Meet FuryBSD: A New Desktop BSD Distribution

At its heart, FuryBSD is a very simple beast. According to the site, “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer.

You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like a couple of other BSDs that are available, such as NomadBSD and GhostBSD. The major difference between those BSDs and FuryBSD is that FuryBSD is much closer to stock FreeBSD. For example, FuryBSD uses the FreeBSD installer, while others have created their own installers and utilities.

As it states on the site, “Although FuryBSD may resemble past graphical BSD projects like PC-BSD and TrueOS, FuryBSD is created by a different team and takes a different approach focusing on tight integration with FreeBSD. This keeps overhead low and maintains compatibility with upstream.” The lead dev also told me that “One key focus for FuryBSD is for it to be a small live media with a few assistive tools to test drivers for hardware.”

Currently, you can go to the FuryBSD homepage and download either an XFCE or KDE LiveCD. A GNOME version is in the works.

NetBSD 9.0

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.

This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes. Here are some highlights of this new release.

News Roundup

OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup

Our target for 2019 was CDN$300K. Our community's continued generosity combined with our corporate donors exceeded that nicely. In addition we received the largest single donation in our history, CDN$380K from Smartisan. The return of Google was another welcome event. Altogether 2019 was our most successful campaign to date, yielding CDN$692K in total.

We thank all our donors, Iridium (Smartisan), Platinum (Yandex, Google), Gold (Microsoft, Facebook) Silver (2Keys) and Bronze (genua, Thinkst Canary). But especially our community of smaller donors whose contributions are the bedrock of our support. Thank you all!

• OpenBSD Foundation 2019 Fundraising Goal Exceeded

A retrospective on our OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers

Our OmniOS fileservers have now been out of service for about six months, which makes it somewhat past time for a retrospective on them. Our OmniOS fileservers followed on our Solaris fileservers, which I wrote a two part retrospective on (part 1, part 2), and have now been replaced by our Linux fileservers. To be honest, I have been sitting on my hands about writing this retrospective because we have mixed feelings about our OmniOS fileservers.

I will put the summary up front. OmniOS worked reasonably well for us over its lifespan here and looking back I think it was almost certainly the right choice for us at the time we made that choice (which was 2013 and 2014). However it was not without issues that marred our experience with it in practice, although not enough to make me regret that we ran it (and ran it for as long as we did). Part of our issues are likely due to a design mistake in making our fileservers too big, although this design mistake was probably magnified when we were unable to use Intel 10G-T networking in OmniOS.

On the one hand, our OmniOS fileservers worked, almost always reliably. Like our Solaris fileservers before them, they ran quietly for years without needing much attention, delivering NFS fileservice to our Ubuntu servers; specifically, we ran them for about five years (2014 through 2019, although we started migrating away at the end of 2018). Over this time we had only minor hardware issues and not all that many disk failures, and we suffered no data loss (with ZFS checksums likely saving us several times, and certainly providing good reassurances). Our overall environment was easy to manage and was pretty much problem free in the face of things like failed disks. I'm pretty sure that our users saw a NFS environment that was solid, reliable, and performed well pretty much all of the time, which is the important thing. So OmniOS basically delivered the fileserver environment we wanted.

NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal

Is it really more than 10 years since we last had an official fundraising drive?

Looking at old TNF financial reports I noticed that we have been doing quite well financially over the last years, with a steady stream of small and medium donations, and most of the time only moderate expenditures. The last fundraising drive back in 2009 was a giant success, and we have lived off it until now.

OpenSSH 8.2 released February 14, 2020

OpenSSH 8.2 was released on 2020-02-14. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/.

OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.

Once again, we would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their continued support of the project, especially those who contributed code or patches, reported bugs, tested snapshots or donated to the project. More information on donations may be found at:

• https://www.openssh.com/donations.html

Beastie Bits

• FreeNAS vs. Unraid: GRUDGE MATCH!
• Unix Toolbox
• Rigs of Rods - OpenBSD Physics Game
• NYCBug - Dr Vixie
• Hamilton BSD User group will meet again on March 10th](http://studybsd.com/)
• BSD Stockholm - Meetup March 3rd 2020

Feedback/Questions

• Shirkdog - Question
• Master One - ZFS + Suspend/resume
• Micah Roth - ZFS write caching

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

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan 2015 schedule

• The list of presentations for the upcoming BSDCan conference has been posted, and the time schedule should be up shortly as well
• Just a reminder: it's going to be held on June 12th and 13th at the University of Ottawa in Canada
• This year's conference will have a massive fifty talks, split up between four tracks instead of three (but unfortunately a person can only be in one place at a time)
• Both Allan and Kris had at least one presentation accepted, and Allan will also be leading a few "birds of a feather" gatherings
• In total, there will be three NetBSD talks, five OpenBSD talks, eight BSD-neutral talks, thirty-five FreeBSD talks and no DragonFly talks
• That's not the ideal balance we'd hope for, but BSDCan says they'll try to improve that next year
• Those numbers are based on the speaker's background, or any past presentations, for the few whose actual topic wasn't made obvious from the title (so there may be a small margin of error)
• Michael Lucas (who's on the BSDCan board) wrote up a blog post about the proposals and rejections this year
• If you can't make it this year, don't worry, we'll be sure to announce the recordings when they're made available
• We also interviewed Dan Langille about the conference and what to expect this year, so check that out too ***

