26: Port Authority

JT Pennington — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

On today's show we have an interview with Joe Marcus Clark, one of the original portmgr members in FreeBSD, and one of the key GNOME porters. Keeping along with that topic, we have a FreeBSD ports tutorial for you as well. The latest news and answers to your BSD questions, right here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Tailoring OpenBSD for an old, strange computer

The author of this article had an OmniBook 800CT, which comes with a pop-out mouse, black and white display, 32MB of RAM and a 133MHz CPU
Obviously he had to install some kind of BSD on it!
This post goes through all his efforts of trimming down OpenBSD to work on such a limited device
He goes through the trial and error of "compile, break it, rebuild, try again"
After cutting a lot out from the kernel, saving a precious megabyte here and there, he eventually gets it working ***

pkgsrcCon and BSDCan

pkgsrccon is "a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure"
This year it will be on June 21st and 22nd
The schedule is still being worked out, so if you want to give a talk, submit it
BSDCan's schedule was also announced
We'll be having presentations about ARM on NetBSD and FreeBSD, PF on OpenBSD, Capsicum and casperd, ASLR in FreeBSD, more about migrating from Linux to BSD, FreeNAS stuff and much more
Kris' presentation was accepted!
Tons of topics, look forward to the recorded versions of all of them hopefully! ***

Two factor auth with pushover

A new write-up from our friend Ted Unangst
Pushover is "a web hook to smartphone push notification gateway" - you sent a POST to a web server and it sends a code to your phone
His post goes through the steps of editing your login.conf and setting it all up to work
Now you can get a two factor authenticated login for ssh! ***

The status of GNOME 3 on BSD

It's no secret that the GNOME team is a Linux-obsessed bunch, almost to the point of being hostile towards other operating systems
OpenBSD keeps their GNOME 3 ports up to date very well, and Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work on that and how easy it is to use
This post goes through the process of how simple it is to get GNOME 3 set up on OpenBSD and even includes a screencast
A few recent posts from some GNOME developers show that they're finally working with the BSD guys to improve portability
The FreeBSD and OpenBSD teams are working together to bring the latest GNOME to all of us - it's a beautiful thing
This goes right along with our interview today! ***

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

The life and daily activities of portmgr, GNOME 3, Tinderbox, portlint, various topics

Tutorial

The FreeBSD Ports Collection

News Roundup

DragonflyBSD 3.8 goals and 3.6.1 release

The Dragonfly team is thinking about what should be in version 3.8
On their bug tracker, it lists some of the things they'd like to get done before then
In the meantime, 3.6.1 was released with lots of bugfixes ***

NYCBSDCon 2014 wrap-up piece

We've got a nice wrap-up titled "NYCBSDCon 2014 Heats Up a Cold Winter Weekend"
The author also interviews GNN about the conference
There's even a little "beginner introduction" to BSD segment
Includes a mention of the recently-launched journal and lots of pictures from the event ***

FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis

GNN in yet another story - he gave a presentation at the NYLUG about the differences between FreeBSD and Linux
He mentions the history of BSD, the patch set and 386BSD, the lawsuit, philosophy and license differences, a complete system vs "distros," development models, BSD-only features and technologies, how to become a committer, overall comparisons, different hats and roles, the different bsds and their goals and actual code differences
Serves as a good introduction you can show your Linux friends ***

PCBSD CFT and weekly digest

Upgrade tools have gotten a major rewrite
You have to help test it, there is no choice! Read more here
How dare Kris be "unimpressed with" freebsd-update and pkgng!?
Various updates and fixes ***

Feedback/Questions

24: The Cluster & The Cloud

JT Pennington — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

This week on BSD Now... a wrap-up from NYCBSDCon! We'll also be talking to Luke Marsden, CEO of HybridCluster, about how they use BSD at large. Following that, our tutorial will show you how to securely share files with SFTP in a chroot. The latest news and answers to your questions, of course it's BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10 as a firewall

Back in 2012, the author of this site wrote an article stating you should avoid FreeBSD 9 for a firewall and use OpenBSD instead
Now, with the release of 10.0, he's apparently changed his mind and switched back over
It mentions the SMP version of pf, general performance advantages and more modern features
The author is a regular listener of BSD Now, hi Joe! ***

Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

Really long blog post, based on a BSDCan presentation, about fighting spam with OpenBSD
Peter Hansteen, author of the book of PF, goes through how he uses OpenBSD's spamd and other security features to combat spam and malware
He goes through his experiences with content filtering and disappointment with a certain proprietary vendor
Not totally BSD-specific, lots of people can enjoy the article - lots of virus history as well ***

FreeBSD ASLR patches submitted

So far, FreeBSD hasn't had Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR is a nice security feature, see wikipedia for more information
With a giant patch from Shawn Webb, it might be integrated into a future version (after a vicious review from the security team of course)
We might have Shawn on the show to talk about it, but he's also giving a presentation at BSDCan about his work with ASLR ***

Old-style pkg_ tools retired

At last the old pkg_add tools are being retired in FreeBSD
pkgng is a huge improvement, and now portmgr@ thinks it's time to cut the cord on the legacy toolset
Ports aren't going away, and probably never will, but for binary package fans and new users that are used to things like apt, pkgng is the way to go
All pkg_ tools will be considered unsupported on September 1, 2014 - even on older branches ***

Interview - Luke Marsden - luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

BSD at HybridCluster

Tutorial

Filesharing with chrooted SFTP

News Roundup

FreeBSD on OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud computing project
It consists of "a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API."
Until now, there wasn't a good way to run a full BSD instance on OpenStack
With a project in the vein of Colin Percival's AWS startup scripts, now that's no longer the case! ***

FOSDEM BSD videos

This year's FOSDEM had seven BSD presentations
The videos are slowly being uploaded for your viewing pleasure
Not all of the BSD ones are up yet, but by the time you're watching this they might be!
Check this directory for most of 'em
The BSD dev room was full, lots of interest in what's going on from the other communities ***

The FreeBSD challenge finally returns!

Due to prodding from a certain guy of a certain podcast, the "FreeBSD Challenge" series has finally resumed
Our friend from the Linux foundation picks up with day 11 and day 12 on his switching from Linux journey
This time he outlines the upgrade process of going from 9 to 10, using freebsd-update
There's also some notes about different options for upgrading ports and some extra tips ***

PCBSD weekly digest

After the big 10.0 release, the PCBSD crew is focusing on bug fixes for a while
During their "fine tuning phase" users are encouraged to submit any and all bugs via the trac system
Warden got some fixes and the package manager got some updates as well
Huge size reduction in PBI format ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Switching To Bsd”

26: Port Authority

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

24: The Cluster & The Cloud

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Luke Marsden - luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions