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Remote DoS in the TCP stack

• A pretty devious bug in the BSD network stack has been making its rounds for a while now, allowing remote attackers to exhaust the resources of a system with nothing more than TCP connections
• While in the LAST_ACK state, which is one of the final stages of a connection's lifetime, the connection can get stuck and hang there indefinitely
• This problem has a slightly confusing history that involves different fixes at different points in time from different people
• Juniper originally discovered the bug and announced a fix for their proprietary networking gear on June 8th
• On June 29th, FreeBSD caught wind of it and fixed the bug in their -current branch, but did not issue a security notice or MFC the fix back to the -stable branches
• On July 13th, two weeks later, OpenBSD fixed the issue in their -current branch with a slightly different patch, citing the FreeBSD revision from which the problem was found
• Immediately afterwards, they merged it back to -stable and issued an errata notice for 5.7 and 5.6
• On July 21st, three weeks after their original fix, FreeBSD committed yet another slightly different fix and issued a security notice for the problem (which didn't include the first fix)
• After the second fix from FreeBSD, OpenBSD gave them both another look and found their single fix to be sufficient, covering the timer issue in a more general way
• NetBSD confirmed they were vulnerable too, and applied another completely different fix to -current on July 24th, but haven't released a security notice yet
• DragonFly is also investigating the issue now to see if they're affected as well ***

c2k15 hackathon reports

• Reports from OpenBSD's latest hackathon, held in Calgary this time, are starting to roll in (there were over 40 devs there, so we might see a lot more of these)
• The first one, from Ingo Schwarze, talks about some of the mandoc work he did at the event
• He writes, "Did you ever look at a huge page in man, wanted to jump to the definition of a specific term - say, in ksh, to the definition of the "command" built-in command - and had to step through dozens of false positives with the less '/' and 'n' search keys before you finally found the actual definition?"
• With mandoc's new internal jump targets, this is a problem of the past now
• Jasper also sent in a report, doing his usual work with Puppet (and specifically "Facter," a tool used by Puppet to gather various bits of system information)
• Aside from that and various ports-related work, Jasper worked on adding tame support to some userland tools, fixing some Octeon stuff and introduced something that OpenBSD has oddly lacked until now: an "-i" flag for sed (hooray!)
• Antoine Jacoutot gave a report on what he did at the hackathon as well, including improvements to the rcctl tool (for configuring startup services)
• It now has an "ls" subcommand with status parsing, allowing you to list running services, stopped services or even ones that failed to start or are supposed to be running (he calls this "the poor man's service monitoring tool")
• He also reworked some of the rc.d system to allow smoother operation of multiple instances of the same daemon to run (using tor with different config files as an example)
• His list also included updating ports, updating ports documentation, updating the hotplug daemon and laying out some plans for automatic sysmerge for future upgrades
• Foundation director Ken Westerback was also there, getting some disk-related and laptop work done
• He cleaned up and committed the 4k sector softraid code that he'd been working on, as well as fixing some trackpad issues
• Stefan Sperling, OpenBSD's token "wireless guy," had a lot to say about the hackathon and what he did there (and even sent in his write-up before he got home)
• He taught tcpdump about some new things, including 802.11n metadata beacons (there's a lot more specific detail about this one in the report)
• Bringing a bag full of USB wireless devices with him, he set out to get the unsupported ones working, as well as fix some driver bugs in the ones that already did work
• One quote from Stefan's report that a lot of people seem to be talking about: "Partway through the hackathon tedu proposed an old diff of his to make our base ls utility display multi-byte characters. This led to a long discussion about how to expand UTF-8 support in base. The conclusion so far indicates that single-byte locales (such as ISO-8859-1 and KOI-8) will be removed from the base OS after the 5.8 release is cut. This simplifies things because the whole system only has to care about a single character encoding. We'll then have a full release cycle to bring UTF-8 support to more base system utilities such as vi, ksh, and mg. To help with this plan, I started organizing a UTF-8-focused hackathon for some time later this year."
• Jeremy Evans wrote in to talk about updating lots of ports, moving the ruby ports up to the latest version and also creating perl and ruby wrappers for the new tame subsystem
• While he's mainly a ports guy, he got to commit fixes to ports, the base system and even the kernel during the hackathon
• Rafael Zalamena, who got commit access at the event, gives his very first report on his networking-related hackathon activities
• With Rafael's diffs and help from a couple other developers, OpenBSD now has support for VPLS
• Jonathan Gray got a lot done in the area of graphics, working on OpenGL and Mesa, updating libdrm and even working with upstream projects to remove some GNU-specific code
• As he's become somewhat known for, Jonathan was also busy running three things in the background: clang's fuzzer, cppcheck and AFL (looking for any potential crashes to fix)
• Martin Pieuchot gave an write-up on his experience: "I always though that hackathons were the best place to write code, but what's even more important is that they are the best (well actually only) moment where one can discuss and coordinate projects with other developers IRL. And that's what I did."
• He laid out some plans for the wireless stack, discussed future plans for PF, made some routing table improvements and did various other bits to the network stack
• Unfortunately, most of Martin's secret plans seem to have been left intentionally vague, and will start to take form in the next release cycle
• We're still eagerly awaiting a report from one of OpenBSD's newest developers, Alexandr Nedvedicky (the Oracle guy who's working on SMP PF and some other PF fixes)
• OpenBSD 5.8's "beta" status was recently reverted, with the message "take that as a hint," so that may mean more big changes are still to come... ***

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• FreeBSD has published their quarterly status report for the months of April to June, citing it to be the largest one so far
• It's broken down into a number of sections: team reports, projects, kernel, architectures, userland programs, ports, documentation, Google Summer of Code and miscellaneous others
• Starting off with the cluster admin, some machines were moved to the datacenter at New York Internet, email services are now more resilient to failure, the svn mirrors (now just "svn.freebsd.org") are now using GeoGNS with official SSL certs and general redundancy was increased
• In the release engineering space, ARM and ARM64 work continues to improve on the Cavium ThunderX, more focus is being put into cloud platforms and the 10.2-RELEASE cycle is reaching its final stages
• The core team has been working on phabricator, the fancy review system, and is considering to integrate oauth support soon
• Work also continues on bhyve, and more operating systems are slowly gaining support (including the much-rumored Windows Server 2012)
• The report also covers recent developments in the Linux emulation layer, and encourages people using 11-CURRENT to help test out the 64bit support
• Multipath TCP was also a hot topic, and there's a brief summary of the current status on that patch (it will be available publicly soon)
• ZFSguru, a project we haven't talked about a lot, also gets some attention in the report - version 0.3 is set to be completed in early August
• PCIe hotplug support is also mentioned, though it's still in the development stages (basic hot-swap functions are working though)
• The official binary packages are now built more frequently than before with the help of additional hardware, so AMD64 and i386 users will have fresher ports without the need for compiling
• Various other small updates on specific areas of ports (KDE, XFCE, X11...) are also included in the report
• Documentation is a strong focus as always, a number of new documentation committers were added and some of the translations have been improved a lot
• Many other topics were covered, including foundation updates, conference plans, pkgsrc support in pkgng, ZFS support for UEFI boot and much more ***

The OpenSSH bug that wasn't

• There's been a lot of discussion about a supposed flaw in OpenSSH, allowing attackers to substantially amplify the number of password attempts they can try per session (without leaving any abnormal log traces, even)
• There's no actual exploit to speak of; this bug would only help someone get more bruteforce tries in with a fewer number of connections
• FreeBSD in its default configuration, with PAM and ChallengeResponseAuthentication enabled, was the only one vulnerable to the problem - not upstream OpenSSH, nor any of the other BSDs, and not even the majority of Linux distros
• If you disable all forms of authentication except public keys, like you're supposed to, then this is also not a big deal for FreeBSD systems
• Realistically speaking, it's more of a PAM bug than anything else
• OpenSSH added an additional check for this type of setup that will be in 7.0, but simply changing your sshd_config is enough to mitigate the issue for now on FreeBSD (or you can run freebsd-update) ***

Interview - Sebastian Wiedenroth - wiedi@netbsd.org / @wied0r

pkgsrc and pkgsrcCon

News Roundup

Now served by OpenBSD

• We've mentioned that you can also install OpenBSD on DO droplets, and this blog post is about someone who actually did it
• The use case for the author was for a webserver, so he decided to try out the httpd in base
• Configuration is ridiculously simple, and the config file in his example provides an HTTPS-only webserver, with plaintext requests automatically redirecting
• TLS 1.2 by default, strong ciphers with LibreSSL and HSTS combined give you a pretty secure web server ***

FreeBSD laptop playbooks

• A new project has started up on Github for configuring FreeBSD on various laptops, unsurprisingly named "freebsd-laptops"
• It's based on ansible, and uses the playbook format for automatic set up and configuration
• Right now, it's only working on a single Lenovo laptop, but the plan is to add instructions for many more models
• Check the Github page for instructions on how to get started, and maybe get involved if you're running FreeBSD on a laptop ***

NetBSD on the NVIDIA Jetson TK1

• If you've never heard of the Jetson TK1, we can go ahead and spoil the secret here: NetBSD runs on it
• As for the specs, it has a quad-core ARMv7 CPU at 2.3GHz, 2 gigs of RAM, gigabit ethernet, SATA, HDMI and mini-PCIE
• This blog post shows which parts of the board are working with NetBSD -current (which seems to be almost everything)
• You can even run X11 on it, pretty sweet ***