SSL interception with relayd

• There was a lot of commotion recently about superfish, a way that Lenovo was intercepting HTTPS traffic and injecting advertisements
• If you're running relayd, you can mimic this evil setup on your own networks (just for testing of course…)
• Reyk Floeter, the guy who wrote relayd, came up a blog post about how to do just that
• It starts off with some backstory and some of the things relayd is capable of
• relayd can run as an SSL server to terminate SSL connections and forward them as plain TCP and, conversely, run as an SSL client to terminal plain TCP connections and tunnel them through SSL
• When you combine these two, you end up with possibilities to filter between SSL connections, effectively creating a MITM scenario
• The post is very long, with lots of details and some sample config files - the whole nine yards ***

OPNsense 15.1.6.1 released

• The OPNsense team has released yet another version in rapid succession, but this one has some big changes
• It's now based on FreeBSD 10.1, with all the latest security patches and driver updates (as well as some in-house patches)
• This version also features a new tool for easily upgrading between versions, simply called "opnsense-update" (similar to freebsd-update)
• It also includes security fixes for BIND and PHP, as well as some other assorted bug fixes
• The installation images have been laid out in a clean way: standard CD and USB images that default to VGA, as well as USB images that default to a console output (for things like Soekris and PCEngines APU boards that only have serial ports)
• With the news of m0n0wall shutting down last week, they've also released bare minimum hardware specifications required to run OPNsense on embedded devices
• Encouraged by last week's mention of PCBSD trying to cut ties with OpenSSL, OPNsense is also now providing experimental images built against LibreSSL for testing (and have instructions on how to switch over without reinstalling) ***

OpenBSD on a Minnowboard Max

• What would our show be without at least one story about someone installing BSD on a weird device
• For once, it's actually not NetBSD…
• This article is about the minnowboard max, a very small X86-based motherboard that looks vaguely similar to a Raspberry Pi
• It's using an Atom CPU instead of ARM, so overall application compatibility should be a bit better (and it even has AES-NI, so crypto performance will be much better than a normal Atom)
• The author describes his entirely solid-state setup, noting that there's virtually no noise, no concern about hard drives dying and very reasonable power usage
• You'll find instructions on how to get OpenBSD installed and going throughout the rest of the article
• Have a look at the spec sheet if you're interested, they make for cool little BSD boxes ***

Netmap for 40gbit NICs in FreeBSD

• Luigi Rizzo posted an announcement to the -current mailing list, detailing some of the work he's just committed
• The ixl(4) driver, that's one for the X1710 40-gigabit card, now has netmap support
• It's currently in 11-CURRENT, but he says it works in 10-STABLE and will be committed there too
• This should make for some serious packet-pushing power
• If you have any network hardware like this, he would appreciate testing for the new code ***

Interview - Ken Westerback - directors@openbsdfoundation.org

The OpenBSD foundation's activities

News Roundup

s2k15 hackathon report: dhclient/dhcpd/fdisk

• The second trip report from the recent OpenBSD hackathon has been published, from the very same guy we just talked to
• Ken was also busy, getting a few networking-related things fixed and improved in the base system
• He wrote a few new small additions for dhclient and beefed up the privsep security, as well as some fixes for tcpdump and dhcpd
• The fdisk tool also got worked on a bit, enabling OpenBSD to properly wipe GPT tables on a previously-formatted disk so you can do a normal install on it
• There's apparently plans for "dhclientng" - presumably a big improvement (rewrite?) of dhclient ***

FreeBSD beginner video series

• A new series of videos has started on YouTube, aimed at helping total beginners learn about FreeBSD
• We usually assume that people who watch the show are already familiar with basic concepts, but they'd be a great introduction to any of your friends that are looking to get started with BSD and need a helping hand
• So far, he's covered how to get FreeBSD, an introduction to installing in VirtualBox, a simple installation or a more in-depth manual installation, navigating the filesystem, basic ssh use, managing users and groups and finally some basic editing with vi and a few other topics
• Everyone's gotta start somewhere and, with a little bit of initial direction, today's newbies could be tomorrow's developers
• It should be an ongoing series with more topics to come ***

NetBSD tests: zero unexpected failures

• The NetBSD guys have a new blog post up about their testing suite for all the CPU architectures
• They've finally gotten the number of "expected" failures down to zero on a few select architectures
• Results are published on a special release engineering page, so you can have a look if you're interested
• The rest of the post links to the "top performers" (ones with less than ten failure) in the -current branch ***

PCBSD switches to IPFW

• The PCBSD crew continues their recent series of switching between major competing features
• This time, they've switched the default firewall away from PF to FreeBSD's native IPFW firewall
• Look forward to Kris wearing a "keep calm and use IPFW" shir- wait ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Dan writes in
• Florian writes in
• Sean writes in
• Chris writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• VCS flamebait
• Hidden agenda ***