Headlines

Entropy

A brief introduction to randomness

• Problem: Computers are very predictable. This is by design.

But what if we want them to act unpredictably? This is very useful if we want to secure our private communications with randomized keys, or not let people cheat at video games, or if we're doing statistical simulations or similar.

Logs grinding Netatalk on FreeBSD to a hault

I’ve heard it said the cobbler’s children walk barefoot. While posessing the qualities of a famed financial investment strategy, it speaks to how we generally put more effort into things for others than ourselves; at least in business.
The HP Microserver I share with Clara is a modest affair compared to what we run at work. It has six spinning rust drives and two SSDs which are ZFS-mirrored; not even in a RAID 10 equivalent. This is underlaid with GELI for encryption, and served to our Macs with Netatalk over gigabit Ethernet with jumbo frames.

News Roundup

NetBSD Core Team Changes

Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions.
Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group, and bringing it up to date with modern functionality.

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Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests.

WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD

A while ago I wanted to learn more about OpenBSD development. So I picked a project, in this case WireGuard, to develop a native client for. Over the last two years, with many different iterations, and working closely with the WireGuard's creator (Jason [Jason A. Donenfeld - Ed.], CC'd), it started to become a serious project eventually reaching parity with other official implementations. Finally, we are here and I think it is time for any further development to happen inside the src tree.

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FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop

I’m using FreeBSD again on a laptop for some reasons so expect to read more about FreeBSD here. This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1.

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Beastie Bits

• List of useful FreeBSD Commands
• Master Your Network With Unix Command Line Tools
• Original Unix containers aka FreeBSD jails
• Flashback : 2003 Article : Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor
• FreeBSD Journal March/April 2020 Filesystems: ZFS Encryption, FUSE, and more, plus Network Bridges
• HAMBug meeting will be online again in June, so those from all over the world are welcome to join, June 9th (2nd Tuesday of each month) at 18:30 Eastern

Feedback/Questions

• + Lyubomir - GELI and ZFS
• Patrick - powerd and powerd++

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

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