BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Bypassing”

46: Network Iodometry

JT Pennington — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0400

We're back, and this week we'll be showing you how to tunnel out of a restrictive network using only DNS queries. We also sat down with Bryan Drewery, from the FreeBSD portmgr team, to talk all about their building cluster and some recent changes. All the latest news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this year
Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
Registering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everything
You can register online here and check hotels in the area
The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants ***

OpenBSD SMP PF update

A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be useless
He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone through
There's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us ***

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
The full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance release
Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much more
If you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome change
With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted ***

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normally
It's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page ***

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup ***

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver
"Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."
He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system ***

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!
Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
You can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application library
Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easy
New Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as well
PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users ***

Feedback/Questions

43: Package Design

JT Pennington — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 08:00:00 -0400

It's a big show this week! We'll be interviewing Marc Espie about OpenBSD's package system and build cluster. Also, we've been asked many times "how do I keep my BSD box up to date?" Well, today's tutorial should finally answer that. Answers to all your emails and this week's headlines, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and schedule

The talks and schedules for EuroBSDCon 2014 are finally revealed
The opening keynote is called "FreeBSD, looking forward to another 10 years" by jkh
Lots of talks spanning FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PCBSD, and we finally have a few about NetBSD and DragonflyBSD too! Variety is great
It looks like Theo even has a talk, but the title isn't on the page... how mysterious
There are also days dedicated to some really interesting tutorials
Register now, the conference is on September 25-28th in Bulgaria
If you see Allan and Kris walking towards you and you haven't given us an interview yet... well you know what's going to happen
Why aren't the videos up from last year yet? Will this year also not have any? ***

FreeNAS vs NAS4Free

More mainstream news covering BSD, this time with an article about different NAS solutions
In a possibly excessive eight-page article, Ars Technica discusses the pros and cons of both FreeNAS and NAS4Free
Both are based on FreeBSD and ZFS of course, but there are more differences than you might expect
Discusses the different development models, release cycles, features, interfaces and ease-of-use factor of each project
"One is pleasantly functional; the other continues devolving during a journey of pain" - uh oh, who's the loser? ***

Quality software costs money, heartbleed was free

PHK writes an article for ACM Queue about open source software projects' funding efforts
A lot of people don't realize just how widespread open source software is - TVs, printers, gaming consoles, etc
The article discusses ways to convince your workplace to fund open source efforts, then goes into a little bit about FreeBSD and Varnish's funding
The latest heartbleed vulnerability should teach everyone that open source projects are critical to the internet, and need people actively maintaining them
On that subject, "Earlier this year the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug laid waste to Internet security, and there are still hundreds of thousands of embedded devices of all kinds—probably your television among them—that have not been and will not ever be software-upgraded to fix it. The best way to prevent that from happening again is to avoid having bugs of that kind go undiscovered for several years, and the only way to avoid that is to have competent people paying attention to the software"
Consider donating to your favorite BSD foundation (or buying cool shirts and CDs!) and keeping the ecosystem alive ***

Geoblock evasion with pf and OpenBSD rdomains

Geoblocking is a way for websites to block visitors based on the location of their IP
This is a blog post about how to get around it, using pf and rdomains
It has the advantage of not requiring any browser plugins or DNS settings on the users' computers, you just need to be running OpenBSD on your router (hmm, if only a website had a tutorial about that...)
In this post, the author wanted to get an American IP address, since the service he was using (Netflix) is blocked in Australia
It's got all the details you need to set up a VPN-like system and bypass those pesky geographic filters ***

Interview - Marc Espie - espie@openbsd.org / @espie_openbsd

OpenBSD's package system, building cluster, various topics

Tutorial

Keeping your BSD up to date

News Roundup

BoringSSL and LibReSSL

Yet another OpenSSL fork pops up, this time from Google, called BoringSSL
Adam Langley has a blog post about it, why they did it and how they're going to maintain it
You can easily browse the source code
Theo de Raadt also weighs in with how this effort relates to LibReSSL
More eyes on the code is good, and patches will be shared between the two projects ***

More BSD Tor nodes wanted

Friend of the show bcallah posts some news to the Tor-BSD mailing list about monoculture in the Tor network being both bad and dangerous
Originally discussed on the Tor-Relays list, it was made apparent that having such a large amount of Linux nodes weakens the security of the whole network
If one vulnerability is found, a huge portion of the network would be useless - we need more variety in the network stacks, crypto, etc.
The EFF is also holding a Tor challenge for people to start up new relays and keep them online for over a year
Check out our Tor tutorial and help out the network, and promote BSD at the same time! ***

FreeBSD 10 OpenStack images

OpenStack, to quote Wikipedia, is "a free and open-source software cloud computing platform. It is primarily deployed as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution."
The article goes into detail about creating a FreeBSD instant, installing and converting it for use with "bsd-cloudinit"
The author of the article is a regular listener and emailer of the show, hey! ***

BSDday 2014 call for papers

BSD Day, a conference not so well-known, is going to be held August 9th in Argentina
It was created in 2008 and is the only BSD conference around that area
The "call for papers" was issued, so if you're around Argentina and use BSD, consider submitting a talk
Sysadmins, developers and regular users are, of course, all welcome to come to the event ***