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Interview - Pawel Jakub Dawidek - pjd@freebsd.org

Porting ZFS, GEOM, GELI, Capsicum, various topics

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

MeetBSD 2014 is approaching

• The MeetBSD conference is coming up, and will be held on November 1st and 2nd in San Jose, California
• MeetBSD has an "unconference" format, which means there will be both planned talks and community events
• All the extra details will be on their site soon
• It also has hotels and various other bits of useful information - hopefully with more info on the talks to come
• Of course, EuroBSDCon is coming up before then ***

First experiences with OpenBSD

• A new blog post that leads off with "tired of the sluggishness of Windows on my laptop and interested in experimenting with a Unix-like that I haven't tried before"
• The author read the famous "BSD for Linux users" series (that most of us have surely seen) and decided to give BSD a try
• He details his different OS and distro history, concluding with how he "eventually became annoyed at the poor quality of Linux userland software"
• From there, it talks about how he used the OpenBSD USB image and got a fully-working system
• He especially liked the simplicity of OpenBSD's "hostname.if" system for network configuration
• Finally, he gets Xorg working and imports all his usual configuration files - seems to be a happy new user! ***

NetBSD rump kernels on bare metal (and Kansai OSC report)

• When you're developing a new OS or a very specialized custom solution, working drivers become one of the hardest things to get right
• However, NetBSD's rump kernels - a very unique concept - make this process a lot easier
• This blog post talks about the process of starting with just a rump kernel and expanding into an internet-ready system in just a week
• Also have a look back at episode 8 for our interview about rump kernels and what exactly they do
• While on the topic of NetBSD, there were also a couple of very detailed reports (with lots of pictures!) of the various NetBSD-themed booths at the 2014 Kansai Open Source Conference that we wanted to highlight ***

OpenSSL and LibreSSL updates

• OpenSSL pushed out a few new versions, fixing multiple vulnerabilities (nine to be precise!)
• Security concerns include leaking memory, possible denial of service, crashing clients, memory exhaustion, TLS downgrades and more
• LibreSSL released a new version to address most of the vulnerabilities, but wasn't affected by some of them
• Whichever version of whatever SSL you use, make sure it's patched for these issues
• DragonFly and OpenBSD are patched as of the time of this recording but, even after a week, NetBSD and FreeBSD are not (outside of -CURRENT) ***

Interview - Robert Watson - rwatson@freebsd.org

FreeBSD architecture, security research techniques, exploit mitigation

Tutorial

Protecting traffic with a BSD-based VPN

News Roundup

A FreeBSD-based CGit server

• If you use git (like a certain host of this show) then you've probably considered setting up your own server
• This article takes you through the process of setting up a jailed git server, complete with a fancy web frontend
• It even shows you how to set up multiple repos with key-based user separation and other cool things
• The author of the post is also a listener of the show, thanks for sending it in! ***

Backup devices for small businesses

• In this article, different methods of data storage and backup are compared
• After weighing the various options, the author comes to an obvious conclusion: FreeNAS is the answer
• He praises FreeNAS and the FreeNAS Mini for their tight integration, rock solid FreeBSD base and the great ZFS featureset that it offers
• It also goes over some of the hardware specifics in the FreeNAS Mini ***

A new Xenocara interview

• As a follow up to last week's OpenSMTPD interview, this Russian blog interviews Matthieu Herrb about Xenocara
• If you're not familiar with Xenocara, it's OpenBSD's version of Xorg with some custom patches
• In this interview, he discusses how large and complex the upstream X11 development is, how different components are worked on by different people, how they test code (including a new framework) and security auditing
• Matthieu is both a developer of upstream Xorg and an OpenBSD developer, so it's natural for him to do a lot of the maintainership work there ***

Building a high performance FreeBSD samba server

• If you've got to PXE boot several hundred Windows boxes to upgrade from XP to 7, what's the best solution?
• FreeBSD, ZFS and Samba obviously!
• The master image and related files clock in at over 20GB, and will be accessed at the same time by all of those clients
• This article documents that process, highlighting some specific configuration tweaks to maximize performance (including NIC bonding)
• It doesn't even require the newest or best hardware with the right changes, pretty cool ***

Feedback/Questions

• An interesting Reddit thread (or two)
• PB writes in
• Sean writes in
• Steve writes in
• Lachlan writes in
• Justin writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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g2k14 hackathon reports

• Nearly 50 OpenBSD developers gathered in Ljubljana, Slovenia from July 8-14 for a hackathon
• Lots of work got done - in just the first two weeks of July, there were over 1000 commits to their CVS tree
• Some of the developers wrote in to document what they were up to at the event
• Bob Beck planned to work on kernel stuff, but then "LibreSSL happened" and he spent most of his time working on that
• Miod Vallat also tells about his LibreSSL experiences
• Brent Cook, a new developer, worked mainly on the portable version of LibreSSL (and we'll be interviewing him next week!)
• Henning Brauer worked on VLAN bpf and various things related to IPv6 and network interfaces (and he still hates IPv6)
• Martin Pieuchot fixed some bugs in the USB stack, softraid and misc other things
• Marc Espie improved the package code, enabling some speed ups, fixed some ports that broke with LibreSSL and some of the new changes and also did some work on ensuring snapshot consistency
• Martin Pelikan integrated read-only ext4 support
• Vadim Zhukov did lots of ports work, including working on KDE4
• Theo de Raadt created a new, more secure system call, "sendsyslog" and did a lot of work with /etc, sysmerge and the rc scripts
• Paul Irofti worked on the USB stack, specifically for the Octeon platform
• Sebastian Benoit worked on relayd filters and IPv6 code
• Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse did work with puppet, packages and the bootloader
• Jonathan Gray imported newer Mesa libraries and did a lot with Xenocara, including work in the installer for autodetection
• Stefan Sperling fixed a lot of issues with wireless drivers
• Florian Obser did many things related to IPv6
• Ingo Schwarze worked on mandoc, as usual, and also rewrote the openbsd.org man.cgi interface
• Ken Westerback hacked on dhclient and dhcpd, and also got dump working on 4k sector drives
• Matthieu Herrb worked on updating and modernizing parts of xenocara ***

