NOTES
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Headlines

Using FreeBSD’s pkg-audit

The 20 year old bug that went to Mars

It's rare that you come across a bug so subtle that it can last for two decades. But, that's exactly what has happened with the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) algorithm. Initially written in 1994, Markus Oberhumer designed a sophisticated and extremely efficient compression algorithm so elegant and well architected that it outperforms zlib and bzip by four or five times their decompression speed.

I was impressed to find out that his LZO algorithm has gone to the planet Mars on NASA devices multiple times! Most recently, LZO has touched down on the red planet within the Mars Curiosity Rover, which just celebrated its first martian anniversary on Tuesday.

In the past few years, LZO has gained traction in file systems as well. LZO can be used in the Linux kernel within btrfs, squashfs, jffs2, and ubifs. A recent variant of the algorithm, LZ4, is used for compression in ZFS for Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD.

With its popularity increasing, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer has been rewritten by many engineering firms for both closed and open systems. These rewrites, however, have always been based on Oberhumer's core open source implementation. As a result, they all inherited a subtle integer overflow. Even LZ4 has the same exact bug, but changed very slightly.

Because the LZO algorithm is considered a library function, each specific implementation must be evaluated for risk, regardless of whether the algorithm used has been patched. Why? We are talking about code that has existed in the wild for two decades. The scope of this algorithm touches everything from embedded microcontrollers on the Mars Rover, mainframe operating systems, modern day desktops, and mobile phones. Engineers that have used LZO must evaluate the use case to identify whether or not the implementation is vulnerable, and in what format.

News Roundup

FreeBSD on Slimbook -- 14 months of updates

LLDB FreeBSD kernel core dump support

Steam on OpenBSD

Beastie Bits

• [OpenSSH Agent Restriction](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20211220061017)
• [OpenBSD’s Clang upgraded to version 13](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20211220060327)
• [Cool, but obscure X11 tools](http://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/)

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.

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NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

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FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud

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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace!

The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.

• Inferno is open source as well *** ## News Roundup ### Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020 We nearly hit our 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000. ***

grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

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Random Programming Challenge

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This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?

OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)

To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).
OpenZFS had a good one too

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

• Brandon - router

• Lawrence - Is BSD for me

• miguel - printing

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

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Prototyping an Onboard Scheduler for the Mars 2020 Rover

• The mars rover runs VxWorks, which is based on BSD, and uses the FreeBSD networking stack. While there has been a lot of type about the little helicopter that was inside the rover running Linux, the rover itself runs BSD. *** ### Practical Guide to Storage of Large Amounts of Microscopy Data > Biological imaging tools continue to increase in speed, scale, and resolution, often resulting in the collection of gigabytes or even terabytes of data in a single experiment. In comparison, the ability of research laboratories to store and manage this data is lagging greatly. This leads to limits on the collection of valuable data and slows data analysis and research progress. Here we review common ways researchers store data and outline the drawbacks and benefits of each method. We also offer a blueprint and budget estimation for a currently deployed data server used to store large datasets from zebrafish brain activity experiments using light-sheet microscopy. Data storage strategy should be carefully considered and different options compared when designing imaging experiments. *** ## News Roundup ### 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. *** ### NextCloud on OpenBSD > NextCloud and OpenBSD are complimentary to one another. NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for propietary platforms, whereas OpenBSD forms the most secure and solid foundation to serve it on. Setting it up in the best way isn’t hard, especially using this step by step tutorial.

MySQL Transactions - the physical side

So you talk to a database, doing transactions. What happens actually, behind the scenes? Let’s have a look.

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TrueNAS 12.0-U2.1 is released

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HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union - NYCBUG - 2021-04-07

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Beastie Bits

• FreeBSD Journal: Case Studies *** ###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

• Al - BusyNAS

• Jeff - ZFS and NFS on FreeBSD

• Michael - remote unlock for encrypted systems

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

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