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

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2022, my first BSD conference (and how they are different)

Red Hat’s OpenShift vs FreeBSD Jails

News Roundup

The history of sending signals to Unix process groups

Running a Docker Host under OpenBSD using vmd(8)

Toolchains adventures - Q3 2022

Beastie Bits

-current has moved to 7.2
Several /sbin daemons are now dynamically-linked
Announcing the pkgsrc 2022Q3 branch

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

• Hans - datacenters and dust
• Tim - Boot issue
• aaron- dwm tiling ***
• 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

Deploying FreeBSD on Oracle Cloud

The Things Spammers Believe - A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends

EuroBSDcon 2022

News Roundup

“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” Status Report

OpenBGPD 7.6 Released

OpenBSD may soon gain further memory protections: immutable userland mappings

Portable OpenSSH commits now SSH-signed

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.

• 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

Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD

Using the FreeBSD RACK TCP Stack

News Roundup

pkgupdate, an OpenBSD script to update packages fast

Plasma System Monitor and FreeBSD

TrueNAS vs FreeNAS (and why you should upgrade!)

Automatically lock screen on OpenBSD using xidle and xlock

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 - LightDM with Slick-Greeter.md
• Dave - Cloned Interface.md
• MJ Rodriguez - Sony.md

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

Headlines

DragonFlyBSD's Kernel Optimizations Are Paying Off

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been working on a big VM rework in the name of performance and other kernel improvements recently. Here is a look at how those DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT improvements are paying off compared to DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as well as FreeBSD 12 and five Linux distribution releases. With Dillon using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system, we used that too for this round of BSD vs. Linux performance benchmarks.
The work by Dillon on the VM overhaul and other changes (including more HAMMER2 file-system work) will ultimately culminate with the DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release (well, unless he opts for DragonFlyBSD 6.0 or so). These are benchmarks of the latest DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT daily ISO as of this week benchmarked across DragonFlyBSD 5.4.3 stable, FreeBSD 12.0, Ubuntu 19.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, Debian 9.9, Debian Buster, and CentOS 7 1810 as a wide variety of reference points both from newer and older Linux distributions. (As for no Clear Linux reference point for a speedy reference point, it currently has a regression with AMD + Samsung NVMe SSD support on some hardware, including this box, prohibiting the drive from coming up due to a presumed power management issue that is still being resolved.)
With Matthew Dillon doing much of his development on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system after he last year proclaimed the greatness of these AMD HEDT CPUs, for this round of testing I also used a Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX with 32 cores / 64 threads. Tests of other AMD/Intel hardware with DragonFlyBSD will come as the next stable release is near and all of the kernel work has settled down. For now it's mostly entertaining our own curiosity how well these DragonFlyBSD optimizations are paying off and how it's increasing the competition against FreeBSD 12 and Linux distributions.

---

What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux?

Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, "What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?"
I've also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions.
They also apply, to some extent, to other BSDs. However, an important disclaimer applies to this article.
This list is aimed at people who are used to Linux and are curious about OpenBSD. It is written to highlight the most important changes from their perspective, not the absolute most important changes from a technical standpoint.
Please bear with me.

• A terminal is a terminal is a terminal
• Practical differences
• Security and system administration
• Why philosophical differences matter
• So what do I choose?
• How to try OpenBSD ***

News Roundup

NetBSD 2019 Google Summer of Code

We are very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2019 projects:

• Akul Abhilash Pillai - Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD kernel fuzzing
• Manikishan Ghantasala - Add KNF (NetBSD style) clang-format configuration
• Siddharth Muralee - Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD
• Surya P - Implementation of COMPAT_LINUX and COMPAT_NETBSD32 DRM ioctls support for NetBSD kernel
• Jason High - Incorporation of Argon2 Password Hashing Algorithm into NetBSD
• Saurav Prakash - Porting NetBSD to HummingBoard Pulse
• Naveen Narayanan - Porting WINE to amd64 architecture on NetBSD

The communiting bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started yesterday. The coding period will start from May 27 until August 19.
Please welcome all our students and a big good luck to students and mentors! A big thank to Google and The NetBSD Foundation organization mentors and administrators! Looking forward to a great Google Summer of Code!

Reducing that contention

The opening keynote at EuroBSDCon 2016 predicted the future 10 years of BSDs. Amongst all the funny previsions, gnn@FreeBSD said that by 2026 OpenBSD will have its first implementation of SMP. Almost 3 years after this talk, that sounds like a plausible forecast... Why? Where are we? What can we do? Let's dive into the issue!

• State of affairs

Most of OpenBSD's kernel still runs under a single lock, ze KERNEL_LOCK(). That includes most of the syscalls, most of the interrupt handlers and most of the fault handlers. Most of them, not all of them. Meaning we have collected & fixed bugs while setting up infrastructures and examples. Now this lock remains the principal responsible for the spin % you can observe in top(1) and systat(1).
I believe that we opted for a difficult hike when we decided to start removing this lock from the bottom. As a result many SCSI & Network interrupt handlers as well as all Audio & USB ones can be executed without big lock. On the other hand very few syscalls are already or almost ready to be unlocked, as we incorrectly say. This explains why basic primitives like tsleep(9), csignal() and selwakeup() are only receiving attention now that the top of the Network Stack is running (mostly) without big lock.

• Next steps

In the past years, most of our efforts have been invested into the Network Stack. As I already mentioned it should be ready to be parallelized. However think we should now concentrate on removing the KERNEL_LOCK(), even if the code paths aren't performance critical.

• See the Article for the rest of the post

fnaify 1.3 released - more games are "fnaify & run" now

This release finally addresses some of the problems that prevent simple running of several games.
This happens for example when an old FNA.dll library comes with the games that doesn't match the API of our native libraries like SDL2, OpenAL, or MojoShader anymore. Some of those cases can be fixed by simply dropping in a newer FNA.dll. fnaify now asks if FNA 17.12 should be automatically added if a known incompatible FNA version is found. You simply answer yes or no.

Another blocker happens when the game expects to check the SteamAPI - either from a running Steam process, or a bundled steam_api library. OpenBSD 6.5-current now has steamworks-nosteam in ports, a stub library for Steamworks.NET that prevents games from crashing simply because an API function isn't found. The repo is here. fnaify now finds this library in /usr/local/share/steamstubs and uses it instead of the bundled (full) Steamworks.NET.dll.
This may help with any games that use this layer to interact with the SteamAPI, mostly those that can only be obtained via Steam.

vmctl(8): command line syntax changed

The order of the arguments in the create, start, and stop commands of vmctl(8) has been changed to match a commonly expected style. Manual usage or scripting with vmctl must be adjusted to use the new syntax.
For example, the old syntax looked like this:

# vmctl create disk.qcow2 -s 50G

The new syntax specifies the command options before the argument:

# vmctl create -s 50G disk.qcow2

Something that Linux distributions should not do when packaging things

Right now I am a bit unhappy at Fedora for a specific packaging situation, so let me tell you a little story of what I, as a system administrator, would really like distributions to not do.
For reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry, I run a Prometheus and Grafana setup on both my home and office Fedora Linux machines (among other things, it gives me a place to test out various things involving them). When I set this up, I used the official upstream versions of both, because I needed to match what we are running (or would soon be).
Recently, Fedora decided to package Grafana themselves (as a RPM), and they called this RPM package 'grafana'. Since the two different packages are different versions of the same thing as far as package management tools are concerned, Fedora basically took over the 'grafana' package name from Grafana. This caused my systems to offer to upgrade me from the Grafana.com 'grafana-6.1.5-1' package to the Fedora 'grafana-6.1.6-1.fc29' one, which I actually did after taking reasonable steps to make sure that the Fedora version of 6.1.6 was compatible with the file layouts and so on from the Grafana version of 6.1.5.
Why is this a problem? It's simple. If you're going to take over a package name from the upstream, you should keep up with the upstream releases. If you take over a package name and don't keep up to date or keep up to date only sporadically, you cause all sorts of heartburn for system administrators who use the package. The least annoying future of this situation is that Fedora has abandoned Grafana at 6.1.6 and I am going to 'upgrade' it with the upstream 6.2.1, which will hopefully be a transparent replacement and not blow up in my face. The most annoying future is that Fedora and Grafana keep ping-ponging versions back and forth, which will make 'dnf upgrade' into a minefield (because it will frequently try to give me a 'grafana' upgrade that I don't want and that would be dangerous to accept). And of course this situation turns Fedora version upgrades into their own minefield, since now I risk an upgrade to Fedora 30 actually reverting the 'grafana' package version on me.

---

Beastie Bits

• [talk] ZFS v UFS on APU2 msata SSD with FreeBSD
• NetBSD 8.1 is out
• lazyboi – the laziest possible way to send raw HTTP POST data
• A Keyboard layout that changes by markov frequency
• Open Source Game Clones
• EuroBSDcon program & registration open ***

Feedback/Questions

• John - A segment idea
• Johnny - Audio only format please don't
• Alex - Thanks and some Linux Snaps vs PBI feedback

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

##Headlines
###MidnightBSD 1.0 now available

I’m happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 1.0 for amd64 and i386. Over the years, many ambitious goals were set for our 1.0 release. As it approached, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to accomplish all of them. This release is more of a natural progression rather than a groundbreaking event. It includes many updates to the base system, improvements to the package manager, an updated compiler, and tools.
Of particular note, you can now boot off of ZFS and use NVME SSDs and some AMD Radeon graphics cards support acceleration. AMD Ryzen support has greatly improved in this release. We also have added bhyve from FreeBSD.
The 1.0 release is finally available. Still building packages for i386 and plan to do an amd64 package build later in the week. The single largest issue with the release process has been the web server performance. The CPU is overloaded and has been at solid 100% for several days. The server has a core i7 7700 in it. I’m trying to figure out what to buy as an upgrade so that we don’t continue to have this issue going forward. As it’s actually blocked in multiple processes, a 6 or 8 core chip might be an improvement for the workload…

• Download links: https://www.midnightbsd.org/download/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=33&v=-rlk2wFsjJ4

###MeetBSD Review

MeetBSD 2018 took place at the sprawling Intel Santa Clara campus. The venue itself felt more like an olive branch than a simple friendly gesture by Intel. In truth it felt like a bit of an apology. You get the subtle sense they feel bad about how the BSD’s were treated with the Meltdown and Specter flaws. In fact, you may be right to think they felt a bit sorry towards the entire open source community.

• MeetBSD 2018

At most massive venues the parking is the first concern, not so here - in fact that was rather straightforward. No, the real challenge is navigating the buildings. Luckily I had help from navigator extraordinaire, Hadea, who located the correct building, SC12 quickly. Finding the entrance took a moment or two though. The lobby itself was converted by iXsystems efficiently into the MeetBSD expo hall, clean, efficient and roomy with registration, some seating, and an extra conference room for on-on-one sessions. On day two sponsor booths were also setup. All who showed up on day one were warmly greeted with badges, lanyards and goodies by Denise and her friendly team.
Like every great BSD event, plenty of food was made available. And as always they make it look effortless. These events showcase iXsystem’s inherent generosity toward its community; with breakfast items in the back of the main auditorium room in the morning, boxed lunches, fruit and cookies at lunch time, and snacks for the rest of the day. But just in case your still hungry, there is a pizza meetup in another Intel room after day one and two.
MeetBSD leverages it’s realistically small crowd size on day one. The morning starts off with introductions of the entire group, the mic is passed around the room.
The group is a good mix of pros in the industry (such as Juniper, Intel, Ebay, Groupon, Cisco, etc), iX staff, and a few enthusiast. Lots of people with a focus or passion for networking. And, of course, some friendly Linux bashing went down for good measure, always followed by a good natured chuckle.

• MeetBSD Gives me The Feels

I find that I am subtly unnerved at this venue, and at lunch I saw it clearly. I have always had a strong geek radar, allowing me to navigate a new area (like Berkeley for MeetBSD of 2016, or even SCALE earlier this year in Pasadena), and in a glance I can see who is from my conference and who isn’t. This means it is easy, nearly effortless to know who to greet with a smile and a wave. These are MY people. Here at the Intel campus though it is different. The drive in alone reveals behemoth complexes all with well known tech names prominently displayed. This is Silicon Valley, and all of these people look like MY people. So much for knowing who’s from my conference. Thank goodness for those infamous BSD horns. None-the-less I am struck by how massive these tech giants are. And Intel is one of the largest of those giants, and see the physical reminders of this fact brought home the significance that they had opened their doors, wifi, and bathrooms to the BSD community.

###[EuroBSDcon 2018 Trip Reports]
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/eurobsd-2018-trip-report-joseph-mingrone/
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/eurobsd-2018-trip-report-vinicius-zavam/
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/eurobsd-2018-trip-report-emmanuel-vadot/

##News Roundup
###DNS over TLS in FreeBSD 12

With the arrival of OpenSSL 1.1.1, an upgraded Unbound, and some changes to the setup and init scripts, FreeBSD 12.0, currently in beta, now supports DNS over TLS out of the box.
DNS over TLS is just what it sounds like: DNS over TCP, but wrapped in a TLS session. It encrypts your requests and the server’s replies, and optionally allows you to verify the identity of the server. The advantages are protection against eavesdropping and manipulation of your DNS traffic; the drawbacks are a slight performance degradation and potential firewall traversal issues, as it runs over a non-standard port (TCP port 853) which may be blocked on some networks. Let’s take a look at how to set it up.

• Conclusion

We’ve seen how to set up Unbound—specifically, the local_unbound service in FreeBSD 12.0—to use DNS over TLS instead of plain UDP or TCP, using Cloudflare’s public DNS service as an example. We’ve looked at the performance impact, and at how to ensure (and verify) that Unbound validates the server certificate to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
The question that remains is whether it is all worth it. There is undeniably a performance hit, though this may improve with TLS 1.3. More importantly, there are currently very few DNS-over-TLS providers—only one, really, since Quad9 filter their responses—and you have to weigh the advantage of encrypting your DNS traffic against the disadvantage of sending it all to a single organization. I can’t answer that question for you, but I can tell you that the parameters are evolving quickly, and if your answer is negative today, it may not remain so for long. More providers will appear. Performance will improve with TLS 1.3 and QUIC. Within a year or two, running DNS over TLS may very well become the rule rather than the experimental exception.

###Upgrading OpenBSD with Ansible

• My router runs OpenBSD -current

A few months ago, I needed software that had just hit the ports tree. I didn’t want to wait for the next release, so I upgraded my router to use -current. Since then, I’ve continued running -current, which means upgrading to a newer snapshot every so often. Running -current is great, but the process of updating to a newer snapshot was cumbersome. Initially, I had to plug in a serial cable and then reboot into bsd.rd, hit enter ten times, then reboot, run sysmerge and update packages.
I eventually switched to upobsd to be able to upgrade without the need for a serial connection. The process was better, but still tiresome. Usually, I would prepare the special version of bsd.rd, boot on bsd.rd, and do something like wash the dishes in the meantime. After about ten minutes, I would dry my hands and then go back to my workstation to see whether the bsd.rd part had finished so I could run sysmerge and pkg_add, and then return to the dishes while it upgraded packages.
Out of laziness, I thought: “I should automate this,” but what happened instead is that I simply didn’t upgrade that machine very often. (Yes, laziness). With my router out of commission, life is very dull, because it is my gateway to the Internet. Even services hosted at my place (like my Mastodon instance) are not reachable when the router is down because I use multiple VLANs (so I need the router to jump across VLANs).

