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Playing with sandboxing

• Sandboxing and privilege separation are popular topics these days - they're the goal of the new "shill" scripting language, they're used heavily throughout OpenBSD, and they're gaining traction with the capsicum framework
• This blog post explores capsicum in FreeBSD, some of its history and where it's used in the base system
• They also include some code samples so you can verify that capsicum is actually denying the program access to certain system calls
• Check our interview about capsicum from a while back if you haven't seen it already ***

OpenNTPD on by default

• OpenBSD has enabled ntpd by default in the installer, rather than prompting the user if they want to turn it on
• In nearly every case, you're going to want to have your clock synced via NTP
• With the HTTPS constraints feature also enabled by default, this should keep the time checked and accurate, even against spoofing attacks
• Lots of problems can be traced back to the time on one system or another being wrong, so this will also eliminate some of those cases
• For those who might be curious, they're using the "pool.ntp.org" cluster of addresses and google for HTTPS constraints (but these can be easily changed) ***

FreeBSD workshop in Landshut

• We mentioned a BSD installfest happening in Germany a few weeks back, and the organizer wrote in with a review of the event
• The installfest instead became a "FreeBSD workshop" session, introducing curious new users to some of the flagship features of the OS
• They covered when to use UFS or ZFS, firewall options, the release/stable/current branches and finally how to automate installations with Ansible
• If you're in south Germany and want to give similar introduction talks or Q&A sessions about the other BSDs, get in touch
• We'll hear more from him about how it went in the feedback section today ***

Swap encryption in DragonFly

• Doing full disk encryption is very important, but something that people sometimes overlook is encrypting their swap
• This can actually be more important than the contents of your disks, especially if an unencrypted password or key hits your swap (as it can be recovered quite easily)
• DragonFlyBSD has added a new experimental option to automatically encrypt your swap partition in fstab
• There was another way to do it previously, but this is a lot easier
• You can achieve similar results in FreeBSD by adding ".eli" to the end of the swap device in fstab, there are a few steps to do it in NetBSD and swap in OpenBSD is encrypted by default
• A one-time key will be created and then destroyed in each case, making recovery of the plaintext nearly impossible ***

Interview - Jed Reynolds - jed@bitratchet.com / @jed_reynolds

Comparing ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

News Roundup

USB thermometer on OpenBSD

• So maybe you've got BSD on your server or router, maybe NetBSD on a toaster, but have you ever used a thermometer with one?
• This blog post introduces the RDing TEMPer Gold USB thermometer, a small device that can tell the room temperature, and how to get it working on OpenBSD
• Wouldn't you know it, OpenBSD has a native "ugold" driver to support it with the sensors framework
• How useful such a device would be is another story though ***

NAS4Free now on ARM

• We talk a lot about hardware for network-attached storage devices on the show, but ARM doesn't come up a lot
• That might be changing soon, as NAS4Free has just released some ARM builds
• These new (somewhat experimental) images are based on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT
• Included in the announcement is a list of fully-supported and partially-supported hardware that they've tested it with
• If anyone has experience with running a NAS on slightly exotic hardware, write in to us ***

pkgsrcCon 2015 CFP and info

• This year's pkgsrcCon will be in Berlin, Germany on July 4th and 5th
• They're looking for talk proposals and ideas for things you'd like to see
• If you or your company uses pkgsrc, or if you're just interested in NetBSD in general, it would be a good event to check out ***

BSDTalk episode 253

• BSDTalk has released another new episode
• In it, he interviews George Neville-Neil about the 2nd edition of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"
• They discuss what's new since the last edition, who the book's target audience is and a lot more
• We're up to 90 episodes now, slowly catching up to Will... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dominik writes in
• Brad writes in
• Corvin writes in
• James writes in ***

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BSD Devroom CFP

• This year's FOSDEM conference (Belgium, Jan 31st - Feb 1st) is having a dedicated BSD devroom
• They've issued a call for papers on anything BSD-related, and we always love more presentations
• If you're in the Belgium area or plan on going, submit a talk about something cool you're doing
• There's also a mailing list and some more information in the original post ***

Bhyve SVM code merge

• The bhyve_svm code has been in the "projects" tree of FreeBSD, but is now ready for -CURRENT
• This changeset will finally allow bhyve to run on AMD CPUs, where it was previously limited to Intel only
• All the supported operating systems and utilities should work on both now
• One thing to note: bhyve doesn't support PCI passthrough on AMD just yet
• There may still be some issues though ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference Tokyo

• The Japanese NetBSD users group held a booth at another recent open source conference
• As always, they were running NetBSD on everything you can imagine
• One of the users reports back to the mailing list on their experience, providing lots of pictures and links
• Here's an interesting screenshot of NetBSD running various other BSDs in Xen ***