FreeBSD pf discussion takes off

• Concerns from last week, about FreeBSD's packet filter being old and unmaintained, seemed to have finally sparked some conversation about the topic on the "questions" and "current" mailing lists (unfortunately people didn't always use reply-all so you have to cross-reference the two lists to follow the whole conversation sometimes)
• Straight from the SMP FreeBSD pf maintainer: "no one right now [is actively developing pf on FreeBSD]"
• Searching for documentation online for pf is troublesome because there are two incompatible syntaxes
• FreeBSD's pf man pages are lacking, and some of FreeBSD's documentation still links to OpenBSD's pages, which won't work anymore - possibly turning away would-be BSD converts because it's frustrating
• There's also the issue of importing patches from pfSense, but most of those still haven't been done either
• Lots of disagreement among developers vs. users...
• Many users are very vocal about wanting it updated, saying the syntax change is no big deal and is worth the benefits - developers aren't interested
• Henning Brauer, the main developer of pf on OpenBSD, has been very nice and offered to help the other BSDs get their pf fixed on multiple occasions
• Gleb Smirnoff, author of the FreeBSD-specific SMP patches, questions Henning's claims about OpenBSD's improved speed as "uncorroborated claims" (but neither side has provided any public benchmarks)
• Gleb had to abandon his work on FreeBSD's pf because funding ran out ***

LibreSSL progress update

• LibreSSL's first few portable releases have come out and they're making great progress, releasing 2.0.3 two days ago
• Lots of non-OpenBSD people are starting to contribute, sending in patches via the tech mailing list
• However, there has already been some drama... with Linux users
• There was a problem with Linux's PRNG, and LibreSSL was unforgiving of it, not making an effort to randomize something that could not provide real entropy
• This "problem" doesn't affect OpenBSD's native implementation, only the portable version
• The developers decide to weigh in to calm the misinformation and rage
• A fix was added in 2.0.2, and Linux may even get a new system call to handle this properly now - remember to say thanks, guys
• Ted Unangst has a really good post about the whole situation, definitely check it out
• As a follow-up from last week, bapt says they're working on building the whole FreeBSD ports tree against LibreSSL, but lots of things still need some patching to work properly - if you're a port maintainer, please test your ports against it ***

Preparation for NetBSD 7

• The release process for NetBSD 7.0 is finally underway
• The netbsd-7 CVS branch should be created around July 26th, which marks the start of the first beta period, which will be lasting until September
• If you run NetBSD, that'll be a great time to help test on as many platforms as you can (this is especially true on custom embedded applications)
• They're also looking for some help updating documentation and fixing any bugs that get reported
• Another formal announcement will be made when the beta binaries are up ***

Interview - Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des@freebsd.org / @RealEvilDES

The role of the FreeBSD Security Officer, recent ports features, various topics

News Roundup

BSDCan ports and packages WG

• Back at BSDCan this year, there was a special event for discussion of FreeBSD ports and packages
• Bapt talked about package building, poudriere and the systems the foundation funded for compiling packages
• There's also some detail about the signing infrastructure and different mirrors
• Ports people and source people need to talk more often about ABI breakage
• The post also includes information about pkg 1.3, the old pkg tools' EOL, the quarterly stable package sets and a lot more (it's a huge post!) ***

Cross-compiling ports with QEMU and poudriere

• With recent QEMU features, you can basically chroot into a completely different architecture
• This article goes through the process of building ARMv6 packages on a normal X86 box
• Note though that this requires 10-STABLE or 11-CURRENT and an extra patch for QEMU right now
• The poudriere-devel port now has a "qemu user" option that will pull in all the requirements
• Hopefully this will pave the way for official pkgng packages on those lesser-used architectures ***

Cloning FreeBSD with ZFS send

• For a FreeBSD mail server that MWL runs, he wanted to have a way to easily restore the whole system if something were to happen
• This post shows his entire process in creating a mirror machine, using ZFS for everything
• The "zfs send" and "zfs snapshot" commands really come in handy for this
• He does the whole thing from a live CD, pretty impressive ***

FreeBSD Overview series

• A new blog series we stumbled upon about a Linux user switching to BSD
• In part one, he gives a little background on being "done with Linux distros" and documents his initial experience getting and installing FreeBSD 10
• He was pleasantly surprised to be able to use ZFS without jumping through hoops and doing custom kernels
• Most of what he was used to on Linux was already in the default FreeBSD (except bash...)
• Part two documents his experiences with pkgng and ports ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in
• Rick writes in
• Clint writes in
• Esteban writes in
• Ben writes in
• Matt sends in pictures of his FreeBSD CD collection ***

This episode was brought to you by

Interview - Josh Paetzel - josh@ixsystems.com / @bsdunix4ever

Crazy ZFS stories, network protocols, server hardware

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

pfSense 2.1.4 released

• The pfSense team has released 2.1.4, shortly after 2.1.3 - it's mainly a security release
• Included within are eight security fixes, most of which are pfSense-specific
• OpenSSL, the WebUI and some packages all need to be patched (and there are instructions on how to do so)
• It also includes a large number of various other bug fixes
• Update all your routers! ***

DragonflyBSD's pf gets SMP

• While we're on the topic of pf...
• Dragonfly patches their old[er than even FreeBSD's] pf to support multithreading in many areas
• Stemming from a user's complaint, Matthew Dillon did his own work on pf to make it SMP-aware
• Altering your configuration's ruleset can also help speed things up, he found
• When will OpenBSD, the source of pf, finally do the same? ***

ChaCha usage and deployment

• A while back, we talked to djm about some cryptography changes in OpenBSD 5.5 and OpenSSH 6.5
• This article is sort of an interesting follow-up to that, showing which projects have adopted ChaCha20
• OpenSSH offers it as a stream cipher now, OpenBSD uses it for it's random number generator, Google offers it in TLS for Chromium and some of their services and lots of other projects seem to be adopting it
• Both Google's fork of OpenSSL and LibReSSL have upcoming implementations, while vanilla OpenSSL does not
• Unfortunately, this article has one mistake: FreeBSD does not use it - they still use the broken RC4 algorithm ***

BSDMag June 2014 issue

• The monthly online BSD magazine releases their newest issue
• This one includes the following articles: TLS hardening, setting up a package cluster in MidnightBSD, more GIMP tutorials, "saving time and headaches using the robot framework for testing," an interview and an article about the increasing number of security vulnerabilities
• The free pdf file is available for download as always ***

Interview - Craig Rodrigues - rodrigc@freebsd.org

FreeBSD's continuous testing infrastructure

Tutorial

Creating pre-patched OpenBSD ISOs

News Roundup

Preauthenticated decryption considered harmful

• Responding to a post from Adam Langley, Ted Unangst talks a little more about how signify and pkg_add handle signatures
• In the past, the OpenBSD installer would pipe the output of ftp straight to tar, but then verify the SHA256 at the end - this had the advantage of not requiring any extra disk space, but raised some security concerns
• With signify, now everything is fully downloaded and verified before tar is even invoked
• The pkg_add utility works a little bit differently, but it's also been improved in this area - details in the post
• Be sure to also read the original post from Adam, lots of good information ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RC2 is out

• As the -RELEASE inches closer, release candidate 2 is out and ready for testing
• Since the last one, it's got some fixes for NIC drivers, the latest file and libmagic security fixes, some serial port workarounds and various other small things
• The updated bsdconfig will use pkgng style packages now too
• A lesser known fact: there are also premade virtual machine images you can use too ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 wrap-up

• In what may be the first real pkgsrcCon article we've ever had!
• Includes wrap-up discussion about the event, the talks, the speakers themselves, what they use pkgsrc for, the hackathon and basically the whole event
• Unfortunately no recordings to be found... ***

PostgreSQL FreeBSD performance and scalability

• FreeBSD developer kib@ writes a report on PostgreSQL on FreeBSD, and how it scales
• On his monster 40-core box with 1TB of RAM, he runs lots of benchmarks and posts the findings
• Lots of technical details if you're interested in getting the best performance out of your hardware
• It also includes specific kernel options he used and the rest of the configuration
• If you don't want to open the pdf file, you can use this link too ***

Feedback/Questions

• James writes in
• Klemen writes in
• John writes in
• Brad writes in
• Adam writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and schedule

• The talks and schedules for EuroBSDCon 2014 are finally revealed
• The opening keynote is called "FreeBSD, looking forward to another 10 years" by jkh
• Lots of talks spanning FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PCBSD, and we finally have a few about NetBSD and DragonflyBSD too! Variety is great
• It looks like Theo even has a talk, but the title isn't on the page... how mysterious
• There are also days dedicated to some really interesting tutorials
• Register now, the conference is on September 25-28th in Bulgaria
• If you see Allan and Kris walking towards you and you haven't given us an interview yet... well you know what's going to happen
• Why aren't the videos up from last year yet? Will this year also not have any? ***

FreeNAS vs NAS4Free

• More mainstream news covering BSD, this time with an article about different NAS solutions
• In a possibly excessive eight-page article, Ars Technica discusses the pros and cons of both FreeNAS and NAS4Free
• Both are based on FreeBSD and ZFS of course, but there are more differences than you might expect
• Discusses the different development models, release cycles, features, interfaces and ease-of-use factor of each project
• "One is pleasantly functional; the other continues devolving during a journey of pain" - uh oh, who's the loser? ***

Quality software costs money, heartbleed was free

• PHK writes an article for ACM Queue about open source software projects' funding efforts
• A lot of people don't realize just how widespread open source software is - TVs, printers, gaming consoles, etc
• The article discusses ways to convince your workplace to fund open source efforts, then goes into a little bit about FreeBSD and Varnish's funding
• The latest heartbleed vulnerability should teach everyone that open source projects are critical to the internet, and need people actively maintaining them
• On that subject, "Earlier this year the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug laid waste to Internet security, and there are still hundreds of thousands of embedded devices of all kinds—probably your television among them—that have not been and will not ever be software-upgraded to fix it. The best way to prevent that from happening again is to avoid having bugs of that kind go undiscovered for several years, and the only way to avoid that is to have competent people paying attention to the software"
• Consider donating to your favorite BSD foundation (or buying cool shirts and CDs!) and keeping the ecosystem alive ***

Geoblock evasion with pf and OpenBSD rdomains

• Geoblocking is a way for websites to block visitors based on the location of their IP
• This is a blog post about how to get around it, using pf and rdomains
• It has the advantage of not requiring any browser plugins or DNS settings on the users' computers, you just need to be running OpenBSD on your router (hmm, if only a website had a tutorial about that...)
• In this post, the author wanted to get an American IP address, since the service he was using (Netflix) is blocked in Australia
• It's got all the details you need to set up a VPN-like system and bypass those pesky geographic filters ***

Interview - Marc Espie - espie@openbsd.org / @espie_openbsd

OpenBSD's package system, building cluster, various topics

Tutorial

Keeping your BSD up to date

News Roundup

BoringSSL and LibReSSL

• Yet another OpenSSL fork pops up, this time from Google, called BoringSSL
• Adam Langley has a blog post about it, why they did it and how they're going to maintain it
• You can easily browse the source code
• Theo de Raadt also weighs in with how this effort relates to LibReSSL
• More eyes on the code is good, and patches will be shared between the two projects ***

More BSD Tor nodes wanted

• Friend of the show bcallah posts some news to the Tor-BSD mailing list about monoculture in the Tor network being both bad and dangerous
• Originally discussed on the Tor-Relays list, it was made apparent that having such a large amount of Linux nodes weakens the security of the whole network
• If one vulnerability is found, a huge portion of the network would be useless - we need more variety in the network stacks, crypto, etc.
• The EFF is also holding a Tor challenge for people to start up new relays and keep them online for over a year
• Check out our Tor tutorial and help out the network, and promote BSD at the same time! ***

FreeBSD 10 OpenStack images

• OpenStack, to quote Wikipedia, is "a free and open-source software cloud computing platform. It is primarily deployed as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution."
• The article goes into detail about creating a FreeBSD instant, installing and converting it for use with "bsd-cloudinit"
• The author of the article is a regular listener and emailer of the show, hey! ***

BSDday 2014 call for papers

• BSD Day, a conference not so well-known, is going to be held August 9th in Argentina
• It was created in 2008 and is the only BSD conference around that area
• The "call for papers" was issued, so if you're around Argentina and use BSD, consider submitting a talk
• Sysadmins, developers and regular users are, of course, all welcome to come to the event ***

Feedback/Questions

• Maruf writes in
• Solomon writes in
• Silas writes in
• Bert writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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PIE and ASLR in FreeBSD update

• A status update for Shawn Webb's ASLR and PIE work for FreeBSD
• One major part of the code, position-independent executable support, has finally been merged into the -CURRENT tree
• "FreeBSD has supported loading PIEs for a while now, but the applications in base weren't compiled as PIEs. Given that ASLR is useless without PIE, getting base compiled with PIE support is a mandatory first step in proper ASLR support"
• If you're running -CURRENT, just add "WITH_PIE=1" to your /etc/src.conf and /etc/make.conf
• The next step is working on the ASLR coding style and getting more developers to look through it
• Shawn will also be at EuroBSDCon (in September) giving an updated version of his BSDCan talk about ASLR ***

Misc. pfSense news

• Couple of pfSense news items this week, including some hardware news
• Someone's gotta test the pfSense hardware devices before they're sold, which involves powering them all on at least once
• To make that process faster, they're building a controllable power board (and include some cool pics)
• There will be more info on that device a bit later on
• On Friday, June 27th, there will be another video session (for paying customers only...) about virtualized firewalls
• pfSense University, a new paid training course, was also announced
• A single two-day class costs $2000, ouch ***

ZFS stripe width

• A new blog post from Matt Ahrens about ZFS stripe width
• "The popularity of OpenZFS has spawned a great community of users, sysadmins, architects and developers, contributing a wealth of advice, tips and tricks, and rules of thumb on how to configure ZFS. In general, this is a great aspect of the ZFS community, but I’d like to take the opportunity to address one piece of misinformed advice"
• Matt goes through different situations where you would set up your zpool differently, each with their own advantages and disadvantages
• He covers best performance on random IOPS, best reliability, and best space efficiency use cases
• It includes a lot of detail on each one, including graphs, and addresses some misconceptions about different RAID-Z levels' overhead factor ***

FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 released

• The third BETA in the 9.3 release cycle is out, we're slowly getting closer to the release
• This is expected to be the final BETA, next will come the RCs
• There have mostly just been small bug fixes since BETA2, but OpenSSL was also updated and the arc4random code was updated to match what's in -CURRENT (but still isn't using ChaCha20)
• The FreeBSD foundation has a blog post about it too
• There's a list of changes between 9.2 and 9.3 as well, but we'll be sure to cover it when the -RELEASE hits ***

Interview - Bryce Chidester - brycec@devio.us / @brycied00d

Running a BSD shell provider

Tutorial

Chaining SSH connections

News Roundup

My FreeBSD adventure

• A Slackware user from the "linux questions" forum decides to try out BSD, and documents his initial impressions and findings
• After ruling out PCBSD due to the demanding hardware requirements and NetBSD due to "politics" (whatever that means, his words) he decides to start off with FreeBSD 10, but also mentions trying OpenBSD later on
• In his forum post, he covers the documentation (and how easy it makes it for a switcher), dual booting, packages vs ports, network configuration and some other little things
• So far, he seems to really enjoy BSD and thinks that it makes a lot of sense compared to Linux
• Might be an interesting, ongoing series we can follow up on later ***

Even more BSDCan trip reports

• BSDCan may be over until next year, but trip reports are still pouring in
• This time we have a summary from Li-Wen Hsu, who was paid for by the FreeBSD foundation
• He's part of the "Jenkins CI for FreeBSD" group and went to BSDCan mostly for that
• Nice long post about all of his experiences at the event, definitely worth a read
• He even talks about... the food ***

