46: Network Iodometry

JT Pennington — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0400

We're back, and this week we'll be showing you how to tunnel out of a restrictive network using only DNS queries. We also sat down with Bryan Drewery, from the FreeBSD portmgr team, to talk all about their building cluster and some recent changes. All the latest news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this year
Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
Registering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everything
You can register online here and check hotels in the area
The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants ***

OpenBSD SMP PF update

A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be useless
He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone through
There's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us ***

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
The full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance release
Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much more
If you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome change
With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted ***

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normally
It's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page ***

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup ***

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver
"Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."
He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system ***

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!
Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
You can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application library
Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easy
New Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as well
PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users ***

Feedback/Questions

16: Cryptocrystalline

JT Pennington — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 08:00:00 -0500

This time on the show, we'll be showing you how to do a fully-encrypted installation of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. We also have an interview with Damien Miller - one of the lead developers of OpenSSH - about some recent crypto changes in the project. If you're into data security, today's the show for you. The latest news and all your burning questions answered, right here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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 ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Dragonfly Bsd”

46: Network Iodometry

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

16: Cryptocrystalline

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

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

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions