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Headlines

Bitrig 1.0 released

• If you haven't heard of it, Bitrig is a fork of OpenBSD that started a couple years ago
• According to their FAQ, some of their goals include: only supporting modern hardware and a limited set of CPU architectures, replacing nearly all GNU tools in base with BSD versions and having better virtualization support
• They've finally announced their first official release, 1.0
• This release introduces support for Clang 3.4, replacing the old GCC, along with libc++ replacing the GNU version
• It also includes filesystem journaling, support for GPT and - most importantly - a hacker-style console with green text on black background
• One of the developers answered some questions about it on Hacker News too ***

Is it time to try BSD?

• Here we get a little peek into the Linux world - more and more people are considering switching
• On a more mainstream tech news site, they have an article about people switching away from Linux and to BSD
• People are starting to get even more suspicious of systemd, and lots of drama in the Linux world is leading a whole new group of potential users over to the BSD side
• This article explores some pros and cons of switching, and features opinions of various users ***

Poudriere 3.1 released

• One of the first things we ever covered on the show was poudriere, a tool with a funny name that's used to build binary packages from FreeBSD ports
• It's come a long way since then, and bdrewery and bapt have just announced a new major version
• This new release features a redesigned web interface to check on the status of your packages
• There are lots of new bulk building options to preserve packages even if some fail to compile - this makes maintaining a production repo much easier
• It also introduces a useful new "pkgclean" subcommand to clean out your repository of packages that aren't needed anymore, and poudriere keeps it cleaner by default as well now
• Check the full release notes for all the additions and bug fixes ***

Firewalling with OpenBSD's pf and pfsync

• A talk by David Gwynne from an Australian conference was uploaded, with the subject matter being pf and pfsync
• He uses pf to manage 60 internal networks with a single firewall
• The talk gives some background on how pf originally came to be and some OpenBSD 101 for the uninitiated
• It also touches on different rulesets, use cases, configuration syntax, placing limits on connections, ospf, authpf, segregating VLANs, synproxy handling and a lot more
• The second half of the presentation focuses on pfsync and carp for failover and redundancy
• With two BSD boxes running pfsync, you can actually patch your kernel and still stay connected to IRC ***

Interview - Patrick Wildt - patrick@bitrig.org / @bitrig

The initial release of Bitrig

News Roundup

Infrastructural enhancements at NYI

• The FreeBSD foundation put up a new blog post detailing some hardware improvements they've recently done
• Their eastern US colocation is hosted at New York Internet, and is used for FTP mirrors, pkgng mirrors, and also as a place for developers to test things
• There've been fourteen machines purchased since July, and now FreeBSD boasts a total of sixty-eight physical boxes there
• This blog post goes into detail about how those servers are used and details some of the network topology ***

The long tail of MD5

• Our friend Ted Unangst is on a quest to replace all instances of MD5 in OpenBSD's tree with something more modern
• In this blog post, he goes through some of the different areas where MD5 still lives, and discovers how easy (or impossible) it would be to replace
• Through some recent commits, OpenBSD now uses SHA512 in some places that you might not expect
• Some other places require a bit more care… ***

DragonFly cheat sheet

• If you've been thinking of trying out DragonFlyBSD lately, this might make the transition a bit easier
• A user-created "cheat sheet" on the website lists some common answers to beginner questions
• The page features a walkthrough of the installer, some shell tips and workarounds for various issues
• At the end, it also has some things that new users can get involved with to help out ***

Experiences with an OpenBSD laptop

• A lot of people seem to be interested in trying out some form of BSD on their laptop, and this article details just that
• The author got interested in OpenBSD mostly because of the security focus and the fact that it's not Linux
• In this blog post, he goes through the steps of researching, installing, configuring, upgrading and finally actually using it on his Thinkpad
• He even gives us a mention as a good place to learn more about BSD, thanks! ***

PC-BSD Updates

• A call for testing of a new update system has gone out
• Conversion to Qt5 for utils has taken place ***

Feedback/Questions

• Chris writes in
• AJ writes in
• Dan writes in
• Jeff writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Over 440% faster
• The PF conundrum (edit: Allan misspoke about PF performance during this segment, apologies.)
• Violating bad standards
• apt-get rid of systemd ***