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

Headlines

Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS

Writing a device driver for Unix V6

News Roundup

FreeBSD/EC2: What I've been up to

Beckhoff has released its TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor

Writing a NetBSD kernel module

Benedicts Git Finds

• Projects
  • Run anything (like full blown GTK apps) under Capsicum
  • Twitter client for UEFI
  • n³ The unorthodox terminal file manager
  • OpenVi: Portable OpenBSD vi for UNIX systems
• Gists and Articles
  • Step-by-step instructions on installing the latest NVIDIA drivers on FreeBSD 13.0 and above
  • FreeBSD SSH Hardening
  • GTFOBins is a curated list of Unix binaries that can be used to bypass local security restrictions in misconfigured systems

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 - Backing Up

Ethan - Thanks

Maxi - question about note taking

• 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 and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 2: Why use OpenBSD?

Looking Towards the Future: FreeBSD on the RISC-V Architecture

News Roundup

OpenBSD Webzine Issue 4

How I ended up liking GNOME

OPNsense 21.7.5 released

Jenkins with FreeBSD Agents in ec2

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

• Andreas - ZFS and Trim
• Hamza - swift on the BSDs
• Kendall - how many mirror

• 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

FreeBSD 11.4-RC2 Now Available

The second RC build of the 11.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

• 11.4-RELEASE notes (still in progress at the time of recording) ***

Install OpenBSD 6.7-current on a PineBook Pro 64

This document is work in progress and I'll update the date above once I change something. If you have something to add, remarks, etc please contact me. Preferably via Mastodon but other means of communication are also fine.

---

News Roundup

Understanding How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe

Veteran technology writer Jim Salter wrote an excellent guide on the ZFS file system’s features and performance that we absolutely had to share. There’s plenty of information in the article for ZFS newbies and advanced users alike. Be sure to check out the article over at Ars Technica to learn more about ZFS concepts including pools, vdevs, datasets, snapshots, and replication, just to name a few.

---

Bringing FreeBSD to ec2

Colin is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service which combines the flexibility and scriptability of the standard UNIX "tar" utility with strong encryption, deduplication, and the reliability of Amazon S3 storage. Having started work on Tarsnap in 2006, Colin is among the first generation of users of Amazon Web Services, and has written dozens of articles about his experiences with AWS on his blog.

---

FreeBSD 2020 Community Survey

The FreeBSD Core Team invites you to complete the 2020 FreeBSD Community Survey. The purpose of this survey is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the project’s priorities and efforts. This is only the second time a survey has been conducted by the FreeBSD Project and your input is valued.
The survey will remain open for 14 days and will close on June 16th at 17:00 UTC (Tuesday 10am PDT).

---

Beastie Bits

• FreeBSD Project Proposals
• TJ Hacking
• Scotland Open Source podcast
• Next FreeBSD Office Hours on June 24, 2020 ***

Feedback/Questions

• Tom - Writing for LPIrstudio
• Luke - rstudio
• Matt - Vlans and Jails

• Morgan - Can I get some commentary on this issue

  ---

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

  ---

Sponsored By:

• Tarsnap Promo Code: bsdnow

Headlines

Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2019

It’s hard to believe that 2019 is nearly over. It has been an amazing year for supporting the FreeBSD Project and community! Why do I say that? Because as I reflect over the past 12 months, I realize how many events we’ve attended all over the world, and how many lives we’ve touched in so many ways. From advocating for FreeBSD to implementing FreeBSD features, my team has been there to help make FreeBSD the best open source project and operating system out there.

In 2019, we focused on supporting a few key areas where the Project needed the most help. The first area was software development. Whether it was contracting FreeBSD developers to work on projects like wifi support, to providing internal staff to quickly implement hardware workarounds, we’ve stepped in to help keep FreeBSD innovative, secure, and reliable. Software development includes supporting the tools and infrastructure that make the development process go smoothly, and we’re on it with team members heading up the Continuous Integration efforts, and actively involved in the clusteradmin and security teams.

