NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk

Why ZFS reports less available space space accounting explained/

We are destroying software

News Roundup

FreeBSD 13.5 Overcomes UFS Y2038 Problem To Push It Out To Year 2106

TUHS: 1972 UNIX V2 "Beta" Resurrected

Some thoughts on why 'inetd activation' didn't catch on

If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well

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

• Nelson - gcc puzzlement

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

• Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

Celebrating FreeBSD Day: A Journey Through 31 Years of Open Source Excellence

Proxmox vs FreeBSD: Which Virtualization Host Performs Better?

News Roundup

Upstreaming FreeBSD Code to the Linux Vector Packet Processor Project

FreeBSD Tips and Tricks: Creating Snapshots With UFS

My Concern With Rust, or a Case for the BSD's

Beastie Bits

• Install FreeBSD 14.1 and KDE Plasma 6 in QEMU VM tutorial - June 2024 - 2da0c933

• Let's Try BSD, Part 1 of 7: Introduction

• OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

• FreeBSD Day: Interview with Deb Goodkin

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

• Johnny - Thanks

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

• Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

3rd Quarter FreeBSD Report

The call for submissions for the 4th Quarter is out

---

OpenZFS 2.0

This Monday, ZFS on Linux lead developer Brian Behlendorf published the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release to GitHub. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between "ZFS on Linux" and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out its side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official.

---

News Roundup

Revision 367034

Various new check-hash checks have been added to the UFS filesystem
over various major releases. Superblock check hashes were added for
the 12 release and cylinder-group and inode check hashes will appear
in the 13 release.

---

OpenSSL 3.0 /dev/crypto issues on FreeBSD

So, just learned that the OpenSSL devs decided to break /dev/crypto on FreeBSD.

---

OS108-9.1 XFCE amd64 released

• OS108 is a fast, open and Secure Desktop Operating System built on top of NetBSD. > Installing OS108 to your hard drive is done by using the sysinst utility, the process is basically the same as installing NetBSD itself. Please refer to the NetBSD guide for installation details, http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/part-install.html
• Installation Video ***

Beastie Bits

• OpenBGPD 6.8p1 portable: released Nov 5th, 2020
• IRC Awk Bot
• Docker on FreeBSD using bhyve and sshfs
• The UNIX Command Language (1976) ***

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

• santi - openrc
• trond - python2 and mailman

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

Headlines

DragonFlyBSD's Kernel Optimizations Are Paying Off

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been working on a big VM rework in the name of performance and other kernel improvements recently. Here is a look at how those DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT improvements are paying off compared to DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as well as FreeBSD 12 and five Linux distribution releases. With Dillon using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system, we used that too for this round of BSD vs. Linux performance benchmarks.
The work by Dillon on the VM overhaul and other changes (including more HAMMER2 file-system work) will ultimately culminate with the DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release (well, unless he opts for DragonFlyBSD 6.0 or so). These are benchmarks of the latest DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT daily ISO as of this week benchmarked across DragonFlyBSD 5.4.3 stable, FreeBSD 12.0, Ubuntu 19.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, Debian 9.9, Debian Buster, and CentOS 7 1810 as a wide variety of reference points both from newer and older Linux distributions. (As for no Clear Linux reference point for a speedy reference point, it currently has a regression with AMD + Samsung NVMe SSD support on some hardware, including this box, prohibiting the drive from coming up due to a presumed power management issue that is still being resolved.)
With Matthew Dillon doing much of his development on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system after he last year proclaimed the greatness of these AMD HEDT CPUs, for this round of testing I also used a Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX with 32 cores / 64 threads. Tests of other AMD/Intel hardware with DragonFlyBSD will come as the next stable release is near and all of the kernel work has settled down. For now it's mostly entertaining our own curiosity how well these DragonFlyBSD optimizations are paying off and how it's increasing the competition against FreeBSD 12 and Linux distributions.

---

What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux?

Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, "What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?"
I've also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions.
They also apply, to some extent, to other BSDs. However, an important disclaimer applies to this article.
This list is aimed at people who are used to Linux and are curious about OpenBSD. It is written to highlight the most important changes from their perspective, not the absolute most important changes from a technical standpoint.
Please bear with me.

• A terminal is a terminal is a terminal
• Practical differences
• Security and system administration
• Why philosophical differences matter
• So what do I choose?
• How to try OpenBSD ***

News Roundup

NetBSD 2019 Google Summer of Code

We are very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2019 projects:

• Akul Abhilash Pillai - Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD kernel fuzzing
• Manikishan Ghantasala - Add KNF (NetBSD style) clang-format configuration
• Siddharth Muralee - Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD
• Surya P - Implementation of COMPAT_LINUX and COMPAT_NETBSD32 DRM ioctls support for NetBSD kernel
• Jason High - Incorporation of Argon2 Password Hashing Algorithm into NetBSD
• Saurav Prakash - Porting NetBSD to HummingBoard Pulse
• Naveen Narayanan - Porting WINE to amd64 architecture on NetBSD

The communiting bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started yesterday. The coding period will start from May 27 until August 19.
Please welcome all our students and a big good luck to students and mentors! A big thank to Google and The NetBSD Foundation organization mentors and administrators! Looking forward to a great Google Summer of Code!

Reducing that contention

The opening keynote at EuroBSDCon 2016 predicted the future 10 years of BSDs. Amongst all the funny previsions, gnn@FreeBSD said that by 2026 OpenBSD will have its first implementation of SMP. Almost 3 years after this talk, that sounds like a plausible forecast... Why? Where are we? What can we do? Let's dive into the issue!

• State of affairs

Most of OpenBSD's kernel still runs under a single lock, ze KERNEL_LOCK(). That includes most of the syscalls, most of the interrupt handlers and most of the fault handlers. Most of them, not all of them. Meaning we have collected & fixed bugs while setting up infrastructures and examples. Now this lock remains the principal responsible for the spin % you can observe in top(1) and systat(1).
I believe that we opted for a difficult hike when we decided to start removing this lock from the bottom. As a result many SCSI & Network interrupt handlers as well as all Audio & USB ones can be executed without big lock. On the other hand very few syscalls are already or almost ready to be unlocked, as we incorrectly say. This explains why basic primitives like tsleep(9), csignal() and selwakeup() are only receiving attention now that the top of the Network Stack is running (mostly) without big lock.

• Next steps

In the past years, most of our efforts have been invested into the Network Stack. As I already mentioned it should be ready to be parallelized. However think we should now concentrate on removing the KERNEL_LOCK(), even if the code paths aren't performance critical.

• See the Article for the rest of the post

fnaify 1.3 released - more games are "fnaify & run" now

This release finally addresses some of the problems that prevent simple running of several games.
This happens for example when an old FNA.dll library comes with the games that doesn't match the API of our native libraries like SDL2, OpenAL, or MojoShader anymore. Some of those cases can be fixed by simply dropping in a newer FNA.dll. fnaify now asks if FNA 17.12 should be automatically added if a known incompatible FNA version is found. You simply answer yes or no.

Another blocker happens when the game expects to check the SteamAPI - either from a running Steam process, or a bundled steam_api library. OpenBSD 6.5-current now has steamworks-nosteam in ports, a stub library for Steamworks.NET that prevents games from crashing simply because an API function isn't found. The repo is here. fnaify now finds this library in /usr/local/share/steamstubs and uses it instead of the bundled (full) Steamworks.NET.dll.
This may help with any games that use this layer to interact with the SteamAPI, mostly those that can only be obtained via Steam.

vmctl(8): command line syntax changed

The order of the arguments in the create, start, and stop commands of vmctl(8) has been changed to match a commonly expected style. Manual usage or scripting with vmctl must be adjusted to use the new syntax.
For example, the old syntax looked like this:

# vmctl create disk.qcow2 -s 50G

The new syntax specifies the command options before the argument:

