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

Headlines

DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs

FreeBSD 13.2 upgrade to 14.0 – properly detailed and (hopefully) correct way

News Roundup

Running OpenBSD on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

Netgate Releases pfSense CE Software Version 2.7.1

SSH agent forwarding and tmux done right

Some explanations about OpenBSD memory usage

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.

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

• Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

  ---

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap
If you like BSDNow, consider supporting us on Patreon

Headlines

Building Your FreeBSD Developer Workstation Setup

What I learned from Russian students: logging is important

News Roundup

How BSD Authentication works

pfSense Software is 15 Today!

OPNsense® Business Edition 21.10 released

Getting started with pot

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
• Benjamin - Question for Benedict
• Nelson - Episode 419 correction

• Peter - state machines

  ---

• 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

Lets talk OpenZFS snapshots

OpenSUSE in Bastille

News Roundup

CUPS printing with netcat

Opnsense-21.1.8

pfSense® Plus Software Version 21.05.1 is Now Available

Beastie Bits

• [MAC Inspired FreeBSD release](https://github.com/mszoek/airyx)
• [Implement unprivileged chroot](https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=a40cf4175c90142442d0c6515f6c83956336699b)
• [InitWare: A systemd fork that runs on BSD](https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare)
• [multics gets a new release](https://multics-wiki.swenson.org/index.php/Main_Page)
• [Open Source Voices interview with Tom Jones](https://www.opensourcevoices.org/17)
• [PDP 11/03 Engineering Drawings](https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1423092689084551171)

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

• Oliver - zfs
• anders - vms
• jeff - byhve guests

• 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

Gemini Capsule in a FreeBSD Jail

With the recent release of FreeBSD 13, I wanted to test it out on a spare RaspberryPi 3 that was part of my old Kubernetes cluster.
In particular, FreeBSD Jails have always interested me, although I’ve never used them in practice. Over the years I’ve managed operating system virtualization through Solaris Zones and Docker containers, and Jails seem like and good middle ground between the two - easier to manage than zones and closer to the OS than Docker.
I also want to run my own Gemini capsule locally to use some of the features that my other hosted capsules don’t have (like SCGI/CGI) and setting up a capsule in a Jail is a good way to learn both at the same time.

FreeBSD Quarterly status report 2021Q1

News Roundup

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS)

My new NAS at home is running TrueNAS Core. So far, it has been excellent, however I struggled a bit setting up a NetBSD VM on it. Part of the problem is that a lot of the docs and how-tos I found are stale, and the information in it no longer applies.
TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI :) But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with one caveat (see below).

Interview with Michael Lucas *BSD, Unix, IT and other books author

Michael Lucas is a famous IT book author. Perhaps best know for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Unix book series. He worked as a system administrator for many years and has now become a full-time book writer. Lately, I did a quick Q and A with Michael about his journey as a professional book author and his daily workflow for writing books.
+

---

pfSense – WireGuard Returns as Experimental Package

---

CGI with Awk on OpenBSD httpd

---

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/Questionsing

• Adam - system state during upgrade
• paul - BSD grep
• sub - feedback

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

Headlines

GPU Passthrough Reported Working on Bhyve

Normally we cover news focused on KVM and sometimes Xen, but something very special has happened with their younger cousin in the BSD world, Bhyve. For those that don’t know, Bhyve (pronounced bee-hive) is the native hypervisor in FreeBSD. It has many powerful features, but one that’s been a pain point for some years now is VGA passthrough. Consumer GPUs have not been useable until very recently despite limited success with enterprise cards. However, Twitter user Michael Yuji found a workaround that enables passing through a consumer card to any *nix system configured to use X11:

• https://twitter.com/michael_yuji/status/1127136891365658625

All you have to do is add a line pointing the X server to the Bus ID of the passed card and the VM will boot, with acceleration and everything. He theorizes that this may not be possible on windows because of the way it looks for display devices, but it’s a solid start. As soon as development surrounding VGA passthrough matures on Bhyve, it will become a very attractive alternative to more common tools like Hyper-V and Qemu, because it makes many powerful features available in the host system like jails, boot environments, BSD networking, and tight ZFS integration. For example, you could potentially run your Router, NAS, preferred workstation OS and any number of other things in one box, and only have to spin up a single VM because of the flexibility afforded by jails over Linux-based containers. The user who found this workaround also announced they’d be writing it up at some point, so stay tuned for details on the process. It’s been slow going on Bhyve passthrough development for a while, but this new revelation is encouraging. We’ll be closely monitoring the situation and report on any other happenings.

---

Confusion with used/free disk space in ZFS

I use ZFS extensively. ZFS is my favorite file system. I write articles and give lectures about it. I work with it every day. In traditional file systems we use df(1) to determine free space on partitions. We can also use du(1) to count the size of the files in the directory. But it’s different on ZFS and this is the most confusing thing EVER. I always forget which tool reports what disk space usage! Every time somebody asks me, I need to google it. For this reason I decided to document it here - for myself - because if I can’t remember it at least I will not need to google it, as it will be on my blog, but maybe you will also benefit from this blog post if you have the same problem or you are starting your journey with ZFS.

The understanding of how ZFS is uses space and how to determine which value means what is a crucial thing. I hope thanks to this article I will finally remember it!

News Roundup

OmniOS Community Edition

The OmniOS Community Edition Association is proud to announce the general availability of OmniOS - r151030. OmniOS is published according to a 6-month release cycle, r151030 LTS takes over from r151028, published in November 2018; and since it is a LTS release it also takes over from r151022. The r151030 LTS release will be supported for 3 Years. It is the first LTS release published by the OmniOS CE Association since taking over the reins from OmniTI in 2017. The next LTS release is scheduled for May 2021. The old stable r151026 release is now end-of-life. See the release schedule for further details. This is only a small selection of the new features, and bug fixes in the new release; review the release notes for full details. If you upgrade from r22 and want to see all new features added since then, make sure to also read the release notes for r24, r26 and r28. The OmniOS team and the illumos community have been very active in creating new features and improving existing ones over the last 6 months.

pfSense 2.4.4 Release p3 is available

We are pleased to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4.4-p3, now available for new installations and upgrades! pfSense software version 2.4.4-p3 is a maintenance release, bringing a number of security enhancements as well as a handful of fixes for issues present in the 2.4.4-p2 release. pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p3 updates and installation images are available now! To see a complete list of changes and find more detail, see the Release Notes. We had hoped to bring you this release a few days earlier, but given the announcement last Tuesday of the Intel Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) issue, we did not have sufficient time to fully incorporate those corrections and properly test for release on Thursday. We felt that it was worth delaying for a few days, rather than making multiple releases within a week.

• Upgrade Notes

Due to the significant nature of the changes in 2.4.4 and later, warnings and error messages, particularly from PHP and package updates, are likely to occur during the upgrade process. In nearly all cases these errors are a harmless side effect of the changes between FreeBSD 11.1 and 11.2 and between PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.2. Always take a backup of the firewall configuration prior to any major change to the firewall, such as an upgrade. Do not update packages before upgrading pfSense! Either remove all packages or do not update packages before running the upgrade. The upgrade will take several minutes to complete. The exact time varies based on download speed, hardware speed, and other factors such installed packages. Be patient during the upgrade and allow the firewall enough time to complete the entire process. After the update packages finish downloading it could take 10-20 minutes or more until the upgrade process ends. The firewall may reboot several times during the upgrade process. Monitor the upgrade from the firewall console for the most accurate view.

NetBSD 8.1 RC1 is out

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.1, the first update of the NetBSD 8 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.

Some highlights of the 8.1 release are:

• x86: Mitigation for INTEL-SA-00233 (MDS)
• Various local user kernel data leaks fixed.
• x86: new rc.conf(5) setting smtoff to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading
• Various network driver fixes and improvements.
• Fixes for thread local storage (TLS) in position independent executables (PIE).
• Fixes to reproducible builds.
• Fixed a performance regression in tmpfs.
• DRM/KMS improvements.
• bwfm(4) wireless driver for Broadcom FullMAC PCI and USB devices added.
• Various sh(1) fixes.
• mfii(4) SAS driver added.
• hcpcd(8) updated to 7.2.2
• httpd(8) updated.

FreeNAS as your Server OS

What if you could have a server OS that had built in RAID, NAS and SAN functionality, and could manage packages, containers and VMs in a GUI? What if that server OS was also free to download and install? Wouldn’t that be kind of awesome? Wouldn’t that be FreeNAS? FreeNAS is the world’s number one, open source storage OS, but it also comes equipped with all the jails, plugins, and VMs you need to run additional server-level services for things like email and web site hosting. File, Block, and even Object storage is all built-in and can be enabled with a few clicks. The ZFS file system scales to more drives than you could ever buy, with no limits for dataset sizes, snapshots, and restores. FreeNAS is also 100% FreeBSD. This is the OS used in the Netflix CDN, your PS4, and the basis for iOS. Set up a jail and get started downloading packages like Apache or NGINX for web hosting or Postfix for email service. Just released, our new TrueCommand management platform also streamlines alerts and enables multi-system monitoring.

Beastie Bits

• Keep Crashing Daemons Running on FreeBSD
• Look what I found today... my first set of BSD CDs...
• NetBSD - Intel MDS
• FreeBSD 11.3-BETA2 -- Please test!

Feedback/Questions

• Anthony - Question
• Guntbert - Podcast
• Guillaume - Another suggestion for Ales from Serbia

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

##Headlines
###FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE Available

• FreeBSD 11.2 was released today (June 27th) and is ready for download
• Highlights:

OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.5p1.
OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.2o.
The clang, llvm, lldb and compiler-rt utilities have been updated to version 6.0.0.
The libarchive(3) library has been updated to version 3.3.2.
The libxo(3) library has been updated to version 0.9.0.
Major Device driver updates to:

• cxgbe(4) – Chelsio 10/25/40/50/100 gigabit NICs – version 1.16.63.0 supports T4, T5 and T6
• ixl(4) – Intel 10 and 40 gigabit NICs, updated to version 1.9.9-k
• ng_pppoe(4) – driver has been updated to add support for user-supplied Host-Uniq tags

New drivers:
+ drm-next-kmod driver supporting integrated Intel graphics with the i915 driver.

• mlx5io(4) – a new IOCTL interface for Mellanox ConnectX-4 and ConnectX-5 10/20/25/40/50/56/100 gigabit NICs
• ocs_fc(4) – Emulex Fibre Channel 8/16/32 gigabit Host Adapters
• smartpqi(4) – HP Gen10 Smart Array Controller Family

The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to support RFC5424-compliant messages when rotating system logs
The diskinfo(8) utility has been updated to include two new flags, -s which displays the disk identity (usually the serial number), and -p which displays the physical path to the disk in a storage controller.
The top(1) utility has been updated to allow filtering on multiple user names when the -U flag is used
The umount(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -N, which is used to forcefully unmount an NFS mounted filesystem.
The ps(1) utility has been updated to display if a process is running with capsicum(4) capability mode, indicated by the flag ‘C’
The service(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -j, which is used to interact with services running within a jail(8). The argument to -j can be either the name or numeric jail ID
The mlx5tool(8) utility has been added, which is used to manage Connect-X 4 and Connect-X 5 devices supported by mlx5io(4).
The ifconfig(8) utility has been updated to include a random option, which when used with the ether option, generates a random MAC address for an interface.
The dwatch(1) utility has been introduced
The efibootmgr(8) utility has been added, which is used to manipulate the EFI boot manager.
The etdump(1) utility has been added, which is used to view El Torito boot catalog information.
The linux(4) ABI compatibility layer has been updated to include support for musl consumers.
The fdescfs(5) filesystem has been updated to support Linux®-specific fd(4) /dev/fd and /proc/self/fd behavior
Support for virtio_console(4) has been added to bhyve(4).
The length of GELI passphrases entered when booting a system with encrypted disks is now hidden by default. See the configuration options in geli(8) to restore the previous behavior.

• In addition to the usual CD/DVD ISO, Memstick, and prebuilt VM images (raw, qcow2, vhd, and vmdk), FreeBSD 11.2 is also available on:
  • Amazon EC2
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Hashicorp/Atlas Vagrant
  • Microsoft Azure


• In addition to a generic ARM64 image for devices like the Pine64 and Raspberry Pi 3, specific images are provided for:
  • GUMSTIX
  • BANANAPI
  • BEAGLEBONE
  • CUBIEBOARD
  • CUBIEBOARD2
  • CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
  • RASPBERRY PI 2
  • PANDABOARD
  • WANDBOARD


• Full Release Notes

###Setting up an MTA Behind Tor

This article will document how to set up OpenSMTPD behind a fully Tor-ified network. Given that Tor’s DNS resolver code does not support MX record lookups, care must be taken for setting up an MTA behind a fully Tor-ified network. OpenSMTPD was chosen because it was easy to modify to force it to fall back to A/AAAA lookups when MX lookups failed with a DNS result code of NOTIMP (4).

Note that as of 08 May 2018, the OpenSMTPD project is planning a configuration file language change. The proposed change has not landed. Once it does, this article will be updated to reflect both the old language and new.

The reason to use an MTA behing a fully Tor-ified network is to be able to support email behind the .onion TLD. This setup will only allow us to send and receive email to and from the .onion TLD.

• Requirements:

• A fully Tor-ified network

• HardenedBSD as the operating system

• A server (or VM) running HardenedBSD behind the fully Tor-ified network.

• /usr/ports is empty

• Or is already pre-populated with the HardenedBSD Ports tree

• Why use HardenedBSD? We get all the features of FreeBSD (ZFS, DTrace, bhyve, and jails) with enhanced security through exploit mitigations and system hardening. Tor has a very unique threat landscape and using a hardened ecosystem is crucial to mitigating risks and threats.

Also note that this article reflects how I’ve set up my MTA. I’ve included configuration files verbatim. You will need to replace the text that refers to my .onion domain with yours.