Our advocacy efforts focused on recruiting new users and contributors to the Project. We attended and participated in 38 conferences and events in 21 countries. From giving FreeBSD presentations and workshops to staffing tables, we were able to have 1:1 conversations with thousands of attendees.

Our travels also provided opportunities to talk directly with FreeBSD commercial and individual users, contributors, and future FreeBSD user/contributors. We’ve seen an increase in use and interest in FreeBSD from all of these organizations and individuals. These meetings give us a chance to learn more about what organizations need and what they and other individuals are working on. The information helps inform the work we should fund.

Wireguard on OpenBSD Router

wireguard (wg) is a modern vpn protocol, using the latest class of encryption algorithms while at the same time promising speed and a small code base.

modern crypto and lean code are also tenants of openbsd, thus it was a no brainer to migrate my router from openvpn over to wireguard.

my setup : a collection of devices, both wired and wireless, that are nat’d through my router (openbsd 6.6) out via my vpn provider azire* and out to the internet using wg-quick to start wg.

running : doubtless this could be improved on, but currently i start wg manually when my router boots. this, and the nat'ing on the vpn interface mean its impossible for clients to connect to the internet without the vpn being up. as my router is on a ups and only reboots when a kernel patch requires it, it’s a compromise i can live with. run wg-quick (please replace vpn with whatever you named your wg .conf file.) and reload pf rules.

News Roundup

Amazon now has FreeBSD/ARM 12

AWS, the cloud division of Amazon, announced in December the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2. This is a custom chip design with a 7nm architecture. It is based on 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores.

Compared to first-generation Graviton processors (A1), today’s new chips should deliver up to 7x the performance of A1 instances in some cases. Floating point performance is now twice as fast. There are additional memory channels and cache speed memory access should be much faster.

The company is working on three types of Graviton2 EC2 instances that should be available soon. Instances with a “g” suffix are powered by Graviton2 chips. If they have a “d” suffix, it also means that they have NVMe local storage.

• General-purpose instances (M6g and M6gd)

• Compute-optimized instances (C6g and C6gd)

• Memory-optimized instances (R6g and R6gd)

You can choose instances with up to 64 vCPUs, 512 GiB of memory and 25 Gbps networking.

And you can see that ARM-powered servers are not just a fad. AWS already promises a 40% better price/performance ratio with ARM-based instances when you compare them with x86-based instances.

AWS has been working with operating system vendors and independent software vendors to help them release software that runs on ARM. ARM-based EC2 instances support Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. It also works with multiple container services (Docker, Amazon ECS, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service).

• Coverage of AWS Announcement

Announcing the pkgsrc-2019Q4 release

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 65th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 20,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/

In total, 190 packages were added, 96 packages were removed, and 1,868 package updates (to 1388 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2019Q3 release. As usual, a large number of updates and additions were processed for packages for go (14), guile (11), perl (170), php (10), python (426), and ruby (110). This continues pkgsrc's tradition of adding useful packages, updating many packages to more current versions, and pruning unmaintained packages that are believed to have essentially no users.

The Joys of UNIX Keyboards

I fell in love with a dead keyboard layout.

A decade or so ago while helping a friends father clean out an old building, we came across an ancient Sun Microsystems server. We found it curious. Everything about it was different from what we were used to. The command line was black on white, the connectors strange and foreign, and the keyboard layout was bizarre.

We never did much with it; turning it on made all the lights in his home dim, and our joint knowledge of UNIX was nonexistent. It sat in his bedroom for years supporting his television at the foot of his bed.

I never forgot that keyboard though. The thought that there was this alternative layout out there seemed intriguing to me.

OpenBSD on Digital Ocean

Last night I had a need to put together a new OpenBSD machine. Since I already use DigitalOcean for one of my public DNS servers I wanted to use them for this need but sadly like all too many of the cloud providers they don't support OpenBSD. Now they do support FreeBSD and I found a couple writeups that show how to use FreeBSD as a shim to install OpenBSD.

