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

Headlines

Using FreeBSD’s pkg-audit

The 20 year old bug that went to Mars

It's rare that you come across a bug so subtle that it can last for two decades. But, that's exactly what has happened with the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) algorithm. Initially written in 1994, Markus Oberhumer designed a sophisticated and extremely efficient compression algorithm so elegant and well architected that it outperforms zlib and bzip by four or five times their decompression speed.

I was impressed to find out that his LZO algorithm has gone to the planet Mars on NASA devices multiple times! Most recently, LZO has touched down on the red planet within the Mars Curiosity Rover, which just celebrated its first martian anniversary on Tuesday.

In the past few years, LZO has gained traction in file systems as well. LZO can be used in the Linux kernel within btrfs, squashfs, jffs2, and ubifs. A recent variant of the algorithm, LZ4, is used for compression in ZFS for Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD.

With its popularity increasing, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer has been rewritten by many engineering firms for both closed and open systems. These rewrites, however, have always been based on Oberhumer's core open source implementation. As a result, they all inherited a subtle integer overflow. Even LZ4 has the same exact bug, but changed very slightly.

Because the LZO algorithm is considered a library function, each specific implementation must be evaluated for risk, regardless of whether the algorithm used has been patched. Why? We are talking about code that has existed in the wild for two decades. The scope of this algorithm touches everything from embedded microcontrollers on the Mars Rover, mainframe operating systems, modern day desktops, and mobile phones. Engineers that have used LZO must evaluate the use case to identify whether or not the implementation is vulnerable, and in what format.

News Roundup

FreeBSD on Slimbook -- 14 months of updates

LLDB FreeBSD kernel core dump support

Steam on OpenBSD

Beastie Bits

• [OpenSSH Agent Restriction](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20211220061017)
• [OpenBSD’s Clang upgraded to version 13](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20211220060327)
• [Cool, but obscure X11 tools](http://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/)

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

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NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Reviewing my first OpenBSD port, and what I'd do differently 10 years later

Install NetBSD 9.2 on a DEC Alpha CPU in QEMU with X11

News Roundup

FreeBSD Experiment Rethinks the OS Install

The switch to FreeBSD rc.d is coming

Irix gets LLVM

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

• Miceal - a few questions
• Nelson - dummynet

• 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 quarterly status report for Q4 2020

Block spammers/abusive IPs with Pf-badhost in OpenBSD. A 'must have' security tool!

Pf-badhost is a very practical, robust, stable and lightweight security script for network servers.
It's compatible with BSD based operating systems such as {Open,Free,Net,Dragonfly}BSD and MacOS. It prevents potentially-bad IP addresses that could possibly attack your servers (and waste your bandwidth and fill your logfiles), by blocking all those IPs contacting your server, and therefore it makes your server network/resources lighter and the logs of important services running on your server become simpler, more readable and efficient.

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News Roundup

Bastille Port Redirection and Persistence

Bastille supports redirecting (rdr) ports from the host system into target containers. This port redirection is commonly used when running Internet services such as web servers, dns servers, email and many others. Any service you want to make public outside of your cluster will likely require port redirection (with some exceptions, see below).

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FreeBSD Wall Display Computer

I've recently added a wall mounted 30" monitor for Grafana in my home. I can highly recommend doing the same, especially in a world where more work from home is becoming the norm.

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The etymology of command-line tools

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GhostBSD 21.01.15 Release Notes

I am happy to announce the availability of the new ISO 21.01.15. This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button's restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.

Beastie Bits

• Interview with Brian Kernighan *** ###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

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