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

Headlines

5 Key Reasons to Consider Open Source Storage Over Commercial Offerings

OpenBSD Minimalist Desktop

News Roundup

BSD-XFCE

Creating an Alpine Linux VM on bhyve - with root on ZFS (optionally encrypted)

FreeBSD Jail Quick Setup with Networking (2022)

Beastie Bits

EuroBSDcon videos are now up
LibreSSL 3.6.1 released
Raspberry Pi 4 with FreeBSD 13-RELEASE: A Perfect Miniature Homelab

AsiaBSDcon 2023 CfP

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

• John - Allan's meetup
• Matthew - atime and a question
• Valentin - Becoming a FreeBSD Developer

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

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

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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

FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available for XFCE and KDE

The Q2 2020 images are not a visible leap forward but a functional leap forward. Most effort was spent creating a better out of box experience for automatic Ethernet configuration, working WiFi, webcam, and improved hypervisor support.

Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux

Since I wrote my article "Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD" I have been wanting to write something about the technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux and while I cannot possibly cover every single reason, I can write about some of the things that I consider worth noting.

News Roundup

+ Not actually Linux distro review deux: GhostBSD

When I began work on the FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE review last week, it didn't take long to figure out that the desktop portion wasn't going very smoothly.

I think it's important for BSD-curious users to know of easier, gentler alternatives, so I did a little looking around and settled on GhostBSD for a follow-up review.

GhostBSD is based on TrueOS, which itself derives from FreeBSD Stable. It was originally a Canadian distro, but—like most successful distributions—it has transcended its country of origin and can now be considered worldwide. Significant GhostBSD development takes place now in Canada, Italy, Germany, and the United States.

“TLS Mastery” sponsorships open

My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on.

This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books.

JT (our producer) shared his Open Source Retail Box Collection on twitter this past weekend and there was a nice response from a few in the BSD Community showing their collections:

• JT's post: https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1251194823589138432

  • High Resolution Image to see the bottom shelf better: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-9QTs2RR/0/f1742096/O/i-9QTs2RR.jpg
  • Closeup of the BSD Section: https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1251294290782928897

• Others jumped in with their collections:

  • Deb Goodkin's collection: https://twitter.com/dgoodkin/status/1251294016139743232 & https://twitter.com/dgoodkin/status/1251298125672660992
  • FreeBSD Frau's FreeBSD Collection: https://twitter.com/freebsdfrau/status/1251290430475350018
  • Jason Tubnor's OpenBSD Collection: https://twitter.com/Tubsta/status/1251265902214918144

Do you have a nice collection, take a picture and send it in!

Tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals - malloc(3)

Hi there,

It's been a very long time I haven't written anything after my last OpenBSD blogs, that is,

OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space.

OpenBSD: Introduction to execpromises in the pledge(2)

pledge(2): OpenBSD's defensive approach to OS Security

So, again I started reading OpenBSD source codes with debugger after reducing my sleep timings and managing to get some time after professional life. This time I have picked one of my favourite item from my wishlist to learn and share, that is, OpenBSD malloc(3), secure allocator

How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

my home FreeNAS runs two pools for data. One RAIDZ2 with four spinning disk drives and one mirror with two SSDs. Toying with InfluxDB and Grafana in the last couple of days I found that I seem to have a constant write load of 1 Megabyte (!) per second on the SSDs. What the ...?

So I run three VMs on the SSDs in total. One with Windows 10, two with Ubuntu running Confluence, A wiki essentially, with files for attachments and MySQL as the backend database. Clearly the writes had to stop when the wikis were not used at all, just sitting idle, right?

Well even with a full query log and quite some experience in the operation of web applications I could not figure out what Confluence is doing (productively, no doubt) but trust me, it writes a couple of hundred kbytes to the database each second just sitting idle.

My infrastructure as of 2019

I've wanted to write about my infrastructure for a while, but I kept thinking, "I'll wait until after I've done $next_thing_on_my_todo." Of course this cycle never ends, so I decided to write about its state at the end of 2019. Maybe I'll write an update on it in a couple of moons; who knows?

