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Remote DoS in the TCP stack

• A pretty devious bug in the BSD network stack has been making its rounds for a while now, allowing remote attackers to exhaust the resources of a system with nothing more than TCP connections
• While in the LAST_ACK state, which is one of the final stages of a connection's lifetime, the connection can get stuck and hang there indefinitely
• This problem has a slightly confusing history that involves different fixes at different points in time from different people
• Juniper originally discovered the bug and announced a fix for their proprietary networking gear on June 8th
• On June 29th, FreeBSD caught wind of it and fixed the bug in their -current branch, but did not issue a security notice or MFC the fix back to the -stable branches
• On July 13th, two weeks later, OpenBSD fixed the issue in their -current branch with a slightly different patch, citing the FreeBSD revision from which the problem was found
• Immediately afterwards, they merged it back to -stable and issued an errata notice for 5.7 and 5.6
• On July 21st, three weeks after their original fix, FreeBSD committed yet another slightly different fix and issued a security notice for the problem (which didn't include the first fix)
• After the second fix from FreeBSD, OpenBSD gave them both another look and found their single fix to be sufficient, covering the timer issue in a more general way
• NetBSD confirmed they were vulnerable too, and applied another completely different fix to -current on July 24th, but haven't released a security notice yet
• DragonFly is also investigating the issue now to see if they're affected as well ***

c2k15 hackathon reports

• Reports from OpenBSD's latest hackathon, held in Calgary this time, are starting to roll in (there were over 40 devs there, so we might see a lot more of these)
• The first one, from Ingo Schwarze, talks about some of the mandoc work he did at the event
• He writes, "Did you ever look at a huge page in man, wanted to jump to the definition of a specific term - say, in ksh, to the definition of the "command" built-in command - and had to step through dozens of false positives with the less '/' and 'n' search keys before you finally found the actual definition?"
• With mandoc's new internal jump targets, this is a problem of the past now
• Jasper also sent in a report, doing his usual work with Puppet (and specifically "Facter," a tool used by Puppet to gather various bits of system information)
• Aside from that and various ports-related work, Jasper worked on adding tame support to some userland tools, fixing some Octeon stuff and introduced something that OpenBSD has oddly lacked until now: an "-i" flag for sed (hooray!)
• Antoine Jacoutot gave a report on what he did at the hackathon as well, including improvements to the rcctl tool (for configuring startup services)
• It now has an "ls" subcommand with status parsing, allowing you to list running services, stopped services or even ones that failed to start or are supposed to be running (he calls this "the poor man's service monitoring tool")
• He also reworked some of the rc.d system to allow smoother operation of multiple instances of the same daemon to run (using tor with different config files as an example)
• His list also included updating ports, updating ports documentation, updating the hotplug daemon and laying out some plans for automatic sysmerge for future upgrades
• Foundation director Ken Westerback was also there, getting some disk-related and laptop work done
• He cleaned up and committed the 4k sector softraid code that he'd been working on, as well as fixing some trackpad issues
• Stefan Sperling, OpenBSD's token "wireless guy," had a lot to say about the hackathon and what he did there (and even sent in his write-up before he got home)
• He taught tcpdump about some new things, including 802.11n metadata beacons (there's a lot more specific detail about this one in the report)
• Bringing a bag full of USB wireless devices with him, he set out to get the unsupported ones working, as well as fix some driver bugs in the ones that already did work
• One quote from Stefan's report that a lot of people seem to be talking about: "Partway through the hackathon tedu proposed an old diff of his to make our base ls utility display multi-byte characters. This led to a long discussion about how to expand UTF-8 support in base. The conclusion so far indicates that single-byte locales (such as ISO-8859-1 and KOI-8) will be removed from the base OS after the 5.8 release is cut. This simplifies things because the whole system only has to care about a single character encoding. We'll then have a full release cycle to bring UTF-8 support to more base system utilities such as vi, ksh, and mg. To help with this plan, I started organizing a UTF-8-focused hackathon for some time later this year."
• Jeremy Evans wrote in to talk about updating lots of ports, moving the ruby ports up to the latest version and also creating perl and ruby wrappers for the new tame subsystem
• While he's mainly a ports guy, he got to commit fixes to ports, the base system and even the kernel during the hackathon
• Rafael Zalamena, who got commit access at the event, gives his very first report on his networking-related hackathon activities
• With Rafael's diffs and help from a couple other developers, OpenBSD now has support for VPLS
• Jonathan Gray got a lot done in the area of graphics, working on OpenGL and Mesa, updating libdrm and even working with upstream projects to remove some GNU-specific code
• As he's become somewhat known for, Jonathan was also busy running three things in the background: clang's fuzzer, cppcheck and AFL (looking for any potential crashes to fix)
• Martin Pieuchot gave an write-up on his experience: "I always though that hackathons were the best place to write code, but what's even more important is that they are the best (well actually only) moment where one can discuss and coordinate projects with other developers IRL. And that's what I did."
• He laid out some plans for the wireless stack, discussed future plans for PF, made some routing table improvements and did various other bits to the network stack
• Unfortunately, most of Martin's secret plans seem to have been left intentionally vague, and will start to take form in the next release cycle
• We're still eagerly awaiting a report from one of OpenBSD's newest developers, Alexandr Nedvedicky (the Oracle guy who's working on SMP PF and some other PF fixes)
• OpenBSD 5.8's "beta" status was recently reverted, with the message "take that as a hint," so that may mean more big changes are still to come... ***

