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

Headlines

FreeBSD on the Framework laptop

Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux

News Roundup

Why is the OpenBSD documentation so good?

How I configure dma for mail delivery in jails on my internet hosts

Introducing muxfs

RAID 1C boot support added

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

• [Oliver - shell tip)[https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/469/feedback/Oliver%20-%20shell%20tip.md]

• 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

OpenZFS with ZSTD land in FreeBSD 13

• ZStandard Compression for OpenZFS > The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base with the community allowing FreeBSD to receive new features sooner and with less effort. > I would advise against doing 'zpool upgrade' or creating indispensable pools using new features until this change has had a month+ to soak.
• Rebasing FreeBSD’s OpenZFS on the new upstream was sponsored by iXsystems
• The competition of ZSTD support for OpenZFS was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation ***

LibreSSL documentation status update

More than six years ago, LibreSSL was forked from OpenSSL, and almost two years ago, i explained the status of LibreSSL documentation during EuroBSDCon 2018 in Bucuresti. So it seems providing an update might be in order.
Note that this is not an update regarding LibreSSL status in general because i'm not the right person to talk about the big picture of working on the LibreSSL code, my work has been quite focussed on documentation. All the same, it is fair to say that even though the number of developers working on it is somewhat limited, the LibreSSL project is quite alive, typically having a release every few months. Progress continues being made with respect to porting and adding new functionality (for example regarding TLSv1.3, CMS, RSA-PSS, RSA-OAEP, GOST, SM3, SM4, XChaCha20 during the last two years), OpenSSL compatibility improvements (including providing additional OpenSSL-1.1 APIs), and lots of bug fixes and code cleanup.

FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead)

’m coming pretty late to the party, because SPARC64 support in FreeBSD is apparently doomed: After the POWER platform made the switch to a LLVM/Clang-based toolchain, SPARC64 is one of the last ones that still uses the ancient GCC 4.2-based toolchain that the project wants to finally get rid off (it has already happened as I was writing this – looks like the firm plan was not so firm after all, since they killed it off early). And compared to the other platforms it has seen not too much love in recent times… SPARC64 being a great platform, I’d be quite sad to see it go. But before that happens let’s see what the current status is and what would need to be done if it were to survive, shall we?

News Roundup

Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader

Almost two years ago I wrote a blog post about checkpoints in ZFS. I didn’t hide that I was a big fan of them. That said, after those two years, I still feel that there are underappreciated features in the ZFS world, so I decided to do something about that.
Currently, one of the best practices for upgrading your operating system is to use boot environments. They are a great feature for managing multiple kernels and userlands. They are based on juggling which ZFS datasets are mounted. Each dataset has its own version of the system. Unfortunately, boot environments have their limitations. If we, for example, upgrade our ZFS pool, we may not be able to use older versions of the system anymore.
The big advantage of boot environments is that they have very good tools. Two main tools are beadm (which was created by vermaden) and bectl (which currently is in the FreeBSD base system). These tools allow us to create and manage boot environments.

Beastie Bits

• The First Unix Port
• TLS Mastery updates, August 2020
• What is the Oldest BSD Distribution still around today

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

• ben - zfs send questions
• lars - zfs pool question
• neutron - bectl vs beadm

• 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 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 ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD ASLR status update

• Shawn Webb gives us a little update on his address space layout randomization work for FreeBSD
• He's implemented execbase randomization for position-independent executables (which OpenBSD also just enabled globally in 5.5 on i386)
• Work has also started on testing ASLR on ARM, using a Raspberry Pi
• He's giving a presentation at BSDCan this year about his ASLR work
• While we're on the topic of BSDCan... ***

BSDCan tutorials, improving the experience

• Peter Hansteen writes a new blog post about his upcoming BSDCan tutorials
• The tutorials are called "Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter" and "Transitioning to OpenBSD 5.5" - both scheduled to last three hours each
• He's requesting anyone that'll be there to go ahead and contact him, telling him exactly what you'd like to learn
• There's also a bit of background information about the tutorials and how he's looking to improve them
• If you're interested in OpenBSD and going to BSDCan this year, hit him up ***

pkgsrc-2014Q1 released

• The new stable branch of pkgsrc packages has been built and is ready
• Python 3.3 is now a "first class citizen" in pkgsrc
• 14255 packages for NetBSD-current/x86_64, 11233 binary packages built with clang for FreeBSD 10/x86_64
• There's a new release every three months, and remember pkgsrc works on MANY operating systems, not just NetBSD - you could even use pkgsrc instead of pkgng or ports if you were so inclined
• They're also looking into signing packages ***

Only two holes in a heck of a long time, who cares?