DragonFly power mangement options

• DragonFly developer Sepherosa, who we've had on the show, has been doing some ACPI work over there
• In this email, he presents some of DragonFly's different power management options: ACPI P-states, C-states, mwait C-states and some Intel-specific bits as well
• He also did some testing with each of them and gave his findings about power saving
• If you've been thinking about running DragonFly on a laptop, this would be a good one to read ***

OpenBSD router under FreeBSD bhyve

• If one BSD just isn't enough for you, and you've only got one machine, why not run two at once
• This article talks about taking a FreeBSD server running bhyve and making a virtualized OpenBSD router with it
• If you've been considering switching over your router at home or the office, doing it in a virtual machine is a good way to test the waters before committing to real hardware
• The author also includes a little bit of history on how he got into both operating systems
• There are lots of mixed opinions about virtualizing core network components, so we'll leave it up to you to do your research
• Of course, the next logical step is to put that bhyve host under Xen on NetBSD... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Kevin writes in
• Logan writes in
• Peter writes in
• Randy writes in ***

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Playing with sandboxing

• Sandboxing and privilege separation are popular topics these days - they're the goal of the new "shill" scripting language, they're used heavily throughout OpenBSD, and they're gaining traction with the capsicum framework
• This blog post explores capsicum in FreeBSD, some of its history and where it's used in the base system
• They also include some code samples so you can verify that capsicum is actually denying the program access to certain system calls
• Check our interview about capsicum from a while back if you haven't seen it already ***

OpenNTPD on by default

• OpenBSD has enabled ntpd by default in the installer, rather than prompting the user if they want to turn it on
• In nearly every case, you're going to want to have your clock synced via NTP
• With the HTTPS constraints feature also enabled by default, this should keep the time checked and accurate, even against spoofing attacks
• Lots of problems can be traced back to the time on one system or another being wrong, so this will also eliminate some of those cases
• For those who might be curious, they're using the "pool.ntp.org" cluster of addresses and google for HTTPS constraints (but these can be easily changed) ***

FreeBSD workshop in Landshut

• We mentioned a BSD installfest happening in Germany a few weeks back, and the organizer wrote in with a review of the event
• The installfest instead became a "FreeBSD workshop" session, introducing curious new users to some of the flagship features of the OS
• They covered when to use UFS or ZFS, firewall options, the release/stable/current branches and finally how to automate installations with Ansible
• If you're in south Germany and want to give similar introduction talks or Q&A sessions about the other BSDs, get in touch
• We'll hear more from him about how it went in the feedback section today ***

Swap encryption in DragonFly

• Doing full disk encryption is very important, but something that people sometimes overlook is encrypting their swap
• This can actually be more important than the contents of your disks, especially if an unencrypted password or key hits your swap (as it can be recovered quite easily)
• DragonFlyBSD has added a new experimental option to automatically encrypt your swap partition in fstab
• There was another way to do it previously, but this is a lot easier
• You can achieve similar results in FreeBSD by adding ".eli" to the end of the swap device in fstab, there are a few steps to do it in NetBSD and swap in OpenBSD is encrypted by default
• A one-time key will be created and then destroyed in each case, making recovery of the plaintext nearly impossible ***

Interview - Jed Reynolds - jed@bitratchet.com / @jed_reynolds

Comparing ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

News Roundup

USB thermometer on OpenBSD

• So maybe you've got BSD on your server or router, maybe NetBSD on a toaster, but have you ever used a thermometer with one?
• This blog post introduces the RDing TEMPer Gold USB thermometer, a small device that can tell the room temperature, and how to get it working on OpenBSD
• Wouldn't you know it, OpenBSD has a native "ugold" driver to support it with the sensors framework
• How useful such a device would be is another story though ***

NAS4Free now on ARM

• We talk a lot about hardware for network-attached storage devices on the show, but ARM doesn't come up a lot
• That might be changing soon, as NAS4Free has just released some ARM builds
• These new (somewhat experimental) images are based on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT
• Included in the announcement is a list of fully-supported and partially-supported hardware that they've tested it with
• If anyone has experience with running a NAS on slightly exotic hardware, write in to us ***

pkgsrcCon 2015 CFP and info

• This year's pkgsrcCon will be in Berlin, Germany on July 4th and 5th
• They're looking for talk proposals and ideas for things you'd like to see
• If you or your company uses pkgsrc, or if you're just interested in NetBSD in general, it would be a good event to check out ***

