BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Tor”

336: Archived Knowledge

JT Pennington — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 08:00:00 -0500

Linux couldn’t duplicate OpenBSD, FreeBSD Q4 status report, OPNsense 19.7.9 released, archives retain and pass on knowledge, HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes, and more.

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

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

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Episode 252: Goes to 11.2 | BSD Now 252

JT Pennington — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 03:00:00 -0400

FreeBSD 11.2 has been released, setting up an MTA behind Tor, running pfsense on DigitalOcean, one year of C, using OpenBGPD to announce VM networks, the power to serve, and a BSDCan trip report.

##Headlines
FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE Available

FreeBSD 11.2 was released today (June 27th) and is ready for download
Highlights:

OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.5p1.
OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.2o.
The clang, llvm, lldb and compiler-rt utilities have been updated to version 6.0.0.
The libarchive(3) library has been updated to version 3.3.2.
The libxo(3) library has been updated to version 0.9.0.
Major Device driver updates to:

cxgbe(4) – Chelsio 10/25/40/50/100 gigabit NICs – version 1.16.63.0 supports T4, T5 and T6
ixl(4) – Intel 10 and 40 gigabit NICs, updated to version 1.9.9-k
ng_pppoe(4) – driver has been updated to add support for user-supplied Host-Uniq tags

New drivers:
+ drm-next-kmod driver supporting integrated Intel graphics with the i915 driver.

mlx5io(4) – a new IOCTL interface for Mellanox ConnectX-4 and ConnectX-5 10/20/25/40/50/56/100 gigabit NICs
ocs_fc(4) – Emulex Fibre Channel 8/16/32 gigabit Host Adapters
smartpqi(4) – HP Gen10 Smart Array Controller Family

The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to support RFC5424-compliant messages when rotating system logs
The diskinfo(8) utility has been updated to include two new flags, -s which displays the disk identity (usually the serial number), and -p which displays the physical path to the disk in a storage controller.
The top(1) utility has been updated to allow filtering on multiple user names when the -U flag is used
The umount(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -N, which is used to forcefully unmount an NFS mounted filesystem.
The ps(1) utility has been updated to display if a process is running with capsicum(4) capability mode, indicated by the flag ‘C’
The service(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -j, which is used to interact with services running within a jail(8). The argument to -j can be either the name or numeric jail ID
The mlx5tool(8) utility has been added, which is used to manage Connect-X 4 and Connect-X 5 devices supported by mlx5io(4).
The ifconfig(8) utility has been updated to include a random option, which when used with the ether option, generates a random MAC address for an interface.
The dwatch(1) utility has been introduced
The efibootmgr(8) utility has been added, which is used to manipulate the EFI boot manager.
The etdump(1) utility has been added, which is used to view El Torito boot catalog information.
The linux(4) ABI compatibility layer has been updated to include support for musl consumers.
The fdescfs(5) filesystem has been updated to support Linux®-specific fd(4) /dev/fd and /proc/self/fd behavior
Support for virtio_console(4) has been added to bhyve(4).
The length of GELI passphrases entered when booting a system with encrypted disks is now hidden by default. See the configuration options in geli(8) to restore the previous behavior.

In addition to the usual CD/DVD ISO, Memstick, and prebuilt VM images (raw, qcow2, vhd, and vmdk), FreeBSD 11.2 is also available on:
- Amazon EC2
- Google Compute Engine
- Hashicorp/Atlas Vagrant
- Microsoft Azure
In addition to a generic ARM64 image for devices like the Pine64 and Raspberry Pi 3, specific images are provided for:
- GUMSTIX
- BANANAPI
- BEAGLEBONE
- CUBIEBOARD
- CUBIEBOARD2
- CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
- RASPBERRY PI 2
- PANDABOARD
- WANDBOARD
Full Release Notes

###Setting up an MTA Behind Tor

This article will document how to set up OpenSMTPD behind a fully Tor-ified network. Given that Tor’s DNS resolver code does not support MX record lookups, care must be taken for setting up an MTA behind a fully Tor-ified network. OpenSMTPD was chosen because it was easy to modify to force it to fall back to A/AAAA lookups when MX lookups failed with a DNS result code of NOTIMP (4).

Note that as of 08 May 2018, the OpenSMTPD project is planning a configuration file language change. The proposed change has not landed. Once it does, this article will be updated to reflect both the old language and new.

The reason to use an MTA behing a fully Tor-ified network is to be able to support email behind the .onion TLD. This setup will only allow us to send and receive email to and from the .onion TLD.

Requirements:
A fully Tor-ified network
HardenedBSD as the operating system
A server (or VM) running HardenedBSD behind the fully Tor-ified network.
/usr/ports is empty
Or is already pre-populated with the HardenedBSD Ports tree
Why use HardenedBSD? We get all the features of FreeBSD (ZFS, DTrace, bhyve, and jails) with enhanced security through exploit mitigations and system hardening. Tor has a very unique threat landscape and using a hardened ecosystem is crucial to mitigating risks and threats.

Also note that this article reflects how I’ve set up my MTA. I’ve included configuration files verbatim. You will need to replace the text that refers to my .onion domain with yours.

On 08 May 2018, HardenedBSD’s version of OpenSMTPD just gained support for running an MTA behind Tor. The package repositories do not yet contain the patch, so we will compile OpenSMTPD from ports.

Steps
Installation
Generating Cryptographic Key Material
Tor Configuration
OpenSMTPD Configuration
Dovecot Configuration
Testing your configuration
Optional: Webmail Access

iXsystems
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/06/21/strings-attached-knowing-when-and-when-not-to-accept-vc-funding/#30f9f18f46ec
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/self-2018-recap/

###Running pfSense on a Digital Ocean Droplet

I love pfSense (and opnSense, no discrimination here). I use it for just about anything, from homelab to large scale deployments and I’ll give out on any fancy <enter brand name fw appliance here> for a pfSense setup on a decent hardware.

I also love DigitalOcean, if you ever used them, you know why, if you never did, head over and try, you’ll understand why.
<shameless plug: head over to JupiterBroadcasting.com, the best technology content out there, they have coupon codes to get you started with DO>.

Unfortunately, while DO offers tremendous amount of useful distros and applications, pfSense isn’t one of them. But, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and here’s how to get pfSense up and running on DO so you can have it as the gatekeeper to your kingdom.

Start by creating a FreeBSD droplet, choose your droplet size (for modest setups, I find the 5$ to be quite awesome):

There are many useful things you can do with pfSense on your droplet, from OpenVPN, squid, firewalling, fancy routing, url filtering, dns black listing and much much more.