On 08 May 2018, HardenedBSD’s version of OpenSMTPD just gained support for running an MTA behind Tor. The package repositories do not yet contain the patch, so we will compile OpenSMTPD from ports.

• Steps
• Installation
• Generating Cryptographic Key Material
• Tor Configuration
• OpenSMTPD Configuration
• Dovecot Configuration
• Testing your configuration
• Optional: Webmail Access

iXsystems
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/06/21/strings-attached-knowing-when-and-when-not-to-accept-vc-funding/#30f9f18f46ec
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/self-2018-recap/

###Running pfSense on a Digital Ocean Droplet

I love pfSense (and opnSense, no discrimination here). I use it for just about anything, from homelab to large scale deployments and I’ll give out on any fancy <enter brand name fw appliance here> for a pfSense setup on a decent hardware.

I also love DigitalOcean, if you ever used them, you know why, if you never did, head over and try, you’ll understand why.
<shameless plug: head over to JupiterBroadcasting.com, the best technology content out there, they have coupon codes to get you started with DO>.

Unfortunately, while DO offers tremendous amount of useful distros and applications, pfSense isn’t one of them. But, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and here’s how to get pfSense up and running on DO so you can have it as the gatekeeper to your kingdom.

Start by creating a FreeBSD droplet, choose your droplet size (for modest setups, I find the 5$ to be quite awesome):

There are many useful things you can do with pfSense on your droplet, from OpenVPN, squid, firewalling, fancy routing, url filtering, dns black listing and much much more.

• One note though, before we wrap up:

You have two ways to initiate the initial setup wizard of the web-configurator:
Spin up another droplet, log into it and browse your way to the INTERNAL ip address of the internal NIC you’ve set up. This is the long and tedious way, but it’s also somewhat safer as it eliminates the small window of risk the second method poses.
or
Once your WAN address is all setup, your pfSense is ready to accept https connection to start the initial web-configurator setup.
Thing is, there’s a default, well known set of credential to this initial wizard (admin:pfsense), so, there is a slight window of opportunity that someone can swoop in (assuming they know you’ve installed pfsense + your wan IP address + the exact time window between setting up the WAN interface and completing the wizard) and do <enter scary thing here>.

I leave it up to you which of the path you’d like to go, either way, once you’re done with the web-configurator wizard, you’ll have a shiny new pfSense installation at your disposal running on your favorite VPS.

Hopefully this was helpful for someone, I hope to get a similar post soon detailing how to get FreeNAS up and running on DO.
Many thanks to Tubsta and his blogpost as well as to Allan Jude, Kris Moore and Benedict Reuschling for their AWESOME and inspiring podcast, BSD Now.

##News Roundup
###One year of C

It’s now nearly a year that I started writing non-trivial amounts of C code again (the first sokol_gfx.h commit was on the 14-Jul-2017), so I guess it’s time for a little retrospective.

In the beginning it was more of an experiment: I wanted to see how much I would miss some of the more useful C++ features (for instance namespaces, function overloading, ‘simple’ template code for containers, …), and whether it is possible to write non-trivial codebases in C without going mad.

Here are all the github projects I wrote in C:

• sokol: a slowly growing set of platform-abstraction headers
• sokol-samples - examples for Sokol
• chips - 8-bit chip emulators
• chips-test - tests and examples for the chip- emulators, including some complete home computer emulators (minus sound)

All in all these are around 32k lines of code (not including 3rd party code like flextGL and HandmadeMath). I think I wrote more C code in the recent 10 months than any other language.

So one thing seems to be clear: yes, it’s possible to write a non-trivial amount of C code that does something useful without going mad (and it’s even quite enjoyable I might add).

• Here’s a few things I learned:

• Pick the right language for a problem

• C is a perfect match for WebAssembly

• C99 is a huge improvement over C89

• The dangers of pointers and explicit memory management are overrated

• Less Boilerplate Code

• Less Language Feature ‘Anxiety’

• Conclusion

All in all my “C experiment” is a success. For a lot of problems, picking C over C++ may be the better choice since C is a much simpler language (btw, did you notice how there are hardly any books, conferences or discussions about C despite being a fairly popular language? Apart from the neverending bickering about undefined behaviour from the compiler people of course ;) There simply isn’t much to discuss about a language that can be learned in an afternoon.

I don’t like some of the old POSIX or Linux APIs as much as the next guy (e.g. ioctl(), the socket API or some of the CRT library functions), but that’s an API design problem, not a language problem. It’s possible to build friendly C APIs with a bit of care and thinking, especially when C99’s designated initialization can be used (C++ should really make sure that the full C99 language can be used from inside C++ instead of continuing to wander off into an entirely different direction).

###Configuring OpenBGPD to announce VM’s virtual networks

We use BGP quite heavily at work, and even though I’m not interacting with that directly, it feels like it’s something very useful to learn at least on some basic level. The most effective and fun way of learning technology is finding some practical application, so I decided to see if it could help to improve networking management for my Virtual Machines.

My setup is fairly simple: I have a host that runs bhyve VMs and I have a desktop system from where I ssh to VMs, both hosts run FreeBSD. All VMs are connected to each other through a bridge and have a common network 10.0.1/24. The point of this exercise is to be able to ssh to these VMs from desktop without adding static routes and without adding vmhost’s external interfaces to the VMs bridge.

I’ve installed openbgpd on both hosts and configured it like this:

vmhost: /usr/local/etc/bgpd.conf
AS 65002
router-id 192.168.87.48
fib-update no

network 10.0.1.1/24

neighbor 192.168.87.41 {
    descr "desktop"
    remote-as 65001
}

Here, router-id is set vmhost’s IP address in my home network (192.168.87/24), fib-update no is set to forbid routing table update, which I initially set for testing, but keeping it as vmhost is not supposed to learn new routes from desktop anyway. network announces my VMs network and neighbor describes my desktop box. Now the desktop box:

desktop: /usr/local/etc/bgpd.conf
AS 65001
router-id 192.168.87.41
fib-update yes

neighbor 192.168.87.48 {                                                                                                                                                                                           
        descr "vmhost"                                                                                                                                                                                             
        remote-as 65002                                                                                                                                                                                            
}

It’s pretty similar to vmhost’s bgpd.conf, but no networks are announced here, and fib-update is set to yes because the whole point is to get VM routes added. Both hosts have to have the openbgpd service enabled:

/etc/rc.conf.local
openbgpd_enable="YES"

• Conclusion

As mentioned already, similar result could be achieved without using BGP by using either static routes or bridging interfaces differently, but the purpose of this exercise is to get some basic hands-on experience with BGP. Right now I’m looking into extending my setup in order to try more complex BGP schema. I’m thinking about adding some software switches in front of my VMs or maybe adding a second VM host (if budget allows). You’re welcome to comment if you have some ideas how to extend this setup for educational purposes in the context of BGP and networking.

As a side note, I really like openbgpd so far. Its configuration file format is clean and simple, documentation is good, error and information messages are clear, and CLI has intuitive syntax.

Digital Ocean

###The Power to Serve

All people within the IT Industry should known where the slogan “The Power To Serve” is exposed every day to millions of people. But maybe too much wishful thinking from me. But without “The Power To Serve” the IT industry today will look totally different. Companies like Apple, Juniper, Cisco and even WatsApp would not exist in their current form.

I provide IT architecture services to make your complex IT landscape manageable and I love to solve complex security and privacy challenges. Complex challenges where people, processes and systems are heavily interrelated. For this knowledge intensive work I often run some IT experiments. When you run experiments nowadays you have a choice:

• Rent some cloud based services or
• DIY (Do IT Yourself) on premise

Running your own developments experiments on your own infrastructure can be time consuming. However smart automation saves time and money. And by creating your own CICD pipeline (Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment) you stay on top of core infrastructure developments. Even hands-on. Knowing how things work from a technical ‘hands-on’ perspective gives great advantages when it comes to solving complex business IT problems. Making a clear distinguish between a business problem or IT problem is useless. Business and IT problems are related. Sometimes causal related, but more often indirect by one or more non linear feedback loops. Almost every business depends of IT systems. Bad IT means often that your customers will leave your business.

One of the things of FeeBSD for me is still FreeBSD Jails. In 2015 I had luck to attend to a presentation of the legendary hacker Poul-Henning Kamp . Check his BSD bio to see what he has done for the FreeBSD community! FreeBSD jails are a light way to visualize your system without enormous overhead. Now that the development on Linux for LXD/LXD is more mature (lxd is the next generation system container manager on linux) there is finally again an alternative for a nice chroot Linux based system again. At least when you do not need the overhead and management complexity that comes with Kubernetes or Docker.

FreeBSD means control and quality for me. When there is an open source package I need, I want to install it from source. It gives me more control and always some extra knowledge on how things work. So no precompiled binaries for me on my BSD systems! If a build on FreeBSD fails most of the time this is an alert regarding the quality for me.

If a complex OSS package is not available at all in the FreeBSD ports collection there should be a reason for it. Is it really that nobody on the world wants to do this dirty maintenance work? Or is there another cause that running this software on FreeBSD is not possible…There are currently 32644 ports available on FreeBSD. So all the major programming language, databases and middleware libraries are present. The FreeBSD organization is a mature organization and since this is one of the largest OSS projects worldwide learning how this community manages to keep innovation and creates and maintains software is a good entrance for learning how complex IT systems function.

FreeBSD is of course BSD licensed. It worked well! There is still a strong community with lots of strong commercial sponsors around the community. Of course: sometimes a GPL license makes more sense. So beside FreeBSD I also love GPL software and the rationale and principles behind it. So my hope is that maybe within the next 25 years the hard battle between BSD vs GPL churches will be more rationalized and normalized. Principles are good, but as all good IT architects know: With good principles alone you never make a good system. So use requirements and not only principles to figure out what OSS license fits your project. There is never one size fits all.

June 19, 1993 was the day the official name for FreeBSD was agreed upon. So this blog is written to celebrate 25th anniversary of FreeBSD.

###Dave’s BSDCan trip report

• So far, only one person has bothered to send in a BSDCan trip report. Our warmest thanks to Dave for doing his part.

Hello guys! During the last show, you asked for a trip report regarding BSDCan 2018.
This was my first time attending BSDCan. However, BSDCan was my second BSD conference overall, my first being vBSDCon 2017 in Reston, VA.
Arriving early Thursday evening and after checking into the hotel, I headed straight to the Red Lion for the registration, picked up my badge and swag and then headed towards the ‘DMS’ building for the newbies talk. The only thing is, I couldn’t find the DMS building! Fortunately I found a BSDCan veteran who was heading there themselves. My only suggestion is to include the full building name and address on the BSDCan web site, or even a link to Google maps to help out with the navigation. The on-campus street maps didn’t have ‘DMS’ written on them anywhere. But I digress.
Once I made it to the newbies talk hosted by Dan Langille and Michael W Lucas, it highlighted places to meet, an overview of what is happening, details about the ‘BSDCan widow/widower tours’ and most importantly, the 6-2-1 rule!
The following morning, we were present with tea/coffee, muffins and other goodies to help prepare us for the day ahead.
The first talk, “The Tragedy of systemd” covered what systemd did wrong and how the BSD community could improve on the ideas behind it.
With the exception of Michael W Lucas, SSH Key Management and Kirk McKusick, The Evolution of FreeBSD Governance talk, I pretty much attended all of the ZFS talks including the lunchtime BoF session, hosted by Allan Jude. Coming from FreeNAS and being involved in the community, this is where my main interest and motivation lies. Since then I have been able to share some of that information with the FreeNAS community forums and chatroom.
I also attended the “Speculating about Intel” lunchtime BoF session hosted by Theo de Raddt, which proved to be “interesting”.
The talks ended with the wrap up session with a few words from Dan, covering the record attendance and made very clear there “was no cabal”. Followed by the the handing over of Groff the BSD goat to a new owner, thank you’s from the FreeBSD Foundation to various community committers and maintainers, finally ending with the charity auction, where a things like a Canadian $20 bill sold for $40, a signed FreeBSD Foundation shirt originally worn by George Neville-Neil, a lost laptop charger, Michael’s used gelato spoon, various books, the last cookie and more importantly, the second to last cookie!
After the auction, we all headed to the Red Lion for food and drinks, sponsored by iXsystems.
I would like to thank the BSDCan organizers, speakers and sponsors for a great conference. I will certainly hope to attend next year!
Regards,
Dave (aka m0nkey_)

• Thanks to Dave for sharing his experiences with us and our viewers

##Beastie Bits

• Robert Watson (from 2008) on how much FreeBSD is in Mac OS X
• Why Intel Skylake CPUs are sometimes 50% slower than older CPUs
• Kristaps Dzonsons is looking for somebody to maintain this as mentioned at this link
• camcontrol(8) saves the day again! Formatting floppy disks in a USB floppy disk drive
• 32+ great indie games now playable on OpenBSD -current; 7 currently on sale!
• Warsaw BSD User Group. June 27 2018 18:30-21:00, Wheel Systems Office, Aleje Jerozolimskie 178, Warsaw

Tarsnap

##Feedback/Questions

• Ron - Adding a disk to ZFS
• Marshall - zfs question
• Thomas - Allan, the myth perpetuator
• Ross - ZFS IO stats per dataset

• 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 and pkgsrcCon videos

• Even more BSDCan 2015 videos are slowly but surely making their way to the internet
• Nigel Williams, Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
• Stephen Bourne, Early days of Unix and design of sh
• John Criswell, Protecting FreeBSD with Secure Virtual Architecture
• Shany Michaely, Expanding RDMA capability over Ethernet in FreeBSD
• John-Mark Gurney, Adding AES-ICM and AES-GCM to OpenCrypto
• Sevan Janiyan, Adventures in building open source software
• And finally, the BSDCan 2015 closing
• Some videos from this year's pkgsrcCon are also starting to appear online
• Sevan Janiyan, A year of pkgsrc 2014 - 2015
• Pierre Pronchery, pkgsrc meets pkg-ng
• Jonathan Perkin, pkgsrc at Joyent
• Jörg Sonnenberger, pkg_install script framework
• Benny Siegert, New Features in BulkTracker
• This is the first time we've ever seen recordings from the conference - hopefully they continue this trend ***

