NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Did Linux Kill Commercial Unix?

Sales of commercial Unix have fallen off a cliff. There has to be something behind this dramatic decline. Has Linux killed its ancestor by becoming a perfectly viable replacement, like an operating system version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

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Wireguard: Simple and Secure VPN in FreeBSD

• A great article by Tom Jones about setting up Wireguard on FreeBSD ***

Setup a Three Node Replicated GlusterFS Cluster on FreeBSD

GlusterFS (GFS) is the open source equivalent to Microsoft's Distributed Filesystem (DFS). It's a service that replicates the contents of a filesystem in real time from one server to another. Clients connect to any server and changes made to a file will replicate automatically. It's similar to something like rsync or syncthing, but much more automatic and transparent. A FreeBSD port has been available since v3.4, and (as of this post) is currently at version 8.0 with 9.0 being released soon.

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News Roundup

OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano (1st Gen)

Lenovo has finally made a smaller version of its X1 Carbon, something I’ve been looking forward to for years.

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NetBSD on the EdgeRouter Lite

NetBSD-current now has pre-built octeon bootable images (which will appear in NetBSD 10.0) for the evbmips port, so I decided to finally give it a try. I've been happily running OpenBSD/octeon on my EdgeRouter Lite for a few years now, and have previously published some notes including more detail about the CPU.

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“TLS Mastery” first draft done!

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Beastie Bits

• A Thread on a FreeBSD Desktop for PineBook Pro
• FOSSASIA Conference - March 2021(Virtual)
• WireGuard for pfSense Software
• NetBSD logo to going Moon *** ###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. ### Producer's Note > Hey everybody, it’s JT here. After our AMA episode where I mentioned I was looking for older BSD Retail Copies, I was contacted by Andrew who hooked me up with a bunch of OpenBSD disks from the 4.x era. So shout out to him, and since that worked so well, I figured I'd give it another shot and ask that if anyone has any old Unixes that will run on an 8088, 8086, or 286 and you're willing to send me copies of the disks. I've recently dug out an old 286 system and I’d love to get a Unix OS on it. I know of Minix, Xenix and Microport, but I haven’t been able to find many versions of them. I've found Microport 1.3.3, and SCO Xenix... but that's about it. Let me know if you happen to have any other versions, or know where I can get them.
  

Feedback/Questions

• Christian - ZFS replication and verification
• Iain - progress
• Paul - APU2 device ***
• 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

BSDCan and pkgsrcCon videos

• Even more BSDCan 2015 videos are slowly but surely making their way to the internet
• Nigel Williams, Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
• Stephen Bourne, Early days of Unix and design of sh
• John Criswell, Protecting FreeBSD with Secure Virtual Architecture
• Shany Michaely, Expanding RDMA capability over Ethernet in FreeBSD
• John-Mark Gurney, Adding AES-ICM and AES-GCM to OpenCrypto
• Sevan Janiyan, Adventures in building open source software
• And finally, the BSDCan 2015 closing
• Some videos from this year's pkgsrcCon are also starting to appear online
• Sevan Janiyan, A year of pkgsrc 2014 - 2015
• Pierre Pronchery, pkgsrc meets pkg-ng
• Jonathan Perkin, pkgsrc at Joyent
• Jörg Sonnenberger, pkg_install script framework
• Benny Siegert, New Features in BulkTracker
• This is the first time we've ever seen recordings from the conference - hopefully they continue this trend ***

OPNsense 15.7 released

• The OPNsense team has released version 15.7, almost exactly six months after their initial debut
• In addition to pulling in the latest security fixes from upstream FreeBSD, 15.7 also includes new integration of an intrusion detection system (and new GUI for it) as well as new blacklisting options for the proxy server
• Taking a note from upstream PF's playbook, ALTQ traffic shaping support has finally been retired as of this release (it was deprecated from OpenBSD a few years ago, and the code was completely removed just over a year ago)
• The LibreSSL flavor has been promoted to production-ready, and users can easily migrate over from OpenSSL via the GUI - switching between the two is simple; no commitment needed
• Various third party ports have also been bumped up to their latest versions to keep things fresh, and there's the usual round of bug fixes included
• Shortly afterwards, 15.7.1 was released with a few more small fixes ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Okinawa

• If you liked last week's episode then you'll probably know what to expect with this one
• The NetBSD users group of Japan hit another open source conference, this time in Okinawa
• This time, they had a few interesting NetBSD machines on display that we didn't get to see in the interview last week
• We'd love to see something like this in North America or Europe too - anyone up for installing BSD on some interesting devices and showing them off at a Linux con? ***