One note though, before we wrap up:

You have two ways to initiate the initial setup wizard of the web-configurator:
Spin up another droplet, log into it and browse your way to the INTERNAL ip address of the internal NIC you’ve set up. This is the long and tedious way, but it’s also somewhat safer as it eliminates the small window of risk the second method poses.
or
Once your WAN address is all setup, your pfSense is ready to accept https connection to start the initial web-configurator setup.
Thing is, there’s a default, well known set of credential to this initial wizard (admin:pfsense), so, there is a slight window of opportunity that someone can swoop in (assuming they know you’ve installed pfsense + your wan IP address + the exact time window between setting up the WAN interface and completing the wizard) and do <enter scary thing here>.

I leave it up to you which of the path you’d like to go, either way, once you’re done with the web-configurator wizard, you’ll have a shiny new pfSense installation at your disposal running on your favorite VPS.

Hopefully this was helpful for someone, I hope to get a similar post soon detailing how to get FreeNAS up and running on DO.
Many thanks to Tubsta and his blogpost as well as to Allan Jude, Kris Moore and Benedict Reuschling for their AWESOME and inspiring podcast, BSD Now.

##News Roundup
One year of C

It’s now nearly a year that I started writing non-trivial amounts of C code again (the first sokol_gfx.h commit was on the 14-Jul-2017), so I guess it’s time for a little retrospective.

In the beginning it was more of an experiment: I wanted to see how much I would miss some of the more useful C++ features (for instance namespaces, function overloading, ‘simple’ template code for containers, …), and whether it is possible to write non-trivial codebases in C without going mad.

Here are all the github projects I wrote in C:

sokol: a slowly growing set of platform-abstraction headers
sokol-samples - examples for Sokol
chips - 8-bit chip emulators
chips-test - tests and examples for the chip- emulators, including some complete home computer emulators (minus sound)

All in all these are around 32k lines of code (not including 3rd party code like flextGL and HandmadeMath). I think I wrote more C code in the recent 10 months than any other language.

So one thing seems to be clear: yes, it’s possible to write a non-trivial amount of C code that does something useful without going mad (and it’s even quite enjoyable I might add).

Here’s a few things I learned:
Pick the right language for a problem
C is a perfect match for WebAssembly
C99 is a huge improvement over C89
The dangers of pointers and explicit memory management are overrated
Less Boilerplate Code
Less Language Feature ‘Anxiety’
Conclusion

All in all my “C experiment” is a success. For a lot of problems, picking C over C++ may be the better choice since C is a much simpler language (btw, did you notice how there are hardly any books, conferences or discussions about C despite being a fairly popular language? Apart from the neverending bickering about undefined behaviour from the compiler people of course ;) There simply isn’t much to discuss about a language that can be learned in an afternoon.

I don’t like some of the old POSIX or Linux APIs as much as the next guy (e.g. ioctl(), the socket API or some of the CRT library functions), but that’s an API design problem, not a language problem. It’s possible to build friendly C APIs with a bit of care and thinking, especially when C99’s designated initialization can be used (C++ should really make sure that the full C99 language can be used from inside C++ instead of continuing to wander off into an entirely different direction).

###Configuring OpenBGPD to announce VM’s virtual networks

We use BGP quite heavily at work, and even though I’m not interacting with that directly, it feels like it’s something very useful to learn at least on some basic level. The most effective and fun way of learning technology is finding some practical application, so I decided to see if it could help to improve networking management for my Virtual Machines.

My setup is fairly simple: I have a host that runs bhyve VMs and I have a desktop system from where I ssh to VMs, both hosts run FreeBSD. All VMs are connected to each other through a bridge and have a common network 10.0.1/24. The point of this exercise is to be able to ssh to these VMs from desktop without adding static routes and without adding vmhost’s external interfaces to the VMs bridge.

I’ve installed openbgpd on both hosts and configured it like this:

vmhost: /usr/local/etc/bgpd.conf
AS 65002
router-id 192.168.87.48
fib-update no
network 10.0.1.1/24
neighbor 192.168.87.41 {
    descr "desktop"
    remote-as 65001
}

Here, router-id is set vmhost’s IP address in my home network (192.168.87/24), fib-update no is set to forbid routing table update, which I initially set for testing, but keeping it as vmhost is not supposed to learn new routes from desktop anyway. network announces my VMs network and neighbor describes my desktop box. Now the desktop box:

desktop: /usr/local/etc/bgpd.conf
AS 65001
router-id 192.168.87.41
fib-update yes
neighbor 192.168.87.48 {                                                                                                                                                                                           
        descr "vmhost"                                                                                                                                                                                             
        remote-as 65002                                                                                                                                                                                            
}

It’s pretty similar to vmhost’s bgpd.conf, but no networks are announced here, and fib-update is set to yes because the whole point is to get VM routes added. Both hosts have to have the openbgpd service enabled:

/etc/rc.conf.local
openbgpdenable="YES"

Conclusion

As mentioned already, similar result could be achieved without using BGP by using either static routes or bridging interfaces differently, but the purpose of this exercise is to get some basic hands-on experience with BGP. Right now I’m looking into extending my setup in order to try more complex BGP schema. I’m thinking about adding some software switches in front of my VMs or maybe adding a second VM host (if budget allows). You’re welcome to comment if you have some ideas how to extend this setup for educational purposes in the context of BGP and networking.

As a side note, I really like openbgpd so far. Its configuration file format is clean and simple, documentation is good, error and information messages are clear, and CLI has intuitive syntax.

Digital Ocean

###The Power to Serve

All people within the IT Industry should known where the slogan “The Power To Serve” is exposed every day to millions of people. But maybe too much wishful thinking from me. But without “The Power To Serve” the IT industry today will look totally different. Companies like Apple, Juniper, Cisco and even WatsApp would not exist in their current form.

I provide IT architecture services to make your complex IT landscape manageable and I love to solve complex security and privacy challenges. Complex challenges where people, processes and systems are heavily interrelated. For this knowledge intensive work I often run some IT experiments. When you run experiments nowadays you have a choice:

Rent some cloud based services or
DIY (Do IT Yourself) on premise

Running your own developments experiments on your own infrastructure can be time consuming. However smart automation saves time and money. And by creating your own CICD pipeline (Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment) you stay on top of core infrastructure developments. Even hands-on. Knowing how things work from a technical ‘hands-on’ perspective gives great advantages when it comes to solving complex business IT problems. Making a clear distinguish between a business problem or IT problem is useless. Business and IT problems are related. Sometimes causal related, but more often indirect by one or more non linear feedback loops. Almost every business depends of IT systems. Bad IT means often that your customers will leave your business.