# vmctl create -s 50G disk.qcow2

Something that Linux distributions should not do when packaging things

Right now I am a bit unhappy at Fedora for a specific packaging situation, so let me tell you a little story of what I, as a system administrator, would really like distributions to not do.
For reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry, I run a Prometheus and Grafana setup on both my home and office Fedora Linux machines (among other things, it gives me a place to test out various things involving them). When I set this up, I used the official upstream versions of both, because I needed to match what we are running (or would soon be).
Recently, Fedora decided to package Grafana themselves (as a RPM), and they called this RPM package 'grafana'. Since the two different packages are different versions of the same thing as far as package management tools are concerned, Fedora basically took over the 'grafana' package name from Grafana. This caused my systems to offer to upgrade me from the Grafana.com 'grafana-6.1.5-1' package to the Fedora 'grafana-6.1.6-1.fc29' one, which I actually did after taking reasonable steps to make sure that the Fedora version of 6.1.6 was compatible with the file layouts and so on from the Grafana version of 6.1.5.
Why is this a problem? It's simple. If you're going to take over a package name from the upstream, you should keep up with the upstream releases. If you take over a package name and don't keep up to date or keep up to date only sporadically, you cause all sorts of heartburn for system administrators who use the package. The least annoying future of this situation is that Fedora has abandoned Grafana at 6.1.6 and I am going to 'upgrade' it with the upstream 6.2.1, which will hopefully be a transparent replacement and not blow up in my face. The most annoying future is that Fedora and Grafana keep ping-ponging versions back and forth, which will make 'dnf upgrade' into a minefield (because it will frequently try to give me a 'grafana' upgrade that I don't want and that would be dangerous to accept). And of course this situation turns Fedora version upgrades into their own minefield, since now I risk an upgrade to Fedora 30 actually reverting the 'grafana' package version on me.

---

Beastie Bits

• [talk] ZFS v UFS on APU2 msata SSD with FreeBSD
• NetBSD 8.1 is out
• lazyboi – the laziest possible way to send raw HTTP POST data
• A Keyboard layout that changes by markov frequency
• Open Source Game Clones
• EuroBSDcon program & registration open ***

Feedback/Questions

• John - A segment idea
• Johnny - Audio only format please don't
• Alex - Thanks and some Linux Snaps vs PBI feedback

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

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

More BSD conference videos

• We mentioned it a few times, but the "New Directions in Operating Systems" conference was held in November in the UK
• The presentations videos are now online, with a few BSD-related talks of interest
• Antti Kantee, Rump kernels and why / how we got here
• Franco Fichtner, An introduction to userland networking
• Robert Watson, New ideas about old OS security
• Lots of other interesting, but non-BSD-related, talks were also presented, so check the full list if you're interested in operating systems in general
• The 2014 AsiaBSDCon videos are also slowly being uploaded (better late than never)
• Kirk McKusick, An Overview of Security in the FreeBSD Kernel
• Matthew Ahrens, OpenZFS ensures the continued excellence of ZFS
• Eric Allman, Bambi Meets Godzilla: They Elope - Open Source Meets the Commercial World
• Scott Long, Modifying the FreeBSD kernel Netflix streaming servers
• Dru Lavigne, ZFS for the Masses
• Kris Moore, Snapshots, Replication, and Boot Environments
• David Chisnall, The Future of LLVM in the FreeBSD Toolchain
• Luba Tang, Bold, fast optimizing linker for BSD
• John Hixson, Introduction to FreeNAS development
• Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM
• Michael Dexter, Visualizing Unix: Graphing bhyve, ZFS and PF with Graphite
• Peter Grehan, Nested Paging in Bhyve
• Martin Matuška, Deploying FreeBSD systems with Foreman and mfsBSD
• James Brown, Analysys of BSD Associate Exam Results
• Mindaugas Rasiukevicius, NPF - progress and perspective
• Luigi Rizzo, Netmap as a core networking technology
• Michael W. Lucas, Sudo: You're Doing it Wrong (not from a BSD conference, but still good)
• They should make for some great material to watch during the holidays ***

OpenBSD vs FreeBSD security features

• From the author of both the OpenBSD and FreeBSD secure gateway articles we've featured in the past comes a new entry about security
• The article goes through a list of all the security features enabled (and disabled) by default in both FreeBSD and OpenBSD
• It covers a wide range of topics, including: memory protection, randomization, encryption, privilege separation, Capsicum, securelevels, MAC, Jails and chroots, network stack hardening, firewall features and much more
• This is definitely one of the most in-depth and complete articles we've seen in a while - the author seems to have done his homework
• If you're looking to secure any sort of BSD box, this post has some very detailed explanations of different exploit mitigation techniques - be sure to read the whole thing
• There are also some good comments on DaemonForums and lobste.rs that you may want to read ***

The password? You changed it, right?

• Peter Hansteen has a new blog post up, detailing some weird SSH bruteforcing he's seen recently
• He apparently reads his auth logs when he gets bored at an airport
• This new bruteforcing attempt seems to be targetting D-Link devices, as evidenced by the three usernames the bots try to use
• More than 700 IPs have tried to get into Peter's BSD boxes using these names in combination with weak passwords
• Lots more details, including the lists of passwords and IPs, can be found in the full article
• If you're using a BSD router, things like this can be easily prevented with PF or fail2ban (and you probably don't have a "d-link" user anyway) ***

Get started with FreeBSD, an intro for Linux users

• Another new BSD article on a mainstream technology news site - seems we're getting popular
• This article is written for Linux users who may be considering switching over to BSD and wondering what it's all about
• It details installing FreeBSD 9.3 and getting a basic system setup, while touching on ports and packages, and explaining some terminology along the way
• "Among the legions of Linux users and admins, there seems to be a sort of passive curiosity about FreeBSD and other BSDs. Like commuters on a packed train, they gaze out at a less crowded, vaguely mysterious train heading in a slightly different direction and wonder what traveling on that train might be like" **

Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwlucas@michaelwlucas.com / @mwlauthor

FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials

News Roundup

OpenSMTPD status update

• The OpenSMTPD guys, particularly Gilles, have posted an update on what they've been up to lately
• As of 5.6, it's become the default MTA in OpenBSD, and sendmail will be totally gone in 5.7
• Email is a much more tricky protocol than you might imagine, and the post goes through some of the weirdness and problems they've had to deal with
• There's also another post that goes into detail on their upcoming filtering API - a feature many have requested
• The API is still being developed, but you can test it out now if you know what you're doing - full details in the article
• OpenSMTPD also has portable versions in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, so check it out ***

OpenCrypto changes in FreeBSD

• A little while back, we talked to John-Mark Gurney about updating FreeBSD's OpenCrypto framework, specifically for IPSEC
• Some of that work has just landed in the -CURRENT branch, and the commit has a bit of details
• The ICM and GCM modes of AES were added, and both include support for AESNI
• There's a new port - "nist-kat" - that can be used to test the new modes of operation
• Some things were fixed in the process as well, including an issue that would leak timing info and result in the ability to forge messages
• Code was also borrowed from both OpenBSD and NetBSD to make this possible ***

First thoughts on OpenBSD's httpd

• Here we have a blog post from a user of OpenBSD's new homegrown web server that made its debut in 5.6
• The author loves that it has proper privilege separation, a very simple config syntax and that it always runs in a chroot
• He also mentions dynamic content hosting with FastCGI, and provides an example of how to set it up
• Be sure to check our interview with Reyk about the new httpd if you're curious on how it got started
• Also, if you're running the version that came with 5.6, there's a huge patch you can apply to get a lot of the features and fixes from -current without waiting for 5.7 ***

Steam on PCBSD

• One of the most common questions people who want to use BSD as a desktop ask us is "can I run games?" or "can I use steam?"
• Steam through the Linux emulation layer (in FreeBSD) may be possible soon, but it's already possible to use it with WINE
• This video shows how to get Steam set up on PCBSD using the Windows version
• There are also some instructions in the video description to look over
• A second video details getting streaming set up ***

Feedback/Questions

• Charlie writes in
• Sean writes in
• Predrag writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• FreeBSD has gotten quite a lot done this quarter
• Changes in the way release branches are supported - major releases will get at least five years over their lifespan
• A new automounter is in the works, hoping to replace amd (which has some issues)
• The CAM target layer and RPC stack have gotten some major optimization and speed boosts
• Work on ZFSGuru continues, with a large status report specifically for that
• The report also mentioned some new committers, both source and ports
• It also covers GNATS being replaced with Bugzilla, the new core team, 9.3-RELEASE, GSoC updates, UEFI booting and lots of other things that we've already mentioned on the show
• "Foundation-sponsored work resulted in 226 commits to FreeBSD over the April to June period" ***