More BSD switchers every day

• A decade-long Linux user is considering making the switch, and asks Reddit about the BSD community
• Tired of the pointless bickering he sees in his current community, he asks if the same problems exist over here and what he should expect
• So far, he's found that BSD people seem to act more level-headed about things, and are much more practical, whereas some FSF/GNU/GPL people make open source a religion
• There's also another semi-related thread about another Linux user wanting to switch to BSD because of systemd and GNU people
• There are some extremely well written and thought-out comments in the replies (in both threads), be sure to give them all a read
• Maybe the OPs should've just watched this show ***

Interview - Olivier Cochard-Labbé - olivier@cochard.me / @ocochardlabbe

The BSD Router Project

News Roundup

FreeBSD -CURRENT on a T420

• Thinkpads are quite popular with BSD developers and users
• Most of the hardware seems to be supported across the BSDs (especially wifi)
• This article walks through installing FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Thinkpad T420 with UEFI
• If you've got a Thinkpad, or especially this specific one, have a look at some of the steps involved ***

FreeNAS on a Supermicro 5018A-MHN4

• More and more people are migrating their NAS devices to BSD-based solutions
• In this post, the author goes through setting up FreeNAS on some of his new hardware
• His new rack-mounted FreeNAS machine has a low power Atom with eight cores and 64GB of RAM - quite a lot for its small form factor
• The rest of the post details all of the hardware he chose and goes through the build process (with lots of cool pictures) ***

Hardening procfs and linprocfs

• There was an exploit published recently for SFTP in OpenSSH, but it mostly just affected Linux
• There exists a native procfs in FreeBSD, which was the target point of that exploit, but it's not used very often
• The Linux emulation layer also supports its own linprocfs, which was affected as well
• The HardenedBSD guys weigh in on how to best solve the problem, and now support an additional protection layer from writing to memory with procfs
• If you want to learn more about ASLR and HardenedBSD, be sure to check out our interview with Shawn too ***

pfSense monitoring with bandwidthd

• A lot of people run pfSense on their home network, and it's really useful to monitor the bandwidth usage
• This article will walk you through setting up bandwidthd to do exactly that
• bandwidthd monitors based on the IP address, rather than per-interface
• It can also build some cool HTML graphs, and we love those pfSense graphs
• Have a look at our bandwidth monitoring and testing tutorial for some more ideas ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dave writes in
• Chris writes in
• Zeke writes in
• Bostjan writes in
• Patrick writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• More old bugs
• The Right Font™ (see also) ***

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NetBSD at Hiroshima Open Source Conference

• NetBSD developers are hard at work, putting NetBSD on everything they can find
• At a technology conference in Hiroshima, some developers brought their exotic machines to put on display
• As usual, there are lots of pictures and a nice report from the conference ***

FreeBSD's Linux emulation overhaul

• For a long time, FreeBSD's emulation layer has been based on an ancient Fedora 10 system
• If you've ever needed to install Adobe Flash on BSD, you'll be stuck with all this extra junk
• With some recent work, that's been replaced with a recent CentOS release
• This opens up the door for newer versions of Skype to run on FreeBSD, and maybe even Steam someday ***

pfSense 2.2-BETA

• Big changes are coming in pfSense land, with their upcoming 2.2 release
• We talked to the developer a while back about future plans, and now they're finally out there
• The 2.2 branch will be based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE (instead of 8.3) and include lots of performance fixes
• It also includes some security updates, lots of package changes and updates and much more
• You can check the full list of changes on their wiki ***

NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi

• This article shows how you can install NetBSD on the ever-so-popular Raspberry Pi
• As of right now, you'll need to use a -CURRENT snapshot to do it
• It also shows how to grow the filesystem to fill up an SD card, some pkgsrc basics and how to get some initial things set up
• Can anyone find something that you can't install NetBSD on? ***

Interview - Steve Wills - swills@freebsd.org / @swills

Mentoring new BSD developers

News Roundup

MidnightBSD 0.5 released

• We don't hear a whole lot about MidnightBSD, but they've just released version 0.5
• It's got a round of the latest FreeBSD security patches, driver updates and various small things
• Maybe one of their developers could come on the show sometime and tell us more about the project ***

BSD Router Project 1.52 released

• The newest update for the BSD Router Project is out
• This version is based on a snapshot of 10-STABLE that's very close to 10.1-RELEASE
• It's mostly a bugfix release, but includes some small changes and package updates ***

Configuring a DragonFly BSD desktop

• We've done tutorials on how to set up a FreeBSD or OpenBSD desktop, but maybe you're more interested in DragonFly
• In this post from Justin Sherrill, you'll learn some of the steps to do just that
• He pulled out an old desktop machine, gave it a try and seems to be pleased with the results
• It includes a few Xorg tips, and there are some comments about the possibility of making a GUI DragonFly installer ***

Building a mini-ITX pfSense box

• Another week, another pfSense firewall build post
• This time, the author is installing to a Jetway J7F2, a mini-ITX device with four LAN ports
• He used to be a m0n0wall guy, but wanted to give the more modern pfSense a try
• Lots of great pictures of the hardware, which we always love ***

Feedback/Questions

• Damian writes in
• Jan writes in
• Dale writes in
• Joe writes in
• Bostjan writes in ***