One of the things of FeeBSD for me is still FreeBSD Jails. In 2015 I had luck to attend to a presentation of the legendary hacker Poul-Henning Kamp . Check his BSD bio to see what he has done for the FreeBSD community! FreeBSD jails are a light way to visualize your system without enormous overhead. Now that the development on Linux for LXD/LXD is more mature (lxd is the next generation system container manager on linux) there is finally again an alternative for a nice chroot Linux based system again. At least when you do not need the overhead and management complexity that comes with Kubernetes or Docker.

FreeBSD means control and quality for me. When there is an open source package I need, I want to install it from source. It gives me more control and always some extra knowledge on how things work. So no precompiled binaries for me on my BSD systems! If a build on FreeBSD fails most of the time this is an alert regarding the quality for me.

If a complex OSS package is not available at all in the FreeBSD ports collection there should be a reason for it. Is it really that nobody on the world wants to do this dirty maintenance work? Or is there another cause that running this software on FreeBSD is not possible…There are currently 32644 ports available on FreeBSD. So all the major programming language, databases and middleware libraries are present. The FreeBSD organization is a mature organization and since this is one of the largest OSS projects worldwide learning how this community manages to keep innovation and creates and maintains software is a good entrance for learning how complex IT systems function.

FreeBSD is of course BSD licensed. It worked well! There is still a strong community with lots of strong commercial sponsors around the community. Of course: sometimes a GPL license makes more sense. So beside FreeBSD I also love GPL software and the rationale and principles behind it. So my hope is that maybe within the next 25 years the hard battle between BSD vs GPL churches will be more rationalized and normalized. Principles are good, but as all good IT architects know: With good principles alone you never make a good system. So use requirements and not only principles to figure out what OSS license fits your project. There is never one size fits all.

June 19, 1993 was the day the official name for FreeBSD was agreed upon. So this blog is written to celebrate 25th anniversary of FreeBSD.

###Dave’s BSDCan trip report

So far, only one person has bothered to send in a BSDCan trip report. Our warmest thanks to Dave for doing his part.

Hello guys! During the last show, you asked for a trip report regarding BSDCan 2018.
This was my first time attending BSDCan. However, BSDCan was my second BSD conference overall, my first being vBSDCon 2017 in Reston, VA.
Arriving early Thursday evening and after checking into the hotel, I headed straight to the Red Lion for the registration, picked up my badge and swag and then headed towards the ‘DMS’ building for the newbies talk. The only thing is, I couldn’t find the DMS building! Fortunately I found a BSDCan veteran who was heading there themselves. My only suggestion is to include the full building name and address on the BSDCan web site, or even a link to Google maps to help out with the navigation. The on-campus street maps didn’t have ‘DMS’ written on them anywhere. But I digress.
Once I made it to the newbies talk hosted by Dan Langille and Michael W Lucas, it highlighted places to meet, an overview of what is happening, details about the ‘BSDCan widow/widower tours’ and most importantly, the 6-2-1 rule!
The following morning, we were present with tea/coffee, muffins and other goodies to help prepare us for the day ahead.
The first talk, “The Tragedy of systemd” covered what systemd did wrong and how the BSD community could improve on the ideas behind it.
With the exception of Michael W Lucas, SSH Key Management and Kirk McKusick, The Evolution of FreeBSD Governance talk, I pretty much attended all of the ZFS talks including the lunchtime BoF session, hosted by Allan Jude. Coming from FreeNAS and being involved in the community, this is where my main interest and motivation lies. Since then I have been able to share some of that information with the FreeNAS community forums and chatroom.
I also attended the “Speculating about Intel” lunchtime BoF session hosted by Theo de Raddt, which proved to be “interesting”.
The talks ended with the wrap up session with a few words from Dan, covering the record attendance and made very clear there “was no cabal”. Followed by the the handing over of Groff the BSD goat to a new owner, thank you’s from the FreeBSD Foundation to various community committers and maintainers, finally ending with the charity auction, where a things like a Canadian $20 bill sold for $40, a signed FreeBSD Foundation shirt originally worn by George Neville-Neil, a lost laptop charger, Michael’s used gelato spoon, various books, the last cookie and more importantly, the second to last cookie!
After the auction, we all headed to the Red Lion for food and drinks, sponsored by iXsystems.
I would like to thank the BSDCan organizers, speakers and sponsors for a great conference. I will certainly hope to attend next year!
Regards,
Dave (aka m0nkey)

Thanks to Dave for sharing his experiences with us and our viewers

##Beastie Bits

Tarsnap

##Feedback/Questions

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

88: Below the Clouds

JT Pennington — Wed, 06 May 2015 08:00:00 -0400

This time on the show, we'll be talking with Ed Schouten about CloudABI. It's a new application binary interface with a strong focus on isolation and restricted capabilities. As always, all this week's BSD news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report

The FreeBSD team has posted a report of the activities that went on between January and March of this year
As usual, it's broken down into separate reports from the various teams in the project (ports, kernel, virtualization, etc)
The ports team continuing battling the flood of PRs, closing quite a lot of them and boasting nearly 7,000 commits this quarter
The core team and cluster admins dealt with the accidental deletion of the Bugzilla database, and are making plans for an improved backup strategy within the project going forward
FreeBSD's future release support model was also finalized and published in February, which should be a big improvement for both users and the release team
Some topics are still being discussed internally, mainly MFCing ZFS ARC responsiveness patches to the 10 branch and deciding whether to maintain or abandon C89 support in the kernel code
Lots of activity is happening in bhyve, some of which we've covered recently, and a number of improvements were made this quarter
Clang, LLVM and LLDB have been updated to the 3.6.0 branch in -CURRENT
Work to get FreeBSD booting natively on the POWER8 CPU architecture is also still in progress, but it does boot in KVM for the time being
The project to replace forth in the bootloader with lua is in its final stages, and can be used on x86 already
ASLR work is still being done by the HardenedBSD guys, and their next aim is position-independent executable
The report also touches on multipath TCP support, the new automounter, opaque ifnet, pkgng updates, secureboot (which should be in 10.2-RELEASE), GNOME and KDE on FreeBSD, PCIe hotplugging, nested kernel support and more
Also of note: work is going on to make ARM a Tier 1 platform in the upcoming 11.0-RELEASE (and support for more ARM boards is still being added, including ARM64) ***

