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Base ISO 100 | BSD Now 44

chris — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 11:46:54 +0000

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This time on the show, we’ll be sitting down to talk with Craig Rodrigues about Jenkins and the FreeBSD testing infrastructure. Following that, we’ll show you how to roll your own OpenBSD ISOs with all the patches already applied… ISO can’t wait!

This week’s news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

pfSense 2.1.4 released

The pfSense team has released 2.1.4, shortly after 2.1.3 – it’s mainly a security release
Included within are eight security fixes, most of which are pfSense-specific
OpenSSL, the WebUI and some packages all need to be patched (and there are instructions on how to do so)
It also includes a large number of various other bug fixes
Update all your routers!

DragonflyBSD’s pf gets SMP

While we’re on the topic of pf…
Dragonfly patches their old[er than even FreeBSD’s] pf to support multithreading in many areas
Stemming from a user’s complaint, Matthew Dillon did his own work on pf to make it SMP-aware
Altering your configuration‘s ruleset can also help speed things up, he found
When will OpenBSD, the source of pf, finally do the same?

ChaCha usage and deployment

A while back, we talked to djm about some cryptography changes in OpenBSD 5.5 and OpenSSH 6.5
This article is sort of an interesting follow-up to that, showing which projects have adopted ChaCha20
OpenSSH offers it as a stream cipher now, OpenBSD uses it for it’s random number generator, Google offers it in TLS for Chromium and some of their services and lots of other projects seem to be adopting it
Both Google’s fork of OpenSSL and LibReSSL have upcoming implementations, while vanilla OpenSSL does not
Unfortunately, this article has one mistake: FreeBSD does not use it – they still use the broken RC4 algorithm

BSDMag June 2014 issue

The monthly online BSD magazine releases their newest issue
This one includes the following articles: TLS hardening, setting up a package cluster in MidnightBSD, more GIMP tutorials, “saving time and headaches using the robot framework for testing,” an interview and an article about the increasing number of security vulnerabilities
The free pdf file is available for download as always

Interview – Craig Rodrigues – rodrigc@freebsd.org

FreeBSD’s continuous testing infrastructure

Tutorial

Creating pre-patched OpenBSD ISOs

News Roundup

Preauthenticated decryption considered harmful

Responding to a post from Adam Langley, Ted Unangst talks a little more about how signify and pkg_add handle signatures
In the past, the OpenBSD installer would pipe the output of ftp straight to tar, but then verify the SHA256 at the end – this had the advantage of not requiring any extra disk space, but raised some security concerns
With signify, now everything is fully downloaded and verified before tar is even invoked
The pkg_add utility works a little bit differently, but it’s also been improved in this area – details in the post
Be sure to also read the original post from Adam, lots of good information

FreeBSD 9.3-RC2 is out

As the -RELEASE inches closer, release candidate 2 is out and ready for testing
Since the last one, it’s got some fixes for NIC drivers, the latest file and libmagic security fixes, some serial port workarounds and various other small things
The updated bsdconfig will use pkgng style packages now too
A lesser known fact: there are also premade virtual machine images you can use too

pkgsrcCon 2014 wrap-up

In what may be the first real pkgsrcCon article we’ve ever had!
Includes wrap-up discussion about the event, the talks, the speakers themselves, what they use pkgsrc for, the hackathon and basically the whole event
Unfortunately no recordings to be found…

PostgreSQL FreeBSD performance and scalability

FreeBSD developer kib@ writes a report on PostgreSQL on FreeBSD, and how it scales
On his monster 40-core box with 1TB of RAM, he runs lots of benchmarks and posts the findings
Lots of technical details if you’re interested in getting the best performance out of your hardware
It also includes specific kernel options he used and the rest of the configuration
If you don’t want to open the pdf file, you can use this link too

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
There, you’ll also find a link to Bob Beck’s LibReSSL talk from the end of May – we finally found a recording!
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you want to come on for an interview or have a tutorial you’d like to see, let us know
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)
Next week Allan will be at BSDCam, so we’ll have a prerecorded episode then

The post Base ISO 100 | BSD Now 44 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Friendly Sandbox | BSD Now 39

chris — Thu, 29 May 2014 13:26:06 +0000

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This time on the show we\’ll be talking with Jon Anderson about Capsicum and Casper to securely sandbox processes. After that, our tutorial will show you how to encrypt all your DNS lookups, either on a single system or for your whole network. News, emails and all the usual fun, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

