Headlines

What I learned during my FreeBSD intership

Hi, my name is Mitchell Horne. I am a computer engineering student at the University of Waterloo, currently in my third year of studies, and fortunate to have been one of the FreeBSD Foundation’s co-op students this past term (January to April). During this time I worked under Ed Maste, in the Foundation’s small Kitchener office, along with another co-op student Arshan Khanifar. My term has now come to an end, and so I’d like to share a little bit about my experience as a newcomer to FreeBSD and open-source development.

I’ll begin with some quick background — and a small admission of guilt. I have been an open-source user for a large part of my life. When I was a teenager I started playing around with Linux, which opened my eyes to the wider world of free software. Other than some small contributions to GNOME, my experience has been mostly as an end user; however, the value of these projects and the open-source philosophy was not lost on me, and is most of what motivated my interest in this position. Before beginning this term I had no personal experience with any of the BSDs, although I knew of their existence and was extremely excited to receive the position. I knew it would be a great opportunity for growth, but I must confess that my naivety about FreeBSD caused me to make the silent assumption that this would be a form of compromise — a stepping stone that would eventually allow me to work on open-source projects that are somehow “greater” or more “legitimate”. After four months spent immersed in this project I have learned how it operates, witnessed its community, and learned about its history. I am happy to admit that I was completely mistaken. Saying it now seems obvious, but FreeBSD is a project with its own distinct uses, goals, and identity. For many there may exist no greater opportunity than to work on FreeBSD full time, and with what I know now I would have a hard time coming up with a project that is more “legitimate”.

• What I Liked

In all cases, the work I submitted this term was reviewed by no less than two people before being committed. The feedback and criticism I received was always both constructive and to the point, and it commented on everything from high-level ideas to small style issues. I appreciate having these thorough reviews in place, since I believe it ultimately encourages people to accept only their best work. It is indicative of the high quality that already exists within every aspect of this project, and this commitment to quality is something that should continue to be honored as a core value. As I’ve discovered in some of my previous work terms, it is all too easy cut corners in the name of a deadline or changing priorities, but the fact that FreeBSD doesn’t need to make these types of compromises is a testament to the power of free software.

It’s a small thing, but the quality and completeness of the FreeBSD documentation was hugely helpful throughout my term. Everything you might need to know about utilities, library functions, the kernel, and more can be found in a man page; and the handbook is a great resource as both an introduction to the operating system and a reference. I only wish I had taken some time earlier in the term to explore the different documents more thoroughly, as they cover a wide range of interesting and useful topics. The effort people put into writing and maintaining FreeBSD’s documentation is easy to overlook, but its value cannot be overstated.

• What I Learned

Although there was a lot I enjoyed, there were certainly many struggles I faced throughout the term, and lessons to be learned from them. I expect that some of issues I faced may be specific to FreeBSD, while others may be common to open-source projects in general. I don’t have enough experience to speculate on which is which, so I will leave this to the reader.

The first lesson can be summed up simply: you have to advocate for your own work. FreeBSD is made up in large part by volunteer efforts, and in many cases there is more work to go around than people available to do it. A consequence of this is that there will not be anybody there to check up on you. Even in my position where I actually had a direct supervisor, Ed often had his plate full with so many other things that the responsibility to find someone to look at my work fell to me. Admittedly, a couple of smaller changes I worked on got left behind or stuck in review simply because there wasn’t a clear person/place to reach out to.

I think this is both a barrier of entry to FreeBSD and a mental hurdle that I needed to get over. If there’s a change you want to see included or reviewed, then you may have to be the one to push for it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Perhaps this process should be easier for newcomers or infrequent contributors (the disconnect between Bugzilla and Phabricator definitely leaves a lot to be desired), but we also have to be aware that this simply isn’t the reality right now. Getting your work looked at may require a little bit more self-motivation, but I’d argue that there are much worse problems a project like FreeBSD could have than this.

I understand this a lot better now, but it is still something I struggle with. I’m not naturally the type of person who easily connects with others or asks for help, so I see this as an area for future growth rather than simply a struggle I encountered and overcame over the course of this work term. Certainly it is an important skill to understand the value of your own work, and equally important is the ability to communicate that value to others.