FreeBSD disk partitioning

• For his latest book series on FreeBSD's GEOM system, MWL asked the hackers mailing list for some clarification
• This erupted into a very long discussion about fdisk vs gnop vs gpart
• So you don't have to read the 500 mailing list posts, he's summarized the findings in a blog post
• It covers MBR vs GPT, disk sector sizes and how to handle all of them with which tools ***

BSD Router Project version 1.51

• A new version of the BSD Router Project has been released, 1.51
• It's now based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE instead of 10.0-RELEASE
• Includes lots of bugfixes and small updates, as well as some patches from pfSense and elsewhere
• Check the sourceforge page for the complete list of changes
• Bad news... the minimum disk size requirement has increased to 512MB... getting pretty bloated ***

Feedback/Questions

• Fongaboo writes in
• David writes in
• Kristian writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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BSDCan 2014 talks and reports, part 2

• More presentations and trip reports are still being uploaded
• Ingo Schwarze, New Trends in mandoc
• Vsevolod Stakhov, The Architecture of the New Solver in pkg
• Julio Merino, The FreeBSD Test Suite
• Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM
• There's also a trip report from Michael Dexter and another (very long and detailed) trip report from our friend Warren Block that even gives us some linkage, thanks! ***

Beyond security, getting to know OpenBSD's real purpose

• Michael W Lucas (who, we learn through this video, has been using BSD since 1986) gave a "webcast" last week, and the audio and slides are finally up
• It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, managing to touch on a lot of OpenBSD topics
• Some of those topics include: what is OpenBSD and why you should care, the philosophy of the project, how it serves as a "pressure cooker for ideas," briefly touches on GPL vs BSDL, their "do it right or don't do it at all" attitude, their stance on NDAs and blobs, recent LibreSSL development, some of the security functions that OpenBSD enabled before anyone else (and the ripple effect that had) and, of course, their disturbing preference for comic sans
• Here's a direct link to the slides
• Great presentation if you'd like to learn a bit about OpenBSD, but also contains a bit of information that long-time users might not know too ***

FreeBSD vs Linux, a comprehensive comparison

• Another blog post covering something people seem to be obsessed with - FreeBSD vs Linux
• This one was worth mentioning because it's very thorough in regards to how things are done behind the scenes, not just the usual technical differences
• It highlights the concept of a "core team" and their role vs "contributors" and "committers" (similar to a presentation Kirk McKusick did not long ago)
• While a lot of things will be the same on both platforms, you might still be asking "which one is right for me?" - this article weighs in with some points for both sides and different use cases
• Pretty well-written and unbiased article that also mentions areas where Linux might be better, so don't hate us for linking it ***

Expand FreeNAS with plugins

• One of the things people love the most about FreeNAS (other than ZFS) is their cool plugin framework
• With these plugins, you can greatly expand the feature set of your NAS via third party programs
• This page talks about a few of the more popular ones and how they can be used to improve your NAS or media box experience
• Some examples include setting up an OwnCloud server, Bacula for backups, Maraschino for managing a home theater PC, Plex Media Server for an easy to use video experience and a few more
• It then goes into more detail about each of them, how to actually install plugins and then how to set them up ***

Interview - Karl Lehenbauer - karl@flightaware.com / @flightaware

FreeBSD at FlightAware, BSD history, various topics

Tutorial

Ports and packages in OpenBSD

News Roundup

Code review culture meets FreeBSD

• In most of the BSDs, changes need to be reviewed by more than one person before being committed to the tree
• This article describes Phabricator, an open source code review system that we briefly mentioned last week
• Instructions for using it are on the wiki
• While not approved by the core team yet for anything official, it's in a testing phase and developers are encouraged to try it out and get their patches reviewed
• Just look at that fancy interface!! ***

Upcoming BSD books

• Sneaky MWL somehow finds his way into both our headlines and the news roundup
• He gives us an update on the next BSD books that he's planning to release
• The plan is to release three (or so) books based on different aspects of FreeBSD's storage system(s) - GEOM, UFS, ZFS, etc.
• This has the advantage of only requiring you to buy the one(s) you're specifically interested in
• "When will they be released? When I'm done writing them. How much will they cost? Dunno."
• It's not Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition... ***

CARP failover and high availability on FreeBSD

• If you're running a cluster or a group of servers, you should have some sort of failover in place
• But the question comes up, "how do you load balance the load balancers!?"
• This video goes through the process of giving more than one machine the same IP, how to set up CARP, securing it and demonstrates a node dying
• Also mentions DNS-based load balancing as another option ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time in PCBSD land, we're getting ready for the 10.0.2 release (ISOs here)
• AppCafe got a good number of fixes, and now shows 10 random highlighted applications
• EasyPBI added a "bulk" mode to create PBIs of an entire FreeBSD port category
• Lumina, the new desktop environment, is still being worked on and got some bug fixes too ***

Feedback/Questions

• Paul writes in
• Matt writes in
• Kjell writes in
• Paul writes in
• Tom writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Interview - John Hixson - john@ixsystems.com / @bsdwhore

FreeNAS development

This episode was brought to you by

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 ***

This episode was brought to you by

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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

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OpenBSD on a Sun T5120

• Our buddy Ted Unangst got himself a cool Sun box
• Of course he had to write a post about installing and running OpenBSD on it
• The post goes through some of the quirks and steps to go through in case you're interested in one of these fine SPARC machines
• He's also got another post about OpenBSD on a Dell CS24-SC server ***

Bhyvecon 2014 videos are up

• Like we mentioned last week, Bhyvecon was an almost-impromptu conference before AsiaBSDCon
• The talks have apparently already been uploaded!
• Subjects include Bhyve's past, present and future, OSv on Bhyve, a general introduction to the tool, migrating those last few pesky Linux boxes to virtualization
• Lots more detail in the videos, so check 'em all out ***

Building a FreeBSD wireless access point

• We've got a new blog post about creating a wireless access point with FreeBSD
• After all the recent news of consumer routers being pwned like candy, it's time for people to start building BSD routers
• The author goes through a lot of the process of getting one set up using good ol' FreeBSD
• Using hostapd, he's able to share his wireless card in hostap mode and offer DHCP to all the clients
• Plenty of config files and more messy details in the post ***

Switching from Synology to FreeNAS

• The author has been considering getting a NAS for quite a while and documents his research
• He was faced with the compromise of convenience vs. flexibility - prebuilt or DIY
• After seeing the potential security issues with proprietary NAS devices, and dealing with frustration with trying to get bugs fixed, he makes the right choice
• The post also goes into some detail about his setup, all the things he needed a NAS to do as well as all the advantages an open source solution would give ***

Interview - Warren Block - wblock@freebsd.org

FreeBSD's documentation project, igor, doceng

Tutorial

The world of BSD mailing lists

News Roundup

HAMMER2 work and notes

• Matthew Dillon has posted some updated notes about the development of the new HAMMER version
• The start of a cluster API was committed to the tree
• There are also links to design document, a freemap design document, a changes list and a todo list ***

BSD Breaking Barriers

• Our friend MWL gave a talk at NYCBSDCon about BSD "breaking barriers"
• "What makes the BSD operating systems special? Why should you deploy your applications on BSD? Why does the BSD community keep growing, and why do Linux sites like DistroWatch say that BSD is where the interesting development work is happening? We'll cover the not-so-obvious reasons why BSD still stands tall after almost 40 years."
• He also has another upcoming talk, (or "webcast") called "Beyond Security: Getting to Know OpenBSD's Real Purpose"
• "OpenBSD is frequently billed as a high-security operating system. That's true, but security isn't the OpenBSD Project's main goal. This webcast will introduce systems administrators to OpenBSD, explain the project's mission, and discuss the features and benefits."
• It's on May 27th and will hopefully be recorded ***

FreeBSD in a chroot

• Finch, "FreeBSD running IN a CHroot," is a new project
• It's a way to extend the functionality of restricted USB-based FreeBSD systems (FreeNAS, etc.)
• All the details and some interesting use cases are on the github page
• He really needs to change the project name though ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots of bugfixes for PCBSD coming down the tubes
• LZ4 compression is now enabled by default on the whole pool
• The latest 10-STABLE has been imported and builds are going
• Also the latest GNOME and Cinnamon builds have been imported and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in (IRC suggests md5deep)
• Don writes in
• kaltheat writes in (We use R0DE Podcast microphones and Logitech C920 HD webcams)
• Harri writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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FreeBSD and OpenBSD in GSOC2014

• The Google Summer of Code is a way to encourage students to write code for open source projects and make some money
• Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted, and we'd love for anyone listening to check out their GSOC pages
• The FreeBSD wiki has a list of things that they'd be interested in someone helping out with
• OpenBSD's want list was also posted
• DragonflyBSD and NetBSD were sadly not accepted this year ***

Yes, you too can be an evil network overlord

• A new blog post about monitoring your network using only free tools
• OpenBSD is a great fit, and has all the stuff you need in the base system or via packages
• It talks about the pflow pseudo-interface, its capabilities and relation to NetFlow (also goes well with pf)
• There's also details about flowd and nfsen, more great tools to make network monitoring easy
• If you're listening, Peter... stop ignoring our emails and come on the show! We know you're watching! ***

BSDMag's February issue is out

• The theme is "configuring basic services on OpenBSD 5.4"
• There's also an interview with Peter Hansteen (oh hey...)
• Topics also include locking down SSH, a GIMP lesson, user/group management, and...
• Linux and Solaris articles? Why?? ***

Changes in bcrypt

• Not specific to any OS, but the OpenBSD team is updating their bcrypt implementation
• There is a bug in bcrypt when hashing long passwords - other OSes need to update theirs too! (FreeBSD already has)
• "The length is stored in an unsigned char type, which will overflow and wrap at 256. Although we consider the existence of affected hashes very rare, in order to differentiate hashes generated before and after the fix, we are introducing a new minor 'b'."
• As long as you upgrade your OpenBSD system in order (without skipping versions) you should be ok going forward
• Lots of specifics in the email, check the full thing ***

Interview - Will Backman - bitgeist@yahoo.com / @bsdtalk

The BSDTalk podcast, BSD advocacy, various topics

Tutorial

Tracking and cross-compiling -CURRENT (NetBSD)

News Roundup

X11 no longer needs root

• Xorg has long since required root privileges to run the main server
• With recent work from the OpenBSD team, now everything (even KMS) can run as a regular user
• Now you can set the "machdep.allowaperture" sysctl to 0 and still use a GUI ***

OpenSSH 6.6 CFT

• Shortly after the huge 6.5 release, we get a routine bugfix update
• Test it out on as many systems as you can
• Check the mailing list for the full bug list ***

Creating an OpenBSD USB drive

• Since OpenBSD doesn't distribute any official USB images, here are some instructions on how to do it
• Step by step guide on how you can make your very own
• However, there's some recent emails that suggest official USB images may be coming soon... oh wait ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• New PBI updates that allow separate ports from /usr/local
• You need to rebuild pbi-manager if you want to try it out
• Updates and changes to Life Preserver, App Cafe, PCDM ***