OPNsense 15.7 released

• The OPNsense team has released version 15.7, almost exactly six months after their initial debut
• In addition to pulling in the latest security fixes from upstream FreeBSD, 15.7 also includes new integration of an intrusion detection system (and new GUI for it) as well as new blacklisting options for the proxy server
• Taking a note from upstream PF's playbook, ALTQ traffic shaping support has finally been retired as of this release (it was deprecated from OpenBSD a few years ago, and the code was completely removed just over a year ago)
• The LibreSSL flavor has been promoted to production-ready, and users can easily migrate over from OpenSSL via the GUI - switching between the two is simple; no commitment needed
• Various third party ports have also been bumped up to their latest versions to keep things fresh, and there's the usual round of bug fixes included
• Shortly afterwards, 15.7.1 was released with a few more small fixes ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Okinawa

• If you liked last week's episode then you'll probably know what to expect with this one
• The NetBSD users group of Japan hit another open source conference, this time in Okinawa
• This time, they had a few interesting NetBSD machines on display that we didn't get to see in the interview last week
• We'd love to see something like this in North America or Europe too - anyone up for installing BSD on some interesting devices and showing them off at a Linux con? ***

OpenBSD BGP and VRFs

• "VRFs, or in OpenBSD rdomains, are a simple, yet powerful (and sometimes confusing) topic"
• This article aims to explain both BGP and rdomains, using network diagrams, for some network isolation goodness
• With multiple rdomains, it's also possible to have two upstream internet connections, but lock different groups of your internal network to just one of them
• The idea of a "guest network" can greatly benefit from this separation as well, even allowing for the same IP ranges to be used without issues
• Combining rdomains with the BGP protocol allows for some very selective and precise blocking/passing of traffic between networks, which is also covered in detail here
• The BSDCan talk on rdomains expands on the subject a bit more if you haven't seen it, as well as a few related posts ***

Interview - Lee Sharp - lee@smallwall.org

SmallWall, a continuation of m0n0wall

News Roundup

Solaris adopts more BSD goodies

• We mentioned a while back that Oracle developers have begun porting a current version of OpenBSD's PF firewall to their next version, even contributing back patches for SMP and other bug fixes
• They recently published an article about PF, talking about what's different about it on their platform compared to others - not especially useful for BSD users, but interesting to read if you like firewalls
• Darren Moffat, who was part of originally getting an SSH implementation into Solaris, has a second blog post up about their "SunSSH" fork
• Going forward, their next version is going to offer a completely vanilla OpenSSH option as well, with the plan being to phase out SunSSH after that
• The article talks a bit about the history of getting SSH into the OS, forking the code and also lists some of the differences between the two
• In a third blog post, they talk about a new system call they're borrowing from OpenBSD, getentropy(2), as well as the addition of arc4random to their libc
• With an up-to-date and SMP-capable PF, ZFS with native encryption, jail-like Zones, unaltered OpenSSH and secure entropy calls… is Solaris becoming better than us?
• Look forward to the upcoming "Solaris Now" podcast _{(not really)} ***

EuroBSDCon 2015 talks and tutorials

• This year's EuroBSDCon is set to be held in Sweden at the beginning of October, and the preliminary list of accepted presentations has been published
• The list looks pretty well-balanced between the different BSDs, something Paul would be happy to see if he was still with us
• It even includes an interesting DragonFly talk and a couple talks from NetBSD developers, in addition to plenty of FreeBSD and OpenBSD of course
• There are also a few tutorials planned for the event, some you've probably seen already and some you haven't
• Registration for the event will be opening very soon (likely this week or next) ***

Using ZFS replication to improve offsite backups

• If you take backups seriously, you're probably using ZFS and probably keeping an offsite copy of the data
• This article covers doing just that, but with a focus on making use of the replication capability
• It'll walk you through taking a snapshot of your pool and then replicating it to another remote system, using "zfs send" and SSH - this has the benefit of only transferring the files that have changed since the last time you did it
• Steps are also taken to allow a regular user to take and manage snapshots, so you don't need to be root for the SSH transfer
• Data integrity is a long process - filesystem-level checksums, resistance to hardware failure, ECC memory, multiple copies in different locations... they all play a role in keeping your files secure; don't skip out on any of them
• One thing the author didn't mention in his post: having an offline copy of the data, ideally sealed in a safe place, is also important ***

Block encryption in OpenBSD

• We've covered ways to do fully-encrypted installations of OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) before, but that requires dedicating a whole drive or partition to the sensitive data
• This blog post takes you through the process of creating encrypted containers in OpenBSD, à la TrueCrypt - that is, a file-backed virtual device with an encrypted filesystem
• It goes through creating a file that looks like random data, pointing vnconfig at it, setting up the crypto and finally using it as a fake storage device
• The encrypted container method offers the advantage of being a bit more portable across installations than other ways ***

Docker hits FreeBSD ports

• The inevitable has happened, and an early FreeBSD port of docker is finally here
• Some details and directions are available to read if you'd like to give it a try, as well as a list of which features work and which don't
• There was also some Hacker News discussion on the topic ***

Microsoft donates to OpenSSH

• We've talked about big businesses using BSD and contributing back before, even mentioning a few other large public donations - now it's Microsoft's turn
• With their recent decision to integrate OpenSSH into an upcoming Windows release, Microsoft has donated a large sum of money to the OpenBSD foundation, making them a gold-level sponsor
• They've also posted some contract work offers on the OpenSSH mailing list, and say that their changes will be upstreamed if appropriate - we're always glad to see this ***

Feedback/Questions

• Joe writes in
• Mike writes in
• Randy writes in
• Tony writes in
• Kevin writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan 2015 videos

• BSDCan just ended last week, but some of the BSD-related presentation videos are already online
• Allan Jude, UCL for FreeBSD
• Andrew Cagney, What happens when a dwarf and a daemon start dancing by the light of the silvery moon?
• Andy Tanenbaum, A reimplementation of NetBSD using a MicroKernel
• Brooks Davis, CheriBSD: A research fork of FreeBSD
• Giuseppe Lettieri, Even faster VM networking with virtual passthrough
• Joseph Mingrone, Molecular Evolution, Genomic Analysis and FreeBSD
• Olivier Cochard-Labbe, Large-scale plug&play x86 network appliance deployment over Internet
• Peter Hessler, Using routing domains / routing tables in a production network
• Ryan Lortie, a stitch in time: jhbuild
• Ted Unangst, signify: Securing OpenBSD From Us To You
• Many more still to come... ***

Documenting my BSD experience

• Increasingly common scenario: a long-time Linux user (since the mid-90s) decides it's finally time to give BSD a try
• "That night I came home, I had been trying to find out everything I could about BSD and I watched many videos, read forums, etc. One of the shows I found was BSD Now. I saw that they helped people and answered questions, so I decided to write in."
• In this ongoing series of blog posts, a user named Michael writes about his initial experiences with trying different BSDs for some different tasks
• The first post covers ZFS on FreeBSD, used to build a file server for his house (and of course he lists the hardware, if you're into that)
• You get a glimpse of a brand new user trying things out, learning how great ZFS-based RAID arrays are and even some of the initial hurdles someone could run into
• He's also looking to venture into the realm of replacing some of his VMs with jails and bhyve soon
• His second post explores replacing the firewall on his self-described "over complicated home network" with an OpenBSD box
• After going from ipfwadmin to ipchains to iptables, not even making it to nftables, he found the simple PF syntax to be really refreshing
• All the tools for his networking needs, the majority of which are in the base system, worked quickly and were easy to understand
• Getting to hear experiences like this are very important - they show areas where all the BSD developers' hard work has paid off, but can also let us know where we need to improve ***

PC-BSD tries HardenedBSD builds

• The PC-BSD team has created a new branch of their git repo with the HardenedBSD ASLR patches integrated
• They're not the first major FreeBSD-based project to offer an alternate build - OPNsense did that a few weeks ago - but this might open the door for more projects to give it a try as well
• With Personacrypt, OpenNTPD, LibreSSL and recent Tor integration through the tools, these additional memory protections will offer PC-BSD users even more security that a default FreeBSD install won't have
• Time will tell if more projects and products like FreeNAS might be interested too ***

C-states in OpenBSD

• People who run BSD on their notebooks, you'll want to pay attention to this one
• OpenBSD has recently committed some ACPI improvements for deep C-states, enabling the processor to enter a low-power mode
• According to a few users so far, the change has resulted in dramatically lower CPU temperatures on their laptops, as well as much better battery life
• If you're running OpenBSD -current on a laptop, try out the latest snapshot and report back with your findings ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Hokkaido

• The Japanese NetBSD users group never sleeps, and they've hit yet another open source conference
• As is usually the case, lots of strange machines on display were running none other than NetBSD (though it was mostly ARM this time)
• We'll be having one of these guys on the show next week to discuss some of the lesser-known NetBSD platforms ***

Interview - Marc Espie - espie@openbsd.org / @espie_openbsd

Recent improvements to OpenBSD's dpb tool

News Roundup

Introducing xhyve, bhyve on OS X

• We've talked about FreeBSD's "bhyve" hypervisor a lot on the show, and now it's been ported to another OS
• As the name "xhyve" might imply, it's a port of bhyve to Mac OS X
• Currently it only has support for virtualizing a few Linux distributions, but more guest systems can be added in the future
• It runs entirely in userspace, and has no extra requirements beyond OS X 10.10 or newer
• There are also a few examples on how to use it ***

4K displays on DragonFlyBSD

• If you've been using DragonFly as a desktop, maybe with those nice Broadwell graphics, you'll be pleased to know that 4K displays work just fine
• Matthew Dillon wrote up a wiki page about some of the specifics, including a couple gotchas
• Some GUI applications might look weird on such a huge resolution,
• HDMI ports are mostly limited to a 30Hz refresh rate, and there are slightly steeper hardware requirements for a smooth experience ***

Sandboxing port daemons on OpenBSD

• We talked about different containment methods last week, and mentioned that a lot of the daemons in OpenBSD's base as chrooted by default - things from ports or packages don't always get the same treatment
• This blog post uses a mumble server as an example, but you can apply it to any service from ports that doesn't chroot by default
• It goes through the process of manually building a sandbox with all the libraries you'll need to run the daemon, and this setup will even wipe and refresh the chroot every time you restart it
• With a few small changes, similar tricks could be done on the other BSDs as well - everybody has chroots ***

SmallWall 1.8.2 released

• SmallWall is a relatively new BSD-based project that we've never covered before
• It's an attempt to keep the old m0n0wall codebase going, and appears to have started around the time m0n0wall called it quits
• They've just released the first official version, so you can give it a try now
• If you're interested in learning more about SmallWall, the lead developer just might be on the show in a few weeks... ***

Feedback/Questions

• David writes in
• Brian writes in
• Dan writes in
• Joel writes in
• Steve writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Using OpenBGPD to distribute pf table updates

• For those not familiar, OpenBGPD is a daemon for the Border Gateway Protocol - a way for routers on the internet to discover and exchange routes to different addresses
• This post, inspired by a talk about using BGP to distribute spam lists, details how to use the protocol to distribute some other useful lists and information
• It begins with "One of the challenges faced when managing our OpenBSD firewalls is the distribution of IPs to pf tables without manually modifying /etc/pf.conf on each of the firewalls every time. This task becomes quite tedious, specifically when you want to distribute different types of changes to different systems (eg administrative IPs to a firewall and spammer IPs to a mail server), or if you need to distribute real time blacklists to a large number of systems."
• If you manage a lot of BSD boxes, this might be an interesting alternative to some of the other ways to distribute configuration files
• OpenBGPD is part of the OpenBSD base system, but there's also an unofficial port to FreeBSD and a "work in progress" pkgsrc version ***

Mounting removable media with autofs

• The FreeBSD foundation has a new article in the "FreeBSD from the trenches" series, this time about the sponsored autofs tool
• It's written by one of the autofs developers, and he details his work on creating and using the utility
• "The purpose of autofs(5) is to mount filesystems on access, in a way that's transparent to the application. In other words, filesystems get mounted when they are first accessed, and then unmounted after some time passes."
• He talks about all the components that need to work together for smooth operation, how to configure it and how to enable it by default for removable drives
• It ends with a real-world example of something we're all probably familiar with: plugging in USB drives and watching the magic happen
• There's also some more advanced bonus material on GEOM classes and all the more technical details ***

The Tor Browser on BSD

• The Tor Project has provided a "browser bundle" for a long time, which is more or less a repackaged Firefox with many security and privacy-related settings preconfigured and some patches applied to the source
• Just tunneling your browser through a transparent Tor proxy is not safe enough - many things can lead to passive fingerprinting or, even worse, anonymity being completely lost
• It has, however, only been released for Windows, OS X and Linux - no BSD version
• "[...] we are pushing back against an emerging monoculture, and this is always a healthy thing. Monocultures are dangerous for many reasons, most importantly to themselves."
• Some work has begun to get a working port on BSD going, and this document tells about the process and how it all got started
• If you've got porting skills, or are interested in online privacy, any help would be appreciated of course (see the post for details on getting involved) ***

