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Playing with sandboxing

• Sandboxing and privilege separation are popular topics these days - they're the goal of the new "shill" scripting language, they're used heavily throughout OpenBSD, and they're gaining traction with the capsicum framework
• This blog post explores capsicum in FreeBSD, some of its history and where it's used in the base system
• They also include some code samples so you can verify that capsicum is actually denying the program access to certain system calls
• Check our interview about capsicum from a while back if you haven't seen it already ***

OpenNTPD on by default

• OpenBSD has enabled ntpd by default in the installer, rather than prompting the user if they want to turn it on
• In nearly every case, you're going to want to have your clock synced via NTP
• With the HTTPS constraints feature also enabled by default, this should keep the time checked and accurate, even against spoofing attacks
• Lots of problems can be traced back to the time on one system or another being wrong, so this will also eliminate some of those cases
• For those who might be curious, they're using the "pool.ntp.org" cluster of addresses and google for HTTPS constraints (but these can be easily changed) ***

FreeBSD workshop in Landshut

• We mentioned a BSD installfest happening in Germany a few weeks back, and the organizer wrote in with a review of the event
• The installfest instead became a "FreeBSD workshop" session, introducing curious new users to some of the flagship features of the OS
• They covered when to use UFS or ZFS, firewall options, the release/stable/current branches and finally how to automate installations with Ansible
• If you're in south Germany and want to give similar introduction talks or Q&A sessions about the other BSDs, get in touch
• We'll hear more from him about how it went in the feedback section today ***

Swap encryption in DragonFly

• Doing full disk encryption is very important, but something that people sometimes overlook is encrypting their swap
• This can actually be more important than the contents of your disks, especially if an unencrypted password or key hits your swap (as it can be recovered quite easily)
• DragonFlyBSD has added a new experimental option to automatically encrypt your swap partition in fstab
• There was another way to do it previously, but this is a lot easier
• You can achieve similar results in FreeBSD by adding ".eli" to the end of the swap device in fstab, there are a few steps to do it in NetBSD and swap in OpenBSD is encrypted by default
• A one-time key will be created and then destroyed in each case, making recovery of the plaintext nearly impossible ***

Interview - Jed Reynolds - jed@bitratchet.com / @jed_reynolds

Comparing ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

News Roundup

USB thermometer on OpenBSD

• So maybe you've got BSD on your server or router, maybe NetBSD on a toaster, but have you ever used a thermometer with one?
• This blog post introduces the RDing TEMPer Gold USB thermometer, a small device that can tell the room temperature, and how to get it working on OpenBSD
• Wouldn't you know it, OpenBSD has a native "ugold" driver to support it with the sensors framework
• How useful such a device would be is another story though ***

NAS4Free now on ARM

• We talk a lot about hardware for network-attached storage devices on the show, but ARM doesn't come up a lot
• That might be changing soon, as NAS4Free has just released some ARM builds
• These new (somewhat experimental) images are based on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT
• Included in the announcement is a list of fully-supported and partially-supported hardware that they've tested it with
• If anyone has experience with running a NAS on slightly exotic hardware, write in to us ***

pkgsrcCon 2015 CFP and info

• This year's pkgsrcCon will be in Berlin, Germany on July 4th and 5th
• They're looking for talk proposals and ideas for things you'd like to see
• If you or your company uses pkgsrc, or if you're just interested in NetBSD in general, it would be a good event to check out ***

BSDTalk episode 253

• BSDTalk has released another new episode
• In it, he interviews George Neville-Neil about the 2nd edition of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"
• They discuss what's new since the last edition, who the book's target audience is and a lot more
• We're up to 90 episodes now, slowly catching up to Will... ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dominik writes in
• Brad writes in
• Corvin writes in
• James writes in ***

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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 ***

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FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results

• The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
• $768,562 from 1659 donors
• Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
• "We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
• A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook) ***

OpenSSH 6.5 released

• We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
• New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
• Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
• Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
• New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
• Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
• Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
• Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
• Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL! ***

Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower

• In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
• This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
• Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
• Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
• The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone." ***

OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black

• Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
• A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
• He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
• It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
• Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices ***

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD

Tutorial

Running an NTP server

News Roundup

Getting started with FreeBSD

• A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
• The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
• He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
• The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far ***

