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

Headlines

A Conversation with Margo Seltzer and Mike Olson: The history of Berkeley DB

Modern inetd in FreeBSD

News Roundup

The reason Unix has the argv[0] issue (and API)

Retrocomputing can be more than games

You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual

Beastie Bits

• New 'Reckless guide to OpenBSD' published
• GhostBSD Online Meetup
• HAMBug online meeting, March 8th @ 18:30 ET
• HardenedBSD 12-STABLE support will be dropped in May 2022
• Option options for getopt
• New Tarsnap version is out
• pfSense Plus version 22.01 and pfSense CE version 2.6.0 Software are Now Available

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

• Karst - replacing disks
• TheHolm - zfs and booting

• 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

Using FreeBSD’s pkg-audit

The 20 year old bug that went to Mars

It's rare that you come across a bug so subtle that it can last for two decades. But, that's exactly what has happened with the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) algorithm. Initially written in 1994, Markus Oberhumer designed a sophisticated and extremely efficient compression algorithm so elegant and well architected that it outperforms zlib and bzip by four or five times their decompression speed.

I was impressed to find out that his LZO algorithm has gone to the planet Mars on NASA devices multiple times! Most recently, LZO has touched down on the red planet within the Mars Curiosity Rover, which just celebrated its first martian anniversary on Tuesday.

In the past few years, LZO has gained traction in file systems as well. LZO can be used in the Linux kernel within btrfs, squashfs, jffs2, and ubifs. A recent variant of the algorithm, LZ4, is used for compression in ZFS for Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD.

With its popularity increasing, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer has been rewritten by many engineering firms for both closed and open systems. These rewrites, however, have always been based on Oberhumer's core open source implementation. As a result, they all inherited a subtle integer overflow. Even LZ4 has the same exact bug, but changed very slightly.

Because the LZO algorithm is considered a library function, each specific implementation must be evaluated for risk, regardless of whether the algorithm used has been patched. Why? We are talking about code that has existed in the wild for two decades. The scope of this algorithm touches everything from embedded microcontrollers on the Mars Rover, mainframe operating systems, modern day desktops, and mobile phones. Engineers that have used LZO must evaluate the use case to identify whether or not the implementation is vulnerable, and in what format.

News Roundup

FreeBSD on Slimbook -- 14 months of updates

LLDB FreeBSD kernel core dump support

Steam on OpenBSD

Beastie Bits

• [OpenSSH Agent Restriction](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20211220061017)
• [OpenBSD’s Clang upgraded to version 13](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20211220060327)
• [Cool, but obscure X11 tools](http://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/)

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 and the BSDNow Patreon

Interview - Solene Rapenne - solene+www@dataswamp.org / [@solene@bsd.network](@solene@bsd.network (mastodon))

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-26-old-computer-challenge-after.html

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

Special Guest: Solène Rapenne.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD ASLR status update

• Shawn Webb gives us a little update on his address space layout randomization work for FreeBSD
• He's implemented execbase randomization for position-independent executables (which OpenBSD also just enabled globally in 5.5 on i386)
• Work has also started on testing ASLR on ARM, using a Raspberry Pi
• He's giving a presentation at BSDCan this year about his ASLR work
• While we're on the topic of BSDCan... ***

BSDCan tutorials, improving the experience

• Peter Hansteen writes a new blog post about his upcoming BSDCan tutorials
• The tutorials are called "Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter" and "Transitioning to OpenBSD 5.5" - both scheduled to last three hours each
• He's requesting anyone that'll be there to go ahead and contact him, telling him exactly what you'd like to learn
• There's also a bit of background information about the tutorials and how he's looking to improve them
• If you're interested in OpenBSD and going to BSDCan this year, hit him up ***

pkgsrc-2014Q1 released

• The new stable branch of pkgsrc packages has been built and is ready
• Python 3.3 is now a "first class citizen" in pkgsrc
• 14255 packages for NetBSD-current/x86_64, 11233 binary packages built with clang for FreeBSD 10/x86_64
• There's a new release every three months, and remember pkgsrc works on MANY operating systems, not just NetBSD - you could even use pkgsrc instead of pkgng or ports if you were so inclined
• They're also looking into signing packages ***

Only two holes in a heck of a long time, who cares?

• A particularly vocal Debian user, a lost soul, somehow finds his way to the misc@ OpenBSD mailing list
• He questions "what's the big deal" about OpenBSD's slogan being "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
• Luckily, the community and Theo set the record straight about why you should care about this
• Running insecure applications on OpenBSD is actually more secure than running them on other systems, due to things like ASLR, PIE and all the security features of OpenBSD
• It spawned a discussion about ease of management and Linux's poor security record, definitely worth reading ***

Interview - Dru Lavigne - dru@freebsd.org / @bsdevents

FreeBSD's documentation printing, documentation springs, various topics

Tutorial

Automatic, unattended OpenBSD installs with PXE

News Roundup

pfSense 2.1.1 released

• A new version of pfSense is released, mainly to fix some security issues
• Tracking some recent FreeBSD advisories, pfSense usually only applies the ones that would matter on a firewall or router
• There are also some NIC driver updates and other things
• Of course if you want to learn more about pfSense, watch episode 25
• 2.1.2 is already up for testing too ***

FreeBSD gets UEFI support

• It looks like FreeBSD's battle with UEFI may be coming to a close?
• Ed Maste committed a giant list of patches to enable UEFI support on x86_64
• Look through the list to see all the details and information
• Thanks FreeBSD foundation! ***

Ideas for the next DragonflyBSD release

• Mr. Dragonfly release engineer himself, Justin Sherrill posts some of his ideas for the upcoming release
• They're aiming for late May for the next version
• Ideas include better support for running in a VM, pkgng fixes, documentation updates and PAM support
• Gasp, they're even considering dropping i386 ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots of new PBI updates for 10.0, new runtime implementation
• New support for running 32 bit applications in PBI runtime
• New default CD and DVD player, umplayer
• Latest GNOME 3 and Cinnamon merged, new edge package builds ***

Feedback/Questions

• Remy writes in
• Jan writes in
• Eddie writes in
• Zen writes in
• Sean writes in ***