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• FreeBSD has published their quarterly status report for the months of April to June, citing it to be the largest one so far
• It's broken down into a number of sections: team reports, projects, kernel, architectures, userland programs, ports, documentation, Google Summer of Code and miscellaneous others
• Starting off with the cluster admin, some machines were moved to the datacenter at New York Internet, email services are now more resilient to failure, the svn mirrors (now just "svn.freebsd.org") are now using GeoGNS with official SSL certs and general redundancy was increased
• In the release engineering space, ARM and ARM64 work continues to improve on the Cavium ThunderX, more focus is being put into cloud platforms and the 10.2-RELEASE cycle is reaching its final stages
• The core team has been working on phabricator, the fancy review system, and is considering to integrate oauth support soon
• Work also continues on bhyve, and more operating systems are slowly gaining support (including the much-rumored Windows Server 2012)
• The report also covers recent developments in the Linux emulation layer, and encourages people using 11-CURRENT to help test out the 64bit support
• Multipath TCP was also a hot topic, and there's a brief summary of the current status on that patch (it will be available publicly soon)
• ZFSguru, a project we haven't talked about a lot, also gets some attention in the report - version 0.3 is set to be completed in early August
• PCIe hotplug support is also mentioned, though it's still in the development stages (basic hot-swap functions are working though)
• The official binary packages are now built more frequently than before with the help of additional hardware, so AMD64 and i386 users will have fresher ports without the need for compiling
• Various other small updates on specific areas of ports (KDE, XFCE, X11...) are also included in the report
• Documentation is a strong focus as always, a number of new documentation committers were added and some of the translations have been improved a lot
• Many other topics were covered, including foundation updates, conference plans, pkgsrc support in pkgng, ZFS support for UEFI boot and much more ***

The OpenSSH bug that wasn't

• There's been a lot of discussion about a supposed flaw in OpenSSH, allowing attackers to substantially amplify the number of password attempts they can try per session (without leaving any abnormal log traces, even)
• There's no actual exploit to speak of; this bug would only help someone get more bruteforce tries in with a fewer number of connections
• FreeBSD in its default configuration, with PAM and ChallengeResponseAuthentication enabled, was the only one vulnerable to the problem - not upstream OpenSSH, nor any of the other BSDs, and not even the majority of Linux distros
• If you disable all forms of authentication except public keys, like you're supposed to, then this is also not a big deal for FreeBSD systems
• Realistically speaking, it's more of a PAM bug than anything else
• OpenSSH added an additional check for this type of setup that will be in 7.0, but simply changing your sshd_config is enough to mitigate the issue for now on FreeBSD (or you can run freebsd-update) ***

Interview - Sebastian Wiedenroth - wiedi@netbsd.org / @wied0r

pkgsrc and pkgsrcCon

News Roundup

Now served by OpenBSD

• We've mentioned that you can also install OpenBSD on DO droplets, and this blog post is about someone who actually did it
• The use case for the author was for a webserver, so he decided to try out the httpd in base
• Configuration is ridiculously simple, and the config file in his example provides an HTTPS-only webserver, with plaintext requests automatically redirecting
• TLS 1.2 by default, strong ciphers with LibreSSL and HSTS combined give you a pretty secure web server ***

FreeBSD laptop playbooks

• A new project has started up on Github for configuring FreeBSD on various laptops, unsurprisingly named "freebsd-laptops"
• It's based on ansible, and uses the playbook format for automatic set up and configuration
• Right now, it's only working on a single Lenovo laptop, but the plan is to add instructions for many more models
• Check the Github page for instructions on how to get started, and maybe get involved if you're running FreeBSD on a laptop ***