• A particularly vocal Debian user, a lost soul, somehow finds his way to the misc@ OpenBSD mailing list
• He questions "what's the big deal" about OpenBSD's slogan being "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
• Luckily, the community and Theo set the record straight about why you should care about this
• Running insecure applications on OpenBSD is actually more secure than running them on other systems, due to things like ASLR, PIE and all the security features of OpenBSD
• It spawned a discussion about ease of management and Linux's poor security record, definitely worth reading ***

Interview - Dru Lavigne - dru@freebsd.org / @bsdevents

FreeBSD's documentation printing, documentation springs, various topics

Tutorial

Automatic, unattended OpenBSD installs with PXE

News Roundup

pfSense 2.1.1 released

• A new version of pfSense is released, mainly to fix some security issues
• Tracking some recent FreeBSD advisories, pfSense usually only applies the ones that would matter on a firewall or router
• There are also some NIC driver updates and other things
• Of course if you want to learn more about pfSense, watch episode 25
• 2.1.2 is already up for testing too ***

FreeBSD gets UEFI support

• It looks like FreeBSD's battle with UEFI may be coming to a close?
• Ed Maste committed a giant list of patches to enable UEFI support on x86_64
• Look through the list to see all the details and information
• Thanks FreeBSD foundation! ***

Ideas for the next DragonflyBSD release

• Mr. Dragonfly release engineer himself, Justin Sherrill posts some of his ideas for the upcoming release
• They're aiming for late May for the next version
• Ideas include better support for running in a VM, pkgng fixes, documentation updates and PAM support
• Gasp, they're even considering dropping i386 ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots of new PBI updates for 10.0, new runtime implementation
• New support for running 32 bit applications in PBI runtime
• New default CD and DVD player, umplayer
• Latest GNOME 3 and Cinnamon merged, new edge package builds ***

Feedback/Questions

• Remy writes in
• Jan writes in
• Eddie writes in
• Zen writes in
• Sean writes in ***

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Headlines

OpenBSD on a Sun T5120

• Our buddy Ted Unangst got himself a cool Sun box
• Of course he had to write a post about installing and running OpenBSD on it
• The post goes through some of the quirks and steps to go through in case you're interested in one of these fine SPARC machines
• He's also got another post about OpenBSD on a Dell CS24-SC server ***

Bhyvecon 2014 videos are up

• Like we mentioned last week, Bhyvecon was an almost-impromptu conference before AsiaBSDCon
• The talks have apparently already been uploaded!
• Subjects include Bhyve's past, present and future, OSv on Bhyve, a general introduction to the tool, migrating those last few pesky Linux boxes to virtualization
• Lots more detail in the videos, so check 'em all out ***

Building a FreeBSD wireless access point

• We've got a new blog post about creating a wireless access point with FreeBSD
• After all the recent news of consumer routers being pwned like candy, it's time for people to start building BSD routers
• The author goes through a lot of the process of getting one set up using good ol' FreeBSD
• Using hostapd, he's able to share his wireless card in hostap mode and offer DHCP to all the clients
• Plenty of config files and more messy details in the post ***

Switching from Synology to FreeNAS

• The author has been considering getting a NAS for quite a while and documents his research
• He was faced with the compromise of convenience vs. flexibility - prebuilt or DIY
• After seeing the potential security issues with proprietary NAS devices, and dealing with frustration with trying to get bugs fixed, he makes the right choice
• The post also goes into some detail about his setup, all the things he needed a NAS to do as well as all the advantages an open source solution would give ***

Interview - Warren Block - wblock@freebsd.org

FreeBSD's documentation project, igor, doceng

Tutorial

The world of BSD mailing lists

News Roundup

HAMMER2 work and notes

• Matthew Dillon has posted some updated notes about the development of the new HAMMER version
• The start of a cluster API was committed to the tree
• There are also links to design document, a freemap design document, a changes list and a todo list ***

BSD Breaking Barriers

• Our friend MWL gave a talk at NYCBSDCon about BSD "breaking barriers"
• "What makes the BSD operating systems special? Why should you deploy your applications on BSD? Why does the BSD community keep growing, and why do Linux sites like DistroWatch say that BSD is where the interesting development work is happening? We'll cover the not-so-obvious reasons why BSD still stands tall after almost 40 years."
• He also has another upcoming talk, (or "webcast") called "Beyond Security: Getting to Know OpenBSD's Real Purpose"
• "OpenBSD is frequently billed as a high-security operating system. That's true, but security isn't the OpenBSD Project's main goal. This webcast will introduce systems administrators to OpenBSD, explain the project's mission, and discuss the features and benefits."
• It's on May 27th and will hopefully be recorded ***

FreeBSD in a chroot

• Finch, "FreeBSD running IN a CHroot," is a new project
• It's a way to extend the functionality of restricted USB-based FreeBSD systems (FreeNAS, etc.)
• All the details and some interesting use cases are on the github page
• He really needs to change the project name though ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots of bugfixes for PCBSD coming down the tubes
• LZ4 compression is now enabled by default on the whole pool
• The latest 10-STABLE has been imported and builds are going
• Also the latest GNOME and Cinnamon builds have been imported and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in (IRC suggests md5deep)
• Don writes in
• kaltheat writes in (We use R0DE Podcast microphones and Logitech C920 HD webcams)
• Harri writes in ***