BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Ids”

54: Luminary Environment

JT Pennington — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 08:00:00 -0400

This week on the show, it's all about Lumina. We'll be giving you a visual walkthrough of the new BSD-exclusive desktop environment, as well as chatting with the main developer. There's also answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Portscout ported to OpenBSD

Portscout is a popular utility used in the FreeBSD ports infrastructure
It lets port maintainers know when there's a new version of the upstream software available by automatically checking the distfile mirror
Now OpenBSD porters can enjoy the same convenience, as it's been ported over
You can view the status online to see how it works and who maintains what
The developer who ported it is working to get all the current features working on OpenBSD, and added a few new features as well
He decided to fork and rename it a few days later ***

Sysadmins and systemd refugees flocking to BSD

With all the drama in Linux land about the rapid changes to their init system, a lot of people are looking at BSD alternatives
This "you got your Windows in my Linux" article (and accompanying comments) give a nice glimpse into the minds of some of those switchers
Both server administrators and regular everyday users are switching away from Linux, as more and more distros give them no choice but to use systemd
Fortunately, the BSD communities are usually very welcoming of switchers - it's pretty nice on this side! ***

OpenBSD's versioning schemes

Ted Unangst explains the various versioning systems within OpenBSD, from the base to libraries to other included software
In contrast to FreeBSD's release cycle, OpenBSD isn't as concerned with breaking backwards compatibility (but only if it's needed to make progress)
This allows them to innovate and introduce new features a lot more easily, and get those features in a stable release that everyone uses
He also details the difference between branches, their errata system and lack of "patch levels" for security
Some other things in OpenBSD don't have version numbers at all, like tmux
"Every release adds some new features, fixes some old bugs, probably adds a new bug or two, and, if I have anything to say about it, removes some old features." ***

VAXstation 4000 Model 90 booting NetBSD

We found a video of NetBSD booting on a 22 year old VAX workstation, circa 1992
This system has a monstrous 71 MHz CPU and 128MB of ECC RAM
It continues in part two, where we learn that it would've cost around $25,000 when it was released!
The uploader talks about his experiences getting NetBSD on it, what does and doesn't work, etc
It's interesting to see that such old hardware isn't necessarily obsolete just because newer things have come out since then (but maybe don't try to build world on it...) ***

Interview - Ken Moore - ken@pcbsd.org

The Lumina desktop environment

Special segment

Lumina walkthrough

News Roundup

Suricata for IDS on pfSense

While most people are familiar with Snort as an intrusion detection system, Suricata is another choice
This guide goes through the steps of installing and configuring it on a public-facing pfSense box
Part two details some of the configuration steps
One other cool thing about Suricata - it's compatible with Snort rules, so you can use the same updates
There's also another recent post about snort as well, if that's more your style
If you run pfSense (or any BSD) as an edge router for a lot of users, this might be worth looking into ***

OpenBSD's systemd API emulation project

This story was pretty popular in the mainstream news this week
For the Google Summer of Code, a student is writing emulation wrappers for some of systemd's functions
There was consideration from some Linux users to port over the finished emulation back to Linux, so they wouldn't have to run the full systemd
One particularly interesting Slashdot comment snippet: "We are currently migrating a large number (much larger than planned after initial results) of systems from RHEL to BSD - a decision taken due to general unhappiness with RHEL6, but SystemD pushed us towards BSD rather than another Linux distro - and in some cases are seeing throughput gains of greater than 10% on what should be equivalent Linux and BSD server builds. The re-learning curve wasn't as steep as we expected, general system stability seems to be better too, and BSD's security reputation goes without saying."
It will NOT be in the base system - only in ports, and only installed as a dependency for things like newer GNOME that require such APIs
In the long run, BSD will still be safe from systemd's reign of terror, but will hopefully still be compatible with some third party packages like GNOME that insist on using it ***

GhostBSD 4 previewed

The GhostBSD project is moving along, slowly getting closer to the 4 release
This article shows some of the progress made, and includes lots of screenshots and interesting graphical frontends
If you're not too familiar with GhostBSD, we interviewed the lead developer a little while back ***

NetBSD on the Banana Pi

The Banana Pi is a tasty alternative to the Raspberry Pi, with similar hardware specs
In this blog post, a NetBSD developer details his experiences in getting NetBSD to run on it
After studying how the prebuilt Linux image booted, he made some notes and started hacking
Ethernet, one of the few things not working, is being looked into and he's hoping to get it fully supported for the upcoming NetBSD 7.0
They're only about $65 as of the time we're recording this, so it might be a fun project to try ***

Feedback/Questions

46: Network Iodometry

JT Pennington — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0400

We're back, and this week we'll be showing you how to tunnel out of a restrictive network using only DNS queries. We also sat down with Bryan Drewery, from the FreeBSD portmgr team, to talk all about their building cluster and some recent changes. All the latest news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this year
Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
Registering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everything
You can register online here and check hotels in the area
The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants ***

OpenBSD SMP PF update

A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be useless
He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone through
There's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us ***

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
The full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance release
Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much more
If you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome change
With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted ***

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normally
It's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page ***

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup ***

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver
"Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."
He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system ***

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!
Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
You can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application library
Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easy
New Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as well
PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users ***