OpenSSH 6.8 released

• Continuing their "tick tock" pattern of releases alternating between new features and bugfixes, the OpenSSH team has released 6.8 - it's a major upgrade, focused on new features (we like those better of course)
• Most of the codebase has gone through refactoring, making it easier for regression tests and improving the general readability
• This release adds support for SHA256-hashed, base64-encoded host key fingerprints, as well as making that the default - a big step up from the previously hex-encoded MD5 fingerprints
• Experimental host key rotation support also makes it debut, allowing for easy in-place upgrading of old keys to newer (or refreshed) keys
• You can now require multiple, different public keys to be verified for a user to authenticate (useful if you're extra paranoid or don't have 100% confidence in any single key type)
• The native version will be in OpenBSD 5.7, and the portable version should hit a ports tree near you soon
• Speaking of the portable version, it now has a configure option to build without OpenSSL or LibreSSL, but doing so limits you to Ed25519 key types and ChaCha20 and AES-CTR ciphers ***

NetBSD at AsiaBSDCon

• The NetBSD guys already have a wrap-up of the recent event, complete with all the pictures and weird devices you'd expect
• It covers their BoF session, the six NetBSD-related presentations and finally their "work in progress" session
• There was a grand total of 34 different NetBSD gadgets on display at the event ***

Interview - Lawrence Teo - lteo@openbsd.org / @lteo

OpenBSD at Calyptix

News Roundup

HardenedBSD introduces Integriforce

• A little bit of background on this one first: NetBSD has something called veriexec, used for checking file integrity at the kernel level
• By doing it at the kernel level, similar to securelevels, it offers some level of protection even when the root account is compromised
• HardenedBSD has introduced a similar mechanism into their "secadm" utility
• You can list binaries in the config file that you want to be protected from changes, then specify whether those can't be run at all, or if they just print a warning
• They're looking for some more extensive testing of this new feature ***

More s2k15 hackathon reports

• A couple more Australian hackathon reports have poured in since the last time
• The first comes from Jonathan Gray, who's done a lot of graphics-related work in OpenBSD recently
• He worked on getting some newer "Southern Islands" and "Graphics Core Next" AMD GPUs working, as well as some OpenGL and DRM-related things
• Also on his todo list was to continue hitting various parts of the tree with American Fuzzy Lop, which ended up fixing a few crashes in mandoc
• Ted Unangst also sent in a report to detail what he hacked on at the event
• With a strong focus on improving SMP scalability, he tackled the virtual memory layer
• His goal was to speed up some syscalls that are used heavily during code compilation, much of which will probably end up in 5.8
• All the trip reports are much more detailed than our short summaries, so give them a read if you're interested in all the technicalities ***

DragonFly 4.0.4 and IPFW3

• DragonFly BSD has put out a small point release to the 4.x branch, 4.0.4
• It includes a minor list of fixes, some of which include a HAMMER FS history fix, removing the no-longer-needed "new xorg" and "with kms" variables and a few LAGG fixes
• There was also a bug in the installer that prevented the rescue image from being installed correctly, which also gets fixed in this version
• Shortly after it was released, their new IPFW2 firewall was added to the tree and subsequently renamed to IPFW3 (since it's technically the third revision) ***

NetBSD gets Raspberry Pi 2 support

• NetBSD has announced initial support for the second revision of the ever-popular Raspberry Pi board
• There are -current snapshots available for download, and multiprocessor support is also on the way
• The NetBSD wiki page about the Raspberry Pi also has some more information and an installation guide
• The usual Hacker News discussion on the subject
• If anyone has one of these little boards, let us know - maybe write up a blog post about your experience with BSD on it ***

OpenIKED as a VPN gateway

• In our first discussion segment, we talked about a few different ways to tunnel your traffic
• While we've done full tutorials on things like SSH tunnels, OpenVPN and Tor, we haven't talked a whole lot about OpenBSD's IPSEC suite
• This article should help fill that gap - it walks you through the complete IKED setup
• From creating the public key infrastructure to configuring the firewall to configuring both the VPN server and client, this guide's got it all ***

Feedback/Questions

• Gary writes in
• Robert writes in
• Joris writes in
• Mike writes in
• Anders writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Can you hear me now
• He must be GNU here
• I've seen some... ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

• We've covered how to build a BSD-based gateway that tunnels all your traffic through a VPN in the past - but what if you don't trust any VPN company?
• It's easy for anyone to say "of course we don't run a modified version of OpenVPN that logs all your traffic... what are you talking about?"
• The VPN provider might also be slow to apply security patches, putting you and the rest of the users at risk
• With this guide, you'll be able to cut out the middleman and create your own VPN, using OpenBSD
• It covers topics such as protecting your server, securing DNS lookups, configuring the firewall properly, general security practices and of course actually setting up the VPN ***

FreeBSD vs Gentoo comparison

• People coming over from Linux will sometimes compare FreeBSD to Gentoo, mostly because of the ports-like portage system for installing software
• This article takes that notion and goes much more in-depth, with lots more comparisons between the two systems
• The author mentions that the installers are very different, ports and portage have many subtle differences and a few other things
• If you're a curious Gentoo user considering FreeBSD, this might be a good article to check out to learn a bit more ***

Kernel W^X in OpenBSD

• W^X, "Write XOR Execute," is a security feature of OpenBSD with a rather strange-looking name
• It's meant to be an exploit mitigation technique, disallowing pages in the address space of a process to be both writable and executable at the same time
• This helps prevent some types of buffer overflows: code injected into it won't execute, but will crash the program (quite obviously the lesser of the two evils)
• Through some recent work, OpenBSD's kernel now has no part of the address space without this feature - whereas it was only enabled in the userland previously
• Doing this incorrectly in the kernel could lead to far worse consequences, and is a lot harder to debug, so this is a pretty huge accomplishment that's been in the works for a while
• More technical details can be found in some recent CVS commits ***

Building an IPFW-based router

• We've covered building routers with PF many times before, but what about IPFW?
• A certain host of a certain podcast decided it was finally time to replace his disappointing consumer router with something BSD-based
• In this blog post, Kris details his experience building and configuring a new router for his home, using IPFW as the firewall
• He covers in-kernel NAT and NATD, installing a DHCP server from packages and even touches on NAT reflection a bit
• If you're an IPFW fan and are thinking about putting together a new router, give this post a read ***

Interview - Jos Schellevis - project@opnsense.org / @opnsense

The birth of OPNsense

News Roundup

On profiling HTTP

• Adrian Chadd, who we've had on the show before, has been doing some more ultra-high performance testing
• Faced with the problem of how to generate a massive amount of HTTP traffic, he looked into the current state of benchmarking tools
• According to him, it's "not very pretty"
• He decided to work on a new tool to benchmark huge amounts of web traffic, and the rest of this post describes the whole process
• You can check out his new code on Github right now ***

Using divert(4) to reduce attacks

• We talked about using divert(4) with PF last week, and this post is a good follow-up to that introduction (though unrelated to that series)
• It talks about how you can use divert, combined with some blacklists, to reduce attacks on whatever public services you're running
• PF has good built-in rate limiting for abusive IPs that hit rapidly, but when they attack slowly over a longer period of time, that won't work
• The Composite Blocking List is a public DNS blocklist, operated alongside Spamhaus, that contains many IPs known to be malicious
• Consider setting this up to reduce the attack spam in your logs if you run public services ***

ChaCha20 patchset for GELI

• A user has posted a patch to the freebsd-hackers list that adds ChaCha support to GELI, the disk encryption system
• There are also some benchmarks that look pretty good in terms of performance
• Currently, GELI defaults to AES in XTS mode with a few tweakable options (but also supports Blowfish, Camellia and Triple DES)
• There's some discussion going on about whether a stream cipher is suitable or not for disk encryption though, so this might not be a match made in heaven just yet ***

PCBSD update system enhancements

• The PCBSD update utility has gotten an update itself, now supporting automatic upgrades
• You can choose what parts of your system you want to let it automatically handle (packages, security updates)
• The update system uses ZFS and Boot Environments for safe updating and bypasses some dubious pkgng functionality
• There's also a new graphical frontend available for it ***

Feedback/Questions

• Mat writes in
• Chris writes in
• Andy writes in
• Beau writes in
• Kutay writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Wait, a real one?
• What's that glowing... ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Introducing OPNsense, a pfSense fork

• OPNsense is a new BSD-based firewall project that was recently started, forked from the pfSense codebase
• Even though it's just been announced, they already have a formal release based on FreeBSD 10 (pfSense's latest stable release is based on 8.3)
• The core team includes a well-known DragonFlyBSD developer
• You can check out their code on Github now, or download an image and try it out - let us know if you do and what you think about it
• They also have a nice wiki and some instructions on getting started for new users
• We plan on having them on the show next week to learn a bit more about how the project got started and why you might want to use it - stay tuned ***

Code rot and why I chose OpenBSD

• Here we have a blog post about rotting codebases - a core banking system in this example
• The author tells the story of how his last days spent at the job were mostly removing old, dead code from a giant project
• He goes on to compare it to OpenSSL and the hearbleed disaster, from which LibreSSL was born
• Instead of just bikeshedding like the rest of the internet, OpenBSD "silently started putting the beast into shape" as he puts it
• The article continues on to mention OpenBSD's code review process, and how it catches any bugs so we don't have more heartbleeds
• "In OpenBSD you are encouraged to run current and the whole team tries its best to make current as stable as it can. You know why? They eat their own dog food. That's so simple yet so amazing that it blows my mind. Developers actually run OpenBSD on their machines daily."
• It's a very long and detailed story about how the author has gotten more involved with BSD, learned from the mailing lists and even started contributing back - he says "In summary, I'm learning more than ever - computing is fun again"
• Look for the phrase "Getting Started" in the blog post for a nice little gem ***

ZFS vs HAMMER FS

• One of the topics we've seen come up from time to time is how FreeBSD's ZFS and DragonFly's HAMMER FS compare to each other
• They both have a lot of features that traditional filesystems lack
• A forum thread was opened for discussion about them both and what they're typically used for
• It compares resource requirements, ideal hardware and pros/cons of each
• Hopefully someone will do another new comparison when HAMMER 2 is finished
• This is not to be confused with the other "hammer" filesystem ***

Portable OpenNTPD revived

• With ISC's NTPd having so many security vulnerabilities recently, people need an alternative NTP daemon
• OpenBSD has developed OpenNTPD since 2004, but the portable version for other operating systems hasn't been actively maintained in a few years
• The older version still works fine, and is in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, but it would be nice to have some of the newer features and fixes from the native version
• Brent Cook, who we've had on the show before to talk about LibreSSL, decided it was time to fix this
• While looking through the code, he also found some fixes for the native version as well
• You can grab it from Github now, or just wait for the updated release to hit the repos of your OS of choice ***

Interview - Ian Sutton - ian@kremlin.cc

BSD replacements for systemd dependencies

News Roundup

pkgng adds OS X support

• FreeBSD's next-gen package manager has just added support for Mac OS X
• Why would you want that? Well.. we don't really know, but it's cool
• The author of the patch may have some insight about what his goal is though
• This could open up the door for a cross-platform pkgng solution, similar to NetBSD's pkgsrc
• There's also the possibility of pkgng being used as a packaging format for MacPorts in the future
• While we're on the topic of pkgng, you can also watch bapt's latest presentation about it from ruBSD 2014 - "four years of pkg" ***

Secure secure shell

• Almost everyone watching BSD Now probably uses OpenSSH and has set up a server at one point or another
• This guide provides a list of best practices beyond the typical "disable root login and use keys" advice you'll often hear
• It specifically goes in-depth with server and client configuration with the best key types, KEX methods and encryption ciphers to use
• There are also good explanations for all the choices, based both on history and probability
• Minimal backwards compatibility is kept, but most of the old and insecure stuff gets disabled
• We've also got a handy chart to show which SSH implementations support which ciphers, in case you need to support Windows users or people who use weird clients ***

Dissecting OpenBSD's divert(4)

• PF has a cool feature that not a lot of people seem to know about: divert
• It lets you send packets to userspace, allowing you to inspect them a lot easier
• This blog post, the first in a series, details all the cool things you can do with divert and how to use it
• A very common example is with intrusion detection systems like Snort ***

Screen recording on FreeBSD

• This is a neat article about a topic we don't cover very often: making video content on BSD
• In the post, you'll learn how to make screencasts with FreeBSD, using kdenlive and ffmpeg
• There are also notes about getting a USB microphone working, so you can do commentary on whatever you're showing
• It also includes lots of details and helpful screenshots throughout the process
• You should make cool screencasts and send them to us ***

Feedback/Questions

• Camio writes in
• ezpzy writes in
• Emett writes in
• Ben writes in
• Laszlo writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Protocol X97
• My thoughts echoed
• Vulnerability sample ***

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More BSD presentation videos

• The MeetBSD video uploading spree continues with a few more talks, maybe this'll be the last batch
• Corey Vixie, Web Apps in Embedded BSD
• Allan Jude, UCL config
• Kip Macy, iflib
• While we're on the topic of conferences, AsiaBSDCon's CFP was extended by one week
• This year's ruBSD will be on December 13th in Moscow
• Also, the BSDCan call for papers is out, and the event will be in June next year
• Lastly, according to Rick Miller, "A potential vBSDcon 2015 event is being explored though a decision has yet to be made." ***

BSD-powered digital library in Africa

• You probably haven't heard much about Nzega, Tanzania, but it's an East African country without much internet access
• With physical schoolbooks being a rarity there, a few companies helped out to bring some BSD-powered reading material to a local school
• They now have a pair of FreeNAS Minis at the center of their local network, with over 80,000 books and accompanying video content stored on them (~5TB of data currently)
• The school's workstations also got wiped and reloaded with FreeBSD, and everyone there seems to really enjoy using it ***

pfSense 2.2 status update

• With lots of people asking when the 2.2 release will be done, some pfSense developers decided to provide a status update
• 2.2 will have a lot of changes: being based on FreeBSD 10.1, Unbound instead of BIND, updating PHP to something recent, including the new(ish) IPSEC stack updates, etc
• All these things have taken more time than previously expected
• The post also has some interesting graphs showing the ratio of opened and close bugs for the upcoming release ***

