NOTES

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

Headlines

From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency

August 2024 Foundation Update

News Roundup

Emails encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG

Workarounds are often forever (unless you work to make them otherwise)

Remote Desktop using RDP and VNC

Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System

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

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

• Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

NOTES

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

Headlines

Navigating FreeBSD’s New Quarterly and Biennial Release Schedule

https://mccd.space/posts/netbsd-review/

EuroBSDCon 2024 Schedule

News Roundup

From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency

Enable local-to-anchors tables in PF rules

CloudBSD

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

Rick - Feedback about Docs Bugs

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

• Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

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

Headlines

Fundamentals of the FreeBSD Shell

Spammers in the Public Cloud, Protected by SPF; Intensified Password Groping Still Ongoing; Spamware Hawked to Spamtraps

News Roundup

A cautionary tale about locking Linux & FreeBSD user accounts

Overgrowth runs on NetBSD

moreutils

NetBSD, CTWM, and Spleen

How to properly interpret a traceroute or mtr

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

Lets talk a bit about some of the events happening this year, BSDCan in virtual this weekend, emfcamp is this weekend too and in person, MCH is this summer and eurobsdcon is in september. How were the postgres conferences benedict?

• 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

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

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FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud

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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace!

The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.

• Inferno is open source as well *** ## News Roundup ### Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020 We nearly hit our 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000. ***

grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

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Random Programming Challenge

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This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?

OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)

To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).
OpenZFS had a good one too

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

• Brandon - router

• Lawrence - Is BSD for me

• miguel - printing

• 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

Major changes coming in PCBSD 11

• The PCBSD team has announced that version 11.0 will have some more pretty big changes (as they've been known to do lately with NTP daemons and firewalls)
• Switching from PF to IPFW provided some benefits for VIMAGE, but the syntax was just too complicated for regular everyday users
• To solve this, they've ported over Linux's iptables, giving users a much more straightforward configuration
• While ZFS has served them well as the default filesystem for a while, Kris decided that Btrfs would be a better choice going forward
• Since the FreeBSD kernel doesn't support it natively, all filesystem calls will be through FUSE from now on - performance is Good Enough
• People often complain about PCBSD's huge ISO download, so, to save space, the default email client will be switched to mutt, and KDE will be replaced with DWM as the default window manager
• To reconfigure it, or make any appearance changes, users just need to edit a simple C header file and recompile - easy peasy
• As we've mentioned on the show, PCBSD has been promoting safe backup solutions for a long time with its "life preserver" utility, making it simple to manage multiple snapshots too
• To test if people have been listening to this advice, Kris recently activated the backdoor he put in life preserver that deletes all the users' files - hope you had that stuff backed up ***

NetBSD and FreeBSD join forces

• The BSD community has been running into one of the same problems Linux has lately: we just have too many different BSDs to choose from
• What's more, none of them have any specific areas they focus on or anything like that (they're all basically the same)
• That situation is about to improve somewhat, as FreeBSD and NetBSD have just merged codebases... say hello to FretBSD
• Within a week, all mailing lists and webservers for the legacy NetBSD and FreeBSD projects will be terminated - the mailing list for the new combined project will be hosted from the United Nations datacenter on a Microsoft Exchange server
• As UN monitors will be moderating the mailing lists to prevent disagreements and divisive arguments before they begin, this system is expected to be adequate for the load
• With FretBSD, your toaster can now run ZFS, so you'll never need to worry about the bread becoming silently corrupted again ***

Puffy in the cloud

• If you've ever wanted to set up a backup server, especially for family members or someone who's not as technology-savvy, you've probably realized there are a lot of options
• This post explores the option of setting up your own Dropbox-like service with Owncloud and PostgreSQL, running atop the new OpenBSD http daemon
• Doing it this way with your own setup, you can control all the security aspects - disk encryption, firewall rules, who can access what and from where, etc
• He also mentions our pf tutorial being helpful in blocking script kiddies from hammering the box
• Be sure to encourage your less-technical friends to always back up their important data ***

NetBSD at AsiaBSDCon

• Some NetBSD developers have put together a report of what they did at the most recent event in Tokyo
• It includes a wrap-up of the event, as well as a list of presentations that NetBSD developers gave
• Have you ever wanted even more pictures of NetBSD running on lots of devices? There's a never-ending supply, apparently
• At the BSD research booth of AsiaBSDCon, there were a large number of machines on display, and someone has finally uploaded pictures of all of them
• There's also a video of an OMRON LUNA-II running the luna68k port ***