• Ansible Reboot Module

I recently got a new job, and one of my first tasks was auditing the Ansible roles written by my predecessors. In one role, the machine rebooted and they used the wait_for_connection module to wait for it to come back up. That sounded quite hackish to me, so out of curiosity, I tried to determine whether there was a better way. I also thought I might be able to use something similar to further automate my OpenBSD upgrades, and wanted to assess the cleanliness of this method. ;-)
I learned that with the then-upcoming 2.7 Ansible release, a proper reboot module would be included. I went to the docs, which stated that for a certain parameter:
I took this to mean that there was no support for OpenBSD. I looked at the code and, indeed, there was not. However, I believed that it wouldn’t be too hard to add it. I added the missing pieces for OpenBSD, tested it on my poor Pine64 and then submitted it upstream. After a quick back and forth, the module’s author merged it into devel (having a friend working at Red Hat helped the process, merci Cyril !) A couple days later, the release engineer merged it into stable-2.7.
I proceeded to actually write the playbook, and then I hit a bug. The parameter reboot_timeout was not recognized by Ansible. This feature would definitely be useful on a slow machine (such as the Pine64 and its dying SD card). Again, my fix was merged into master by the module’s author and then merged into stable-2.7. 2.7.1 will be the first release to feature these fixes, but if you use OpenBSD -current, you already have access to them. I backported the patches when I updated ansible.
Fun fact about Ansible and reboots: “The win_reboot module was […] included with Ansible 2.1,” while for unix systems it wasn’t added until 2.7. :D For more details, you can read the module’s author blog article.

• The explanations

Ansible runs my script on the remote host to fetch the sets. It creates an answer file from the template and then gives it to upobsd. Once upobsd has created the kernel, Ansible copies it in place of /bsd on the host. The router reboots and boots on /bsd, which is upobsd’s bsd.rd. The installer runs in auto_update mode. Once it comes back from bsd.rd land, it archives the kernel and finishes by upgrading all the packages.
It also supports upgrading without fetching the sets ahead of time. For instance, I upgrade this way on my Pine64 because if I cared about speed, I wouldn’t use this weak computer with its dying SD card. For this case, I just comment out the path_sets variable and Ansible instead creates an answer file that will instruct the installer to fetch the sets from the designated mirror.
I’ve been archiving my kernels for a few years. It’s a nice way to fill up / keep a history of my upgrades. If I spot a regression, I can try a previous kernel … which may not work with the then-desynchronized userland, but that’s another story.
sysmerge already runs with rc.sysmerge in batch mode and sends the result by email. I don’t think there’s merit to running it again in the playbook. The only perk would be discovering in the terminal whether any files need to be manually merged, rather than reading exactly the same output in the email.
Initially, I used the openbsd_pkg module, but it doesn’t work on -current just before a release because pkg_add automatically looks for pub/OpenBSD/${release}/packages/${arch} (which is empty). I wrote and tested this playbook while 6.4 was around the corner, so I switched to command to be able to pass the -Dsnap parameter.

• The result

I’m very happy with the playbook! It performs the upgrade with as little intervention as possible and minimal downtime. \o/

###Using smartd to automatically run tests on your drives

Those programs can “control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe disks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure.” See the smartmontools website for more information.

NOTE: “Due to OS-specific issues and also depending on the different state of smartmontools development on the platforms, device support is not the same for all OS platforms.” – use the documentation for your OS.

I first started using smartd in March 2010 (according to that blog post, that’s when I still writing on both The FreeBSD Diary and this blog). Back then, and until recently, all I did was start smartd. As far as I can tell, all it did was send daily status messages via the FreeBSD periodic tools. I would set my drive devices via daily_status_smart_devices in /etc/periodic.conf and the daily status reports would include drive health information.

• Two types of tests
• My original abandoned attempt
• How do you prove it works?
• Looking at the test results
• Failed drive to the rescue
• smartd.conf I am using
• supernews

##Beastie Bits

• Decent Pics of “Relayd & Httpd Mastery” signature
• A Unix Shell poster from 1983
• Cambridge UNIX historians (Cambridge, United Kingdom)
• Goals for FreeBSD 13
• September/October 2018 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal Now Available
• Using acme.sh for Let’s Encrypt certificates on pkgsrc.org servers
• Deploying Anycast DNS Using OpenBSD and BGP
• How to check your data integrity?

##Feedback/Questions

• Raymond - MeetBSD California
  • Dev Summit Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb87fdKUIo8TNG6f94xo9_W-XXrEbqgWI
  • Conference Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb87fdKUIo8Q41aoPE6vssP-uF4dxk86b
  • Conference videos are still being processed, the rest should appear over the next few weeks.



• Greg - Stable vs Release


• Mjrodriguez - Open/FreeBSD support for Single Board computers

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

##Headlines
###FreeBSD Foundation Update, September 2018

• MESSAGE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Dear FreeBSD Community Member, It is hard to believe that September is over. The Foundation team had a busy month promoting FreeBSD all over the globe, bug fixing in preparation for 12.0, and setting plans in motion to kick off our 4th quarter fundraising and advocacy efforts. Take a minute to see what we’ve been up to and please consider making a donation to help us continue our efforts supporting FreeBSD!

• September 2018 Development Projects Update

In preparation for the release of FreeBSD 12.0, I have been working on investigating and fixing a backlog of kernel bug reports. Of course, this kind of work is never finished, and we will continue to make progress after the release. In the past couple of months I have fixed a combination of long-standing issues and recent regressions. Of note are a pair of UNIX domain socket bugs which had been affecting various applications for years. In particular, Chromium tabs would frequently hang unless a workaround was manually applied to the system, and the bug had started affecting recent versions of Firefox as well. Fixing these issues gave me an opportunity to revisit and extend our regression testing for UNIX sockets, which, in turn, resulted in some related bugs being identified and fixed.
Of late I have also been investigating reports of issues with ZFS, particularly, those reported on FreeBSD 11.2. A number of regressions, including a kernel memory leak and issues with ARC reclamation, have already been fixed for 12.0; investigation of other reports is ongoing. Those who closely follow FreeBSD-CURRENT know that some exciting work to improve memory usage on NUMA systems is now enabled by default. As is usually the case when new code is deployed in a diverse array of systems and workloads, a number of problems since have been identified. We are working on resolving them as soon as possible to ensure the quality of the release.
I’m passionate about maintaining FreeBSD’s stability and dependability as it continues to expand and grow new features, and I’m grateful to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring this work. We depend on users to report problems to the mailing lists and via the bug tracker, so please try running the 12.0 candidate builds and help us make 12.0 a great release.

• Fundraising Update: Supporting the Project

It’s officially Fall here at Foundation headquarters and we’re heading full-steam into our final fundraising campaign of the year. We couldn’t even have begun to reach our funding goal of $1.25 million dollars without the support from the companies who have partnered with us this year. Thank you to Verisign for becoming a Silver Partner. They now join a growing list of companies like Xiplink, NetApp, Microsoft, Tarsnap, VMware, and NeoSmart Technologies that are stepping up and showing their commitment to FreeBSD!
Funding from commercial users like these and individual users like yourself, help us continue our efforts of supporting critical areas of FreeBSD such as:

• Operating System Improvements: Providing staff to immediately respond to urgent problems and implement new features and functionality allowing for the innovation and stability you’ve come to rely on.
• Security: Providing engineering resources to bolster the capacity and responsiveness of the Security team providing your users with piece of mind when security issues arise.
• Release Engineering: Continue providing a full-time release engineer, resulting in timely and reliable releases you can plan around.
• Quality Assurance: Improving and increasing test coverage, continuous integration, and automated testing with a full-time software engineer to ensure you receive the highest quality, secure, and reliable operating system.
• New User Experience: Improving the process and documentation for getting new people involved with FreeBSD, and supporting those people as they become integrated into the FreeBSD Community providing the resources you may need to get new folks up to speed.
• Training: Supporting more FreeBSD training for undergraduates, graduates, and postgraduates. Growing the community means reaching people and catching their interest in systems software as early as possible and providing you with a bigger pool of candidates with the FreeBSD skills you’re looking for.
• Face-to-Face Opportunities: Facilitating collaboration among members of the community, and building connections throughout the industry to support a healthy and growing ecosystem and make it easier for you to find resources when questions emerge .

We can continue the above work, if we meet our goal this year!
If your company uses FreeBSD, please consider joining our growing list of 2018 partners. If you haven’t made your donation yet, please consider donating today. We are indebted to the individual donors, and companies listed above who have already shown their commitment to open source.
Thank you for supporting FreeBSD and the Foundation!

• September 2018 Release Engineering Update

The FreeBSD Release Engineering team continued working on the upcoming 12.0 RELEASE. At present, the 12.0 schedule had been adjusted by one week to allow for necessary works-in-progress to be completed.
Of note, one of the works-in-progress includes updating OpenSSL from 1.0.2 to 1.1.1, in order to avoid breaking the application binary interface (ABI) on an established stable branch.
Due to the level of non-trivial intrusiveness that had already been discovered and addressed in a project branch of the repository, it is possible (but not yet definite) that the schedule will need to be adjusted by another week to allow more time for larger and related updates for this particular update.
Should the 12.0-RELEASE schedule need to be adjusted at any time during the release cycle, the schedule on the FreeBSD project website will be updated accordingly. The current schedule is available at:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/schedule.html

• BSDCam 2018 Trip Report: Marie Helene Kvello-Aune

I’d like to start by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip to BSDCam(bridge) 2018. I wouldn’t have managed to attend otherwise. I’ve used FreeBSD in both personal and professional deployments since the year 2000, and over the last few years I have become more involved with development and documentation.
I arrived in Gatwick, London at midnight. On Monday, August 13, I took the train to Cambridge, and decided to do some touristy activities as I walked from the train station to Churchill College. I ran into Allan outside the hotel right before the sky decided it was time for a heavy rainfall. Monday was mostly spent settling in, recouping after travel, and hanging out with Allan, Brad, Will and Andy later in the afternoon/evening. Read more…

• Continuous Integration Update

The FreeBSD Foundation has sponsored the development of the Project’s continuous integration system, available at https://ci.FreeBSD.org, since June. Over the summer, we improved both the software and hardware infrastructure, and also added some new jobs for extending test coverage of the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches. Following are some highlights.

• New Hardware

The Foundation purchased 4 new build machines for scaling up the computation power for the various test jobs. These newer, faster machines substantially speed up the time it takes to test amd64 builds, so that failing changes can be identified more quickly. Also, in August, we received a donation of 2 PINE A64-LTS boards from PINE64.org, which will be put in the hardware test lab as one part of the continuous tests.

• CI Staging Environment

We used hardware from a previous generation CI system to build a staging environment for the CI infrastructure, which is available at
https://ci-dev.freebsd.org. It executes the configurations and scripts from the “staging” branch of the FreeBSD-CI repository, and the development feature branches. We also use it to experiment with the new version of the jenkins server and plugins. Having a staging environment avoids affecting the production CI environment, reducing downtime.

• Mail Notification

In July, we turned on failure notification for all the kernel and world build jobs. Committers will receive email containing the build information and failure log to inform them of possible problems with their modification on certain architectures. For amd64 of the -CURRENT branch, we also enabled the notification on failing regression test cases. Currently mail is sent only to the individual committers, but with help from postmaster team, we have created a dev-ci mailing list and will soon be also sending notifications there.

• New Test Job

In August, we updated the embedded script of the virtual machine image. Originally it only executed pre-defined tests, but now this behavior can be modified by the data on the attached disk. This mechanism is used for adding new ZFS tests jobs. We are also working on analyzing and fixing the failing and skipped test cases.

• Work in Progress

In August and September, we had two developer summits, one in Cambridge, UK and one in Bucharest, Romania. In these meetings, we discussed running special tests, such as ztest, which need a longer run time. We also planned the network testing for TCP/IP stack

###Daemonize - a Tiny C Library for Programming the UNIX Daemons

Whatever they say, writing System-V style UNIX daemons is hard. One has to follow many rules to make a daemon process behave correctly on diverse UNIX flavours. Moreover, debugging such a code might be somewhat tricky. On the other hand, the process of daemon initialisation is rigid and well defined so the corresponding code has to be written and debugged once and later can be reused countless number of times.
Developers of BSD UNIX were very aware of this, as there a C library function daemon() was available starting from version 4.4. The function, although non-standard, is present on many UNIXes. Unfortunately, it does not follow all the required steps to reliably run a process in the background on systems which follow System-V semantics (e.g. Linux). The details are available at the corresponding Linux man page. The main problem here, as I understand it, is that daemon() does not use the double-forking technique to avoid the situation when zombie processes appear.
Whenever I encounter a problem like this one, I know it is time to write a tiny C library which solves it. This is exactly how ‘daemonize’ was born (GitHub mirror). The library consists of only two files which are meant to be integrated into the source tree of your project. Recently I have updated the library and realised that it would be good to describe how to use it on this site.
If for some reason you want to make a Windows service, I have a battle tested template code for you as well.

• System-V Daemon Initialisation Procedure

To make discussion clear we shall quote the steps which have to be performed during a daemon initialisation (according to daemon(7) manual page on Linux). I do it to demonstrate that this task is more tricky than one might expect.

• So, here we go:

• Close all open file descriptors except standard input, output, and error (i.e. the first three file descriptors 0, 1, 2). This ensures that no accidentally passed file descriptor stays around in the daemon process. On Linux, this is best implemented by iterating through /proc/self/fd, with a fallback of iterating from file descriptor 3 to the value returned by getrlimit() for RLIMIT_NOFILE.

• Reset all signal handlers to their default. This is best done by iterating through the available signals up to the limit of _NSIG and resetting them to SIG_DFL.

• Reset the signal mask using sigprocmask().

• Sanitize the environment block, removing or resetting environment variables that might negatively impact daemon runtime.

• Call fork(), to create a background process.

• In the child, call setsid() to detach from any terminal and create an independent session.

• In the child, call fork() again, to ensure that the daemon can never re-acquire a terminal again.

• Call exit() in the first child, so that only the second child (the actual daemon process) stays around. This ensures that the daemon process is re-parented to init/PID 1, as all daemons should be.

• In the daemon process, connect /dev/null to standard input, output, and error.

• In the daemon process, reset the umask to 0, so that the file modes passed to open(), mkdir() and suchlike directly control the access mode of the created files and directories.

• In the daemon process, change the current directory to the root directory (/), in order to avoid that the daemon involuntarily blocks mount points from being unmounted.

• In the daemon process, write the daemon PID (as returned by getpid()) to a PID file, for example /run/foobar.pid (for a hypothetical daemon “foobar”) to ensure that the daemon cannot be started more than once. This must be implemented in race-free fashion so that the PID file is only updated when it is verified at the same time that the PID previously stored in the PID file no longer exists or belongs to a foreign process.

• In the daemon process, drop privileges, if possible and applicable.

• From the daemon process, notify the original process started that initialization is complete. This can be implemented via an unnamed pipe or similar communication channel that is created before the first fork() and hence available in both the original and the daemon process.

• Call exit() in the original process. The process that invoked the daemon must be able to rely on that this exit() happens after initialization is complete and all external communication channels are established and accessible.

The discussed library does most of the above-mentioned initialisation steps as it becomes immediately evident that implementation details for some of them heavily dependent on the internal logic of an application itself, so it is not possible to implement them in a universal library. I believe it is not a flaw, though, as the missed parts are safe to implement in an application code.

