NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

TrueNAS is Multi-OS

There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used.
Once software applications became prominent, your hardware’s OS determined the applications you could run. Application vendors were forced to juggle the burden of “portability” between OS platforms, choosing carefully the operating systems they’d develop their software to. Then, there were the great OS Wars of the 1990s, replete with the rampant competition, licensing battles, and nasty lawsuits, which more or less gave birth to the “open source OS” era.
The advent of the hypervisor simultaneously gave way to the “virtual era” which set us on a path of agnosticism toward the OS. Instead of choosing from the applications available for your chosen OS, you could simply install another OS on the same hardware for your chosen application. The OS became nothing but a necessary cog in the stack.
TrueNAS open storage enables this “post-OS era” with support for storage clients of all UNIX flavors, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, VMware, Citrix, and many others. Containerization has carried that mentality even further. An operating system, like the hardware that runs it, is now just thought of as part of the “infrastructure”.

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Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD 9.0, for a FreeBSD guy

I had one of my other HP Microservers brought back from the office last week to help with this working-from-home world we’re in right now. I was going to wipe an old version of Debian Wheezy/Xen and install FreeBSD to mirror my other machines before thinking: why not NetBSD?

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News Roundup

FreeBSD's New Code of Conduct

• FreeBSD Announcement Email

Gaming on OpenBSD

While no one would expect this, there are huge efforts from a small team to bring more games into OpenBSD. In fact, now some commercial games works natively now, thanks to Mono or Java. There are no wine or linux emulation layer in OpenBSD.
Here is a small list of most well known games that run on OpenBSD:

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'dig' a little deeper

I knew the existence of the dig command but didn't exactly know when and how to use it. Then, just recently I encountered an issue that allowed me to learn and make use of it.

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HAMMER2 and periodic snapshots

The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system.

• git: Implement periodic hammer2 snapshots ***

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

• Cy - OpenSSL relicensing
• Christian - lagg vlans and iocage
• Brad - SMR ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

5x if_bridge Performance Improvement

With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Kristof Provost harnesses new parallel techniques to uncork performance bottleneck

• Kristof also streamed some of his work, providing an interesting insight into how such development work happens
• > https://www.twitch.tv/provostk/videos ***

How Unix Won

+> Unix has won in every conceivable way. And in true mythic style, it contains the seeds of its own eclipse. This is my subjective historical narrative of how that happened.

I’m using the name “Unix” to include the entire family of operating systems descended from it, or that have been heavily influenced by it. That includes Linux, SunOS, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and many, many others.
Both major mobile OSs, Android and iOS, have Unix roots. Their billions of users dwarf those using clunky things like laptops and desktops, but even there, Windows is only the non-Unix viable OS. Almost everything running server-side in giant datacenters is Linux.
How did Unix win?

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News Roundup

Check logs of central syslog-ng log host on FreeBSD

This blog post continues where the blog post A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD left off. Open source solutions to check syslog log messages exist, such as Logcheck or Logwatch. Although these are not to difficult to implement and maintain, I still found these to much. So I went for my own home grown solution to check the syslog messages of the SoCruel.NU central log host. And the solution presented in this blog post works pretty well for me!

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Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD

Until recently, I’ve never had a chance to use VLANs on FreeBSD hosts, though I sometimes configure them on ethernet switches.
But when I was playing with vnet jails, I suddenly got interested in VLAN configuration on FreeBSD and experimented with it for some time.
I wrote this short article to summarize my current understanding of how to configure VLANs on FreeBSD.

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Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS

Some hardware is not supported in illumos yet, but luckily there is bhyve which supports pci passthrough to any guest operating system. To continue with my OmniOS desktop on "modern" hardware I would love wifi support, so why not using a bhyve guest as router zone which provide the required drivers?

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TrueNAS 11.3-U2 is Generally Available

TrueNAS 11.3-U2.1 is generally available as of 4/22/2020. This update is based on FreeNAS 11.3-U2 which has had over 50k deployments and received excellent community and third party reviews. The Release Notes are available on the iXsystems.com website.

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Beastie Bits

HardenedBSD April 2020 Status Report
NYC Bug’s Mailing List - Listing of open Dev Jobs

Feedback/Questions

• Greg - Lenovo
• Matt - BSD Packaging

• Morgan - Performance

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

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Headlines

EKCD - Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD

Some time ago, I was describing how to configure networking crash dumps. In that post, I mentioned that there is also the possibility to encrypt crash dumps. Today we will look into this functionality. Initially, it was implemented during Google Summer of Code 2013 by my friend Konrad Witaszczyk, who made it available in FreeBSD 12. If you can understand Polish, you can also look into his presentation on BSD-PL on which he gave a comprehensive review of all kernel crash dumps features.

The main issue with crash dumps is that they may include sensitive information available in memory during a crash. They will contain all the data from the kernel and the userland, like passwords, private keys, etc. While dumping them, they are written to unencrypted storage, so if somebody took out the hard drive, they could access sensitive data. If you are sending a crash dump through the network, it may be captured by third parties. Locally the data are written directly to a dump device, skipping the GEOM subsystem. The purpose of that is to allow a kernel to write a crash dump even in case a panic occurs in the GEOM subsystem. It means that a crash dump cannot be automatically encrypted with GELI.

Time on Unix

Time, a word that is entangled in everything in our lives, something we’re intimately familiar with. Keeping track of it is important for many activities we do.

Over millennia we’ve developed different ways to calculate it. Most prominently, we’ve relied on the position the sun appears to be at in the sky, what is called apparent solar time.