More OpenBSD hackathon reports

• As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
• He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
• This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there ***

X11 in a jail

• We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
• A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
• Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
• Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
• AMD graphics are now officially supported
• GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
• Grub updates and fixes
• PCBSD also got a mention in eweek ***

Feedback/Questions

• Justin writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Martin writes in
• Alex writes in - unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
• James writes in
• John writes in ***

Headlines

pkgng 1.2 released

• bapt and bdrewery from the portmgr team released pkgng 1.2 final
• New features include an improved build system, plugin improvements, new bootstrapping command, SRV mirror improvements, a new "pkg config" command, repo improvements, vuXML is now default, new fingerprint features and much more
• Really simple to upgrade, check our pkgng tutorial if you want some easy instructions
• It's also made its way into Dragonfly
• See the show notes for the full list of new features and fixes ***

ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH

• Damien Miller recently committed support for a new authenticated encryption cipher for OpenSSH, chacha20-poly1305
• Long blog post explaining what these are and why we need them
• This cipher combines two primitives: the ChaCha20 cipher and the Poly1305 MAC
• RC4 is broken, we needed an authenticated encryption mode to complement AES-GCM that doesn't show the packet length in cleartext
• Great explanation of the differences between EtM, MtE and EaM and their advantages
• "Both AES-GCM and the EtM MAC modes have a small downside though: because we no longer desire to decrypt the packet as we go, the packet length must be transmitted in plaintext. This unfortunately makes some forms of traffic analysis easier as the attacker can just read the packet lengths directly." ***

Is it time to dump Linux and move to BSD

• ITworld did an article about switching from Linux to BSD
• The author's interest was sparked from a review he was reading that said "I feel the BSD communities, especially the FreeBSD-based projects, are where the interesting developments are happening these days. Over in FreeBSD land we have efficient PBI bundles, a mature advanced file system in the form of ZFS, new friendly and powerful system installers, a new package manager (pkgng), a powerful jail manager and there will soon be new virtualization technology coming with the release of FreeBSD 10.0"
• The whole article can be summed up with "yes" - ok, next story! ***

OpenZFS devsummit videos

• The OpenZFS developer summit discussion and presentation videos are up
• People from various operating systems (FreeBSD, Mac OS X, illumos, etc.) were there to discuss ZFS on their platforms and the challenges they faced
• Question and answer session from representatives of every OS - had a couple FreeBSD guys there including one from the foundation
• Presentations both about ZFS itself and some hardware-based solutions for implementing ZFS in production
• TONS of video, about 6 hours' worth
• This leads us into our interview, which is... ***

Interview - George Wilson - wilzun@gmail.com / @zfsdude

OpenZFS

Tutorial

A crash course on ZFS

News Roundup

ruBSD 2013 information

• The ruBSD 2013 conference will take place on Saturday December 14, 2013 at 10:30 AM in Moscow, Russia
• Speakers include three OpenBSD developers, Theo de Raadt, Henning Brauer and Mike Belopuhov
• Their talks are titled "The bane of backwards compatibility," "OpenBSD's pf: Design, Implementation and Future" and "OpenBSD: Where crypto is going?"
• No word on if there will be video recordings, but we'll let you know if that changes ***

DragonFly roadmap, post 3.6

• John Marino posted a possible roadmap for DragonFly, now that they're past the 3.6 release
• He wants some third party vendor software updated from very old versions (WPA supplicant, bmake, binutils)
• Plans to replace GCC44 with Clang, but GCC47 will probably be the primary compiler still
• Bring in fixes and new stuff from FreeBSD 10 ***

BSDCan 2014 CFP

• BSDCan 2014 will be held on May 16-17 in Ottawa, Canada
• They're now accepting proposals for talks
• If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal
• We'll be getting lots of interviews there ***

casperd added to -CURRENT

• "It (and its services) will be responsible forgiving access to functionality that is not available in capability modes and box. The functionality can be precisely restricted."
• Lists some sysctls that can be controlled ***

ZFS corruption bug fixed in -CURRENT

• Just a quick follow-up from last week, the ZFS corruption bug in FreeBSD -CURRENT was very quickly fixed, before that episode was even uploaded ***

Feedback/Questions

• Chris writes in
• SW writes in
• Jason writes in
• Clint writes in
• Chris writes in ***