NetBSD on the NVIDIA Jetson TK1

• If you've never heard of the Jetson TK1, we can go ahead and spoil the secret here: NetBSD runs on it
• As for the specs, it has a quad-core ARMv7 CPU at 2.3GHz, 2 gigs of RAM, gigabit ethernet, SATA, HDMI and mini-PCIE
• This blog post shows which parts of the board are working with NetBSD -current (which seems to be almost everything)
• You can even run X11 on it, pretty sweet ***

DragonFly power mangement options

• DragonFly developer Sepherosa, who we've had on the show, has been doing some ACPI work over there
• In this email, he presents some of DragonFly's different power management options: ACPI P-states, C-states, mwait C-states and some Intel-specific bits as well
• He also did some testing with each of them and gave his findings about power saving
• If you've been thinking about running DragonFly on a laptop, this would be a good one to read ***

OpenBSD router under FreeBSD bhyve

• If one BSD just isn't enough for you, and you've only got one machine, why not run two at once
• This article talks about taking a FreeBSD server running bhyve and making a virtualized OpenBSD router with it
• If you've been considering switching over your router at home or the office, doing it in a virtual machine is a good way to test the waters before committing to real hardware
• The author also includes a little bit of history on how he got into both operating systems
• There are lots of mixed opinions about virtualizing core network components, so we'll leave it up to you to do your research
• Of course, the next logical step is to put that bhyve host under Xen on NetBSD... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Kevin writes in
• Logan writes in
• Peter writes in
• Randy writes in ***

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PIE and ASLR in FreeBSD update

• A status update for Shawn Webb's ASLR and PIE work for FreeBSD
• One major part of the code, position-independent executable support, has finally been merged into the -CURRENT tree
• "FreeBSD has supported loading PIEs for a while now, but the applications in base weren't compiled as PIEs. Given that ASLR is useless without PIE, getting base compiled with PIE support is a mandatory first step in proper ASLR support"
• If you're running -CURRENT, just add "WITH_PIE=1" to your /etc/src.conf and /etc/make.conf
• The next step is working on the ASLR coding style and getting more developers to look through it
• Shawn will also be at EuroBSDCon (in September) giving an updated version of his BSDCan talk about ASLR ***

Misc. pfSense news

• Couple of pfSense news items this week, including some hardware news
• Someone's gotta test the pfSense hardware devices before they're sold, which involves powering them all on at least once
• To make that process faster, they're building a controllable power board (and include some cool pics)
• There will be more info on that device a bit later on
• On Friday, June 27th, there will be another video session (for paying customers only...) about virtualized firewalls
• pfSense University, a new paid training course, was also announced
• A single two-day class costs $2000, ouch ***

ZFS stripe width

• A new blog post from Matt Ahrens about ZFS stripe width
• "The popularity of OpenZFS has spawned a great community of users, sysadmins, architects and developers, contributing a wealth of advice, tips and tricks, and rules of thumb on how to configure ZFS. In general, this is a great aspect of the ZFS community, but I’d like to take the opportunity to address one piece of misinformed advice"
• Matt goes through different situations where you would set up your zpool differently, each with their own advantages and disadvantages
• He covers best performance on random IOPS, best reliability, and best space efficiency use cases
• It includes a lot of detail on each one, including graphs, and addresses some misconceptions about different RAID-Z levels' overhead factor ***

FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 released

• The third BETA in the 9.3 release cycle is out, we're slowly getting closer to the release
• This is expected to be the final BETA, next will come the RCs
• There have mostly just been small bug fixes since BETA2, but OpenSSL was also updated and the arc4random code was updated to match what's in -CURRENT (but still isn't using ChaCha20)
• The FreeBSD foundation has a blog post about it too
• There's a list of changes between 9.2 and 9.3 as well, but we'll be sure to cover it when the -RELEASE hits ***

Interview - Bryce Chidester - brycec@devio.us / @brycied00d

Running a BSD shell provider

Tutorial

Chaining SSH connections

News Roundup

My FreeBSD adventure

• A Slackware user from the "linux questions" forum decides to try out BSD, and documents his initial impressions and findings
• After ruling out PCBSD due to the demanding hardware requirements and NetBSD due to "politics" (whatever that means, his words) he decides to start off with FreeBSD 10, but also mentions trying OpenBSD later on
• In his forum post, he covers the documentation (and how easy it makes it for a switcher), dual booting, packages vs ports, network configuration and some other little things
• So far, he seems to really enjoy BSD and thinks that it makes a lot of sense compared to Linux
• Might be an interesting, ongoing series we can follow up on later ***