Recommended hardware threads

• A few threads on caught our attention this week, all about hardware recommendations for BSD setups
• In the first one, the OP asks about mini-ITX hardware to run a FreeBSD server and NAS
• Everyone gave some good recommendations for low power, Atom-based systems
• The second thread started off asking about which CPU architecture is best for PF on an OpenBSD router, but ended up being another hardware thread
• For a router, the ALIX, APU and Soekris boards still seem to be the most popular choices, with the third and fourth threads confirming this
• If you're thinking about building your first BSD box - server, router, NAS, whatever - these might be some good links to read ***

Interview - Paul Schenkeveld - freebsd@psconsult.nl

Running a BSD conference

News Roundup

From Linux to FreeBSD - for reals

• Another Linux user is ready to switch to BSD, and takes to Reddit for some community encouragement (seems to be a common thing now)
• After being a Linux guy for 20(!) years, he's ready to switch his systems over, and is looking for some helpful guides to transition
• In the comments, a lot of new switchers offer some advice and reading material
• If any of the listeners have some things that were helpful along your switching journey, maybe send 'em this guy's way ***

Running FreeBSD as a Xen Dom0

• Continuing progress has been made to allow FreeBSD to be a host for the Xen hypervisor
• This wiki article explains how to run the Xen branch of FreeBSD and host virtual machines on it
• Xen on FreeBSD currently supports PV guests (modified kernels) and HVM (unmodified kernels, uses hardware virtualization features)
• The wiki provides instructions for running Debian (PV) and FreeBSD (HVM), and discusses the features that are not finished yet ***

HardenedBSD updates and changes

• a.out is the old executable format for Unix
• The name stands for assembler output, and was coined by Ken Thompson as the fixed name for output of his PDP-7 assembler in 1968
• FreeBSD, on which HardenedBSD is based, switched away from a.out in version 3.0
• A restriction against NULL mapping was introduced in FreeBSD 7 and enabled by default in FreeBSD 8
• However, for reasons of compatibility, it could be switched off, allowing buggy applications to continue to run, at the risk of allowing a kernel bug to be exploited
• HardenedBSD has removed the sysctl, making it impossible to run in ‘insecure mode’
• Package building update: more consistent repo, no more i386 packages ***

Feedback/Questions

• Boris writes in
• Alex writes in (edit: adding "tinker panic 0" to the ntp.conf will disable the sanity check)
• Chris writes in
• Robert writes in
• Jake writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Real world authpf use
• The great perl event of 2014 ***

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BSD Devroom CFP

• This year's FOSDEM conference (Belgium, Jan 31st - Feb 1st) is having a dedicated BSD devroom
• They've issued a call for papers on anything BSD-related, and we always love more presentations
• If you're in the Belgium area or plan on going, submit a talk about something cool you're doing
• There's also a mailing list and some more information in the original post ***

Bhyve SVM code merge

• The bhyve_svm code has been in the "projects" tree of FreeBSD, but is now ready for -CURRENT
• This changeset will finally allow bhyve to run on AMD CPUs, where it was previously limited to Intel only
• All the supported operating systems and utilities should work on both now
• One thing to note: bhyve doesn't support PCI passthrough on AMD just yet
• There may still be some issues though ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference Tokyo

• The Japanese NetBSD users group held a booth at another recent open source conference
• As always, they were running NetBSD on everything you can imagine
• One of the users reports back to the mailing list on their experience, providing lots of pictures and links
• Here's an interesting screenshot of NetBSD running various other BSDs in Xen ***

More BSD switchers every day

• A decade-long Linux user is considering making the switch, and asks Reddit about the BSD community
• Tired of the pointless bickering he sees in his current community, he asks if the same problems exist over here and what he should expect
• So far, he's found that BSD people seem to act more level-headed about things, and are much more practical, whereas some FSF/GNU/GPL people make open source a religion
• There's also another semi-related thread about another Linux user wanting to switch to BSD because of systemd and GNU people
• There are some extremely well written and thought-out comments in the replies (in both threads), be sure to give them all a read
• Maybe the OPs should've just watched this show ***

Interview - Olivier Cochard-Labbé - olivier@cochard.me / @ocochardlabbe

The BSD Router Project

News Roundup

FreeBSD -CURRENT on a T420

• Thinkpads are quite popular with BSD developers and users
• Most of the hardware seems to be supported across the BSDs (especially wifi)
• This article walks through installing FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Thinkpad T420 with UEFI
• If you've got a Thinkpad, or especially this specific one, have a look at some of the steps involved ***

FreeNAS on a Supermicro 5018A-MHN4

• More and more people are migrating their NAS devices to BSD-based solutions
• In this post, the author goes through setting up FreeNAS on some of his new hardware
• His new rack-mounted FreeNAS machine has a low power Atom with eight cores and 64GB of RAM - quite a lot for its small form factor
• The rest of the post details all of the hardware he chose and goes through the build process (with lots of cool pictures) ***

Hardening procfs and linprocfs

• There was an exploit published recently for SFTP in OpenSSH, but it mostly just affected Linux
• There exists a native procfs in FreeBSD, which was the target point of that exploit, but it's not used very often
• The Linux emulation layer also supports its own linprocfs, which was affected as well
• The HardenedBSD guys weigh in on how to best solve the problem, and now support an additional protection layer from writing to memory with procfs
• If you want to learn more about ASLR and HardenedBSD, be sure to check out our interview with Shawn too ***

pfSense monitoring with bandwidthd

• A lot of people run pfSense on their home network, and it's really useful to monitor the bandwidth usage
• This article will walk you through setting up bandwidthd to do exactly that
• bandwidthd monitors based on the IP address, rather than per-interface
• It can also build some cool HTML graphs, and we love those pfSense graphs
• Have a look at our bandwidth monitoring and testing tutorial for some more ideas ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dave writes in
• Chris writes in
• Zeke writes in
• Bostjan writes in
• Patrick writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• More old bugs
• The Right Font™ (see also) ***

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BSD talks at XDC 2014

• This year's Xorg conference featured a few BSD-related talks
• Matthieu Herrb, Status of the OpenBSD graphics stack
• Matthieu's talk details what's been done recently in Xenocara the OpenBSD kernel for graphics (slides here)
• Jean-Sébastien Pédron, The status of the graphics stack on FreeBSD
• His presentation gives a history of major changes and outlines the current overall status of graphics in FreeBSD (slides here)
• Francois Tigeot, Porting DRM/KMS drivers to DragonFlyBSD
• Francois' talk tells the story of how he ported some of the DRM and KMS kernel drivers to DragonFly (slides here) ***

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

• The FreeBSD project has a report of their activities between July and September of this year
• Lots of ARM work has been done, and a goal for 11.0 is tier one support for the platform
• The release includes reports from the cluster admin team, release team, ports team, core team and much more, but we've already covered most of the items on the show
• If you're interested in seeing what the FreeBSD community has been up to lately, check the full report - it's huge ***

Monitoring pfSense logs using ELK

• If you're one of those people who loves the cool graphs and charts that pfSense can produce, this is the post for you
• ELK (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) is a group of tools that let you collect, store, search and (most importantly) visualize logs
• It works with lots of different things that output logs and can be sent to one central server for displaying
• This post shows you how to set up pfSense to do remote logging to ELK and get some pretty awesome graphs ***

Some updates to IPFW

• Even though PF gets a lot of attention, a lot of FreeBSD people still love IPFW
• While mostly a dormant section of the source tree, some updates were recently committed to -CURRENT
• The commit lists the user-visible changes, performance changes, ABI changes and internal changes
• It should be merged back to -STABLE after a month or so of testing, and will probably end up in 10.2-RELEASE
• Also check this blog post for some more information and fancy graphs ***

Interview - Hiroki Sato (佐藤広生) - hrs@freebsd.org / @hiroki_sato

BSD in Japan, technology conferences, various topics

News Roundup

pfSense on Hyper-V

• In case you didn't know, the latest pfSense snapshots support running on Hyper-V
• Unfortunately, the current stable release is based on an old, unsupported FreeBSD 8.x base, so you have to use the snapshots for now
• The author of the post tells about his experience running pfSense and gives lots of links to read if you're interested in doing the same
• He also praises pfSense above other Linux-based solutions for its IPv6 support and high quality code ***

OpenBSD as a daily driver

• A curious Reddit user posts to ask the community about using OpenBSD as an everyday desktop OS
• The overall consensus is that it works great for that, stays out of your way and is quite reliable
• Caveats would include there being no Adobe Flash support (though others consider this a blessing..) and it requiring a more hands-on approach to updating
• If you're considering running OpenBSD as a "daily driver," check all the comments for more information and tips ***

Getting PF log statistics

• The author of this post runs an OpenBSD box in front of all his VMs at his colocation, and details his experiences with firewall logs
• He usually investigates any IPs of interest with whois, nslookup, etc. - but this gets repetitive quickly, so..
• He sets out to find the best way to gather firewall log statistics
• After coming across a perl script to do this, he edited it a bit and is now a happy, lazy admin once again
• You can try out his updated PF script here ***

FlashRD 1.7 released

• In case anyone's not familiar, flashrd is a tool to create OpenBSD images for embedded hardware devices, executing from a virtualized environment
• This new version is based on (the currently unreleased) OpenBSD 5.6, and automatically adapts to the number of CPUs you have for building
• It also includes fixes for 4k drives and lots of various other improvements
• If you're interested in learning more, take a look at some of the slides and audio from the main developer on the website ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Don writes in
• Andriy writes in
• Richard writes in
• Robert writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Subtle trolling
• Old bugs with old fixes
• A pig reinstall
• Strange DOS-like environment ***

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NetBSD at Hiroshima Open Source Conference

• NetBSD developers are hard at work, putting NetBSD on everything they can find
• At a technology conference in Hiroshima, some developers brought their exotic machines to put on display
• As usual, there are lots of pictures and a nice report from the conference ***

FreeBSD's Linux emulation overhaul

• For a long time, FreeBSD's emulation layer has been based on an ancient Fedora 10 system
• If you've ever needed to install Adobe Flash on BSD, you'll be stuck with all this extra junk
• With some recent work, that's been replaced with a recent CentOS release
• This opens up the door for newer versions of Skype to run on FreeBSD, and maybe even Steam someday ***

pfSense 2.2-BETA

• Big changes are coming in pfSense land, with their upcoming 2.2 release
• We talked to the developer a while back about future plans, and now they're finally out there
• The 2.2 branch will be based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE (instead of 8.3) and include lots of performance fixes
• It also includes some security updates, lots of package changes and updates and much more
• You can check the full list of changes on their wiki ***

NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi

• This article shows how you can install NetBSD on the ever-so-popular Raspberry Pi
• As of right now, you'll need to use a -CURRENT snapshot to do it
• It also shows how to grow the filesystem to fill up an SD card, some pkgsrc basics and how to get some initial things set up
• Can anyone find something that you can't install NetBSD on? ***

Interview - Steve Wills - swills@freebsd.org / @swills

Mentoring new BSD developers

News Roundup

MidnightBSD 0.5 released

• We don't hear a whole lot about MidnightBSD, but they've just released version 0.5
• It's got a round of the latest FreeBSD security patches, driver updates and various small things
• Maybe one of their developers could come on the show sometime and tell us more about the project ***

BSD Router Project 1.52 released

• The newest update for the BSD Router Project is out
• This version is based on a snapshot of 10-STABLE that's very close to 10.1-RELEASE
• It's mostly a bugfix release, but includes some small changes and package updates ***

Configuring a DragonFly BSD desktop

• We've done tutorials on how to set up a FreeBSD or OpenBSD desktop, but maybe you're more interested in DragonFly
• In this post from Justin Sherrill, you'll learn some of the steps to do just that
• He pulled out an old desktop machine, gave it a try and seems to be pleased with the results
• It includes a few Xorg tips, and there are some comments about the possibility of making a GUI DragonFly installer ***

Building a mini-ITX pfSense box

• Another week, another pfSense firewall build post
• This time, the author is installing to a Jetway J7F2, a mini-ITX device with four LAN ports
• He used to be a m0n0wall guy, but wanted to give the more modern pfSense a try
• Lots of great pictures of the hardware, which we always love ***

Feedback/Questions

• Damian writes in
• Jan writes in
• Dale writes in
• Joe writes in
• Bostjan writes in ***

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FreeBSD 10.1-BETA1 is out

• The first maintenance update in the 10.x series of FreeBSD is on its way
• Since we can't see a changelog yet, the 10-STABLE release notes offer a glimpse at some of the new features and fixes that will be included in 10.1
• The vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, lots of drivers were updated, lots of bugs were fixed and bhyve also got many improvements from 11
• Initial UEFI support, multithreaded softupdates for UFS and many more things were added
• You can check the release schedule for the planned release dates
• Details for the various forms of release media can be found in the announcement ***

Remote headless OpenBSD installation

• A lot of server providers only offer a limited number of operating systems to be easily installed on their boxes
• Sometimes you'll get lucky and they'll offer FreeBSD, but it's much harder to find ones that natively support other BSDs
• This article shows how you can use a Linux-based rescue system, a RAM disk and QEMU to install OpenBSD on the bare metal of a server, headlessly and remotely
• It required a few specific steps you'll want to take note of, but is extremely useful for those pesky hosting providers ***

Building a firewall appliance with pfSense

• In this article, we learn how to easily set up a gateway and wireless access point with pfSense on a Netgate ALIX2C3 APU
• After the author's modem died, he decided to look into a more do-it-yourself option with pf and a tiny router board
• The hardware he used has gigabit ports and a BSD-compatible wireless card, as well as enough CPU power for a modest workload and a few services (OpenVPN, etc.)
• There's a lot of great pictures of the hardware and detailed screenshots, definitely worth a look ***

