NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

It's time to say goodbye to the GPL

The trigger for this post is the reinstating of Richard Stallman, a very problematic character, to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I am appalled by this move, and join others in the call for his removal.
This occasion has caused me to reevaluate the position of the FSF in computing. It is the steward of the GNU project (a part of Linux distributions, loosely speaking), and of a family of software licenses centred around the GNU General Public License (GPL). These efforts are unfortunately tainted by Stallman’s behaviour. However, this is not what I actually want to talk about today.

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runj: a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails

Today, I open-sourced runj, a new experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. For the past 6.5 years I’ve been working on Linux containers, but never really had much experience with FreeBSD jails. runj (pronounced “run jay”) is a vehicle for me to learn more about FreeBSD in general and jails in particular. With my position on the Technical Oversight Board of the Open Containers Initiative, I’m also interested in understanding how the OCI runtime specification can be adapted to other operating systems like FreeBSD.

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News Roundup

A Bit of Xenix History

From 1986 to 1989, I worked in the Xenix1 group at Microsoft. It was my first job out of school, and I was the most junior person on the team. I was hopelessly naive, inexperienced, generally clueless, and borderline incompetent, but my coworkers were kind, supportive and enormously forgiving – just a lovely bunch of folks.

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On Updating QEMU's bsd-user fork

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FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop

My old (2009) HP laptop now runs FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.

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Beastie Bits

• Registration is now open for the June 2021 #FreeBSD Developers Summit
• 6.0RC1 images available
• Lexical File Names in Plan 9 or Getting Dot-Dot Right
• The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike
• Initial Support for the riscv64 Architecture *** ###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

• Hamza - Congrats on 400
• Renato - DTS and ContainerD
• Rob - Music

• 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

Enabling FreeBSD on AArch64

• One of the things the FreeBSD foundation has been dumping money into lately is ARM64 support, but we haven't heard too much about it - this article should change that
• Since it's on a mainstream ARM site, the article begins with a bit of FreeBSD history, leading up to the current work on ARM64
• There's also a summary of some of the ARM work done at this year's BSDCan, including details about running it on the Cavium ThunderX platform (which has 48 cores)
• As of just a couple months ago, dtrace is even working on this new architecture
• Come 11.0-RELEASE, the plan is for ARM64 to get the same "tier 1" treatment as X86, which would imply binary updates for base and ports - something Raspberry Pi users often complain about not having ***

OpenBSD's tcpdump detailed

• Most people are probably familiar with tcpdump, a very useful packet sniffing and capturing utility that's included in all the main BSD base systems
• This video guide is specifically about the version in OpenBSD, which has gone through some major changes (it's pretty much a fork with no version number anymore)
• Unlike on the other platforms, OpenBSD's tcpdump will always run in a chroot as an unprivileged user - this has saved it from a number of high-profile exploits
• It also has support for the "pf.os" system, allowing you to filter out operating system fingerprints in the packet captures
• There's also PF (and pflog) integration, letting you see which line in your ruleset triggered a specific match
• Being able to run tcpdump directly on your router is pretty awesome for troubleshooting ***

More FreeBSD foundation at BSDCan

• The FreeBSD foundation has another round of trip reports from this year's BSDCan
• First up is Kamil Czekirda, who gives a good summary of some of the devsummit, FreeBSD-related presentations, some tutorials, getting freebsd-update bugs fixed and of course eating cake
• A second post from Christian Brueffer, who cleverly planned ahead to avoid jetlag, details how he got some things done during the FreeBSD devsummit
• Their third report is from our buddy Warren Block, who (unsurprisingly) worked on a lot of documentation-related things, including getting more people involved with writing them
• In true doc team style, his report is the most well-written of the bunch, including lots of links and a clear separation of topics (doc lounge, contributing to the wiki, presentations...)
• Finally, the fourth one comes to us from Shonali Balakrishna, who also gives an outline of some of the talks
• "Not only does a BSD conference have way too many very smart people in one room, but also some of the nicest." ***

DragonFly on the Chromebook C720

• If you've got one of the Chromebook laptops and weren't happy with the included OS, DragonFlyBSD might be worth a go
• This article is a "mini-report" on how DragonFly functions on the device as a desktop, and
• While the 2GB of RAM proved to be a bit limiting, most of the hardware is well-supported
• DragonFly's wiki has a full guide on getting set up on one of these devices as well ***

Interview - David Meyer - info@xinuos.com / @xinuos

Xinuos, BSD license model vs. others, community interaction

News Roundup

Introducing LiteBSD

• We definitely don't talk about 4.4BSD a lot on the show
• LiteBSD is "a variant of [the] 4.4BSD operating system adapted for microcontrollers"
• If you've got really, really old hardware (or are working in the embedded space) then this might be an interesting hobby project to look info ***

HardenedBSD announces ASLR completion

• HardenedBSD, now officially a full-on fork of FreeBSD, has declared their ASLR patchset to be complete
• The latest and last addition to the work was VDSO (Virtual Dynamic Shared Object) randomization, which is now configurable with a sysctl
• This post gives a summary of the six main features they've added since the beginning
• Only a few small things are left to do - man page cleanups, possibly shared object load order improvements ***

Unlock the reaper

• In the ongoing quest to make more of OpenBSD SMP-friendly, a new patch was posted that unlocks the reaper in the kernel
• When there's a zombie process causing a resource leak, it's the reaper's job to deallocate their resources (and yes we're still talking about computers, not horror movies)
• Initial testing has yielded positive results and no regressions
• They're looking for testers, so you can install a -current snapshot and get it automatically
• An updated version of the patch is coming soon too
• A hackathon is going on right now, so you can expect more SMP improvements in the near future ***