• The Library’s Application Programming Interface

The generic programming interface was loosely modelled after above-mentioned BSD’s daemon() function. The library provides two user available functions (one is, in fact, implemented on top of the other) as well as a set of flags to control a daemon creation behaviour.

• Conclusion

The objective of the library is to hide all the trickery of programming a daemon so you could concentrate on the more creative parts of your application. I hope it does this well.
If you are not only interested in writing a daemon, but also want to make yourself familiar with the techniques which are used to accomplish that, the source code is available. Moreover, I would advise anyone, who starts developing for a UNIX environment to do that, as it shows many intricacies of programming for these platforms.

##News Roundup
###EuroBSDCon 2018 travel report and obligatory pics

This was my first big BSD conference. We also planned - planned might be a big word - thought about doing a devsummit on Friday. Since the people who were in charge of that had a change of plans, I was sure it’d go horribly wrong.
The day before the devsummit and still in the wrong country, I mentioned the hours and venue on the wiki, and booked a reservation for a restaurant.
It turns out that everything was totally fine, and since the devsummit was at the conference venue (that was having tutorials that day), they even had signs pointing at the room we were given. Thanks EuroBSDCon conference organizers!
At the devsummit, we spent some time hacking. A few people came with “travel laptops” without access to anything, like Riastradh, so I gave him access to my own laptop. This didn’t hold very long and I kinda forgot about it, but for a few moments he had access to a NetBSD source tree and an 8 thread, 16GB RAM machine with which to build things.
We had a short introduction and I suggested we take some pictures, so here’s the ones we got. A few people were concerned about privacy, so they’re not pictured. We had small team to hold the camera :-)
At the actual conference days, I stayed at the speaker hotel with the other speakers. I’ve attempted to make conversation with some visibly FreeBSD/OpenBSD people, but didn’t have plans to talk about anything, so there was a lot of just following people silently.
Perhaps for the next conference I’ll prepare a list of questions to random BSD people and then very obviously grab a piece of paper and ask, “what was…”, read a bit from it, and say, “your latest kernel panic?”, I’m sure it’ll be a great conversation starter.
At the conference itself, was pretty cool to have folks like Kirk McKusick give first person accounts of some past events (Kirk gave a talk about governance at FreeBSD), or the second keynote by Ron Broersma.
My own talk was hastily prepared, it was difficult to bring the topic together into a coherent talk. Nevertheless, I managed to talk about stuff for a while 40 minutes, though usually I skip over so many details that I have trouble putting together a sufficiently long talk.
I mentioned some of my coolest bugs to solve (I should probably make a separate article about some!). A few people asked for the slides after the talk, so I guess it wasn’t totally incoherent.
It was really fun to meet some of my favourite NetBSD people. I got to show off my now fairly well working laptop (it took a lot of work by all of us!).
After the conference I came back with a conference cold, and it took a few days to recover from it. Hopefully I didn’t infect too many people on the way back.

###GhostBSD tested on real hardware T410 – better than TrueOS?

You might have heard about FreeBSD which is ultimately derived from UNIX back in the days. It is not Linux even though it is similar in many ways because Linux was designed to follow UNIX principles. Seeing is believing, so check out the video of the install and some apps as well!

Nowadays if you want some of that BSD on your personal desktop how to go about? Well there is a full package or distro called GhostBSD which is based on FreeBSD current with a Mate or XFCE desktop preconfigured. I did try another package called TrueOS before and you can check out my blog post as well.

Let’s give it a try on my Lenovo ThinkPad T410. You can download the latest version from ghostbsd.org. Creating a bootable USB drive was surprisingly difficult as rufus did not work and created a corrupted drive. You have to follow this procedure under Windows: download the 2.5GB .iso file and rename the extension to .img. Download Win32 Disk imager and burn the img file to an USB drive and boot from it. You will be able to start a live session and use the onboard setup to install GhostBSD unto a disk.

I did encounter some bugs or quirks along the way. The installer failed the first time for some unknown reason but worked on the second attempt. The first boot stopped upon initialization of the USB3 ports (the T410 does not have USB3) but I could use some ‘exit’ command line magic to continue. The second boot worked fine. Audio was only available through headphones, not speakers but that could partially be fixed using the command line again. Lot’s of installed apps did not show up in the start menu and on goes the quirks list.

Overall it is still better than TrueOS for me because drivers did work very well and I could address most of the existing bugs.

• On the upside:

• Free and open source FreeBSD package ready to go

• Mate or XFCE desktop (Mate is the only option for daily builds)

• Drivers work fine including LAN, WiFi, video 2D & 3D, audio, etc

• UFS or ZFS advanced file systems available

• Some downsides:

• Less driver and direct app support than Linux

• Installer and desktop have some quirks and bugs

• App-store is cumbersome, inferior to TrueOS

##Beastie Bits

• EuroBSDCon 2018 and NetBSD sanitizers
• New mandoc feature: -T html -O toc
• EuroBSDcon 2018
• Polish BSD User Group
• garbage[43]: What year is it?
• The Demo @ 50
• Microsoft ports DTrace from FreeBSD to Windows 10
• OpenBSD joins Twitter
• NetBSD curses ripoffline improvements
• FCP-0101: Deprecating most 10/100 Ethernet drivers
• Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q3 release
• Debian on OpenBSD vmd (without qemu or another debian system)
• A BSD authentication module for duress passwords (Joshua Stein)
• Disk Price/Performance Analysis

##Feedback/Questions

• DJ - Zombie ZFS
• Josua - arm tier 1? how to approach it
• -Gamah - 5ghz

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

##Headlines

###[FreeBSD DevSummit & EuroBSDcon 2018 in Romania]

• Your hosts are back from EuroBSDcon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania this year. The first two days of the conference are used for tutorials and devsummits (FreeBSD and NetBSD), while the last two are for talks.
• Although Benedict organized the devsummit in large parts, he did not attend it this year. He held his Ansible tutorial in the morning of the first day, followed by Niclas Zeising’s new ports and poudriere tutorial (which had a record attendance). It was intended for beginners that had never used poudriere before and those who wanted to create their first port. The tutorial was well received and Niclas already has ideas for extending it for future conferences.
• On the second day, Benedict took Kirk McKusick’s “An Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Operating System” tutorial, held as a one full day class this year. Although it was reduced in content, it went into enough depth of many areas of the kernel and operating system to spark many questions from attendees. Clearly, this is a good start into kernel programming as Kirk provides enough material and backstories to understand why certain things are implemented as they are.
• Olivier Robert took [https://www.talegraph.com/tales/l2o9ltrvsE](pictures from the devsummit) and created a nice gallery out of it.
• Devsummit evenings saw dinners at two restaurants that allowed developers to spend some time talking over food and drinks.
• The conference opened on the next day with the opening session held by Mihai Carabas. He introduced the first keynote speaker, a colleague of his who presented “Lightweight virtualization with LightVM and Unikraft”.
• Benedict helped out at the FreeBSD Foundation sponsor table and talked to people. He saw the following talks in between:

Selfhosting as an alternative to the public cloud (by Albert Dengg)
Using Boot Environments at Scale (by Allan Jude)
Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
FreeBSD Graphics (by Niclas Zeising)

• Allan spent a lot of time talking to people and helping track down issues they were having, in addition to attending many talks:

  Hacking together a FreeBSD presentation streaming box – For as little as possible (by Tom Jones)
  Introduction of FreeBSD in new environments (by Baptiste Daroussin)
  Keynote: Some computing and networking historical perspectives (by Ron Broersma)
  Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
  FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
  Being a BSD user (by Roller Angel)
  From “Hello World” to the VFS Layer: building a beadm for DragonFly BSD (by Michael Voight)

• We also met the winner of our Power Bagel raffle from Episode 2^8. He received the item in the meantime and had it with him at the conference, providing a power outlet to charge other people’s devices.
• During the closing session, GroffTheBSDGoat was handed over to Deb Goodkin, who will bring the little guy to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference and then to MeetBSD later this year. It was also revealed that next year’s EuroBSDcon will be held in Lillehammer, Norway.
• Thanks to all the speakers, helpers, sponsors, organizers, and attendees for making it a successful conferences. There were no talks recorded this year, but the slides will be uploaded to the EuroBSDcon website in a couple of weeks. The OpenBSD talks are already available, so check them out.

###Software disenchantment

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:
@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I’ll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)
You’ve probably heard this mantra: “programmer time is more expensive than computer time”. What it means basically is that we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.

• Everything is unbearably slow

Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
Google Inbox, a web app written by Google, running in Chrome browser also by Google, takes 13 seconds to open moderately-sized emails:
It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because it’s the only way anything can be animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesn’t mean 60fps, it’s rather “as fast as this web page could possibly go”. I’m dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 60Hz already.
Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
Pavel Fatin: Typing in editor is a relatively simple process, so even 286 PCs were able to provide a rather fluid typing experience.
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why can’t it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.

• Everything is HUUUUGE

And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10× faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that?
Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
Windows 95 was 30Mb. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4Gb, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 Mb. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?
Google keyboard app routinely eats 150 Mb. Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95? Google app, which is basically just a package for Google Web Search, is 350 Mb! Google Play Services, which I do not use (I don’t buy books, music or videos there)—300 Mb that just sit there and which I’m unable to delete.
All that leaves me around 1 Gb for my photos after I install all the essential (social, chats, maps, taxi, banks etc) apps. And that’s with no games and no music at all! Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?
Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera.
A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.
At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn’t imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don’t know what’s going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared.

• Better world manifesto

I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.
What we have today is not progress. We barely meet business goals with poor tools applied over the top. We’re stuck in local optima and nobody wants to move out. It’s not even a good place, it’s bloated and inefficient. We just somehow got used to it.
So I want to call it out: where we are today is bullshit. As engineers, we can, and should, and will do better. We can have better tools, we can build better apps, faster, more predictable, more reliable, using fewer resources (orders of magnitude fewer!). We need to understand deeply what are we doing and why. We need to deliver: reliably, predictably, with topmost quality. We can—and should–take pride in our work. Not just “given what we had…”—no buts!
I hope I’m not alone at this. I hope there are people out there who want to do the same. I’d appreciate if we at least start talking about how absurdly bad our current situation in the software industry is. And then we maybe figure out how to get out.

##News Roundup
###[llvm-announce] LLVM 7.0.0 Release

I am pleased to announce that LLVM 7 is now available.

Get it here: https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#7.0.0

The release contains the work on trunk up to SVN revision 338536 plus
work on the release branch. It is the result of the community's work
over the past six months, including: function multiversioning in Clang
with the 'target' attribute for ELF-based x86/x86_64 targets, improved
PCH support in clang-cl, preliminary DWARF v5 support, basic support
for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVPTX, OpenCL C++ support, MSan, X-Ray
and libFuzzer support for FreeBSD, early UBSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer
support for OpenBSD, UBSan checks for implicit conversions, many
long-tail compatibility issues fixed in lld which is now production
ready for ELF, COFF and MinGW, new tools llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca and
diagtool. And as usual, many optimizations, improved diagnostics, and
bug fixes.

For more details, see the release notes:
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

Thanks to everyone who helped with filing, fixing, and code reviewing
for the release-blocking bugs!

Special thanks to the release testers and packagers: Bero
Rosenkränzer, Brian Cain, Dimitry Andric, Jonas Hahnfeld, Lei Huang
Michał Górny, Sylvestre Ledru, Takumi Nakamura, and Vedant Kumar.

For questions or comments about the release, please contact the
community on the mailing lists. Onwards to LLVM 8!

Cheers,
Hans

###Update your Thinkpad’s bios with Linux or OpenBSD

• Get your new bios

At first, go to the Lenovo website and download your new bios:

• Go to lenovo support
• Use the search bar to find your product (example for me, x270)
• Choose the right product (if necessary) and click search
• On the right side, click on Update Your System
• Click on BIOS/UEFI
• Choose *BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows *
• Download

For me the file is called like this : r0iuj25wd.iso

• Extract bios update

Now you will need to install geteltorito.

• With OpenBSD:

$ doas pkg_add geteltorito
quirks-3.7 signed on 2018-09-09T13:15:19Z
geteltorito-0.6: ok

• With Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install genisoimage

• Now we will extract the bios update :

$ geteltorito -o bios_update.img r0iuj25wd.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 43008 sector(s) of 512 Bytes

Image has been written to file "bios_update.img".
This will create a file called bios_update.img.

• Put the image on an USB key
• CAREFULL : on my computer, my USB key is sda1 on Linux and sd1 on OpenBSD.

Please check twice on your computer the name of your USB key.

• With OpenBSD :

$ doas dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/rsd1c

• With Linux :

$ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda

Now all you need is to reboot, to boot on your USB key and follow the instructions. Enjoy 😉

###Announcing The HardenedBSD Foundation

In June of 2018, we announced our intent to become a not-for-profit, tax-exempt 501©(3) organization in the United States. It took a dedicated team months of work behind-the-scenes to make that happen. On 06 September 2018, HardenedBSD Foundation Corp was granted 501©(3) status, from which point all US-based persons making donations can deduct the donation from their taxes.
We are grateful for those who contribute to HardenedBSD in whatever way they can. Thank you for making HardenedBSD possible. We look forward to a bright future, driven by a helpful and positive community.

###How you migrate ZFS filesystems matters

If you want to move a ZFS filesystem around from one host to another, you have two general approaches; you can use ‘zfs send’ and ‘zfs receive’, or you can use a user level copying tool such as rsync (or ‘tar -cf | tar -xf’, or any number of similar options). Until recently, I had considered these two approaches to be more or less equivalent apart from their convenience and speed (which generally tilted in favour of ‘zfs send’). It turns out that this is not necessarily the case and there are situations where you will want one instead of the other.
We have had two generations of ZFS fileservers so far, the Solaris ones and the OmniOS ones. When we moved from the first generation to the second generation, we migrated filesystems across using ‘zfs send’, including the filesystem with my home directory in it (we did this for various reasons). Recently I discovered that some old things in my filesystem didn’t have file type information in their directory entries. ZFS has been adding file type information to directories for a long time, but not quite as long as my home directory has been on ZFS.
This illustrates an important difference between the ‘zfs send’ approach and the rsync approach, which is that zfs send doesn’t update or change at least some ZFS on-disk data structures, in the way that re-writing them from scratch from user level does. There are both positives and negatives to this, and a certain amount of rewriting does happen even in the ‘zfs send’ case (for example, all of the block pointers get changed, and ZFS will re-compress your data as applicable).
I knew that in theory you had to copy things at the user level if you wanted to make sure that your ZFS filesystem and everything in it was fully up to date with the latest ZFS features. But I didn’t expect to hit a situation where it mattered in practice until, well, I did. Now I suspect that old files on our old filesystems may be partially missing a number of things, and I’m wondering how much of the various changes in ‘zfs upgrade -v’ apply even to old data.
(I’d run into this sort of general thing before when I looked into ext3 to ext4 conversion on Linux.)
With all that said, I doubt this will change our plans for migrating our ZFS filesystems in the future (to our third generation fileservers). ZFS sending and receiving is just too convenient, too fast and too reliable to give up. Rsync isn’t bad, but it’s not the same, and so we only use it when we have to (when we’re moving only some of the people in a filesystem instead of all of them, for example).
PS: I was going to try to say something about what ‘zfs send’ did and didn’t update, but having looked briefly at the code I’ve concluded that I need to do more research before running my keyboard off. In the mean time, you can read the OpenZFS wiki page on ZFS send and receive, which has plenty of juicy technical details.
PPS: Since eliminating all-zero blocks is a form of compression, you can turn zero-filled files into sparse files through a ZFS send/receive if the destination has compression enabled. As far as I know, genuine sparse files on the source will stay sparse through a ZFS send/receive even if they’re sent to a destination with compression off.