BSDTalk episode 253

• BSDTalk has released another new episode
• In it, he interviews George Neville-Neil about the 2nd edition of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"
• They discuss what's new since the last edition, who the book's target audience is and a lot more
• We're up to 90 episodes now, slowly catching up to Will... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dominik writes in
• Brad writes in
• Corvin writes in
• James writes in ***

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EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

• September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this year
• Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
• Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
• Registering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everything
• You can register online here and check hotels in the area
• The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants ***

OpenBSD SMP PF update

• A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
• With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
• In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
• The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be useless
• He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone through
• There's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
• We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us ***

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

• An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
• The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
• It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
• Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

• After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
• The full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance release
• Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much more
• If you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
• Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome change
• With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted ***

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

• We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
• This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
• Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normally
• It's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page ***

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

• The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
• Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
• With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
• The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup ***

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

• A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
• Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver
• "Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."
• He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system ***

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

• Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!
• Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
• You can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application library
• Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easy
• New Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as well
• PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users ***

Feedback/Questions

• Jeff writes in - Sending Encrypted Backups over SSH + Sending ZFS snapshots via user
• Bruce writes in
• Richard writes in
• Jeff writes in - NYCBUG dmesg list
• Steve 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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Tailoring OpenBSD for an old, strange computer

• The author of this article had an OmniBook 800CT, which comes with a pop-out mouse, black and white display, 32MB of RAM and a 133MHz CPU
• Obviously he had to install some kind of BSD on it!
• This post goes through all his efforts of trimming down OpenBSD to work on such a limited device
• He goes through the trial and error of "compile, break it, rebuild, try again"
• After cutting a lot out from the kernel, saving a precious megabyte here and there, he eventually gets it working ***

pkgsrcCon and BSDCan

• pkgsrccon is "a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure"
• This year it will be on June 21st and 22nd
• The schedule is still being worked out, so if you want to give a talk, submit it
• BSDCan's schedule was also announced
• We'll be having presentations about ARM on NetBSD and FreeBSD, PF on OpenBSD, Capsicum and casperd, ASLR in FreeBSD, more about migrating from Linux to BSD, FreeNAS stuff and much more
• Kris' presentation was accepted!
• Tons of topics, look forward to the recorded versions of all of them hopefully! ***

Two factor auth with pushover

• A new write-up from our friend Ted Unangst
• Pushover is "a web hook to smartphone push notification gateway" - you sent a POST to a web server and it sends a code to your phone
• His post goes through the steps of editing your login.conf and setting it all up to work
• Now you can get a two factor authenticated login for ssh! ***

The status of GNOME 3 on BSD

• It's no secret that the GNOME team is a Linux-obsessed bunch, almost to the point of being hostile towards other operating systems
• OpenBSD keeps their GNOME 3 ports up to date very well, and Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work on that and how easy it is to use
• This post goes through the process of how simple it is to get GNOME 3 set up on OpenBSD and even includes a screencast
• A few recent posts from some GNOME developers show that they're finally working with the BSD guys to improve portability
• The FreeBSD and OpenBSD teams are working together to bring the latest GNOME to all of us - it's a beautiful thing
• This goes right along with our interview today! ***

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

The life and daily activities of portmgr, GNOME 3, Tinderbox, portlint, various topics

Tutorial

The FreeBSD Ports Collection

News Roundup

DragonflyBSD 3.8 goals and 3.6.1 release

• The Dragonfly team is thinking about what should be in version 3.8
• On their bug tracker, it lists some of the things they'd like to get done before then
• In the meantime, 3.6.1 was released with lots of bugfixes ***

NYCBSDCon 2014 wrap-up piece

• We've got a nice wrap-up titled "NYCBSDCon 2014 Heats Up a Cold Winter Weekend"
• The author also interviews GNN about the conference
• There's even a little "beginner introduction" to BSD segment
• Includes a mention of the recently-launched journal and lots of pictures from the event ***

FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis

• GNN in yet another story - he gave a presentation at the NYLUG about the differences between FreeBSD and Linux
• He mentions the history of BSD, the patch set and 386BSD, the lawsuit, philosophy and license differences, a complete system vs "distros," development models, BSD-only features and technologies, how to become a committer, overall comparisons, different hats and roles, the different bsds and their goals and actual code differences
• Serves as a good introduction you can show your Linux friends ***

PCBSD CFT and weekly digest

• Upgrade tools have gotten a major rewrite
• You have to help test it, there is no choice! Read more here
• How dare Kris be "unimpressed with" freebsd-update and pkgng!?
• Various updates and fixes ***

Feedback/Questions

• Jeffrey writes in
• Shane writes in
• Ferdinand writes in
• Curtis writes in
• Clint writes in
• Peter writes in ***