Feedback/Questions

• espressowar writes in
• Antonio writes in
• Christian writes in
• Adam writes in
• Alex writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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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

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FreeBSD's new testing infrastructure

• A new test suite was added to FreeBSD, with 3 powerful machines available
• Both -CURRENT and stable/10 have got the test suite build infrastructure in place
• Designed to help developers test and improve major scalability across huge amounts of CPUs and RAM
• More details available here
• Could the iXsystems monster server be involved...? ***

OpenBSD gets signify

• At long last, OpenBSD gets support for signed releases!
• For "the world's most secure OS" it was very easy to MITM kernel patches, updates, installer isos, everything
• A commit to the -current tree reveals a new "signify" tool is currently being kicked around
• More details in a blog post from the guy who committed it
• Quote: "yeah, briefly, the plan is to sign sets and packages. that's still work in progress." ***

Faces of FreeBSD

• This time they interview Isabell Long
• She's a volunteer staff member on the freenode IRC network
• In 2011, she participated in the Google Code-In contest and became involved with documentation
• "The new committer mentoring process proved very useful and that, plus the accepting community of FreeBSD, are reasons why I stay involved." ***

pkgsrc-2013Q4 branched

• The quarterly pkgsrc branch from NetBSD is out
• 13472 total packages for NetBSD-current/amd64 + 13049 binary packages built with clang!
• Lots of numbers and stats in the announcement
• pkgsrc works on quite a few different OSes, not just NetBSD
• See our interview with Amitai Schlair for a bit about pkgsrc ***

OpenBSD on Google's Compute Engine

• Google Compute Engine is a "cloud computing" platform similar to EC2
• Unfortunately, they only offer poor choices for the OS (Debian and CentOS)
• Recently it's been announced that there is a custom OS option
• It's using a WIP virtio-scsi driver, lots of things still need more work
• Lots of technical and networking details about the struggles to get OpenBSD working on it ***

The Installfest

We'll be showing you the installer of each of the main BSDs. As of the date this episode airs, we're using:

• FreeBSD 10.0
• OpenBSD 5.4
• NetBSD 6.1.2
• DragonflyBSD 3.6
• PCBSD 10.0 ***

News Roundup

Building an OpenBSD wireless access point

• A neat write up we found around the internet about making an OpenBSD wifi router
• Goes through the process of PXE booting, installing base, using a serial console, setting up networking and wireless
• Even includes a puffy sticker on the Soekris box at the end, how cute ***

FreeBSD 4.X jails on 10.0

• Blog entry from our buddy Michael Lucas
• For whatever reason (an "in-house application"), he needed to run a FreeBSD 4 jail in FreeBSD 10
• Talks about the options he had: porting software, virtualizing, dealing with slow old hardware
• He goes through the whole process of making an ancient jail
• It's "an acceptable trade-off, if it means I don’t have to touch actual PHP code." ***

Unscrewed: a story about OpenBSD

• Pretty long blog post about how a network admin used OpenBSD to save the day
• To set the tone, "It was 5am, and the network was down"
• Great war story about replacing expensive routers and networking equipment with cheaper hardware and BSD
• Mentions a lot of the built in tools and how OpenBSD is great for routers and high security applications ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC3 is out and ready to be tested
• New detection of ATI Hybrid Graphics, they're working on nVidia next
• Re-classifying Linux jails as unsupported / experimental ***

Feedback/Questions

• Daniel writes in
• Erik writes in
• SW writes in
• [Bostjan writes in[(http://slexy.org/view/s20N9bfkum)
• Samuel writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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Secure communications with OpenBSD and OpenVPN

• Starting off today's theme of encryption...
• A new blog series about combining OpenBSD and OpenVPN to secure your internet traffic
• Part 1 covers installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption (which we'll be doing later on in the show)
• Part 2 covers the initial setup of OpenVPN certificates and keys
• Parts 3 and 4 are the OpenVPN server and client configuration
• Part 5 is some updates and closing remarks ***

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

• The December 2013 semi-annual newsletter was sent out from the foundation
• In the newsletter you will find the president's letter, articles on the current development projects they sponsor and reports from all the conferences and summits they sponsored
• The president's letter alone is worth the read, really amazing
• Really long, with lots of details and stories from the conferences and projects ***

Use of NetBSD with Marvell Kirkwood Processors

• Article that gives a brief history of NetBSD and how to use it on an IP-Plug computer
• The IP-Plug is a "multi-functional mini-server was developed by Promwad engineers by the order of AK-Systems. It is designed for solving a wide range of tasks in IP networks and can perform the functions of a computer or a server. The IP-Plug is powered from a 220V network and has low power consumption, as well as a small size (which can be compared to the size of a mobile phone charger)."
• Really cool little NetBSD ARM project with lots of graphs, pictures and details ***

Experimenting with zero-copy network IO

• Long blog post from Adrian Chadd about zero-copy network IO on FreeBSD
• Discusses the different OS' implementations and options
• He's able to get 35 gbit/sec out of 70,000 active TCP sockets, but isn't stopping there
• Tons of details, check the full post ***

Interview - Damien Miller - djm@openbsd.org / @damienmiller

Cryptography in OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Tutorial

Full disk encryption in FreeBSD & OpenBSD

News Roundup

OpenZFS office hours

• Our buddy George Wilson sat down to take some ZFS questions from the community
• You can see more info about it here ***

