NOTES

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Headlines

FreeBSD Foundation Q2 2025 Status Update

Keeping Data Safe with OpenZFS: Security, Encryption, and Delegation

News Roundup

Ollama on FreeBSD Using GPU Passthrough

ClonOS

Preliminary support for Raspberry Pi 5

Sylve: Manage bhyve VMs and Clusters on FreeBSD

Preventing Systemd DHCP RELEASE Behavior

Call for testing - Samba 4.22 in 0mp's ports tree

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Feedback/Questions

-Vincent - Ollama on FreeBSD

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Headlines

Secure Boot for FreeBSD

The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning

News Roundup

Teching the tech and rushing the endorphins

Passing a Device Into A FreeBSD Jail With A Stable Name

ZFS snapshots aren't as immutable as I thought, due to snapshot metadata

Let's write a peephole optimizer for QBE's arm64 backend

Migrate a Peertube instance from Debian to FreeBSD

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Feedback/Questions

-Steve - Interviews

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Headlines

X Window System At 40

Lessons from Ancient File Systems

News Roundup

HardenedBSD July 2024 Status Report

FreeBSD's 'root on ZFS' default appeals to me for an odd reason

I Miss BSD/Linux

Simple automated deployments using git push

Beastie Bits

• EuroBSDCon 2024
• Ebook of “Run Your Own Mail Server” off to early backers
• Interactive UNIX

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Feedback/Questions

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Headlines

FreeBSD Status Report First Quarter 2024

Why not BSD + Sequel next week

News Roundup

LibreSSL version 3.9.2 released

Running NetBSD on OmniOS using bhyve

X.Org on NetBSD - the state of things

Unix version control lore: what, ident

How I search in 2024

sshd(8) split into multiple binaries

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Feedback/Questions

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Headlines

FreeBSD Status Report Fourth Quarter 2023

In Memoriam : Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85

News Roundup

Migrate a FreeBSD bhyve virtual machine to OmniOS

This blog is AI free

Hard disk LEDs and Noisy Machines

SSH based comment system

NetBSD 10 RC.4 is available

Beastie Bits

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Feedback/Questions

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Headlines

Security, Performance, and Interoperability; Introducing FreeBSD 14

HardenedBSD November 2023 Status Report

News Roundup

How to create a FreeBSD Jail hosting a remote desktop

A sneak Peak

Programming FreeBSD Reading Process Information

Why Unix kernels have grown caches for directory entries 'name caches'

Always learning, Always Teaching

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Headlines

OpenBSD 7.4

Making Software Last Forever

News Roundup

DragonFlyBSD Per-process capability-based restrictions

HardenedBSD September 2023 Status Report

NetBSD as a Kubernetes Pod

Firefox hardening with Arkenfox

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Feedback/Questions

• A Random Listener - Other Podcasts
• Dante - Thanks
• Lars - WEI DRM
• YKLA - transcripts ***

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Headlines

Unlocking Infrastructure Sovereignty: Harnessing the Power of Open Source Solutions for Business Flexibility and Cost-Effectiveness

Recap of first meeting of the FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group

News Roundup

HardenedBSD August 2023 Status Report

• [HardenedBSD 14-STABLE Now Available](https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2023-09-11/hardenedbsd-14-stable-now-available)

August 2023 donation report

• [Late on the announcement but... GhostBSD 23.06.01 ISO is now available](http://ghostbsd.org/23.06.01_iso_is_now_available)

MidnightBSD 3.1 Released

OpenBSD Webzine ISSUE #14 is out

Beastie Bits

• [ZFS for Dummies](https://ikrima.dev/dev-notes/homelab/zfs-for-dummies/)
• [The Switch runs FreeBSD](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/5xbe5a/the_switch_runs_freebsd_making_it_nintendos_first/)
• [KDE on OpenBSD](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=169391479324962)
• [(Kubernetes v1.28.0) for illumos, FreeBSD and OpenBSD](https://medium.com/@norlin.t/by-the-way-planternetes-kubernetes-v1-28-0-for-illumos-freebsd-and-openbsd-5d57026d6a25)
• [Video: C Programming on System 6 - VCF Midwest, Wi-Fi DA](https://jcs.org/2023/09/20/vcfmw)

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Feedback/Questions

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Headlines

FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2023

Our 2023 Recommended Summer Reads 2023

News Roundup

How to install Kanboard on OpenBSD

A bit of Unix history on 'su -'

Some hints for splitting commits

Live from OpenBSD in Amsterdam

In memoriam

In Memoriam: Hans Petter William Sirevåg Selasky

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Feedback/Questions

• Agbo - Using BSD for a business

• Chris - Desktop BSD systems

• Dane - Use another OS

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Headlines

Automation and Hacking Your FreeBSD CLI

Run your own instant messaging service on FreeBSD

News Roundup

Watch Netflix on FreeBSD

HardenedBSD January 2023 Status Report

How To Set Up SSH Keys With YubiKey as two-factor authentication (U2F/FIDO2)

OpenSSH fixes double-free memory bug that’s pokable over the network

A late announcement, but better late than never

Next NYC*BUG: March? April? Certainly May!