A new OpenBSD HTTPD is born

• Work has begun on a new HTTP daemon in the OpenBSD base system
• A lot of people are asking "why?" since OpenBSD includes a chrooted nginx already - will it be removed? Will they co-exist?
• Initial responses seem to indicate that nginx is getting bloated, and is a bit overkill for just serving content (this isn't trying to be a full-featured replacement)
• It's partially based on the relayd codebase and also comes from the author of relayd, Reyk Floeter
• This has the added benefit of the usual, easy-to-understand syntax and privilege separation
• There's a very brief man page online already
• It supports vhosts and can serve static files, but is still in very active development - there will probably be even more new features by the time this airs
• Will it be named OpenHTTPD? Or perhaps... LibreHTTPD? (I hope not) ***

pkgng 1.3 announced

• The newest version of FreeBSD's second generation package management system has been released, with lots of new features
• It has a new "real" solver to automatically handle conflicts, and dynamically discover new ones (this means the annoying -o option is deprecated now, hooray!)
• Lots of the code has been sandboxed for extra security
• You'll probably notice some new changes to the UI too, making things more user friendly
• A few days later 1.3.1 was released to fix a few small bugs, then 1.3.2 shortly thereafter and 1.3.3 yesterday ***

FreeBSD after-install security tasks

• A number of people have written in to ask us "how do I secure my BSD box after I install it?"
• With this blog post, hopefully most of their questions will finally be answered in detail
• It goes through locking down SSH with keys, patching the base system for security, installing packages and keeping them updated, monitoring and closing any listening services and a few other small things
• Not only does it just list things to do, but the post also does a good job of explaining why you should do them
• Maybe we'll see some more posts in this series in the future ***

Interview - Brent Cook - bcook@openbsd.org / @busterbcook

LibreSSL's portable version and development

News Roundup

FreeBSD Mastery - Storage Essentials

• MWL's new book about the FreeBSD storage subsystems now has an early draft available
• Early buyers can get access to an in-progress draft of the book before the official release, but keep in mind that it may go through a lot of changes
• Topics of the book will include GEOM, UFS, ZFS, the disk utilities, partition schemes, disk encryption and maximizing I/O performance
• You'll get access to the completed (e)book when it's done if you buy the early draft
• The suggested price is $8 ***

Why BSD and not Linux?

• Yet another thread comes up asking why you should choose BSD over Linux or vice-versa
• Lots of good responses from users of the various BSDs
• Directly ripping a quote: "Features like Ports, Capsicum, CARP, ZFS and DTrace were stable on BSDs before their Linux versions, and some of those are far more usable on BSD. Features like pf are still BSD-only. FreeBSD has GELI and ipfw and is "GCC free". DragonflyBSD has HAMMER and kernel performance tuning. OpenBSD have upstream pf and their gamut of security features, as well as a general emphasis on simplicity."
• And "Over the years, the BSDs have clearly shown their worth in the nix ecosystem by pioneering new features and driving adoption of others. The most recent on OpenBSD were 2038 support and LibreSSL. FreeBSD still arguably rules the FOSS storage space with ZFS."
• Some other users share their switching experiences - worth a read ***

More g2k14 hackathon reports

• Following up from last week's huge list of hackathon reports, we have a few more
• Landry Breuil spent some time with Ansible testing his infrastructure, worked on the firefox port and tried to push some of their patches upstream
• Andrew Fresh enjoyed his first hackathon, pushing OpenBSD's perl patches upstream and got tricked into rewriting the adduser utility in perl
• Ted Unangst did his usual "teduing" (removing of) old code - say goodbye to asa, fpr, mkstr, xstr, oldrdist, fsplit, uyap and bluetooth
• Luckily we didn't have to cover 20 new ones this time! ***

BSDTalk episode 243

• The newest episode of BSDTalk is out, featuring an interview with Ingo Schwarze of the OpenBSD team
• The main topic of discussion is mandoc, which some users might not be familiar with
• mandoc is a utility for formatting manpages that OpenBSD and NetBSD use (DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD include it in their source tree, but it's not built by default)
• We'll catch up to you soon, Will! ***

Feedback/Questions

• Thomas writes in
• Stephen writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Florian writes in
• Bob Beck writes in - and note the "Caution" section that was added to libressl.org ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan 2014 talks and reports, part 2

• More presentations and trip reports are still being uploaded
• Ingo Schwarze, New Trends in mandoc
• Vsevolod Stakhov, The Architecture of the New Solver in pkg
• Julio Merino, The FreeBSD Test Suite
• Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM
• There's also a trip report from Michael Dexter and another (very long and detailed) trip report from our friend Warren Block that even gives us some linkage, thanks! ***

Beyond security, getting to know OpenBSD's real purpose

• Michael W Lucas (who, we learn through this video, has been using BSD since 1986) gave a "webcast" last week, and the audio and slides are finally up
• It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, managing to touch on a lot of OpenBSD topics
• Some of those topics include: what is OpenBSD and why you should care, the philosophy of the project, how it serves as a "pressure cooker for ideas," briefly touches on GPL vs BSDL, their "do it right or don't do it at all" attitude, their stance on NDAs and blobs, recent LibreSSL development, some of the security functions that OpenBSD enabled before anyone else (and the ripple effect that had) and, of course, their disturbing preference for comic sans
• Here's a direct link to the slides
• Great presentation if you'd like to learn a bit about OpenBSD, but also contains a bit of information that long-time users might not know too ***

FreeBSD vs Linux, a comprehensive comparison

• Another blog post covering something people seem to be obsessed with - FreeBSD vs Linux
• This one was worth mentioning because it's very thorough in regards to how things are done behind the scenes, not just the usual technical differences
• It highlights the concept of a "core team" and their role vs "contributors" and "committers" (similar to a presentation Kirk McKusick did not long ago)
• While a lot of things will be the same on both platforms, you might still be asking "which one is right for me?" - this article weighs in with some points for both sides and different use cases
• Pretty well-written and unbiased article that also mentions areas where Linux might be better, so don't hate us for linking it ***

Expand FreeNAS with plugins

• One of the things people love the most about FreeNAS (other than ZFS) is their cool plugin framework
• With these plugins, you can greatly expand the feature set of your NAS via third party programs
• This page talks about a few of the more popular ones and how they can be used to improve your NAS or media box experience
• Some examples include setting up an OwnCloud server, Bacula for backups, Maraschino for managing a home theater PC, Plex Media Server for an easy to use video experience and a few more
• It then goes into more detail about each of them, how to actually install plugins and then how to set them up ***

Interview - Karl Lehenbauer - karl@flightaware.com / @flightaware

FreeBSD at FlightAware, BSD history, various topics

Tutorial

Ports and packages in OpenBSD

News Roundup

Code review culture meets FreeBSD

• In most of the BSDs, changes need to be reviewed by more than one person before being committed to the tree
• This article describes Phabricator, an open source code review system that we briefly mentioned last week
• Instructions for using it are on the wiki
• While not approved by the core team yet for anything official, it's in a testing phase and developers are encouraged to try it out and get their patches reviewed
• Just look at that fancy interface!! ***

Upcoming BSD books

• Sneaky MWL somehow finds his way into both our headlines and the news roundup
• He gives us an update on the next BSD books that he's planning to release
• The plan is to release three (or so) books based on different aspects of FreeBSD's storage system(s) - GEOM, UFS, ZFS, etc.
• This has the advantage of only requiring you to buy the one(s) you're specifically interested in
• "When will they be released? When I'm done writing them. How much will they cost? Dunno."
• It's not Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition... ***

CARP failover and high availability on FreeBSD

• If you're running a cluster or a group of servers, you should have some sort of failover in place
• But the question comes up, "how do you load balance the load balancers!?"
• This video goes through the process of giving more than one machine the same IP, how to set up CARP, securing it and demonstrates a node dying
• Also mentions DNS-based load balancing as another option ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time in PCBSD land, we're getting ready for the 10.0.2 release (ISOs here)
• AppCafe got a good number of fixes, and now shows 10 random highlighted applications
• EasyPBI added a "bulk" mode to create PBIs of an entire FreeBSD port category
• Lumina, the new desktop environment, is still being worked on and got some bug fixes too ***

Feedback/Questions

• Paul writes in
• Matt writes in
• Kjell writes in
• Paul writes in
• Tom writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenBSD 5.5 released

• If you ordered a CD set then you've probably had it for a little while already, but OpenBSD has formally announced the public release of 5.5
• This is one of the biggest releases to date, with a very long list of changes and improvements
• Some of the highlights include: time_t being 64 bit on all platforms, release sets and binary packages being signed with the new signify tool, a new autoinstall feature of the installer, SMP support on Alpha, a new AViiON port, lots of new hardware drivers including newer NICs, the new vxlan driver, relayd improvements, a new pf queue system for bandwidth shaping, dhcpd and dhclient fixes, OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 and all its new features, position-independent executables being default for i386, the RNG has been replaced with ChaCha20 as well as some other security improvements, FUSE support, tmpfs, softraid partitions larger than 2TB and a RAID 5 implementation, OpenSSH 6.6 with all its new features and fixes... and a lot more
• The full list of changes is HUGE, be sure to read through it all if you're interested in the details
• If you're doing an upgrade from 5.4 instead of a fresh install, pay careful attention to the upgrade guide as there are some very specific steps for this version
• Also be sure to apply the errata patches on your new installations... especially those OpenSSL ones (some of which still aren't fixed in the other BSDs yet)
• On the topic of errata patches, the project is now going to also send them out (signed) via the announce mailing list, a very welcome change
• Congrats to the whole team on this great release - 5.6 is going to be even more awesome with "Libre"SSL and lots of other stuff that's currently in development ***

FreeBSD foundation funding highlights

• The FreeBSD foundation posts a new update on how they're spending the money that everyone donates
• "As we embark on our 15th year of serving the FreeBSD Project and community, we are proud of what we've done to help FreeBSD become the most innovative, reliable, and high-performance operation system"
• During this spring, they want to highlight the new UEFI boot support and newcons
• There's a lot of details about what exactly UEFI is and why we need it going forward
• FreeBSD has also needed some updates to its console to support UTF8 and wide characters
• Hopefully this series will continue and we'll get to see what other work is being sponsored ***

OpenSSH without OpenSSL

• The OpenSSH team has been hard at work, making it even better, and now OpenSSL is completely optional
• Since it won't have access to the primitives OpenSSL uses, there will be a trade-off of features vs. security
• This version will drop support for legacy SSH v1, and the only two cryptographic algorithms supported are an in-house implementation of AES in counter mode and the new combination of the Chacha20 stream cipher with Poly1305 for packet integrity
• Key exchange is limited to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman and the newer Curve25519 KEXs
• No support for RSA, DSA or ECDSA public keys - only Ed25519
• It also includes a new buffer API and a set of wrappers to make it compatible with the existing API
• Believe it or not, this was planned before all the heartbleed craziness
• Maybe someday soon we'll have a mini-openssh-portable in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, would be really neat ***

BSDMag's April 2014 issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine has got a new issue available for download
• This time the articles include: pascal on BSD, an introduction to revision control systems and configuration management, deploying NetBSD on AWS EC2, more GIMP tutorials, an AsiaBSDCon 2014 report and a piece about how easily credit cards are stolen online
• Anyone can contribute to the magazine, just send the editors an email about what you want to write
• No Linux articles this time around, good ***

Interview - David Chisnall - theraven@freebsd.org

The LLVM/Clang switch, FreeBSD's core team, various topics

Tutorial

RAID in FreeBSD and OpenBSD

News Roundup

BSDTalk episode 240

• Our buddy Will Backman has uploaded a new episode of BSDTalk, this time with our other buddy GNN as the guest - mainly to talk about NTP and keeping reliable time
• Topics include the specific details of crystals used in watches and computers to keep time, how temperature affects the quality, different sources of inaccuracy, some general NTP information, why you might want extremely precise time, different time sources (GPS, satellite, etc), differences in stratum levels, the problem of packet delay and estimating the round trip time, some of the recent NTP amplification attacks, the downsides to using UDP instead of TCP and... much more
• GNN also talks a little about the Precision Time Protocol and how it's different than NTP
• Two people we've interviewed talking to each other, awesome
• If you're interested in NTP, be sure to see our tutorial too ***

m2k14 trip reports

• We've got a few more reports from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Morocco
• The first one is from Antoine Jacoutot (who is a key GNOME porter and gave us the screenshots for the OpenBSD desktop tutorial)
• "Since I always fail at actually doing whatever I have planned for a hackathon, this time I decided to come to m2k14 unprepared about what I was going to do"
• He got lots of work done with ports and pushing GNOME-related patches back up to the main project, then worked on fixing ports' compatibility with LibreSSL
• Speaking of LibreSSL, there's an article all would-be portable version writers should probably read and take into consideration
• Jasper Adriaanse also writes about what he got done over there
• He cleaned up and fixed the puppet port to work better with OpenBSD ***

