NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

A Week With Plan 9

I spent the first week of 2021 learning an OS called Plan 9 from Bell Labs. This is a fringe Operating System, long abandoned by it’s original authors. It's also responsible for a great deal of inspiration elsewhere. If you’ve used the Go language, /proc, UTF-8 or Docker, you’ve used Plan 9-designed features. This issue dives into Operating System internals and some moderately hard computer science topics. If that sort of thing isn’t your bag you might want to skip ahead. Normal service will resume shortly.

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Exploring Swap on FreeBSD

On modern Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, “swapping” refers to the activity of paging out the contents of memory to a disk and then paging it back in on demand. The page-out activity occurs in response to a lack of free memory in the system: the kernel tries to identify pages of memory that probably will not be accessed in the near future, and copies their contents to a disk for safekeeping until they are needed again. When an application attempts to access memory that has been swapped out, it blocks while the kernel fetches that saved memory from the swap disk, and then resumes execution as if nothing had happened.

News Roundup

How to create a FreeBSD pkg mirror using bastille and poudriere

This a short how-to for creating a FreeBSD pkg mirror using BastilleBSD and Poudriere.

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How to set up FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS

How do I install, set up and configure a FreeBSD 12 jail with VNET on ZFS? How can I create FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with /etc/jail.conf to run OpenVPN, Apache, Wireguard and other Internet-facing services securely on my BSD box?
FreeBSD jail is nothing but operating system-level virtualization that allows partitioning a FreeBSD based Unix server. Such systems have their root user and access rights. Jails can use network subsystem virtualization infrastructure or share an existing network. FreeBSD jails are a powerful way to increase security. Usually, you create jail per services such as an Nginx/Apache webserver with PHP/Perl/Python app, WireGuard/OpeNVPN server, MariaDB/PgSQL server, and more. This page shows how to configure a FreeBSD Jail with vnet and ZFZ on FreeBSD 12.x.

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Creating Comfy FreeBSD Jails Using Standard Tools

Docker has stormed into software development in recent years. While the concepts behind it are powerful and useful, similar tools have been used in systems for decades. FreeBSD’s jails in one of those tools which build upon even older chroot(2) To put it shortly, with these tools, you can make a safe environment separated from the rest of the system.

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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

• Chris - USB BSD variant
• Jacob - host wifi through a jail
• Jordan - new tool vs updating existing tool ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

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Headlines

Xen dom0 in FreeBSD 11-CURRENT

• FreeBSD has just gotten dom0 support for the Xen hypervisor, something NetBSD has had for a while now
• The ports tree will now have a Xen kernel and toolstack, meaning that they can be updated much more rapidly than if they were part of base
• It's currently limited to Intel boxes with EPT and a working IOMMU, running a recent version of the -CURRENT branch, but we'll likely see it when 11.0 comes out
• How will this affect interest in Bhyve? ***

A tale of two educational moments

• Here we have a blog post from an OpenBSD developer about some experiences he had helping people get involved with the project
• It's split into two stories: one that could've gone better, and one that went really well
• For the first one, he found that someone was trying to modify a package from their ports tree to have fewer dependencies
• Experience really showed its worth, and he was able to write a quick patch to do exactly what the other person had been working on for a few hours - but wasn't so encouraging about getting it committed
• In the second story, he discussed updating a different port with a user of a forum, and ended up improving the new user's workflow considerably with just a few tips
• The lesson to take away from this is that we can all help out to encourage and assist new users - everyone was a newbie once ***

What's coming in NetBSD 7

• We first mentioned NetBSD 7.0 on the show in July of 2014, but it still hasn't been released and there hasn't been much public info about it
• This blog post outlines some of the bigger features that we can expect to see when it actually does come out
• Their total platform count is now over 70, so you'd be hard-pressed to find something that it doesn't run on
• There have been a lot of improvements in the graphics area, particularly with DRM/KMS, including Intel Haswell and Nouveau (for nVidia cards)
• Many ARM boards now have full SMP support
• Clang has also finally made its way into the base system, something we're glad to see, and it should be able to build the base OS on i386, AMD64 and ARM - other architectures are still a WIP
• In the crypto department: their PNRG has switched from the broken RC4 to the more modern ChaCha20, OpenSSL has been updated in base and LibreSSL is in pkgsrc
• NetBSD's in-house firewall, npf, has gotten major improvements since its initial debut in NetBSD 6.0
• Looking to the future, NetBSD hopes to integrate a stable ZFS implementation later on ***