OpenBSD BGP and VRFs

• "VRFs, or in OpenBSD rdomains, are a simple, yet powerful (and sometimes confusing) topic"
• This article aims to explain both BGP and rdomains, using network diagrams, for some network isolation goodness
• With multiple rdomains, it's also possible to have two upstream internet connections, but lock different groups of your internal network to just one of them
• The idea of a "guest network" can greatly benefit from this separation as well, even allowing for the same IP ranges to be used without issues
• Combining rdomains with the BGP protocol allows for some very selective and precise blocking/passing of traffic between networks, which is also covered in detail here
• The BSDCan talk on rdomains expands on the subject a bit more if you haven't seen it, as well as a few related posts ***

Interview - Lee Sharp - lee@smallwall.org

SmallWall, a continuation of m0n0wall

News Roundup

Solaris adopts more BSD goodies

• We mentioned a while back that Oracle developers have begun porting a current version of OpenBSD's PF firewall to their next version, even contributing back patches for SMP and other bug fixes
• They recently published an article about PF, talking about what's different about it on their platform compared to others - not especially useful for BSD users, but interesting to read if you like firewalls
• Darren Moffat, who was part of originally getting an SSH implementation into Solaris, has a second blog post up about their "SunSSH" fork
• Going forward, their next version is going to offer a completely vanilla OpenSSH option as well, with the plan being to phase out SunSSH after that
• The article talks a bit about the history of getting SSH into the OS, forking the code and also lists some of the differences between the two
• In a third blog post, they talk about a new system call they're borrowing from OpenBSD, getentropy(2), as well as the addition of arc4random to their libc
• With an up-to-date and SMP-capable PF, ZFS with native encryption, jail-like Zones, unaltered OpenSSH and secure entropy calls… is Solaris becoming better than us?
• Look forward to the upcoming "Solaris Now" podcast _{(not really)} ***

EuroBSDCon 2015 talks and tutorials

• This year's EuroBSDCon is set to be held in Sweden at the beginning of October, and the preliminary list of accepted presentations has been published
• The list looks pretty well-balanced between the different BSDs, something Paul would be happy to see if he was still with us
• It even includes an interesting DragonFly talk and a couple talks from NetBSD developers, in addition to plenty of FreeBSD and OpenBSD of course
• There are also a few tutorials planned for the event, some you've probably seen already and some you haven't
• Registration for the event will be opening very soon (likely this week or next) ***

Using ZFS replication to improve offsite backups

• If you take backups seriously, you're probably using ZFS and probably keeping an offsite copy of the data
• This article covers doing just that, but with a focus on making use of the replication capability
• It'll walk you through taking a snapshot of your pool and then replicating it to another remote system, using "zfs send" and SSH - this has the benefit of only transferring the files that have changed since the last time you did it
• Steps are also taken to allow a regular user to take and manage snapshots, so you don't need to be root for the SSH transfer
• Data integrity is a long process - filesystem-level checksums, resistance to hardware failure, ECC memory, multiple copies in different locations... they all play a role in keeping your files secure; don't skip out on any of them
• One thing the author didn't mention in his post: having an offline copy of the data, ideally sealed in a safe place, is also important ***

Block encryption in OpenBSD

• We've covered ways to do fully-encrypted installations of OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) before, but that requires dedicating a whole drive or partition to the sensitive data
• This blog post takes you through the process of creating encrypted containers in OpenBSD, à la TrueCrypt - that is, a file-backed virtual device with an encrypted filesystem
• It goes through creating a file that looks like random data, pointing vnconfig at it, setting up the crypto and finally using it as a fake storage device
• The encrypted container method offers the advantage of being a bit more portable across installations than other ways ***

Docker hits FreeBSD ports

• The inevitable has happened, and an early FreeBSD port of docker is finally here
• Some details and directions are available to read if you'd like to give it a try, as well as a list of which features work and which don't
• There was also some Hacker News discussion on the topic ***

Microsoft donates to OpenSSH

• We've talked about big businesses using BSD and contributing back before, even mentioning a few other large public donations - now it's Microsoft's turn
• With their recent decision to integrate OpenSSH into an upcoming Windows release, Microsoft has donated a large sum of money to the OpenBSD foundation, making them a gold-level sponsor
• They've also posted some contract work offers on the OpenSSH mailing list, and say that their changes will be upstreamed if appropriate - we're always glad to see this ***

Feedback/Questions

• Joe writes in
• Mike writes in
• Randy writes in
• Tony writes in
• Kevin 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 ***