They are both sort of old at this point and with OpenBSD 6.6 out I ran into a bit of a snag. The default these days is to use a GPT partition table to enable EFI booting. This is generally pretty sane but it looks to me like the FreeBSD droplet doesn't support this. After the installer rebooted the VM failed to boot, being unable to find the bootloader.

Thankfully DigitalOcean has a recovery ISO that you can boot by simply switching to it and powering off and then on your Droplet.

Beastie Bits

• FreeBSD defaults to LLVM on PPC
• Theo De Raadt Interview between Ottawa 2019 Hackathon and BSDCAN 2019
• Bastille Poll about what people would like to see in 2020
• Notes on the classic book : The Design of the UNIX Operating System
• Multics History
• First meeting of the Hamilton BSD user group, February 11, 2020 18:30 - 21:00, Boston Pizza on Upper James St

Feedback/Questions

• Bill - 1.1 CDROM
• Greg - More 50 Year anniversary information
• Dave - Question time for Allan

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

Headlines

The future of ZFS in FreeBSD

The sources for FreeBSD’s ZFS support are currently taken directly from Illumos with local ifdefs to support the peculiarities of FreeBSD where the Solaris Portability Layer (SPL) shims fall short. FreeBSD has regularly pulled changes from Illumos and tried to push back any bug fixes and new features done in the context of FreeBSD. In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL: https://www.delphix.com/blog/kickoff-future-eko-2018 This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos. While working through the git history of ZoL I have also discovered that many races and locking bugs have been fixed in ZoL and never made it back to Illumos and thus FreeBSD. This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD’s ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly to ZoL https://github.com/zfsonfreebsd/ZoF so that we might all have a single shared code base. A port for ZoF can be found at https://github.com/miwi-fbsd/zof-port Before it can be committed some additional functionality needs to be added to the FreeBSD opencrypto framework. These can be found at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18520 This port will provide FreeBSD users with multi modifier protection, project quotas, encrypted datasets, allocation classes, vectorized raidz, vectorized checksums, and various command line improvements.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Update

With FreeBSD having gone all the way to 12, it is perhaps useful to take a look back at all the things that have been accomplished, in terms of many visible changes, as well as all the things that happen behind the scenes to ensure that FreeBSD continues to offer an alternative in both design, implementation, and execution. The things you can look forward to reading about are too numerous to summarize, but cover just about everything from finalizing releases, administrative work, optimizations and depessimizations, features added and fixed, and many areas of improvement that might just surprise you a little. Please have a cup of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, or other beverage of choice, and enjoy this culmulative set of reports covering everything that’s been done since October, 2017. —Daniel Ebdrup

News Roundup

One year of flying with the Raven: Ready for the Desktop?

It has been a little over one year now that I’m with the Ravenports project. Time to reflect my involvement, my expectations and hopes.

• Ravenports

Ravenports is a universal packaging framework for *nix operating systems. For the user it provides easy access to binary packages of common software for multiple platforms. It has been the long-lasting champion on Repology’s top 10 repositories regarding package freshness (rarely dropping below 96 percent while all other projects keep below 90!).

For the porter it offers a well-designed and elegant means of writing cross-platform buildsheets that allow building the same version of the software with (completely or mostly) the same compile-time configuration on different operating systems or distributions.

And for the developer it means a real-world project that’s written in modern Ada (ravenadm) and C (pkg) – as well as some Perl for support scripts and make. Things feel very optimized and fast. Not being a programmer though, I cannot really say anything about the actual code and thus leave it to the interested reader’s judgement.

