NOTES

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

Headlines

Isolating Containers with ZFS and Linux Namespaces

DragonFly BSD 6.4.2

FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart

News Roundup

For Upcoming PF Tutorials, We Welcome Your Questions

Using ~/.ssh/authorized keys to decide what the incoming connection can do

PDF bruteforce tool to recover locked files

How and why typical (SaaS) pricing is too high for university departments

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

• Nils - CFP

• 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

Applying the ARC Algorithm to the ARC

Advancing Cloud Native Containers on FreeBSD: Podman Testing Highlights

News Roundup

Running Web Browsers in FreeBSD Jail

Fixing pf not allowing IPv6 traffic on FreeBSD

Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web

Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository

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

• Sam - EDR Support

• 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

OpenBSD 7.6 Released

Open Source FreeBSD NAS: Maintenance Best Practices

News Roundup

Self-hosting Bitwarden / VaultWarden on FreeBSD

I most definitely should (self-host)!

My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

Make Your Own CDN With OpenBSD Base and Just 2 Packages

Beastie Bits

- BSD History archive

• ***

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

• Mischa - feedback

• lars - feedback

• Message from JT... the problem is spam, sometimes real messages get lost in flood of spam, if we don't cover your email within a few weeks, please email back in.

And now... for some laughs, I shall share with you all, some of the delightful spam we have gotten for your entertainment.

• Kim
• Alexander
• Lee

• 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

Headlines

FreeBSD is an amazing operating System

Update 2020-01-21: Since I wrote this article it got posted on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobster, and a few people have emailed me with comments. I have updated the article with comments where I have found it needed. As an important side note I would like to point out that I am not a FreeBSD developer, there may be things going on in the FreeBSD world that I know absolutely nothing about. I am also not glued to the FreeBSD developer mailing lists. I am not a FreeBSD "fanboy". I have been using GNU/Linux a ton more for the past two decades than FreeBSD, mainly due to hardware incompatibility (lacking or buggy drivers), and I love both Debian GNU/Linux and Arch Linux just as much as FreeBSD. However, I am concerned about the development of GNU/Linux as of late. Also this article is not about me trying to make anyone switch from something else to FreeBSD. It's about why I like FreeBSD and that I recommend you try it out if you're into messing with operating systems.

I think the year was late 1999 or mid 2000 when I one day was browsing computer books at my favorite bookshop and I discovered the book The Complete FreeBSD third edition from 1999 by Greg Lehey. With the book came 4 CD Roms with FreeBSD 3.3.

I had already familiarized myself with GNU/Linux in 1998, and I was in the process of migrating every server and desktop operating system away from Microsoft Windows, both at home and at my company, to GNU/Linux, initially Red Hat Linux and then later Debian GNU/Linux, which eventually became my favorite GNU/Linux distribution for many years.

When I first saw The Complete FreeBSD book by Greg Lehey I remember noticing the text on the front page that said, "The Free Version of Berkeley UNIX" and "Rock Solid Stability", and I was immediately intrigued! What was that all about? A free UNIX operating system! And rock solid stability? That sounded amazing.

Hyperbola Dev Interview

In late December 2019, Hyperbola announced that they would be making major changes to their project. They have decided to drop the Linux kernel in favor of forking the OpenBSD kernel. This announcement only came months after Project Trident announced that they were going in the opposite direction (from BSD to Linux).

Hyperbola also plans to replace all software that is not GPL v3 compliant with new versions that are.

To get more insight into the future of their new project, I interviewed Andre, co-founder of Hyperbola.

News Roundup

Improving the ptrace(2) API and preparing for LLVM-10.0

This month I have improved the NetBSD ptrace(2) API, removing one legacy interface with a few flaws and replacing it with two new calls with new features, and removing technical debt.

As LLVM 10.0 is branching now soon (Jan 15th 2020), I worked on proper support of the LLVM features for NetBSD 9.0 (today RC1) and NetBSD HEAD (future 10.0).

The first FreeBSD conference in Australia

FreeBSD has existed as an operating system, project, and foundation for more than twenty years, and its earlier incantations have exited for far longer. The old guard have been developing code, porting software, and writing documentation for longer than I’ve existed. I’ve been using it for more than a decade for personal projects, and professionally for half that time.

While there are many prominent Australian FreeBSD contributors, sysadmins, and users, we’ve always had to venture overseas for conferences. We’re always told Australians are among the most ardent travellers, but I always wondered if we could do a domestic event as well.

And on Tuesday, we did! Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand.