OpenZFS office hours

• We mentioned a couple weeks back that the OpenZFS office hours series was starting back up
• They've just uploaded the recording of their most recent freeform discussion, with Justin Gibbs being the main presenter
• In it, they cover how Justin got into ZFS, running in virtualized environments, getting patches into the different projects, getting more people involved, reviewing code, spinning disks vs SSDs, defragging, speeding up resilvering, zfsd and much more ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng

Discussion

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng (follow-up)

Feedback/Questions

• Jeff writes in
• Anonymous writes in
• Alex writes in
• Joris writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• ok feedback@ ***

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Headlines

FreeBSD 10 as a firewall

• Back in 2012, the author of this site wrote an article stating you should avoid FreeBSD 9 for a firewall and use OpenBSD instead
• Now, with the release of 10.0, he's apparently changed his mind and switched back over
• It mentions the SMP version of pf, general performance advantages and more modern features
• The author is a regular listener of BSD Now, hi Joe! ***

Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

• Really long blog post, based on a BSDCan presentation, about fighting spam with OpenBSD
• Peter Hansteen, author of the book of PF, goes through how he uses OpenBSD's spamd and other security features to combat spam and malware
• He goes through his experiences with content filtering and disappointment with a certain proprietary vendor
• Not totally BSD-specific, lots of people can enjoy the article - lots of virus history as well ***

FreeBSD ASLR patches submitted

• So far, FreeBSD hasn't had Address Space Layout Randomization
• ASLR is a nice security feature, see wikipedia for more information
• With a giant patch from Shawn Webb, it might be integrated into a future version (after a vicious review from the security team of course)
• We might have Shawn on the show to talk about it, but he's also giving a presentation at BSDCan about his work with ASLR ***

Old-style pkg_ tools retired

• At last the old pkg_add tools are being retired in FreeBSD
• pkgng is a huge improvement, and now portmgr@ thinks it's time to cut the cord on the legacy toolset
• Ports aren't going away, and probably never will, but for binary package fans and new users that are used to things like apt, pkgng is the way to go
• All pkg_ tools will be considered unsupported on September 1, 2014 - even on older branches ***

Interview - Luke Marsden - luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

BSD at HybridCluster

Tutorial

Filesharing with chrooted SFTP

News Roundup

FreeBSD on OpenStack

• OpenStack is a cloud computing project
• It consists of "a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API."
• Until now, there wasn't a good way to run a full BSD instance on OpenStack
• With a project in the vein of Colin Percival's AWS startup scripts, now that's no longer the case! ***

FOSDEM BSD videos

• This year's FOSDEM had seven BSD presentations
• The videos are slowly being uploaded for your viewing pleasure
• Not all of the BSD ones are up yet, but by the time you're watching this they might be!
• Check this directory for most of 'em
• The BSD dev room was full, lots of interest in what's going on from the other communities ***

The FreeBSD challenge finally returns!

• Due to prodding from a certain guy of a certain podcast, the "FreeBSD Challenge" series has finally resumed
• Our friend from the Linux foundation picks up with day 11 and day 12 on his switching from Linux journey
• This time he outlines the upgrade process of going from 9 to 10, using freebsd-update
• There's also some notes about different options for upgrading ports and some extra tips ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• After the big 10.0 release, the PCBSD crew is focusing on bug fixes for a while
• During their "fine tuning phase" users are encouraged to submit any and all bugs via the trac system
• Warden got some fixes and the package manager got some updates as well
• Huge size reduction in PBI format ***