We’ve decided to split it as seasons pass, counting one full cycle of the 4 seasons as a year, a full rotation around the sun. We’ve also divided the passing of light to the lack thereof as days, a rotation of the earth on itself. Moving on to more precise clock divisions such as seconds, minutes, and hours, units that meant different things at different points in history. Ultimately, as travel got faster, the different ways of counting time that evolved in multiple places had to converge. People had to agree on what it all meant.

See the article for more

News Roundup

Improve ZVOL sync write performance by using a taskq

A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD - Part 1

syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure.

HEADS UP: NetBSD Entropy Overhaul

This week I committed an overhaul of the kernel entropy system. Please let me know if you observe any snags! For the technical background, see the thread on tech-kern a few months ago: https://mail-index.NetBSD.org/tech-kern/2019/12/21/msg025876.html.

Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment

I used T_PAGEFLT’s blog post as a reference for setting my NetBSD kernel development environment since his website is down I’m putting down the steps here so it would be helpful for starters.

Beastie Bits

• You can now use ccache to speed up dsynth even more.
• Improving libossaudio, and the future of OSS in NetBSD
• DragonFlyBSD DHCPCD Import dhcpcd-9.0.2 with the following changes
• Reminder: watch this space for upcoming FreeBSD Office Hours, next is May 13th at 2pm Eastern, 18:00 UTC

Feedback/Questions

• Ghislain - ZFS Question
• Jake - Paypal Donations
• Oswin - Hammer tutorial

• 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 11 goals and discussion

• Something that actually happened at BSDCan this year...
• During the FreeBSD devsummit, there was some discussion about what changes will be made in 11.0-RELEASE
• Some of MWL's notes include: the test suite will be merged to 10-STABLE, more work on the MIPS platforms, LLDB getting more attention, UEFI boot and install support
• A large list of possibilities was also included and open for discussion, including AES-GCM in IPSEC, ASLR, OpenMP, ICC, in-place kernel upgrades, Capsicum improvements, TCP performance improvements and A LOT more
• There's also some notes from the devsummit virtualization session, mostly talking about bhyve
• Lastly, he also provides some notes about ports and packages and where they're going ***

An SSH honeypot with OpenBSD and Kippo

• Everyone loves messing with script kiddies, right?
• This blog post introduces Kippo, an SSH honeypot tool, and how to use it in combination with OpenBSD
• It includes a step by step (or rather, command by command) guide and some tips for running a honeypot securely
• You can use this to get new 0day exploits or find weaknesses in your systems
• OpenBSD makes a great companion for security testing tools like this with all its exploit mitigation techniques that protect all running applications ***

NetBSD foundation financial report

• The NetBSD foundation has posted their 2013 financial report
• It's a very "no nonsense" page, pretty much only the hard numbers
• In 2013, they got $26,000 of income in donations
• The rest of the page shows all the details, how they spent it on hardware, consulting, conference fees, legal costs and everything else
• Be sure to donate to whichever BSDs you like and use! ***

Building a fully-encrypted NAS with OpenBSD

• Usually the popular choice for a NAS system is FreeNAS, or plain FreeBSD if you know what you're doing
• This article takes a look at the OpenBSD side and explains how to build a NAS with security in mind
• The NAS will be fully encrypted, no separate /boot partition like FreeBSD and FreeNAS require - this means the kernel itself is even protected
• The obvious trade-off is the lack of ZFS support for storage, but this is an interesting idea that would fit most people's needs too
• There's also a bit of background information on NAS systems in general, some NAS-specific security tips and even some nice graphs and pictures of the hardware - fantastic write up! ***

Interview - Brian Callahan & Aaron Bieber - admin@lists.nycbug.org & admin@cobug.org

Forming a local BSD Users Group

Tutorial

The basics of pkgsrc

News Roundup

FreeBSD periodic mails vs. monitoring

• If you've ever been an admin for a lot of FreeBSD boxes, you've probably noticed that you get a lot of email
• This page tells about all the different alert emails, cron emails and other reports you might end up getting, as well as how to manage them
• From bad SSH logins to Zabbix alerts, it all adds up quickly
• It highlights the periodic.conf file and FreeBSD's periodic daemon, as well as some third party monitoring tools you can use to keep track of your servers ***

Doing cool stuff with OpenBSD routing domains

• A blog post from our viewer and regular emailer, Kjell-Aleksander!
• He manages some internally-routed IP ranges at his work, but didn't want to have equipment for each separate project
• This is where OpenBSD routing domains and pf come in to save the day
• The blog post goes through the process with all the network details you could ever dream of
• He even named his networking equipment... after us ***

LibreSSL, the good and the bad

• We're all probably familiar with OpenBSD's fork of OpenSSL at this point
• However, "for those of you that don't know it, OpenSSL is at the same time the best and most popular SSL/TLS library available, and utter junk"
• This article talks about some of the cryptographic development challenges involved with maintaining such a massive project
• You need cryptographers, software engineers, software optimization specialists - there are a lot of roles that need to be filled
• It also mentions some OpenSSL alternatives and recent LibreSSL progress, as well as some downsides to the fork - the main one being their aim for backwards compatibility ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots going on in PCBSD land this week, AppCafe has been redesigned
• The PBI system is being replaced with pkgng, PBIs will be automatically converted once you update
• In the more recent post, there's some further explanation of the PBI system and the reason for the transition
• It's got lots of details on the different ways to install software, so hopefully it will clear up any possible confusion ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Sean writes in
• tsyn 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 ***