I also learned the importance of starting small. My first week or two on the job mainly involved getting set up and comfortable with the workflow. After this initial stage, I began exploring the project and found myself overwhelmed by its scale. With so many possible areas to investigate, and so much work happening at once, I felt quite lost on where to begin. Many of the potential projects I found were too far beyond my experience level, and most small bugs were picked up and fixed quickly by more experienced contributors before I could even get to them.

It’s easy to make the mistake that FreeBSD is made up solely of a few rock-star committers that do everything. This is how it appears at face-value, as reading through commits, bug reports, and mailing lists yields a few of the same names over and over. The reality is that just as important are the hundreds of users and infrequent contributors who take the time to submit bug reports, patches, or feedback. Even though there are some people who would fall under the umbrella of a rock-star committer, they didn’t get there overnight. Rather, they have built their skills and knowledge through many years of involvement in FreeBSD and similar projects.

As a student coming into this project and having high expectations of myself, it was easy to set the bar too high by comparing myself against those big committers, and feel that my work was insignificant, inadequate, and simply too infrequent. In reality, there is no reason I should have felt this way. In a way, this comparison is disrespectful to those who have reached this level, as it took them a long time to get there, and it’s a humbling reminder that any skill worth learning requires time, patience, and dedication. It is easy to focus on an end product and simply wish to be there, but in order to be truly successful one must start small, and find satisfaction in the struggle of learning something new. I take pride in the many small successes I’ve had throughout my term here, and appreciate the fact that my journey into FreeBSD and open-source software is only just beginning.

• Closing Thoughts

I would like to close with some brief thank-you’s. First, to everyone at the Foundation for being so helpful, and allowing this position to exist in the first place. I am extremely grateful to have been given this unique opportunity to learn about and give back to the open-source world. I’d also like to thank my office mates; Ed: for being an excellent mentor, who offered an endless wealth of knowledge and willingness to share it. My classmate and fellow intern Arshan: for giving me a sense of camaraderie and the comforting reminder that at many moments he was as lost as I was. Finally, a quick thanks to everyone else I crossed paths with who offered reviews and advice. I appreciate your help and look forward to working with you all further.

I am walking away from this co-op with a much greater appreciation for this project, and have made it a goal to remain involved in some capacity. I feel that I’ve gained a little bit of a wider perspective on my place in the software world, something I never really got from my previous co-ops. Whether it ends up being just a stepping stone, or the beginning of much larger involvement, I thoroughly enjoyed my time here.

Recent Developments in FreeBSD

• Support for encrypted, compressed (gzip and zstd), and network crash dumps enabled by default on most platforms
• Intel Microcode Splitter
• Intel Spec Store Bypass Disable control
• Raspberry Pi 3B+ Ethernet Driver
• IBRS for i386
• Upcoming:
• Microcode updater for AMD CPUs
• the RACK TCP/IP stack, from Netflix
• Voting in the FreeBSD Core Election begins today:

DigitalOcean Digital Ocean Promo Link for BSD Now Listeners

Running FreeNAS on a DigitalOcean Droplet

• Need to backup your FreeNAS offsite? Run a locked down instance in the cloud, and replicate to it
• The tutorial walks though the steps of converting a fresh FreeBSD based droplet into a FreeNAS
• Create a droplet, and add a small secondary block-storage device
• Boot the droplet, login, and download FreeNAS
• Disable swap, enable ‘foot shooting’ mode in GEOM
• use dd to write the FreeNAS installer to the boot disk
• Reboot the droplet, and use the FreeNAS installer to install FreeNAS to the secondary block storage device
• Now, reimage the droplet with FreeBSD again, to replace the FreeNAS installer
• Boot, and dd FreeNAS from the secondary block storage device back to the boot disk
• You can now destroy the secondary block device
• Now you have a FreeNAS, and can take it from there.
• Use the FreeNAS replication wizard to configure sending snapshots from your home NAS to your cloud NAS
• Note: You might consider creating a new block storage device to create a larger pool, that you can more easily grow over time, rather than using the boot device in the droplet as your main pool.