The importance of mentoring

• Adrian Chadd has a blog post up about mentoring new users, and it tells the story of how he originally got into FreeBSD
• He tells the story of, at age 11, meeting someone else who knew about making crystal sets that became his role model
• Eventually we get to his first FreeBSD 1.1 installation (which he temporarily abandoned for Linux, since it didn't have a color "ls" command) and how he started using the OS
• Nowadays, there's a formal mentoring system in FreeBSD
• While he talks about FreeBSD in the post, a lot of the concepts apply to all the BSDs (or even just life in general) ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Herminio writes in
• Stuart writes in
• Richard writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Introducing OPNsense, a pfSense fork

• OPNsense is a new BSD-based firewall project that was recently started, forked from the pfSense codebase
• Even though it's just been announced, they already have a formal release based on FreeBSD 10 (pfSense's latest stable release is based on 8.3)
• The core team includes a well-known DragonFlyBSD developer
• You can check out their code on Github now, or download an image and try it out - let us know if you do and what you think about it
• They also have a nice wiki and some instructions on getting started for new users
• We plan on having them on the show next week to learn a bit more about how the project got started and why you might want to use it - stay tuned ***

Code rot and why I chose OpenBSD

• Here we have a blog post about rotting codebases - a core banking system in this example
• The author tells the story of how his last days spent at the job were mostly removing old, dead code from a giant project
• He goes on to compare it to OpenSSL and the hearbleed disaster, from which LibreSSL was born
• Instead of just bikeshedding like the rest of the internet, OpenBSD "silently started putting the beast into shape" as he puts it
• The article continues on to mention OpenBSD's code review process, and how it catches any bugs so we don't have more heartbleeds
• "In OpenBSD you are encouraged to run current and the whole team tries its best to make current as stable as it can. You know why? They eat their own dog food. That's so simple yet so amazing that it blows my mind. Developers actually run OpenBSD on their machines daily."
• It's a very long and detailed story about how the author has gotten more involved with BSD, learned from the mailing lists and even started contributing back - he says "In summary, I'm learning more than ever - computing is fun again"
• Look for the phrase "Getting Started" in the blog post for a nice little gem ***

ZFS vs HAMMER FS

• One of the topics we've seen come up from time to time is how FreeBSD's ZFS and DragonFly's HAMMER FS compare to each other
• They both have a lot of features that traditional filesystems lack
• A forum thread was opened for discussion about them both and what they're typically used for
• It compares resource requirements, ideal hardware and pros/cons of each
• Hopefully someone will do another new comparison when HAMMER 2 is finished
• This is not to be confused with the other "hammer" filesystem ***

Portable OpenNTPD revived

• With ISC's NTPd having so many security vulnerabilities recently, people need an alternative NTP daemon
• OpenBSD has developed OpenNTPD since 2004, but the portable version for other operating systems hasn't been actively maintained in a few years
• The older version still works fine, and is in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, but it would be nice to have some of the newer features and fixes from the native version
• Brent Cook, who we've had on the show before to talk about LibreSSL, decided it was time to fix this
• While looking through the code, he also found some fixes for the native version as well
• You can grab it from Github now, or just wait for the updated release to hit the repos of your OS of choice ***

Interview - Ian Sutton - ian@kremlin.cc

BSD replacements for systemd dependencies

News Roundup

pkgng adds OS X support

• FreeBSD's next-gen package manager has just added support for Mac OS X
• Why would you want that? Well.. we don't really know, but it's cool
• The author of the patch may have some insight about what his goal is though
• This could open up the door for a cross-platform pkgng solution, similar to NetBSD's pkgsrc
• There's also the possibility of pkgng being used as a packaging format for MacPorts in the future
• While we're on the topic of pkgng, you can also watch bapt's latest presentation about it from ruBSD 2014 - "four years of pkg" ***

Secure secure shell

• Almost everyone watching BSD Now probably uses OpenSSH and has set up a server at one point or another
• This guide provides a list of best practices beyond the typical "disable root login and use keys" advice you'll often hear
• It specifically goes in-depth with server and client configuration with the best key types, KEX methods and encryption ciphers to use
• There are also good explanations for all the choices, based both on history and probability
• Minimal backwards compatibility is kept, but most of the old and insecure stuff gets disabled
• We've also got a handy chart to show which SSH implementations support which ciphers, in case you need to support Windows users or people who use weird clients ***

Dissecting OpenBSD's divert(4)

• PF has a cool feature that not a lot of people seem to know about: divert
• It lets you send packets to userspace, allowing you to inspect them a lot easier
• This blog post, the first in a series, details all the cool things you can do with divert and how to use it
• A very common example is with intrusion detection systems like Snort ***

Screen recording on FreeBSD

• This is a neat article about a topic we don't cover very often: making video content on BSD
• In the post, you'll learn how to make screencasts with FreeBSD, using kdenlive and ffmpeg
• There are also notes about getting a USB microphone working, so you can do commentary on whatever you're showing
• It also includes lots of details and helpful screenshots throughout the process
• You should make cool screencasts and send them to us ***

Feedback/Questions

• Camio writes in
• ezpzy writes in
• Emett writes in
• Ben writes in
• Laszlo writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Protocol X97
• My thoughts echoed
• Vulnerability sample ***

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 ***