NOTES

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Headlines

Debunking Common Myths About FreeBSD

Please, don’t force me to log in

News Roundup

Exploring FreeBSD service(8) basics

Failed Product Designs: A Laptop with Seven Screens
The Expanscape Aurora 7

“What’s a Permissive License – and Why Should I Care?”

Beginning of the year Laugh

Beastie Bits

NetBSD 10: Thirty Years, Still Going Strong!
Dracula theme using bash shell
pinsyscalls(2) working in anger
First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD

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NOTES

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Headlines

ZFS High Availability with
Asynchronous Replication and zrep

Stop Blogging and start documenting

News Roundup

2023 in Review: Infrastructure

NovaCustom NV41 laptop review

OpenBSD Video Audio Screen Recording

HDMI Audio sound patches into GhostBSD source code /usr/ghost14/ghostbsd-src SOLVED Jan20 2024

Beastie Bits

DSA removal from OpenSSH

NetBSD/evbppc 10.99.10 on the Nintendo Wii

NetBSD/amd64 current performance patch

November/December 2023 FreeBSD Journal Issue

Feedback

• Rick - Questions

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NOTES
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Headlines

Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls – The Ultimate Guide - Part 2

27 Years with the Perfect OS

News Roundup

Top 20 OpenSSH Server Best Security Practices

Huge pfsync rewrite

OpenSMTPD 7.3.0p1 released

Running OpenBSD 7.3 on your laptop is really hard (not)

QuicSSH

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Feedback/Questions

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Headlines

Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them

OpenZFS for HPC Clusters

News Roundup

Self-Hosted Bookmarks using DAV and httpd on OpenBSD

Terraform + Proxmox + OpenBSD = <3

WOL Plex Server

Against Innovation

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NOTES
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Headlines

FreeBSD on the Framework laptop

Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux

News Roundup

Why is the OpenBSD documentation so good?

How I configure dma for mail delivery in jails on my internet hosts

Introducing muxfs

RAID 1C boot support added

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Feedback/Questions

• [Oliver - shell tip)[https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/469/feedback/Oliver%20-%20shell%20tip.md]

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

NOTES
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Headlines

Full system backups with FFS snapshots, ZFS and dump(8)

Tuning Recordsize in OpenZFS

News Roundup

Optimizing FreeBSD Power Consumption on Modern Intel Laptops

I need to remember to check for ZFS filesystems being mounted

Use tcpdump to save wireless bridge

Beastie Bits

• [FreeBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU](https://www.cambus.net/freebsd-on-the-vortex86dx-cpu/)
• [HAMMER2 vs USB stick pulls](https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2022/03/22/26800.html)
• [New US mirror for DragonFly](https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2022/03/09/26742.html)
• [HelloSystem 13.1 RC1](https://github.com/helloSystem/ISO/releases/tag/experimental-13.1-RC1)
• [Video introduction to OpenBSD 7.0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeUsE-3nSes)
• [Losses in the community](https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2022-April/025643.html)

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Feedback/Questions

• Sam - BSD Laptops
• Reese - Electric Groff
• Alexandra - New to BSD

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

NOTES
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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 ***

NOTES
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Headlines

bhyve - The FreeBSD Hypervisor

FreeBSD has had varying degrees of support as a hypervisor host throughout its history. For a time during the mid-2000s, VMWare Workstation 3.x could be made to run under FreeBSD’s Linux Emulation, and Qemu was ported in 2004, and later the kQemu accelerator in 2005. Then in 2009 a port for VirtualBox was introduced. All of these solutions suffered from being a solution designed for a different operating system and then ported to FreeBSD, requiring constant maintenance.

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ZFS and FreeBSD Support

Klara offers flexible Support Subscriptions for your ZFS and FreeBSD infrastructure. Get a world class team of experts to back you up. Check it out on our website!

udf info leak

FreeBSD UDF driver info leak
Analysis done on FreeBSD release 11.0 because that's what I had around.

• Fix committed to FreeBSD ***

News Roundup

I'm now a user of Vim, not classical Vi (partly because of windows)

In the past I've written entries (such as this one) where I said that I was pretty much a Vi user, not really a Vim user, because I almost entirely stuck to Vi features. In a comment on my entry on not using and exploring Vim features, rjc reinforced this, saying that I seemed to be using vi instead of vim (and that there was nothing wrong with this). For a long time I thought this way myself, but these days this is not true any more. These days I really want Vim, not classical Vi.