Receive Side Scaling - UDP testing

• Adrian Chadd has been working on RSS (Receive Side Scaling) in FreeBSD, and gives an update on the progress
• He's using some quad core boxes with 10 gigabit ethernet for the tests
• The post gives lots of stats and results from his network benchmark, as well as some interesting workarounds he had to do
• He also provides some system configuration options, sysctl knobs, etc. (if you want to try it out)
• And speaking of Adrian Chadd... ***

Interview - Adrian Chadd - adrian@freebsd.org / @erikarn

BSD on laptops, wifi, drivers, various topics

News Roundup

Sendmail removed from OpenBSD

• Mail server admins around the world are rejoicing, because sendmail is finally gone from OpenBSD
• With OpenSMTPD being a part of the base system, sendmail became largely redundant and unneeded
• If you've ever compared a "sendmail.cf" file to an "smtpd.conf" file... the different is as clear as night and day
• 5.6 will serve as a transitional release, including both sendmail and OpenSMTPD, but 5.7 will be the first release without it
• If you still need it for some reason, sendmail will live in ports from now on
• Hopefully FreeBSD will follow suit sometime in the future as well, possibly including DragonFly's mail transfer agent in base (instead of an entire mail server) ***

pfSense backups with pfmb

• We've mentioned the need for a tool to back up pfSense configs a number of times on the show
• This script, hosted on github, does pretty much exactly that
• It can connect to one (or more!) pfSense installations and back up the configuration
• You can roll back or replace failed hardware very easily with its restore function
• Everything is done over SSH, so it should be pretty secure ***

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

• We mentioned when the pre orders were up, but now "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2nd edition" seems to be shipping out
• If you're interested in FreeBSD development, or learning about the operating system internals, this is a great book to buy
• We've even had all three authors on the show before! ***

OpenBSD's systemd replacement updates

• We mentioned last week that the news of OpenBSD creating systemd wrappers was getting mainstream attention
• One of the developers writes in to Undeadly, detailing what's going on and what the overall status is
• He also clears up any confusion about "porting systemd to BSD" (that's not what's going on) or his code ever ending up in base (it won't)
• The top comment as of right now is a Linux user asking if his systemd wrappers can be ported back to Linux... poor guy ***

Feedback/Questions

• Brad writes in
• Ben writes in
• Mathieu writes in
• Steve writes in ***

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FreeBSD foundation's new IPSEC project

• The FreeBSD foundation, along with Netgate, is sponsoring some new work on the IPSEC code
• With bandwidth in the 10-40 gigabit per second range, the IPSEC stack needs to be brought up to modern standards in terms of encryption and performance
• This new work will add AES-CTR and AES-GCM modes to FreeBSD's implementation, borrowing some code from OpenBSD
• The updated stack will also support AES-NI for hardware-based encryption speed ups
• It's expected to be completed by the end of September, and will also be in pfSense 2.2 ***

NetBSD at Shimane Open Source Conference 2014

• The Japanese NetBSD users group held a NetBSD booth at the Open Source Conference 2014 in Shimane on August 23
• One of the developers has gathered a bunch of pictures from the event and wrote a fairly lengthy summary
• They had NetBSD running on all sorts of devices, from Raspberry Pis to Sun Java Stations
• Some visitors said that NetBSD had the most chaotic booth at the conference ***

pfSense 2.1.5 released

• A new version of the pfSense 2.1 branch is out
• Mostly a security-focused release, including three web UI fixes and the most recent OpenSSL fix (which FreeBSD has still not patched in -RELEASE after nearly a month)
• It also includes many other bug fixes, check the blog post for the full list ***

Systems, Science and FreeBSD

• Our friend George Neville-Neil gave a presentation at Microsoft Research
• It's mainly about using FreeBSD as a platform for research, inside and outside of universities
• The talk describes the OS and its features, ports, developer community, documentation, who uses BSD and much more ***

Interview - Reyk Floeter - reyk@openbsd.org / @reykfloeter

OpenBSD's HTTP daemon

Tutorial

A crash course on HAMMER FS

News Roundup

OpenBSD's rcctl tool usage

• OpenBSD recently got a new tool for managing /etc/rc.conf.local in -current
• Similar to FreeBSD's "sysrc" tool, it eliminates the need to manually edit rc.conf.local to enable or disable services
• This blog post - from a BSD Now viewer - shows the typical usage of the new tool to alter the startup services
• It won't make it to 5.6, but will be in 5.7 (next May) ***

pfSense mini-roundup

• We found five interesting pfSense articles throughout the week and wanted to quickly mention them
• The first item in our pfSense mini-roundup details how you can stream Netflix to in non-US countries using a "smart" DNS service
• The second post talks about setting ip IPv6, in particular if Comcast is your ISP
• The third one features pfSense on Softpedia, a more mainstream tech site
• The fourth post describes how to filter HTTPS traffic with Squid and pfSense
• The last article describes setting up a VPN using the "tinc" daemon and pfSense
• It seems to be lesser known, compared to things like OpenVPN or SSH tunnels, so it's interesting to read about
• This pfSense HQ website seems to have lots of other cool pfSense items, check it out ***

OpenBSD's new buffer cache

• OpenBSD has traditionally used the tried-and-true LRU algorithm for buffer cache, but it has a few problems
• Ted Unangst has just switched to a new algorithm in -current, partially based on 2Q, and details some of his work
• Initial tests show positive results in terms of cache responsiveness
• Check the post for all the fine details ***

BSDTalk episode 244

• Another new BSDTalk is up and, this time around, Will Backman interviews Ken Moore, the developer of the new BSD desktop environment
• They discuss the history of development, differences between it and other DEs, lots of topics
• If you're more of a visual person, fear not, because...
• We'll have Ken on next week, including a full "virtual walkthrough" of Lumina and its applications ***

Feedback/Questions

• Ghislain writes in
• Raynold writes in
• Van writes in
• Sean writes in
• Stefan writes in ***

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FreeBSD foundation August update

• The foundation has published a new PDF detailing some of their recent activities
• It includes project development updates, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule and some of its new features
• There is also a short interview with Dru Lavigne in the "voices from the community" section
• If you're into hardware, there's another section about some new FreeBSD server equipment
• In closing, there's an update on funding too ***

NSD for an authoritative nameserver

• With BIND having been removed from FreeBSD 10.0, you might be looking to replace your old DNS setup
• This article shows how to use NSD for an authoritative DNS nameserver
• It's also got a link to a similar article on Unbound, the new favorite recursive and caching resolver (they work great together)
• All the instructions are presented very neatly, with all the little details included
• Less BIND means less vulnerabilities, everybody's happy ***

BIND and Nginx removed from OpenBSD

• While we're on the topic of DNS servers, BIND was finally removed from OpenBSD as well
• The base system contains both NSD and Unbound, so users can transition over between 5.6 (November of this year) and 5.7 (May of next year)
• They've also removed nginx from the base system, in favor of the new custom HTTP daemon
• BIND and Nginx are still available in ports if you don't want to switch
• We're hoping to have Reyk Floeter on the show next week to talk about it, but scheduling might not work out, so it may be a little later on
• With Apache gone in the upcoming 5.6, It's also likely that sendmail will be removed before 5.7 - hooray for modern alternatives ***

NetBSD demo videos

• A Japanese NetBSD developer has been uploading lots of interesting videos
• Unsurprisingly, they're all featuring NetBSD running on exotic and weird hardware
• Most of them are demoing sound or running a modern Twitter client on an ancient computer
• They're from the same guy that did the conference wrap-up we mentioned recently ***

Interview - Shawn Webb - shawn.webb@hardenedbsd.org / @lattera

Address space layout randomization in FreeBSD

Tutorial

Reverse SSH tunneling

News Roundup

Puppet master-agent installation on FreeBSD

• If you've got a lot of BSD boxes under your control, or if you're just lazy, you've probably looked into Puppet before
• The author claims a lack of BSD-specific Puppet documentation, so he decided to write up some notes of his own
• He goes through some advantages of using this type of tool for deployments, even when you don't have a huge number of systems
• The rest of the post explains how to set up both the master and the agent configurations ***

Misc. pfSense items

• We found a few miscellaneous pfSense articles this past week
• The first one is about the hunt for the "ultimate" free open source firewall, where pfSense is obviously a strong contender
• The second one shows how to log NAT firewall states (a good way to find out which family member has been torrenting!)
• In the third, you can see how to automatically back up your configuration files
• The fourth item shows how to set up PXE booting with pfSense, similar to one of our tutorials ***

Time Machine backups on ZFS

• If you've got a Mac you need to keep backed up, a FreeBSD server with ZFS can take the place of an expensive "time capsule"
• This post walks you through setting up netatalk and mDNS for a very versatile Time Machine backup system
• With a single command on the OS X side, you can write to and read from the BSD box just like a regular external drive
• Surprisingly simple to do, recommended for anyone with Macs on their network ***

Lumina desktop preview

• Lumina, the BSD-exclusive desktop environment, seems to be coming along nicely
• The main developer has posted an update on the PCBSD blog with some screenshots
• Lots of new features have been added, many of which are documented in the post
• There just might be a BSD Now episode about Lumina coming up.. (cough cough) ***

Feedback/Questions

• Gary writes in
• Cedric writes in
• Caldwell writes in
• Cary writes in ***

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pfSense 2.1.4 released

• The pfSense team has released 2.1.4, shortly after 2.1.3 - it's mainly a security release
• Included within are eight security fixes, most of which are pfSense-specific
• OpenSSL, the WebUI and some packages all need to be patched (and there are instructions on how to do so)
• It also includes a large number of various other bug fixes
• Update all your routers! ***

DragonflyBSD's pf gets SMP

• While we're on the topic of pf...
• Dragonfly patches their old[er than even FreeBSD's] pf to support multithreading in many areas
• Stemming from a user's complaint, Matthew Dillon did his own work on pf to make it SMP-aware
• Altering your configuration's ruleset can also help speed things up, he found
• When will OpenBSD, the source of pf, finally do the same? ***

ChaCha usage and deployment

• A while back, we talked to djm about some cryptography changes in OpenBSD 5.5 and OpenSSH 6.5
• This article is sort of an interesting follow-up to that, showing which projects have adopted ChaCha20
• OpenSSH offers it as a stream cipher now, OpenBSD uses it for it's random number generator, Google offers it in TLS for Chromium and some of their services and lots of other projects seem to be adopting it
• Both Google's fork of OpenSSL and LibReSSL have upcoming implementations, while vanilla OpenSSL does not
• Unfortunately, this article has one mistake: FreeBSD does not use it - they still use the broken RC4 algorithm ***

BSDMag June 2014 issue

• The monthly online BSD magazine releases their newest issue
• This one includes the following articles: TLS hardening, setting up a package cluster in MidnightBSD, more GIMP tutorials, "saving time and headaches using the robot framework for testing," an interview and an article about the increasing number of security vulnerabilities
• The free pdf file is available for download as always ***

Interview - Craig Rodrigues - rodrigc@freebsd.org

FreeBSD's continuous testing infrastructure

Tutorial

Creating pre-patched OpenBSD ISOs

News Roundup

Preauthenticated decryption considered harmful

• Responding to a post from Adam Langley, Ted Unangst talks a little more about how signify and pkg_add handle signatures
• In the past, the OpenBSD installer would pipe the output of ftp straight to tar, but then verify the SHA256 at the end - this had the advantage of not requiring any extra disk space, but raised some security concerns
• With signify, now everything is fully downloaded and verified before tar is even invoked
• The pkg_add utility works a little bit differently, but it's also been improved in this area - details in the post
• Be sure to also read the original post from Adam, lots of good information ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RC2 is out

• As the -RELEASE inches closer, release candidate 2 is out and ready for testing
• Since the last one, it's got some fixes for NIC drivers, the latest file and libmagic security fixes, some serial port workarounds and various other small things
• The updated bsdconfig will use pkgng style packages now too
• A lesser known fact: there are also premade virtual machine images you can use too ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 wrap-up

• In what may be the first real pkgsrcCon article we've ever had!
• Includes wrap-up discussion about the event, the talks, the speakers themselves, what they use pkgsrc for, the hackathon and basically the whole event
• Unfortunately no recordings to be found... ***

PostgreSQL FreeBSD performance and scalability

• FreeBSD developer kib@ writes a report on PostgreSQL on FreeBSD, and how it scales
• On his monster 40-core box with 1TB of RAM, he runs lots of benchmarks and posts the findings
• Lots of technical details if you're interested in getting the best performance out of your hardware
• It also includes specific kernel options he used and the rest of the configuration
• If you don't want to open the pdf file, you can use this link too ***

Feedback/Questions

• James writes in
• Klemen writes in
• John writes in
• Brad writes in
• Adam writes in ***

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PIE and ASLR in FreeBSD update

• A status update for Shawn Webb's ASLR and PIE work for FreeBSD
• One major part of the code, position-independent executable support, has finally been merged into the -CURRENT tree
• "FreeBSD has supported loading PIEs for a while now, but the applications in base weren't compiled as PIEs. Given that ASLR is useless without PIE, getting base compiled with PIE support is a mandatory first step in proper ASLR support"
• If you're running -CURRENT, just add "WITH_PIE=1" to your /etc/src.conf and /etc/make.conf
• The next step is working on the ASLR coding style and getting more developers to look through it
• Shawn will also be at EuroBSDCon (in September) giving an updated version of his BSDCan talk about ASLR ***

Misc. pfSense news

• Couple of pfSense news items this week, including some hardware news
• Someone's gotta test the pfSense hardware devices before they're sold, which involves powering them all on at least once
• To make that process faster, they're building a controllable power board (and include some cool pics)
• There will be more info on that device a bit later on
• On Friday, June 27th, there will be another video session (for paying customers only...) about virtualized firewalls
• pfSense University, a new paid training course, was also announced
• A single two-day class costs $2000, ouch ***