For something different than our usual Beastie Bits… we bring you…

We're all quarantined so lets install BSD on things! Install BSD on something this week, write it up and let us know about it, and maybe we'll feature you!

• Installation of NetBSD on a Mac Mini

• OpenBSD on the HP Envy 13

• Install NetBSD on a Vintage Computer

• BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC

• Allan started a series of FreeBSD Office Hours

BSDNow is going Independent

• After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.

Feedback/Questions

• Todd - LinusTechTips Claims about ZFS

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

Headlines

Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD

Here is a quick HOWTO for those who want to provide some FreeBSD based compute resources to help finding vaccines.

UPDATE 2020-03-22: 0mp@ made a port out of this, it is in “biology/linux-foldingathome”.

Per default it will now pick up some SARS-CoV‑2 (COVID-19) related folding tasks. There are some more config options (e.g. how much of the system resources are used). Please refer to the official Folding@Home site for more information about that. Be also aware that there is a big rise in compute resources donated to Folding@Home, so the pool of available work units may be empty from time to time, but they are working on adding more work units. Be patient.

How to configure the Wireguard VPN in OPNsense

WireGuard is a modern designed VPN that uses the latest cryptography for stronger security, is very lightweight, and is relatively easy to set up (mostly). I say ‘mostly’ because I found setting up WireGuard in OPNsense to be more difficult than I anticipated. The basic setup of the WireGuard VPN itself was as easy as the authors claim on their website, but I came across a few gotcha's. The gotcha's occur with functionality that is beyond the scope of the WireGuard protocol so I cannot fault them for that. My greatest struggle was configuring WireGuard to function similarly to my OpenVPN server. I want the ability to connect remotely to my home network from my iPhone or iPad, tunnel all traffic through the VPN, have access to certain devices and services on my network, and have the VPN devices use my home's Internet connection.

WireGuard behaves more like a SSH server than a typical VPN server. With WireGuard, devices which have shared their cryptographic keys with each other are able to connect via an encrypted tunnel (like a SSH server configured to use keys instead of passwords). The devices that are connecting to one another are referred to as “peer” devices. When the peer device is an OPNsense router with WireGuard installed, for instance, it can be configured to allow access to various resources on your network. It becomes a tunnel into your network similar to OpenVPN (with the appropriate firewall rules enabled). I will refer to the WireGuard installation on OPNsense as the server rather than a “peer” to make it more clear which device I am configuring unless I am describing the user interface because that is the terminology used interchangeably by WireGuard.

The documentation I found on WireGuard in OPNsense is straightforward and relatively easy to understand, but I had to wrestle with it for a little while to gain a better understanding on how it should be configured. I believe it was partially due to differing end goals – I was trying to achieve something a little different than the authors of other wiki/blog/forum posts. Piecing together various sources of information, I finally ended up with a configuration that met the goals stated above.

News Roundup

NomadBSD 1.3.1

NomadBSD 1.3.1 has recently been made available. NomadBSD is a lightweight and portable FreeBSD distribution, designed to run on live on a USB flash drive, allowing you to plug, test, and play on different hardware. They have also started a forum as of yesterday, where you can ask questions and mingle with the NomadBSD community. Notable changes in 1.3.1 are base system upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-p2. automatic network interface setup improved, image size increased to over 4GB, Thunderbird, Zeroconf, and some more listed below.

GhostBSD 20.02

Eric Turgeon, main developer of GhostBSD, has announced version 20.02 of the FreeBSD based operating system. Notable changes are ZFS partition into the custom partition editor installer, allowing you to install alongside with Windows, Linux, or macOS. Other changes are force upgrade all packages on system upgrade, improved update station, and powerd by default for laptop battery performance.

