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

Headlines

Deploying FreeBSD on Oracle Cloud

The Things Spammers Believe - A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends

EuroBSDcon 2022

News Roundup

“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” Status Report

OpenBGPD 7.6 Released

OpenBSD may soon gain further memory protections: immutable userland mappings

Portable OpenSSH commits now SSH-signed

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

Achieving RPO/RTO Objectives with ZFS - Part 1

FreeBSD Foundation Q2 Report

OpenBSD full Tor setup

News Roundup

MyBee — FreeBSD OS and hypervisor bhyve as private cloud

Expanding our FreeBSD home file server

OpenBSD on the Framework Laptop

Portable GELI

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

• Chunky_pie - zfs question
• Paul - several questions
• chris - firewall question ***
• 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

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• FreeBSD has gotten quite a lot done this quarter
• Changes in the way release branches are supported - major releases will get at least five years over their lifespan
• A new automounter is in the works, hoping to replace amd (which has some issues)
• The CAM target layer and RPC stack have gotten some major optimization and speed boosts
• Work on ZFSGuru continues, with a large status report specifically for that
• The report also mentioned some new committers, both source and ports
• It also covers GNATS being replaced with Bugzilla, the new core team, 9.3-RELEASE, GSoC updates, UEFI booting and lots of other things that we've already mentioned on the show
• "Foundation-sponsored work resulted in 226 commits to FreeBSD over the April to June period" ***

A new OpenBSD HTTPD is born

• Work has begun on a new HTTP daemon in the OpenBSD base system
• A lot of people are asking "why?" since OpenBSD includes a chrooted nginx already - will it be removed? Will they co-exist?
• Initial responses seem to indicate that nginx is getting bloated, and is a bit overkill for just serving content (this isn't trying to be a full-featured replacement)
• It's partially based on the relayd codebase and also comes from the author of relayd, Reyk Floeter
• This has the added benefit of the usual, easy-to-understand syntax and privilege separation
• There's a very brief man page online already
• It supports vhosts and can serve static files, but is still in very active development - there will probably be even more new features by the time this airs
• Will it be named OpenHTTPD? Or perhaps... LibreHTTPD? (I hope not) ***

pkgng 1.3 announced

• The newest version of FreeBSD's second generation package management system has been released, with lots of new features
• It has a new "real" solver to automatically handle conflicts, and dynamically discover new ones (this means the annoying -o option is deprecated now, hooray!)
• Lots of the code has been sandboxed for extra security
• You'll probably notice some new changes to the UI too, making things more user friendly
• A few days later 1.3.1 was released to fix a few small bugs, then 1.3.2 shortly thereafter and 1.3.3 yesterday ***

FreeBSD after-install security tasks

• A number of people have written in to ask us "how do I secure my BSD box after I install it?"
• With this blog post, hopefully most of their questions will finally be answered in detail
• It goes through locking down SSH with keys, patching the base system for security, installing packages and keeping them updated, monitoring and closing any listening services and a few other small things
• Not only does it just list things to do, but the post also does a good job of explaining why you should do them
• Maybe we'll see some more posts in this series in the future ***

Interview - Brent Cook - bcook@openbsd.org / @busterbcook

LibreSSL's portable version and development

News Roundup

FreeBSD Mastery - Storage Essentials

• MWL's new book about the FreeBSD storage subsystems now has an early draft available
• Early buyers can get access to an in-progress draft of the book before the official release, but keep in mind that it may go through a lot of changes
• Topics of the book will include GEOM, UFS, ZFS, the disk utilities, partition schemes, disk encryption and maximizing I/O performance
• You'll get access to the completed (e)book when it's done if you buy the early draft
• The suggested price is $8 ***

Why BSD and not Linux?

