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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 ***

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Headlines

BSDCan schedule, speakers and talks

• This year's BSDCan will kick off on May 14th in Ottawa
• The list of speakers is also out
• And finally the talks everyone's looking forward to
• Lots of great tutorials and talks, spanning a wide range of topics of interest
• Be sure to come by so you can and meet Allan and Kris in person and get BSDCan shirts ***

NYCBSDCon talks uploaded

• The BSD TV YouTube channel has been uploading recordings from the 2014 NYCBSDCon
• Jeff Rizzo's talk, "Releasing NetBSD: So Many Targets, So Little Time"
• Dru Lavigne's talk, "ZFS Management Tools in FreeNAS and PC-BSD"
• Scott Long's talk, "Serving one third of the Internet via FreeBSD"
• Michael W. Lucas' talk, "BSD Breaking Barriers" ***

FreeBSD Journal, issue 2

• The bi-monthly FreeBSD journal's second issue is out
• Topics in this issue include pkg, poudriere, the PBI format, hwpmc and journaled soft-updates
• In less than two months, they've already gotten over 1000 subscribers! It's available on Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, etc
• "We are also working on a dynamic version of the magazine that can be read in many web browsers, including those that run on FreeBSD"
• Check our interview with GNN for more information about the journal ***

OpenSSL, more like OpenSS-Hell

• We mentioned this huge OpenSSL bug last week during all the chaos, but the aftermath is just as messy
• There's been a pretty vicious response from security experts all across the internet and in all of the BSD projects - and rightfully so
• We finally have a timeline of events
• Reactions from ISC, PCBSD, Tarsnap, the Tor project, FreeBSD, NetBSD, oss-sec, PHK, Varnish and Akamai
• pfSense released a new version to fix it
• OpenBSD disabled heartbeat entirely and is very unforgiving of the IETF
• Ted Unangst has two good write-ups about the issue and how horrible the OpenSSL codebase is
• A nice quote from one of the OpenBSD lists: "Given how trivial one-liner fixes such as #2569 have remained unfixed for 2.5+ years, one can only assume that OpenSSL's bug tracker is only used to park bugs, not fix them"
• Sounds like someone else was having fun with the bug for a while too
• There's also another OpenSSL bug that OpenBSD patched - it allows an attacker to inject data from one connection into another
• OpenBSD has also imported the most current version of OpenSSL and are ripping it apart from the inside out - we're seeing a fork in real time ***

Interview - Jim Brown - info@bsdcertification.org

The BSD Certification exams

Tutorial

Building OpenBSD binary packages in bulk

News Roundup

Portable signify

• Back in episode 23 we talked with Ted Unangst about the new "signify" tool in OpenBSD
• Now there's a (completely unofficial) portable version of it on github
• If you want to verify your OpenBSD sets ahead of time on another OS, this tool should let you do it
• Maybe other BSD projects can adopt it as a replacement for gpg and incorporate it into their base systems ***

Foundation goals and updates

• The OpenBSD foundation has reached their 2014 goal of $150,000
• You can check their activities and goals to see where the money is going
• Remember that funding also goes to OpenSSH, which EVERY system uses and relies on everyday to protect their data
• The FreeBSD foundation has kicked off their spring fundraising campaign
• There's also a list of their activities and goals available to read through
• Be sure to support your favorite BSD, whichever one, so they can continue to make and improve great software that powers the whole internet ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• New PBI runtime that fixes stability issues and decreases load times
• "Update Center" is getting a lot of development and improvements
• Lots of misc. bug fixes and updates ***

Feedback/Questions

• There's a reddit thread we wanted to highlight - a user wants to show his friend BSD and why it's great
• Brad writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• iGibbs writes in
• Matt writes in ***