NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Useless use of GNU

Meet the 2021 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students

News Roundup

Large Unix programs were historically not all that portable between Unixes

• References this article: I’m not sure that UNIX won *** ### A new path: vm86-based venix emulator *** ### ZFS Is Mysteriously Eating My CPU *** ### traceroute(8) gets speed boost ***

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

• Al - TransAtlantic Cables
• Christopher - NVMe
• JohnnyK - Vivaldi ***
• 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

Preorders for cool BSD stuff

• The 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is up for preorder
• We talked to GNN briefly about it, but he and Kirk have apparently finally finished the book
• "For many years, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System has been recognized as the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure. Now, this definitive guide has been extensively updated to reflect all major FreeBSD improvements between Versions 5 and Versions 11"
• OpenBSD 5.5 preorders are also up, so you can buy a CD set now
• You can help support the project, and even get the -release of the OS before it's available publicly
• 5.5 is a huge release with lots of big changes, so now is the right time to purchase one of these - tell Austin we sent you! ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 CFP

• This year's pkgsrcCon is in London, on June 21st and 22nd
• There's a Call For Papers out now, so you can submit your talks
• Anything related to pkgsrc is fine, it's pretty informal
• Does anyone in the audience know if the talks will be recorded? This con is relatively unknown ***

BSDMag issue for March 2014

• The monthly BSD magazine releases its newest issue
• Topics this time include: deploying NetBSD using AWS EC2, creating a multi-purpose file server with NetBSD, DragonflyBSD as a backup server, more GIMP lessons, network analysis with wireshark and a general security article
• The Linux article trend seems to continue... hmm ***

Non-ECC RAM in FreeNAS

• We've gotten a few questions about ECC RAM with ZFS
• Here we've got a surprising blog post about why someone did not go with ECC RAM for his NAS build
• The article mentions the benefits of ECC and admits it is a better choice in nearly all instances, but unfortunately it's not very widespread in consumer hardware motherboards and it's more expensive
• Regular RAM also has "special" issues with ZFS and pool corruption
• Long post, so check out the whole thing if you've been considering your memory options and weighing the benefits ***

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

EdgeBSD (slides)

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD desktop

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr-lurkers

• This week we get to hear from Frederic Culot, colut@
• Originally an OpenBSD user from France, Frederic joined as a ports committer in 2010 and recently joined the portmgr lurkers team
• "FreeBSD is also one of my sources of inspiration when it comes to how organizations behave and innovate, and I find it very interesting to compare FreeBSD with the for-profit companies I work for"
• We get to find out a little bit about him, why he loves FreeBSD and what he does for the project ***

NetBSD on the Playstation 2

• Who doesn't want to run NetBSD on their old PS2?
• The PS2 port of NetBSD was sadly removed in 2009, but it has been revived
• It's using a slightly unusual MIPS CPU that didn't have much GCC support
• Hopefully a bootable kernel will be available soon ***

The FreeBSD Challenge update

• Our friend from the Linux Foundation continues his FreeBSD switching journey
• This time he starts off by discovering virtual machines suck at keeping accurate time, and some ports weren't working because of his clock being way off
• After polling the IRC for help, he finally learns the difference between ntpdate and ntpd and both of their use cases
• Maybe he should've just read our NTP tutorial! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• The mount tray icon got lots of updates and fixes
• The faulty distribution server has finally been tracked down and... destroyed
• New language localization project is in progress
• Many many updates to ports and PBIs, new -STABLE builds ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Patrick writes in
• Chris writes in
• Ron writes in
• Tyler writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Tailoring OpenBSD for an old, strange computer