BSDCan 2014 talks and reports

The majority of the BSDCan talks are finally uploaded, so prepare to be flooded with links
Karl Lehenbauer\’s keynote (he\’s on next week\’s episode)
Mariusz Zaborski and Pawel Jakub Dawidek,
Capsicum and Casper (relevant to today\’s interview)
Luigi Rizzo,
In-kernel OpenvSwitch on FreeBSD
Dwayne Hart, Migrating from Linux to FreeBSD for Backend Data Storage
Warner Losh, NAND Flash and FreeBSD
Simon Gerraty, FreeBSD bmake and Meta Mode
Bob Beck, LibreSSL – The First 30 Days
Henning Brauer, OpenBGPD Turns 10 Years Old
Arun Thomas, BSD ARM Kernel Internals
Peter Hessler, Using BGP for Realtime Spam Lists
Pedro Giffuni, Features and Status of FreeBSD\’s Ext2 Implementation
Matt Ahrens, OpenZFS Upcoming Features and Performance Enhancements
Daichi Goto, Shellscripts and Commands
Benno Rice, Keeping Current
Sean Bruno, MIPS Router Hacking
John-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI Performance
Patrick Kelsey, Userspace Networking with libuinet
Massimiliano Stucchi, IPv6 Transitioning Mechanisms
Roger Pau Monné, Taking the Red Pill
Shawn Webb, Introducing ASLR in FreeBSD
There\’s also a trip report from Peter Hessler and one from Julio Merino
The latter report also talks about how, unfortunately, NetBSD basically had no presence in the event at all (and how that\’s a recurring trend)

Defend your network and privacy with a VPN and OpenBSD

After all the recent news about spying, backdoored routers, deep packet inspection and everything else, you might want to start taking steps at getting some privacy back
This article describes how to set up a secure network gateway and VPN using OpenBSD and related crypto utilities
There are bits for DHCP, DNS, OpenVPN, DNSCrypt and a watchdog script to make sure your tunnel is always being used
You can transparently tunnel all your outbound traffic over the VPN with this configuration, nothing is needed on any of the client systems – this could also be used with Tor (but it would be very slow)
It also includes a few general privacy tips, recommended browser extensions, etc
The intro to the article is especially great, so give the whole thing a read
He mentions our OpenBSD router guide and other tutorials being a big help for this setup, so hello if you\’re watching!

You should try FreeBSD

In this blog post, the author talks a bit about how some Linux people aren\’t familiar with the BSDs and how we can take steps to change that
He goes into some FreeBSD history specifically, then talks about some of the apparent (and not-so-apparent) differences between the two
Possibly the most useful part is how to address the question \”my server already works, why bother switching?\”
\”Stackoverflow’s answers assume I have apt-get installed\” ← lol
It includes mention of the great documentation, stability, ports, improved security and much more
A takeaway quote for would-be Linux switchers: \”I like to compare FreeBSD to a really tidy room where you can find everything with your eyes closed. Once you know where the closets are, it is easy to just grab what you need, even if you have never touched it before\”

OpenBSD and the little Mauritian contributor

This is a story about a guy from Mauritius named Logan, one of OpenBSD\’s newest developers
Back in 2010, he started sending in patched for OpenBSD\’s \”mg\” editor, among other small things, and eventually added file transfer resume support for SFTP
The article talks about his journey from just a guy who submits a patch here and there to joining the developer ranks and even getting his picture taken with Theo at a recent hackathon
It really shows how easy it is to get involved with the different BSDs and contribute back to the software ecosystem
Congrats to Logan, and hopefully this will inspire more people to start helping out and contributing code back

Interview – Jon Anderson – jonathan@freebsd.org

Capsicum and Casperd

Tutorial

Encrypting DNS lookups

News Roundup

FreeBSD Journal, May 2014 issue

The newest issue of the FreeBSD Journal is out, following the bi-monthly release cycle
This time the topics include: a letter from the foundation, a ports report, some 9.3-RELEASE plans, an events calendar, an overview of ipfw, exploring network activity with dtrace, an article about kqueue, data distribution with dnssec and finally an article about TCP scaling
Pick up your (digital) copy at Amazon, Google Play or on iTunes and have a read

LibreSSL porting update

Since the last LibreSSL post we covered, a couple unofficial \”portable\” versions have died off
Unfortunately, people still think they can just port LibreSSL to other BSDs and Linux all willy-nilly – stop doing that!
This post reiterates that LibreSSL currently relies on a lot of OpenBSD-specific security functions that are not present in other systems, and also gives a very eye-opening example
Please wait for an official portable version instead of wasting time with these dime-a-dozen github clones that do more harm than good