##Beastie Bits

• BSD Users Stockholm Meetup #4: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 at 18:00
• BSD Poland User Group: Next Meeting: October 11, 2018, 18:15 - 21:15 at Warsaw University of Technology
• n2k18 Hackathon report: Ken Westerback (krw@) on disklabel(8) work, dhclient(8) progress
• Running MirageOS Unikernels on OpenBSD in vmm (Now Works)
• vmm(4) gets support for qcow2
• MeetBSD and SecurityBsides
• Colin Percival reduced FreeBSD startup time from 10627ms (11.2) to 4738ms (12.0)
• FreeBSD 11.1 end-of-life
• KnoxBug: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 18:00: Real-world Performance Advantages of NVDIMM and NVMe: Case Study with OpenZFS

##Feedback/Questions

• Todd - 2 Nics, 1 bhyve and a jail cell
• Thomas - Deep Dive
• Morgan - Send/Receive to Manage Fragmentation?
• Dominik - hierarchical jails -> networking

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

Picking the contest winner

1. Vincent
2. Bostjan
3. Andrew
4. Klaus-Hendrik
5. Will
6. Toby
7. Johnny
8. David
9. manfrom
10. Niclas
11. Gary
12. Eddy
13. Bruce
14. Lizz
15. Jim

Random number generator

##Headlines
###The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it’s actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written.
A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for “Multiplexed Information and Computing Service.” Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to phone a computer from remote terminals and then read e-mail, edit documents, run calculations, and so forth. It was to be a great leap forward from the way computers were mostly being used, with people tediously preparing and submitting batch jobs on punch cards to be run one by one.
Over five years, AT&T invested millions in the Multics project, purchasing a GE-645 mainframe computer and dedicating to the effort many of the top researchers at the company’s renowned Bell Telephone Laboratories—­including Thompson and Ritchie, Joseph F. Ossanna, Stuart Feldman, M. Douglas McIlroy, and the late Robert Morris. But the new system was too ambitious, and it fell troublingly behind schedule. In the end, AT&T’s corporate leaders decided to pull the plug.
After AT&T’s departure from the Multics project, managers at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, N.J., became reluctant to allow any further work on computer operating systems, leaving some researchers there very frustrated. Although Multics hadn’t met many of its objectives, it had, as Ritchie later recalled, provided them with a “convenient interactive computing service, a good environment in which to do programming, [and] a system around which a fellowship could form.” Suddenly, it was gone.
With heavy hearts, the researchers returned to using their old batch system. At such an inauspicious moment, with management dead set against the idea, it surely would have seemed foolhardy to continue designing computer operating systems. But that’s exactly what Thompson, Ritchie, and many of their Bell Labs colleagues did. Now, some 40 years later, we should be thankful that these programmers ignored their bosses and continued their labor of love, which gave the world Unix, one of the greatest computer operating systems of all time.
The rogue project began in earnest when Thompson, Ritchie, and a third Bell Labs colleague, Rudd Canaday, began to sketch out on paper the design for a file system. Thompson then wrote the basics of a new operating system for the lab’s GE-645 mainframe. But with the Multics project ended, so too was the need for the GE-645. Thompson realized that any further programming he did on it was likely to go nowhere, so he dropped the effort.
Thompson had passed some of his time after the demise of Multics writing a computer game called Space Travel, which simulated all the major bodies in the solar system along with a spaceship that could fly around them. Written for the GE-645, Space Travel was clunky to play—and expensive: roughly US $75 a game for the CPU time. Hunting around, Thompson came across a dusty PDP-7, a minicomputer built by Digital Equipment Corp. that some of his Bell Labs colleagues had purchased earlier for a circuit-analysis project. Thompson rewrote Space Travel to run on it.
And with that little programming exercise, a second door cracked ajar. It was to swing wide open during the summer of 1969 when Thompson’s wife, Bonnie, spent a month visiting his parents to show off their newborn son. Thompson took advantage of his temporary bachelor existence to write a good chunk of what would become the Unix operating system for the discarded PDP‑7. The name Unix stems from a joke one of Thompson’s colleagues made: Because the new operating system supported only one user (Thompson), he saw it as an emasculated version of Multics and dubbed it “Un-multiplexed Information and Computing Service,” or Unics. The name later morphed into Unix.
Initially, Thompson used the GE-645 to compose and compile the software, which he then downloaded to the PDP‑7. But he soon weaned himself from the mainframe, and by the end of 1969 he was able to write operating-system code on the PDP-7 itself. That was a step in the right direction. But Thompson and the others helping him knew that the PDP‑7, which was already obsolete, would not be able to sustain their skunkworks for long. They also knew that the lab’s management wasn’t about to allow any more research on operating systems.
So Thompson and Ritchie got crea­tive. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC’s newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote.
Management took the bait, and an order for a PDP-11 was placed in May 1970. The machine itself arrived soon after, although the disk drives for it took more than six months to appear. During the interim, Thompson, Ritchie, and others continued to develop Unix on the PDP-7. After the PDP-11’s disks were installed, the researchers moved their increasingly complex operating system over to the new machine. Next they brought over the roff text formatter written by Ossanna and derived from the runoff program, which had been used in an earlier time-sharing system.
Unix was put to its first real-world test within Bell Labs when three typists from AT&T’s patents department began using it to write, edit, and format patent applications. It was a hit. The patent department adopted the system wholeheartedly, which gave the researchers enough credibility to convince management to purchase another machine—a newer and more powerful PDP-11 model—allowing their stealth work on Unix to continue.
During its earliest days, Unix evolved constantly, so the idea of issuing named versions or releases seemed inappropriate. But the researchers did issue new editions of the programmer’s manual periodically, and the early Unix systems were named after each such edition. The first edition of the manual was completed in November 1971.
So what did the first edition of Unix offer that made it so great? For one thing, the system provided a hierarchical file system, which allowed something we all now take for granted: Files could be placed in directories—or equivalently, folders—that in turn could be put within other directories. Each file could contain no more than 64 kilobytes, and its name could be no more than six characters long. These restrictions seem awkwardly limiting now, but at the time they appeared perfectly adequate.
Although Unix was ostensibly created for word processing, the only editor available in 1971 was the line-oriented ed. Today, ed is still the only editor guaranteed to be present on all Unix systems. Apart from the text-processing and general system applications, the first edition of Unix included games such as blackjack, chess, and tic-tac-toe. For the system administrator, there were tools to dump and restore disk images to magnetic tape, to read and write paper tapes, and to create, check, mount, and unmount removable disk packs.
Most important, the system offered an interactive environment that by this time allowed time-sharing, so several people could use a single machine at once. Various programming languages were available to them, including BASIC, Fortran, the scripting of Unix commands, assembly language, and B. The last of these, a descendant of a BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), ultimately evolved into the immensely popular C language, which Ritchie created while also working on Unix.
The first edition of Unix let programmers call 34 different low-level routines built into the operating system. It’s a testament to the system’s enduring nature that nearly all of these system calls are still available—and still heavily used—on modern Unix and Linux systems four decades on. For its time, first-­edition Unix provided a remarkably powerful environment for software development. Yet it contained just 4200 lines of code at its heart and occupied a measly 16 KB of main memory when it ran.
Unix’s great influence can be traced in part to its elegant design, simplicity, portability, and serendipitous timing. But perhaps even more important was the devoted user community that soon grew up around it. And that came about only by an accident of its unique history.
The story goes like this: For years Unix remained nothing more than a Bell Labs research project, but by 1973 its authors felt the system was mature enough for them to present a paper on its design and implementation at a symposium of the Association for Computing Machinery. That paper was published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM. Its appearance brought a flurry of requests for copies of the software.
This put AT&T in a bind. In 1956, AT&T had agreed to a U.S government consent decree that prevented the company from selling products not directly related to telephones and telecommunications, in return for its legal monopoly status in running the country’s long-distance phone service. So Unix could not be sold as a product. Instead, AT&T released the Unix source code under license to anyone who asked, charging only a nominal fee. The critical wrinkle here was that the consent decree prevented AT&T from supporting Unix. Indeed, for many years Bell Labs researchers proudly displayed their Unix policy at conferences with a slide that read, “No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.”
With no other channels of support available to them, early Unix adopters banded together for mutual assistance, forming a loose network of user groups all over the world. They had the source code, which helped. And they didn’t view Unix as a standard software product, because nobody seemed to be looking after it. So these early Unix users themselves set about fixing bugs, writing new tools, and generally improving the system as they saw fit.
The Usenix user group acted as a clearinghouse for the exchange of Unix software in the United States. People could send in magnetic tapes with new software or fixes to the system and get back tapes with the software and fixes that Usenix had received from others. In Australia, the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney produced a more robust version of Unix, the Australian Unix Share Accounting Method, which could cope with larger numbers of concurrent users and offered better performance.
By the mid-1970s, the environment of sharing that had sprung up around Unix resembled the open-source movement so prevalent today. Users far and wide were enthusiastically enhancing the system, and many of their improvements were being fed back to Bell Labs for incorporation in future releases. But as Unix became more popular, AT&T’s lawyers began looking harder at what various licensees were doing with their systems.
One person who caught their eye was John Lions, a computer scientist then teaching at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. In 1977, he published what was probably the most famous computing book of the time, A Commentary on the Unix Operating System, which contained an annotated listing of the central source code for Unix.
Unix’s licensing conditions allowed for the exchange of source code, and initially, Lions’s book was sold to licensees. But by 1979, AT&T’s lawyers had clamped down on the book’s distribution and use in academic classes. The anti­authoritarian Unix community reacted as you might expect, and samizdat copies of the book spread like wildfire. Many of us have nearly unreadable nth-­generation photocopies of the original book.
End runs around AT&T’s lawyers indeed became the norm—even at Bell Labs. For example, between the release of the sixth edition of Unix in 1975 and the seventh edition in 1979, Thompson collected dozens of important bug fixes to the system, coming both from within and outside of Bell Labs. He wanted these to filter out to the existing Unix user base, but the company’s lawyers felt that this would constitute a form of support and balked at their release. Nevertheless, those bug fixes soon became widely distributed through unofficial channels. For instance, Lou Katz, the founding president of Usenix, received a phone call one day telling him that if he went down to a certain spot on Mountain Avenue (where Bell Labs was located) at 2 p.m., he would find something of interest. Sure enough, Katz found a magnetic tape with the bug fixes, which were rapidly in the hands of countless users.
By the end of the 1970s, Unix, which had started a decade earlier as a reaction against the loss of a comfortable programming environment, was growing like a weed throughout academia and the IT industry. Unix would flower in the early 1980s before reaching the height of its popularity in the early 1990s.
For many reasons, Unix has since given way to other commercial and noncommercial systems. But its legacy, that of an elegant, well-designed, comfortable environment for software development, lives on. In recognition of their accomplishment, Thompson and Ritchie were given the Japan Prize earlier this year, adding to a collection of honors that includes the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation and the Association of Computing Machinery’s Turing Award. Many other, often very personal, tributes to Ritchie and his enormous influence on computing were widely shared after his death this past October.
Unix is indeed one of the most influential operating systems ever invented. Its direct descendants now number in the hundreds. On one side of the family tree are various versions of Unix proper, which began to be commercialized in the 1980s after the Bell System monopoly was broken up, freeing AT&T from the stipulations of the 1956 consent decree. On the other side are various Unix-like operating systems derived from the version of Unix developed at the University of California, Berkeley, including the one Apple uses today on its computers, OS X. I say “Unix-like” because the developers of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix on which these systems were based worked hard to remove all the original AT&T code so that their software and its descendants would be freely distributable.
The effectiveness of those efforts were, however, called into question when the AT&T subsidiary Unix System Laboratories filed suit against Berkeley Software Design and the Regents of the University of California in 1992 over intellectual property rights to this software. The university in turn filed a counterclaim against AT&T for breaches to the license it provided AT&T for the use of code developed at Berkeley. The ensuing legal quagmire slowed the development of free Unix-like clones, including 386BSD, which was designed for the Intel 386 chip, the CPU then found in many IBM PCs.
Had this operating system been available at the time, Linus Torvalds says he probably wouldn’t have created Linux, an open-source Unix-like operating system he developed from scratch for PCs in the early 1990s. Linux has carried the Unix baton forward into the 21st century, powering a wide range of digital gadgets including wireless routers, televisions, desktop PCs, and Android smartphones. It even runs some supercomputers.
Although AT&T quickly settled its legal disputes with Berkeley Software Design and the University of California, legal wrangling over intellectual property claims to various parts of Unix and Linux have continued over the years, often involving byzantine corporate relations. By 2004, no fewer than five major lawsuits had been filed. Just this past August, a software company called the TSG Group (formerly known as the SCO Group), lost a bid in court to claim ownership of Unix copyrights that Novell had acquired when it purchased the Unix System Laboratories from AT&T in 1993.
As a programmer and Unix historian, I can’t help but find all this legal sparring a bit sad. From the very start, the authors and users of Unix worked as best they could to build and share, even if that meant defying authority. That outpouring of selflessness stands in sharp contrast to the greed that has driven subsequent legal battles over the ownership of Unix.
The world of computer hardware and software moves forward startlingly fast. For IT professionals, the rapid pace of change is typically a wonderful thing. But it makes us susceptible to the loss of our own history, including important lessons from the past. To address this issue in a small way, in 1995 I started a mailing list of old-time Unix ­aficionados. That effort morphed into the Unix Heritage Society. Our goal is not only to save the history of Unix but also to collect and curate these old systems and, where possible, bring them back to life. With help from many talented members of this society, I was able to restore much of the old Unix software to working order, including Ritchie’s first C compiler from 1972 and the first Unix system to be written in C, dating from 1973.
One holy grail that eluded us for a long time was the first edition of Unix in any form, electronic or otherwise. Then, in 2006, Al Kossow from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif., unearthed a printed study of Unix dated 1972, which not only covered the internal workings of Unix but also included a complete assembly listing of the kernel, the main component of this operating system. This was an amazing find—like discovering an old Ford Model T collecting dust in a corner of a barn. But we didn’t just want to admire the chrome work from afar. We wanted to see the thing run again.
In 2008, Tim Newsham, an independent programmer in Hawaii, and I assembled a team of like-minded Unix enthusiasts and set out to bring this ancient system back from the dead. The work was technically arduous and often frustrating, but in the end, we had a copy of the first edition of Unix running on an emulated PDP-11/20. We sent out messages announcing our success to all those we thought would be interested. Thompson, always succinct, simply replied, “Amazing.” Indeed, his brainchild was amazing, and I’ve been happy to do what I can to make it, and the story behind it, better known.

Digital Ocean
http://do.co/bsdnow

###FreeBSD jails with a single public IP address

Jails in FreeBSD provide a simple yet flexible way to set up a proper server layout. In the most setups the actual server only acts as the host system for the jails while the applications themselves run within those independent containers. Traditionally every jail has it’s own IP for the user to be able to address the individual services. But if you’re still using IPv4 this might get you in trouble as the most hosters don’t offer more than one single public IP address per server.

