NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

NetBSD 9.2 Released

DragonFly 6.0 is out!

• Release Notes *** ### EuroBSDCon 2021 will be online *** ## News Roundup ### Home Network Monitoring using Prometheus > This blog post describes my setup for monitoring various devices on my home network suh as servers, laptops/desktops, networking gear etc. The setup and configuration is squarely geared towards small/medium sized network monitoring. A similar setup might work for large networks, but you will need to plan your compute/storage/bandwidth capacities accordingly. I’m running all the monitoring software on FreeBSD, but you can run it on your choice of OS. Just make sure to install the packages using your OS’s package manager. *** ### Preventing FreeBSD to kill PostgreSQL (aka OOM Killer prevention) > There are a lot of interesting articles on how to prevent the Out of Memory Killer (OOM killer in short) on Linux to ruin your day, or better your night. One particularly well done explanation about how the OOM Killer works, and how to help PostgreSQL to survive, is, in my humble opinion, the one from Percona Blog. *** ### Customizing Emacs for Git Commit Messages >I do a lot of commits to the FreeBSD project and elsewhere. It would be nice if I could setup emacs in a custom way for each commit message that I'm editing. > Fortunately, GNU Emacs provides a nice way to do just that. While I likely could do some of these things with git commit hooks, I find this to be a little nicer. *** ### Deleting old FreeBSD boot environments > I like boot environments (BE) on FreeBSD. They were especially handy when building the AWS host for FreshPorts, since I had no serial console. I would create a BE saving the current status, then make some changes. I’d mark the current BE as boot once, so I could boot back in the known good BE. Worst case, I could mount the storage onto a rescue EC2 instance and adjust the bootfs value of the zpool. ***

Always be quitting

A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job. But act as if you might leave on short notice. Counterintuitively, this will make you a better engineer and open up growth opportunities.

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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

• Christopher - zfs question
• Chris - two questions
• Vas - zpools and moving to FreeBSD 13

• 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

Comparing sandboxing techniques

I had the opportunity to implement a sandbox and I'd like to write about the differences between the various sandboxing techniques available on three different operating systems: FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD.

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Statement on FreeBSD development processes

In light of the recent commentary on FreeBSD's development practices, members of the Core team would like to issue the following statement.

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Customizing FreeBSD Ports and Packages

A basic intro to building your own packages

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News Roundup

FVWM(3) and the quest for a comfortable NetBSD desktop

FVWM substantially allows one to build a fully-fledged lightweight desktop environment from scratch, with an almost unparalleled degree of freedom. Although using FVWM does not require any knowledge of programming languages, it is possible to extend it with M4, C, and Perl preprocessing.

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Nginx as a TCP/UDP relay

In this tutorial I will explain how to use Nginx as a TCP or UDP relay as an alternative to Haproxy or Relayd. This mean nginx will be able to accept requests on a port (TCP/UDP) and relay it to another backend without knowing about the content. It also permits to negociates a TLS session with the client and relay to a non-TLS backend. In this example I will explain how to configure Nginx to accept TLS requests to transmit it to my Gemini server Vger, Gemini protocol has TLS as a requirement.

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HardenedBSD March 2021 Status Report

This month, I worked on finding and fixing the regression that caused kernel panics on our package builders. I think I found the issue: I made it so that the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel just included GENERIC so that we follow FreeBSD's toggling of features. Doing so added QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH to our kernel config. That option is the likely culprit. If the next package build (with the option removed) completes, I will commit the change that removes QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH from the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel.

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Detailed Behaviors of Unix Signal

When Unix is mentioned in this document it means macOS or Linux as they are the mainly used Unix at this moment. When shell is mentioned it means Bash or Zsh. Most demos are written in C for macOS with Apple libc and Linux with glibc.

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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

• andrew - flatpak

• chris - mac and truenas

• robert - some questions

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

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NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel

Learn more about customizing the build of the FreeBSD kernel and its loadable modules

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OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong

In my article about running OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong back in 2016, I mentioned looking for a Fuloong. All hope seemed lost until the Summer of 2017, when a fellow OpenBSD developer was contacted by a generous user (Thanks again, Lars!) offering to donate two Lemote Fuloong machines, and I was lucky enough to get one of those units.

News Roundup

How ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd

On Solaris and Illumos, how ZFS pools and filesystems were brought up at boot was always a partial mystery to me (and it seemed to involve the kernel knowing a lot about /etc/zfs/zpool.cache). On Linux, additional software RAID arrays are brought up mostly through udev rules, which has its own complications. For a long time I had the general impression that ZFS on Linux also worked through udev rules to recognize vdev components, much like software RAID. However, this turns out to not be the case and the modern ZFS on Linux boot process is quite straightforward on systemd systems.

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LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed

During the past month we’ve successfully removed the legacy FreeBSD plugin and continued improving the new one. We have prepared an implementation of hardware breakpoint and watchpoint support for FreeBSD/AArch64, and iterated over all tests that currently fail on that platform. Therefore, we have concluded the second milestone.

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FreshBSD 2021

6 weeks ago I created a branch for a significant rework of FreshBSD. Nearly 300 commits later, and just a week shy of our 15th anniversary, the result is what you’re looking at now. I hope you like it.

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gmid is a gemini server for unixes.

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Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide now in english

The ports system is one of FreeBSD's greatest advantages for users who want flexibility and control over their software. It enables administrators to easily create and manage source-based installations using a system that is robust and predictable.

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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.

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

Special Guest: Tom Jones.