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OpenSMTPD for the whole family

• Setting up a BSD mail server is something a lot of us are probably familiar with doing, at least for our own accounts
• This article talks about configuring a home mail server too, but even for the other people you live with
• After convincing his wife to use their BSD-based Owncloud server for backups, the author talks about moving her over to his brand new OpenSMTPD server too
• If you've ever run a mail server and had to deal with greylisting, you'll appreciate the struggle he went through
• In the end, BGP-based list distribution saved the day, and his family is being served well by a BSD box ***

NetBSD on the Edgerouter Lite

• We've talked a lot about building your own BSD-based router on the show, but not many of the devices we mention are in the same price range as consumer devices
• The EdgeRouter Lite, a small MIPS-powered machine, is starting to become popular (and is a bit cheaper)
• A NetBSD developer has been hacking on it, and documents the steps to get a working install in this blog post
• The process is fairly simple, and you can cross-compile your own installation image on any CPU architecture (even from another BSD!)
• OpenBSD and FreeBSD also have some support for these devices ***

Bitrig at NYC*BUG

• The New York City BSD users group has semi-regular meetings with presentations, and this time the speaker was John Vernaleo
• John discussed Bitrig, an OpenBSD fork that we've talked about a couple times on the show
• He talks about what they've been up to lately, why they're doing what they're doing, difference in supported platforms
• Ports and packages between the two projects are almost exactly the same, but he covers the differences in the base systems, how (some) patches get shared between the two and finally some development model differences ***

OPNsense, meet HardenedBSD

• Speaking of forks, two FreeBSD-based forked projects we've mentioned on the show, HardenedBSD and OPNsense, have decided to join forces
• Backporting their changes to the 10-STABLE branch, HardenedBSD hopes to introduce some of their security additions to the OPNsense codebase
• Paired up with LibreSSL, this combination should offer a good solution for anyone wanting a BSD-based firewall with an easy web interface
• We'll cover more news on the collaboration as it comes out ***

Interview - Mike Larkin - mlarkin@openbsd.org / @mlarkin2012

Memory protections in OpenBSD: W^X, ASLR, PIE, SSP

News Roundup

A closer look at FreeBSD

• The week wouldn't be complete without at least one BSD article making it to a mainstream tech site
• This time, it's a high-level overview of FreeBSD, some of its features and where it's used
• Being that it's an overview article on a more mainstream site, you won't find anything too technical - it covers some BSD history, stability, ZFS, LLVM and Clang, ports and packages, jails and the licensing
• If you have any BSD-curious Linux friends, this might be a good one to send to them ***

Linksys NSLU2 and NetBSD

• The Linksys NSLU2 is a proprietary network-attached storage device introduced back in 2004
• "About 2 months ago I set a goal to run some kind of BSD on the spare Linksys NSLU2 I had. This was driven mostly by curiosity, after listening to a few BSDNow episodes and becoming a regular listener [...]"
• After doing some research, the author of this post discovered that he could cross-compile NetBSD for the device straight from his Linux box
• If you've got one of these old devices kicking around, check out this write-up and get some BSD action on there ***

OpenBSD disklabel templates

• We've covered OpenBSD's "autoinstall" feature for unattended installations in the past, but one area where it didn't offer a lot of customization was with the disk layout
• With a few recent changes, there are now a series of templates you can use for a completely customized partition scheme
• This article takes you through the process of configuring an autoinstall answer file and adding the new section for disklabel
• Combine this new feature with our -stable iso tutorial, and you could deploy completely patched and customized images en masse pretty easily ***

FreeBSD native ARM builds

• FreeBSD -CURRENT builds for the ARM CPU architecture can now be built natively, without utilities that aren't part of base
• Some of the older board-specific kernel configuration files have been replaced, and now the "IMC6" target is used
• This goes along with what we read in the most recent quarterly status report - ARM is starting to get treated as a first class citizen ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Ron writes in
• Charles writes in
• Bostjan 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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BSDCan schedule, speakers and talks

• This year's BSDCan will kick off on May 14th in Ottawa
• The list of speakers is also out
• And finally the talks everyone's looking forward to
• Lots of great tutorials and talks, spanning a wide range of topics of interest
• Be sure to come by so you can and meet Allan and Kris in person and get BSDCan shirts ***

NYCBSDCon talks uploaded

• The BSD TV YouTube channel has been uploading recordings from the 2014 NYCBSDCon
• Jeff Rizzo's talk, "Releasing NetBSD: So Many Targets, So Little Time"
• Dru Lavigne's talk, "ZFS Management Tools in FreeNAS and PC-BSD"
• Scott Long's talk, "Serving one third of the Internet via FreeBSD"
• Michael W. Lucas' talk, "BSD Breaking Barriers" ***

FreeBSD Journal, issue 2

• The bi-monthly FreeBSD journal's second issue is out
• Topics in this issue include pkg, poudriere, the PBI format, hwpmc and journaled soft-updates
• In less than two months, they've already gotten over 1000 subscribers! It's available on Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, etc
• "We are also working on a dynamic version of the magazine that can be read in many web browsers, including those that run on FreeBSD"
• Check our interview with GNN for more information about the journal ***

OpenSSL, more like OpenSS-Hell

• We mentioned this huge OpenSSL bug last week during all the chaos, but the aftermath is just as messy
• There's been a pretty vicious response from security experts all across the internet and in all of the BSD projects - and rightfully so
• We finally have a timeline of events
• Reactions from ISC, PCBSD, Tarsnap, the Tor project, FreeBSD, NetBSD, oss-sec, PHK, Varnish and Akamai
• pfSense released a new version to fix it
• OpenBSD disabled heartbeat entirely and is very unforgiving of the IETF
• Ted Unangst has two good write-ups about the issue and how horrible the OpenSSL codebase is
• A nice quote from one of the OpenBSD lists: "Given how trivial one-liner fixes such as #2569 have remained unfixed for 2.5+ years, one can only assume that OpenSSL's bug tracker is only used to park bugs, not fix them"
• Sounds like someone else was having fun with the bug for a while too
• There's also another OpenSSL bug that OpenBSD patched - it allows an attacker to inject data from one connection into another
• OpenBSD has also imported the most current version of OpenSSL and are ripping it apart from the inside out - we're seeing a fork in real time ***

Interview - Jim Brown - info@bsdcertification.org

The BSD Certification exams

Tutorial

Building OpenBSD binary packages in bulk

News Roundup

Portable signify

• Back in episode 23 we talked with Ted Unangst about the new "signify" tool in OpenBSD
• Now there's a (completely unofficial) portable version of it on github
• If you want to verify your OpenBSD sets ahead of time on another OS, this tool should let you do it
• Maybe other BSD projects can adopt it as a replacement for gpg and incorporate it into their base systems ***

Foundation goals and updates

• The OpenBSD foundation has reached their 2014 goal of $150,000
• You can check their activities and goals to see where the money is going
• Remember that funding also goes to OpenSSH, which EVERY system uses and relies on everyday to protect their data
• The FreeBSD foundation has kicked off their spring fundraising campaign
• There's also a list of their activities and goals available to read through
• Be sure to support your favorite BSD, whichever one, so they can continue to make and improve great software that powers the whole internet ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• New PBI runtime that fixes stability issues and decreases load times
• "Update Center" is getting a lot of development and improvements
• Lots of misc. bug fixes and updates ***

Feedback/Questions

• There's a reddit thread we wanted to highlight - a user wants to show his friend BSD and why it's great
• Brad writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• iGibbs writes in
• Matt writes in ***