NOTES

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

Headlines

From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency

August 2024 Foundation Update

News Roundup

Emails encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG

Workarounds are often forever (unless you work to make them otherwise)

Remote Desktop using RDP and VNC

Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System

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

• 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 and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

ZFS Optimization Success Stories

Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

News Roundup

We need better support for SSH host certificates

Fast Unix Commands

Fascination with AWK

Beastie Bits

• [Development environment updated and working])https://twitter.com/sweordbora/status/1618603990463438851?s=52&t=GHrPlL6qZhIWo6u2Y5ie3g)
• [WIP] feat: add basic FreeBSD support on Kubelet](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115870)
• Jar of Fortunes

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

NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

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FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud

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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace!

The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.

• Inferno is open source as well *** ## News Roundup ### Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020 We nearly hit our 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000. ***

grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

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Random Programming Challenge

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This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?

OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)

To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).
OpenZFS had a good one too

Tarsnap

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Feedback/Questions

• Brandon - router

• Lawrence - Is BSD for me

• miguel - printing

• 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

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 ***

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

The Origin of the Shell

CTSS was developed during 1963 and 64. I was at MIT on the computer center staff at that time. After having written dozens of commands for CTSS, I reached the stage where I felt that commands should be usable as building blocks for writing more commands, just like subroutine libraries. Hence, I wrote "RUNCOM", a sort of shell driving the execution of command scripts, with argument substitution. The tool became instantly most popular, as it became possible to go home in the evening while leaving behind long runcoms executing overnight. It was quite neat for boring and repetitive tasks such as renaming, moving, updating, compiling, etc. whole directories of files for system and application maintenance and monitoring.

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Return to Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs has held the same charm after my last visit that took a few days. This time I'll keep this operating system in an emulator where I can explore into it when I am distracted.

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News Roundup

Why a new BSD?

This article is to explain some decisions and plans made by the ArisbluBSD team, why we are making our own thing, and what the plan is for the OS. We mainly want to talk about five things: desktop, package management, software availability, custom software, and the future of the OS. We mostly want to explain what the goal of the OS is, and how we plan to expand in the near future. Without further ado, let's explain ArisbluBSD's plan.

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OPNsense 20.7.5 released

We return briefly for a small patch set and plan to pin the 20.1 upgrade path to this particular version to avoid unnecessary stepping stones. We wish you all a healthy Friday. And of course: patch responsibly!

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Midnight BSD 2.0 Release Status

We identified some issues with the 2.0 ISOs slated for release with the ZFS bootloader not working.
Until this issue is resolved, we are unable to build release ISOs. We've left the old ones up as they work fine for anyone using UFS.

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HardenedBSD November 2020 Status Report

We're getting close to the end of November. My wife and I have plans this weekend, so I thought I'd take the time to write November's status report today.

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Beastie Bits

• [rga: ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc.](https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/)
• [exa - A modern replacement for ls](https://the.exa.website/)
• [The myriad meanings of pwd in Unix systems](https://qmacro.org/2020/11/08/the-meaning-of-pwd-in-unix-systems/)

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

• Karl - Camera Help
• Alejandro - domain registrar
• Johnny - thoughts on 372 ***
• 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

Adventures in Freebernetes: bhyve My Guest

Part 2 of experiments in FreeBSD and Kubernetes: Creating your first guest

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Tracing Kernel Functions: FBT stack() and arg

In my previous post I described how FBT intercepts function calls and vectors them into the DTrace framework. That laid the foundation for what I want to discuss in this post: the implementation of the stack() action and built-in arg variables. These features rely on the precise layout of the stack, the details of which I touched on previously. In this post I hope to illuminate those details a bit more with the help of some visuals, and then guide you through the implementation of these two DTrace features as they relate to the FBT provider.

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News Roundup

Dummynet: The Better Way of Building FreeBSD Networks

Dummynet is the FreeBSD traffic shaper, packet scheduler, and network emulator. Dummynet allows you to emulate a whole set of network environments in a straight-forward way. It has the ability to model delay, packet loss, and can act as a traffic shaper and policer. Dummynet is roughly equivalent to netem in Linux, but we have found that dummynet is easier to integrate and provides much more consistent results.

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New beginnings: CDBUG virtual meetings

I had overwhelmingly positive responses from the broader *BSD community about restarting CDBUG meetings as virtual, at least for now. Hopefully this works well and even when we're back to in-person meetings we can still find a way to bring in virtual attendees.

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LibreSSL update in DragonFly

DragonFly has a new version of libressl, noting cause it has a newer TLS1.3 implementation – something that may be necessary for you.

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Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD

So couple of days ago I migrated from macOS on Macbook Pro to FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.

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Beastie Bits

• Firefox is not paxctl safe for NetBSD
• FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

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

• carlos - BSD Now around the world
• paulo - freebsd on a Bananapi
  • paulo - followup

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

Headlines

Rethinking OpenBSD Security

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.
I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.

FreeBSD 2020 Q1 Quarterly report

Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.

News Roundup

The Notion of Progress and User Interfaces

One trait of modern Western culture is the notion of progress. A view claiming, at large, everything is getting better and better.

How should we think about progress? Both in general and regarding technology?

Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses

I was recently pointed at a web page on Thomas E. Dickeys site talking about NetBSD curses. It seems initially that the page was intended to be a pointer to some differences between ncurses and NetBSD curses and does appear to start off in this vein but it seems that the author has lost the plot as the document evolved and the tail end of it seems to be devolving into some sort of slanging match. I don't want to go through Mr. Dickey's document point by point, that would be tedious but I would like to pick out some of the things that I believe to be the most egregious. Please note that even though I am a NetBSD developer, the opinions below are my own and not the NetBSD projects.

Making Unix a little more Plan9-like

I’m not really interested in defending anything. I tried out plan9port and liked it, but I have to live in Unix land. Here’s how I set that up.

A Warning

The suckless community, and some of the plan9 communities, are dominated by jackasses. I hope that’s strong enough wording to impress the severity. Don’t go into IRC for help. Stay off the suckless email list. The software is great, the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned, but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.

Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE

This month's Linux distro review isn't of a Linux distribution at all—instead, we're taking a look at FreeBSD, the original gangster of free Unix-like operating systems.

The first FreeBSD release was in 1993, but the operating system's roots go further back—considerably further back. FreeBSD started out in 1992 as a patch-release of Bill and Lynne Jolitz's 386BSD—but 386BSD itself came from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD itself goes back to 1977—for reference, Linus Torvalds was only seven years old then.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge something up front—our distro reviews include the desktop experience, and that is very much not FreeBSD's strength. FreeBSD is far, far better suited to running as a headless server than as a desktop! We're going to get a full desktop running on it anyway, because according to Lee Hutchinson, I hate myself—and also because we can't imagine readers wouldn't care about it.

FreeBSD does not provide a good desktop experience, to say the least. But if you're hankering for a BSD-based desktop, don't worry—we're already planning a followup review of GhostBSD, a desktop-focused BSD distribution.

Beastie Bits

• Wifi renewal restarted
• HAMMER2 and a quick start for DragonFly
• Engineering NetBSD 9.0
• Antivirus Protection using OPNsense Plugins
• BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC

BSDNow is going Independent

• After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. LinuxAcademy is now under new leadership, and we understand that cutbacks needed to be made, and that BSD is not their core product. That does not mean your favourite BSD podcast is going away, we will continue and we expect things will not look much different. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.

Feedback/Questions

• Jordyn - ZFS Pool Problem

  • debug - https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/raw/master/episodes/347/feedback/dbg.txt

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