NOTES

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

Headlines

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands

Core Infrastructure: Why You Need to Control Your NTP

News Roundup

Automatic Display switch for OpenBSD laptop

Using a 2013 Mac Pro as a FreeBSD Desktop

Some terminal frustrations

Copying all files of a directory, including hidden ones, with cp

You Should Use /tmp/ More

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

• Tyler - Toms request

• 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

Controlling Your Core Infrastructure: DNS

Laptop Support and Usability Project Update: First Monthly Report & Community Initiatives

News Roundup

FreeBSD at FOSDEM 2025

Uploading a message to an IMAP server using curl

The Death of Email Forwarding

Cruising a VPS at OpenBSD Amsterdam

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

• 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

OpenBSD Workstation for the People

Bridging Networks Across VPS With Wireguard and VXLAN on FreeBSD

News Roundup

Updating FreeBSD the Manual Way

Part of (computer) security is convincing people that it works

Where’s my backup?

Vi and Vim: A Brief Overview

Hello FreeBSD

Beastie Bits

• DeadBSD #5 EnigmOS
• THE WORKSTATION YOU WANTED IN 1990, IN YOUR POCKET

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 - Nyxt

• 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

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

MeetBSD 2014 is approaching

• The MeetBSD conference is coming up, and will be held on November 1st and 2nd in San Jose, California
• MeetBSD has an "unconference" format, which means there will be both planned talks and community events
• All the extra details will be on their site soon
• It also has hotels and various other bits of useful information - hopefully with more info on the talks to come
• Of course, EuroBSDCon is coming up before then ***

First experiences with OpenBSD

• A new blog post that leads off with "tired of the sluggishness of Windows on my laptop and interested in experimenting with a Unix-like that I haven't tried before"
• The author read the famous "BSD for Linux users" series (that most of us have surely seen) and decided to give BSD a try
• He details his different OS and distro history, concluding with how he "eventually became annoyed at the poor quality of Linux userland software"
• From there, it talks about how he used the OpenBSD USB image and got a fully-working system
• He especially liked the simplicity of OpenBSD's "hostname.if" system for network configuration
• Finally, he gets Xorg working and imports all his usual configuration files - seems to be a happy new user! ***

NetBSD rump kernels on bare metal (and Kansai OSC report)

• When you're developing a new OS or a very specialized custom solution, working drivers become one of the hardest things to get right
• However, NetBSD's rump kernels - a very unique concept - make this process a lot easier
• This blog post talks about the process of starting with just a rump kernel and expanding into an internet-ready system in just a week
• Also have a look back at episode 8 for our interview about rump kernels and what exactly they do
• While on the topic of NetBSD, there were also a couple of very detailed reports (with lots of pictures!) of the various NetBSD-themed booths at the 2014 Kansai Open Source Conference that we wanted to highlight ***

OpenSSL and LibreSSL updates

• OpenSSL pushed out a few new versions, fixing multiple vulnerabilities (nine to be precise!)
• Security concerns include leaking memory, possible denial of service, crashing clients, memory exhaustion, TLS downgrades and more
• LibreSSL released a new version to address most of the vulnerabilities, but wasn't affected by some of them
• Whichever version of whatever SSL you use, make sure it's patched for these issues
• DragonFly and OpenBSD are patched as of the time of this recording but, even after a week, NetBSD and FreeBSD are not (outside of -CURRENT) ***

Interview - Robert Watson - rwatson@freebsd.org

FreeBSD architecture, security research techniques, exploit mitigation

Tutorial

Protecting traffic with a BSD-based VPN

News Roundup

A FreeBSD-based CGit server

• If you use git (like a certain host of this show) then you've probably considered setting up your own server
• This article takes you through the process of setting up a jailed git server, complete with a fancy web frontend
• It even shows you how to set up multiple repos with key-based user separation and other cool things
• The author of the post is also a listener of the show, thanks for sending it in! ***

Backup devices for small businesses

• In this article, different methods of data storage and backup are compared
• After weighing the various options, the author comes to an obvious conclusion: FreeNAS is the answer
• He praises FreeNAS and the FreeNAS Mini for their tight integration, rock solid FreeBSD base and the great ZFS featureset that it offers
• It also goes over some of the hardware specifics in the FreeNAS Mini ***

A new Xenocara interview

• As a follow up to last week's OpenSMTPD interview, this Russian blog interviews Matthieu Herrb about Xenocara
• If you're not familiar with Xenocara, it's OpenBSD's version of Xorg with some custom patches
• In this interview, he discusses how large and complex the upstream X11 development is, how different components are worked on by different people, how they test code (including a new framework) and security auditing
• Matthieu is both a developer of upstream Xorg and an OpenBSD developer, so it's natural for him to do a lot of the maintainership work there ***