BSDMag May 2014 issue is out

The usual monthly release from BSDMag, covering a variety of subjects
This time around the topics include: managing large development projects using RCS, working with HAMMER FS and PFSes, running MeteorJS on FreeBSD 11, another bhyve article, more GIMP tutorials and a few other things
It\’s a free PDF, go grab it

BSDTalk episode 241

A new episode of BSDTalk is out, this time with Bob Beck
He talks about the OpenBSD foundation\’s recent activities, his own work in the project, some stories about the hardware in Theo\’s basement and a lot more
The interview itself isn\’t about LibreSSL at all, but they do touch on it a bit too
Really interesting stuff, covers a lot of different topics in a short amount of time

Feedback/Questions

We got a number of replies about last week\’s VPN question, so thanks to everyone who sent in an email about it – the vpnc package seems to be what we were looking for
Tim writes in
AJ writes in
Peter writes in
Thomas writes in
Martin writes in

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
We\’re looking for new tutorial ideas, so if there\’s something specific you\’d like to learn about, let us know
FreeBSD core team elections are in progress – nominations ended today. There are 21 candidates, and voting is open for the next month. We\’ll let you know how it goes in a future episode.
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post The Friendly Sandbox | BSD Now 39 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Eclipsing Binaries | BSD Now 18

chris — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 21:36:57 +0000

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Put away the Christmas trees and update your ports trees! We\’re back with the first show of 2014, and we\’ve got some catching up to do. This time on the show, we have an interview with Baptiste Daroussin about the future of FreeBSD binary packages. Following that, we\’ll be highlighting a cool script to do binary upgrades on OpenBSD. Lots of holiday news and listener feedback, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

iXsystems: This is what 80 cores and 1TB of RAM looks like!

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Headlines

Faces of FreeBSD continues

Our first one details Shteryana Shopova, the local organizer for EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sophia
Gives some information about how she got into BSD
\”I installed FreeBSD on my laptop, alongside the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn\’t booted the other two operating systems in months. So I wiped them out.\”
She wrote bsnmpd and extended it with the help of a grant from the FreeBSD Foundation
We\’ve also got one for Kevin Martin
Started off with a pinball website, ended up learning about FreeBSD from an ISP and starting his own hosting company
\”FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community.\”

OpenPF?

A blog post over at the Dragonfly digest
What if we had some cross platform development of OpenBSD\’s firewall?
Similar to portable OpenSSH or OpenZFS, there could be a centrally-developed version with compatibility glue
Right now FreeBSD 9\’s pf is old, FreeBSD 10\’s pf is old (but has the best performance of any implementation due to custom patches), NetBSD\’s pf is old (but they\’re working on a fork) and Dragonfly\’s pf is old
Further complicated by the fact that PF itself doesn’t have a version number, since it was designed to just be ‘the pf that came with OpenBSD 5.4’
Not likely to happen any time soon, but it\’s good food for thought

Year of BSD on the server

A good blog post about switching servers from Linux to BSD
2014 is going to be the year of a lot of switching, due to FreeBSD 10\’s amazing new features
This author was particularly taken with pkgng and the more coherent layout of BSD systems
Similarly, there was also a recent reddit thread, \”Why did you choose BSD over Linux?\”
Both are excellent reads for Linux users that are thinking about making the switch, send \’em to your friends

Getting to know your portmgr

This time in the series they interview Bryan Drewery, a fairly new addition to the team
He started maintaining portupgrade and portmaster, and eventually ended up on the ports management team
Believe it or not, his wife actually had a lot to do with him getting into FreeBSD full-time
Lots of fun trivia and background about him
Speaking of portmgr, our interview for today is…

This episode was brought to you by

Interview – Baptiste Daroussin – bapt@freebsd.org

The future of FreeBSD\’s binary packages, ports\’ features, various topics

Tutorial

Binary upgrades in OpenBSD

Using a third party script, binary upgrades in OpenBSD are easy
It automates a lot of the manual work and saves time – great for large deployments

News Roundup

pfSense december hang out

Interview/presentation from pfSense developer Chris Buechler with an accompanying blog post
\”This is the first in what will be a monthly recurring series. Each month, we’ll have a how to tutorial on a specific topic or area of the system, and updates on development and other happenings with the project. We have several topics in mind, but also welcome community suggestions on topics\”
Speaking of pfSense, they recently opened an online store
We\’re planning on having a pfSense episode next month!