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Feedback/Questions

• Daniel - Plan 9 lives
• Jason - nvd driver

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Headlines

FreeBSD Status Report Fourth Quarter 2022

How to limit a jail

News Roundup

The parallel port

Hello System 0.8 is out

Solbournes in space

Beastie Bits

• Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
• New Open Position: FreeBSD Userland Software Developer
• The One Lone Audiobook now exclusive on my store ***

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Headlines

2022 in Review: Software Development

What can we learn from Vintage Computing

News Roundup

OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022

A Decade of HardenedBSD

In Praise of Plan9

Beastie Bits

LibreSSL 3.7.0 Released
OPNsense 22.7.10 released
BSDCan 2023 call for papers
How to lock OpenSSH authentication agent
Once upon a time long ago, I was sitting alone in the UCLA ARPANET site...

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Feedback/Questions

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Headlines

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report Third Quarter 2022

Avoid Infrastructure Vendor Lock-in by leveraging MinIO and OpenZFS

Announcing the FreeBSD/Firecracker platform

News Roundup

How Much Faster Is Making A Tar Archive Without Gzip?

PostgreSQL from packages on OpenBSD

Upgrading an NVMe zpool from 222G to 1TB drives

PSA: Don't use Reddit for Linux or BSD related questions

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Feedback/Questions

• Hinnerk - vnet jails
  Tom’s response example: https://adventurist.me/posts/00304

• Hugo - Apple M2

• kevin - emacs backspace
  )

  ---

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Headlines

From 0 to Bhyve on FreeBSD 13.1

Analyze OpenBSD’s Kernel with Domain-Specific Knowledge

News Roundup

OpenBSD Webzine: ISSUE #10

HardenedBSD June 2022 Status Report

OpenBSD has two new C compilers: chibicc and kefir

SSD TRIM in NetBSD HEAD (-current)

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Headlines

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report First Quarter 2022

Installing Nginx on OpenBSD 7.1

News Roundup

Live Webinar: Open-source Virtualization: Getting started with bhyve

• Hosted by Jim Salter and Allan Jude
• Live July 12th at 13:00 ET
• Available on-demand a few days later

Persistent Memory Allocation

Colorize your BSD shell

How to Install cgit With Gitolite and Nginx on FreeBSD 13

EuroBSDCon 2022 (Austria) Program announced

• Come to Austria and learn about the latest happenings in the BSDs
• 2 days of tutorials, and 2 days of 3 concurrent tracks of talks
• Registration is open now. See you there! ***

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Feedback/Questions

• Brad - Drive question
• Carl - Wiring question
• Jon - Jails question

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Headlines

Containerd gains support for launching Linux containers on FreeBSD

• Uses Linux compat and the Linux Jails concept to deploy a full Linux container userland on FreeBSD

OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64

News Roundup

Live Webinar: Open-source Virtualization: Getting started with bhyve

• Hosted by Jim Salter and Allan Jude
• Live July 12th at 13:00 ET
• Available on-demand a few days later

The True Minimalistic Window Manager Does Not Exist

OpenBSD folklore and share/misc/airport

HardenedBSD May 2022 Status Report

DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 out

• Changelog ***

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Feedback/Questions

• Norbert - question
• Paulo - network question

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Headlines

The Birth of Unix

Help requested for three big items for Lumina

News Roundup

FreeBSD 13 on Thinkpad T460s

HardenedBSD January 2022 Status Report

OPNsense 22.1 "Observant Owl" released

Beastie Bits

• The early days of Unix at Bell Labs - Brian Kernighan (LCA 2022 Online)
• BastilleBSD User Survey Smallest desktop of the day with BSD: Raspberry Pi 400
• Reminder BSDCan 2022 - online only
• Joshua Stein Video: Q&A
• DNSSEC Mastery, second edition, creeping out *** ###Tarsnap
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Feedback/Questions

• Alec - Playstation FreeBSD-Linux question
• Nelson - Interesting Interview
• Oscar - Omni OS

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Headlines

Gemini Capsule in a FreeBSD Jail

With the recent release of FreeBSD 13, I wanted to test it out on a spare RaspberryPi 3 that was part of my old Kubernetes cluster.
In particular, FreeBSD Jails have always interested me, although I’ve never used them in practice. Over the years I’ve managed operating system virtualization through Solaris Zones and Docker containers, and Jails seem like and good middle ground between the two - easier to manage than zones and closer to the OS than Docker.
I also want to run my own Gemini capsule locally to use some of the features that my other hosted capsules don’t have (like SCGI/CGI) and setting up a capsule in a Jail is a good way to learn both at the same time.