OpenBSD 5.7 released

OpenBSD has formally released another new version, complete with the giant changelog we've come to expect
In the hardware department, 5.7 features many driver improvements and fixes, as well as support for some new things: USB 3.0 controllers, newer Intel and Atheros wireless cards and some additional 10gbit NICs
If you're using one of the Soekris boards, there's even a new driver to manipulate the GPIO and LEDs on them - this has some fun possibilities
Some new security improvements include: SipHash being sprinkled in some areas to protect hashing functions, big W^X improvements in the kernel space, static PIE on all architectures, deterministic "random" functions being replaced with strong randomness, and support for remote logging over TLS
The entire source tree has also been audited to use reallocarray, which unintentionally saved OpenBSD's libc from being vulnerable to earlier attacks affecting other BSDs' implementations
Being that it's OpenBSD, a number of things have also been removed from the base system: procfs, sendmail, SSLv3 support and loadable kernel modules are all gone now (not to mention the continuing massacre of dead code in LibreSSL)
Some people seem to be surprised about the removal of loadable modules, but almost nothing utilized them in OpenBSD, so it was really just removing old code that no one used anymore - very different from FreeBSD or Linux in this regard, where kernel modules are used pretty heavily
BIND and nginx have been taken out, so you'll need to either use the versions in ports or switch to Unbound and the in-base HTTP daemon
Speaking of httpd, it's gotten a number of new features, and has had time to grow and mature since its initial debut - if you've been considering trying it out, now would be a great time to do so
This release also includes the latest OpenSSH (with stronger fingerprint types and host key rotation), OpenNTPD (with the HTTPS constraints feature), OpenSMTPD, LibreSSL and mandoc
Check the errata page for any post-release fixes, and the upgrade guide for specific instructions on updating from 5.6
Groundwork has also been laid for some major SMP scalability improvements - look forward to those in future releases
There's a song and artwork to go along with the release as always, and CDs should be arriving within a few days - we'll show some pictures next week
Consider picking one up to support the project (and it's the only way to get puffy stickers)
For those of you paying close attention, the banner image for this release just might remind you of a certain special episode of BSD Now... ***

Tor-BSD diversity project

We've talked about Tor on the show a few times, and specifically about getting more of the network on BSD (Linux has an overwhelming majority right now)
A new initiative has started to do just that, called the Tor-BSD diversity project
"Monocultures in nature are dangerous, as vulnerabilities are held in common across a broad spectrum. Diversity means single vulnerabilities are less likely to harm the entire ecosystem. [...] A single kernel vulnerability in GNU/Linux that impacting Tor relays could be devastating. We want to see a stronger Tor network, and we believe one critical ingredient for that is operating system diversity."
In addition to encouraging people to put up more relays, they're also continuing work on porting the Tor Browser Bundle to BSD, so more desktop users can have easy access to online privacy
There's an additional progress report for that part specifically, and it looks like most of the work is done now
Engaging the broader BSD community about Tor and fixing up the official documentation are also both on their todo list
If you've been considering running a node to help out, there's always our handy tutorial on getting set up ***

PC-BSD 10.1.2-RC1 released

If you want a sneak peek at the upcoming PC-BSD 10.1.2, the first release candidate is now available to grab
This quarterly update includes a number of new features, improvements and even some additional utilities
PersonaCrypt is one of them - it's a new tool for easily migrating encrypted home directories between systems
A new "stealth mode" option allows for a one-time login, using a blank home directory that gets wiped after use
Similarly, a new "Tor mode" allows for easy tunneling of all your traffic through the Tor network
IPFW is now the default firewall, offering improved VIMAGE capabilities
The life preserver backup tool now allows for bare-metal restores via the install CD
ISC's NTP daemon has been replaced with OpenNTPD, and OpenSSL has been replaced with LibreSSL
It also includes the latest Lumina desktop, and there's another post dedicated to that
Binary packages have also been updated to fresh versions from the ports tree
More details, including upgrade instructions, can be found in the linked blog post ***

Interview - Ed Schouten - ed@freebsd.org / @edschouten

CloudABI

News Roundup

Open Household Router Contraption

This article introduces OpenHRC, the "Open Household Router Contraption"
In short, it's a set of bootstrapping scripts to turn a vanilla OpenBSD install into a feature-rich gateway device
It also makes use of Ansible playbooks for configuration, allowing for a more "mass deployment" type of setup
Everything is configured via a simple text file, and you end up with a local NTP server, DHCP server, firewall (obviously) and local caching DNS resolver - it even does DNSSEC validation
All the code is open source and on Github, so you can read through what's actually being changed and put in place
There's also a video guide to the entire process, if you're more of a visual person ***

OPNsense 15.1.10 released

Speaking of BSD routers, if you're looking for a "prebuilt and ready to go" option, OPNsense has just released a new version
15.1.10 drops some of the legacy patches they inherited from pfSense, aiming to stay closer to the mainline FreeBSD source code
Going along with this theme, they've redone how they do ports, and are now kept totally in sync with the regular ports tree
Their binary packages are now signed using the fingerprint-style method, various GUI menus have been rewritten and a number of other bugs were fixed
NanoBSD-based images are also available now, so you can try it out on hardware with constrained resources as well
Version 15.1.10.1 was released shortly thereafter, including a hotfix for VLANs ***

IBM Workpad Z50 and NetBSD

Before the infamous netbook fad came and went, IBM had a handheld PDA device that looked pretty much the same
Back in 1999, they released the Workpad Z50 with Windows CE, sporting a 131MHz MIPS CPU, 16MB of RAM and a 640x480 display
You can probably tell where this is going... the article is about installing NetBSD it
"What prevents me from taking my pristine Workpad z50 to the local electronics recycling facility is NetBSD. With a little effort it is possible to install recent versions of NetBSD on the Workpad z50 and even have XWindows running"
The author got pkgsrc up and running on it too, and cleverly used distcc to offload the compiling jobs to something a bit more modern
He's also got a couple videos of the bootup process and running Xorg (neither of which we'd call "speedy" by any stretch of the imagination) ***

FreeBSD from the trenches

The FreeBSD foundation has a new blog post up in their "from the trenches" series, detailing FreeBSD in some real-world use cases
In this installment, Glen Barber talks about how he sets up all his laptops with ZFS and GELI
While the installer allows for an automatic ZFS layout, Glen notes that it's not a one-size-fits-all thing, and goes through doing everything manually
Each command is explained, and he walks you through the process of doing an encrypted installation on your root zpool ***