New FuryBSD XFCE and KDE images

This new release is now based on FreeBSD 12.1 with the latest FreeBSD quarterly packages. This brings XFCE up to 4.14, and KDE up to 5.17. In addition to updates this new ISO mostly addresses community bugs, community enhancement requests, and community pull requests. Due to the overwhelming amount of reports with GitHub hosting all new releases are now being pushed to SourceForge only for the time being. Previous releases will still be kept for archive purposes.

pf-badhost 0.3 Released

pf-badhost is a simple, easy to use badhost blocker that uses the power of the pf firewall to block many of the internet's biggest irritants. Annoyances such as SSH and SMTP bruteforcers are largely eliminated. Shodan scans and bots looking for webservers to abuse are stopped dead in their tracks. When used to filter outbound traffic, pf-badhost blocks many seedy, spooky malware containing and/or compromised webhosts.

Beastie Bits

• DragonFly i915 drm update
• CShell is punk rock
• The most surprising Unix programs

Feedback/Questions

• Master One - Torn between OpenBSD and FreeBSD
• Brad - Follow up to Linus ZFS story
• Filipe Carvalho - Call for Portuguese BSD User Groups

• 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

Preorders for cool BSD stuff

• The 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is up for preorder
• We talked to GNN briefly about it, but he and Kirk have apparently finally finished the book
• "For many years, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System has been recognized as the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure. Now, this definitive guide has been extensively updated to reflect all major FreeBSD improvements between Versions 5 and Versions 11"
• OpenBSD 5.5 preorders are also up, so you can buy a CD set now
• You can help support the project, and even get the -release of the OS before it's available publicly
• 5.5 is a huge release with lots of big changes, so now is the right time to purchase one of these - tell Austin we sent you! ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 CFP

• This year's pkgsrcCon is in London, on June 21st and 22nd
• There's a Call For Papers out now, so you can submit your talks
• Anything related to pkgsrc is fine, it's pretty informal
• Does anyone in the audience know if the talks will be recorded? This con is relatively unknown ***

BSDMag issue for March 2014

• The monthly BSD magazine releases its newest issue
• Topics this time include: deploying NetBSD using AWS EC2, creating a multi-purpose file server with NetBSD, DragonflyBSD as a backup server, more GIMP lessons, network analysis with wireshark and a general security article
• The Linux article trend seems to continue... hmm ***

Non-ECC RAM in FreeNAS

• We've gotten a few questions about ECC RAM with ZFS
• Here we've got a surprising blog post about why someone did not go with ECC RAM for his NAS build
• The article mentions the benefits of ECC and admits it is a better choice in nearly all instances, but unfortunately it's not very widespread in consumer hardware motherboards and it's more expensive
• Regular RAM also has "special" issues with ZFS and pool corruption
• Long post, so check out the whole thing if you've been considering your memory options and weighing the benefits ***

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

EdgeBSD (slides)

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD desktop

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr-lurkers

• This week we get to hear from Frederic Culot, colut@
• Originally an OpenBSD user from France, Frederic joined as a ports committer in 2010 and recently joined the portmgr lurkers team
• "FreeBSD is also one of my sources of inspiration when it comes to how organizations behave and innovate, and I find it very interesting to compare FreeBSD with the for-profit companies I work for"
• We get to find out a little bit about him, why he loves FreeBSD and what he does for the project ***

NetBSD on the Playstation 2

• Who doesn't want to run NetBSD on their old PS2?
• The PS2 port of NetBSD was sadly removed in 2009, but it has been revived
• It's using a slightly unusual MIPS CPU that didn't have much GCC support
• Hopefully a bootable kernel will be available soon ***

The FreeBSD Challenge update

• Our friend from the Linux Foundation continues his FreeBSD switching journey
• This time he starts off by discovering virtual machines suck at keeping accurate time, and some ports weren't working because of his clock being way off
• After polling the IRC for help, he finally learns the difference between ntpdate and ntpd and both of their use cases
• Maybe he should've just read our NTP tutorial! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• The mount tray icon got lots of updates and fixes
• The faulty distribution server has finally been tracked down and... destroyed
• New language localization project is in progress
• Many many updates to ports and PBIs, new -STABLE builds ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Patrick writes in
• Chris writes in
• Ron writes in
• Tyler writes in ***