38: A BUG's Life

JT Pennington — Wed, 21 May 2014 08:00:00 -0400

We're back from BSDCan! This week on the show we'll be chatting with Brian Callahan and Aaron Bieber about forming a local BSD users group. We'll get to hear their experiences of running one and maybe encourage some of you to start your own! After that, we've got a tutorial on the basics of NetBSD's package manager, pkgsrc. Answers to your emails and the latest headlines, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 11 goals and discussion

Something that actually happened at BSDCan this year...
During the FreeBSD devsummit, there was some discussion about what changes will be made in 11.0-RELEASE
Some of MWL's notes include: the test suite will be merged to 10-STABLE, more work on the MIPS platforms, LLDB getting more attention, UEFI boot and install support
A large list of possibilities was also included and open for discussion, including AES-GCM in IPSEC, ASLR, OpenMP, ICC, in-place kernel upgrades, Capsicum improvements, TCP performance improvements and A LOT more
There's also some notes from the devsummit virtualization session, mostly talking about bhyve
Lastly, he also provides some notes about ports and packages and where they're going ***

An SSH honeypot with OpenBSD and Kippo

Everyone loves messing with script kiddies, right?
This blog post introduces Kippo, an SSH honeypot tool, and how to use it in combination with OpenBSD
It includes a step by step (or rather, command by command) guide and some tips for running a honeypot securely
You can use this to get new 0day exploits or find weaknesses in your systems
OpenBSD makes a great companion for security testing tools like this with all its exploit mitigation techniques that protect all running applications ***

NetBSD foundation financial report

The NetBSD foundation has posted their 2013 financial report
It's a very "no nonsense" page, pretty much only the hard numbers
In 2013, they got $26,000 of income in donations
The rest of the page shows all the details, how they spent it on hardware, consulting, conference fees, legal costs and everything else
Be sure to donate to whichever BSDs you like and use! ***

Building a fully-encrypted NAS with OpenBSD

Usually the popular choice for a NAS system is FreeNAS, or plain FreeBSD if you know what you're doing
This article takes a look at the OpenBSD side and explains how to build a NAS with security in mind
The NAS will be fully encrypted, no separate /boot partition like FreeBSD and FreeNAS require - this means the kernel itself is even protected
The obvious trade-off is the lack of ZFS support for storage, but this is an interesting idea that would fit most people's needs too
There's also a bit of background information on NAS systems in general, some NAS-specific security tips and even some nice graphs and pictures of the hardware - fantastic write up! ***

Interview - Brian Callahan & Aaron Bieber - admin@lists.nycbug.org & admin@cobug.org

Forming a local BSD Users Group

Tutorial

The basics of pkgsrc

News Roundup

FreeBSD periodic mails vs. monitoring

If you've ever been an admin for a lot of FreeBSD boxes, you've probably noticed that you get a lot of email
This page tells about all the different alert emails, cron emails and other reports you might end up getting, as well as how to manage them
From bad SSH logins to Zabbix alerts, it all adds up quickly
It highlights the periodic.conf file and FreeBSD's periodic daemon, as well as some third party monitoring tools you can use to keep track of your servers ***

Doing cool stuff with OpenBSD routing domains

A blog post from our viewer and regular emailer, Kjell-Aleksander!
He manages some internally-routed IP ranges at his work, but didn't want to have equipment for each separate project
This is where OpenBSD routing domains and pf come in to save the day
The blog post goes through the process with all the network details you could ever dream of
He even named his networking equipment... after us ***

LibreSSL, the good and the bad

We're all probably familiar with OpenBSD's fork of OpenSSL at this point
However, "for those of you that don't know it, OpenSSL is at the same time the best and most popular SSL/TLS library available, and utter junk"
This article talks about some of the cryptographic development challenges involved with maintaining such a massive project
You need cryptographers, software engineers, software optimization specialists - there are a lot of roles that need to be filled
It also mentions some OpenSSL alternatives and recent LibreSSL progress, as well as some downsides to the fork - the main one being their aim for backwards compatibility ***

PCBSD weekly digest

Lots going on in PCBSD land this week, AppCafe has been redesigned
The PBI system is being replaced with pkgng, PBIs will be automatically converted once you update
In the more recent post, there's some further explanation of the PBI system and the reason for the transition
It's got lots of details on the different ways to install software, so hopefully it will clear up any possible confusion ***

Feedback/Questions

26: Port Authority

JT Pennington — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

On today's show we have an interview with Joe Marcus Clark, one of the original portmgr members in FreeBSD, and one of the key GNOME porters. Keeping along with that topic, we have a FreeBSD ports tutorial for you as well. The latest news and answers to your BSD questions, right here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

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 ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Lug”

38: A BUG's Life

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Brian Callahan & Aaron Bieber - admin@lists.nycbug.org & admin@cobug.org

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

26: Port Authority

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions