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

Headlines

Terrapin Attack

• OpenSSH 9.6 is out
• OpenBSD Patches
• FreeBSD Patches
• If anyone is aware of NetBSD Patches, please send them into the show so I can update the show notes

SSH Hardening with ssh-audit

News Roundup

MidnightBSD 3.1.2

syscall(2) removed from -current

2024 FreeBSD Community Survey is Here

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

• (Markus - how to verify FreeBSD deliverables](https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/539/feedback/Markus%20-%20how%20to%20verify%20FreeBSD%20deliverables.md)
• (neb - tui](https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/539/feedback/neb%20-%20tui.md)

• 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

OpenBSD Full Disk Encryption with CoreBoot and Tianocore Payload

It has been a while since I have posted here so I wanted to share something that was surprisingly difficult for me to figure out. I have a Thinkpad T440p that I have flashed with Coreboot 4.11 with some special patches that allow the newer machine to work. When I got the laptop, the default BIOS was UEFI and I installed two operating systems.

Windows 10 with bitlocker full disk encryption on the “normal” drive (I replaced the spinning 2.5″ disk with an SSD)

Ubuntu 19.10 on the m.2 SATA drive that I installed using LUKS full disk encryption

I purchased one of those carriers for the optical bay that allows you to install a third SSD and so I did that with the intent of putting OpenBSD on it. Since my other two operating systems were running full disk encryption, I wanted to do the same on OpenBSD.

• See article for rest of story

FreeBSD 12.0 EOL

Dear FreeBSD community,

As of February 29, 2020, FreeBSD 12.0 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 12.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

• 12.1 Active release
• 12.2 Release Schedule

News Roundup

Some effects of the ZFS DVA format on data layout and growing ZFS pools

One piece of ZFS terminology is DVA and DVAs, which is short for Data Virtual Address. For ZFS, a DVA is the equivalent of a block number in other filesystems; it tells ZFS where to find whatever data we're talking about. The short summary of what fields DVAs have and what they mean is that DVAs tell us how to find blocks by giving us their vdev (by number) and their byte offset into that particular vdev (and then their size). A typical DVA might say that you find what it's talking about on vdev 0 at byte offset 0x53a40ed000. There are some consequences of this that I hadn't really thought about until the other day.

Right away we can see why ZFS has a problem removing a vdev; the vdev's number is burned into every DVA that refers to data on it. If there's no vdev 0 in the pool, ZFS has no idea where to even start looking for data because all addressing is relative to the vdev. ZFS pool shrinking gets around this by adding a translation layer that says where to find the portions of vdev 0 that you care about after it's been removed.

Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates.

• Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.

Full name of the FreeBSD Root Account

NetBSD now has a users(7) and groups(7) manual. Looking into what entries existed in the passwd and group files I wondered about root’s full name who we now know as Charlie Root in the BSDs....

OpenBSD Go Situation

Over in the fediverse, Pete Zaitcev had a reaction to my entry on OpenBSD versus Prometheus for us:

I don't think the situation is usually that bad. Our situation with Prometheus is basically a worst case scenario for Go on OpenBSD, and most people will have much better results, especially if you stick to supported OpenBSD versions.

If you stick to supported OpenBSD versions, upgrading your machines as older OpenBSD releases fall out of support (as the OpenBSD people want you to do), you should not have any problems with your own Go programs. The latest Go release will support the currently supported OpenBSD versions (as long as OpenBSD remains a supported platform for Go), and the Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee means that you can always rebuild your current Go programs with newer versions of Go. You might have problems with compiled binaries that you don't want to rebuild, but my understanding is that this is the case for OpenBSD in general; it doesn't guarantee a stable ABI even for C programs (cf). If you use OpenBSD, you have to be prepared to rebuild your code after OpenBSD upgrades regardless of what language it's written in.

Beastie Bits

• Test your TOR
• OPNsense 20.1.1 released
• pkg for FreeBSD 1.13

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in about Wireguard
• Charlie has a followup to wpa_supplicant as lower class citizen
• Lars writes about LibreSSL as a positive example

• 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

Secure communications with OpenBSD and OpenVPN

• Starting off today's theme of encryption...
• A new blog series about combining OpenBSD and OpenVPN to secure your internet traffic
• Part 1 covers installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption (which we'll be doing later on in the show)
• Part 2 covers the initial setup of OpenVPN certificates and keys
• Parts 3 and 4 are the OpenVPN server and client configuration
• Part 5 is some updates and closing remarks ***

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

• The December 2013 semi-annual newsletter was sent out from the foundation
• In the newsletter you will find the president's letter, articles on the current development projects they sponsor and reports from all the conferences and summits they sponsored
• The president's letter alone is worth the read, really amazing
• Really long, with lots of details and stories from the conferences and projects ***

Use of NetBSD with Marvell Kirkwood Processors

• Article that gives a brief history of NetBSD and how to use it on an IP-Plug computer
• The IP-Plug is a "multi-functional mini-server was developed by Promwad engineers by the order of AK-Systems. It is designed for solving a wide range of tasks in IP networks and can perform the functions of a computer or a server. The IP-Plug is powered from a 220V network and has low power consumption, as well as a small size (which can be compared to the size of a mobile phone charger)."
• Really cool little NetBSD ARM project with lots of graphs, pictures and details ***

Experimenting with zero-copy network IO

• Long blog post from Adrian Chadd about zero-copy network IO on FreeBSD
• Discusses the different OS' implementations and options
• He's able to get 35 gbit/sec out of 70,000 active TCP sockets, but isn't stopping there
• Tons of details, check the full post ***

Interview - Damien Miller - djm@openbsd.org / @damienmiller

Cryptography in OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Tutorial

Full disk encryption in FreeBSD & OpenBSD

News Roundup

OpenZFS office hours

• Our buddy George Wilson sat down to take some ZFS questions from the community
• You can see more info about it here ***

License summaries in pkgng

• A discussion between Justin Sherill and some NYCBUG guys about license frameworks in pkgng
• Similar to pkgsrc's "ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES" setting, pkgng could let the user decide which software licenses he wants to allow
• Maybe we could get a "pkg licenses" command to display the license of all installed packages
• Ok bapt, do it ***

The FreeBSD challenge continues

• Checking in with our buddy from the Linux foundation...
• The switching from Linux to FreeBSD blog series continues for his month-long trial
• Follow up from last week: "As a matter of fact, I did check out PC-BSD, and wanted the challenge. Call me addicted to pain and suffering, but the pride and accomplishment you feel from diving into FreeBSD is quite rewarding."
• Since we last mentioned it, he's decided to go from a VM to real hardware, got all of his common software installed, experimented with the Linux emulation, set up virtualbox, learned about slices/partitions/disk management, found BSD alternatives to his regularly-used commands and lots more ***

Ports gets a stable branch

• For the first time ever, FreeBSD's ports tree will have a maintained "stable" branch
• This is similar to how pkgsrc does things, with a rolling release for updated software and stable branch for only security and big fixes
• All commits to this branch require approval of portmgr, looks like it'll start in 2014Q1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• John writes in
• Spencer writes in
• Campbell writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Clint writes in ***