68: Just the Essentials

JT Pennington — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 08:00:00 -0500

Coming up this week, we'll be talking with Michael Lucas about his newest BSD book, "FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials." It's got lots of great information about the disk subsystems, GEOM, filesystems, you name it. We've also got the usual round of news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

OpenBSD vs FreeBSD security features

From the author of both the OpenBSD and FreeBSD secure gateway articles we've featured in the past comes a new entry about security
The article goes through a list of all the security features enabled (and disabled) by default in both FreeBSD and OpenBSD
It covers a wide range of topics, including: memory protection, randomization, encryption, privilege separation, Capsicum, securelevels, MAC, Jails and chroots, network stack hardening, firewall features and much more
This is definitely one of the most in-depth and complete articles we've seen in a while - the author seems to have done his homework
If you're looking to secure any sort of BSD box, this post has some very detailed explanations of different exploit mitigation techniques - be sure to read the whole thing
There are also some good comments on DaemonForums and lobste.rs that you may want to read ***

The password? You changed it, right?

Peter Hansteen has a new blog post up, detailing some weird SSH bruteforcing he's seen recently
He apparently reads his auth logs when he gets bored at an airport
This new bruteforcing attempt seems to be targetting D-Link devices, as evidenced by the three usernames the bots try to use
More than 700 IPs have tried to get into Peter's BSD boxes using these names in combination with weak passwords
Lots more details, including the lists of passwords and IPs, can be found in the full article
If you're using a BSD router, things like this can be easily prevented with PF or fail2ban (and you probably don't have a "d-link" user anyway) ***

Get started with FreeBSD, an intro for Linux users

Another new BSD article on a mainstream technology news site - seems we're getting popular
This article is written for Linux users who may be considering switching over to BSD and wondering what it's all about
It details installing FreeBSD 9.3 and getting a basic system setup, while touching on ports and packages, and explaining some terminology along the way
"Among the legions of Linux users and admins, there seems to be a sort of passive curiosity about FreeBSD and other BSDs. Like commuters on a packed train, they gaze out at a less crowded, vaguely mysterious train heading in a slightly different direction and wonder what traveling on that train might be like" **

Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwlucas@michaelwlucas.com / @mwlauthor

FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials

News Roundup

OpenSMTPD status update

The OpenSMTPD guys, particularly Gilles, have posted an update on what they've been up to lately
As of 5.6, it's become the default MTA in OpenBSD, and sendmail will be totally gone in 5.7
Email is a much more tricky protocol than you might imagine, and the post goes through some of the weirdness and problems they've had to deal with
There's also another post that goes into detail on their upcoming filtering API - a feature many have requested
The API is still being developed, but you can test it out now if you know what you're doing - full details in the article
OpenSMTPD also has portable versions in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, so check it out ***

OpenCrypto changes in FreeBSD

A little while back, we talked to John-Mark Gurney about updating FreeBSD's OpenCrypto framework, specifically for IPSEC
Some of that work has just landed in the -CURRENT branch, and the commit has a bit of details
The ICM and GCM modes of AES were added, and both include support for AESNI
There's a new port - "nist-kat" - that can be used to test the new modes of operation
Some things were fixed in the process as well, including an issue that would leak timing info and result in the ability to forge messages
Code was also borrowed from both OpenBSD and NetBSD to make this possible ***

First thoughts on OpenBSD's httpd

Here we have a blog post from a user of OpenBSD's new homegrown web server that made its debut in 5.6
The author loves that it has proper privilege separation, a very simple config syntax and that it always runs in a chroot
He also mentions dynamic content hosting with FastCGI, and provides an example of how to set it up
Be sure to check our interview with Reyk about the new httpd if you're curious on how it got started
Also, if you're running the version that came with 5.6, there's a huge patch you can apply to get a lot of the features and fixes from -current without waiting for 5.7 ***

Steam on PCBSD

One of the most common questions people who want to use BSD as a desktop ask us is "can I run games?" or "can I use steam?"
Steam through the Linux emulation layer (in FreeBSD) may be possible soon, but it's already possible to use it with WINE
This video shows how to get Steam set up on PCBSD using the Windows version
There are also some instructions in the video description to look over
A second video details getting streaming set up ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Storage Essentials”