Why you should use FreeBSD on your cloud VPS

• Here we have a blog post from Atlantic, a VPS and hosting provider, about 10 reasons for using FreeBSD
• Starts off with a little bit of BSD history for those who are unfamiliar with it and only know Linux and Windows
• The 10 reasons are: community, stability, collaboration, ease of use, ports, security, ZFS, GEOM, sound and having lots of options
• The post goes into detail about each of them and why FreeBSD makes a great choice for a VPS OS ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Big changes coming in the way PCBSD manages software
• The PBI system, AppCafe and related tools are all going to use pkgng now
• The AppCafe will no longer be limited to PBIs, so much more software will be easily available from the ports tree
• New rating system coming soon and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

• Martin writes in
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• Alex writes in
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• Jarrad writes in ***

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FreeBSD quarterly status report

• Gabor Pali sent out the October-December 2013 status report to get everyone up to date on what's going on
• The report contains 37 entries and is very very long... various reports from all the different teams under the FreeBSD umbrella, probably too many to even list in the show notes
• Lots of work going on in the ARM world, EC2/Xen and Google Compute Engine are also improving
• Secure boot support hopefully coming [by mid-year](www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/62855-freebsd-to-support-secure-boot-by-mid-year)
• There's quite a bit going on in the FreeBSD world, many projects happening at the same time ***

n2k14 OpenBSD Hackathon Report

• Recently, OpenBSD held one of their hackathons in New Zealand
• 15 developers gathered there to sit in a room and write code for a few days
• Philip Guenther brings back a nice report of the event
• If you've been watching the -current CVS logs, you've seen the flood of commits just from this event alone
• Fixes with threading, Linux compat, ACPI, and various other things - some will make it into 5.5 and others need more testing
• Another report from Theo details his work
• Updates to the random subsystem, some work-in-progress pf fixes, suspend/resume fixes and more signing stuff ***

Four new NetBSD releases

• NetBSD released versions 6.1.3, 6.0.4, 5.2.2 and 5.1.4
• These updates include lots of bug fixes and some security updates, not focused on new features
• You can upgrade depending on what branch you're currently on
• Confused about the different branches? See this graph. ***

The future of open source ZFS development

• On February 11, 2014, Matt Ahrens will be giving a presentation about ZFS
• The talk will be about the future of ZFS and the open source development since Oracle closed the code
• It's in San Jose, California - go if you can! ***

Interview - George Neville-Neil - gnn@freebsd.org / @gvnn3

The FreeBSD Journal

Tutorial

Tracking -STABLE and -CURRENT (OpenBSD)

News Roundup

pfSense news and 2.1.1 snapshots

• pfSense has some snapshots available for the upcoming 2.1.1 release
• They include FreeBSD security fixes as well as some other updates
• There are recordings posted of some of the previous hangouts
• Unfortunately they're only for subscribers, so you'll have to wait until next month when we have Chris on the show to talk about pfSense! ***

FreeBSD on Google Compute Engine

• Recently we mentioned some posts about getting OpenBSD to run on GCE, here's the FreeBSD version
• Nice big fat warning: "The team has put together a best-effort posting that will get most, if not all, of you up and running. That being said, we need to remind you that FreeBSD is being supported on Google Compute Engine by the community. The instructions are being provided as-is and without warranty."
• Their instructions are a little too Linuxy (assuming wget, etc.) for our taste, someone should probably get it updated!
• Other than that it's a pretty good set of instructions on how to get up and running ***

Dragonfly ACPI update

• Sascha Wildner committed some new ACPI code
• There's also a "heads up" to update your BIOS if you experience problems
• Check the mailing list post for all the details ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 users need to upgrade all their packages for 10.0-RC5
• PBIs needed to be rebuilt.. actually everything did
• Help test GNOME 3 so we can get it in the official ports tree
• By the way, I think Kris has an announcement - PCBSD 10.0 is out! ***

Feedback/Questions

• Tony writes in
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• Nils writes in
• Solomon writes in ***