Broadwell in DragonFly

DragonFlyBSD has officially won the race to get an Intel Broadwell graphics driver
Their i915 driver has been brought up to speed with Linux 3.14's, adding not only Broadwell support, but many other bugfixes for other cards too
It's planned for commit to the main tree very soon, but you can test it out with a git branch for the time being ***

Feedback/Questions

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How did you guess ***

81: Puffy in a Box

JT Pennington — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 08:00:00 -0400

We're back from AsiaBSDCon! This week on the show, we'll be talking to Lawrence Teo about how Calyptix uses OpenBSD in their line of commercial routers. They're getting BSD in the hands of Windows admins who don't even realize it. We also have all this week's news and answer to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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Using OpenBGPD to distribute pf table updates

For those not familiar, OpenBGPD is a daemon for the Border Gateway Protocol - a way for routers on the internet to discover and exchange routes to different addresses
This post, inspired by a talk about using BGP to distribute spam lists, details how to use the protocol to distribute some other useful lists and information
It begins with "One of the challenges faced when managing our OpenBSD firewalls is the distribution of IPs to pf tables without manually modifying /etc/pf.conf on each of the firewalls every time. This task becomes quite tedious, specifically when you want to distribute different types of changes to different systems (eg administrative IPs to a firewall and spammer IPs to a mail server), or if you need to distribute real time blacklists to a large number of systems."
If you manage a lot of BSD boxes, this might be an interesting alternative to some of the other ways to distribute configuration files
OpenBGPD is part of the OpenBSD base system, but there's also an unofficial port to FreeBSD and a "work in progress" pkgsrc version ***

Mounting removable media with autofs

The FreeBSD foundation has a new article in the "FreeBSD from the trenches" series, this time about the sponsored autofs tool
It's written by one of the autofs developers, and he details his work on creating and using the utility
"The purpose of autofs(5) is to mount filesystems on access, in a way that's transparent to the application. In other words, filesystems get mounted when they are first accessed, and then unmounted after some time passes."
He talks about all the components that need to work together for smooth operation, how to configure it and how to enable it by default for removable drives
It ends with a real-world example of something we're all probably familiar with: plugging in USB drives and watching the magic happen
There's also some more advanced bonus material on GEOM classes and all the more technical details ***

The Tor Browser on BSD

The Tor Project has provided a "browser bundle" for a long time, which is more or less a repackaged Firefox with many security and privacy-related settings preconfigured and some patches applied to the source
Just tunneling your browser through a transparent Tor proxy is not safe enough - many things can lead to passive fingerprinting or, even worse, anonymity being completely lost
It has, however, only been released for Windows, OS X and Linux - no BSD version
"[...] we are pushing back against an emerging monoculture, and this is always a healthy thing. Monocultures are dangerous for many reasons, most importantly to themselves."
Some work has begun to get a working port on BSD going, and this document tells about the process and how it all got started
If you've got porting skills, or are interested in online privacy, any help would be appreciated of course (see the post for details on getting involved) ***

OpenSSH 6.8 released

Continuing their "tick tock" pattern of releases alternating between new features and bugfixes, the OpenSSH team has released 6.8 - it's a major upgrade, focused on new features (we like those better of course)
Most of the codebase has gone through refactoring, making it easier for regression tests and improving the general readability
This release adds support for SHA256-hashed, base64-encoded host key fingerprints, as well as making that the default - a big step up from the previously hex-encoded MD5 fingerprints
Experimental host key rotation support also makes it debut, allowing for easy in-place upgrading of old keys to newer (or refreshed) keys
You can now require multiple, different public keys to be verified for a user to authenticate (useful if you're extra paranoid or don't have 100% confidence in any single key type)
The native version will be in OpenBSD 5.7, and the portable version should hit a ports tree near you soon
Speaking of the portable version, it now has a configure option to build without OpenSSL or LibreSSL, but doing so limits you to Ed25519 key types and ChaCha20 and AES-CTR ciphers ***

NetBSD at AsiaBSDCon

The NetBSD guys already have a wrap-up of the recent event, complete with all the pictures and weird devices you'd expect
It covers their BoF session, the six NetBSD-related presentations and finally their "work in progress" session
There was a grand total of 34 different NetBSD gadgets on display at the event ***

Interview - Lawrence Teo - lteo@openbsd.org / @lteo

OpenBSD at Calyptix

News Roundup

HardenedBSD introduces Integriforce

A little bit of background on this one first: NetBSD has something called veriexec, used for checking file integrity at the kernel level
By doing it at the kernel level, similar to securelevels, it offers some level of protection even when the root account is compromised
HardenedBSD has introduced a similar mechanism into their "secadm" utility
You can list binaries in the config file that you want to be protected from changes, then specify whether those can't be run at all, or if they just print a warning
They're looking for some more extensive testing of this new feature ***

More s2k15 hackathon reports

A couple more Australian hackathon reports have poured in since the last time
The first comes from Jonathan Gray, who's done a lot of graphics-related work in OpenBSD recently
He worked on getting some newer "Southern Islands" and "Graphics Core Next" AMD GPUs working, as well as some OpenGL and DRM-related things
Also on his todo list was to continue hitting various parts of the tree with American Fuzzy Lop, which ended up fixing a few crashes in mandoc
Ted Unangst also sent in a report to detail what he hacked on at the event
With a strong focus on improving SMP scalability, he tackled the virtual memory layer
His goal was to speed up some syscalls that are used heavily during code compilation, much of which will probably end up in 5.8
All the trip reports are much more detailed than our short summaries, so give them a read if you're interested in all the technicalities ***

DragonFly 4.0.4 and IPFW3

DragonFly BSD has put out a small point release to the 4.x branch, 4.0.4
It includes a minor list of fixes, some of which include a HAMMER FS history fix, removing the no-longer-needed "new xorg" and "with kms" variables and a few LAGG fixes
There was also a bug in the installer that prevented the rescue image from being installed correctly, which also gets fixed in this version
Shortly after it was released, their new IPFW2 firewall was added to the tree and subsequently renamed to IPFW3 (since it's technically the third revision) ***

NetBSD gets Raspberry Pi 2 support

NetBSD has announced initial support for the second revision of the ever-popular Raspberry Pi board
There are -current snapshots available for download, and multiprocessor support is also on the way
The NetBSD wiki page about the Raspberry Pi also has some more information and an installation guide
The usual Hacker News discussion on the subject
If anyone has one of these little boards, let us know - maybe write up a blog post about your experience with BSD on it ***