Modern KDE on FreeBSD

New stuff in the official FreeBSD repositories! The X11 team has landed a newer version of libinput, opening up the way for KDE Plasma 5.14 in ports. That’s a pretty big update and it may frighten people with a new wallpaper. What this means is that the graphical stack is once again on-par with what Plasma upstream expects, and we can get back to chasing releases as soon as they happen, rather than gnashing our teeth at missing dependencies. The KDE-FreeBSD CI servers are in the process of being upgraded to 12-STABLE, and we’re integrating with the new experimental CI systems as well. This means we are chasing sensibly-modern systems (13-CURRENT is out of scope).

The many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2

Talking to FreeBSD users recently, I became aware that while I’ve created a lot of tools, I haven’t done a very good job of explaining how, and more importantly when to use them. So for all of the EC2-curious FreeBSD users out there: Here are the many ways to launch and configure FreeBSD in EC2 — ranging from the simplest to the most complicated (but most powerful):

• Launch FreeBSD and SSH in
• Launch FreeBSD and provide user-data
• Use the AMI Builder to create a customized FreeBSD AMI
• Build a FreeBSD AMI from a modified FreeBSD source tree
• Build your own disk image

I hope I’ve provided tools which help you to run FreeBSD in EC2, no matter how common or unusual your needs are. If you find my work useful, please consider supporting my work in this area; while this is both something I enjoy working on and something which is useful for my day job (Tarsnap, my online backup service), having support would make it easier for me to prioritize FreeBSD/EC2 issues over other projects.

Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD

GOG.com prefers that you use their GOG Galaxy desktop app to download, install and manage all of your GOG games. But customers always have the option to install the game on their own terms, with a platform-specific installer. GOG offers these installers for Mac, Windows and/or Linux, depending on which platforms the game is available for.

• The installers truly are platform-specific:
• macOS games are distributed in a standard .pkg
• Windows games are distributed in a setup wizard .exe
• Linux games are distributed in a goofy shell archive

Of course, none of those are NetBSD. So, if I wanted to even attempt to play a game distributed by GOG.com on NetBSD, which one should I pick? The obvious choice is the Linux installer, since Linux is the most similar to NetBSD, right? Au contraire! In practice, I found that it is easier to download the Windows installer.

Here’s what I mean. For example, I ported the open source version of Aquaria to pkgsrc, but that package is only the game’s engine, not the multimedia data. The multimedia data is still copyrighted. Therefore, you need to get it from somewhere else. GOG is usually a good choice, because they distribute their games without DRM. And as mentioned earlier, picking the Linux installer seemed like a natural choice.

Now, actually PLAYING the games on NetBSD is a separate matter entirely. The game I’ve got here, though, my current obsession Pyre, is built with MonoGame and therefore could theoretically work on NetBSD, too, with the help of a library called FNA and a script for OpenBSD called fnaify. I do hope to create a pkgsrc package for FNA and port the fnaify script to NetBSD at some point.

Beastie Bits

• Software as a Reflection of Values With Bryan Cantrill
• Collection of bmc talks, updated 2018
• wump: incorrect wumpus movement probability
• Debugging Rust with VSCode on FreeBSD
• SMB/CIFS on FreeBSD
• BSD Tattoo
• pkgsrc-2018Q4 branch announcement
• toying with wireguard on openbsd
• new USB audio class v2.0 driver
• Todd Mortimer Removing ROP Gadgets from OpenBSD EuroBSDCon 2018
• OpenBSD 6.5 release page is online
• shell access to historical Unix versions in your browser

Feedback/Questions

• Brad - ZFS Features and Upgrades
• Andre - Splitting ZFS array
• Michael - Priority/nice value for Jails?