• Create the internal network

In this case NAT (“Network Address Translation”) is a good way to expose services in different jails using the same IP address.
First, let’s create an internal network (“NAT network”) at 192.168.0.0/24. You could generally use any private IPv4 address space as specified in RFC 1918. Here’s an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network. Using pf, FreeBSD’s firewall, we will map requests on different ports of the same public IP address to our individual jails as well as provide network access to the jails themselves.
First let’s check which network devices are available. In my case there’s em0 which provides connectivity to the internet and lo0, the local loopback device.

  options=209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC>
  [...]
  inet 172.31.1.100 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.31.1.255
  nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
  media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
  status: active

lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
  options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
  inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
  inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
  inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
  nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>```

> For our internal network, we create a cloned loopback device called lo1. Therefore we need to customize the /etc/rc.conf file, adding the following two lines:

```cloned_interfaces="lo1"
ipv4_addrs_lo1="192.168.0.1-9/29"```

> This defines a /29 network, offering IP addresses for a maximum of 6 jails:

```ipcalc 192.168.0.1/29
Address:   192.168.0.1          11000000.10101000.00000000.00000 001
Netmask:   255.255.255.248 = 29 11111111.11111111.11111111.11111 000
Wildcard:  0.0.0.7              00000000.00000000.00000000.00000 111
=>
Network:   192.168.0.0/29       11000000.10101000.00000000.00000 000
HostMin:   192.168.0.1          11000000.10101000.00000000.00000 001
HostMax:   192.168.0.6          11000000.10101000.00000000.00000 110
Broadcast: 192.168.0.7          11000000.10101000.00000000.00000 111
Hosts/Net: 6                     Class C, Private Internet```

> Then we need to restart the network. Please be aware of currently active SSH sessions as they might be dropped during restart. It’s a good moment to ensure you have KVM access to that server ;-)

```service netif restart```

> After reconnecting, our newly created loopback device is active:

```lo1: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
  options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
  inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xfffffff8
  inet 192.168.0.2 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.3 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.4 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.5 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.6 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.7 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.8 netmask 0xffffffff
  inet 192.168.0.9 netmask 0xffffffff
  nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>```

+ Setting up

> pf part of the FreeBSD base system, so we only have to configure and enable it. By this moment you should already have a clue of which services you want to expose. If this is not the case, just fix that file later on. In my example configuration, I have a jail running a webserver and another jail running a mailserver:

 +  Public IP address
```IP_PUB="1.2.3.4"```

 +  Packet normalization
```scrub in all```

 +  Allow outbound connections from within the jails
```nat on em0 from lo1:network to any -> (em0)```

 +  webserver jail at 192.168.0.2
```rdr on em0 proto tcp from any to $IP_PUB port 443 -> 192.168.0.2```

 + just an example in case you want to redirect to another port within your jail
```rdr on em0 proto tcp from any to $IP_PUB port 80 -> 192.168.0.2 port 8080```

 + mailserver jail at 192.168.0.3
```rdr on em0 proto tcp from any to $IP_PUB port 25 -> 192.168.0.3```
```rdr on em0 proto tcp from any to $IP_PUB port 587 -> 192.168.0.3```
```rdr on em0 proto tcp from any to $IP_PUB port 143 -> 192.168.0.3```
```rdr on em0 proto tcp from any to $IP_PUB port 993 -> 192.168.0.3```

> Now just enable pf like this (which is the equivalent of adding pf_enable=YES to /etc/rc.conf):

```sysrc pf_enable="YES"```

> and start it:

```service pf start```

+ Install ezjail

> Ezjail is a collection of scripts by erdgeist that allow you to easily manage your jails.

```pkg install ezjail```

> As an alternative, you could install ezjail from the ports tree. Now we need to set up the basejail which contains the shared base system for our jails. In fact, every jail that you create get’s will use that basejail to symlink directories related to the base system like /bin and /sbin. This can be accomplished by running

```ezjail-admin install```

> In the next step, we’ll copy the /etc/resolv.conf file from our host to the newjail, which is the template for newly created jails (the parts that are not provided by basejail), to ensure that domain resolution will work properly within our jails later on:

```cp /etc/resolv.conf /usr/jails/newjail/etc/```

> Last but not least, we enable ezjail and start it:

```sysrc ezjail_enable="YES"```
```service ezjail start```

+ Create a jail

> Creating a jail is as easy as it could probably be:

```ezjail-admin create webserver 192.168.0.2```
```ezjail-admin start webserver```

> Now you can access your jail using:

```ezjail-admin console webserver```

> Each jail contains a vanilla FreeBSD installation.

+ Deploy services

> Now you can spin up as many jails as you want to set up your services like web, mail or file shares. You should take care not to enable sshd within your jails, because that would cause problems with the service’s IP bindings. But this is not a problem, just SSH to the host and enter your jail using ezjail-admin console.
***

###[EuroBSDcon 2018 Talks & Schedule](https://2018.eurobsdcon.org/talks-schedule/)
***




##News Roundup
###[OpenBSD on an iBook G4](https://bobstechsite.com/openbsd-on-an-ibook-g4/)
> I've mentioned on social media and on the BTS podcast a few times that I wanted to try installing OpenBSD onto an old "snow white" iBook G4 I acquired last summer to see if I could make it a useful machine again in the year 2018.  This particular eBay purchase came with a 14" 1024x768 TFT screen, 1.07GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 1.5GB RAM, 100GB of HDD space and an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card with 32 MB of SDRAM. The optical drive, ethernet port, battery & USB slots are also fully-functional. The only thing that doesn't work is the CMOS battery, but that's not unexpected for a device that was originally released in 2004.

+ Initial experiments

> This iBook originally arrived at my door running Apple Mac OSX Leopard and came with the original install disk, the iLife & iWork suites for 2008, various instruction manuals, a working power cable and a spare keyboard. As you'll see in the pictures I took for this post the characters on the buttons have started to wear away from 14 years of intensive use, but the replacement needs a very good clean before I decide to swap it in!

> After spending some time exploring the last version of OSX to support the IBM PowerPC processor architecture I tried to see if the hardware was capable of modern computing with Linux. Something I knew ahead of trying this was that the WiFi adapter was unlikely to work because it's a highly proprietary component designed by Apple to work specifically with OSX and nothing else, but I figured I could probably use a wireless USB dongle later to get around this limitation.

> Unfortunately I found that no recent versions of mainstream Linux distributions would boot off this machine. Debian has dropped support 32-bit PowerPC architectures and the PowerPC variants of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (vanilla, MATE and Lubuntu) wouldn't even boot the installer! The only distribution I could reliably install on the hardware was Lubuntu 14.04 LTS.

> Unfortunately I'm not the biggest fan of the LXDE desktop for regular work and a lot of ported applications were old and broken because it clearly wasn't being maintained by people that use the hardware anymore. Ubuntu 14.04 is also approaching the end of its support life in early 2019, so this limited solution also has a limited shelf-life.

+ Over to BSD

> I discussed this problem with a few people on Mastodon and it was pointed out to me that OSX is built on the Darwin kernel, which happens to be a variant of BSD. NetBSD and OpenBSD fans in particular convinced me that their communities still saw the value of supporting these old pieces of kit and that I should give BSD a try.

> So yesterday evening I finally downloaded the "macppc" version of OpenBSD 6.3 with no idea what to expect. I hoped for the best but feared the worst because my last experience with this operating system was trying out PC-BSD in 2008 and discovering with disappointment that it didn't support any of the hardware on my Toshiba laptop.

> When I initially booted OpenBSD I was a little surprised to find the login screen provided no visual feedback when I typed in my password, but I can understand the security reasons for doing that. The initial desktop environment that was loaded was very basic. All I could see was a console output window, a terminal and a desktop switcher in the X11 environment the system had loaded.

> After a little Googling I found this blog post had some fantastic instructions to follow for the post-installation steps: https://sohcahtoa.org.uk/openbsd.html. I did have to adjust them slightly though because my iBook only has 1.5GB RAM and not every package that page suggests is available on macppc by default. You can see a full list here: https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.3/packages/powerpc/.

+ Final thoughts

> I was really impressed with the performance of OpenBSD's "macppc" port. It boots much faster than OSX Leopard on the same hardware and unlike Lubuntu 14.04 it doesn't randomly hang for no reason or crash if you launch something demanding like the GIMP.

> I was pleased to see that the command line tools I'm used to using on Linux have been ported across too. OpenBSD also had no issues with me performing basic desktop tasks on XFCE like browsing the web with NetSurf, playing audio files with VLC and editing images with the GIMP. Limited gaming is also theoretically possible if you're willing to build them (or an emulator) from source with SDL support.

> If I wanted to use this system for heavy duty work then I'd probably be inclined to run key applications like LibreOffice on a Raspberry Pi and then connect my iBook G4 to those using VNC or an SSH connection with X11 forwarding. BSD is UNIX after all, so using my ancient laptop as a dumb terminal should work reasonably well.

> In summary I was impressed with OpenBSD and its ability to breathe new life into this old Apple Mac. I'm genuinely excited about the idea of trying BSD with other devices on my network such as an old Asus Eee PC 900 netbook and at least one of the many Raspberry Pi devices I use. Whether I go the whole hog and replace Fedora on my main production laptop though remains to be seen!

***

###[The template user with PAM and login(1)](http://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/48)
> When you build a new service (or an appliance) you need your users to be able to configure it from the command line. To accomplish this you can create system accounts for all registered users in your service and assign them a special login shell which provides such limited functionality. This can be painful if you have a dynamic user database.
> Another challenge is authentication via remote services such as RADIUS. How can we implement  services when we authenticate through it and log into it as a different user? Furthermore, imagine a scenario when RADIUS decides on which account we have the right to access by sending an additional attribute.
> To address these two problems we can use a "template" user. Any of the PAM modules can set the value of the PAM_USER item. The value of this item will be used to determine which account we want to login. Only the "template" user must exist on the local password database, but the credential check can be omitted by the module.
> This functionality exists in the login(1) used by FreeBSD, HardenedBSD, DragonFlyBSD and illumos. The functionality doesn't exist in the login(1) used in NetBSD, and OpenBSD doesn't support PAM modules at all. In addition what  is also noteworthy is that such functionality was also in the OpenSSH but they decided to remove it and call it a security vulnerability (CVE 2015-6563). I can see how some people may have seen it that way, that’s why I recommend reading this article from an OpenPAM author and a FreeBSD security officer at the time.
> Knowing the background let's take a look at an example.

```PAM_EXTERN int
pam_sm_authenticate(pam_handle_t *pamh, int flags __unused,
    int argc __unused, const char *argv[] __unused)
{
        const char *user, *password;
        int err;

        err = pam_get_user(pamh, &user, NULL);
        if (err != PAM_SUCCESS)
                return (err);

        err = pam_get_authtok(pamh, PAM_AUTHTOK, &password, NULL);
        if (err == PAM_CONV_ERR)
                return (err);
        if (err != PAM_SUCCESS)
                return (PAM_AUTH_ERR);

        err = authenticate(user, password);
        if (err != PAM_SUCCESS) {
                return (err);
        }

        return (pam_set_item(pamh, PAM_USER, "template"));
}

In the listing above we have an example of a PAM module. The pam_get_user(3) provides a username. The pam_get_authtok(3) shows us a secret given by the user. Both functions allow us to give an optional prompt which should be shown to the user. The authenticate function is our crafted function which authenticates the user. In our first scenario we wanted to keep all users in an external database. If authentication is successful we then switch to a template user which has a shell set up for a script allowing us to configure the machine. In our second scenario the authenticate function authenticates the user in RADIUS.

Another step is to add our PAM module to the /etc/pam.d/system or to the /etc/pam.d/login configuration:

auth sufficient pam_template.so no_warn allow_local

Unfortunately the description of all these options goes beyond this article - if you would like to know more about it you can find them in the PAM manual. The last thing we need to do is to add our template user to the system which you can do by the adduser(8) command or just simply modifying the /etc/master.passwd file and use pwd_mkdb(8) program:

$ tail -n /etc/master.passwd
template:*:1000:1000::0:0:User &:/:/usr/local/bin/templatesh
$ sudo pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd

As you can see,the template user can be locked and we still can use it in our PAM module (the * character after login).
I would like to thank Dag-Erling Smørgrav for pointing this functionality out to me when I was looking for it some time ago.

iXsystems
iXsystems @ VMWorld

###ZFS file server

• What is the need?

At work, we run a compute cluster that uses an Isilon cluster as primary NAS storage. Excluding snapshots, we have about 200TB of research data, some of them in compressed formats, and others not. We needed an offsite backup file server that would constantly mirror our primary NAS and serve as a quick recovery source in case of a data loss in the the primary NAS. This offsite file server would be passive - will never face the wrath of the primary cluster workload.
In addition to the role of a passive backup server, this solution would take on some passive report generation workloads as an ideal way of offloading some work from the primary NAS. The passive work is read-only.
The backup server would keep snapshots in a best effort basis dating back to 10 years. However, this data on this backup server would be archived to tapes periodically.

• A simple guidance of priorities:

• Data integrity > Cost of solution > Storage capacity > Performance.

• Why not enterprise NAS? NetApp FAS or EMC Isilon or the like?

We decided that enterprise grade NAS like NetAPP FAS or EMC Isilon are prohibitively expensive and an overkill for our needs.
An open source & cheaper alternative to enterprise grade filesystem with the level of durability we expect turned up to be ZFS. We’re already spoilt from using snapshots by a clever Copy-on-Write Filesystem(WAFL) by NetApp. ZFS providing snapshots in almost identical way was a big influence in the choice. This is also why we did not consider just a CentOS box with the default XFS filesystem.

• FreeBSD vs Debian for ZFS

This is a backup server, a long-term solution. Stability and reliability are key requirements. ZFS on Linux may be popular at this time, but there is a lot of churn around its development, which means there is a higher probability of bugs like this to occur. We’re not looking for cutting edge features here. Perhaps, Linux would be considered in the future.

• FreeBSD + ZFS

We already utilize FreeBSD and OpenBSD for infrastructure services and we have nothing but praises for the stability that the BSDs have provided us. We’d gladly use FreeBSD and OpenBSD wherever possible.

• Okay, ZFS, but why not FreeNAS?

IMHO, FreeNAS provides a integrated GUI management tool over FreeBSD for a novice user to setup and configure FreeBSD, ZFS, Jails and many other features. But, this user facing abstraction adds an extra layer of complexity to maintain that is just not worth it in simpler use cases like ours. For someone that appreciates the commandline interface, and understands FreeBSD enough to administer it, plain FreeBSD + ZFS is simpler and more robust than FreeNAS.

• Specifications
• Lenovo SR630 Rackserver
• 2 X Intel Xeon silver 4110 CPUs
• 768 GB of DDR4 ECC 2666 MHz RAM
• 4 port SAS card configured in passthrough mode(JBOD)
• Intel network card with 10 Gb SFP+ ports
• 128GB M.2 SSD for use as boot drive
• 2 X HGST 4U60 JBOD
• 120(2 X 60) X 10TB SAS disks

###Reflection on one-year usage of OpenBSD

I have used OpenBSD for more than one year, and it is time to give a summary of the experience:

• (1) What do I get from OpenBSD?

a) A good UNIX tutorial. When I am curious about some UNIXcommands’ implementation, I will refer to OpenBSD source code, and I actually gain something every time. E.g., refresh socket programming skills from nc; know how to process file efficiently from cat.

b) A better test bed. Although my work focus on developing programs on Linux, I will try to compile and run applications on OpenBSD if it is possible. One reason is OpenBSD usually gives more helpful warnings. E.g., hint like this:

......
warning: sprintf() is often misused, please use snprintf()
......