OpenIKED as a VPN gateway

In our first discussion segment, we talked about a few different ways to tunnel your traffic
While we've done full tutorials on things like SSH tunnels, OpenVPN and Tor, we haven't talked a whole lot about OpenBSD's IPSEC suite
This article should help fill that gap - it walks you through the complete IKED setup
From creating the public key infrastructure to configuring the firewall to configuring both the VPN server and client, this guide's got it all ***

Feedback/Questions

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79: Just Add QEMU

JT Pennington — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 08:00:00 -0500

Coming up this time on the show, we'll be talking to Sean Bruno. He's been using poudriere and QEMU to cross compile binary packages, and has some interesting stories to tell about it. We've also got answers to viewer-submitted questions and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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AsiaBSDCon 2015 schedule

Almost immediately after we finished recording an episode last week, the 2015 AsiaBSDCon schedule went up
This year's conference will be between 12-15 March at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan
The first and second days are for tutorials, as well as the developer summit and vendor summit
Days four and five are the main event with the presentations, which Kris and Allan both made the cut for once again
Not counting the ones that have yet to be revealed (as of the day we're recording this), there will be thirty-six different talks in all - four BSD-neutral, four NetBSD, six OpenBSD and twenty-two FreeBSD
Summaries of all the presentations are on the timetable page if you scroll down a bit ***

FreeBSD foundation updates and more

The FreeBSD foundation has posted a number of things this week, the first of which is their February 2015 status update
It provides some updates on the funded projects, including PCI express hotplugging and FreeBSD on the POWER8 platform
There's a FOSDEM recap and another update of their fundraising goal for 2015
They also have two new blog posts: a trip report from SCALE13x and a featured "FreeBSD in the trenches" article about how a small typo caused a lot of ZFS chaos in the cluster
"Then panic ensued. The machine didn't panic -- I did." ***

OpenBSD improves browser security

No matter what OS you run on your desktop, the most likely entry point for an exploit these days is almost certainly the web browser
Ted Unangst writes in to the OpenBSD misc list to introduce a new project he's working on, simply titled "improving browser security"
He gives some background on the W^X memory protection in the base system, but also mentions that some applications in ports don't adhere to it
For it to be enforced globally instead of just recommended, at least one browser (or specifically, one JIT engine) needs to be fixed to use it
"A system that is 'all W^X except where it's not' is the same as a system that's not W^X. We've worked hard to provide a secure foundation for programs; we'd like to see them take advantage of it."
The work is being supported by the OpenBSD foundation, and we'll keep you updated on this undertaking as more news about it is released
There's also some discussion on Hacker News and Undeadly about it ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Tokyo

The Japanese NetBSD users group has once again invaded a conference, this time in Tokyo
There's even a spreadsheet of all the different platforms they were showing off at the booth (mostly ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Landisk this time around)
If you just can't get enough strange devices running BSD, check the mailing list post for lots of pictures
Their next target is, as you might guess, AsiaBSDCon 2015 - maybe we'll run into them ***

Interview - Sean Bruno - sbruno@freebsd.org / @franknbeans

Cross-compiling packages with poudriere and QEMU

News Roundup

The Crypto Bone

The Crypto Bone is a new device that's aimed at making encryption and secure communications easier and more accessible
Under the hood, it's actually just a Beaglebone board, running stock OpenBSD with a few extra packages
It includes a web interface for configuring keys and secure tunnels
The source code is freely available for anyone interested in hacking on it (or auditing the crypto), and there's a technical overview of how everything works on their site
If you don't want to teach your mom how to use PGP, buy her one of these(?) ***

BSD in the 2015 Google Summer of Code

For those who don't know, GSoC is a way for students to get paid to work on a coding project for an open source organization
Good news: both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted for the 2015 event
FreeBSD has a wiki page of ideas for people to work on
OpenBSD also has an ideas page where you can see some of the initial things that might be interesting
If you're a student looking to get involved with BSD development, this might be a great opportunity to even get paid to do it
Who knows, you may even end up on the show if you work on a cool project
GSoC will be accepting idea proposals starting March 16th, so you have some time to think about what you'd like to hack on ***

pfSense 2.3 roadmap

The pfSense team has posted a new blog entry, detailing some of their plans for future versions
PPTP will finally be deprecated, PHP will be updated to 5.6 and other packages will also get updated to newer versions
PBIs are scheduled to be replaced with native pkgng packages
Version 3.0, something coming much later, will be a major rewrite that gets rid of PHP entirely
Their ultimate goal is for pfSense to be a package you can install atop of a regular FreeBSD install, rather than a repackaged distribution ***

PCBSD 10.1.2 security features

PCBSD 10.1.2 will include a number of cool security features, some of which are detailed in a new blog post
A new "personacrypt" utility is introduced, which allows for easy encryption and management of external drives for your home directory
Going along with this, it also has a "stealth mode" that allows for one-time temporary home directories (but it doesn't self-destruct, don't worry)
The LibreSSL integration also continues, and now packages will be built with it by default
If you're using the Life Preserver utility for backups, it will encrypt the remote copy of your files in the next update
They've also been working on introducing some new options to enable tunneling your traffic through Tor
There will now be a fully-transparent proxy option that utilizes the switch to IPFW we mentioned last week
A small disclaimer: remember that many things can expose your true IP when using Tor, so use this option at your own risk if you require full anonymity
Look forward to Kris wearing a Tor shirt in future episodes ***

Feedback/Questions

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76: Time for a Change

JT Pennington — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 08:00:00 -0500

This week, we'll be talking to Henning Brauer about OpenNTPD and its recently revived portable version. After that, we'll be discussing different ways to securely tunnel your traffic: specifically OpenVPN, IPSEC, SSH and Tor. All that and the latest news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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Strange timer bug in FreeBSD 11

Peter Wemm wrote in to the FreeBSD -CURRENT mailing list with an interesting observation
Running the latest development code in the infrastructure, the clock would stop keeping time after 24 days of uptime
This meant things like cron and sleep would break, TCP/IP wouldn't time out or resend packets, a lot of things would break
A workaround until it was fixed was to reboot every 24 days, but this is BSD we're talking about - uptime is our game
An initial proposal was adding a CFLAG to the build options which makes makes signed arithmetic wrap
Peter disagreed and gave some background, offering a different patch to fix the issue and detect it early if it happens again
Ultimately, the problem was traced back to an issue with a recent clang import
It only affected -CURRENT, not -RELEASE or -STABLE, but was definitely a bizarre bug to track down ***

An OpenBSD mail server

There's been a recent influx of blog posts about building a BSD mail server for some reason
In this fancy series of posts, the author sets up OpenSMTPD in its native OpenBSD home, whereas previous posts have been aimed at FreeBSD and Linux
In addition to the usual steps, this one also covers DKIMproxy, ClamAV for scanning attachments, Dovecot for IMAP and also multiple choices of spam filtering: spamd or SpamAssassin
It also shows you how to set up Roundcube for building a web interface, using the new in-base httpd
That means this is more of a "complete solution" - right down to what the end users see
The series is split up into categories so it's very easy to follow along step-by-step ***

How DragonFlyBSD uses git

DragonFlyBSD, along with PCBSD and EdgeBSD, uses git as its version control system for the system source code
In a series of posts, Matthew Dillon (the project lead) details their internal setup
They're using vanilla git over ssh, with the developers' accounts set to git-only (no shell access)
The maintainers of the server are the only ones with shell access available
He also details how a cron job syncs from the master to a public box that anyone can check out code from
It would be interesting to hear about how other BSD projects manage their master source repository ***

Why not try PCBSD?