Interview - Kamila Součková - kamila@ksp.sk / @anotherkamila

BSD conferences, Google Summer of Code, various topics

News Roundup

FreeBSD foundation March update

• The FreeBSD foundation has published their March update for fundraising and sponsored projects
• In the document, you'll find information about upcoming ARMv8 enhancements, some event recaps and a Google Summer of Code status update
• They also mention our interview with the foundation president - be sure to check it out if you haven't ***

Inside OpenBSD's new httpd

• BSD news continues to dominate mainstream tech news sites… well not really, but they talk about it once in a while
• The SD Times is featuring an article about OpenBSD's in-house HTTP server, after seeing Reyk's AsiaBSDCon presentation about it (which he's giving at BSDCan this year, too)
• In this article, they talk about the rapid transition of webservers in the base system - apache being replaced with nginx, only to be replaced with httpd shortly thereafter
• Since the new daemon has had almost a full release cycle to grow, new features and fixes have been pouring in
• The post also highlights some of the security features: everything runs in a chroot with privsep by default, and it also leverages strong TLS 1.2 defaults (including Perfect Forward Secrecy) ***

Using poudriere without OpenSSL

• Last week we talked about using LibreSSL in FreeBSD for all your ports
• One of the problems that was mentioned is that some ports are configured improperly, and end up linking against the OpenSSL in the base system even when you tell them not to
• This blog post shows how to completely strip OpenSSL out of the poudriere build jails, something that's a lot more difficult than you'd think
• If you're a port maintainer, pay close attention to this post, and get your ports fixed to adhere to the make.conf options properly ***

HAMMER and GPT in OpenBSD

• Someone, presumably a Google Summer of Code student, wrote in to the lists about his HAMMER FS porting proposal
• He outlined the entire process and estimated timetable, including what would be supported and which aspects were beyond the scope of his work (like the clustering stuff)
• There's no word yet on if it will be accepted, but it's an interesting idea to explore, especially when you consider that HAMMER really only has one developer
• In more disk-related news, Ken Westerback has been committing quite a lot of GPT-related fixes recently
• Full GPT support will most likely be finished before 5.8, but anything involving HAMMER FS is still anyone's guess ***

Feedback/Questions

• Morgan writes in
• Dustin writes in
• Stan writes in
• Mica writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Developers in freefall
• Xorg thieves pt. 1
• Xorg thieves pt. 2 ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10 as a firewall

• Back in 2012, the author of this site wrote an article stating you should avoid FreeBSD 9 for a firewall and use OpenBSD instead
• Now, with the release of 10.0, he's apparently changed his mind and switched back over
• It mentions the SMP version of pf, general performance advantages and more modern features
• The author is a regular listener of BSD Now, hi Joe! ***

Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

• Really long blog post, based on a BSDCan presentation, about fighting spam with OpenBSD
• Peter Hansteen, author of the book of PF, goes through how he uses OpenBSD's spamd and other security features to combat spam and malware
• He goes through his experiences with content filtering and disappointment with a certain proprietary vendor
• Not totally BSD-specific, lots of people can enjoy the article - lots of virus history as well ***

FreeBSD ASLR patches submitted

• So far, FreeBSD hasn't had Address Space Layout Randomization
• ASLR is a nice security feature, see wikipedia for more information
• With a giant patch from Shawn Webb, it might be integrated into a future version (after a vicious review from the security team of course)
• We might have Shawn on the show to talk about it, but he's also giving a presentation at BSDCan about his work with ASLR ***

Old-style pkg_ tools retired

• At last the old pkg_add tools are being retired in FreeBSD
• pkgng is a huge improvement, and now portmgr@ thinks it's time to cut the cord on the legacy toolset
• Ports aren't going away, and probably never will, but for binary package fans and new users that are used to things like apt, pkgng is the way to go
• All pkg_ tools will be considered unsupported on September 1, 2014 - even on older branches ***

Interview - Luke Marsden - luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

BSD at HybridCluster

Tutorial

Filesharing with chrooted SFTP

News Roundup

FreeBSD on OpenStack

• OpenStack is a cloud computing project
• It consists of "a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API."
• Until now, there wasn't a good way to run a full BSD instance on OpenStack
• With a project in the vein of Colin Percival's AWS startup scripts, now that's no longer the case! ***

FOSDEM BSD videos

• This year's FOSDEM had seven BSD presentations
• The videos are slowly being uploaded for your viewing pleasure
• Not all of the BSD ones are up yet, but by the time you're watching this they might be!
• Check this directory for most of 'em
• The BSD dev room was full, lots of interest in what's going on from the other communities ***

The FreeBSD challenge finally returns!