Building a high performance FreeBSD samba server

• If you've got to PXE boot several hundred Windows boxes to upgrade from XP to 7, what's the best solution?
• FreeBSD, ZFS and Samba obviously!
• The master image and related files clock in at over 20GB, and will be accessed at the same time by all of those clients
• This article documents that process, highlighting some specific configuration tweaks to maximize performance (including NIC bonding)
• It doesn't even require the newest or best hardware with the right changes, pretty cool ***

Feedback/Questions

• An interesting Reddit thread (or two)
• PB writes in
• Sean writes in
• Steve writes in
• Lachlan writes in
• Justin writes in ***

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 ***

Feedback/Questions

• Fongaboo writes in
• David writes in
• Kristian writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan 2014 talks and reports

• The majority of the BSDCan talks are finally uploaded, so prepare to be flooded with links
• Karl Lehenbauer's keynote (he's on next week's episode)
• Mariusz Zaborski and Pawel Jakub Dawidek, Capsicum and Casper (relevant to today's interview)
• Luigi Rizzo, In-kernel OpenvSwitch on FreeBSD
• Dwayne Hart, Migrating from Linux to FreeBSD for Backend Data Storage
• Warner Losh, NAND Flash and FreeBSD
• Simon Gerraty, FreeBSD bmake and Meta Mode
• Bob Beck, LibreSSL - The First 30 Days
• Henning Brauer, OpenBGPD Turns 10 Years Old
• Arun Thomas, BSD ARM Kernel Internals
• Peter Hessler, Using BGP for Realtime Spam Lists
• Pedro Giffuni, Features and Status of FreeBSD's Ext2 Implementation
• Matt Ahrens, OpenZFS Upcoming Features and Performance Enhancements
• Daichi Goto, Shellscripts and Commands
• Benno Rice, Keeping Current
• Sean Bruno, MIPS Router Hacking
• John-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI Performance
• Patrick Kelsey, Userspace Networking with libuinet
• Massimiliano Stucchi, IPv6 Transitioning Mechanisms
• Roger Pau Monné, Taking the Red Pill
• Shawn Webb, Introducing ASLR in FreeBSD
• There's also a trip report from Peter Hessler and one from Julio Merino
• The latter report also talks about how, unfortunately, NetBSD basically had no presence in the event at all (and how that's a recurring trend) ***

Defend your network and privacy with a VPN and OpenBSD

• After all the recent news about spying, backdoored routers, deep packet inspection and everything else, you might want to start taking steps at getting some privacy back
• This article describes how to set up a secure network gateway and VPN using OpenBSD and related crypto utilities
• There are bits for DHCP, DNS, OpenVPN, DNSCrypt and a watchdog script to make sure your tunnel is always being used
• You can transparently tunnel all your outbound traffic over the VPN with this configuration, nothing is needed on any of the client systems - this could also be used with Tor (but it would be very slow)
• It also includes a few general privacy tips, recommended browser extensions, etc
• The intro to the article is especially great, so give the whole thing a read
• He mentions our OpenBSD router guide and other tutorials being a big help for this setup, so hello if you're watching! ***

You should try FreeBSD

• In this blog post, the author talks a bit about how some Linux people aren't familiar with the BSDs and how we can take steps to change that
• He goes into some FreeBSD history specifically, then talks about some of the apparent (and not-so-apparent) differences between the two
• Possibly the most useful part is how to address the question "my server already works, why bother switching?"
• "Stackoverflow’s answers assume I have apt-get installed"
• It includes mention of the great documentation, stability, ports, improved security and much more
• A takeaway quote for would-be Linux switchers: "I like to compare FreeBSD to a really tidy room where you can find everything with your eyes closed. Once you know where the closets are, it is easy to just grab what you need, even if you have never touched it before" ***

OpenBSD and the little Mauritian contributor

• This is a story about a guy from Mauritius named Logan, one of OpenBSD's newest developers
• Back in 2010, he started sending in patched for OpenBSD's "mg" editor, among other small things, and eventually added file transfer resume support for SFTP
• The article talks about his journey from just a guy who submits a patch here and there to joining the developer ranks and even getting his picture taken with Theo at a recent hackathon
• It really shows how easy it is to get involved with the different BSDs and contribute back to the software ecosystem
• Congrats to Logan, and hopefully this will inspire more people to start helping out and contributing code back ***

Interview - Jon Anderson - jonathan@freebsd.org

Capsicum and Casperd

Tutorial

Encrypting DNS lookups

News Roundup

FreeBSD Journal, May 2014 issue

• The newest issue of the FreeBSD Journal is out, following the bi-monthly release cycle
• This time the topics include: a letter from the foundation, a ports report, some 9.3-RELEASE plans, an events calendar, an overview of ipfw, exploring network activity with dtrace, an article about kqueue, data distribution with dnssec and finally an article about TCP scaling
• Pick up your (digital) copy at Amazon, Google Play or on iTunes and have a read ***