• 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

EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon

• This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria
• They've got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present
• There will also be a tutorial section of the conference
• AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!
• All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted
• Check the link for all the details on the talks - if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers! ***

FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

• The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU
• This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router
• Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up
• It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don't want to use the ones rolled by someone else
• For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router
• Of course if you're more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too ***

Signed pkgsrc package guide

• We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up
• It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)
• He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them
• The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer ***

Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports

• Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI
• In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things
• In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara
• In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead - but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he's done
• In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things ***

Interview - Chris Buechler - cmb@pfsense.com / @cbuechler

pfSense

Tutorial

pfSense walkthrough

News Roundup

FreeBSD challenge continues

• Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey
• In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first
• In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he's starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again - concludes that ports are the way to go
• In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch
• In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails! ***

BSD books in 2014

• BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them
• In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014
• In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and...
• Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)
• Check the link for all the details ***

How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images

• Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post
• Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch
• You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI
• It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time around we discuss how you can become a developer
• Kris also details the length of supported releases
• Expect lots of new features in 10.1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Jake writes in
• Niclas writes in
• Steffan writes in
• Antonio writes in
• Chris writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE is out

• The long awaited, giant release of FreeBSD is now official and ready to be downloaded
• One of the biggest releases in FreeBSD history, with tons of new updates
• Some features include: LDNS/Unbound replacing BIND, Clang by default (no GCC anymore), native Raspberry Pi support and other ARM improvements, bhyve, hyper-v support, AMD KMS, VirtIO, Xen PVHVM in GENERIC, lots of driver updates, ZFS on root in the installer, SMP patches to pf that drastically improve performance, Netmap support, pkgng by default, wireless stack improvements, a new iSCSI stack, FUSE in the base system... the list goes on and on
• Start up your freebsd-update or do a source-based upgrade ***

OpenSSH 6.5 CFT

• Our buddy Damien Miller announced a Call For Testing for OpenSSH 6.5
• Huge, huge release, focused on new features rather than bugfixes (but it includes those too)
• New ciphers, new key formats, new config options, see the mailing list for all the details
• Should be in OpenBSD 5.5 in May, look forward to it - but also help test on other platforms! ***

DIY NAS story, FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA

• Another new blog post about FreeNAS!
• Instead of updating the older tutorials, the author started fresh and wrote a new one for 2014
• "I did briefly consider suggesting nas4free for the EconoNAS blog, since it’s essentially a fork off the FreeNAS tree but may run better on slower hardware, but ultimately I couldn’t recommend anything other than FreeNAS"
• Really long article with lots of nice details about his setup, why you might want a NAS, etc.
• Speaking of FreeNAS, they released 9.2.1-BETA with lots of bugfixes ***

OpenBSD needed funding for electricity.. and they got it

• Briefly mentioned at the end of last week's show, but has blown up over the internet since
• OpenBSD in the headlines of major tech news sites: slashdot, zdnet, the register, hacker news, reddit, twitter.. thousands of comments
• They needed about $20,000 to cover electric costs for the server rack in Theo's basement
• Lots of positive reaction from the community helping out so far, and it appears they have reached their goal and got $100,000 in donations
• From Bob Beck: "we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately $100,000 in donations to the foundation"
• This is a shining example of the BSD community coming together, and even the Linux people realizing how critical BSD is to the world at large ***

Interview - Colin Percival - cperciva@freebsd.org / @cperciva

FreeBSD on Amazon EC2, backups with Tarsnap, 10.0-RELEASE, various topics

Tutorial

Bandwidth monitoring and testing

News Roundup

pfSense talk at Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyoukai

• Isaac Levy will be presenting "pfSense Practical Experiences: from home routers, to High-Availability Datacenter Deployments"
• He's also going to be looking for help to translate the pfSense documentation into Japanese
• The event is on February 17, 2014 if you're in the Tokyo area ***

m0n0wall 1.8.1 released

• For those who don't know, m0n0wall is an older BSD-based firewall OS that's mostly focused on embedded applications
• pfSense was forked from it in 2004, and has a lot more active development now
• They switched to FreeBSD 8.4 for this new version
• Full list of updates in the changelog
• This version requires at least 128MB RAM and a disk/CF size of 32MB or more, oh no! ***