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FreeBSD on ESXi ARM Fling: Fixing Virtual Hardware

With the current state of FreeBSD on ARM in general, a number of hardware drivers are either set to not auto-load on boot, or are entirely missing altogether. This page is to document my findings with various bits of hardware, and if possible, list fixes.

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Introduction of a new FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin in LLDB

Moritz Systems have been contracted by the FreeBSD Foundation to modernize the LLDB debugger’s support for FreeBSD. We are writing a new plugin utilizing the more modern client-server layout that is already used by Darwin, Linux, NetBSD and (unofficially) OpenBSD. The new plugin is going to gradually replace the legacy one.

OpenBSD Laptop

Hi, I know it’s been a while. I recently had to nuke and re-pave my personal laptop and I thought it would be a nice thing to share with the community how I set up OpenBSD on it so that I have a useful, modern, secure environment for getting work done. I’m not going to say I’m the expert on this or that this is the BEST way to set up OpenBSD, but I thought it would be worthwhile for folks doing Google searches to at least get my opinion on this. So, given that, let’s go…

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Feedback/Questions

• Ethan - Linux user wanting to try out OpenBSD
• iian - Learning IT
• johnny - bsd swag

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

NOTES
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Headlines

FreeBSD USB Audio

I recently got a Behringer UMC22 sound card for video conferencing and DJing. This page documents what I’ve learned about using this sound card, and USB audio in general, on FreeBSD.
tl;dr: Everything works as long as the sound card follows the USB audio device class specification.

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Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users

Kyua's current goal is to reimplement only the ATF tools while maintaining backwards compatibility with the tests written with the ATF libraries (i.e. with the NetBSD test suite).
Because Kyua is a replacement of some ATF components, the end goal is to integrate Kyua into the NetBSD base system (just as ATF is) and remove the deprecated ATF components. Removing the deprecated components will allow us to make the above-mentioned improvements to Kyua, as well as many others, without having to deal with the obsolete ATF code base. Discussing how and when this transition might happen is out of the scope of this document at the moment.

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News Roundup

Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around

I'm a long term user of ZFS on Linux and over pretty much all of the time I've used it, I've built it from the latest development version. Generally this means I update my ZoL build at the same time as I update my Fedora kernel, since a ZoL update requires a kernel reboot anyway. This is a little bit daring, of course, although the ZoL development version has generally been quite solid (and this way I get the latest features and improvements long before I otherwise would).

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Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster

As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to compute some statistics on win/loss ratios for chess games he downloaded from the millionbase archive, and generally have fun with EMR. Since the data volume was only about 1.75GB containing around 2 million chess games, I was skeptical of using Hadoop for the task, but I can understand his goal of learning and having fun with mrjob and EMR. Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results, it seems ideally suited to stream processing with shell commands. I tried this out, and for the same amount of data I was able to use my laptop to get the results in about 12 seconds (processing speed of about 270MB/sec), while the Hadoop processing took about 26 minutes (processing speed of about 1.14MB/sec).

FreeBSD Laptop Find Out Battery Life Status Command

I know how to find out battery life status using Linux operating system. How do I monitor battery status on a laptop running FreeBSD version 9.x/10.x/11.x/12.x?
You can use any one of the following commands to get battery status under FreeBSD laptop including remaining battery life and more.

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Beastie Bits

BSD Beer
Awk for JSON
Drawing Pictures The Unix Way - with pic and troff
Refactoring the FreeBSD Kernel with Checked C

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Feedback/Questions

• Jason - German Locales
• pcwizz - Router Style Device
• predrag - OpenBSD Router Hardware ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

NOTES
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Headlines

Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With "pot" Within 5 Minutes

pot is a great and relatively new jail management tool. It offers DevOps style provisioning and can even be used to provide Docker-like, scalable cloud services together with nomad and consul (more about this in Orchestrating jails with nomad and pot).

OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS

Today I will be creating a OpenBSD guest via bhyve on OmniOS. I will also be adding a Pass Through Ethernet Controller so I can have a multi-homed guest that will serve as a firewall/router.
This post will cover setting up bhyve on OmniOS, so it will also be a good introduction to bhyve. As well, I look into OpenBSD’s uEFI boot loader so if you have had trouble with this, then you are in the right place.

News Roundup

BSD versus Linux distribution development

Q: Comparing-apples-to-BSDs asks: I was reading one of the old articles from the archive. One of the things mentioned was how the BSDs have a distinct approach in terms of packaging the base system relative to userland apps, and that the Linux distros at the time were not following the same practice. Are there Linux distros that have adopted the same approach in modern times? If not, are there technical limitations that are preventing them from doing so, such as some distros supporting multiple kernel versions maybe?
DistroWatch answers: In the article mentioned above, I made the observation that Linux distributions tend to take one of two approaches when it comes to packaging software. Generally a Linux distribution will either offer a rolling release, where virtually all packages are regularly upgraded to their latest stable releases, or a fixed release where almost all packages are kept at a set version number and only receive bug fixes for the life cycle of the distribution. Projects like Arch Linux and Void are popular examples of rolling, always-up-to-date distributions while Fedora and Ubuntu offer fixed platforms.

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My FreeBSD Laptop Build

I have always liked Thinkpad hardware and when I started to do more commuting I decided I needed something that had a decent sized screen but fit well on a bus. Luckily about this time Lenovo gave me a nice gift in the Thinkpad X390. Its basically the famous X2xx series but with a 13” screen and smaller bezel.
So with this laptop I figured it was time to actually put the docs together on how I got my FreeBSD workstation working on it. I will here in the near future have another post that will cover this for HardenedBSD as well since the steps are similar but have a few extra gotchas due to the extra hardening.

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FreeBSD CURRENT Binary Upgrades

• Disclaimer This proof-of-concept is not a publication of FreeBSD.
• Description up.bsd.lv is a proof-of-concept of binary updates for FreeBSD/amd64 CURRENT/HEAD to facilitate the exhaustive testing of FreeBSD and the bhyve hypervisor and OpenZFS 2.0 specifically. Updates are based on the SVN revisions of official FreeBSD Release Engineering bi-monthly snapshots.

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Feedback/Questions

• Karl - pfsense
• Val - esxi question

• lars - openbsd router hardware

  ---

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

  ---

Headlines

Entropy

A brief introduction to randomness

• Problem: Computers are very predictable. This is by design.

But what if we want them to act unpredictably? This is very useful if we want to secure our private communications with randomized keys, or not let people cheat at video games, or if we're doing statistical simulations or similar.

Logs grinding Netatalk on FreeBSD to a hault

I’ve heard it said the cobbler’s children walk barefoot. While posessing the qualities of a famed financial investment strategy, it speaks to how we generally put more effort into things for others than ourselves; at least in business.
The HP Microserver I share with Clara is a modest affair compared to what we run at work. It has six spinning rust drives and two SSDs which are ZFS-mirrored; not even in a RAID 10 equivalent. This is underlaid with GELI for encryption, and served to our Macs with Netatalk over gigabit Ethernet with jumbo frames.

News Roundup

NetBSD Core Team Changes

Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions.
Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group, and bringing it up to date with modern functionality.

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Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests.

WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD

A while ago I wanted to learn more about OpenBSD development. So I picked a project, in this case WireGuard, to develop a native client for. Over the last two years, with many different iterations, and working closely with the WireGuard's creator (Jason [Jason A. Donenfeld - Ed.], CC'd), it started to become a serious project eventually reaching parity with other official implementations. Finally, we are here and I think it is time for any further development to happen inside the src tree.

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FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop

I’m using FreeBSD again on a laptop for some reasons so expect to read more about FreeBSD here. This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1.

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Beastie Bits

• List of useful FreeBSD Commands
• Master Your Network With Unix Command Line Tools
• Original Unix containers aka FreeBSD jails
• Flashback : 2003 Article : Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor
• FreeBSD Journal March/April 2020 Filesystems: ZFS Encryption, FUSE, and more, plus Network Bridges
• HAMBug meeting will be online again in June, so those from all over the world are welcome to join, June 9th (2nd Tuesday of each month) at 18:30 Eastern

Feedback/Questions

• + Lyubomir - GELI and ZFS
• Patrick - powerd and powerd++

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv