NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

High Availability Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD, CARP, pfsync, and ifstated

I have been running OpenBSD on a Soekris net5501 for my router/firewall since early 2012. Because I run a multitude of services on this system (more on that later), the meager 500Mhz AMD Geode + 512MB SDRAM was starting to get a little sluggish while trying to do anything via the terminal. Despite the perceived performance hit during interactive SSH sessions, it still supported a full 100Mbit connection with NAT, so I wasn’t overly eager to change anything. Luckily though, my ISP increased the bandwidth available on my plan tier to 150Mbit+. Unfortunately, the Soekris only contained 4xVIA Rhine Fast Ethernet. So now, I was using a slow system and wasting money by not being able to fully utilize my connection.

Building the Development Version of Emacs on NetBSD

I hadn’t really planned on installing a NetBSD VM (after doing all the other two BSDs), but then a NetBSD-related Emacs bug report arrived.

News Roundup

rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc

Let’s open with the controversy: the scripts that live under /etc/rc.d/ in FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are in the wrong place. They all should live in /libexec/rc.d/ because they are code, not configuration.
This misplacement is something that has bugged me for ages but I never had the energy to open this can of worms back when I was very involved in NetBSD. I suspect it would have been a draining discussion and a very difficult thing to change.

FreeBSD 11.3 EOL

As of September 30, 2020, FreeBSD 11.3 will reach end-of-life and will no longer
be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 11.3 are strongly
encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

OPNsense 20.7.1 Released

Overall, the jump to HardenedBSD 12.1 is looking promising from our end. From the reported issues we still have more logging quirks to investigate and especially Netmap support (used in IPS and Sensei) is lacking in some areas that were previously working. Patches are being worked on already so we shall get there soon enough. Stay tuned.

MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out

MidnightBSD 1.2.7 is available via the FTP/HTTP and mirrors as well as github.

It includes several bug fixes and security updates over the last ISO release and is recommended for new installations.

Users who don't want to updatee the whole OS, should consider at least updating libmport as there are many package management fixes

Beastie Bits

• Tarsnap podcast
• NetBSD Tips and Tricks
• FreeBSD mini-git Primer
• GhostBSD Financial Reports ***

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

• Daniel - Documentation Tooling
• Fongaboo - Where did the ZFS tutorial Go?
• Johnny - Browser Cold Wars ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

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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 ***