News Roundup

Network Manager Control for OpenBSD (Updated)

• Generalities

• I just remind the scope of this small tool:

  • allow you to pre-define several cable or wifi connections
  • let nmctl to connect automatically to the first available one
  • allow you to easily switch from one network connection to an other one
  • create openbox dynamic menus

• Enhancements in this version

This is my second development version: 0.2. I've added performed several changes in the code:

• code style cleanup, to better match the python recommendations
• adapt the tool to allow to connect to an Open-wifi having blancs in the name. This happens in some hotels
• implement a loop as work-around concerning the arp table issue.

The source code is still on the git of Sourceforge.net. You can see the files here

And you can download the last version here

• Feedbacks after few months

I'm using this script on my OpenBSD laptop since about 5 months. In my case, I'm mainly using the openbox menus and the --restart option.

• The Openbox menus

The openbox menus are working fine. As explain in my previous blog, I just have to create 2 entries in my openbox's menu.xml file, and all the rest comes automatically from nmctl itself thanks to the --list and --scan options. I've not changed this part of nmctl since it works as expected (for me :-) ).

• The --restart option

Because I'm very lazy, and because OpenBSD is very simple to use, I've added the command "nmctl --restart" in the /etc/apm/resume script. Thanks to apmd, this script will be used each time I'm opening the lid of my laptop. In other words, each time I'll opening my laptop, nmctl will search the optimum network connection for me. But I had several issues in this scenario. Most of the problems were linked to the arp table issues. Indeed, in some circumstances, my proxy IP address was associated to the cable interface instead of the wifi interface or vice-versa. As consequence I'm not able to connect to the proxy, thus not able to connect to internet. So the ping to google (final test nmctl perform) is failing. Knowing that anyhow, I'm doing a full arp cleanup, it's not clear for me from where this problem come from. To solve this situation I've implemented a "retry" concept. In other words, before testing an another possible network connection (as listed in my /etc/nmctl.conf file), the script try 3x the current connection's parameters. If you want to reduce or increase this figures, you can do it via the --retry parameter.

• Results of my expertise with this small tool

Where ever I'm located, my laptop is now connecting automatically to the wifi / cable connection previously identified for this location. Currently I have 3 places where I have Wifi credentials and 2 offices places where I just have to plug the network cable. Since the /etc/apm/resume scripts is triggered when I open the lid of the laptop, I just have to make sure that I plug the RJ45 before opening the laptop. For the rest, I do not have to type any commands, OpenBSD do all what is needed ;-). I hotels or restaurants, I can just connect to the Open Wifi thanks to the openbox menu created by "nmctl --scan".

• Next steps

• Documentation

The tool is missing lot of documentation. I appreciate OpenBSD for his great documentation, so I have to do the same. I plan to write a README and a man page at first instances. But since my laziness, I will do it as soon as I see some interest for this tool from other persons.

• Tests

I now have to travel and see how to see the script react on the different situations. Interested persons are welcome to share with me the outcome of their tests. I'm curious how it work.

OpenBSD 6.3 on EdgeRouter Lite simple upgrade method

• TL;DR

OpenBSD 6.3 oceton upgrade instructions may not factor that your ERL is running from the USB key they want wiped with the miniroot63.fs image loaded on. Place the bsd.rd for OpenBSD 6.3 on the sd0i slice used by U-Boot for the kernel, and then edit the boot command to run it.

• a tiny upgrade

The OpenBSD documentation is comprehensive, but there might be rough corners around what are probably edge cases in their user base. People running EdgeRouter Lite hardware for example, who are looking to upgrade from 6.2 to 6.3. The documentation, which gave us everything we needed last time, left me with some questions about how to upgrade. In INSTALL.octeon, the Upgrading section does mention: The best solution, whenever possible, is to backup your data and reinstall from scratch I had to check if that directive existed in the documentation for other architectures. I wondered if oceton users were getting singled out. We were not. Just simplicity and pragmatism.