• Due to prodding from a certain guy of a certain podcast, the "FreeBSD Challenge" series has finally resumed
• Our friend from the Linux foundation picks up with day 11 and day 12 on his switching from Linux journey
• This time he outlines the upgrade process of going from 9 to 10, using freebsd-update
• There's also some notes about different options for upgrading ports and some extra tips ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• After the big 10.0 release, the PCBSD crew is focusing on bug fixes for a while
• During their "fine tuning phase" users are encouraged to submit any and all bugs via the trac system
• Warden got some fixes and the package manager got some updates as well
• Huge size reduction in PBI format ***

Feedback/Questions

• Derrick writes in
• Sean writes in
• Patrick writes in
• Peter writes in
• Sean writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE is out

• The long awaited, giant release of FreeBSD is now official and ready to be downloaded
• One of the biggest releases in FreeBSD history, with tons of new updates
• Some features include: LDNS/Unbound replacing BIND, Clang by default (no GCC anymore), native Raspberry Pi support and other ARM improvements, bhyve, hyper-v support, AMD KMS, VirtIO, Xen PVHVM in GENERIC, lots of driver updates, ZFS on root in the installer, SMP patches to pf that drastically improve performance, Netmap support, pkgng by default, wireless stack improvements, a new iSCSI stack, FUSE in the base system... the list goes on and on
• Start up your freebsd-update or do a source-based upgrade ***

OpenSSH 6.5 CFT

• Our buddy Damien Miller announced a Call For Testing for OpenSSH 6.5
• Huge, huge release, focused on new features rather than bugfixes (but it includes those too)
• New ciphers, new key formats, new config options, see the mailing list for all the details
• Should be in OpenBSD 5.5 in May, look forward to it - but also help test on other platforms! ***

DIY NAS story, FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA

• Another new blog post about FreeNAS!
• Instead of updating the older tutorials, the author started fresh and wrote a new one for 2014
• "I did briefly consider suggesting nas4free for the EconoNAS blog, since it’s essentially a fork off the FreeNAS tree but may run better on slower hardware, but ultimately I couldn’t recommend anything other than FreeNAS"
• Really long article with lots of nice details about his setup, why you might want a NAS, etc.
• Speaking of FreeNAS, they released 9.2.1-BETA with lots of bugfixes ***

OpenBSD needed funding for electricity.. and they got it

• Briefly mentioned at the end of last week's show, but has blown up over the internet since
• OpenBSD in the headlines of major tech news sites: slashdot, zdnet, the register, hacker news, reddit, twitter.. thousands of comments
• They needed about $20,000 to cover electric costs for the server rack in Theo's basement
• Lots of positive reaction from the community helping out so far, and it appears they have reached their goal and got $100,000 in donations
• From Bob Beck: "we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately $100,000 in donations to the foundation"
• This is a shining example of the BSD community coming together, and even the Linux people realizing how critical BSD is to the world at large ***

Interview - Colin Percival - cperciva@freebsd.org / @cperciva

FreeBSD on Amazon EC2, backups with Tarsnap, 10.0-RELEASE, various topics

Tutorial

Bandwidth monitoring and testing

News Roundup

pfSense talk at Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyoukai

• Isaac Levy will be presenting "pfSense Practical Experiences: from home routers, to High-Availability Datacenter Deployments"
• He's also going to be looking for help to translate the pfSense documentation into Japanese
• The event is on February 17, 2014 if you're in the Tokyo area ***

m0n0wall 1.8.1 released

• For those who don't know, m0n0wall is an older BSD-based firewall OS that's mostly focused on embedded applications
• pfSense was forked from it in 2004, and has a lot more active development now
• They switched to FreeBSD 8.4 for this new version
• Full list of updates in the changelog
• This version requires at least 128MB RAM and a disk/CF size of 32MB or more, oh no! ***

Ansible and PF, plus NTP

• Another blog post from our buddy Michael Lucas
• There've been some NTP amplification attacks recently in the news
• The post describes how he configured ntpd on a lot of servers without a lot of work
• He leverages pf and ansible for the configuration
• OpenNTPD is, not surprisingly, unaffected - use it ***

ruBSD videos online

• Just a quick followup from a few weeks ago
• Theo and Henning's talks from ruBSD are now available for download
• There's also a nice interview with Theo ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 images are available
• Wine PBI is now available for 10
• 9.2 systems will now be able to upgrade to version 10 and keep their PBI library ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sha'ul writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Mike writes in
• Charlie writes in (and gets a reply)
• Kevin writes in ***