FreeBSD Quarterly status report 2021Q1

News Roundup

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS)

My new NAS at home is running TrueNAS Core. So far, it has been excellent, however I struggled a bit setting up a NetBSD VM on it. Part of the problem is that a lot of the docs and how-tos I found are stale, and the information in it no longer applies.
TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI :) But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with one caveat (see below).

Interview with Michael Lucas *BSD, Unix, IT and other books author

Michael Lucas is a famous IT book author. Perhaps best know for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Unix book series. He worked as a system administrator for many years and has now become a full-time book writer. Lately, I did a quick Q and A with Michael about his journey as a professional book author and his daily workflow for writing books.
+

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pfSense – WireGuard Returns as Experimental Package

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CGI with Awk on OpenBSD httpd

---

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Feedback/Questionsing

• Adam - system state during upgrade
• paul - BSD grep
• sub - feedback

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Headlines

Comparing sandboxing techniques

I had the opportunity to implement a sandbox and I'd like to write about the differences between the various sandboxing techniques available on three different operating systems: FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD.

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Statement on FreeBSD development processes

In light of the recent commentary on FreeBSD's development practices, members of the Core team would like to issue the following statement.

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Customizing FreeBSD Ports and Packages

A basic intro to building your own packages

---

News Roundup

FVWM(3) and the quest for a comfortable NetBSD desktop

FVWM substantially allows one to build a fully-fledged lightweight desktop environment from scratch, with an almost unparalleled degree of freedom. Although using FVWM does not require any knowledge of programming languages, it is possible to extend it with M4, C, and Perl preprocessing.

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Nginx as a TCP/UDP relay

In this tutorial I will explain how to use Nginx as a TCP or UDP relay as an alternative to Haproxy or Relayd. This mean nginx will be able to accept requests on a port (TCP/UDP) and relay it to another backend without knowing about the content. It also permits to negociates a TLS session with the client and relay to a non-TLS backend. In this example I will explain how to configure Nginx to accept TLS requests to transmit it to my Gemini server Vger, Gemini protocol has TLS as a requirement.

---

HardenedBSD March 2021 Status Report

This month, I worked on finding and fixing the regression that caused kernel panics on our package builders. I think I found the issue: I made it so that the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel just included GENERIC so that we follow FreeBSD's toggling of features. Doing so added QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH to our kernel config. That option is the likely culprit. If the next package build (with the option removed) completes, I will commit the change that removes QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH from the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel.

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Detailed Behaviors of Unix Signal

When Unix is mentioned in this document it means macOS or Linux as they are the mainly used Unix at this moment. When shell is mentioned it means Bash or Zsh. Most demos are written in C for macOS with Apple libc and Linux with glibc.

---

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Feedback/Questions

• andrew - flatpak

• chris - mac and truenas

• robert - some questions

  ---

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Headlines

Routing and Firewalling VLANS with FreeBSD

In this article we are going to look at and integrate two network isolation technologies, VLANs and VNET. VLANs are common place, and if you have done some network management or design then you are likely to have interacted with them. The second are FreeBSDs VNET virtual network stacks, a powerful network stack isolation technology that gives FreeBSD jails super powers.
Ethernet VLAN (standardised by IEEE 802.1Q) are an extension to Ethernet and provide an essential method for scaling network deployments. They are used in all environments to enable reuse of common infrastructure by isolating portions of networks from each other. VLANs allow the reuse of common cables, switches and routers to carry completely different networks. It is common to have data that must be separated from different networks carried on common cables until their VLAN tags are finally stripped at a gateway switch or router.

How to set up FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS

How do I install, set up and configure a FreeBSD 12 jail with VNET on ZFS? How can I create FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with /etc/jail.conf to run OpenVPN, Apache, Wireguard and other Internet-facing services securely on my BSD box?
FreeBSD jail is nothing but operating system-level virtualization that allows partitioning a FreeBSD based Unix server. Such systems have their root user and access rights. Jails can use network subsystem virtualization infrastructure or share an existing network. FreeBSD jails are a powerful way to increase security. Usually, you create jail per services such as an Nginx/Apache webserver with PHP/Perl/Python app, WireGuard/OpeNVPN server, MariaDB/PgSQL server, and more. This page shows how to configure a FreeBSD Jail with vnet and ZFS on FreeBSD 12.x.