• Reading on:

To upgrade OpenBSD 6.3 from a previous version, start with the general instructions in the section "Installing OpenBSD". But that section requires us to boot off of TFTP or NFS. Which I don’t want to do right now. Could also use a USB stick with the miniroot63.fs installed on it. But as the ERL only has a single USB port, we would have to remove the USB stick with the current install on it. Once we get to the Install or Upgrade prompt, there would be nothing to upgrade. Well, I guess I could use a USB hub. But the ERL’s USB port is inside the case. With all the screws in. And the tools are neatly put away. And I’d have to pull the USB hub from behind a workstation. And it’s two am. And I cleaned up the cabling in the lab this past weekend. Looks nice for once. So I don’t want to futz around with all that. There must be an almost imperceptibly easier way of doing this than setting up a TFTP server or NFS share in five minutes… Right?

iXsystems Boise Technology Show 2018 Recap

OpenZFS User Conference Slides & Videos

• Thank you ZFS
• ZSTD Compression
• Pool Layout Considerations
• ZFS Releases
• Helping Developers Help You
• ZFS and MySQL on Linux
• Micron
• OSNEXUS
• ZFS at Six Feet Up
• Flexible Disk Use with OpenZFS

Batch editing files with ed

• what’s ‘ed’?

ed is this sort of terrifying text editor. A typical interaction with ed for me in the past has gone something like this:

$ ed help ? h ? asdfasdfasdfsadf ? <close terminal in frustration>

Basically if you do something wrong, ed will just print out a single, unhelpful, ?. So I’d basically dismissed ed as an old arcane Unix tool that had no practical use today. vi is a successor to ed, except with a visual interface instead of this ?

• surprise: Ed is actually sort of cool and fun

So if Ed is a terrifying thing that only prints ? at you, why am I writing a blog post about it? WELL!!!! On April 1 this year, Michael W Lucas published a new short book called Ed Mastery. I like his writing, and even though it was sort of an april fool’s joke, it was ALSO a legitimate actual real book, and so I bought it and read it to see if his claims that Ed is actually interesting were true. And it was so cool!!!! I found out:

• how to get Ed to give you better error messages than just ?
• that the name of the grep command comes from ed syntax (g/re/p)
• the basics of how to navigate and edit files using ed

All of that was a cool Unix history lesson, but did not make me want to actually use Ed in real life. But!!!

The other neat thing about Ed (that did make me want to use it!) is that any Ed session corresponds to a script that you can replay! So if I know Ed, then I can use Ed basically as a way to easily apply vim-macro-like programs to my files.

Beastie Bits

• FreeBSD Mastery: Jails -- Help make it happen
• Video: OpenZFS Basics presented by George Wilson and Matt Ahrens at Scale 16x back in March 2018
• DragonFlyBSD’s IPFW gets highspeed lockless in-kernel NAT
• A Love Letter to OpenBSD
• New talks, and the F-bomb
• Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc
• BSD Meetup in Zurich: May 24th
• BSD Meetup in Warsaw: May 24th
• MeetBSD 2018

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

• Seth - First time poudriere Builder
• Farhan - Why we didn't go FreeBSD
• architech - Encryption Feedback
• Dave - Handy Tip on setting up automated coredump handling for FreeBSD

• 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

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EdgeRouter Lite, meet OpenBSD

• The ERL, much like the Raspberry Pi and a bunch of other cheap boards, is getting more and more popular as more things get ported to run on it
• We've covered installing NetBSD and FreeBSD on them before, but OpenBSD has gotten a lot better support for them as well now (including the onboard storage in 5.8)
• Ted Unangst got a hold of one recently and kindly wrote up some notes about installing and using OpenBSD on it
• He covers doing a network install, getting the (slightly strange) bootloader working with u-boot and some final notes about the hardware
• More discussion can be found on Hacker News and various other places
• One thing to note about these devices: because of their MIPS64 processor, they'll have weaker ASLR than X86 CPUs (and no W^X at all) ***

Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System interview

• For those who don't know, the "Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" is a semi-recently-revived technical reference book for FreeBSD development
• InfoQ has a review of the book up for anyone who might be interested, but they also have an interview the authors
• "The book takes an approach to FreeBSD from inside out, starting with kernel services, then moving to process and memory management, I/O and devices, filesystems, IPC and network protocols, and finally system startup and shutdown. The book provides dense, technical information in a clear way, with lots of pseudo-code, diagrams, and tables to illustrate the main points."
• Aside from detailing a few of the chapters, the interview covers who the book's target audience is, some history of the project, long-term support, some of the newer features and some general OS development topics ***

Path list parameter in OpenBSD tame

• We've mentioned OpenBSD's relatively new "tame" subsystem a couple times before: it's an easy-to-implement "self-containment" framework, allowing programs to have a reduced feature set mode with even less privileges
• One of the early concerns from users of other process containment tools was that tame was too broad in the way it separated disk access - you could either read/write files or not, nothing in between
• Now there's the option to create a whitelist of specific files and directories that your binary is allowed to access, giving a much finer-grained set of controls to developers
• The next step is to add tame restraints to the OpenBSD userland utilities, which should probably be done by 5.9
• More discussion can be found on Reddit and Hacker News ***

FreeBSD & PC-BSD 10.2-RELEASE

• The FreeBSD team has released the second minor version bump to the 10.x branch, including all the fixes from 10-STABLE since 10.1 came out
• The Linux compatibility layer has been updated to support CentOS 6, rather than the much older Fedora Core base used previously, and the DRM graphics code has been updated to match Linux 3.8.13
• New installations (and newly-upgraded systems) will use the quarterly binary package set, rather than the rolling release model that most people are used to
• A VXLAN driver was added, allowing you to create virtual LANs by encapsulating the ethernet frame in a UDP packet
• The bhyve codebase is much newer, enabling support for AMD CPUs with SVM and AMD-V extensions
• ARM and ARM64 code saw some fixes and improvements, including SMP support on a few specific boards and support for a few new boards
• The bootloader now supports entering your GELI passphrase before loading the kernel in full disk encryption setups
• In addition to assorted userland fixes and driver improvements, various third party tools in the base system were updated: resolvconf, ISC NTPd, netcat, file, unbound, OpenSSL, sendmail
• Check the full release notes for the rest of the details and changes
• PC-BSD also followed with their 10.2-RELEASE, sporting a few more additional features ***

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

OpenSSH: phasing out broken crypto, default cipher changes

News Roundup

NetBSD at Open Source Conference Shimane

• We weren't the only ones away at conferences last week - the Japanese NetBSD guys are always raiding one event or another
• This time they had NetBSD running on some Sony NWS devices (MIPS-based)
• JavaStations were also on display - something we haven't ever seen before (made between 1996-2000) ***

BAFUG videos

• The Bay Area FreeBSD users group has been uploading some videos of their recent meetings
• Devin Teske hosts the first one, discussing adding GELI support to the bootloader, including some video demonstrations of how it works
• Shortly after beginning, Adrian Chadd takes over the conversation and they discuss various problems (and solutions) related to the bootloader - for example, how can we type encryption passwords with non-US keyboard layouts
• In a second video, Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy introduce "NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X"
• In it, they discuss their ideas of merging more Mac OS X features into FreeBSD (launchd to replace the init system, some APIs, etc)
• People should record presentations at their BSD users groups and send them to us ***

L2TP over IPSEC on OpenBSD

• If you've got an OpenBSD box and some Mac OS X clients that need secure communications, surprise: they can work together pretty well
• Using only the base tools in both operating systems, you can build a nice IPSEC setup for tunneling all your traffic
• This guide specifically covers L2TP, using npppd and pre-shared keys
• Server setup, client setup, firewall configuration and routing-related settings are all covered in detail ***

Reliable bare metal with TrueOS

• Imagine a server version of PC-BSD with some useful utilities preinstalled - that's basically TrueOS
• This article walks you through setting up a FreeBSD -CURRENT server (using TrueOS) to create a pretty solid backup solution
• Most importantly, he also covers how to keep everything redundant and deal with hard drives failing
• The author chose to go with the -CURRENT branch because of the delay between regular releases, and newer features not making their way to users as fast as he'd like
• Another factor is that there are no binary snapshots of FreeBSD -CURRENT that can be easily used for in-place upgrades, but with TrueOS (and some other BSDs) there are ***

Kernel W^X on i386

• We mentioned some big W^X kernel changes in OpenBSD a while back, but the work was mainly for x86_64 CPU architecture (which makes sense; that's what most people run now)
• Mike Larkin is back again, and isn't leaving the people with older hardware out, committing similar kernel work into the i386 platform now as well
• Check out our interview with Mike for some more background info on memory protections like W^X ***

