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More BSDCan 2015 videos

• Almost as if we said it would happen last week, more BSD-related presentation videos have been uploaded
• Alexander Motin, Feature-rich and fast SCSI target with CTL and ZFS
• Daichi Goto, FreeBSD for High Density Servers
• Ken Moore, Lumina-DE
• Kevin Bowling, FreeBSD Operations at Limelight Networks
• Maciej Pasternacki, Jetpack, a container runtime for FreeBSD
• Ray Percival, Networking with OpenBSD in a virtualized environment
• Reyk Floeter, Introducing OpenBSD's new httpd
• Still more to come, hopefully ***

OpenBSD httpd rewrite support

• One of the most-requested features of OpenBSD's new HTTP daemon (in fact, you can hear someone asking about it in the video just above) is rewrite support
• There were concerns about regex code being too complicated and potentially allowing another attack surface, so that was out
• Instead, Reyk ported over an implementation of lua pattern matching while on the flight back from BSDCan, turning it into a C API without the lua bindings
• In the mailing list post, he shows an example of how to use it for redirects and provides the diff if you'd like to give it a try now
• It's since been committed to -current, so you can try it out with a snapshot too ***

SSH 2FA on FreeBSD

• We've discussed different ways to lock down SSH access to your BSD boxes before - use keys instead of passwords, whitelist IPs, or even use two-factor authentication
• This article serves as a sort of "roundup" on different methods to set up two-factor authentication on FreeBSD
• It touches on key pairs with a server-side password, google authenticator and a few other variations
• While the article is focused on FreeBSD, a lot of it can be easily applied to the others too
• OpenSSH has a great security record, but two-factor authentication is always a good thing to have for the most important systems ***

NetBSD 7.0-RC1 released

• NetBSD has just announced the first release candidate for the 7.0 branch, after a long delay since the initial beta (11 months ago)
• Some of the standout features include: improved KMS/DRM with support for modern GPUs, SMP support on ARM, lots of new ARM boards officially supported, GPT support in the installer, Lua kernel scripting, a multiprocessor USB stack, improvements to NPF (their firewall) and, optionally, Clang 3.6.1
• They're looking for as much testing as possible, so give it a try and report your findings to the release engineering team ***

Interview - Sean Chittenden - seanc@freebsd.org / @seanchittenden

FreeBSD at Groupon, ZFS

News Roundup

OpenSMTPD and Dovecot

• We've covered a number of OpenSMTPD mail server guides on the show, each with just a little something different to offer than the last
• This blog post about it has something not mentioned before: virtual domains and virtual users
• This means you can easily have "user1@domain.com" and "user2@otherdomain.com" both go to a local user on the box (or a different third address)
• It also covers SSL certificates, blocking spam and setting up IMAP access, the usual
• Now might also be a good time to test out OpenSMTPD 5.7.1-rc1, which we'll cover in more detail when it's released... ***

OctoPkg, a QT frontend to pkgng

• A PC-BSD user has begun porting over a graphical package management utility from Arch linux called Octopi
• Obviously, it needed to be rewritten to use FreeBSD's pkg system instead of pacman
• There are some basic instructions on how to get it built and running on the github page
• After some testing, it'll likely make its way to the FreeBSD ports tree
• Tools like this might make it easier for desktop users (who are used to similar things in Ubuntu or related distros) to switch over ***

AFL vs. mandoc, a quantitative analysis

• Ingo Schwarze has written a pretty detailed article about how he and other OpenBSD developers have been fuzzing mandoc with AFL
• It's meant to be accompanying material to his BSDCan talk, which already covered nine topics
• mandoc is an interesting example to stress test with fuzzing, since its main job is to take and parse some highly varying input
• The article breaks down the 45 different bugs that were found, based on their root cause
• If you're interested in secure coding practices, this'll be a great one to read ***

OpenZFS conference videos

• Videos from the second OpenZFS conference have just started to show up
• The first talk is by, you guessed it, Matt Ahrens
• In it, he covers some ZFS history, the Oracle takeover, the birth of illumos and OpenZFS, some administration basics and also some upcoming features that are being worked on
• There are also videos from Nexenta and HGST, talking about how they use and contribute to OpenZFS ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bryson writes in
• Kevin writes in ***

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Updates to FreeBSD's random(4)

• FreeBSD's random device, which presents itself as "/dev/random" to users, has gotten a fairly major overhaul in -CURRENT
• The CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator) algorithm, Yarrow, now has a new alternative called Fortuna
• Yarrow is still the default for now, but Fortuna can be used with a kernel option (and will likely be the new default in 11.0-RELEASE)
• Pluggable modules can now be written to add more sources of entropy
• These changes are expected to make it in 11.0-RELEASE, but there hasn't been any mention of MFCing them to 10 or 9 ***

