NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

TrueNAS is Multi-OS

There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used.
Once software applications became prominent, your hardware’s OS determined the applications you could run. Application vendors were forced to juggle the burden of “portability” between OS platforms, choosing carefully the operating systems they’d develop their software to. Then, there were the great OS Wars of the 1990s, replete with the rampant competition, licensing battles, and nasty lawsuits, which more or less gave birth to the “open source OS” era.
The advent of the hypervisor simultaneously gave way to the “virtual era” which set us on a path of agnosticism toward the OS. Instead of choosing from the applications available for your chosen OS, you could simply install another OS on the same hardware for your chosen application. The OS became nothing but a necessary cog in the stack.
TrueNAS open storage enables this “post-OS era” with support for storage clients of all UNIX flavors, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, VMware, Citrix, and many others. Containerization has carried that mentality even further. An operating system, like the hardware that runs it, is now just thought of as part of the “infrastructure”.

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Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD 9.0, for a FreeBSD guy

I had one of my other HP Microservers brought back from the office last week to help with this working-from-home world we’re in right now. I was going to wipe an old version of Debian Wheezy/Xen and install FreeBSD to mirror my other machines before thinking: why not NetBSD?

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News Roundup

FreeBSD's New Code of Conduct

• FreeBSD Announcement Email

Gaming on OpenBSD

While no one would expect this, there are huge efforts from a small team to bring more games into OpenBSD. In fact, now some commercial games works natively now, thanks to Mono or Java. There are no wine or linux emulation layer in OpenBSD.
Here is a small list of most well known games that run on OpenBSD:

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'dig' a little deeper

I knew the existence of the dig command but didn't exactly know when and how to use it. Then, just recently I encountered an issue that allowed me to learn and make use of it.

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HAMMER2 and periodic snapshots

The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system.

• git: Implement periodic hammer2 snapshots ***

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

• Cy - OpenSSL relicensing
• Christian - lagg vlans and iocage
• Brad - SMR ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

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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

• Antonio writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Sean writes in
• tsyn writes in
• Chris writes in ***