ITwire, another more mainstream tech site, published a recent article about switching to PCBSD
They interview a guy named Kris that we've never heard of before
In the article, they touch on how easy it can potentially be for Linux users looking to switch over to the BSD side - lots of applications are exactly the same
"With the growing adoption of systemd, dissatisfaction with Linux has reached proportions not seen in recent years, to the extent that people have started talking of switching to FreeBSD."
If you have some friends who complain to you about systemd all the time, this might be a good article to show them ***

Interview - Henning Brauer - henning@openbsd.org / @henningbrauer

OpenNTPD and its portable variant

News Roundup

Authenticated time in OpenNTPD

We recorded that interview with Henning just a few days ago, and it looks like part of it may be outdated already
While at the hackathon, some developers came up with an alternate way to get authenticated NTP responses
You can now add an HTTPS URL to your ntpd.conf in addition to the time server pool
OpenNTPD will query it (over TLS, with CA verification) and look at the date sent in the HTTPS header
It's not intended to be a direct time source, just a constraint to keep things within reason
If you receive regular NTP packets that are way off from the TLS packet, those will be discarded and the server(s) marked as invalid
Henning and Theo also weigh in to give some of the backstory on the idea
Lots more detail can be found in Reyk's email explaining the new feature (and it's optional of course) ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Oita and Hamanako

It's been a while since we've featured one of these trip reports, but the Japanese NetBSD users group is still doing them
This time the conferences were in Oita and Hamanako, Japan
Machines running NetBSD included the CubieBoard2 Allwinner A20, Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi, Sharp NetWalker and a couple Zaurus devices
As always, they took lots of pictures from the event of NetBSD on all these weird machines ***

Poudriere in a jail

A common question we get about our poudriere tutorial is "how do I run it in a jail?" - this blog post is about exactly that
It takes you through the networking setup, zpool setup, nginx setup, making the jail and finally poking the right holes in the jail to allow poudriere to work its magic ***

Bruteblock, another way to stop bruteforce

We've mentioned a few different ways to stop ssh bruteforce attempts in the past: fail2ban, denyhosts, or even just with pf's built-in rate limiting
Bruteblock is a similar tool, but it's not just for ssh logins - it can do a number of other services
It can also work directly with IPFW, which is a plus if you're using that as your firewall
Add a few lines to your syslog.conf and bruteblock will get executed automatically
The rest of the article takes you through the different settings you can configure for blocking ***

New iwm(4) driver and cross-polination

The OpenBSD guys recently imported a new "iwm" driver for newer Intel 7260 wireless cards (commonly found in Thinkpads)
NetBSD wasted no time in porting it over, giving a bit of interesting backstory
According to Antti Kantee, "it was created for OpenBSD by writing and porting a NetBSD driver which was developed in a rump kernel in Linux userspace"
Both projects would appreciate further testing if you have the hardware and can provide useful bug reports
Maybe FreeBSD and DragonFly will port it over too, or come up with something that's partially based on the code ***

PCBSD current images

The first PCBSD -CURRENT images should be available this weekend
This image will be tagged 11.0-CURRENTFEB2015, with planned monthly updates
For the more adventurous this will allow testing both FreeBSD and PCBSD bleeding edge ***

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

Discussion

Comparison of ways to securely tunnel your traffic

OpenVPN, OpenBSD IKED, FreeBSD IPSEC, OpenSSH, Tor ***

43: Package Design

JT Pennington — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 08:00:00 -0400

It's a big show this week! We'll be interviewing Marc Espie about OpenBSD's package system and build cluster. Also, we've been asked many times "how do I keep my BSD box up to date?" Well, today's tutorial should finally answer that. Answers to all your emails and this week's headlines, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and schedule

The talks and schedules for EuroBSDCon 2014 are finally revealed
The opening keynote is called "FreeBSD, looking forward to another 10 years" by jkh
Lots of talks spanning FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PCBSD, and we finally have a few about NetBSD and DragonflyBSD too! Variety is great
It looks like Theo even has a talk, but the title isn't on the page... how mysterious
There are also days dedicated to some really interesting tutorials
Register now, the conference is on September 25-28th in Bulgaria
If you see Allan and Kris walking towards you and you haven't given us an interview yet... well you know what's going to happen
Why aren't the videos up from last year yet? Will this year also not have any? ***

FreeNAS vs NAS4Free

More mainstream news covering BSD, this time with an article about different NAS solutions
In a possibly excessive eight-page article, Ars Technica discusses the pros and cons of both FreeNAS and NAS4Free
Both are based on FreeBSD and ZFS of course, but there are more differences than you might expect
Discusses the different development models, release cycles, features, interfaces and ease-of-use factor of each project
"One is pleasantly functional; the other continues devolving during a journey of pain" - uh oh, who's the loser? ***

Quality software costs money, heartbleed was free

PHK writes an article for ACM Queue about open source software projects' funding efforts
A lot of people don't realize just how widespread open source software is - TVs, printers, gaming consoles, etc
The article discusses ways to convince your workplace to fund open source efforts, then goes into a little bit about FreeBSD and Varnish's funding
The latest heartbleed vulnerability should teach everyone that open source projects are critical to the internet, and need people actively maintaining them
On that subject, "Earlier this year the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug laid waste to Internet security, and there are still hundreds of thousands of embedded devices of all kinds—probably your television among them—that have not been and will not ever be software-upgraded to fix it. The best way to prevent that from happening again is to avoid having bugs of that kind go undiscovered for several years, and the only way to avoid that is to have competent people paying attention to the software"
Consider donating to your favorite BSD foundation (or buying cool shirts and CDs!) and keeping the ecosystem alive ***

Geoblock evasion with pf and OpenBSD rdomains

Geoblocking is a way for websites to block visitors based on the location of their IP
This is a blog post about how to get around it, using pf and rdomains
It has the advantage of not requiring any browser plugins or DNS settings on the users' computers, you just need to be running OpenBSD on your router (hmm, if only a website had a tutorial about that...)
In this post, the author wanted to get an American IP address, since the service he was using (Netflix) is blocked in Australia
It's got all the details you need to set up a VPN-like system and bypass those pesky geographic filters ***

Interview - Marc Espie - espie@openbsd.org / @espie_openbsd

OpenBSD's package system, building cluster, various topics

Tutorial

Keeping your BSD up to date

News Roundup

BoringSSL and LibReSSL

Yet another OpenSSL fork pops up, this time from Google, called BoringSSL
Adam Langley has a blog post about it, why they did it and how they're going to maintain it
You can easily browse the source code
Theo de Raadt also weighs in with how this effort relates to LibReSSL
More eyes on the code is good, and patches will be shared between the two projects ***

More BSD Tor nodes wanted

Friend of the show bcallah posts some news to the Tor-BSD mailing list about monoculture in the Tor network being both bad and dangerous
Originally discussed on the Tor-Relays list, it was made apparent that having such a large amount of Linux nodes weakens the security of the whole network
If one vulnerability is found, a huge portion of the network would be useless - we need more variety in the network stacks, crypto, etc.
The EFF is also holding a Tor challenge for people to start up new relays and keep them online for over a year
Check out our Tor tutorial and help out the network, and promote BSD at the same time! ***

FreeBSD 10 OpenStack images

OpenStack, to quote Wikipedia, is "a free and open-source software cloud computing platform. It is primarily deployed as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution."
The article goes into detail about creating a FreeBSD instant, installing and converting it for use with "bsd-cloudinit"
The author of the article is a regular listener and emailer of the show, hey! ***

BSDday 2014 call for papers

BSD Day, a conference not so well-known, is going to be held August 9th in Argentina
It was created in 2008 and is the only BSD conference around that area
The "call for papers" was issued, so if you're around Argentina and use BSD, consider submitting a talk
Sysadmins, developers and regular users are, of course, all welcome to come to the event ***

Feedback/Questions

42: Devious Methods

JT Pennington — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 08:00:00 -0400

Coming up this week, we'll be showing you how to chain SSH connections, as well as some cool tricks you can do with it. Going along with that theme, we also have an interview with Bryce Chidester about running a BSD-based shell provider. News, emails and cowsay turkeys, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

PIE and ASLR in FreeBSD update

A status update for Shawn Webb's ASLR and PIE work for FreeBSD
One major part of the code, position-independent executable support, has finally been merged into the -CURRENT tree
"FreeBSD has supported loading PIEs for a while now, but the applications in base weren't compiled as PIEs. Given that ASLR is useless without PIE, getting base compiled with PIE support is a mandatory first step in proper ASLR support"
If you're running -CURRENT, just add "WITH_PIE=1" to your /etc/src.conf and /etc/make.conf
The next step is working on the ASLR coding style and getting more developers to look through it
Shawn will also be at EuroBSDCon (in September) giving an updated version of his BSDCan talk about ASLR ***

Misc. pfSense news

Couple of pfSense news items this week, including some hardware news
Someone's gotta test the pfSense hardware devices before they're sold, which involves powering them all on at least once
To make that process faster, they're building a controllable power board (and include some cool pics)
There will be more info on that device a bit later on
On Friday, June 27th, there will be another video session (for paying customers only...) about virtualized firewalls
pfSense University, a new paid training course, was also announced
A single two-day class costs $2000, ouch ***

ZFS stripe width

A new blog post from Matt Ahrens about ZFS stripe width
"The popularity of OpenZFS has spawned a great community of users, sysadmins, architects and developers, contributing a wealth of advice, tips and tricks, and rules of thumb on how to configure ZFS. In general, this is a great aspect of the ZFS community, but I’d like to take the opportunity to address one piece of misinformed advice"
Matt goes through different situations where you would set up your zpool differently, each with their own advantages and disadvantages
He covers best performance on random IOPS, best reliability, and best space efficiency use cases
It includes a lot of detail on each one, including graphs, and addresses some misconceptions about different RAID-Z levels' overhead factor ***

FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 released

The third BETA in the 9.3 release cycle is out, we're slowly getting closer to the release
This is expected to be the final BETA, next will come the RCs
There have mostly just been small bug fixes since BETA2, but OpenSSL was also updated and the arc4random code was updated to match what's in -CURRENT (but still isn't using ChaCha20)
The FreeBSD foundation has a blog post about it too
There's a list of changes between 9.2 and 9.3 as well, but we'll be sure to cover it when the -RELEASE hits ***

Interview - Bryce Chidester - brycec@devio.us / @brycied00d

Running a BSD shell provider

Tutorial

Chaining SSH connections

News Roundup

My FreeBSD adventure

A Slackware user from the "linux questions" forum decides to try out BSD, and documents his initial impressions and findings
After ruling out PCBSD due to the demanding hardware requirements and NetBSD due to "politics" (whatever that means, his words) he decides to start off with FreeBSD 10, but also mentions trying OpenBSD later on
In his forum post, he covers the documentation (and how easy it makes it for a switcher), dual booting, packages vs ports, network configuration and some other little things
So far, he seems to really enjoy BSD and thinks that it makes a lot of sense compared to Linux
Might be an interesting, ongoing series we can follow up on later ***

Even more BSDCan trip reports

BSDCan may be over until next year, but trip reports are still pouring in
This time we have a summary from Li-Wen Hsu, who was paid for by the FreeBSD foundation
He's part of the "Jenkins CI for FreeBSD" group and went to BSDCan mostly for that
Nice long post about all of his experiences at the event, definitely worth a read
He even talks about... the food ***

FreeBSD disk partitioning

For his latest book series on FreeBSD's GEOM system, MWL asked the hackers mailing list for some clarification
This erupted into a very long discussion about fdisk vs gnop vs gpart
So you don't have to read the 500 mailing list posts, he's summarized the findings in a blog post
It covers MBR vs GPT, disk sector sizes and how to handle all of them with which tools ***

BSD Router Project version 1.51

A new version of the BSD Router Project has been released, 1.51
It's now based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE instead of 10.0-RELEASE
Includes lots of bugfixes and small updates, as well as some patches from pfSense and elsewhere
Check the sourceforge page for the complete list of changes
Bad news... the minimum disk size requirement has increased to 512MB... getting pretty bloated ***