OpenBSD Tor relays and network diversity

• We've talked about getting more BSD-based Tor nodes a few times in previous episodes
• The "tor-relays" mailing list has had some recent discussion about increasing diversity in the Tor network, specifically by adding more OpenBSD nodes
• With the security features and attention to detail, it makes for an excellent dedicated Tor box
• More and more adversaries are attacking Tor nodes, so having something that can withstand that will help the greater network at large
• A few users are even saying they'll convert their Linux nodes to OpenBSD to help out
• Check the archive for the full conversation, and maybe run a node yourself on any of the BSDs
• The Tor wiki page on OpenBSD is pretty out of date (nine years old!?) and uses the old pf syntax, maybe one of our listeners can modernize it ***

SSP now default for FreeBSD ports

• SSP, or Stack Smashing Protection, is an additional layer of protection against buffer overflows that the compiler can give to the binaries it produces
• It's now enabled by default in FreeBSD's ports tree, and the pkgng packages will have it as well - but only for amd64 (all supported releases) and i386 (10.0-RELEASE or newer)
• This will only apply to regular ports and binary packages, not the quarterly branch that only receives security updates
• If you were using the temporary "new Xorg" or SSP package repositories instead of the default ones, you need to switch back over
• NetBSD made this the default on i386 and amd64 two years ago and OpenBSD made this the default on all architectures twelve years ago
• Next time you rebuild your ports, things should be automatically hardened without any extra steps or configuration needed ***

Building an OpenBSD firewall and router

• While we've discussed the software and configuration of an OpenBSD router, this Reddit thread focuses more on the hardware side
• The OP lists some of his potential choices, but was originally looking for something a bit cheaper than a Soekris
• Most agree that, if it's for a business especially, it's worth the extra money to go with something that's well known in the BSD community
• They also list a few other popular alternatives: ALIX or the APU series from PC Engines, some Supermicro boards, etc.
• Through the comments, we also find out that QuakeCon runs OpenBSD on their network
• Hopefully most of our listeners are running some kind of BSD as their gateway - try it out if you haven't already ***

Interview - Kristaps Džonsons - kristaps@bsd.lv

Mandoc, historical man pages, various topics

Tutorial

Throttling bandwidth with PF

News Roundup

NetBSD at Kansai Open Forum 2014

• Japanese NetBSD users invade yet another conference, demonstrating that they can and will install NetBSD on everything
• From a Raspberry Pi to SHARP Netwalkers to various luna68k devices, they had it all
• As always, you can find lots of pictures in the trip report ***

Getting to know your portmgr lurkers

• The lovable "getting to know your portmgr" series makes its triumphant return
• This time around, they interview Alex, one of the portmgr lurkers that joined just this month
• "How would you describe yourself?" "Too lazy."
• Another post includes a short interview with Emanuel, another new lurker
• We discussed the portmgr lurkers initiative with Steve Wills a while back ***

NetBSD's ARM port gets SMP

• The ARM port of NetBSD now has SMP support, allowing more than one CPU to be used
• This blog post on the website has a list of supported boards: Banana Pi, Cubieboard 2, Cubietruck, Merrii Hummingbird A31, CUBOX-I and NITROGEN6X
• NetBSD's release team is working on getting these changes into the 7 branch before 7.0 is released
• There are also a few nice pictures in the article ***

A high performance mid-range NAS

• This blog post is about FreeNAS and optimizing iSCSI performance
• It talks about using mid-range hardware with FreeNAS and different tunables you can change to affect performance
• There are some nice graphs and lots of detail if you're interested in tweaking some of your own settings
• They conclude "there is no optimal configuration; rather, FreeNAS can be configured to suit a particular workload" ***

Feedback/Questions

• Heto writes in
• Brad writes in
• Tyler writes in
• Tim writes in
• Brad writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Suspicious contributions
• La puissance du fromage
• Nothing unusual here ***

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FreeBSD quarterly status report

• FreeBSD has gotten quite a lot done this quarter
• Changes in the way release branches are supported - major releases will get at least five years over their lifespan
• A new automounter is in the works, hoping to replace amd (which has some issues)
• The CAM target layer and RPC stack have gotten some major optimization and speed boosts
• Work on ZFSGuru continues, with a large status report specifically for that
• The report also mentioned some new committers, both source and ports
• It also covers GNATS being replaced with Bugzilla, the new core team, 9.3-RELEASE, GSoC updates, UEFI booting and lots of other things that we've already mentioned on the show
• "Foundation-sponsored work resulted in 226 commits to FreeBSD over the April to June period" ***