A practical guide to containers on FreeNAS for a depraved psychopath

This is a simple write-up to setup Docker on FreeNAS 11 or FreeBSD 11.

But muh jails?

You know that jails are dope and you know that jails are dope, yet no one else knows it. So here we are stuck with docker. Two years ago I would be the last person to recommend using docker, but a whole lot of things has changes past years…

So jails are dead then?

No, jails are still dope, but jails lack tools to manage them. Yes, there are a few tools, but they meant for hard-core FreeBSD users who used to suffering. Docker allows you to run applications without deep knowledge of application you’re running. It will also allow you to run applications that are not ported to FreeBSD.

Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD

As an operating system GNU/Linux has become a real mess because of the fragmented nature of the project, the bloatware in the kernel, and because of the jerking around by commercial interests.

• Response Should you migrate from Linux to BSD? It depends.

Beastie Bits

• Using the OpenBSD ports tree with dedicated users
• broot on FreeBSD
• A Trip down Memory Lane
• Running syslog-ng in BastilleBSD
• NASA : Using Software Packages in pkgsrc

Feedback/Questions

• All of our questions this week were pretty technical in nature so I'm going to save those for the next episode so Allan can weigh in on them, since if we cover them now we're basically going to be deferring to Allan anyway.

• 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

FreeBSD on Olimex RT5350F-OLinuXino

• If you haven't heard of the RT5350F-OLinuXino-EVB, you're not alone (actually, we probably couldn't even remember the name if we did know about it)
• It's a small board with a MIPS CPU, two ethernet ports, wireless support and... 32MB of RAM
• This blog series documents installing FreeBSD on the device, but it is quite a DIY setup at the moment
• In part two of the series, he talks about the GPIO and how you can configure it
• Part three is still in the works, so check the site later on for further progress and info ***

The modern OpenBSD home router

• In a new series of blog posts, one guy takes you through the process of building an OpenBSD-based gateway for his home network
• "It’s no secret that most consumer routers ship with software that’s flaky at best, and prohibitively insecure at worst"
• Armed with a 600MHz Pentium III CPU, he shows the process of setting up basic NAT, firewalling and even getting hostap mode working for wireless
• This guide also covers PPP and IPv6, in case you have those requirements
• In a similar but unrelated series, another user does a similar thing - his post also includes details on reusing your consumer router as a wireless bridge
• He also has a separate post for setting up an IPSEC VPN on the router ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Kansai

• The Japanese NetBSD users group has teamed up with the Kansai BSD users group and Nagoya BSD users group to invade another conference
• They had NetBSD running on all the usual (unusual?) devices, but some of the other BSDs also got a chance to shine at the event
• Last time they mostly had ARM devices, but this time the centerpiece was an OMRON LUNA88k
• They had at least one FreeBSD and OpenBSD device, and at least one NetBSD device even had Adobe Flash running on it
• And what conference would be complete without an LED-powered towel ***

OpenSSH 7.0 released

• The OpenSSH team has just finished up the 7.0 release, and the focus this time is deprecating legacy code
• SSHv1 support is disabled, 1024 bit diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 KEX is disabled and the v00 cert format authentication is disabled
• The syntax for permitting root logins has been changed, and is now called "prohibit-password" instead of "without-password" (this makes it so root can login, but only with keys) - all interactive authentication methods for root are also disabled by default now
• If you're using an older configuration file, the "without-password" option still works, so no change is required
• You can now control which public key types are available for authentication, as well as control which public key types are offered for host authentications
• Various bug fixes and documentation improvements are also included
• Aside from the keyboard-interactive and PAM-related bugs, this release includes one minor security fix: TTY permissions were too open, so users could write messages to other logged in users
• In the next release, even more deprecation is planned: RSA keys will be refused if they're under 1024 bits, CBC-based ciphers will be disabled and the MD5 HMAC will also be disabled ***

Interview - Peter Toth - peter.toth198@gmail.com / @pannonp

Containment with iocage

News Roundup

More c2k15 reports

• A few more hackathon reports from c2k15 in Calgary are still slowly trickling in
• Alexander Bluhm's up first, and he continued improving OpenBSD's regression test suite (this ensures that no changes accidentally break existing things)
• He also worked on syslogd, completing the TCP input code - the syslogd in 5.8 will have TLS support for secure remote logging
• Renato Westphal sent in a report of his very first hackathon
• He finished up the VPLS implementation and worked on EIGRP (which is explained in the report) - the end result is that OpenBSD will be more easily deployable in a Cisco-heavy network
• Philip Guenther also wrote in, getting some very technical and low-level stuff done at the hackathon
• His report opens with "First came a diff to move the grabbing of the kernel lock for soft-interrupts from the ASM stubs to the C routine so that mere mortals can actually push it around further to reduce locking." - not exactly beginner stuff
• There were also some C-state, suspend/resume and general ACPI improvements committed, and he gives a long list of random other bits he worked on as well ***

FreeBSD jails, the hard way

• As you learned from our interview this week, there's quite a selection of tools available to manage your jails
• This article takes the opposite approach, using only the tools in the base system: ZFS, nullfs and jail.conf
• Unlike with iocage, ZFS isn't actually a requirement for this method
• If you are using it, though, you can make use of snapshots for making template jails ***

OpenSSH hardware tokens

• We've talked about a number of ways to do two-factor authentication with SSH, but what if you want it on both the client and server?
• This blog post will show you how to use a hardware token as a second authentication factor, for the "something you know, something you have" security model
• It takes you through from start to finish: formatting the token, generating keys, getting it integrated with sshd
• Most of this will apply to any OS that can run ssh, and the token used in the example can be found online for pretty cheap too ***

LibreSSL 2.2.2 released

• The LibreSSL team has released version 2.2.2, which signals the end of the 5.8 development cycle and includes many fixes
• At the c2k15 hackathon, developers uncovered dozens of problems in the OpenSSL codebase with the Coverity code scanner, and this release incorporates all those: dead code, memory leaks, logic errors (which, by the way, you really don't want in a crypto tool...) and much more
• SSLv3 support was removed from the "openssl" command, and only a few other SSLv3 bits remain - once workarounds are found for ports that specifically depend on it, it'll be removed completely
• Various other small improvements were made: DH params are now 2048 bits by default, more old workarounds removed, cmake support added, etc
• It'll be in 5.8 (due out earlier than usual) and it's in the FreeBSD ports tree as well ***

Feedback/Questions

• James writes in
• Stuart writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan and pkgsrcCon videos

• Even more BSDCan 2015 videos are slowly but surely making their way to the internet
• Nigel Williams, Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
• Stephen Bourne, Early days of Unix and design of sh
• John Criswell, Protecting FreeBSD with Secure Virtual Architecture
• Shany Michaely, Expanding RDMA capability over Ethernet in FreeBSD
• John-Mark Gurney, Adding AES-ICM and AES-GCM to OpenCrypto
• Sevan Janiyan, Adventures in building open source software
• And finally, the BSDCan 2015 closing
• Some videos from this year's pkgsrcCon are also starting to appear online
• Sevan Janiyan, A year of pkgsrc 2014 - 2015
• Pierre Pronchery, pkgsrc meets pkg-ng
• Jonathan Perkin, pkgsrc at Joyent
• Jörg Sonnenberger, pkg_install script framework
• Benny Siegert, New Features in BulkTracker
• This is the first time we've ever seen recordings from the conference - hopefully they continue this trend ***

OPNsense 15.7 released

• The OPNsense team has released version 15.7, almost exactly six months after their initial debut
• In addition to pulling in the latest security fixes from upstream FreeBSD, 15.7 also includes new integration of an intrusion detection system (and new GUI for it) as well as new blacklisting options for the proxy server
• Taking a note from upstream PF's playbook, ALTQ traffic shaping support has finally been retired as of this release (it was deprecated from OpenBSD a few years ago, and the code was completely removed just over a year ago)
• The LibreSSL flavor has been promoted to production-ready, and users can easily migrate over from OpenSSL via the GUI - switching between the two is simple; no commitment needed
• Various third party ports have also been bumped up to their latest versions to keep things fresh, and there's the usual round of bug fixes included
• Shortly afterwards, 15.7.1 was released with a few more small fixes ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Okinawa

• If you liked last week's episode then you'll probably know what to expect with this one
• The NetBSD users group of Japan hit another open source conference, this time in Okinawa
• This time, they had a few interesting NetBSD machines on display that we didn't get to see in the interview last week
• We'd love to see something like this in North America or Europe too - anyone up for installing BSD on some interesting devices and showing them off at a Linux con? ***

OpenBSD BGP and VRFs

• "VRFs, or in OpenBSD rdomains, are a simple, yet powerful (and sometimes confusing) topic"
• This article aims to explain both BGP and rdomains, using network diagrams, for some network isolation goodness
• With multiple rdomains, it's also possible to have two upstream internet connections, but lock different groups of your internal network to just one of them
• The idea of a "guest network" can greatly benefit from this separation as well, even allowing for the same IP ranges to be used without issues
• Combining rdomains with the BGP protocol allows for some very selective and precise blocking/passing of traffic between networks, which is also covered in detail here
• The BSDCan talk on rdomains expands on the subject a bit more if you haven't seen it, as well as a few related posts ***

Interview - Lee Sharp - lee@smallwall.org

SmallWall, a continuation of m0n0wall

News Roundup

Solaris adopts more BSD goodies

• We mentioned a while back that Oracle developers have begun porting a current version of OpenBSD's PF firewall to their next version, even contributing back patches for SMP and other bug fixes
• They recently published an article about PF, talking about what's different about it on their platform compared to others - not especially useful for BSD users, but interesting to read if you like firewalls
• Darren Moffat, who was part of originally getting an SSH implementation into Solaris, has a second blog post up about their "SunSSH" fork
• Going forward, their next version is going to offer a completely vanilla OpenSSH option as well, with the plan being to phase out SunSSH after that
• The article talks a bit about the history of getting SSH into the OS, forking the code and also lists some of the differences between the two
• In a third blog post, they talk about a new system call they're borrowing from OpenBSD, getentropy(2), as well as the addition of arc4random to their libc
• With an up-to-date and SMP-capable PF, ZFS with native encryption, jail-like Zones, unaltered OpenSSH and secure entropy calls… is Solaris becoming better than us?
• Look forward to the upcoming "Solaris Now" podcast _{(not really)} ***

EuroBSDCon 2015 talks and tutorials

• This year's EuroBSDCon is set to be held in Sweden at the beginning of October, and the preliminary list of accepted presentations has been published
• The list looks pretty well-balanced between the different BSDs, something Paul would be happy to see if he was still with us
• It even includes an interesting DragonFly talk and a couple talks from NetBSD developers, in addition to plenty of FreeBSD and OpenBSD of course
• There are also a few tutorials planned for the event, some you've probably seen already and some you haven't
• Registration for the event will be opening very soon (likely this week or next) ***

Using ZFS replication to improve offsite backups

• If you take backups seriously, you're probably using ZFS and probably keeping an offsite copy of the data
• This article covers doing just that, but with a focus on making use of the replication capability
• It'll walk you through taking a snapshot of your pool and then replicating it to another remote system, using "zfs send" and SSH - this has the benefit of only transferring the files that have changed since the last time you did it
• Steps are also taken to allow a regular user to take and manage snapshots, so you don't need to be root for the SSH transfer
• Data integrity is a long process - filesystem-level checksums, resistance to hardware failure, ECC memory, multiple copies in different locations... they all play a role in keeping your files secure; don't skip out on any of them
• One thing the author didn't mention in his post: having an offline copy of the data, ideally sealed in a safe place, is also important ***

Block encryption in OpenBSD

• We've covered ways to do fully-encrypted installations of OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) before, but that requires dedicating a whole drive or partition to the sensitive data
• This blog post takes you through the process of creating encrypted containers in OpenBSD, à la TrueCrypt - that is, a file-backed virtual device with an encrypted filesystem
• It goes through creating a file that looks like random data, pointing vnconfig at it, setting up the crypto and finally using it as a fake storage device
• The encrypted container method offers the advantage of being a bit more portable across installations than other ways ***

Docker hits FreeBSD ports

• The inevitable has happened, and an early FreeBSD port of docker is finally here
• Some details and directions are available to read if you'd like to give it a try, as well as a list of which features work and which don't
• There was also some Hacker News discussion on the topic ***

Microsoft donates to OpenSSH

• We've talked about big businesses using BSD and contributing back before, even mentioning a few other large public donations - now it's Microsoft's turn
• With their recent decision to integrate OpenSSH into an upcoming Windows release, Microsoft has donated a large sum of money to the OpenBSD foundation, making them a gold-level sponsor
• They've also posted some contract work offers on the OpenSSH mailing list, and say that their changes will be upstreamed if appropriate - we're always glad to see this ***

Feedback/Questions

• Joe writes in
• Mike writes in
• Randy writes in
• Tony writes in
• Kevin writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Interview - Sepherosa Ziehau - sephe@dragonflybsd.org

Features of DragonFlyBSD's network stack

Discussion

Comparing containment methods and privilege separation

• chroot, jails, systrace, capsicum, filesystem permissions, separating users ***

Feedback/Questions

• Brad writes in
• Anonymous writes in
• Benjamin writes in
• Jeroen writes in ***