Even more BSDCan trip reports

• BSDCan may be over until next year, but trip reports are still pouring in
• This time we have a summary from Li-Wen Hsu, who was paid for by the FreeBSD foundation
• He's part of the "Jenkins CI for FreeBSD" group and went to BSDCan mostly for that
• Nice long post about all of his experiences at the event, definitely worth a read
• He even talks about... the food ***

FreeBSD disk partitioning

• For his latest book series on FreeBSD's GEOM system, MWL asked the hackers mailing list for some clarification
• This erupted into a very long discussion about fdisk vs gnop vs gpart
• So you don't have to read the 500 mailing list posts, he's summarized the findings in a blog post
• It covers MBR vs GPT, disk sector sizes and how to handle all of them with which tools ***

BSD Router Project version 1.51

• A new version of the BSD Router Project has been released, 1.51
• It's now based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE instead of 10.0-RELEASE
• Includes lots of bugfixes and small updates, as well as some patches from pfSense and elsewhere
• Check the sourceforge page for the complete list of changes
• Bad news... the minimum disk size requirement has increased to 512MB... getting pretty bloated ***

Feedback/Questions

• Fongaboo writes in
• David writes in
• Kristian writes in ***

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FreeBSD moves to Bugzilla

• Historically, FreeBSD has used the old GNATS system for keeping track of bug reports
• After years and years of wanting to switch, they've finally moved away from GNATS to Bugzilla
• It offers a lot of advantages, is much more modern and actively maintained and
• There's a new workflow chart for developers to illustrate the new way of doing things
• The old "send-pr" command will still work for the time being, but will eventually be phased out in favor of native Bugzilla reporting tools (of which there are multiple in ports)
• This will hopefully make reporting bugs a lot less painful ***

DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2014

• We previously covered this blog last year, but the 2014 edition is up
• More of a hardware-focused article, the author details the parts he's using for a budget NAS
• Details the motherboard, RAM, CPU, hard drives, case, etc
• With a set goal of $500 max, he goes just over it - $550 for all the parts
• Lots of nice pictures of the hardware and step by step instructions for assembly, as well as software configuration instructions ***

DragonflyBSD 3.8 released

• Justin announced the availability of DragonflyBSD 3.8.0
• Binaries in /bin and /sbin are dynamic now, enabling the use of PAM and NSS to manage user accounts
• It includes a new HAMMER FS backup script and lots of FreeBSD tools have been synced with their latest versions
• Work continues on for the Intel graphics drivers, but it's currently limited to the HD4000 and Ivy Bridge series
• See the release page for more info and check the link for source-based upgrade instructions ***

OpenZFS European conference 2014

• There was an OpenZFS conference held in Europe recently, and now the videos are online for your viewing pleasure
• Matt Ahrens, Introduction
• Michael Alexander, FhGFS performance on ZFS
• Andriy Gapon, Testing ZFS on FreeBSD
• Luke Marsden, HybridCluster: ZFS in the cloud
• Vadim Comănescu, Syneto: continuously delivering a ZFS-based OS
• Chris George, DDRdrive ZIL accelerator: random write revelation
• Grenville Whelan, High-Availability
• Phil Harman, Harman Holistic
• Mark Rees, Storiant and OpenZFS
• Andrew Holway, EraStor ZFS appliances
• Dan Vâtca, Syneto and OpenZFS
• Luke Marsden, HybridCluster and OpenZFS
• Matt Ahrens, Delphix and OpenZFS
• Check the link for slides and other goodies ***

Interview - Benedict Reuschling - bcr@freebsd.org

BSD documentation, getting commit access, unix education, various topics

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr, Steve Wills

• "It is my pleasure to introduce Steve Wills, the newest member of the portmgr team"
• swills is an all-round good guy, does a lot for ports (especially the ruby ports)
• In this interview, we learn why he uses FreeBSD, the most embarrassing moment in his FreeBSD career and much more
• He used to work for Red Hat, woah ***

BSDTalk episode 242

• This time on BSDTalk, Will interviews Chris Buechler from pfSense
• Topics include: the heartbleed vulnerability and how it affected pfSense, how people usually leave their firewalls unpatched for a long time (or even forget about them!), changes between major versions, the upgrade process, upcoming features in their 10-based version, backporting drivers and security fixes
• They also touch on recent concerns in the pfSense community about their license change, that they may be "going commercial" and closing the source - so tune in to find out what their future plans are for all of that ***

Turn old PC hardware into a killer home server

• Lots of us have old hardware lying around doing nothing but collecting dust
• Why not turn that old box into a modern file server with FreeNAS and ZFS?
• This article goes through the process of setting up a NAS, gives a little history behind the project and highlights some of the different protocols FreeNAS can use (NFS, SMB, AFS, etc)
• Most of our users are already familiar with all of this stuff, nothing too advanced
• Good to see BSD getting some well-deserved attention on a big mainstream site ***

