. How much will they cost? Dunno."
• It's not Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition... ***

CARP failover and high availability on FreeBSD

• If you're running a cluster or a group of servers, you should have some sort of failover in place
• But the question comes up, "how do you load balance the load balancers!?"
• This video goes through the process of giving more than one machine the same IP, how to set up CARP, securing it and demonstrates a node dying
• Also mentions DNS-based load balancing as another option ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time in PCBSD land, we're getting ready for the 10.0.2 release (ISOs here)
• AppCafe got a good number of fixes, and now shows 10 random highlighted applications
• EasyPBI added a "bulk" mode to create PBIs of an entire FreeBSD port category
• Lumina, the new desktop environment, is still being worked on and got some bug fixes too ***

Feedback/Questions

• Paul writes in
• Matt writes in
• Kjell writes in
• Paul writes in
• Tom writes in ***

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 ***