• The author of this article had an OmniBook 800CT, which comes with a pop-out mouse, black and white display, 32MB of RAM and a 133MHz CPU
• Obviously he had to install some kind of BSD on it!
• This post goes through all his efforts of trimming down OpenBSD to work on such a limited device
• He goes through the trial and error of "compile, break it, rebuild, try again"
• After cutting a lot out from the kernel, saving a precious megabyte here and there, he eventually gets it working ***

pkgsrcCon and BSDCan

• pkgsrccon is "a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure"
• This year it will be on June 21st and 22nd
• The schedule is still being worked out, so if you want to give a talk, submit it
• BSDCan's schedule was also announced
• We'll be having presentations about ARM on NetBSD and FreeBSD, PF on OpenBSD, Capsicum and casperd, ASLR in FreeBSD, more about migrating from Linux to BSD, FreeNAS stuff and much more
• Kris' presentation was accepted!
• Tons of topics, look forward to the recorded versions of all of them hopefully! ***

Two factor auth with pushover

• A new write-up from our friend Ted Unangst
• Pushover is "a web hook to smartphone push notification gateway" - you sent a POST to a web server and it sends a code to your phone
• His post goes through the steps of editing your login.conf and setting it all up to work
• Now you can get a two factor authenticated login for ssh! ***

The status of GNOME 3 on BSD

• It's no secret that the GNOME team is a Linux-obsessed bunch, almost to the point of being hostile towards other operating systems
• OpenBSD keeps their GNOME 3 ports up to date very well, and Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work on that and how easy it is to use
• This post goes through the process of how simple it is to get GNOME 3 set up on OpenBSD and even includes a screencast
• A few recent posts from some GNOME developers show that they're finally working with the BSD guys to improve portability
• The FreeBSD and OpenBSD teams are working together to bring the latest GNOME to all of us - it's a beautiful thing
• This goes right along with our interview today! ***

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

The life and daily activities of portmgr, GNOME 3, Tinderbox, portlint, various topics

Tutorial

The FreeBSD Ports Collection

News Roundup

DragonflyBSD 3.8 goals and 3.6.1 release

• The Dragonfly team is thinking about what should be in version 3.8
• On their bug tracker, it lists some of the things they'd like to get done before then
• In the meantime, 3.6.1 was released with lots of bugfixes ***

NYCBSDCon 2014 wrap-up piece

• We've got a nice wrap-up titled "NYCBSDCon 2014 Heats Up a Cold Winter Weekend"
• The author also interviews GNN about the conference
• There's even a little "beginner introduction" to BSD segment
• Includes a mention of the recently-launched journal and lots of pictures from the event ***

FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis

• GNN in yet another story - he gave a presentation at the NYLUG about the differences between FreeBSD and Linux
• He mentions the history of BSD, the patch set and 386BSD, the lawsuit, philosophy and license differences, a complete system vs "distros," development models, BSD-only features and technologies, how to become a committer, overall comparisons, different hats and roles, the different bsds and their goals and actual code differences
• Serves as a good introduction you can show your Linux friends ***

PCBSD CFT and weekly digest

• Upgrade tools have gotten a major rewrite
• You have to help test it, there is no choice! Read more here
• How dare Kris be "unimpressed with" freebsd-update and pkgng!?
• Various updates and fixes ***

Feedback/Questions

• Jeffrey writes in
• Shane writes in
• Ferdinand writes in
• Curtis writes in
• Clint writes in
• Peter writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results

• The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
• $768,562 from 1659 donors
• Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
• "We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
• A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook) ***

OpenSSH 6.5 released

• We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
• New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
• Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
• Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
• New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
• Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
• Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
• Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
• Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL! ***

Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower

• In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
• This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
• Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
• Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
• The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone." ***

OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black

• Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
• A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
• He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
• It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
• Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices ***

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD

Tutorial

Running an NTP server

News Roundup

Getting started with FreeBSD

• A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
• The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
• He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
• The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far ***

More OpenBSD hackathon reports

• As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
• He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
• This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there ***

X11 in a jail

• We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
• A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
• Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
• Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
• AMD graphics are now officially supported
• GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
• Grub updates and fixes
• PCBSD also got a mention in eweek ***

Feedback/Questions

• Justin writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Martin writes in
• Alex writes in - unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
• James writes in
• John 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

• Peter writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Jordan writes in
• Christian writes in
• entransic writes in ***