NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

My New Project: zedfs.com

Have you ever had an idea that keeps coming back to you over and over again? For a week? For a month? I know that feeling. My new project was born from this feeling.
On this blog, I mix content a lot. I have written personal posts (not many of them, but still), FreeBSD development posts, development posts, security posts, and ZFS posts. This mixed content can be problematic sometimes. I share a lot of stuff here, and readers don’t know what to expect next. I am just excited by so many things, and I want to share that excitement with you!

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TrueNAS CORE is Ready for Deployment

TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 was released yesterday and with it, TrueNAS CORE is ready for deployment. The merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image can now begin its path into mainstream use. TrueNAS CORE is the new FreeNAS and is on schedule.
The TrueNAS 12.0 BETA process started in June and has been the most successful BETA release ever with more than 3,000 users and only minor issues. Ars Technica provided a detailed technical walkthrough of the original BETA. There is a long list of features and performance improvements. During the BETA process, TrueNAS 12.0 demonstrated over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60.

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News Roundup

Interprocess Communication in FreeBSD 11: Performance Analysis

Interprocess communication, IPC, is one of the most fundamental functions of a modern operating system, playing an essential role in the fabric of contemporary applications. This report conducts an investigation in FreeBSD of the real world performance considerations behind two of the most common IPC mechanisms; pipes and sockets. A simple benchmark provides a fair sense of effective bandwidth for each, and analysis using DTrace, hardware performance counters and the operating system’s source code is presented. We note that pipes outperform sockets by 63% on average across all configurations, and further that the size of userspace transmission buffers has a profound effect on performance — larger buffers are beneficial up to a point (∼ 32-64 KiB) after which performance collapses as a result of devastating cache exhaustion. A deep scrutiny of the probe effects at play is also presented, justifying the validity of conclusions drawn from these experiments.

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Back To The Future: Unix Wildcards Gone Wild

First of all, this article has nothing to do with modern hacking techniques like ASLR bypass, ROP exploits, 0day remote kernel exploits or Chrome's Chain-14-Different-Bugs-To-Get-There... Nope, nothing of the above. This article will cover one interesting old-school Unix hacking technique, that will still work nowadays in 2013.

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Unix Wars

Dozens of different operating systems have been developed over the years, but only Unix has grown in so many varieties. There are three main branches. Four factors have facilitated this growth...

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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

• Chris - installing FreeBSD 13-current
• Dane - FreeBSD History Lesson
• Marc - linux compat
• Mason - apropos battery

• Paul - a topic idea

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

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Headlines

Backup and Restore on NetBSD

Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most Admin Handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing my old Mac Mini's OS by NetBSD, I tried to implement an automated backup, allowing me to handle it similarly to the time machine backups I've been using before. Suggestions on how to improve are always welcome.

BSD Release: OpenBSD 6.7

The OpenBSD project produces and operating system which places focus on portability, standardisation, code correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. The project's latest release is OpenBSD 6.7 which introduces several new improvements to the cron scheduling daemon, improvements to the web server daemon, and the top command now offers scrollable output. These and many more changes can be found in the project's release announcement: "This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 6.7. For a comprehensive list, see the changelog leading to 6.7. General improvements and bugfixes: Reduced the minimum allowed number of chunks in a CONCAT volume from 2 to 1, increasing the number of volumes which can be created on a single disk with bioctl(8) from 7 to 15. This can be used to create more partitions than previously. Rewrote the cron(8) flag-parsing code to be getopt-like, allowing tight formations like -ns and flag repetition. Renamed the 'options' field in crontab(5) to 'flags'. Added crontab(5) -s flag to the command field, indicating that only a single instance of the job should run concurrently. Added cron(8) support for random time values using the ~ operator. Allowed cwm(1) configuration of window size based on percentage of the master window during horizontal and vertical tiling actions."

• Release Announcement
• Release Notes

News Roundup

Building a WireGuard Jail with the FreeBSD's Standard Tools

Recently, I had an opportunity to build a WireGuard jail on a FreeBSD 12.1 host.
As it was really quick and easy to setup and it has been working completely fine for a month, I’d like to share my experience with anyone interested in this topic.

The Unix divide over who gets to chown things, and (disk space) quotas

One of the famous big splits between the BSD Unix world and the System V world is whether ordinary users can use chown (the command and the system call) to give away their own files. In System V derived Unixes you were generally allowed to; in BSD derived Unixes you weren't. Until I looked it up now to make sure, I thought that BSD changed this behavior from V7 and that V7 had an unrestricted chown. However, this turns out to be wrong; in V7 Unix, chown(2) was restricted to root only.

You Can Influence the TrueNAS CORE Roadmap!

As many of you know, we’ve historically had three ticket types available in our tracker: Bugs, Features, and Improvements, which are all fairly self-explanatory. After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to implement a new type of ticket, a “Suggestion”. These will be replacing Feature and Improvement requests for the TrueNAS Community, simplifying things down to two options: Bugs and Suggestions. This change also introduces a slightly different workflow than before.

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Beastie Bits

• FreeNAS Spare Parts Build: Testing ZFS With Imbalanced VDEVs and Mismatched Drives
• TLSv1.3 server code enabled in LibreSSL in -current
• Interview with Deb Goodkin ***

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan - WireGaurd
• Chad - ZFS Pool Design

• Pedreo - Scale FreeBSD Jails

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