A new OpenBSD HTTPD is born

• Work has begun on a new HTTP daemon in the OpenBSD base system
• A lot of people are asking "why?" since OpenBSD includes a chrooted nginx already - will it be removed? Will they co-exist?
• Initial responses seem to indicate that nginx is getting bloated, and is a bit overkill for just serving content (this isn't trying to be a full-featured replacement)
• It's partially based on the relayd codebase and also comes from the author of relayd, Reyk Floeter
• This has the added benefit of the usual, easy-to-understand syntax and privilege separation
• There's a very brief man page online already
• It supports vhosts and can serve static files, but is still in very active development - there will probably be even more new features by the time this airs
• Will it be named OpenHTTPD? Or perhaps... LibreHTTPD? (I hope not) ***

pkgng 1.3 announced

• The newest version of FreeBSD's second generation package management system has been released, with lots of new features
• It has a new "real" solver to automatically handle conflicts, and dynamically discover new ones (this means the annoying -o option is deprecated now, hooray!)
• Lots of the code has been sandboxed for extra security
• You'll probably notice some new changes to the UI too, making things more user friendly
• A few days later 1.3.1 was released to fix a few small bugs, then 1.3.2 shortly thereafter and 1.3.3 yesterday ***

FreeBSD after-install security tasks

• A number of people have written in to ask us "how do I secure my BSD box after I install it?"
• With this blog post, hopefully most of their questions will finally be answered in detail
• It goes through locking down SSH with keys, patching the base system for security, installing packages and keeping them updated, monitoring and closing any listening services and a few other small things
• Not only does it just list things to do, but the post also does a good job of explaining why you should do them
• Maybe we'll see some more posts in this series in the future ***

Interview - Brent Cook - bcook@openbsd.org / @busterbcook

LibreSSL's portable version and development

News Roundup

FreeBSD Mastery - Storage Essentials

• MWL's new book about the FreeBSD storage subsystems now has an early draft available
• Early buyers can get access to an in-progress draft of the book before the official release, but keep in mind that it may go through a lot of changes
• Topics of the book will include GEOM, UFS, ZFS, the disk utilities, partition schemes, disk encryption and maximizing I/O performance
• You'll get access to the completed (e)book when it's done if you buy the early draft
• The suggested price is $8 ***

Why BSD and not Linux?

• Yet another thread comes up asking why you should choose BSD over Linux or vice-versa
• Lots of good responses from users of the various BSDs
• Directly ripping a quote: "Features like Ports, Capsicum, CARP, ZFS and DTrace were stable on BSDs before their Linux versions, and some of those are far more usable on BSD. Features like pf are still BSD-only. FreeBSD has GELI and ipfw and is "GCC free". DragonflyBSD has HAMMER and kernel performance tuning. OpenBSD have upstream pf and their gamut of security features, as well as a general emphasis on simplicity."
• And "Over the years, the BSDs have clearly shown their worth in the nix ecosystem by pioneering new features and driving adoption of others. The most recent on OpenBSD were 2038 support and LibreSSL. FreeBSD still arguably rules the FOSS storage space with ZFS."
• Some other users share their switching experiences - worth a read ***

More g2k14 hackathon reports

• Following up from last week's huge list of hackathon reports, we have a few more
• Landry Breuil spent some time with Ansible testing his infrastructure, worked on the firefox port and tried to push some of their patches upstream
• Andrew Fresh enjoyed his first hackathon, pushing OpenBSD's perl patches upstream and got tricked into rewriting the adduser utility in perl
• Ted Unangst did his usual "teduing" (removing of) old code - say goodbye to asa, fpr, mkstr, xstr, oldrdist, fsplit, uyap and bluetooth
• Luckily we didn't have to cover 20 new ones this time! ***

BSDTalk episode 243

• The newest episode of BSDTalk is out, featuring an interview with Ingo Schwarze of the OpenBSD team
• The main topic of discussion is mandoc, which some users might not be familiar with
• mandoc is a utility for formatting manpages that OpenBSD and NetBSD use (DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD include it in their source tree, but it's not built by default)
• We'll catch up to you soon, Will! ***

Feedback/Questions

• Thomas writes in
• Stephen writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Florian writes in
• Bob Beck writes in - and note the "Caution" section that was added to libressl.org ***