BSDMag December issue is out

The free monthly BSD magazine gets a new release for December
Topics include CARP on FreeBSD, more BSD programming, \”unix basics for security professionals,\” some kernel introductions, using OpenBSD as a transparent proxy with relayd, GhostBSD overview and some stuff about SSH

OpenBSD gets tmpfs

In addition to the recently-added FUSE support, OpenBSD now has tmpfs
To get more testing, it was enabled by default in -current
Should make its way into 5.5 if everything goes according to plan
Enables lots of new possibilities, like our ccache and tmpfs guide

PCBSD weekly digests

Catching up with all the work going on in PCBSD land..
10.0-RC2 is now available
The big pkgng 1.2 problems seem to have been worked out

Feedback/Questions

Remy writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2UrUzlnf6
Jason writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2iqnywwKX
Rob writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2IUcPySbh
John writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21aYlbXz2
Stuart writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21vrYSqU8

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
The jail tutorial and disk encryption tutorial have gotten some improvements and updates
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
Happy new year everybody!

The post Eclipsing Binaries | BSD Now 18 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A Brief Intorduction | BSD Now 8

chris — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:48:00 +0000

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We chat with Antti Kantee from the NetBSD project about a crazy little thing called rump kernels. We\’ll also be showing you all the different cool things you can do with BSD and the Tor network, as well as discussing all the latest news. So sit back and enjoy BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

FreeBSD July-September 2013 Status Report

Quarterly FreeBSD status report is out with A LOT of updates, we\’ll cover a few of them
Highlights include AES-NI Improvements for GELI, Capsicum development, Continuation of the Newcons Project, Download Manager Service for the Ports Collection, status updates from all the various FreeBSD teams, FreeBSD on EC2 news, updates to the CSPRNG, much more
We\’ve covered some of these things already, but there\’s lots to read in the announcement
See full page for details on everything

Dragonfly SMP contention update

Lots of work going in to reducing SMP contention in the next Dragonfly release
Anything which forks and/or execs a lot will now run as close to optimally as it is possible to run on a multi-core box
The lead developer was using poudriere and noticed the performance difference, says this is \”a fairly major milestone for the project\”
Lots of technical details in the mailing list post, check it out

FreeBSD gets \”first boot\” rc.d scripts

Colin Percival added support for scripts that run on the first boot
Might be desirable for embedded systems to automatically download and apply patches
Similarly, it can be used to invoke freebsd-update to patch your system on the first bootup
Could also be used to download and run a script or install ports or packages
Already MFCed to 10-STABLE and 9-STABLE and added to ports
Lots of possibilities

NetBSD gets lua scripting in the kernel

NetBSD gained support for the Lua scripting language in the kernel
A luactl command was added to easily manipulate it
It will be interesting to see what can come out of this
Speaking of NetBSD kernels, that leads us into our interview!

— Interview –

Interview – Antti Kantee – pooka@netbsd.org / @anttikantee

The anykernel and rump kernels
rump kernels in userspace, rump kernels + applications on Xen, fs-utils, rump kernel compiled to javascript

Tutorial

Running a Tor relay, bridge, exit or hidden service

The BSDs, with their great network performance and security, make great Tor nodes
This tutorial shows the different cool things you can do with Tor
Help out the network by donating some bandwidth
We need more BSD nodes. Our random number generator isn\’t backdoored like Linux\’s

News Roundup

Second PCBSD feature digest it out

Weekly PCBSD digest is out to tell you about new features
Mentions switching over all bug reports to trac.pcbsd.org
Life Preserver has finished development and is now being tested
PCBSD 10.0 ISOs coming soon

OpenBSD imports VXLAN interface

VXLAN is a virtual extensible local area network tunnel interface
UDP-based tunneling protocol for overlaying virtualized layer 2 networks over layer 3 networks

OpenZFS Office Hours

The question and answer session with Matt has been uploaded
Covers lots of topics ranging from cross-compatibility to performance improvements and trivia

BSDMag\’s October issue is out

Free monthly BSD magazine releases another issue
Topics include FreeBSD moving to SVN, a BSD programming intro, new PCBSD utilities, migrating from Linux to BSD and OpenBSD LTS updates (which we already covered!)

Feedback/Questions

Ben writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20MUQmfuD
- PCBSD pkg config: https://github.com/pcbsd/pcbsd/blob/master/build-files/conf/port-make.conf
Brian writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20oVdxaE5
Toby writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2GfQkSSDz
Noah writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2IFpjbWVr

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, etc to feedback@bsdnow.tv
We don’t check YouTube comments, JB comments, Reddit, etc. If you want us to see it, send it via email (the preferred way) or Twitter (also acceptable)
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post A Brief Intorduction | BSD Now 8 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.