46: Network Iodometry

JT Pennington — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0400

We're back, and this week we'll be showing you how to tunnel out of a restrictive network using only DNS queries. We also sat down with Bryan Drewery, from the FreeBSD portmgr team, to talk all about their building cluster and some recent changes. All the latest news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this year
Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
Registering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everything
You can register online here and check hotels in the area
The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants ***

OpenBSD SMP PF update

A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be useless
He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone through
There's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us ***

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port ***

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
The full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance release
Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much more
If you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome change
With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted ***

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normally
It's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page ***

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup ***

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver
"Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."
He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system ***

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!
Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
You can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application library
Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easy
New Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as well
PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users ***

Feedback/Questions

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 ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Two Factor Authentication”

46: Network Iodometry

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Bryan Drewery - bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

26: Port Authority

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions