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

Headlines

Virtualization showdown – FreeBSD’s bhyve vs. Linux’s KVM

The Birth of Standard Error

News Roundup

Investigating why Steam started picking a random font

Curious Case of Maintaining Sufficient Free Space with ZFS

Call for testing on updated Apple M1/M2 bootloader code

FreeBSD on my workstation

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

• Brad - Initial Setup
• Joseph - openbsd and postgresql

• 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

• 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

• 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 ***

Headlines

Entropy

A brief introduction to randomness

• Problem: Computers are very predictable. This is by design.

But what if we want them to act unpredictably? This is very useful if we want to secure our private communications with randomized keys, or not let people cheat at video games, or if we're doing statistical simulations or similar.

Logs grinding Netatalk on FreeBSD to a hault

I’ve heard it said the cobbler’s children walk barefoot. While posessing the qualities of a famed financial investment strategy, it speaks to how we generally put more effort into things for others than ourselves; at least in business.
The HP Microserver I share with Clara is a modest affair compared to what we run at work. It has six spinning rust drives and two SSDs which are ZFS-mirrored; not even in a RAID 10 equivalent. This is underlaid with GELI for encryption, and served to our Macs with Netatalk over gigabit Ethernet with jumbo frames.

News Roundup

NetBSD Core Team Changes

Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions.
Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group, and bringing it up to date with modern functionality.

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Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests.

WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD

A while ago I wanted to learn more about OpenBSD development. So I picked a project, in this case WireGuard, to develop a native client for. Over the last two years, with many different iterations, and working closely with the WireGuard's creator (Jason [Jason A. Donenfeld - Ed.], CC'd), it started to become a serious project eventually reaching parity with other official implementations. Finally, we are here and I think it is time for any further development to happen inside the src tree.

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FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop

I’m using FreeBSD again on a laptop for some reasons so expect to read more about FreeBSD here. This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1.

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Beastie Bits

• List of useful FreeBSD Commands
• Master Your Network With Unix Command Line Tools
• Original Unix containers aka FreeBSD jails
• Flashback : 2003 Article : Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor
• FreeBSD Journal March/April 2020 Filesystems: ZFS Encryption, FUSE, and more, plus Network Bridges
• HAMBug meeting will be online again in June, so those from all over the world are welcome to join, June 9th (2nd Tuesday of each month) at 18:30 Eastern

Feedback/Questions

• + Lyubomir - GELI and ZFS
• Patrick - powerd and powerd++

• 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

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 ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Updates to FreeBSD's random(4)

• FreeBSD's random device, which presents itself as "/dev/random" to users, has gotten a fairly major overhaul in -CURRENT
• The CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator) algorithm, Yarrow, now has a new alternative called Fortuna
• Yarrow is still the default for now, but Fortuna can be used with a kernel option (and will likely be the new default in 11.0-RELEASE)
• Pluggable modules can now be written to add more sources of entropy
• These changes are expected to make it in 11.0-RELEASE, but there hasn't been any mention of MFCing them to 10 or 9 ***

OpenBSD Tor relays and network diversity

• We've talked about getting more BSD-based Tor nodes a few times in previous episodes
• The "tor-relays" mailing list has had some recent discussion about increasing diversity in the Tor network, specifically by adding more OpenBSD nodes
• With the security features and attention to detail, it makes for an excellent dedicated Tor box
• More and more adversaries are attacking Tor nodes, so having something that can withstand that will help the greater network at large
• A few users are even saying they'll convert their Linux nodes to OpenBSD to help out
• Check the archive for the full conversation, and maybe run a node yourself on any of the BSDs
• The Tor wiki page on OpenBSD is pretty out of date (nine years old!?) and uses the old pf syntax, maybe one of our listeners can modernize it ***

SSP now default for FreeBSD ports

• SSP, or Stack Smashing Protection, is an additional layer of protection against buffer overflows that the compiler can give to the binaries it produces
• It's now enabled by default in FreeBSD's ports tree, and the pkgng packages will have it as well - but only for amd64 (all supported releases) and i386 (10.0-RELEASE or newer)
• This will only apply to regular ports and binary packages, not the quarterly branch that only receives security updates
• If you were using the temporary "new Xorg" or SSP package repositories instead of the default ones, you need to switch back over
• NetBSD made this the default on i386 and amd64 two years ago and OpenBSD made this the default on all architectures twelve years ago
• Next time you rebuild your ports, things should be automatically hardened without any extra steps or configuration needed ***

Building an OpenBSD firewall and router

• While we've discussed the software and configuration of an OpenBSD router, this Reddit thread focuses more on the hardware side
• The OP lists some of his potential choices, but was originally looking for something a bit cheaper than a Soekris
• Most agree that, if it's for a business especially, it's worth the extra money to go with something that's well known in the BSD community
• They also list a few other popular alternatives: ALIX or the APU series from PC Engines, some Supermicro boards, etc.
• Through the comments, we also find out that QuakeCon runs OpenBSD on their network
• Hopefully most of our listeners are running some kind of BSD as their gateway - try it out if you haven't already ***

Interview - Kristaps Džonsons - kristaps@bsd.lv

Mandoc, historical man pages, various topics

Tutorial

Throttling bandwidth with PF

News Roundup

NetBSD at Kansai Open Forum 2014

• Japanese NetBSD users invade yet another conference, demonstrating that they can and will install NetBSD on everything
• From a Raspberry Pi to SHARP Netwalkers to various luna68k devices, they had it all
• As always, you can find lots of pictures in the trip report ***

Getting to know your portmgr lurkers

• The lovable "getting to know your portmgr" series makes its triumphant return
• This time around, they interview Alex, one of the portmgr lurkers that joined just this month
• "How would you describe yourself?" "Too lazy."
• Another post includes a short interview with Emanuel, another new lurker
• We discussed the portmgr lurkers initiative with Steve Wills a while back ***

NetBSD's ARM port gets SMP

• The ARM port of NetBSD now has SMP support, allowing more than one CPU to be used
• This blog post on the website has a list of supported boards: Banana Pi, Cubieboard 2, Cubietruck, Merrii Hummingbird A31, CUBOX-I and NITROGEN6X
• NetBSD's release team is working on getting these changes into the 7 branch before 7.0 is released
• There are also a few nice pictures in the article ***

A high performance mid-range NAS

• This blog post is about FreeNAS and optimizing iSCSI performance
• It talks about using mid-range hardware with FreeNAS and different tunables you can change to affect performance
• There are some nice graphs and lots of detail if you're interested in tweaking some of your own settings
• They conclude "there is no optimal configuration; rather, FreeNAS can be configured to suit a particular workload" ***

Feedback/Questions

• Heto writes in
• Brad writes in
• Tyler writes in
• Tim writes in
• Brad writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Suspicious contributions
• La puissance du fromage
• Nothing unusual here ***