Unbloating the VAX install CD

• After a discussion on the VAX mailing list, something very important came to the attention of the developers...
• You can't boot NetBSD on a VAX box with 16MB of RAM from the CD image
• This blog post goes through the developer's adventure in trying to fix that through emulation and stripping various things out of the kernel to make it smaller
• In the end, he got it booting - and now all three VAX users who want to run NetBSD can do so on their systems with 16MB of RAM... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Thomas writes in
• Reynold writes in
• Bostjan writes in
• Paul writes in
• John writes in ***

Headlines

pkgng 1.2 released

• bapt and bdrewery from the portmgr team released pkgng 1.2 final
• New features include an improved build system, plugin improvements, new bootstrapping command, SRV mirror improvements, a new "pkg config" command, repo improvements, vuXML is now default, new fingerprint features and much more
• Really simple to upgrade, check our pkgng tutorial if you want some easy instructions
• It's also made its way into Dragonfly
• See the show notes for the full list of new features and fixes ***

ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH

• Damien Miller recently committed support for a new authenticated encryption cipher for OpenSSH, chacha20-poly1305
• Long blog post explaining what these are and why we need them
• This cipher combines two primitives: the ChaCha20 cipher and the Poly1305 MAC
• RC4 is broken, we needed an authenticated encryption mode to complement AES-GCM that doesn't show the packet length in cleartext
• Great explanation of the differences between EtM, MtE and EaM and their advantages
• "Both AES-GCM and the EtM MAC modes have a small downside though: because we no longer desire to decrypt the packet as we go, the packet length must be transmitted in plaintext. This unfortunately makes some forms of traffic analysis easier as the attacker can just read the packet lengths directly." ***

Is it time to dump Linux and move to BSD

• ITworld did an article about switching from Linux to BSD
• The author's interest was sparked from a review he was reading that said "I feel the BSD communities, especially the FreeBSD-based projects, are where the interesting developments are happening these days. Over in FreeBSD land we have efficient PBI bundles, a mature advanced file system in the form of ZFS, new friendly and powerful system installers, a new package manager (pkgng), a powerful jail manager and there will soon be new virtualization technology coming with the release of FreeBSD 10.0"
• The whole article can be summed up with "yes" - ok, next story! ***

OpenZFS devsummit videos

• The OpenZFS developer summit discussion and presentation videos are up
• People from various operating systems (FreeBSD, Mac OS X, illumos, etc.) were there to discuss ZFS on their platforms and the challenges they faced
• Question and answer session from representatives of every OS - had a couple FreeBSD guys there including one from the foundation
• Presentations both about ZFS itself and some hardware-based solutions for implementing ZFS in production
• TONS of video, about 6 hours' worth
• This leads us into our interview, which is... ***

Interview - George Wilson - wilzun@gmail.com / @zfsdude

OpenZFS

Tutorial

A crash course on ZFS

News Roundup

ruBSD 2013 information

• The ruBSD 2013 conference will take place on Saturday December 14, 2013 at 10:30 AM in Moscow, Russia
• Speakers include three OpenBSD developers, Theo de Raadt, Henning Brauer and Mike Belopuhov
• Their talks are titled "The bane of backwards compatibility," "OpenBSD's pf: Design, Implementation and Future" and "OpenBSD: Where crypto is going?"
• No word on if there will be video recordings, but we'll let you know if that changes ***

DragonFly roadmap, post 3.6

• John Marino posted a possible roadmap for DragonFly, now that they're past the 3.6 release
• He wants some third party vendor software updated from very old versions (WPA supplicant, bmake, binutils)
• Plans to replace GCC44 with Clang, but GCC47 will probably be the primary compiler still
• Bring in fixes and new stuff from FreeBSD 10 ***

BSDCan 2014 CFP

• BSDCan 2014 will be held on May 16-17 in Ottawa, Canada
• They're now accepting proposals for talks
• If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal
• We'll be getting lots of interviews there ***

casperd added to -CURRENT

• "It (and its services) will be responsible forgiving access to functionality that is not available in capability modes and box. The functionality can be precisely restricted."
• Lists some sysctls that can be controlled ***

ZFS corruption bug fixed in -CURRENT

• Just a quick follow-up from last week, the ZFS corruption bug in FreeBSD -CURRENT was very quickly fixed, before that episode was even uploaded ***

Feedback/Questions

• Chris writes in
• SW writes in
• Jason writes in
• Clint writes in
• Chris writes in ***