Feedback/Questions

• Markus writes in
• Sean writes in
• Theo writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenSMTPD for the whole family

• Setting up a BSD mail server is something a lot of us are probably familiar with doing, at least for our own accounts
• This article talks about configuring a home mail server too, but even for the other people you live with
• After convincing his wife to use their BSD-based Owncloud server for backups, the author talks about moving her over to his brand new OpenSMTPD server too
• If you've ever run a mail server and had to deal with greylisting, you'll appreciate the struggle he went through
• In the end, BGP-based list distribution saved the day, and his family is being served well by a BSD box ***

NetBSD on the Edgerouter Lite

• We've talked a lot about building your own BSD-based router on the show, but not many of the devices we mention are in the same price range as consumer devices
• The EdgeRouter Lite, a small MIPS-powered machine, is starting to become popular (and is a bit cheaper)
• A NetBSD developer has been hacking on it, and documents the steps to get a working install in this blog post
• The process is fairly simple, and you can cross-compile your own installation image on any CPU architecture (even from another BSD!)
• OpenBSD and FreeBSD also have some support for these devices ***

Bitrig at NYC*BUG

• The New York City BSD users group has semi-regular meetings with presentations, and this time the speaker was John Vernaleo
• John discussed Bitrig, an OpenBSD fork that we've talked about a couple times on the show
• He talks about what they've been up to lately, why they're doing what they're doing, difference in supported platforms
• Ports and packages between the two projects are almost exactly the same, but he covers the differences in the base systems, how (some) patches get shared between the two and finally some development model differences ***

OPNsense, meet HardenedBSD

• Speaking of forks, two FreeBSD-based forked projects we've mentioned on the show, HardenedBSD and OPNsense, have decided to join forces
• Backporting their changes to the 10-STABLE branch, HardenedBSD hopes to introduce some of their security additions to the OPNsense codebase
• Paired up with LibreSSL, this combination should offer a good solution for anyone wanting a BSD-based firewall with an easy web interface
• We'll cover more news on the collaboration as it comes out ***

Interview - Mike Larkin - mlarkin@openbsd.org / @mlarkin2012

Memory protections in OpenBSD: W^X, ASLR, PIE, SSP

News Roundup

A closer look at FreeBSD

• The week wouldn't be complete without at least one BSD article making it to a mainstream tech site
• This time, it's a high-level overview of FreeBSD, some of its features and where it's used
• Being that it's an overview article on a more mainstream site, you won't find anything too technical - it covers some BSD history, stability, ZFS, LLVM and Clang, ports and packages, jails and the licensing
• If you have any BSD-curious Linux friends, this might be a good one to send to them ***

Linksys NSLU2 and NetBSD

• The Linksys NSLU2 is a proprietary network-attached storage device introduced back in 2004
• "About 2 months ago I set a goal to run some kind of BSD on the spare Linksys NSLU2 I had. This was driven mostly by curiosity, after listening to a few BSDNow episodes and becoming a regular listener [...]"
• After doing some research, the author of this post discovered that he could cross-compile NetBSD for the device straight from his Linux box
• If you've got one of these old devices kicking around, check out this write-up and get some BSD action on there ***

OpenBSD disklabel templates

• We've covered OpenBSD's "autoinstall" feature for unattended installations in the past, but one area where it didn't offer a lot of customization was with the disk layout
• With a few recent changes, there are now a series of templates you can use for a completely customized partition scheme
• This article takes you through the process of configuring an autoinstall answer file and adding the new section for disklabel
• Combine this new feature with our -stable iso tutorial, and you could deploy completely patched and customized images en masse pretty easily ***

FreeBSD native ARM builds

• FreeBSD -CURRENT builds for the ARM CPU architecture can now be built natively, without utilities that aren't part of base
• Some of the older board-specific kernel configuration files have been replaced, and now the "IMC6" target is used
• This goes along with what we read in the most recent quarterly status report - ARM is starting to get treated as a first class citizen ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Ron writes in
• Charles writes in
• Bostjan writes in ***

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 ***