Rushing into BSD | BSD Now 138

chris

6 years ago

This week on the show, we will be talking to Benedict Reushling about his role with the FreeBSD foundation and the journey that took him there. That plus a few weeks worth of news to get caught up on, coming up next on BSDNow!

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

HardenedBSD introduces full PIE support

PIE base for amd64 and i386
Only nine applications are not compiled as PIEs
Tested PIE base on several amd64 systems, both virtualized and bare metal
Hoped to be to enabled it for ARM64 before or during BSDCan.
Shawn will be bringing ten Raspberry Pi 3 devices (which are ARM64) with to BSDCan, eight of which will be given out to lucky individuals. “We want the BSD community to hack on them and get ARM64/Aarch64 fully functional on them.”

Lessons learned from 30 years of MINIX

Eat your own dog food.
By not relying on idiosyncratic features of the hardware, one makes porting to new platforms much easier.
The Internet is like an elephant; it never forgets.
When standards exist (such as ANSI Standard C) stick to them.
Even after you have adopted a strategy, you should nevertheless reexamine it from time to time.
Keep focused on your real goal, Einstein was right: Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler.

pfSense 2.3 released

Rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap
TLS v1.0 disabled for the GUI
Moved to a FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE base
PHP Upgraded to 5.6
The “Full Backup” feature has been deprecated
Closed 760 total tickets of which 137 are fixed bugs
Known Regressions
OpenVPN topology change
IP aliases with CARP IP parent lose their parent interface association post-upgrade
IPsec IPComp does not work.
IGMP Proxy does not work with VLAN interfaces.
Many other updates and changes

OPNsense 16.1.10 released

openvpn: revive windows installer binaries
system: improved config history and backup pages layout
system: increased backup count default from 30 to 60
system: /var /tmp MFS awareness for crash dumps added
trust: add “IP security IKE intermediate” to server key usage
firmware: moved reboot, halt and defaults pages to new home
languages: updates to Russian, French, German and Japanese
Many other updates and changes

Interview – Benedict Reuschling – bcr@freebsd.org

FreeBSD Foundation in Europe

News Roundup

Write opinionated workarounds

Colin Percival has written a great blog post this past week, specifically talking about his policy of writing “opinionated workarounds”.
The idea came about due to his working on multi-platform software, and the frustrations of dealing with POSIX violations
The crux of the post is how he deals with these workarounds. Specifically by only applying them to the particular system in which it was required. And doing so loudly.
This has some important benefits. First, it doesn’t potentially expose other systems to bugs / security flaws when a workaround doesn’t “work” on a system for which it wasn’t designed. Secondly it’s important to complain. Loudly. This lets the user know that they are running on a system that doesn’t adhere to POSIX compliance, and maybe even get the attention of a developer who could remedy the situation.

Privilege escalation in calendar(1)

File this one under “Ouch that hurts” a new security vuln has been posted, this time against NetBSD’s ‘calendar’ command.
Specifically it looks like some of the daily scripts uses the ‘-a’ flag, which requires super-user privs in order to process all users calendar files and mail the results.
However the bug occurred because the calendar command didn’t drop priv properly before executing external commands (whoops!)
To workaround you can set run_calendar=NO in the daily.conf file, or apply the fixed binary from upstream.

PGCon 2016

PGCon 2016 is now only 4 weeks away
The conference will be held at the University of Ottawa (same venue as BSDCan) from May 17th to 20th
Tutorials: 17-18 May 2016 (Tue & Wed)
Talks: 19-20 May 2016 (Thu-Fri)
Wednesday is a developer unconference.
Saturday is a user unconference.
“PGCon is an annual conference for users and developers of PostgreSQL, a leading relational database, which just happens to be open source. PGCon is the place to meet, discuss, build relationships, learn valuable insights, and generally chat about the work you are doing with PostgreSQL. If you want to learn why so many people are moving to PostgreSQL, PGCon will be the place to find out why. Whether you are a casual user or you’ve been working with PostgreSQL for years, PGCon will have something for you.”
New to PGSQL? Just a user? Long time developers? This conference has something for you. A great lineup of talks, plus unconference days focused on both users and developers

CfP EuroBSDCon 2016

The call for papers has been issued for EuroBSDCon 2016 in Belgrade, Serbia
The conference will be held from the 22nd to 25th of September, 2016
The deadline for talk submissions is: Sunday the 8th of May, 2016
Submit your talk or tutorial proposal before it is too late

Beastie Bits

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