95: Bitrot Group Therapy

JT Pennington — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 08:00:00 -0400

This time on the show, we'll be talking some ZFS with Sean Chittenden. He's been using it on FreeBSD at Groupon, and has some interesting stories about how it's saved his data. Answers to your emails and all of this week's headlines, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

OpenBSD httpd rewrite support

One of the most-requested features of OpenBSD's new HTTP daemon (in fact, you can hear someone asking about it in the video just above) is rewrite support
There were concerns about regex code being too complicated and potentially allowing another attack surface, so that was out
Instead, Reyk ported over an implementation of lua pattern matching while on the flight back from BSDCan, turning it into a C API without the lua bindings
In the mailing list post, he shows an example of how to use it for redirects and provides the diff if you'd like to give it a try now
It's since been committed to -current, so you can try it out with a snapshot too ***

SSH 2FA on FreeBSD

We've discussed different ways to lock down SSH access to your BSD boxes before - use keys instead of passwords, whitelist IPs, or even use two-factor authentication
This article serves as a sort of "roundup" on different methods to set up two-factor authentication on FreeBSD
It touches on key pairs with a server-side password, google authenticator and a few other variations
While the article is focused on FreeBSD, a lot of it can be easily applied to the others too
OpenSSH has a great security record, but two-factor authentication is always a good thing to have for the most important systems ***

NetBSD 7.0-RC1 released

NetBSD has just announced the first release candidate for the 7.0 branch, after a long delay since the initial beta (11 months ago)
Some of the standout features include: improved KMS/DRM with support for modern GPUs, SMP support on ARM, lots of new ARM boards officially supported, GPT support in the installer, Lua kernel scripting, a multiprocessor USB stack, improvements to NPF (their firewall) and, optionally, Clang 3.6.1
They're looking for as much testing as possible, so give it a try and report your findings to the release engineering team ***

Interview - Sean Chittenden - seanc@freebsd.org / @seanchittenden

FreeBSD at Groupon, ZFS

News Roundup

OpenSMTPD and Dovecot

We've covered a number of OpenSMTPD mail server guides on the show, each with just a little something different to offer than the last
This blog post about it has something not mentioned before: virtual domains and virtual users
This means you can easily have "user1@domain.com" and "user2@otherdomain.com" both go to a local user on the box (or a different third address)
It also covers SSL certificates, blocking spam and setting up IMAP access, the usual
Now might also be a good time to test out OpenSMTPD 5.7.1-rc1, which we'll cover in more detail when it's released... ***

OctoPkg, a QT frontend to pkgng

A PC-BSD user has begun porting over a graphical package management utility from Arch linux called Octopi
Obviously, it needed to be rewritten to use FreeBSD's pkg system instead of pacman
There are some basic instructions on how to get it built and running on the github page
After some testing, it'll likely make its way to the FreeBSD ports tree
Tools like this might make it easier for desktop users (who are used to similar things in Ubuntu or related distros) to switch over ***

AFL vs. mandoc, a quantitative analysis

Ingo Schwarze has written a pretty detailed article about how he and other OpenBSD developers have been fuzzing mandoc with AFL
It's meant to be accompanying material to his BSDCan talk, which already covered nine topics
mandoc is an interesting example to stress test with fuzzing, since its main job is to take and parse some highly varying input
The article breaks down the 45 different bugs that were found, based on their root cause
If you're interested in secure coding practices, this'll be a great one to read ***

OpenZFS conference videos

Videos from the second OpenZFS conference have just started to show up
The first talk is by, you guessed it, Matt Ahrens
In it, he covers some ZFS history, the Oracle takeover, the birth of illumos and OpenZFS, some administration basics and also some upcoming features that are being worked on
There are also videos from Nexenta and HGST, talking about how they use and contribute to OpenZFS ***

Feedback/Questions

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BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Groupon”