Feedback/Questions

• Derrick writes in
• Sean writes in
• Patrick writes in
• Peter writes in
• Sean writes in ***

Headlines

pkgng 1.2 released

• bapt and bdrewery from the portmgr team released pkgng 1.2 final
• New features include an improved build system, plugin improvements, new bootstrapping command, SRV mirror improvements, a new "pkg config" command, repo improvements, vuXML is now default, new fingerprint features and much more
• Really simple to upgrade, check our pkgng tutorial if you want some easy instructions
• It's also made its way into Dragonfly
• See the show notes for the full list of new features and fixes ***

ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH

• Damien Miller recently committed support for a new authenticated encryption cipher for OpenSSH, chacha20-poly1305
• Long blog post explaining what these are and why we need them
• This cipher combines two primitives: the ChaCha20 cipher and the Poly1305 MAC
• RC4 is broken, we needed an authenticated encryption mode to complement AES-GCM that doesn't show the packet length in cleartext
• Great explanation of the differences between EtM, MtE and EaM and their advantages
• "Both AES-GCM and the EtM MAC modes have a small downside though: because we no longer desire to decrypt the packet as we go, the packet length must be transmitted in plaintext. This unfortunately makes some forms of traffic analysis easier as the attacker can just read the packet lengths directly." ***

Is it time to dump Linux and move to BSD

• ITworld did an article about switching from Linux to BSD
• The author's interest was sparked from a review he was reading that said "I feel the BSD communities, especially the FreeBSD-based projects, are where the interesting developments are happening these days. Over in FreeBSD land we have efficient PBI bundles, a mature advanced file system in the form of ZFS, new friendly and powerful system installers, a new package manager (pkgng), a powerful jail manager and there will soon be new virtualization technology coming with the release of FreeBSD 10.0"
• The whole article can be summed up with "yes" - ok, next story! ***

OpenZFS devsummit videos

• The OpenZFS developer summit discussion and presentation videos are up
• People from various operating systems (FreeBSD, Mac OS X, illumos, etc.) were there to discuss ZFS on their platforms and the challenges they faced
• Question and answer session from representatives of every OS - had a couple FreeBSD guys there including one from the foundation
• Presentations both about ZFS itself and some hardware-based solutions for implementing ZFS in production
• TONS of video, about 6 hours' worth
• This leads us into our interview, which is... ***

Interview - George Wilson - wilzun@gmail.com / @zfsdude

OpenZFS

Tutorial

A crash course on ZFS

News Roundup

ruBSD 2013 information

• The ruBSD 2013 conference will take place on Saturday December 14, 2013 at 10:30 AM in Moscow, Russia
• Speakers include three OpenBSD developers, Theo de Raadt, Henning Brauer and Mike Belopuhov
• Their talks are titled "The bane of backwards compatibility," "OpenBSD's pf: Design, Implementation and Future" and "OpenBSD: Where crypto is going?"
• No word on if there will be video recordings, but we'll let you know if that changes ***

DragonFly roadmap, post 3.6

• John Marino posted a possible roadmap for DragonFly, now that they're past the 3.6 release
• He wants some third party vendor software updated from very old versions (WPA supplicant, bmake, binutils)
• Plans to replace GCC44 with Clang, but GCC47 will probably be the primary compiler still
• Bring in fixes and new stuff from FreeBSD 10 ***

BSDCan 2014 CFP

• BSDCan 2014 will be held on May 16-17 in Ottawa, Canada
• They're now accepting proposals for talks
• If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal
• We'll be getting lots of interviews there ***

casperd added to -CURRENT

• "It (and its services) will be responsible forgiving access to functionality that is not available in capability modes and box. The functionality can be precisely restricted."
• Lists some sysctls that can be controlled ***

ZFS corruption bug fixed in -CURRENT

• Just a quick follow-up from last week, the ZFS corruption bug in FreeBSD -CURRENT was very quickly fixed, before that episode was even uploaded ***

Feedback/Questions

• Chris writes in
• SW writes in
• Jason writes in
• Clint writes in
• Chris writes in ***