LibreSSL porting update

• Since the last LibreSSL post we covered, a couple unofficial "portable" versions have died off
• Unfortunately, people still think they can just port LibreSSL to other BSDs and Linux all willy-nilly - stop doing that!
• This post reiterates that LibreSSL currently relies on a lot of OpenBSD-specific security functions that are not present in other systems, and also gives a very eye-opening example
• Please wait for an official portable version instead of wasting time with these dime-a-dozen github clones that do more harm than good ***

BSDMag May 2014 issue is out

• The usual monthly release from BSDMag, covering a variety of subjects
• This time around the topics include: managing large development projects using RCS, working with HAMMER FS and PFSes, running MeteorJS on FreeBSD 11, another bhyve article, more GIMP tutorials and a few other things
• It's a free PDF, go grab it ***

BSDTalk episode 241

• A new episode of BSDTalk is out, this time with Bob Beck
• He talks about the OpenBSD foundation's recent activities, his own work in the project, some stories about the hardware in Theo's basement and a lot more
• The interview itself isn't about LibreSSL at all, but they do touch on it a bit too
• Really interesting stuff, covers a lot of different topics in a short amount of time ***

Feedback/Questions

• We got a number of replies about last week's VPN question, so thanks to everyone who sent in an email about it - the vpnc package seems to be what we were looking for
• Tim writes in
• AJ writes in
• Peter writes in
• Thomas writes in
• Martin writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Secure communications with OpenBSD and OpenVPN

• Starting off today's theme of encryption...
• A new blog series about combining OpenBSD and OpenVPN to secure your internet traffic
• Part 1 covers installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption (which we'll be doing later on in the show)
• Part 2 covers the initial setup of OpenVPN certificates and keys
• Parts 3 and 4 are the OpenVPN server and client configuration
• Part 5 is some updates and closing remarks ***

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

• The December 2013 semi-annual newsletter was sent out from the foundation
• In the newsletter you will find the president's letter, articles on the current development projects they sponsor and reports from all the conferences and summits they sponsored
• The president's letter alone is worth the read, really amazing
• Really long, with lots of details and stories from the conferences and projects ***

Use of NetBSD with Marvell Kirkwood Processors

• Article that gives a brief history of NetBSD and how to use it on an IP-Plug computer
• The IP-Plug is a "multi-functional mini-server was developed by Promwad engineers by the order of AK-Systems. It is designed for solving a wide range of tasks in IP networks and can perform the functions of a computer or a server. The IP-Plug is powered from a 220V network and has low power consumption, as well as a small size (which can be compared to the size of a mobile phone charger)."
• Really cool little NetBSD ARM project with lots of graphs, pictures and details ***

Experimenting with zero-copy network IO

• Long blog post from Adrian Chadd about zero-copy network IO on FreeBSD
• Discusses the different OS' implementations and options
• He's able to get 35 gbit/sec out of 70,000 active TCP sockets, but isn't stopping there
• Tons of details, check the full post ***

Interview - Damien Miller - djm@openbsd.org / @damienmiller

Cryptography in OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Tutorial

Full disk encryption in FreeBSD & OpenBSD

News Roundup

OpenZFS office hours

• Our buddy George Wilson sat down to take some ZFS questions from the community
• You can see more info about it here ***

License summaries in pkgng

• A discussion between Justin Sherill and some NYCBUG guys about license frameworks in pkgng
• Similar to pkgsrc's "ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES" setting, pkgng could let the user decide which software licenses he wants to allow
• Maybe we could get a "pkg licenses" command to display the license of all installed packages
• Ok bapt, do it ***

The FreeBSD challenge continues

• Checking in with our buddy from the Linux foundation...
• The switching from Linux to FreeBSD blog series continues for his month-long trial
• Follow up from last week: "As a matter of fact, I did check out PC-BSD, and wanted the challenge. Call me addicted to pain and suffering, but the pride and accomplishment you feel from diving into FreeBSD is quite rewarding."
• Since we last mentioned it, he's decided to go from a VM to real hardware, got all of his common software installed, experimented with the Linux emulation, set up virtualbox, learned about slices/partitions/disk management, found BSD alternatives to his regularly-used commands and lots more ***

Ports gets a stable branch

• For the first time ever, FreeBSD's ports tree will have a maintained "stable" branch
• This is similar to how pkgsrc does things, with a rolling release for updated software and stable branch for only security and big fixes
• All commits to this branch require approval of portmgr, looks like it'll start in 2014Q1 ***

Feedback/Questions

• John writes in
• Spencer writes in
• Campbell writes in
• Sha'ul writes in
• Clint writes in ***