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Faces of FreeBSD continues

• Our first one details Shteryana Shopova, the local organizer for EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sophia
• Gives some information about how she got into BSD
• "I installed FreeBSD on my laptop, alongside the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn't booted the other two operating systems in months. So I wiped them out."
• She wrote bsnmpd and extended it with the help of a grant from the FreeBSD Foundation
• We've also got one for Kevin Martin
• Started off with a pinball website, ended up learning about FreeBSD from an ISP and starting his own hosting company
• "FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community." ***

OpenPF?

• A blog post over at the Dragonfly digest
• What if we had some cross platform development of OpenBSD's firewall?
• Similar to portable OpenSSH or OpenZFS, there could be a centrally-developed version with compatibility glue
• Right now FreeBSD 9's pf is old, FreeBSD 10's pf is old (but has the best performance of any implementation due to custom patches), NetBSD's pf is old (but they're working on a fork) and Dragonfly's pf is old
• Further complicated by the fact that PF itself doesn’t have a version number, since it was designed to just be ‘the pf that came with OpenBSD 5.4’
• Not likely to happen any time soon, but it's good food for thought ***

Year of BSD on the server

• A good blog post about switching servers from Linux to BSD
• 2014 is going to be the year of a lot of switching, due to FreeBSD 10's amazing new features
• This author was particularly taken with pkgng and the more coherent layout of BSD systems
• Similarly, there was also a recent reddit thread, "Why did you choose BSD over Linux?"
• Both are excellent reads for Linux users that are thinking about making the switch, send 'em to your friends ***

Getting to know your portmgr

• This time in the series they interview Bryan Drewery, a fairly new addition to the team
• He started maintaining portupgrade and portmaster, and eventually ended up on the ports management team
• Believe it or not, his wife actually had a lot to do with him getting into FreeBSD full-time
• Lots of fun trivia and background about him
• Speaking of portmgr, our interview for today is... ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

The future of FreeBSD's binary packages, ports' features, various topics

News Roundup

pfSense december hang out

• Interview/presentation from pfSense developer Chris Buechler with an accompanying blog post
• "This is the first in what will be a monthly recurring series. Each month, we’ll have a how to tutorial on a specific topic or area of the system, and updates on development and other happenings with the project. We have several topics in mind, but also welcome community suggestions on topics"
• Speaking of pfSense, they recently opened an online store
• We're planning on having a pfSense episode next month! ***

BSDMag December issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine gets a new release for December
• Topics include CARP on FreeBSD, more BSD programming, "unix basics for security professionals," some kernel introductions, using OpenBSD as a transparent proxy with relayd, GhostBSD overview and some stuff about SSH ***

OpenBSD gets tmpfs

• In addition to the recently-added FUSE support, OpenBSD now has tmpfs
• To get more testing, it was enabled by default in -current
• Should make its way into 5.5 if everything goes according to plan
• Enables lots of new possibilities, like our ccache and tmpfs guide ***

PCBSD weekly digests

• Catching up with all the work going on in PCBSD land..
• 10.0-RC2 is now available
• The big pkgng 1.2 problems seem to have been worked out ***

Feedback/Questions

• Remy writes in
• Jason writes in
• Rob writes in
• John writes in
• Stuart writes in ***

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More faces of FreeBSD

• Another installment of the FoF series
• This time they talk with Reid Linnemann who works at Spectra Logic
• Gives a history of all the different jobs he's done, all the programming languages he knows
• Mentions how he first learned about FreeBSD, actually pretty similar to Kris' story
• "I used the system to build and install ports, and explored, getting actively involved in the mailing lists and forums, studying, passing on my own limited knowledge to those who could benefit from it. I pursued my career in the open source software world, learning the differences in BSD and GNU licensing and the fragmented nature of Linux distributions, realizing the FreeBSD community was more mature and well distributed about industry, education, and research. Everything steered me towards working with and on FreeBSD."
• Now works on FreeBSD as his day job
• The second one covers Brooks Davis
• FreeBSD committer since 2001 and core team member from 2006 through 2012
• He's helped drive our transition from a GNU toolchain to a more modern LLVM-based toolchain
• "One of the reasons I like FreeBSD is the community involved in the process of building a principled, technically-advanced operating system platform. Not only do we produce a great product, but we have fun doing it."
• Lots more in the show notes ***

We cannot trust Intel and Via’s chip-based crypto

• We woke up to see FreeBSD on the front page of The Register, Ars Technica, Slashdot and Hacker News for their strong stance on security and respecting privacy
• At the EuroBSDCon dev summit, there was some discussion about removing support for hardware-based random number generators.
• FreeBSD's /dev/random got some updates and, for 10.0, will no longer allow the use of Intel or VIA's hardware RNGs as the sole point of entropy
• "It will still be possible to access hardware random number generators, that is, RDRAND, Padlock etc., directly by inline assembly or by using OpenSSL from userland, if required, but we cannot trust them any more" ***

OpenSMTPD 5.4.1 released

• The OpenBSD developers came out with major a new version
• Improved config syntax (please check your smtpd.conf before upgrading)
• Adds support for TLS Perfect Forward Secrecy and custom CA certificate
• MTA, Queue and SMTP server improvements
• SNI support confirmed for the next version
• Check the show notes for the full list of changes, pretty huge release
• Watch Episode 3 for an interview we did with the developers ***

More getting to know your portmgr

• The portmgr secretary, Thomas Abthorpe, interviews... himself!
• Joined as -secretary in March 2010, upgraded to full member in March 2011
• His inspiration for using BSD is "I wanted to run a webserver, and I wanted something free. I was going to use something linux, then met up with a former prof from university, and shared my story with him. He told me FreeBSD was the way to go."
• Mentions how he loves that anyone can contribute and watch it "go live"
• The second one covers Baptiste Daroussin
• The reason for his nick, bapt, is "Baptiste is too long to type"
• There's even a video of bapt joining the team! ***

Interview - Santa Clause - josh@ixsystems.com / @freenasteam

FreeNAS 9.2.0

Note: we originally scheduled the interview to be with Josh Paetzel, but Santa showed up instead.

Tutorial

FreeNAS walkthrough

News Roundup

Introducing configinit

• CloudInit is "a system originally written for Ubuntu which performs configuration of a system at boot-time based on user-data provided via EC2"
• Wasn't ideal for FreeBSD since it requires python and is designed around the concept of configuring a system by running commands (rather than editing configuration files)
• Colin Percival came up with configinit, a FreeBSD alternative
• Alongside his new "firstboot-pkgs" port, it can spin up a webserver in 120 seconds from "launch" of the EC2 instance
• Check the show notes for full blog post ***

OpenSSH support for Ed25519 and bcrypt keys

• New Ed25519 key support (hostkeys and user identities) using the public domain ed25519 reference code
• SSH private keys were encrypted with a symmetric key that's just an MD5 of their password
• Now they'll be using bcrypt by default
• We'll get more into this in next week's interview ***

The FreeBSD challenge

• A member of the Linux foundation blogs about using FreeBSD
• Goes through all the beginner steps, has to "unlearn" some of his Linux ways
• Only a few posts as of this time, but it's a continuing series that may be helpful for switchers ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• GNOME3, cinnamon and mate desktops are in the installer
• Compat layer updated to CentOS 6, enables newest Skype
• Looking for people to test printers and hplip
• Continuing work on grub, but the ability to switch between bootloaders is back ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in
• Jason writes in
• John writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Alexy writes in ***