ZFS stripe width

• A new blog post from Matt Ahrens about ZFS stripe width
• "The popularity of OpenZFS has spawned a great community of users, sysadmins, architects and developers, contributing a wealth of advice, tips and tricks, and rules of thumb on how to configure ZFS. In general, this is a great aspect of the ZFS community, but I’d like to take the opportunity to address one piece of misinformed advice"
• Matt goes through different situations where you would set up your zpool differently, each with their own advantages and disadvantages
• He covers best performance on random IOPS, best reliability, and best space efficiency use cases
• It includes a lot of detail on each one, including graphs, and addresses some misconceptions about different RAID-Z levels' overhead factor ***

FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 released

• The third BETA in the 9.3 release cycle is out, we're slowly getting closer to the release
• This is expected to be the final BETA, next will come the RCs
• There have mostly just been small bug fixes since BETA2, but OpenSSL was also updated and the arc4random code was updated to match what's in -CURRENT (but still isn't using ChaCha20)
• The FreeBSD foundation has a blog post about it too
• There's a list of changes between 9.2 and 9.3 as well, but we'll be sure to cover it when the -RELEASE hits ***

Interview - Bryce Chidester - brycec@devio.us / @brycied00d

Running a BSD shell provider

Tutorial

Chaining SSH connections

News Roundup

My FreeBSD adventure

• A Slackware user from the "linux questions" forum decides to try out BSD, and documents his initial impressions and findings
• After ruling out PCBSD due to the demanding hardware requirements and NetBSD due to "politics" (whatever that means, his words) he decides to start off with FreeBSD 10, but also mentions trying OpenBSD later on
• In his forum post, he covers the documentation (and how easy it makes it for a switcher), dual booting, packages vs ports, network configuration and some other little things
• So far, he seems to really enjoy BSD and thinks that it makes a lot of sense compared to Linux
• Might be an interesting, ongoing series we can follow up on later ***

Even more BSDCan trip reports

• BSDCan may be over until next year, but trip reports are still pouring in
• This time we have a summary from Li-Wen Hsu, who was paid for by the FreeBSD foundation
• He's part of the "Jenkins CI for FreeBSD" group and went to BSDCan mostly for that
• Nice long post about all of his experiences at the event, definitely worth a read
• He even talks about... the food ***

FreeBSD disk partitioning

• For his latest book series on FreeBSD's GEOM system, MWL asked the hackers mailing list for some clarification
• This erupted into a very long discussion about fdisk vs gnop vs gpart
• So you don't have to read the 500 mailing list posts, he's summarized the findings in a blog post
• It covers MBR vs GPT, disk sector sizes and how to handle all of them with which tools ***

BSD Router Project version 1.51

• A new version of the BSD Router Project has been released, 1.51
• It's now based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE instead of 10.0-RELEASE
• Includes lots of bugfixes and small updates, as well as some patches from pfSense and elsewhere
• Check the sourceforge page for the complete list of changes
• Bad news... the minimum disk size requirement has increased to 512MB... getting pretty bloated ***

Feedback/Questions

• Fongaboo writes in
• David writes in
• Kristian writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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FreeBSD moves to Bugzilla

• Historically, FreeBSD has used the old GNATS system for keeping track of bug reports
• After years and years of wanting to switch, they've finally moved away from GNATS to Bugzilla
• It offers a lot of advantages, is much more modern and actively maintained and
• There's a new workflow chart for developers to illustrate the new way of doing things
• The old "send-pr" command will still work for the time being, but will eventually be phased out in favor of native Bugzilla reporting tools (of which there are multiple in ports)
• This will hopefully make reporting bugs a lot less painful ***

DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2014

• We previously covered this blog last year, but the 2014 edition is up
• More of a hardware-focused article, the author details the parts he's using for a budget NAS
• Details the motherboard, RAM, CPU, hard drives, case, etc
• With a set goal of $500 max, he goes just over it - $550 for all the parts
• Lots of nice pictures of the hardware and step by step instructions for assembly, as well as software configuration instructions ***

DragonflyBSD 3.8 released

• Justin announced the availability of DragonflyBSD 3.8.0
• Binaries in /bin and /sbin are dynamic now, enabling the use of PAM and NSS to manage user accounts
• It includes a new HAMMER FS backup script and lots of FreeBSD tools have been synced with their latest versions
• Work continues on for the Intel graphics drivers, but it's currently limited to the HD4000 and Ivy Bridge series
• See the release page for more info and check the link for source-based upgrade instructions ***

OpenZFS European conference 2014

• There was an OpenZFS conference held in Europe recently, and now the videos are online for your viewing pleasure
• Matt Ahrens, Introduction
• Michael Alexander, FhGFS performance on ZFS
• Andriy Gapon, Testing ZFS on FreeBSD
• Luke Marsden, HybridCluster: ZFS in the cloud
• Vadim Comănescu, Syneto: continuously delivering a ZFS-based OS
• Chris George, DDRdrive ZIL accelerator: random write revelation
• Grenville Whelan, High-Availability
• Phil Harman, Harman Holistic
• Mark Rees, Storiant and OpenZFS
• Andrew Holway, EraStor ZFS appliances
• Dan Vâtca, Syneto and OpenZFS
• Luke Marsden, HybridCluster and OpenZFS
• Matt Ahrens, Delphix and OpenZFS
• Check the link for slides and other goodies ***

Interview - Benedict Reuschling - bcr@freebsd.org

BSD documentation, getting commit access, unix education, various topics

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr, Steve Wills

• "It is my pleasure to introduce Steve Wills, the newest member of the portmgr team"
• swills is an all-round good guy, does a lot for ports (especially the ruby ports)
• In this interview, we learn why he uses FreeBSD, the most embarrassing moment in his FreeBSD career and much more
• He used to work for Red Hat, woah ***

BSDTalk episode 242

• This time on BSDTalk, Will interviews Chris Buechler from pfSense
• Topics include: the heartbleed vulnerability and how it affected pfSense, how people usually leave their firewalls unpatched for a long time (or even forget about them!), changes between major versions, the upgrade process, upcoming features in their 10-based version, backporting drivers and security fixes
• They also touch on recent concerns in the pfSense community about their license change, that they may be "going commercial" and closing the source - so tune in to find out what their future plans are for all of that ***

Turn old PC hardware into a killer home server

• Lots of us have old hardware lying around doing nothing but collecting dust
• Why not turn that old box into a modern file server with FreeNAS and ZFS?
• This article goes through the process of setting up a NAS, gives a little history behind the project and highlights some of the different protocols FreeNAS can use (NFS, SMB, AFS, etc)
• Most of our users are already familiar with all of this stuff, nothing too advanced
• Good to see BSD getting some well-deserved attention on a big mainstream site ***

Unbloating the VAX install CD

• After a discussion on the VAX mailing list, something very important came to the attention of the developers...
• You can't boot NetBSD on a VAX box with 16MB of RAM from the CD image
• This blog post goes through the developer's adventure in trying to fix that through emulation and stripping various things out of the kernel to make it smaller
• In the end, he got it booting - and now all three VAX users who want to run NetBSD can do so on their systems with 16MB of RAM... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Thomas writes in
• Reynold writes in
• Bostjan writes in
• Paul writes in
• John writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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ALTQ removed from PF

• Kicking off our big PF episode...
• The classic packet queueing system, ALTQ, was recently removed from OpenBSD -current
• There will be a transitional phase between 5.5 and 5.6 where you can still use it by replacing the "queue" keyword with "oldqueue" in your pf.conf
• As of 5.6, due about six months from now, you'll have to change your ruleset to the new syntax if you're using it for bandwidth shaping
• After more than ten years, bandwidth queueing has matured quite a bit and we can finally put ALTQ to rest, in favor of the new queueing subsystem
• This doesn't affect FreeBSD, PCBSD, NetBSD or DragonflyBSD since all of their PFs are older and maintained separately. ***

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

• The quarterly status report from FreeBSD is out, detailing some of the project's ongoing tasks
• Some highlights include the first "stable" branch of ports, ARM improvements (including SMP), bhyve improvements, more work on the test suite, desktop improvements including the new vt console driver and UEFI booting support finally being added
• We've got some specific updates from the cluster admin team, core team, documentation team, portmgr team, email team and release engineering team
• LOTS of details and LOTS of topics to cover, give it a read ***

OpenBSD's OpenSSL rewrite continues with m2k14

• A mini OpenBSD hackathon begins in Morocco, Africa
• You can follow the changes in the -current CVS log, but a lot of work is mainly going towards the OpenSSL cleaning
• We've got two trip reports so far, hopefully we'll have some more to show you in a future episode
• You can see some of the more interesting quotes from the tear-down or see everything
• Apparently they are going to call the fork "LibreSSL" ....
• What were the OpenSSL developers thinking? The RSA private key was used to seed the entropy!
• We also got some mainstream news coverage and another post from Ted about the history of the fork
• Definitely consider donating to the OpenBSD foundation, this fork will benefit all the other BSDs too ***

NetBSD 6.1.4 and 6.0.5 released

• New updates for the 6.1 and 6.0 branches of NetBSD, focusing on bugfixes
• The main update is - of course - the heartbleed vulnerability
• Also includes fixes for other security issues and even a kernel panic... on Atari
• Patch your Ataris right now, this is serious business ***

Interview - Peter Hansteen - peter@bsdly.net / @pitrh

The Book of PF: 3rd edition

Tutorial

BSD Firewalls: PF

News Roundup

New Xorg now the default in FreeBSD

• For quite a while now, FreeBSD has had two versions of X11 in ports
• The older, stable version was the default, but you could install a newer one by having "WITH_NEW_XORG" in /etc/make.conf
• They've finally made the switch for 10-STABLE and 9-STABLE
• Check this wiki page for more info ***

GSoC-accepted BSD projects

• The Google Summer of Code team has got the list of accepted project proposals uploaded so we can see what's planned
• OpenBSD's list includes DHCP configuration parsing improvements, systemd replacements, porting capsicum, GPT and UEFI support, and modernizing the DHCP daemon
• The FreeBSD list was also posted
• Theirs includes porting FreeBSD to the Android emulator, CTF in the kernel debugger, improved unicode support, converting firewall rules to a C module, pkgng improvements, MicroBlaze support, PXE fixes, bhyve caching, bootsplash and lots more
• Good luck to all the students participating, hopefully they become full time BSD users ***

Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example

• HybridCluster posted the second part of their VFS and ZFS series
• This new post has lots of technical details once again, definitely worth reading if you're a ZFS guy
• Of course, also watch episode 24 for our interview with HybridCluster - they do really interesting stuff ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Preload has been ported over, it's a daemon that prefetches applications
• PCBSD is developing their own desktop environment, Lumina (there's also an FAQ)
• It's still in active development, but you can try it out by installing from ports
• We'll be showing a live demo of it in a few weeks (when development settles down a bit)
• Some kid in Australia subjects his poor mother to being on camera while she tries out PCBSD and gives her impressions of it ***

This episode was brought to you by

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OpenBSD on a Sun T5120

• Our buddy Ted Unangst got himself a cool Sun box
• Of course he had to write a post about installing and running OpenBSD on it
• The post goes through some of the quirks and steps to go through in case you're interested in one of these fine SPARC machines
• He's also got another post about OpenBSD on a Dell CS24-SC server ***

Bhyvecon 2014 videos are up

• Like we mentioned last week, Bhyvecon was an almost-impromptu conference before AsiaBSDCon
• The talks have apparently already been uploaded!
• Subjects include Bhyve's past, present and future, OSv on Bhyve, a general introduction to the tool, migrating those last few pesky Linux boxes to virtualization
• Lots more detail in the videos, so check 'em all out ***

Building a FreeBSD wireless access point

• We've got a new blog post about creating a wireless access point with FreeBSD
• After all the recent news of consumer routers being pwned like candy, it's time for people to start building BSD routers
• The author goes through a lot of the process of getting one set up using good ol' FreeBSD
• Using hostapd, he's able to share his wireless card in hostap mode and offer DHCP to all the clients
• Plenty of config files and more messy details in the post ***

Switching from Synology to FreeNAS

• The author has been considering getting a NAS for quite a while and documents his research
• He was faced with the compromise of convenience vs. flexibility - prebuilt or DIY
• After seeing the potential security issues with proprietary NAS devices, and dealing with frustration with trying to get bugs fixed, he makes the right choice
• The post also goes into some detail about his setup, all the things he needed a NAS to do as well as all the advantages an open source solution would give ***

Interview - Warren Block - wblock@freebsd.org

FreeBSD's documentation project, igor, doceng

Tutorial

The world of BSD mailing lists

News Roundup

HAMMER2 work and notes

• Matthew Dillon has posted some updated notes about the development of the new HAMMER version
• The start of a cluster API was committed to the tree
• There are also links to design document, a freemap design document, a changes list and a todo list ***

BSD Breaking Barriers

• Our friend MWL gave a talk at NYCBSDCon about BSD "breaking barriers"
• "What makes the BSD operating systems special? Why should you deploy your applications on BSD? Why does the BSD community keep growing, and why do Linux sites like DistroWatch say that BSD is where the interesting development work is happening? We'll cover the not-so-obvious reasons why BSD still stands tall after almost 40 years."
• He also has another upcoming talk, (or "webcast") called "Beyond Security: Getting to Know OpenBSD's Real Purpose"
• "OpenBSD is frequently billed as a high-security operating system. That's true, but security isn't the OpenBSD Project's main goal. This webcast will introduce systems administrators to OpenBSD, explain the project's mission, and discuss the features and benefits."
• It's on May 27th and will hopefully be recorded ***