License summaries in pkgng

• A discussion between Justin Sherill and some NYCBUG guys about license frameworks in pkgng
• Similar to pkgsrc's "ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES" setting, pkgng could let the user decide which software licenses he wants to allow
• Maybe we could get a "pkg licenses" command to display the license of all installed packages
• Ok bapt, do it ***

The FreeBSD challenge continues

• Checking in with our buddy from the Linux foundation...
• The switching from Linux to FreeBSD blog series continues for his month-long trial
• Follow up from last week: "As a matter of fact, I did check out PC-BSD, and wanted the challenge. Call me addicted to pain and suffering, but the pride and accomplishment you feel from diving into FreeBSD is quite rewarding."
• Since we last mentioned it, he's decided to go from a VM to real hardware, got all of his common software installed, experimented with the Linux emulation, set up virtualbox, learned about slices/partitions/disk management, found BSD alternatives to his regularly-used commands and lots more ***

Ports gets a stable branch

• For the first time ever, FreeBSD's ports tree will have a maintained "stable" branch
• This is similar to how pkgsrc does things, with a rolling release for updated software and stable branch for only security and big fixes
• All commits to this branch require approval of portmgr, looks like it'll start in 2014Q1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• John writes in
• Spencer writes in
• Campbell writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Clint writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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More faces of FreeBSD

• Another installment of the FoF series
• This time they talk with Reid Linnemann who works at Spectra Logic
• Gives a history of all the different jobs he's done, all the programming languages he knows
• Mentions how he first learned about FreeBSD, actually pretty similar to Kris' story
• "I used the system to build and install ports, and explored, getting actively involved in the mailing lists and forums, studying, passing on my own limited knowledge to those who could benefit from it. I pursued my career in the open source software world, learning the differences in BSD and GNU licensing and the fragmented nature of Linux distributions, realizing the FreeBSD community was more mature and well distributed about industry, education, and research. Everything steered me towards working with and on FreeBSD."
• Now works on FreeBSD as his day job
• The second one covers Brooks Davis
• FreeBSD committer since 2001 and core team member from 2006 through 2012
• He's helped drive our transition from a GNU toolchain to a more modern LLVM-based toolchain
• "One of the reasons I like FreeBSD is the community involved in the process of building a principled, technically-advanced operating system platform. Not only do we produce a great product, but we have fun doing it."
• Lots more in the show notes ***

We cannot trust Intel and Via’s chip-based crypto

• We woke up to see FreeBSD on the front page of The Register, Ars Technica, Slashdot and Hacker News for their strong stance on security and respecting privacy
• At the EuroBSDCon dev summit, there was some discussion about removing support for hardware-based random number generators.
• FreeBSD's /dev/random got some updates and, for 10.0, will no longer allow the use of Intel or VIA's hardware RNGs as the sole point of entropy
• "It will still be possible to access hardware random number generators, that is, RDRAND, Padlock etc., directly by inline assembly or by using OpenSSL from userland, if required, but we cannot trust them any more" ***

OpenSMTPD 5.4.1 released

• The OpenBSD developers came out with major a new version
• Improved config syntax (please check your smtpd.conf before upgrading)
• Adds support for TLS Perfect Forward Secrecy and custom CA certificate
• MTA, Queue and SMTP server improvements
• SNI support confirmed for the next version
• Check the show notes for the full list of changes, pretty huge release
• Watch Episode 3 for an interview we did with the developers ***

More getting to know your portmgr

• The portmgr secretary, Thomas Abthorpe, interviews... himself!
• Joined as -secretary in March 2010, upgraded to full member in March 2011
• His inspiration for using BSD is "I wanted to run a webserver, and I wanted something free. I was going to use something linux, then met up with a former prof from university, and shared my story with him. He told me FreeBSD was the way to go."
• Mentions how he loves that anyone can contribute and watch it "go live"
• The second one covers Baptiste Daroussin
• The reason for his nick, bapt, is "Baptiste is too long to type"
• There's even a video of bapt joining the team! ***

Interview - Santa Clause - josh@ixsystems.com / @freenasteam

FreeNAS 9.2.0

Note: we originally scheduled the interview to be with Josh Paetzel, but Santa showed up instead.

Tutorial

FreeNAS walkthrough

News Roundup

Introducing configinit

• CloudInit is "a system originally written for Ubuntu which performs configuration of a system at boot-time based on user-data provided via EC2"
• Wasn't ideal for FreeBSD since it requires python and is designed around the concept of configuring a system by running commands (rather than editing configuration files)
• Colin Percival came up with configinit, a FreeBSD alternative
• Alongside his new "firstboot-pkgs" port, it can spin up a webserver in 120 seconds from "launch" of the EC2 instance
• Check the show notes for full blog post ***

OpenSSH support for Ed25519 and bcrypt keys

• New Ed25519 key support (hostkeys and user identities) using the public domain ed25519 reference code
• SSH private keys were encrypted with a symmetric key that's just an MD5 of their password
• Now they'll be using bcrypt by default
• We'll get more into this in next week's interview ***

The FreeBSD challenge

• A member of the Linux foundation blogs about using FreeBSD
• Goes through all the beginner steps, has to "unlearn" some of his Linux ways
• Only a few posts as of this time, but it's a continuing series that may be helpful for switchers ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• GNOME3, cinnamon and mate desktops are in the installer
• Compat layer updated to CentOS 6, enables newest Skype
• Looking for people to test printers and hplip
• Continuing work on grub, but the ability to switch between bootloaders is back ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in
• Jason writes in
• John writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Alexy writes in ***