Ansible and PF, plus NTP

• Another blog post from our buddy Michael Lucas
• There've been some NTP amplification attacks recently in the news
• The post describes how he configured ntpd on a lot of servers without a lot of work
• He leverages pf and ansible for the configuration
• OpenNTPD is, not surprisingly, unaffected - use it ***

ruBSD videos online

• Just a quick followup from a few weeks ago
• Theo and Henning's talks from ruBSD are now available for download
• There's also a nice interview with Theo ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 images are available
• Wine PBI is now available for 10
• 9.2 systems will now be able to upgrade to version 10 and keep their PBI library ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sha'ul writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Mike writes in
• Charlie writes in (and gets a reply)
• Kevin writes in ***

Headlines

Getting to know your portmgr

• In this interview they talk to one of the "Annoying Reminder Guys" - Erwin Lansing, the second longest serving member of FreeBSD's portmgr (also vice-president of the FreeBSD Foundation)
• He actually maintains the .dk ccTLD
• Describes FreeBSD as "the best well-hidden success story in operating systems, by now in the hands of more people than one can count and used by even more people, and not one of them knows it! It’s not only the best operating system currently around, but also the most supportive and inspiring community."
• In the next one they speak with Martin Wilke (miwi@)
• The usual, "what inspires you about FreeBSD" "how did you get into it" etc. ***

vBSDCon wrap-up compilation

• Lots of write-ups about vBSDCon gathered in one place
• Some from OpenBSD guys
• Some from FreeBSD guys
• Some from RootBSD
• Some from iXsystems
• Some from Verisign
• And of course our own wrap-up chat in BSD Now Episode 009 ***

Faces of FreeBSD

• This week they talk to Gábor Páli from Hungary
• Talks about his past as a game programmer and how it got involved with FreeBSD
• "I met János Háber, who admired the technical merits of FreeBSD and recommended it over the popular GNU/Linux distributions. I downloaded FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE, found it reliable, consistent, easy to install, update and use."
• He's been contributing since 2008 and does lots of work with Haskell in ports
• He also organizes EuroBSDCon and is secretary of the FreeBSD Core Team ***

Dragonfly 3.6 released

• dports now default instead of pkgsrc
• Big SMP scaling improvements
• Experimental i915 and KMS support
• See our interview with Justin Sherrill if you want to hear (a lot) more about it - nearly an hour long ***

Interview - Jordan Hubbard - jkh@freebsd.org / @omgjkh

FreeBSD's founding and future

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD router, part 2

• Note: there was a mistake in the video version of the tutorial, please consult the written version for the proper instructions. ***

News Roundup

pfSense 2.1 on AWS EC2

• We now have pfSense 2.1 available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• In keeping with the community spirit, they’re also offering a free "public" AMI
• Check the FAQ and User Guide on their site for additional details
• Interesting possibilities with pfSense in the cloud ***

Puffy on the desktop

• Distrowatch, a primarily Linux-focused site, features an OpenBSD 5.4 review
• They talk about using it on the desktop, how to set it up
• Very long write-up, curious Linux users should give it a read
• Ends with "Most people will still see OpenBSD as an operating system for servers and firewalls, but OpenBSD can also be used in desktop environments if the user doesn't mind a little manual work. The payoff is a very light, responsive system that is unlikely to ever misbehave" ***

Two-factor authentication with SSH

• Blog post about using a yubikey with SSH public keys
• Uses a combination of a OTP, BSDAuth and OpenBSD's login.conf, but it can be used with PAM on other systems as well
• Allows for two-factor authentication (a la gmail) in case your private key is compromised
• Anyone interested in an extra-hardened SSH server should give it a read ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 has approximately 400 PBIs for public consumption
• They will be merging the GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops into the 10.0 ports tree - please help test them, this is pretty big news in and of itself!
• PCDM is coming along nicely, more bugs are getting fixed
• Added ZFS dataset options to PCBSD’s new text installer front-end ***

Feedback/Questions

• Ben writes in
• Florian writes in
• Zach writes in
• Addison writes in
• Adam writes in
• Adam's BSD Router Project tutorial can be downloaded here. ***