Or you can refer this post which I wrote before. The other is sometimes program run well on Linux may crash on OpenBSD, and OpenBSD can help you find hidden bugs.

c) Some handy tools. E.g. I find tcpbench is useful, so I ported it into Linux for my own usage (project is here).

• (2) What I give back to OpenBSD?

a) Patches. Although most of them are trivial modifications, they are still my contributions.

b) Write blog posts to share experience about using OpenBSD.

c) Develop programs for OpenBSD/*BSD: lscpu and free.

d) Porting programs into OpenBSD: E.g., I find google/benchmark is a nifty tool, but lacks OpenBSD support, I submitted PR and it is accepted. So you can use google/benchmark on OpenBSD now.

• Generally speaking, the time invested on OpenBSD is rewarding. If you are still hesitating, why not give a shot?

##Beastie Bits

• BSD Users Stockholm Meetup
• BSDCan 2018 Playlist
• OPNsense 18.7 released
• Testing TrueOS (FreeBSD derivative) on real hardware ThinkPad T410
• Kernel Hacker Wanted!
• Replace a pair of 8-bit writes to VGA memory with a single 16-bit write
• Reduce taskq and context-switch cost of zio pipe
• Proposed FreeBSD Memory Management change, expected to improve ZFS ARC interactions

Tarsnap

##Feedback/Questions

• Anian_Z - Question
• Robert - Pool question
• Lain - Congratulations
• Thomas - L2arc

• 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

OpenBSD hypervisor coming soon

• Our buddy Mike Larkin never rests, and he posted some very tight-lipped console output on Twitter recently
• From what little he revealed at the time, it appeared to be a new hypervisor (that is, X86 hardware virtualization) running on OpenBSD -current, tentatively titled "vmm"
• Later on, he provided a much longer explanation on the mailing list, detailing a bit about what the overall plan for the code is
• Originally started around the time of the Australia hackathon, the work has since picked up more steam, and has gotten a funding boost from the OpenBSD foundation
• One thing to note: this isn't just a port of something like Xen or Bhyve; it's all-new code, and Mike explains why he chose to go that route
• He also answered some basic questions about the requirements, when it'll be available, what OSes it can run, what's left to do, how to get involved and so on ***

Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd

• Last week we mentioned a talk Jordan Hubbard gave about integrating various parts of Mac OS X into FreeBSD
• One of the changes, perhaps the most controversial item on the list, was the adoption of launchd to replace the init system (replacing init systems seems to cause backlash, we've learned)
• In this article, the author talks about why he thinks this is a bad idea
• He doesn't oppose the integration into FreeBSD-derived projects, like FreeNAS and PC-BSD, only vanilla FreeBSD itself - this is also explained in more detail
• The post includes both high-level descriptions and low-level technical details, and provides an interesting outlook on the situation and possibilities
• Reddit had quite a bit to say about this one, some in agreement and some not ***

DragonFly graphics improvements

• The DragonFlyBSD guys are at it again, merging newer support and fixes into their i915 (Intel) graphics stack
• This latest update brings them in sync with Linux 3.17, and includes Haswell fixes, DisplayPort fixes, improvements for Broadwell and even Cherryview GPUs
• You should also see some power management improvements, longer battery life and various other bug fixes
• If you're running DragonFly, especially on a laptop, you'll want to get this stuff on your machine quick - big improvements all around ***

OpenBSD tames the userland

• Last week we mentioned OpenBSD's tame framework getting support for file whitelists, and said that the userland integration was next - well, now here we are
• Theo posted a mega diff of nearly 100 smaller diffs, adding tame support to many areas of the userland tools
• It's still a work-in-progress version; there's still more to be added (including the file path whitelist stuff)
• Some classic utilities are even being reworked to make taming them easier - the "w" command, for example
• The diff provides some good insight on exactly how to restrict different types of utilities, as well as how easy it is to actually do so (and en masse)
• More discussion can be found on HN, as one might expect
• If you're a software developer, and especially if your software is in ports already, consider adding some more fine-grained tame support in your next release ***

Interview - Scott Courtney - vbsdcon@verisign.com / @verisign

vBSDCon 2015

News Roundup

OPNsense, beyond the fork

• We first heard about OPNsense back in January, and they've since released nearly 40 versions, spanning over 5,000 commits
• This is their first big status update, covering some of the things that've happened since the project was born
• There's been a lot of community growth and participation, mass bug fixing, new features added, experimental builds with ASLR and much more - the report touches on a little of everything ***

LibreSSL nukes SSLv3

• With their latest release, LibreSSL began to turn off SSLv3 support, starting with the "openssl" command
• At the time, SSLv3 wasn't disabled entirely because of some things in the OpenBSD ports tree requiring it (apache being one odd example)
• They've now flipped the switch, and the process of complete removal has started
• From the Undeadly summary, "This is an important step for the security of the LibreSSL library and, by extension, the ports tree. It does, however, require lots of testing of the resulting packages, as some of the fallout may be at runtime (so not detected during the build). That is part of why this is committed at this point during the release cycle: it gives the community more time to test packages and report issues so that these can be fixed. When these fixes are then pushed upstream, the entire software ecosystem will benefit. In short: you know what to do!"
• With this change and a few more to follow shortly, Libre*SSL* won't actually support SSL anymore - time to rename it "LibreTLS" ***

FreeBSD MPTCP updated

• For anyone unaware, Multipath TCP is "an ongoing effort of the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Multipath TCP working group, that aims at allowing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to use multiple paths to maximize resource usage and increase redundancy."
• There's been work out of an Australian university to add support for it to the FreeBSD kernel, and the patchset was recently updated
• Including in this latest version is an overview of the protocol, how to get it compiled in, current features and limitations and some info about the routing requirements
• Some big performance gains can be had with MPTCP, but only if both the client and server systems support it - getting it into the FreeBSD kernel would be a good start ***

UEFI and GPT in OpenBSD

• There hasn't been much fanfare about it yet, but some initial UEFI and GPT-related commits have been creeping into OpenBSD recently
• Some support for UEFI booting has landed in the kernel, and more bits are being slowly enabled after review
• This comes along with a number of other commits related to GPT, much of which is being refactored and slowly reintroduced
• Currently, you have to do some disklabel wizardry to bypass the MBR limit and access more than 2TB of space on a single drive, but it should "just work" with GPT (once everything's in)
• The UEFI bootloader support has been committed, so stay tuned for more updates as further progress is made ***

Feedback/Questions

• John writes in
• Mason writes in
• Earl writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Major changes coming in PCBSD 11

• The PCBSD team has announced that version 11.0 will have some more pretty big changes (as they've been known to do lately with NTP daemons and firewalls)
• Switching from PF to IPFW provided some benefits for VIMAGE, but the syntax was just too complicated for regular everyday users
• To solve this, they've ported over Linux's iptables, giving users a much more straightforward configuration
• While ZFS has served them well as the default filesystem for a while, Kris decided that Btrfs would be a better choice going forward
• Since the FreeBSD kernel doesn't support it natively, all filesystem calls will be through FUSE from now on - performance is Good Enough
• People often complain about PCBSD's huge ISO download, so, to save space, the default email client will be switched to mutt, and KDE will be replaced with DWM as the default window manager
• To reconfigure it, or make any appearance changes, users just need to edit a simple C header file and recompile - easy peasy
• As we've mentioned on the show, PCBSD has been promoting safe backup solutions for a long time with its "life preserver" utility, making it simple to manage multiple snapshots too
• To test if people have been listening to this advice, Kris recently activated the backdoor he put in life preserver that deletes all the users' files - hope you had that stuff backed up ***

NetBSD and FreeBSD join forces

• The BSD community has been running into one of the same problems Linux has lately: we just have too many different BSDs to choose from
• What's more, none of them have any specific areas they focus on or anything like that (they're all basically the same)
• That situation is about to improve somewhat, as FreeBSD and NetBSD have just merged codebases... say hello to FretBSD
• Within a week, all mailing lists and webservers for the legacy NetBSD and FreeBSD projects will be terminated - the mailing list for the new combined project will be hosted from the United Nations datacenter on a Microsoft Exchange server
• As UN monitors will be moderating the mailing lists to prevent disagreements and divisive arguments before they begin, this system is expected to be adequate for the load
• With FretBSD, your toaster can now run ZFS, so you'll never need to worry about the bread becoming silently corrupted again ***

Puffy in the cloud

• If you've ever wanted to set up a backup server, especially for family members or someone who's not as technology-savvy, you've probably realized there are a lot of options
• This post explores the option of setting up your own Dropbox-like service with Owncloud and PostgreSQL, running atop the new OpenBSD http daemon
• Doing it this way with your own setup, you can control all the security aspects - disk encryption, firewall rules, who can access what and from where, etc
• He also mentions our pf tutorial being helpful in blocking script kiddies from hammering the box
• Be sure to encourage your less-technical friends to always back up their important data ***

NetBSD at AsiaBSDCon

• Some NetBSD developers have put together a report of what they did at the most recent event in Tokyo
• It includes a wrap-up of the event, as well as a list of presentations that NetBSD developers gave
• Have you ever wanted even more pictures of NetBSD running on lots of devices? There's a never-ending supply, apparently
• At the BSD research booth of AsiaBSDCon, there were a large number of machines on display, and someone has finally uploaded pictures of all of them
• There's also a video of an OMRON LUNA-II running the luna68k port ***

Interview - Kamila Součková - kamila@ksp.sk / @anotherkamila

BSD conferences, Google Summer of Code, various topics

News Roundup

FreeBSD foundation March update

• The FreeBSD foundation has published their March update for fundraising and sponsored projects
• In the document, you'll find information about upcoming ARMv8 enhancements, some event recaps and a Google Summer of Code status update
• They also mention our interview with the foundation president - be sure to check it out if you haven't ***

Inside OpenBSD's new httpd

• BSD news continues to dominate mainstream tech news sites… well not really, but they talk about it once in a while
• The SD Times is featuring an article about OpenBSD's in-house HTTP server, after seeing Reyk's AsiaBSDCon presentation about it (which he's giving at BSDCan this year, too)
• In this article, they talk about the rapid transition of webservers in the base system - apache being replaced with nginx, only to be replaced with httpd shortly thereafter
• Since the new daemon has had almost a full release cycle to grow, new features and fixes have been pouring in
• The post also highlights some of the security features: everything runs in a chroot with privsep by default, and it also leverages strong TLS 1.2 defaults (including Perfect Forward Secrecy) ***

Using poudriere without OpenSSL

• Last week we talked about using LibreSSL in FreeBSD for all your ports
• One of the problems that was mentioned is that some ports are configured improperly, and end up linking against the OpenSSL in the base system even when you tell them not to
• This blog post shows how to completely strip OpenSSL out of the poudriere build jails, something that's a lot more difficult than you'd think
• If you're a port maintainer, pay close attention to this post, and get your ports fixed to adhere to the make.conf options properly ***

HAMMER and GPT in OpenBSD

• Someone, presumably a Google Summer of Code student, wrote in to the lists about his HAMMER FS porting proposal
• He outlined the entire process and estimated timetable, including what would be supported and which aspects were beyond the scope of his work (like the clustering stuff)
• There's no word yet on if it will be accepted, but it's an interesting idea to explore, especially when you consider that HAMMER really only has one developer
• In more disk-related news, Ken Westerback has been committing quite a lot of GPT-related fixes recently
• Full GPT support will most likely be finished before 5.8, but anything involving HAMMER FS is still anyone's guess ***

Feedback/Questions

• Morgan writes in
• Dustin writes in
• Stan writes in
• Mica writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Developers in freefall
• Xorg thieves pt. 1
• Xorg thieves pt. 2 ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2015 call for papers

• The call for papers has been announced for the next EuroBSDCon, which is set to be held in Sweden this year
• According to their site, the call for presentation proposals period will start on Monday the 23rd of March until Friday the 17th of April
• If giving a full talk isn't your thing, there's also a call for tutorials - if you're comfortable teaching other people about something BSD-related, this could be a great thing too
• You're not limited to one proposal - several speakers gave multiple in 2014 - so don't hesitate if you've got more than one thing you'd like to talk about
• We'd like to see a more balanced conference schedule than BSDCan's having this year, but that requires effort on both sides - if you're doing anything cool with any BSD, we'd encourage you submit a proposal (or two)
• Check the announcement for all the specific details and requirements
• If your talk gets accepted, the conference even pays for your travel expenses ***

Making security sausage

• Ted Unangst has a new blog post up, detailing his experiences with some recent security patches both in and out of OpenBSD
• "Unfortunately, I wrote the tool used for signing patches which somehow turned into a responsibility for also creating the inputs to be signed. That was not the plan!"
• The post first takes us through a few OpenBSD errata patches, explaining how some can get fixed very quickly, but others are more complicated and need a bit more review
• It also covers security in upstream codebases, and how upstream projects sometimes treat security issues as any other bug
• Following that, it leads to the topic of FreeType - and a much more complicated problem with backporting patches between versions
• The recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities were also mentioned, with an interesting story to go along with them
• Just 45 minutes before the agreed-upon announcement, OpenBSD devs found a problem with the patch OpenSSL planned to release - it had to be redone at the last minute
• It was because of this that FreeBSD actually had to release a security update to their security update
• He concludes with "My number one wish would be that every project provide small patches for security issues. Dropping enormous feature releases along with a note 'oh, and some security too' creates downstream mayhem." ***

Running FreeBSD on the server, a sysadmin speaks

• More BSD content is appearing on mainstream technology sites, and, more importantly, BSD Now is being mentioned
• ITWire recently did an interview with Allan about running FreeBSD on servers (possibly to go with their earlier interview with Kris about desktop usage)
• They discuss some of the advantages BSD brings to the table for sysadmins that might be used to Linux or some other UNIX flavor
• It also covers specific features like jails, ZFS, long-term support, automating tasks and even… what to name your computers
• If you've been considering switching your servers over from Linux to FreeBSD, but maybe wanted to hear some first-hand experience, this is the article for you ***

NetBSD ported to Hardkernel ODROID-C1

• In their never-ending quest to run on every new board that comes out, NetBSD has been ported to the Hardkernel ODROID-C1
• This one features a quad-core ARMv7 CPU at 1.5GHz, has a gig of ram and gigabit ethernet... all for just $35
• There's a special kernel config file for this board's hardware, available in both -current and the upcoming 7.0
• More info can be found on their wiki page
• After this was written, basic framebuffer console support was also committed, allowing a developer to run XFCE on the device ***

Interview - Bernard Spil - brnrd@freebsd.org / @sp1l

LibreSSL adoption in FreeBSD ports and the wider software ecosystem

News Roundup

Monitoring pf logs with Gource

• If you're using pf on any of the BSDs, maybe you've gotten bored of grepping logs and want to do something more fancy
• This article will show you how to get set up with Gource for a cinematic-like experience
• If you've never heard of Gource, it's "an OpenGL-based 3D visualization tool intended for visualizing activity on source control repositories"
• When you put all the tools together, you can end up with some pretty eye-catching animations of your firewall traffic
• One of our listeners wrote in to say that he set this up and, almost immediately, noticed his girlfriend's phone had been compromised - graphical representations of traffic could be useful for detecting suspicious network activity ***

pkgng 1.5.0 alpha1 released

• The development version of pkgng was updated to 1.4.99.14, or 1.5.0 alpha1
• This update introduces support for provides/requires, something that we've been wanting for a long time
• It will also now print which package is the reason for direct dependency change
• Another interesting addition is the "pkg -r" switch, allowing cross installation of packages
• Remember this isn't the stable version, so maybe don't upgrade to it just yet on any production systems
• DragonFly will also likely pick up this update once it's marked stable ***

Welcome to OpenBSD

• We mentioned last week that our listener Brian was giving a talk in the Troy, New York area
• The slides from that talk are now online, and they've been generating quite a bit of discussion online
• It's simply titled "Welcome to OpenBSD" and gives the reader an introduction to the OS (and how easy it is to get involved with contributing)
• Topics include a quick history of the project, who the developers are and what they do, some proactive security techniques and finally how to get involved
• As you may know, NetBSD has almost 60 supported platforms and their slogan is "of course it runs NetBSD" - Brian says, with 17 platforms over 13 CPU architectures, "it probably runs OpenBSD"
• No matter which BSD you might be interested in, these slides are a great read, especially for any beginners looking to get their feet wet
• Try to guess which font he used... ***

BSDTalk episode 252

• And somehow Brian has snuck himself into another news item this week
• He makes an appearance in the latest episode of BSD Talk, where he chats with Will about running a BSD-based shell provider
• If that sounds familiar, it's probably because we did the same thing, albeit with a different member of their team
• In this interview, they discuss what a shell provider does, hardware requirements and how to weed out the spammers in favor of real people
• They also talk a bit about the community aspect of a shared server, as opposed to just running a virtual machine by yourself ***

Feedback/Questions

• Christian writes in
• Stefan writes in
• Possnfiffer writes in
• Ruudsch writes in
• Shane writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Accidental support
• Larry's tears
• The boy who sailed with BSD ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

The missing EuroBSDCon videos

• Some of the missing videos from EuroBSDCon 2014 we mentioned before have mysteriously appeared
• Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD, looking forward to another 10 years
• Lourival Viera Neto, NPF scripting with Lua
• Kris Moore, Snapshots, replication and boot environments
• Andy Tanenbaum, A reimplementation of NetBSD based on a microkernel
• Kirk McKusick, An introduction to FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS
• Emannuel Dreyfus, FUSE and beyond, bridging filesystems
• John-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI performance
• Unfortunately, there are still about six talks missing… and no ETA ***

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro (or two)

• We've got a couple posts about running FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro this week
• In the first one, the author talks a bit about trying to run Linux on his laptop for quite a while, going back and forth between it and something that Just Works™
• Eventually he came full circle, and the focus on using only GUI tools got in the way, instead of making things easier
• He works on a lot of FreeBSD-related software, so switching to it for a desktop seems to be the obvious next step
• He's still not quite to that point yet, but documents his experiments with BSD as a desktop
• The second article also documents an ex-Linux user switching over to BSD for their desktop
• It also covers power management, bluetooth and trackpad setup
• On the topic of Gentoo, "Underneath the beautiful and easy-to-use Portage system lies the same glibc, the same turmoil over a switch to a less-than-ideal init system, and the same kernel-level bugs that bring my productivity down"
• Check out both articles if you've been considering running FreeBSD on a MacBook ***

Remote logging over TLS

• In most of the BSDs, syslogd has been able to remotely send logs to another server for a long time
• That feature can be very useful, especially for forensics purposes - it's much harder for an attacker to hide their activities if the logs aren't on the same server
• The problem is, of course, that it's sent in cleartext, unless you tunnel it over SSH or use some kind of third party wrapper
• With a few recent commits, OpenBSD's syslogd now supports sending logs over TLS natively, including X509 certificate verification
• By default, syslogd runs as an unprivileged user in a chroot on OpenBSD, so there were some initial concerns about certificate verification - how does that user access the CA chain outside of the chroot?
• That problem was also conquered, by loading the CA chain directly from memory, so the entire process can be run in the chroot without issue
• Some of the privsep verifcation code even made its way into LibreSSL right afterwards
• If you haven't set up remote logging before, now might be an interesting time to try it out ***

FreeBSD, not a Linux distro

• George Neville-Neil gave a presentation recently, titled "FreeBSD: not a Linux distro"
• It's meant to be an introduction to new users that might've heard about FreeBSD, but aren't familiar with any BSD history
• He goes through some of that history, and talks about what FreeBSD is and why you might want to use it over other options
• There's even an interesting "thirty years in three minutes" segment
• It's not just a history lesson though, he talks about some of the current features and even some new things coming in the next version(s)
• We also learn about filesystems, jails, capsicum, clang, dtrace and the various big companies using FreeBSD in their products
• This might be a good video to show your friends or potential employer if you're looking to introduce FreeBSD to them ***

Long-term support considered harmful

• There was recently a pretty horrible bug in GNU's libc (BSDs aren't affected, don't worry)
• Aside from the severity of the actual problem, the fix was delayed for quite a long time, leaving people vulnerable
• Ted Unangst writes a post about how this idea of long-term support could actually be harmful in the long run, and compares it to how OpenBSD does things
• OpenBSD releases a new version every six months, and only the two most recent releases get support and security fixes
• He describes this as both a good thing and a bad thing: all the bugs in the ecosystem get flushed out within a year, but it forces people to stay (relatively) up-to-date
• "Upgrades only get harder and more painful (and more fragile) the longer one goes between them. More changes, more damage. Frequent upgrades amortize the cost and ensure that regressions are caught early."
• There was also some discussion about the article you can check out ***

Interview - Andrew Tanenbaum - info@minix3.org / @minix3

MINIX's integration of NetBSD

News Roundup

Using AFL on OpenBSD

• We've talked about American Fuzzy Lop a bit on a previous episode, and how some OpenBSD devs are using it to catch and fix new bugs
• Undeadly has a cool guide on how you can get started with fuzzing
• It's a little on the advanced side, but if you're interested in programming or diagnosing crashes, it'll be a really interesting article to read
• Lots of recent CVEs in other open source projects are attributed to fuzzing - it's a great way to stress test your software ***

Lumina 0.8.1 released

• A new version of Lumina, the BSD-licensed desktop environment from PCBSD, has been released
• This update includes some new plugins, lots of bugfixes and even "quality-of-life improvements"
• There's a new audio player desktop plugin, a button to easily minimize all windows at once and some cool new customization options
• You can get it in PCBSD's edge repo or install it through regular ports (on FreeBSD, OpenBSD or DragonFly!)
• If you haven't seen our episode about Lumina, where we interview the developer and show you a tour of its features, gotta go watch it ***

My first OpenBSD port

• The author of the "Code Rot & Why I Chose OpenBSD" article has a new post up, this time about ports
• He recently made his first port and got it into the tree, so he talks about the whole process from start to finish
• After learning some of the basics and becoming comfortable running -current, he noticed there wasn't a port for the "Otter" web browser
• At that point he did what you're supposed to do in that situation, and started working on it himself
• OpenBSD has a great porter's handbook that he referenced throughout the process
• Long story short, his browser of choice is in the official ports collection and now he's the maintainer (and gets to deal with any bug reports, of course)
• If some software you use isn't available for whatever BSD you're using, you could be the one to make it happen ***

How to slide with DragonFly

• DragonFly BSD has a new HAMMER FS utility called "Slider"
• It's used to easily browse through file history and undelete files - imagine something like a commandline version of Apple's Time Machine
• They have a pretty comprehensive guide on how to use it on their wiki page
• If you're using HAMMER FS, this is a really handy tool to have, check it out ***

OpenSMTPD with Dovecot and Salt

• We recently had a feedback question about which mail servers you can use on BSD - Postfix, Exim and OpenSMTPD being the big three
• This blog post details how to set up OpenSMTPD, including Dovecot for IMAP and Salt for quick and easy deployment
• Intrigued by it becoming the default MTA in OpenBSD, the author decided to give it a try after being a long-time Postfix fan
• "Small, fast, stable, and very easy to customize, no more ugly m4 macros to deal with"
• Check it out if you've been thinking about configuring your first mail server on any of the BSDs ***

Feedback/Questions

• Christopher writes in (handbook section)
• Mark writes in
• Kevin writes in
• Stefano writes in
• Matthew writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Not that interested actually
• This guy again
• Yep, this is the place ***

This episode was brought to you by

Special segment

How our viewers got into BSD

• Jason's story (text)
• bsdx's story (text)
• David's story (text)
• Brad's story (text)
• Reese's story (video)
• Bryan's story (video)
• Pete's story (text)
• Anders' story (text)
• Guillermo's story (text)
• Jonathan's story (text)
• Adam's story (text)
• Chris' story (text)
• Tigersharke's story (text)
• Roller and Kandie's stories (text)
• Uwe's story (text)
• Pascal's story (text) and (image) ***

Interview - Erwin Lansing - erwin@freebsd.org

BSD in Europe, getting people involved

Interview - Cristina Vintila - @cristina_crow

BSD conferences

This episode was brought to you by

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More BSD presentation videos

• The MeetBSD video uploading spree continues with a few more talks, maybe this'll be the last batch
• Corey Vixie, Web Apps in Embedded BSD
• Allan Jude, UCL config
• Kip Macy, iflib
• While we're on the topic of conferences, AsiaBSDCon's CFP was extended by one week
• This year's ruBSD will be on December 13th in Moscow
• Also, the BSDCan call for papers is out, and the event will be in June next year
• Lastly, according to Rick Miller, "A potential vBSDcon 2015 event is being explored though a decision has yet to be made." ***

BSD-powered digital library in Africa

• You probably haven't heard much about Nzega, Tanzania, but it's an East African country without much internet access
• With physical schoolbooks being a rarity there, a few companies helped out to bring some BSD-powered reading material to a local school
• They now have a pair of FreeNAS Minis at the center of their local network, with over 80,000 books and accompanying video content stored on them (~5TB of data currently)
• The school's workstations also got wiped and reloaded with FreeBSD, and everyone there seems to really enjoy using it ***

pfSense 2.2 status update

• With lots of people asking when the 2.2 release will be done, some pfSense developers decided to provide a status update
• 2.2 will have a lot of changes: being based on FreeBSD 10.1, Unbound instead of BIND, updating PHP to something recent, including the new(ish) IPSEC stack updates, etc
• All these things have taken more time than previously expected
• The post also has some interesting graphs showing the ratio of opened and close bugs for the upcoming release ***

Recommended hardware threads

• A few threads on caught our attention this week, all about hardware recommendations for BSD setups
• In the first one, the OP asks about mini-ITX hardware to run a FreeBSD server and NAS
• Everyone gave some good recommendations for low power, Atom-based systems
• The second thread started off asking about which CPU architecture is best for PF on an OpenBSD router, but ended up being another hardware thread
• For a router, the ALIX, APU and Soekris boards still seem to be the most popular choices, with the third and fourth threads confirming this
• If you're thinking about building your first BSD box - server, router, NAS, whatever - these might be some good links to read ***

Interview - Paul Schenkeveld - freebsd@psconsult.nl

Running a BSD conference

News Roundup

From Linux to FreeBSD - for reals

• Another Linux user is ready to switch to BSD, and takes to Reddit for some community encouragement (seems to be a common thing now)
• After being a Linux guy for 20(!) years, he's ready to switch his systems over, and is looking for some helpful guides to transition
• In the comments, a lot of new switchers offer some advice and reading material
• If any of the listeners have some things that were helpful along your switching journey, maybe send 'em this guy's way ***

Running FreeBSD as a Xen Dom0

• Continuing progress has been made to allow FreeBSD to be a host for the Xen hypervisor
• This wiki article explains how to run the Xen branch of FreeBSD and host virtual machines on it
• Xen on FreeBSD currently supports PV guests (modified kernels) and HVM (unmodified kernels, uses hardware virtualization features)
• The wiki provides instructions for running Debian (PV) and FreeBSD (HVM), and discusses the features that are not finished yet ***

HardenedBSD updates and changes

• a.out is the old executable format for Unix
• The name stands for assembler output, and was coined by Ken Thompson as the fixed name for output of his PDP-7 assembler in 1968
• FreeBSD, on which HardenedBSD is based, switched away from a.out in version 3.0
• A restriction against NULL mapping was introduced in FreeBSD 7 and enabled by default in FreeBSD 8
• However, for reasons of compatibility, it could be switched off, allowing buggy applications to continue to run, at the risk of allowing a kernel bug to be exploited
• HardenedBSD has removed the sysctl, making it impossible to run in ‘insecure mode’
• Package building update: more consistent repo, no more i386 packages ***

Feedback/Questions

• Boris writes in
• Alex writes in (edit: adding "tinker panic 0" to the ntp.conf will disable the sanity check)
• Chris writes in
• Robert writes in
• Jake writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Real world authpf use
• The great perl event of 2014 ***

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BSD talks at XDC 2014

• This year's Xorg conference featured a few BSD-related talks
• Matthieu Herrb, Status of the OpenBSD graphics stack
• Matthieu's talk details what's been done recently in Xenocara the OpenBSD kernel for graphics (slides here)
• Jean-Sébastien Pédron, The status of the graphics stack on FreeBSD
• His presentation gives a history of major changes and outlines the current overall status of graphics in FreeBSD (slides here)
• Francois Tigeot, Porting DRM/KMS drivers to DragonFlyBSD
• Francois' talk tells the story of how he ported some of the DRM and KMS kernel drivers to DragonFly (slides here) ***

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

• The FreeBSD project has a report of their activities between July and September of this year
• Lots of ARM work has been done, and a goal for 11.0 is tier one support for the platform
• The release includes reports from the cluster admin team, release team, ports team, core team and much more, but we've already covered most of the items on the show
• If you're interested in seeing what the FreeBSD community has been up to lately, check the full report - it's huge ***

Monitoring pfSense logs using ELK

• If you're one of those people who loves the cool graphs and charts that pfSense can produce, this is the post for you
• ELK (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) is a group of tools that let you collect, store, search and (most importantly) visualize logs
• It works with lots of different things that output logs and can be sent to one central server for displaying
• This post shows you how to set up pfSense to do remote logging to ELK and get some pretty awesome graphs ***

Some updates to IPFW

• Even though PF gets a lot of attention, a lot of FreeBSD people still love IPFW
• While mostly a dormant section of the source tree, some updates were recently committed to -CURRENT
• The commit lists the user-visible changes, performance changes, ABI changes and internal changes
• It should be merged back to -STABLE after a month or so of testing, and will probably end up in 10.2-RELEASE
• Also check this blog post for some more information and fancy graphs ***

Interview - Hiroki Sato (佐藤広生) - hrs@freebsd.org / @hiroki_sato

BSD in Japan, technology conferences, various topics

News Roundup

pfSense on Hyper-V

• In case you didn't know, the latest pfSense snapshots support running on Hyper-V
• Unfortunately, the current stable release is based on an old, unsupported FreeBSD 8.x base, so you have to use the snapshots for now
• The author of the post tells about his experience running pfSense and gives lots of links to read if you're interested in doing the same
• He also praises pfSense above other Linux-based solutions for its IPv6 support and high quality code ***

OpenBSD as a daily driver

• A curious Reddit user posts to ask the community about using OpenBSD as an everyday desktop OS
• The overall consensus is that it works great for that, stays out of your way and is quite reliable
• Caveats would include there being no Adobe Flash support (though others consider this a blessing..) and it requiring a more hands-on approach to updating
• If you're considering running OpenBSD as a "daily driver," check all the comments for more information and tips ***

