31: Edgy BSD Users

JT Pennington — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 08:00:00 -0400

This week we'll be talking to Richard Stallman about the upcoming GPLv4 and how it will protect our software from being stolen. After that, we'll show you how to recover from those pesky ZFS on Linux corruption issues, as well as some tips on how to explain to your boss that all the production boxes were compromised. Your questions and all the latest GNUs, on Linux Now - the place to Lin.. ux.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Preorders for cool BSD stuff

The 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is up for preorder
We talked to GNN briefly about it, but he and Kirk have apparently finally finished the book
"For many years, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System has been recognized as the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure. Now, this definitive guide has been extensively updated to reflect all major FreeBSD improvements between Versions 5 and Versions 11"
OpenBSD 5.5 preorders are also up, so you can buy a CD set now
You can help support the project, and even get the -release of the OS before it's available publicly
5.5 is a huge release with lots of big changes, so now is the right time to purchase one of these - tell Austin we sent you! ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 CFP

This year's pkgsrcCon is in London, on June 21st and 22nd
There's a Call For Papers out now, so you can submit your talks
Anything related to pkgsrc is fine, it's pretty informal
Does anyone in the audience know if the talks will be recorded? This con is relatively unknown ***

BSDMag issue for March 2014

The monthly BSD magazine releases its newest issue
Topics this time include: deploying NetBSD using AWS EC2, creating a multi-purpose file server with NetBSD, DragonflyBSD as a backup server, more GIMP lessons, network analysis with wireshark and a general security article
The Linux article trend seems to continue... hmm ***

Non-ECC RAM in FreeNAS

We've gotten a few questions about ECC RAM with ZFS
Here we've got a surprising blog post about why someone did not go with ECC RAM for his NAS build
The article mentions the benefits of ECC and admits it is a better choice in nearly all instances, but unfortunately it's not very widespread in consumer hardware motherboards and it's more expensive
Regular RAM also has "special" issues with ZFS and pool corruption
Long post, so check out the whole thing if you've been considering your memory options and weighing the benefits ***

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

EdgeBSD (slides)

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD desktop

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr-lurkers

This week we get to hear from Frederic Culot, colut@
Originally an OpenBSD user from France, Frederic joined as a ports committer in 2010 and recently joined the portmgr lurkers team
"FreeBSD is also one of my sources of inspiration when it comes to how organizations behave and innovate, and I find it very interesting to compare FreeBSD with the for-profit companies I work for"
We get to find out a little bit about him, why he loves FreeBSD and what he does for the project ***

NetBSD on the Playstation 2

Who doesn't want to run NetBSD on their old PS2?
The PS2 port of NetBSD was sadly removed in 2009, but it has been revived
It's using a slightly unusual MIPS CPU that didn't have much GCC support
Hopefully a bootable kernel will be available soon ***

The FreeBSD Challenge update

Our friend from the Linux Foundation continues his FreeBSD switching journey
This time he starts off by discovering virtual machines suck at keeping accurate time, and some ports weren't working because of his clock being way off
After polling the IRC for help, he finally learns the difference between ntpdate and ntpd and both of their use cases
Maybe he should've just read our NTP tutorial! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

The mount tray icon got lots of updates and fixes
The faulty distribution server has finally been tracked down and... destroyed
New language localization project is in progress
Many many updates to ports and PBIs, new -STABLE builds ***

Feedback/Questions

23: Time Signatures

JT Pennington — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, we'll be talking with Ted Unangst of the OpenBSD team about their new signing infrastructure. After that, we've got a tutorial on how to run your own NTP server. News, your feedback and even... the winner of our tutorial contest will be announced! So stay tuned to BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results

The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
$768,562 from 1659 donors
Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
"We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook) ***

OpenSSH 6.5 released

We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL! ***

Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower

In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone." ***

OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black

Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices ***

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD

Tutorial

Running an NTP server

News Roundup

Getting started with FreeBSD

A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far ***

More OpenBSD hackathon reports

As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there ***

X11 in a jail

We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas ***

PCBSD weekly digest

10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
AMD graphics are now officially supported
GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
Grub updates and fixes
PCBSD also got a mention in eweek ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Richard Stallman”

31: Edgy BSD Users

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

23: Time Signatures

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions