From the Foundation (Part 2) | BSD Now 78

chris

7 years ago

This week we continue our two-part series on the activities of various BSD foundations. Ken Westerback joins us today to talk all about the OpenBSD foundation and what it is they do. We’ve also got answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

BSDCan 2015 schedule

The list of presentations for the upcoming BSDCan conference has been posted, and the time schedule should be up shortly as well
Just a reminder: it’s going to be held on June 12th and 13th at the University of Ottawa in Canada
This year’s conference will have a massive fifty talks, split up between four tracks instead of three (but unfortunately a person can only be in one place at a time)
Both Allan and Kris had at least one presentation accepted, and Allan will also be leading a few “birds of a feather” gatherings
In total, there will be three NetBSD talks, five OpenBSD talks, eight BSD-neutral talks, thirty-five FreeBSD talks and no DragonFly talks
That’s not the ideal balance we’d hope for, but BSDCan says they’ll try to improve that next year
Those numbers are based on the speaker’s background, or any past presentations, for the few whose actual topic wasn’t made obvious from the title (so there may be a small margin of error)
Michael Lucas (who’s on the BSDCan board) wrote up a blog post about the proposals and rejections this year
If you can’t make it this year, don’t worry, we’ll be sure to announce the recordings when they’re made available
We also interviewed Dan Langille about the conference and what to expect this year, so check that out too

SSL interception with relayd

There was a lot of commotion recently about superfish, a way that Lenovo was intercepting HTTPS traffic and injecting advertisements
If you’re running relayd, you can mimic this evil setup on your own networks (just for testing of course…)
Reyk Floeter, the guy who wrote relayd, came up a blog post about how to do just that
It starts off with some backstory and some of the things relayd is capable of
relayd can run as an SSL server to terminate SSL connections and forward them as plain TCP and, conversely, run as an SSL client to terminal plain TCP connections and tunnel them through SSL
When you combine these two, you end up with possibilities to filter between SSL connections, effectively creating a MITM scenario
The post is very long, with lots of details and some sample config files – the whole nine yards

OPNsense 15.1.6.1 released

The OPNsense team has released yet another version in rapid succession, but this one has some big changes
It’s now based on FreeBSD 10.1, with all the latest security patches and driver updates (as well as some in-house patches)
This version also features a new tool for easily upgrading between versions, simply called “opnsense-update” (similar to freebsd-update)
It also includes security fixes for BIND and PHP, as well as some other assorted bug fixes
The installation images have been laid out in a clean way: standard CD and USB images that default to VGA, as well as USB images that default to a console output (for things like Soekris and PCEngines APU boards that only have serial ports)
With the news of m0n0wall shutting down last week, they’ve also released bare minimum hardware specifications required to run OPNsense on embedded devices
Encouraged by last week’s mention of PCBSD trying to cut ties with OpenSSL, OPNsense is also now providing experimental images built against LibreSSL for testing (and have instructions on how to switch over without reinstalling)

OpenBSD on a Minnowboard Max

What would our show be without at least one story about someone installing BSD on a weird device
For once, it’s actually not NetBSD…
This article is about the minnowboard max, a very small X86-based motherboard that looks vaguely similar to a Raspberry Pi
It’s using an Atom CPU instead of ARM, so overall application compatibility should be a bit better (and it even has AES-NI, so crypto performance will be much better than a normal Atom)
The author describes his entirely solid-state setup, noting that there’s virtually no noise, no concern about hard drives dying and very reasonable power usage
You’ll find instructions on how to get OpenBSD installed and going throughout the rest of the article
Have a look at the spec sheet if you’re interested, they make for cool little BSD boxes

Netmap for 40gbit NICs in FreeBSD

Luigi Rizzo posted an announcement to the -current mailing list, detailing some of the work he’s just committed
The ixl(4) driver, that’s one for the X1710 40-gigabit card, now has netmap support
It’s currently in 11-CURRENT, but he says it works in 10-STABLE and will be committed there too
This should make for some serious packet-pushing power
If you have any network hardware like this, he would appreciate testing for the new code

Interview – Ken Westerback – directors@openbsdfoundation.org

The OpenBSD foundation‘s activities

News Roundup

s2k15 hackathon report: dhclient/dhcpd/fdisk

The second trip report from the recent OpenBSD hackathon has been published, from the very same guy we just talked to
Ken was also busy, getting a few networking-related things fixed and improved in the base system
He wrote a few new small additions for dhclient and beefed up the privsep security, as well as some fixes for tcpdump and dhcpd
The fdisk tool also got worked on a bit, enabling OpenBSD to properly wipe GPT tables on a previously-formatted disk so you can do a normal install on it
There’s apparently plans for “dhclientng” – presumably a big improvement (rewrite?) of dhclient

FreeBSD beginner video series

A new series of videos has started on YouTube, aimed at helping total beginners learn about FreeBSD
We usually assume that people who watch the show are already familiar with basic concepts, but they’d be a great introduction to any of your friends that are looking to get started with BSD and need a helping hand
So far, he’s covered how to get FreeBSD, an introduction to installing in VirtualBox, a simple installation or a more in-depth manual installation, navigating the filesystem, basic ssh use, managing users and groups and finally some basic editing with vi and a few other topics
Everyone’s gotta start somewhere and, with a little bit of initial direction, today’s newbies could be tomorrow’s developers
It should be an ongoing series with more topics to come

NetBSD tests: zero unexpected failures

The NetBSD guys have a new blog post up about their testing suite for all the CPU architectures
They’ve finally gotten the number of “expected” failures down to zero on a few select architectures
Results are published on a special release engineering page, so you can have a look if you’re interested
The rest of the post links to the “top performers” (ones with less than ten failure) in the -current branch

PCBSD switches to IPFW

The PCBSD crew continues their recent series of switching between major competing features
This time, they’ve switched the default firewall away from PF to FreeBSD’s native IPFW firewall
Look forward to Kris wearing a “keep calm and use IPFW” shir- wait

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Some extra emails would be great, since we’ll be recording two episodes next week
Be sure to say hi if you’re at AsiaBSDCon in a couple weeks, maybe we could even interview some listeners too
We talked to the NetBSD foundation back in episode 12 and DragonFlyBSD doesn’t have a foundation, so there won’t be an “official” third part in this series