Getting PF log statistics

• The author of this post runs an OpenBSD box in front of all his VMs at his colocation, and details his experiences with firewall logs
• He usually investigates any IPs of interest with whois, nslookup, etc. - but this gets repetitive quickly, so..
• He sets out to find the best way to gather firewall log statistics
• After coming across a perl script to do this, he edited it a bit and is now a happy, lazy admin once again
• You can try out his updated PF script here ***

FlashRD 1.7 released

• In case anyone's not familiar, flashrd is a tool to create OpenBSD images for embedded hardware devices, executing from a virtualized environment
• This new version is based on (the currently unreleased) OpenBSD 5.6, and automatically adapts to the number of CPUs you have for building
• It also includes fixes for 4k drives and lots of various other improvements
• If you're interested in learning more, take a look at some of the slides and audio from the main developer on the website ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Don writes in
• Andriy writes in
• Richard writes in
• Robert writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Subtle trolling
• Old bugs with old fixes
• A pig reinstall
• Strange DOS-like environment ***

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NetBSD's EuroBSDCon report

• This year's EuroBSDCon had the record number of NetBSD developers attending
• The NetBSD guys had a small devsummit as well, and this blog post details some of their activities
• Pierre Pronchery also talked about EdgeBSD there (also see our interview if you haven't already)
• Hopefully this trend continues, and NetBSD starts to have even more of a presence at the conferences ***

Upcoming features in OpenBSD 5.6

• OpenBSD 5.6 is to be released in just under a month from now, and one of the developers wrote a blog post about some of the new features
• The post is mostly a collection of various links, many of which we've discussed before
• It'll be the first version with LibreSSL and many other cool things
• We will, of course, have all the details on the day of release
• There are some good comments on hacker news about 5.6 as well ***

FreeBSD ARMv8-based implementation

• The FreeBSD foundation is sponsoring some work to port FreeBSD to the new ThunderX ARM CPU family
• With the potential to have up to 48 cores, this type of CPU might make ARM-based servers a more appealing option
• Cavium, the company involved with this deal, seems to have lots of BSD fans
• This collaboration is expected to result in Tier 1 recognition of the ARMv8 architecture ***

Updating orphaned OpenBSD ports

• We discussed OpenBSD porting over portscout from FreeBSD a while back
• Their ports team is making full use of it now, and they're also looking for people to help update some unmaintained ports
• A new subdomain, portroach.openbsd.org, will let you view all the ports information easily
• If you're interested in learning to port software, or just want to help update a port you use, this is a good chance to get involved ***

Interview - Matt Ranney & George Kola - mjr@ranney.com & george.kola@voxer.com

BSD at Voxer, companies switching from Linux, community interaction

Tutorial

Adblocking with DNSMasq & Pixelserv

News Roundup

GhostBSD 4.0 released

• The 4.0 branch of GhostBSD has finally been released, based on FreeBSD 10
• With it come all the big 10.0 changes: clang instead of gcc, pkgng by default, make replaced by bmake
• Mate is now the default desktop, with different workstation styles to choose from ***

Reports from PF about banned IPs

• If you run any kind of public-facing server, you've probably seen your logs fill up with unwanted traffic
• This is especially true if you run SSH on port 22, which the author of this post seems to
• A lot can be done with just PF and some brute force tables
• He goes through some different options for blocking Chinese IPs and break-in attempts
• It includes a useful script he wrote to get reports about the IPs being blocked via email ***

NetBSD 6.1.5 and 6.0.6 released

• The 6.1 and 6.0 branches of NetBSD got some updates
• They include a number of security and stability fixes - plenty of OpenSSL mentions
• Various panics and other small bugs also got fixed ***

OpenSSH 6.7 released

• After a long delay, OpenSSH 6.7 has finally been released
• Major internal refactoring has been done to make part of OpenSSH usable as a library
• SFTP transfers can now be resumed
• Lots of bug fixes, a few more new features - check the release notes for all the details
• This release disables some insecure ciphers by default, so keep that in mind if you connect with legacy clients that use Arcfour or CBC modes ***

Feedback/Questions

• Andriy writes in
• Karl writes in
• Possnfiffer writes in
• Brad writes in
• Solomon writes in ***

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NetBSD at Hiroshima Open Source Conference

• NetBSD developers are hard at work, putting NetBSD on everything they can find
• At a technology conference in Hiroshima, some developers brought their exotic machines to put on display
• As usual, there are lots of pictures and a nice report from the conference ***

FreeBSD's Linux emulation overhaul

• For a long time, FreeBSD's emulation layer has been based on an ancient Fedora 10 system
• If you've ever needed to install Adobe Flash on BSD, you'll be stuck with all this extra junk
• With some recent work, that's been replaced with a recent CentOS release
• This opens up the door for newer versions of Skype to run on FreeBSD, and maybe even Steam someday ***

pfSense 2.2-BETA

• Big changes are coming in pfSense land, with their upcoming 2.2 release
• We talked to the developer a while back about future plans, and now they're finally out there
• The 2.2 branch will be based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE (instead of 8.3) and include lots of performance fixes
• It also includes some security updates, lots of package changes and updates and much more
• You can check the full list of changes on their wiki ***

NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi

• This article shows how you can install NetBSD on the ever-so-popular Raspberry Pi
• As of right now, you'll need to use a -CURRENT snapshot to do it
• It also shows how to grow the filesystem to fill up an SD card, some pkgsrc basics and how to get some initial things set up
• Can anyone find something that you can't install NetBSD on? ***

Interview - Steve Wills - swills@freebsd.org / @swills

Mentoring new BSD developers

News Roundup

MidnightBSD 0.5 released

• We don't hear a whole lot about MidnightBSD, but they've just released version 0.5
• It's got a round of the latest FreeBSD security patches, driver updates and various small things
• Maybe one of their developers could come on the show sometime and tell us more about the project ***

BSD Router Project 1.52 released

• The newest update for the BSD Router Project is out
• This version is based on a snapshot of 10-STABLE that's very close to 10.1-RELEASE
• It's mostly a bugfix release, but includes some small changes and package updates ***

Configuring a DragonFly BSD desktop

• We've done tutorials on how to set up a FreeBSD or OpenBSD desktop, but maybe you're more interested in DragonFly
• In this post from Justin Sherrill, you'll learn some of the steps to do just that
• He pulled out an old desktop machine, gave it a try and seems to be pleased with the results
• It includes a few Xorg tips, and there are some comments about the possibility of making a GUI DragonFly installer ***

Building a mini-ITX pfSense box

• Another week, another pfSense firewall build post
• This time, the author is installing to a Jetway J7F2, a mini-ITX device with four LAN ports
• He used to be a m0n0wall guy, but wanted to give the more modern pfSense a try
• Lots of great pictures of the hardware, which we always love ***

Feedback/Questions

• Damian writes in
• Jan writes in
• Dale writes in
• Joe writes in
• Bostjan writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Interview - Peter Wemm - peter@freebsd.org / @karinjiri

The FreeBSD web cluster and infrastructure

Feedback/Questions

• Todd writes in
• Brandon writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

• September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this year
• Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
• Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
• Registering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everything
• You can register online here and check hotels in the area
• The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants ***

OpenBSD SMP PF update

• A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
• With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
• In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
• The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be useless
• He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone through
• There's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
• We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us ***

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

• An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
• The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
• It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
• Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

• After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
• The full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance release
• Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much more
• If you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
• Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome change
• With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted ***

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

• We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
• This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
• Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normally
• It's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page ***

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

• The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
• Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
• With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
• The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup ***

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

• A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
• Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver
• "Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."
• He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system ***

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

• Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!
• Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
• You can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application library
• Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easy
• New Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as well
• PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users ***

Feedback/Questions

• Jeff writes in - Sending Encrypted Backups over SSH + Sending ZFS snapshots via user
• Bruce writes in
• Richard writes in
• Jeff writes in - NYCBUG dmesg list
• Steve writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and schedule

• The talks and schedules for EuroBSDCon 2014 are finally revealed
• The opening keynote is called "FreeBSD, looking forward to another 10 years" by jkh
• Lots of talks spanning FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PCBSD, and we finally have a few about NetBSD and DragonflyBSD too! Variety is great
• It looks like Theo even has a talk, but the title isn't on the page... how mysterious
• There are also days dedicated to some really interesting tutorials
• Register now, the conference is on September 25-28th in Bulgaria
• If you see Allan and Kris walking towards you and you haven't given us an interview yet... well you know what's going to happen
• Why aren't the videos up from last year yet? Will this year also not have any? ***

FreeNAS vs NAS4Free

• More mainstream news covering BSD, this time with an article about different NAS solutions
• In a possibly excessive eight-page article, Ars Technica discusses the pros and cons of both FreeNAS and NAS4Free
• Both are based on FreeBSD and ZFS of course, but there are more differences than you might expect
• Discusses the different development models, release cycles, features, interfaces and ease-of-use factor of each project
• "One is pleasantly functional; the other continues devolving during a journey of pain" - uh oh, who's the loser? ***

Quality software costs money, heartbleed was free

• PHK writes an article for ACM Queue about open source software projects' funding efforts
• A lot of people don't realize just how widespread open source software is - TVs, printers, gaming consoles, etc
• The article discusses ways to convince your workplace to fund open source efforts, then goes into a little bit about FreeBSD and Varnish's funding
• The latest heartbleed vulnerability should teach everyone that open source projects are critical to the internet, and need people actively maintaining them
• On that subject, "Earlier this year the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug laid waste to Internet security, and there are still hundreds of thousands of embedded devices of all kinds—probably your television among them—that have not been and will not ever be software-upgraded to fix it. The best way to prevent that from happening again is to avoid having bugs of that kind go undiscovered for several years, and the only way to avoid that is to have competent people paying attention to the software"
• Consider donating to your favorite BSD foundation (or buying cool shirts and CDs!) and keeping the ecosystem alive ***

Geoblock evasion with pf and OpenBSD rdomains

• Geoblocking is a way for websites to block visitors based on the location of their IP
• This is a blog post about how to get around it, using pf and rdomains
• It has the advantage of not requiring any browser plugins or DNS settings on the users' computers, you just need to be running OpenBSD on your router (hmm, if only a website had a tutorial about that...)
• In this post, the author wanted to get an American IP address, since the service he was using (Netflix) is blocked in Australia
• It's got all the details you need to set up a VPN-like system and bypass those pesky geographic filters ***

Interview - Marc Espie - espie@openbsd.org / @espie_openbsd

OpenBSD's package system, building cluster, various topics

Tutorial

Keeping your BSD up to date

News Roundup

BoringSSL and LibReSSL

• Yet another OpenSSL fork pops up, this time from Google, called BoringSSL
• Adam Langley has a blog post about it, why they did it and how they're going to maintain it
• You can easily browse the source code
• Theo de Raadt also weighs in with how this effort relates to LibReSSL
• More eyes on the code is good, and patches will be shared between the two projects ***

More BSD Tor nodes wanted

• Friend of the show bcallah posts some news to the Tor-BSD mailing list about monoculture in the Tor network being both bad and dangerous
• Originally discussed on the Tor-Relays list, it was made apparent that having such a large amount of Linux nodes weakens the security of the whole network
• If one vulnerability is found, a huge portion of the network would be useless - we need more variety in the network stacks, crypto, etc.
• The EFF is also holding a Tor challenge for people to start up new relays and keep them online for over a year
• Check out our Tor tutorial and help out the network, and promote BSD at the same time! ***

FreeBSD 10 OpenStack images

• OpenStack, to quote Wikipedia, is "a free and open-source software cloud computing platform. It is primarily deployed as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution."
• The article goes into detail about creating a FreeBSD instant, installing and converting it for use with "bsd-cloudinit"
• The author of the article is a regular listener and emailer of the show, hey! ***

BSDday 2014 call for papers

• BSD Day, a conference not so well-known, is going to be held August 9th in Argentina
• It was created in 2008 and is the only BSD conference around that area
• The "call for papers" was issued, so if you're around Argentina and use BSD, consider submitting a talk
• Sysadmins, developers and regular users are, of course, all welcome to come to the event ***

Feedback/Questions

• Maruf writes in
• Solomon writes in
• Silas writes in
• Bert 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 ***

Headlines

Faces of FreeBSD

• The FreeBSD foundation is publishing articles on different FreeBSD developers
• This one is about Colin Percival (cperciva@), the ex-security officer
• Tells the story of how he first found BSD, what he contributed back, how he eventually became the security officer
• Running series with more to come ***

Lots of BSD presentation videos uploaded

• EuroBSDCon 2013 dev summit videos, AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos, MWL's presentation video
• Most of us never get to see the dev summit talks since they're only for developers
• AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos also up finally
• List of AsiaBSDCon presentation topics here
• Our buddy Michael W Lucas gave an "OpenBSD for Linux users" talk at a Michigan Unix Users Group.
• He says "Among other things, I compare OpenBSD to Richard Stallman and physically assault an audience member. We also talk long long time, memory randomization, PF, BSD license versus GPL, Microsoft and other OpenBSD stuff"
• Really informative presentation, pretty long, answers some common questions at the end ***

Call for Presentations: FOSDEM 2014 and NYCBSDCon 2014

• FOSDEM 2014 will take place on 1–2 February, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium
• Just like in the last years, there will be both a BSD booth and a developer's room
• The topics of the devroom include all BSD operating systems. Every talk is welcome, from internal hacker discussion to real-world examples and presentations about new and shiny features.
• If you are in the area or want to go, check the show notes for details
• NYCBSDCon is also accepting papers.
• It'll be in New York City at the beginning of February 2014
• If anyone wants to give a talk at one of these conferences, go ahead and send in your stuff! ***

FreeBSD foundation's year-end fundraising campaign

• The FreeBSD foundation has been supporting the FreeBSD project and community for over 13 years
• As of today they have raised about half a million dollars, but still have a while to go
• Donations go towards new features, paying for the server infrastructure, conferences, supporting the community, hiring full-time staff members and promoting FreeBSD at events
• They are preparing the debut of a new online magazine, the FreeBSD Journal
• Typically big companies make their huge donations in December, like a couple of anonymous donors that gave around $250,000 each last year
• Make your donation today over at freebsdfoundation.org, every little bit helps
• Everyone involved with BSD Now made a donation last year and will do so again this year ***

Interview - Amitai Schlair - schmonz@netbsd.org / @schmonz

The NetBSD Foundation, pkgsrc, future plans

Tutorial

Combining SSH and tmux

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

News Roundup

PS4 released

• Sony's Playstation 4 is finally released
• As previously thought, its OS is heavily based on FreeBSD and uses the kernel among other things
• Link in the show notes contains the full list of BSD software they're using
• Always good to see BSD being so widespread ***

BSD Mag November issue

• Free monthly BSD magazine publishes another issue
• This time their topics include: Configuring a Highly Available Service on FreeBSD, IT Inventory & Asset Management Automation, more FreeBSD Programming Primer, PfSense and Snort and a few others
• PDF linked in the show notes ***

pbulk builds made easy

• NetBSD's pbulk tool is similar to poudriere, but for pkgsrc
• While working on updating the documentation, a developer cleaned up quite a lot of code
• He wrote a script that automates pbulk deployment and setup
• The whole setup of a dedicated machine has been reduced to just three commands ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Over 200 PBIs have been populated in to the PC-BSD 10 Stable Appcafe
• Many PC-BSD programs received some necessary bug fixes and updates
• Some include network detection in the package and update managers, nvidia graphic detection, security updates for PCDM ***

Feedback/Questions

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• entransic writes in ***