FreeBSD in a chroot

• Finch, "FreeBSD running IN a CHroot," is a new project
• It's a way to extend the functionality of restricted USB-based FreeBSD systems (FreeNAS, etc.)
• All the details and some interesting use cases are on the github page
• He really needs to change the project name though ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots of bugfixes for PCBSD coming down the tubes
• LZ4 compression is now enabled by default on the whole pool
• The latest 10-STABLE has been imported and builds are going
• Also the latest GNOME and Cinnamon builds have been imported and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in (IRC suggests md5deep)
• Don writes in
• kaltheat writes in (We use R0DE Podcast microphones and Logitech C920 HD webcams)
• Harri writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

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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 ***

This episode was brought to you by

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FreeBSD quarterly status report

• Gabor Pali sent out the October-December 2013 status report to get everyone up to date on what's going on
• The report contains 37 entries and is very very long... various reports from all the different teams under the FreeBSD umbrella, probably too many to even list in the show notes
• Lots of work going on in the ARM world, EC2/Xen and Google Compute Engine are also improving
• Secure boot support hopefully coming [by mid-year](www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/62855-freebsd-to-support-secure-boot-by-mid-year)
• There's quite a bit going on in the FreeBSD world, many projects happening at the same time ***

n2k14 OpenBSD Hackathon Report

• Recently, OpenBSD held one of their hackathons in New Zealand
• 15 developers gathered there to sit in a room and write code for a few days
• Philip Guenther brings back a nice report of the event
• If you've been watching the -current CVS logs, you've seen the flood of commits just from this event alone
• Fixes with threading, Linux compat, ACPI, and various other things - some will make it into 5.5 and others need more testing
• Another report from Theo details his work
• Updates to the random subsystem, some work-in-progress pf fixes, suspend/resume fixes and more signing stuff ***

Four new NetBSD releases

• NetBSD released versions 6.1.3, 6.0.4, 5.2.2 and 5.1.4
• These updates include lots of bug fixes and some security updates, not focused on new features
• You can upgrade depending on what branch you're currently on
• Confused about the different branches? See this graph. ***

The future of open source ZFS development

• On February 11, 2014, Matt Ahrens will be giving a presentation about ZFS
• The talk will be about the future of ZFS and the open source development since Oracle closed the code
• It's in San Jose, California - go if you can! ***

Interview - George Neville-Neil - gnn@freebsd.org / @gvnn3

The FreeBSD Journal

Tutorial

Tracking -STABLE and -CURRENT (OpenBSD)

News Roundup

pfSense news and 2.1.1 snapshots

• pfSense has some snapshots available for the upcoming 2.1.1 release
• They include FreeBSD security fixes as well as some other updates
• There are recordings posted of some of the previous hangouts
• Unfortunately they're only for subscribers, so you'll have to wait until next month when we have Chris on the show to talk about pfSense! ***

FreeBSD on Google Compute Engine

• Recently we mentioned some posts about getting OpenBSD to run on GCE, here's the FreeBSD version
• Nice big fat warning: "The team has put together a best-effort posting that will get most, if not all, of you up and running. That being said, we need to remind you that FreeBSD is being supported on Google Compute Engine by the community. The instructions are being provided as-is and without warranty."
• Their instructions are a little too Linuxy (assuming wget, etc.) for our taste, someone should probably get it updated!
• Other than that it's a pretty good set of instructions on how to get up and running ***

Dragonfly ACPI update

• Sascha Wildner committed some new ACPI code
• There's also a "heads up" to update your BIOS if you experience problems
• Check the mailing list post for all the details ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 users need to upgrade all their packages for 10.0-RC5
• PBIs needed to be rebuilt.. actually everything did
• Help test GNOME 3 so we can get it in the official ports tree
• By the way, I think Kris has an announcement - PCBSD 10.0 is out! ***

Feedback/Questions

• Tony writes in
• Jeff writes in
• Remy writes in
• Nils writes in
• Solomon writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE is out

• The long awaited, giant release of FreeBSD is now official and ready to be downloaded
• One of the biggest releases in FreeBSD history, with tons of new updates
• Some features include: LDNS/Unbound replacing BIND, Clang by default (no GCC anymore), native Raspberry Pi support and other ARM improvements, bhyve, hyper-v support, AMD KMS, VirtIO, Xen PVHVM in GENERIC, lots of driver updates, ZFS on root in the installer, SMP patches to pf that drastically improve performance, Netmap support, pkgng by default, wireless stack improvements, a new iSCSI stack, FUSE in the base system... the list goes on and on
• Start up your freebsd-update or do a source-based upgrade ***

OpenSSH 6.5 CFT

• Our buddy Damien Miller announced a Call For Testing for OpenSSH 6.5
• Huge, huge release, focused on new features rather than bugfixes (but it includes those too)
• New ciphers, new key formats, new config options, see the mailing list for all the details
• Should be in OpenBSD 5.5 in May, look forward to it - but also help test on other platforms! ***

DIY NAS story, FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA

• Another new blog post about FreeNAS!
• Instead of updating the older tutorials, the author started fresh and wrote a new one for 2014
• "I did briefly consider suggesting nas4free for the EconoNAS blog, since it’s essentially a fork off the FreeNAS tree but may run better on slower hardware, but ultimately I couldn’t recommend anything other than FreeNAS"
• Really long article with lots of nice details about his setup, why you might want a NAS, etc.
• Speaking of FreeNAS, they released 9.2.1-BETA with lots of bugfixes ***

OpenBSD needed funding for electricity.. and they got it

• Briefly mentioned at the end of last week's show, but has blown up over the internet since
• OpenBSD in the headlines of major tech news sites: slashdot, zdnet, the register, hacker news, reddit, twitter.. thousands of comments
• They needed about $20,000 to cover electric costs for the server rack in Theo's basement
• Lots of positive reaction from the community helping out so far, and it appears they have reached their goal and got $100,000 in donations
• From Bob Beck: "we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately $100,000 in donations to the foundation"
• This is a shining example of the BSD community coming together, and even the Linux people realizing how critical BSD is to the world at large ***

Interview - Colin Percival - cperciva@freebsd.org / @cperciva

FreeBSD on Amazon EC2, backups with Tarsnap, 10.0-RELEASE, various topics

Tutorial

Bandwidth monitoring and testing

News Roundup

pfSense talk at Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyoukai

• Isaac Levy will be presenting "pfSense Practical Experiences: from home routers, to High-Availability Datacenter Deployments"
• He's also going to be looking for help to translate the pfSense documentation into Japanese
• The event is on February 17, 2014 if you're in the Tokyo area ***

m0n0wall 1.8.1 released

• For those who don't know, m0n0wall is an older BSD-based firewall OS that's mostly focused on embedded applications
• pfSense was forked from it in 2004, and has a lot more active development now
• They switched to FreeBSD 8.4 for this new version
• Full list of updates in the changelog
• This version requires at least 128MB RAM and a disk/CF size of 32MB or more, oh no! ***

Ansible and PF, plus NTP

• Another blog post from our buddy Michael Lucas
• There've been some NTP amplification attacks recently in the news
• The post describes how he configured ntpd on a lot of servers without a lot of work
• He leverages pf and ansible for the configuration
• OpenNTPD is, not surprisingly, unaffected - use it ***

ruBSD videos online

• Just a quick followup from a few weeks ago
• Theo and Henning's talks from ruBSD are now available for download
• There's also a nice interview with Theo ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 images are available
• Wine PBI is now available for 10
• 9.2 systems will now be able to upgrade to version 10 and keep their PBI library ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sha'ul writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Mike writes in
• Charlie writes in (and gets a reply)
• Kevin writes in ***

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Faces of FreeBSD continues

• Our first one details Shteryana Shopova, the local organizer for EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sophia
• Gives some information about how she got into BSD
• "I installed FreeBSD on my laptop, alongside the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn't booted the other two operating systems in months. So I wiped them out."
• She wrote bsnmpd and extended it with the help of a grant from the FreeBSD Foundation
• We've also got one for Kevin Martin
• Started off with a pinball website, ended up learning about FreeBSD from an ISP and starting his own hosting company
• "FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community." ***

OpenPF?

• A blog post over at the Dragonfly digest
• What if we had some cross platform development of OpenBSD's firewall?
• Similar to portable OpenSSH or OpenZFS, there could be a centrally-developed version with compatibility glue
• Right now FreeBSD 9's pf is old, FreeBSD 10's pf is old (but has the best performance of any implementation due to custom patches), NetBSD's pf is old (but they're working on a fork) and Dragonfly's pf is old
• Further complicated by the fact that PF itself doesn’t have a version number, since it was designed to just be ‘the pf that came with OpenBSD 5.4’
• Not likely to happen any time soon, but it's good food for thought ***

Year of BSD on the server

• A good blog post about switching servers from Linux to BSD
• 2014 is going to be the year of a lot of switching, due to FreeBSD 10's amazing new features
• This author was particularly taken with pkgng and the more coherent layout of BSD systems
• Similarly, there was also a recent reddit thread, "Why did you choose BSD over Linux?"
• Both are excellent reads for Linux users that are thinking about making the switch, send 'em to your friends ***

Getting to know your portmgr

• This time in the series they interview Bryan Drewery, a fairly new addition to the team
• He started maintaining portupgrade and portmaster, and eventually ended up on the ports management team
• Believe it or not, his wife actually had a lot to do with him getting into FreeBSD full-time
• Lots of fun trivia and background about him
• Speaking of portmgr, our interview for today is... ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

The future of FreeBSD's binary packages, ports' features, various topics

News Roundup

pfSense december hang out

• Interview/presentation from pfSense developer Chris Buechler with an accompanying blog post
• "This is the first in what will be a monthly recurring series. Each month, we’ll have a how to tutorial on a specific topic or area of the system, and updates on development and other happenings with the project. We have several topics in mind, but also welcome community suggestions on topics"
• Speaking of pfSense, they recently opened an online store
• We're planning on having a pfSense episode next month! ***

BSDMag December issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine gets a new release for December
• Topics include CARP on FreeBSD, more BSD programming, "unix basics for security professionals," some kernel introductions, using OpenBSD as a transparent proxy with relayd, GhostBSD overview and some stuff about SSH ***

OpenBSD gets tmpfs

• In addition to the recently-added FUSE support, OpenBSD now has tmpfs
• To get more testing, it was enabled by default in -current
• Should make its way into 5.5 if everything goes according to plan
• Enables lots of new possibilities, like our ccache and tmpfs guide ***

PCBSD weekly digests

• Catching up with all the work going on in PCBSD land..
• 10.0-RC2 is now available
• The big pkgng 1.2 problems seem to have been worked out ***

Feedback/Questions

• Remy writes in
• Jason writes in
• Rob writes in
• John writes in
• Stuart writes in ***

Headlines

Getting to know your portmgr

• In this interview they talk to one of the "Annoying Reminder Guys" - Erwin Lansing, the second longest serving member of FreeBSD's portmgr (also vice-president of the FreeBSD Foundation)
• He actually maintains the .dk ccTLD
• Describes FreeBSD as "the best well-hidden success story in operating systems, by now in the hands of more people than one can count and used by even more people, and not one of them knows it! It’s not only the best operating system currently around, but also the most supportive and inspiring community."
• In the next one they speak with Martin Wilke (miwi@)
• The usual, "what inspires you about FreeBSD" "how did you get into it" etc. ***

vBSDCon wrap-up compilation

• Lots of write-ups about vBSDCon gathered in one place
• Some from OpenBSD guys
• Some from FreeBSD guys
• Some from RootBSD
• Some from iXsystems
• Some from Verisign
• And of course our own wrap-up chat in BSD Now Episode 009 ***

Faces of FreeBSD

• This week they talk to Gábor Páli from Hungary
• Talks about his past as a game programmer and how it got involved with FreeBSD
• "I met János Háber, who admired the technical merits of FreeBSD and recommended it over the popular GNU/Linux distributions. I downloaded FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE, found it reliable, consistent, easy to install, update and use."
• He's been contributing since 2008 and does lots of work with Haskell in ports
• He also organizes EuroBSDCon and is secretary of the FreeBSD Core Team ***

Dragonfly 3.6 released

• dports now default instead of pkgsrc
• Big SMP scaling improvements
• Experimental i915 and KMS support
• See our interview with Justin Sherrill if you want to hear (a lot) more about it - nearly an hour long ***

Interview - Jordan Hubbard - jkh@freebsd.org / @omgjkh

FreeBSD's founding and future

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD router, part 2

• Note: there was a mistake in the video version of the tutorial, please consult the written version for the proper instructions. ***

News Roundup

pfSense 2.1 on AWS EC2

• We now have pfSense 2.1 available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• In keeping with the community spirit, they’re also offering a free "public" AMI
• Check the FAQ and User Guide on their site for additional details
• Interesting possibilities with pfSense in the cloud ***

Puffy on the desktop

• Distrowatch, a primarily Linux-focused site, features an OpenBSD 5.4 review
• They talk about using it on the desktop, how to set it up
• Very long write-up, curious Linux users should give it a read
• Ends with "Most people will still see OpenBSD as an operating system for servers and firewalls, but OpenBSD can also be used in desktop environments if the user doesn't mind a little manual work. The payoff is a very light, responsive system that is unlikely to ever misbehave" ***

Two-factor authentication with SSH

• Blog post about using a yubikey with SSH public keys
• Uses a combination of a OTP, BSDAuth and OpenBSD's login.conf, but it can be used with PAM on other systems as well
• Allows for two-factor authentication (a la gmail) in case your private key is compromised
• Anyone interested in an extra-hardened SSH server should give it a read ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 has approximately 400 PBIs for public consumption
• They will be merging the GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops into the 10.0 ports tree - please help test them, this is pretty big news in and of itself!
• PCDM is coming along nicely, more bugs are getting fixed
• Added ZFS dataset options to PCBSD’s new text installer front-end ***

Feedback/Questions

• Ben writes in
• Florian writes in
• Zach writes in
• Addison writes in
• Adam writes in
• Adam's BSD Router Project tutorial can be downloaded here. ***