News Roundup

pkgsrc-2020Q4 released

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 69th quarterly release
of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available
with more than 24,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more
information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/

FreeBSD ON A Raspberry PI 4 With 4GB of RAM

This is the story of how I managed to get FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, though I think the setup story is pretty similar for those with 2GB and 8GB.1

HardenedBSD December 2020 Status Report

Happy New Year! On this the last day of 2020, I submit December's status report.

Beastie Bits

• Christmas Cards The Unix Way - with pic and troff
• Fast RPI3 upgrade from source (cross compile) *** ###Tarsnap
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Feedback/Questions

• Robert - zfs question

• Neb - AMA episode.md

• Joe - puppet

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Headlines

The Origin of the Shell

CTSS was developed during 1963 and 64. I was at MIT on the computer center staff at that time. After having written dozens of commands for CTSS, I reached the stage where I felt that commands should be usable as building blocks for writing more commands, just like subroutine libraries. Hence, I wrote "RUNCOM", a sort of shell driving the execution of command scripts, with argument substitution. The tool became instantly most popular, as it became possible to go home in the evening while leaving behind long runcoms executing overnight. It was quite neat for boring and repetitive tasks such as renaming, moving, updating, compiling, etc. whole directories of files for system and application maintenance and monitoring.

---

Return to Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs has held the same charm after my last visit that took a few days. This time I'll keep this operating system in an emulator where I can explore into it when I am distracted.

---

News Roundup

Why a new BSD?

This article is to explain some decisions and plans made by the ArisbluBSD team, why we are making our own thing, and what the plan is for the OS. We mainly want to talk about five things: desktop, package management, software availability, custom software, and the future of the OS. We mostly want to explain what the goal of the OS is, and how we plan to expand in the near future. Without further ado, let's explain ArisbluBSD's plan.

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OPNsense 20.7.5 released

We return briefly for a small patch set and plan to pin the 20.1 upgrade path to this particular version to avoid unnecessary stepping stones. We wish you all a healthy Friday. And of course: patch responsibly!

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Midnight BSD 2.0 Release Status

We identified some issues with the 2.0 ISOs slated for release with the ZFS bootloader not working.
Until this issue is resolved, we are unable to build release ISOs. We've left the old ones up as they work fine for anyone using UFS.

---

HardenedBSD November 2020 Status Report

We're getting close to the end of November. My wife and I have plans this weekend, so I thought I'd take the time to write November's status report today.

---

Beastie Bits

• [rga: ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc.](https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/)
• [exa - A modern replacement for ls](https://the.exa.website/)
• [The myriad meanings of pwd in Unix systems](https://qmacro.org/2020/11/08/the-meaning-of-pwd-in-unix-systems/)

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Feedback/Questions

• Karl - Camera Help
• Alejandro - domain registrar
• Johnny - thoughts on 372 ***
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Headlines

A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch

Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's been a faithful alley for a long, long time. I've never had a problem with patch until I embarked on the 2.11BSD restoration project. In going over the logs very carefully, I've discovered a bug that bites this effort twice. It's quite interesting to use 27 year old patches to find this bug while restoring a 29 year old OS...

Sandbox for FreeBSD

A sandbox is a software which artificially limits access to the specific resources on the target according to the assigned policy. The sandbox installs hooks to the kernel syscalls and other sub-systems in order to interrupt the events triggered by the application. From the application point of view, application working as usual, but when it wants to access, for instance, /dev/kmem the sandbox software decides against the assigned sandbox scheme whether to grant or deny access.
In our case, the sandbox is a kernel module which uses MAC (Mandatory Access Control) Framework developed by the TrustedBSD team. All necessary hooks were introduced to the FreeBSD kernel.

• Source Code
• Documentation

News Roundup

Changing from one dataset to another within a jail

ZFS has a the ability to share itself within a jail. That gives the jail some autonomy, and I like that.
I’ve written briefly about that, specifically for iocage. More recently, I started using a zfs snapshot for caching clearing.
The purpose of this post is to document the existing configuration of the production FreshPorts webserver and outline the plan on how to modify it for more zfs-snapshot-based cache clearing.

You don’t need tmux or screen for ZFS

Back in January I mentioned how to add redundancy to a ZFS pool by adding a mirrored drive. Someone with a private account on Twitter asked me why FreeBSD—and NetBSD!—doesn’t ship with a tmux or screen equivilent in base in order to daemonise the process and let them run in the background.
ZFS already does this for its internal commands.

HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations

This last month has largely been a quiet one. I've restarted work on porting five-year-old work from the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) project into HardenedBSD. Chiefly, I've started forward-porting the libc and rtld bits from the CPI project and now need to look at llvm compiler/linker enhancements. We need to be able to apply SafeStack to shared objects, not just application binaries. This forward-porting work I'm doing is to support that effort.
The infrastructure has settled and is now churning normally and happily. We're still working out bandwidth issues. We hope to have a new fiber line ran by the end of September.
As part of this status report, I'm issuing a formal call for donations. I'm aiming for $4,000.00 USD for a newer self-hosted Gitea server. I hope to purchase the new server before the end of 2020.

Important parts of Unix's history happened before readline support was common

Unix and things that run on Unix have been around for a long time now. In particular, GNU Readline was first released in 1989 (as was Bash), which is long enough ago for it (or lookalikes) to become pretty much pervasive, especially in Unix shells. Today it's easy to think of readline support as something that's always been there. But of course this isn't the case. Unix in its modern form dates from V7 in 1979 and 4.2 BSD in 1983, so a lot of Unix was developed before readline and was to some degree shaped by the lack of it.

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Feedback/Questions

• Mason - mailserver
• casey - freebsd on decline
• denis - postgres ***
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Headlines

FreeBSD Quarterly Report

This report will be covering FreeBSD related projects between April and June, and covers a diverse set of topics ranging from kernel updates over userland and ports, as well to third-party work.
Some highlights picked with the roll of a d100 include, but are not limited to, the ability to forcibly unmounting UFS when the underlying media becomes inaccessible, added preliminary support for Bluetooth Low Energy, a introduction to the FreeBSD Office Hours, and a repository of software collections called potluck to be installed with the pot utility, as well as many many more things.
As a little treat, readers can also get a rare report from the quarterly team.
Finally, on behalf of the quarterly team, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation and thank you to salvadore@, who decided to take down his shingle. His contributions not just the quarterly reports themselves, but also the surrounding tooling to many-fold ease the work, are immeasurable.

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Traditional Unix Toolchains

Older Unix systems tend to be fairly uniform in how they handle the so-called 'toolchain' for creating binaries. This blog will give a quick overview of the toolchain pipeline for Unix systems that follow the V7 tradition (which evolved along with Unix, a topic for a separate blog maybe).
Unix is a pipeline based system, either physically or logically. One program takes input, process the data and produces output. The input and output have some interface they obey, usually text-based. The Unix toolchain is no different.

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News Roundup

Bastille Day 2020 : v0.7 released

This release matures the project from 0.6.x -> 0.7.x. Continued testing and bug fixes are proving Bastille capable for a range of use-cases. New (experimental) features are examples of innovation from community contribution and feedback. Thank you.

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Beastie Bits

• Finding meltdown on DragonFly
• NetBSD Server Outage ***

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

• Vincent - Gnome 3 question
• Malcolm - ZFS question
• Hassan - Video question
  • For those that watch on youtube, don’t forget to subscribe to our new YouTube Channel if you want updates when we post them on YT

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

Rethinking OpenBSD Security

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.
I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.

FreeBSD 2020 Q1 Quarterly report

Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.

News Roundup

The Notion of Progress and User Interfaces

One trait of modern Western culture is the notion of progress. A view claiming, at large, everything is getting better and better.

How should we think about progress? Both in general and regarding technology?

Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses

I was recently pointed at a web page on Thomas E. Dickeys site talking about NetBSD curses. It seems initially that the page was intended to be a pointer to some differences between ncurses and NetBSD curses and does appear to start off in this vein but it seems that the author has lost the plot as the document evolved and the tail end of it seems to be devolving into some sort of slanging match. I don't want to go through Mr. Dickey's document point by point, that would be tedious but I would like to pick out some of the things that I believe to be the most egregious. Please note that even though I am a NetBSD developer, the opinions below are my own and not the NetBSD projects.

Making Unix a little more Plan9-like

I’m not really interested in defending anything. I tried out plan9port and liked it, but I have to live in Unix land. Here’s how I set that up.

A Warning

The suckless community, and some of the plan9 communities, are dominated by jackasses. I hope that’s strong enough wording to impress the severity. Don’t go into IRC for help. Stay off the suckless email list. The software is great, the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned, but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.

Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE

This month's Linux distro review isn't of a Linux distribution at all—instead, we're taking a look at FreeBSD, the original gangster of free Unix-like operating systems.

The first FreeBSD release was in 1993, but the operating system's roots go further back—considerably further back. FreeBSD started out in 1992 as a patch-release of Bill and Lynne Jolitz's 386BSD—but 386BSD itself came from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD itself goes back to 1977—for reference, Linus Torvalds was only seven years old then.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge something up front—our distro reviews include the desktop experience, and that is very much not FreeBSD's strength. FreeBSD is far, far better suited to running as a headless server than as a desktop! We're going to get a full desktop running on it anyway, because according to Lee Hutchinson, I hate myself—and also because we can't imagine readers wouldn't care about it.

FreeBSD does not provide a good desktop experience, to say the least. But if you're hankering for a BSD-based desktop, don't worry—we're already planning a followup review of GhostBSD, a desktop-focused BSD distribution.

Beastie Bits

• Wifi renewal restarted
• HAMMER2 and a quick start for DragonFly
• Engineering NetBSD 9.0
• Antivirus Protection using OPNsense Plugins
• BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC

BSDNow is going Independent

• After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. LinuxAcademy is now under new leadership, and we understand that cutbacks needed to be made, and that BSD is not their core product. That does not mean your favourite BSD podcast is going away, we will continue and we expect things will not look much different. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.

Feedback/Questions

• Jordyn - ZFS Pool Problem

  • debug - https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/raw/master/episodes/347/feedback/dbg.txt

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Headlines

OpenBSD has to be a BSD Unix and you couldn't duplicate it with Linux

OpenBSD has a well deserved reputation for putting security and a clean system (for code, documentation, and so on) first, and everything else second. OpenBSD is of course based on BSD (it's right there in the name) and descends from FreeBSD NetBSD (you can read the history here). But one of the questions you could ask about it is whether it had to be that way, and in particular if you could build something like OpenBSD on top of Linux. I believe that the answer is no.

Linux and the *BSDs have a significantly different model of what they are. BSDs have a 'base system' that provides an integrated and fully operational core Unix, covering the kernel, C library and compiler, and the normal Unix user level programs, all maintained and distributed by the particular BSD. Linux is not a single unit this way, and instead all of the component parts are maintained separately and assembled in various ways by various Linux distributions. Both approaches have their advantages, but one big one for the BSD approach is that it enables global changes.

Making global changes is an important part of what makes OpenBSD's approach to improving security, code maintenance, and so on work. Because it directly maintains everything as a unit, OpenBSD is in a position to introduce new C library or kernel APIs (or change them) and then immediately update all sorts of things in user level programs to use the new API. This takes a certain amount of work, of course, but it's possible to do it at all. And because OpenBSD can do this sort of ambitious global change, it does.

This goes further than just the ability to make global changes, because in theory you can patch in global changes on top of a bunch of separate upstream projects. Because OpenBSD is in control of its entire base system, it's not forced to try to reconcile different development priorities or integrate clashing changes. OpenBSD can decide (and has) that only certain sorts of changes will be accepted into its system at all, no matter what people want. If there are features or entire programs that don't fit into what OpenBSD will accept, they just lose out.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report 2019Q4

Here is the last quarterly status report for 2019. As you might remember from last report, we changed our timeline: now we collect reports the last month of each quarter and we edit and publish the full document the next month. Thus, we cover here the period October 2019 - December 2019.

If you thought that the FreeBSD community was less active in the Christmas' quarter you will be glad to be proven wrong: a quick glance at the summary will be sufficient to see that much work has been done in the last months.

Have a nice read!

News Roundup

OPNsense 19.7.9 released

As 20.1 nears we will be making adjustments to the scope of the release with an announcement following shortly.

For now, this update brings you a GeoIP database configuration page for aliases which is now required due to upstream database policy changes and a number of prominent third-party software updates we are happy to see included.

Archives are important to retain and pass on knowledge

Archives are important. When they are public and available for searching, it retains and passes on knowledge. It saves vast amounts of time.

HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes

I've been working today on deploying Tor Onion Service v3 nodes across our build infrastructure. I'm happy to announce that the public portion of this is now completed. Below you will find various onion service hostnames and their match to our infrastructure.

• hardenedbsd.org: lkiw4tmbudbr43hbyhm636sarn73vuow77czzohdbqdpjuq3vdzvenyd.onion
• ci-01.nyi.hardenedbsd.org: qspcqclhifj3tcpojsbwoxgwanlo2wakti2ia4wozxjcldkxmw2yj3yd.onion
• ci-03.md.hardenedbsd.org: eqvnohly4tjrkpwatdhgptftabpesofirnhz5kq7jzn4zd6ernpvnpqd.onion
• ci-04.md.hardenedbsd.org: rfqabq2w65nhdkukeqwf27r7h5xfh53h3uns6n74feeyl7s5fbjxczqd.onion
• git-01.md.hardenedbsd.org: dacxzjk3kq5mmepbdd3ai2ifynlzxsnpl2cnkfhridqfywihrfftapid.onion

Beastie Bits

• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (MIT Course)
• An old Unix Ad
• OpenBSD syscall call-from verification
• OpenBSD/arm64 on Pinebook
• Reminder: First Southern Ontario BSD user group meeting, February 11th (this coming Tuesday!) 18:30 at Boston Pizza on Upper James st, Hamilton.
• NYCBUG: March meeting will feature Dr. Paul Vixie and his new talk “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes”
• 8th Meetup of the Stockholm BUG: March 3 at 18:00
• Polish BSD User Group meets on Feb 11, 2020 at 18:15

Feedback/Questions

• Sean - ZFS and Creation Dates
• Christopher - Help on ZFS Disaster Recovery
• Mike - Encrypted ZFS Send

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Headlines

FreeBSD third quarterly status report for 2019

This quarter the reports team has been more active than usual thanks to a better organization: calls for reports and reminders have been sent regularly, reports have been reviewed and merged quickly (I would like to thank debdrup@ in particular for his reviewing work).

Efficiency could still be improved with the help of our community. In particular, the quarterly team has found that many reports have arrived in the last days before the deadline or even after. I would like to invite the community to follow the guidelines below that can help us sending out the reports sooner.

Starting from next quarter, all quarterly status reports will be prepared the last month of the quarter itself, instead of the first month after the quarter's end. This means that deadlines for submitting reports will be the 1st of January, April, July and October.

Next quarter will then be a short one, covering the months of November and December only and the report will probably be out in mid January.

OpenBSD on Sparc64

OpenBSD, huh? Yes, I usually write about FreeBSD and that’s in fact what I tried installing on the machine first. But I ran into problems with it very early on (never even reached single user mode) and put it aside for later. Since I powered up the SunFire again last month, I needed an OS now and chose OpenBSD for the simple reason that I have it available.

First I wanted to call this article simply “OpenBSD on SPARC” – but that would have been misleading since OpenBSD used to support 32-bit SPARC processors, too. The platform was just put to rest after the 5.9 release.

Version 6.0 was the last release of OpenBSD that came on CD-ROM. When I bought it, I thought that I’d never use the SPARC CD. But here was the chance! While it is an obsolete release, it comes with the cryptographic signatures to verify the next release. So the plan is to start at 6.0 as I can trust the original CDs and then update to the latest release. This will also be an opportunity to recap on some of the things that changed over the various versions.

News Roundup

ZoL repo move to OpenZFS

Because it will contain the ZFS source code for both Linux and FreeBSD, we will rename the "ZFSonLinux" code repository to "OpenZFS". Specifically, the repo at http://github.com/ZFSonLinux/zfs will be moved to the OpenZFS organization, at http://github.com/OpenZFS/zfs.

The next major release of ZFS for Linux and FreeBSD will be "OpenZFS 2.0", and is expected to ship in 2020.

Mcclure111 Sun Thread

A long time ago— like 15 years ago— I worked at Sun Microsystems. The company was nearly dead at the time (it died a couple years later) because they didn't make anything that anyone wanted to buy anymore. So they had a lot of strange ideas about how they'd make their comeback.

GEOM NOP

Sometimes while testing file systems or applications you want to simulate some errors on the disk level. The first time I heard about this need was from Baptiste Daroussin during his presentation at AsiaBSDCon 2016. He mentioned how they had built a test lab with it. The same need was recently discussed during the PGCon 2019, to test a PostgreSQL instance. If you are FreeBSD user, I have great news for you: there is a GEOM provider which allows you to simulate a failing device.

GNOP allows us to configure transparent providers from existing ones. The first interesting option of it is that we can slice the device into smaller pieces, thanks to the ‘offset option’ and ‘stripsesize’. This allows us to observe how the data on the disk is changing. Let’s assume that we want to observe the changes in the GPT table when the GPT flags are added or removed (for example the bootme flags which are described here). We can use dd every time and analyze it using absolute values from the disks.

Keeping NetBSD up-to-date with pkg_comp 2.0

This is a tutorial to guide you through the shiny new pkg_comp 2.0 on NetBSD.

Goals: to use pkg_comp 2.0 to build a binary repository of all the packages you are interested in; to keep the repository fresh on a daily basis; and to use that repository with pkgin to maintain your NetBSD system up-to-date and secure.

This tutorial is specifically targeted at NetBSD but should work on other platforms with some small changes. Expect, at the very least, a macOS-specific tutorial as soon as I create a pkg_comp standalone installer for that platform.

Beastie Bits

• DragonFly - Radeon Improvements
• NomadBSD review
• Spongebob OpenBSD Security Comic
• Forth : The Early Years
• LCM+L PDP-7 booting and running UNIX Version 0

Feedback/Questions

• Chris - Ctrl-T
  • Improved Ctrl+t that shows kernel backtrace
• Brian - Migrating NexentaStore to FreeBSD/FreeNAS
• Avery - How to get involved

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Headlines

FreeBSD 12.1

• Some of the highlights:

  • BearSSL has been imported to the base system.
  • The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, compiler-rt utilities and libc++ have been updated to version 8.0.1.
  • OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1d.
  • Several userland utility updates.