• Yet another thread comes up asking why you should choose BSD over Linux or vice-versa
• Lots of good responses from users of the various BSDs
• Directly ripping a quote: "Features like Ports, Capsicum, CARP, ZFS and DTrace were stable on BSDs before their Linux versions, and some of those are far more usable on BSD. Features like pf are still BSD-only. FreeBSD has GELI and ipfw and is "GCC free". DragonflyBSD has HAMMER and kernel performance tuning. OpenBSD have upstream pf and their gamut of security features, as well as a general emphasis on simplicity."
• And "Over the years, the BSDs have clearly shown their worth in the nix ecosystem by pioneering new features and driving adoption of others. The most recent on OpenBSD were 2038 support and LibreSSL. FreeBSD still arguably rules the FOSS storage space with ZFS."
• Some other users share their switching experiences - worth a read ***

More g2k14 hackathon reports

• Following up from last week's huge list of hackathon reports, we have a few more
• Landry Breuil spent some time with Ansible testing his infrastructure, worked on the firefox port and tried to push some of their patches upstream
• Andrew Fresh enjoyed his first hackathon, pushing OpenBSD's perl patches upstream and got tricked into rewriting the adduser utility in perl
• Ted Unangst did his usual "teduing" (removing of) old code - say goodbye to asa, fpr, mkstr, xstr, oldrdist, fsplit, uyap and bluetooth
• Luckily we didn't have to cover 20 new ones this time! ***

BSDTalk episode 243

• The newest episode of BSDTalk is out, featuring an interview with Ingo Schwarze of the OpenBSD team
• The main topic of discussion is mandoc, which some users might not be familiar with
• mandoc is a utility for formatting manpages that OpenBSD and NetBSD use (DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD include it in their source tree, but it's not built by default)
• We'll catch up to you soon, Will! ***

Feedback/Questions

• Thomas writes in
• Stephen writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Florian writes in
• Bob Beck writes in - and note the "Caution" section that was added to libressl.org ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD and OpenBSD in GSOC2014

• The Google Summer of Code is a way to encourage students to write code for open source projects and make some money
• Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted, and we'd love for anyone listening to check out their GSOC pages
• The FreeBSD wiki has a list of things that they'd be interested in someone helping out with
• OpenBSD's want list was also posted
• DragonflyBSD and NetBSD were sadly not accepted this year ***

Yes, you too can be an evil network overlord

• A new blog post about monitoring your network using only free tools
• OpenBSD is a great fit, and has all the stuff you need in the base system or via packages
• It talks about the pflow pseudo-interface, its capabilities and relation to NetFlow (also goes well with pf)
• There's also details about flowd and nfsen, more great tools to make network monitoring easy
• If you're listening, Peter... stop ignoring our emails and come on the show! We know you're watching! ***

BSDMag's February issue is out

• The theme is "configuring basic services on OpenBSD 5.4"
• There's also an interview with Peter Hansteen (oh hey...)
• Topics also include locking down SSH, a GIMP lesson, user/group management, and...
• Linux and Solaris articles? Why?? ***

Changes in bcrypt

• Not specific to any OS, but the OpenBSD team is updating their bcrypt implementation
• There is a bug in bcrypt when hashing long passwords - other OSes need to update theirs too! (FreeBSD already has)
• "The length is stored in an unsigned char type, which will overflow and wrap at 256. Although we consider the existence of affected hashes very rare, in order to differentiate hashes generated before and after the fix, we are introducing a new minor 'b'."
• As long as you upgrade your OpenBSD system in order (without skipping versions) you should be ok going forward
• Lots of specifics in the email, check the full thing ***

Interview - Will Backman - bitgeist@yahoo.com / @bsdtalk

The BSDTalk podcast, BSD advocacy, various topics

Tutorial

Tracking and cross-compiling -CURRENT (NetBSD)

News Roundup

X11 no longer needs root

• Xorg has long since required root privileges to run the main server
• With recent work from the OpenBSD team, now everything (even KMS) can run as a regular user
• Now you can set the "machdep.allowaperture" sysctl to 0 and still use a GUI ***

OpenSSH 6.6 CFT

• Shortly after the huge 6.5 release, we get a routine bugfix update
• Test it out on as many systems as you can
• Check the mailing list for the full bug list ***

Creating an OpenBSD USB drive

• Since OpenBSD doesn't distribute any official USB images, here are some instructions on how to do it
• Step by step guide on how you can make your very own
• However, there's some recent emails that suggest official USB images may be coming soon... oh wait ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• New PBI updates that allow separate ports from /usr/local
• You need to rebuild pbi-manager if you want to try it out
• Updates and changes to Life Preserver, App Cafe, PCDM ***

Feedback/Questions

• espressowar writes in
• Antonio writes in
• Christian writes in
• Adam writes in
• Alex writes in ***