Bridging the Gap | BSD Now 13

chris

9 years ago

We sit down for an interview with Jordan Hubbard, one of the founders of the FreeBSD project – and the one who invented ports! Later in the show, we\’ll be showing you some new updates to the OpenBSD router tutorial from a couple weeks ago. We\’ve also got news, your questions and even our first viewer-submitted video, right here on BSD Now.. the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Getting to know your portmgr

In this interview they talk to one of the \”Annoying Reminder Guys\” – Erwin Lansing, the second longest serving member of FreeBSD\’s portmgr (also vice-president of the FreeBSD Foundation)
He actually maintains the .dk ccTLD
Describes FreeBSD as \”the best well-hidden success story in operating systems, by now in the hands of more people than one can count and used by even more people, and not one of them knows it! It’s not only the best operating system currently around, but also the most supportive and inspiring community.\”
In the next one they speak with Martin Wilke (miwi@) which is strange since he\’s \”on hiatus\” + hasn\’t done anything in a long time
The usual, \”what inspires you about FreeBSD\” \”how did you get into it\” etc.

vBSDCon wrap-up compilation

Lots of write-ups about vBSDCon gathered in one place
Some from OpenBSD guys
Some from FreeBSD guys
Some from RootBSD
Some from iXsystems
Some from Verisign
And of course our own wrap-up chat in BSD Now Episode 009

Faces of FreeBSD

This week they talk to Gábor Páli from Hungary
Talks about his past as a game programmer and how it got involved with FreeBSD
\”I met János Háber, who admired the technical merits of FreeBSD and recommended it over the popular GNU/Linux distributions. I downloaded FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE, found it reliable, consistent, easy to install, update and use.\”
He\’s been contributing since 2008 and does lots of work with Haskell in ports
He also organizes EuroBSDCon and is secretary of the FreeBSD Core Team

Dragonfly 3.6 released

dports now default instead of pkgsrc
Big SMP scaling improvements
Experimental i915 and KMS support
See our interview with Justin Sherrill if you want to hear (a lot) more about it – nearly an hour long
Matt Dillion’s comments

ZFS TRIM bug on FreeBSD -CURRENT r258632

Do not upgrade to or past 258632, there is a ZFS TRIM bug that could result in data loss
If you have already upgraded, disable TRIM with vfs.zfs.trim.enabled=0 immediately
Roll back to a previous kernel, and then scrub your pool
A fix is expected shortly

Interview – Jordan Hubbard – jkh@freebsd.org / @omgjkh

FreeBSD\’s founding and future

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD router, part 2

Note: there was a mistake in the video version of the tutorial, please consult the written version for the proper instructions.
A few weeks back we showed you how to build a high performance BSD router
Lots of work has been done to clean up and reorganize it, it\’s cut up into sections now, also has a new section about power saving
It\’s been updated for \”switchless\” operation, using a virtual ethernet interface and some bridging magic (special thanks to Ryan for helping me test that)
This updated guide will show you how to do an all-in-one router to replace your consumer one without any additional hardware
We\’ll also showcase some extras – the email alerts, errata checking script and SSH/Tor tunnels
The errata script now auto-detects if you\’re running -release, -stable or -current and acts accordingly; can automatically patch your source code and alert you

News Roundup

pfSense 2.1 on AWS EC2

We now have pfSense 2.1 available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
In keeping with the community spirit, they’re also offering a free \”public\” AMI
Check the FAQ and User Guide on their site for additional details
Interesting possibilities with pfSense in the cloud

Puffy on the desktop

Distrowatch, a primarily Linux-focused site, features an OpenBSD 5.4 review
They talk about using it on the desktop, how to set it up
Very long write-up, curious Linux users should give it a read
Ends with \”Most people will still see OpenBSD as an operating system for servers and firewalls, but OpenBSD can also be used in desktop environments if the user doesn\’t mind a little manual work. The payoff is a very light, responsive system that is unlikely to ever misbehave\”

Two-factor authentication with SSH

Blog post about using a yubikey with SSH public keys
Uses a combination of a OTP, BSDAuth and OpenBSD\’s login.conf, but it can be used with PAM on other systems as well
Allows for two-factor authentication (a la gmail) in case your private key is compromised
Anyone interested in an extra-hardened SSH server should give it a read

PCBSD weekly digest

10.0 has approximately 400 PBIs for public consumption
They will be merging the GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops into the 10.0 ports tree – please help test them, this is pretty big news in and of itself!
PCDM is coming along nicely, more bugs are getting fixed
Added ZFS dataset options to PCBSD’s new text installer front-end

Feedback/Questions

Ben writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2ag1fA7Ug
Florian writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2TSIvZzVO
Zach writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20Po4soFF
Addison writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20ntzqi9c
Adam writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2EYJjVKBk
Adam\’s BSD Router Project tutorial can be downloaded here.

Lots of links in today\’s show notes, check them out. All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you have stories about how you or your company uses BSD, interesting things you\’ve done, crazy network stories or cool projects, send them to us!
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
Reminder: the FreeBSD foundation\’s year-end donation is going on, please help out if you can. Happy Thanksgiving!