• For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.1R/relnotes.html

A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984.

Nobody needs to be told that UNIX is popular today. In this article we will show you a little of where it was yesterday and over the past decade. And, without meaning in the least to minimise the incredible contributions of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, we will bring to light many of the others who worked on early versions, and try to show where some of the key ideas came from, and how they got into the UNIX of today.

Our title says we are talking about UNIX evolution. Evolution means different things to different people. We use the term loosely, to describe the change over time among the many different UNIX variants in use both inside and outside Bell Labs. Ideas, code, and useful programs seem to have made their way back and forth - like mutant genes - among all the many UNIXes living in the phone company over the decade in question.

Part One looks at some of the major components of the current UNIX system - the text formatting tools, the compilers and program development tools, and so on. Most of the work described in Part One took place at Research'', a part of Bell Laboratories (now AT&T Bell Laboratories, then as nowthe Labs''), and the ancestral home of UNIX. In planned (but not written) later parts, we would have looked at some of the myriad versions of UNIX - there are far more than one might suspect. This includes a look at Columbus and USG and at Berkeley Unix. You'll begin to get a glimpse inside the history of the major streams of development of the system during that time.

News Roundup

My FreeBSD Development Setup

I do my FreeBSD development using git, tmux, vim and cscope.

I keep a FreeBSD fork on my github, I have forked https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd to https://github.com/adventureloop/freebsd

OPNsense 19.7.6 released

As we are experiencing the Suricata community first hand in Amsterdam we thought to release this version a bit earlier than planned. Included is the latest Suricata 5.0.0 release in the development version. That means later this November we will releasing version 5 to the production version as we finish up tweaking the integration and maybe pick up 5.0.1 as it becomes available.

LDAP TLS connectivity is now integrated into the system trust store, which ensures that all required root and intermediate certificates will be seen by the connection setup when they have been added to the authorities section. The same is true for trusting self-signed certificates. On top of this, IPsec now supports public key authentication as contributed by Pascal Mathis.

HardenedBSD November 2019 Status Report.

We at HardenedBSD have a lot of news to share. On 05 Nov 2019, Oliver Pinter resigned amicably from the project. All of us at HardenedBSD owe Oliver our gratitude and appreciation. This humble project, named by Oliver, was born out of his thesis work and the collaboration with Shawn Webb. Oliver created the HardenedBSD repo on GitHub in April 2013. The HardenedBSD Foundation was formed five years later to carry on this great work.

DNSSEC enabled in default unbound(8) configuration.

DNSSEC validation has been enabled in the default unbound.conf(5) in -current. The relevant commits were from Job Snijders (job@)

How to Install Shopware with NGINX and Let's Encrypt on FreeBSD 12

Shopware is the next generation of open source e-commerce software. Based on bleeding edge technologies like Symfony 3, Doctrine2 and Zend Framework Shopware comes as the perfect platform for your next e-commerce project. This tutorial will walk you through the Shopware Community Edition (CE) installation on FreeBSD 12 system by using NGINX as a web server.

• Requirements

Make sure your system meets the following minimum requirements:

• Linux-based operating system with NGINX or Apache 2.x (with mod_rewrite) web server installed.
• PHP 5.6.4 or higher with ctype, gd, curl, dom, hash, iconv, zip, json, mbstring, openssl, session, simplexml, xml, zlib, fileinfo, and pdo/mysql extensions. PHP 7.1 or above is strongly recommended.
• MySQL 5.5.0 or higher.
• Possibility to set up cron jobs.
• Minimum 4 GB available hard disk space.
• IonCube Loader version 5.0.0 or higher (optional).

How to Compile RainbowCrack on OpenBSD

Project RainbowCrack was originally Zhu Shuanglei's implementation, it's not clear to me if the project is still just his or if it's even been maintained for a while. His page seems to have been last updated in August 2007.

The Project RainbowCrack web page now has just binaries for Windows XP and Linux, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Earlier versions were available as source code. The version 1.2 source code does not compile on OpenBSD, and in my experience it doesn't compile on Linux, either. It seems to date from 2004 at the earliest, and I think it makes some version-2.4 assumptions about Linux kernel headers.

• You might also look at ophcrack, a more modern tool, although it seems to be focused on cracking Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 password hashes

Feedback/Questions

• Reese - Amature radio info
• Chris - VPN
• Malcolm - NAT

• 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 ***