NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

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

Tarsnap

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Headlines

AsiaBSDCon 2015 schedule

• Almost immediately after we finished recording an episode last week, the 2015 AsiaBSDCon schedule went up
• This year's conference will be between 12-15 March at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan
• The first and second days are for tutorials, as well as the developer summit and vendor summit
• Days four and five are the main event with the presentations, which Kris and Allan both made the cut for once again
• Not counting the ones that have yet to be revealed (as of the day we're recording this), there will be thirty-six different talks in all - four BSD-neutral, four NetBSD, six OpenBSD and twenty-two FreeBSD
• Summaries of all the presentations are on the timetable page if you scroll down a bit ***

FreeBSD foundation updates and more

• The FreeBSD foundation has posted a number of things this week, the first of which is their February 2015 status update
• It provides some updates on the funded projects, including PCI express hotplugging and FreeBSD on the POWER8 platform
• There's a FOSDEM recap and another update of their fundraising goal for 2015
• They also have two new blog posts: a trip report from SCALE13x and a featured "FreeBSD in the trenches" article about how a small typo caused a lot of ZFS chaos in the cluster
• "Then panic ensued. The machine didn't panic -- I did." ***

OpenBSD improves browser security

• No matter what OS you run on your desktop, the most likely entry point for an exploit these days is almost certainly the web browser
• Ted Unangst writes in to the OpenBSD misc list to introduce a new project he's working on, simply titled "improving browser security"
• He gives some background on the W^X memory protection in the base system, but also mentions that some applications in ports don't adhere to it
• For it to be enforced globally instead of just recommended, at least one browser (or specifically, one JIT engine) needs to be fixed to use it
• "A system that is 'all W^X except where it's not' is the same as a system that's not W^X. We've worked hard to provide a secure foundation for programs; we'd like to see them take advantage of it."
• The work is being supported by the OpenBSD foundation, and we'll keep you updated on this undertaking as more news about it is released
• There's also some discussion on Hacker News and Undeadly about it ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Tokyo

• The Japanese NetBSD users group has once again invaded a conference, this time in Tokyo
• There's even a spreadsheet of all the different platforms they were showing off at the booth (mostly ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Landisk this time around)
• If you just can't get enough strange devices running BSD, check the mailing list post for lots of pictures
• Their next target is, as you might guess, AsiaBSDCon 2015 - maybe we'll run into them ***

Interview - Sean Bruno - sbruno@freebsd.org / @franknbeans

Cross-compiling packages with poudriere and QEMU

News Roundup

The Crypto Bone

• The Crypto Bone is a new device that's aimed at making encryption and secure communications easier and more accessible
• Under the hood, it's actually just a Beaglebone board, running stock OpenBSD with a few extra packages
• It includes a web interface for configuring keys and secure tunnels
• The source code is freely available for anyone interested in hacking on it (or auditing the crypto), and there's a technical overview of how everything works on their site
• If you don't want to teach your mom how to use PGP, buy her one of these(?) ***

BSD in the 2015 Google Summer of Code

• For those who don't know, GSoC is a way for students to get paid to work on a coding project for an open source organization
• Good news: both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted for the 2015 event
• FreeBSD has a wiki page of ideas for people to work on
• OpenBSD also has an ideas page where you can see some of the initial things that might be interesting
• If you're a student looking to get involved with BSD development, this might be a great opportunity to even get paid to do it
• Who knows, you may even end up on the show if you work on a cool project
• GSoC will be accepting idea proposals starting March 16th, so you have some time to think about what you'd like to hack on ***

pfSense 2.3 roadmap

• The pfSense team has posted a new blog entry, detailing some of their plans for future versions
• PPTP will finally be deprecated, PHP will be updated to 5.6 and other packages will also get updated to newer versions
• PBIs are scheduled to be replaced with native pkgng packages
• Version 3.0, something coming much later, will be a major rewrite that gets rid of PHP entirely
• Their ultimate goal is for pfSense to be a package you can install atop of a regular FreeBSD install, rather than a repackaged distribution ***

PCBSD 10.1.2 security features

• PCBSD 10.1.2 will include a number of cool security features, some of which are detailed in a new blog post
• A new "personacrypt" utility is introduced, which allows for easy encryption and management of external drives for your home directory
• Going along with this, it also has a "stealth mode" that allows for one-time temporary home directories (but it doesn't self-destruct, don't worry)
• The LibreSSL integration also continues, and now packages will be built with it by default
• If you're using the Life Preserver utility for backups, it will encrypt the remote copy of your files in the next update
• They've also been working on introducing some new options to enable tunneling your traffic through Tor
• There will now be a fully-transparent proxy option that utilizes the switch to IPFW we mentioned last week
• A small disclaimer: remember that many things can expose your true IP when using Tor, so use this option at your own risk if you require full anonymity
• Look forward to Kris wearing a Tor shirt in future episodes ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Chris writes in
• Van writes in
• Stu writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• H
• Pay up, mister Free
• Heritage protected
• Blind leading the blind
• What are the chances ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

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

Headlines

EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon

• This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria
• They've got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present
• There will also be a tutorial section of the conference
• AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!
• All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted
• Check the link for all the details on the talks - if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers! ***

FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

• The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU
• This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router
• Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up
• It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don't want to use the ones rolled by someone else
• For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router
• Of course if you're more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too ***

Signed pkgsrc package guide

• We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up
• It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)
• He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them
• The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer ***

Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports

• Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI
• In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things
• In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara
• In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead - but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he's done
• In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things ***

Interview - Chris Buechler - cmb@pfsense.com / @cbuechler

pfSense

Tutorial

pfSense walkthrough

News Roundup

FreeBSD challenge continues

• Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey
• In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first
• In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he's starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again - concludes that ports are the way to go
• In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch
• In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails! ***

BSD books in 2014

• BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them
• In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014
• In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and...
• Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)
• Check the link for all the details ***

How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images

• Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post
• Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch
• You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI
• It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time around we discuss how you can become a developer
• Kris also details the length of supported releases
• Expect lots of new features in 10.1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Jake writes in
• Niclas writes in
• Steffan writes in
• Antonio writes in
• Chris writes in ***