copyleft – Jupiter Broadcasting

Coming up this time on the show, we’ll be talking with the CTO of Xinuos, David Meyer, about their adoption of FreeBSD. We also discuss the BSD license model for businesses & the benefits of contributing changes back.

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Headlines

Enabling FreeBSD on AArch64

One of the things the FreeBSD foundation has been dumping money into lately is ARM64 support, but we haven’t heard too much about it – this article should change that
Since it’s on a mainstream ARM site, the article begins with a bit of FreeBSD history, leading up to the current work on ARM64
There’s also a summary of some of the ARM work done at this year’s BSDCan, including details about running it on the Cavium ThunderX platform (which has 48 cores)
As of just a couple months ago, dtrace is even working on this new architecture
Come 11.0-RELEASE, the plan is for ARM64 to get the same “tier 1” treatment as X86, which would imply binary updates for base and ports – something Raspberry Pi users often complain about not having

OpenBSD’s tcpdump detailed

Most people are probably familiar with tcpdump, a very useful packet sniffing and capturing utility that’s included in all the main BSD base systems
This video guide is specifically about the version in OpenBSD, which has gone through some major changes (it’s pretty much a fork with no version number anymore)
Unlike on the other platforms, OpenBSD’s tcpdump will always run in a chroot as an unprivileged user – this has saved it from a number of high-profile exploits
It also has support for the “pf.os” system, allowing you to filter out operating system fingerprints in the packet captures
There’s also PF (and pflog) integration, letting you see which line in your ruleset triggered a specific match
Being able to run tcpdump directly on your router is pretty awesome for troubleshooting

More FreeBSD foundation at BSDCan

The FreeBSD foundation has another round of trip reports from this year’s BSDCan
First up is Kamil Czekirda, who gives a good summary of some of the devsummit, FreeBSD-related presentations, some tutorials, getting freebsd-update bugs fixed and of course eating cake
A second post from Christian Brueffer, who cleverly planned ahead to avoid jetlag, details how he got some things done during the FreeBSD devsummit
Their third report is from our buddy Warren Block, who (unsurprisingly) worked on a lot of documentation-related things, including getting more people involved with writing them
In true doc team style, his report is the most well-written of the bunch, including lots of links and a clear separation of topics (doc lounge, contributing to the wiki, presentations…)
Finally, the fourth one comes to us from Shonali Balakrishna, who also gives an outline of some of the talks
“Not only does a BSD conference have way too many very smart people in one room, but also some of the nicest.”

DragonFly on the Chromebook C720

If you’ve got one of the Chromebook laptops and weren’t happy with the OS it came with, DragonFlyBSD might be worth a go
This article is a “mini-report” on how DragonFly functions on the device as a desktop, and
While the 2GB of RAM proved to be a bit limiting, most of the hardware is well-supported
DragonFly’s wiki has a full guide on getting set up on one of these devices as well

Interview – David Meyer – info@xinuos.com / @xinuos

Xinuos, BSD license model vs. others, community interaction

News Roundup

Introducing LiteBSD

We definitely don’t talk about 4.4BSD a lot on the show
LiteBSD is “a variant of [the] 4.4BSD operating system adapted for microcontrollers”
If you’ve got really, really old hardware (or are working in the embedded space) then this might be an interesting hobby project to look info

HardenedBSD announces ASLR completion

HardenedBSD, now officially a full-on fork of FreeBSD, has declared their ASLR patchset to be complete
The latest and last addition to the work was VDSO (Virtual Dynamic Shared Object) randomization, which is now configurable with a sysctl
This post gives a summary of the six main features they’ve added since the beginning
Only a few small things are left to do – man page cleanups, possibly shared object load order improvements

Unlock the reaper

In the ongoing quest to make more of OpenBSD SMP-friendly, a new patch was posted that unlocks the reaper in the kernel
When there’s a zombie process causing a resource leak, it’s the reaper’s job to deallocate their resources (and yes we’re still talking about computers, not horror movies)
Initial testing has yielded positive results and no regressions
They’re looking for testers, so you can install a -current snapshot and get it automatically
An updated version of the patch is coming soon too
A hackathon is going on right now, so you can expect more SMP improvements in the near future

The importance of mentoring

Adrian Chadd has a blog post up about mentoring new users, and it tells the story of how he originally got into FreeBSD
He tells the story of, at age 11, meeting someone else who knew about making crystal sets that became his role model
Eventually we get to his first FreeBSD 1.1 installation (which he temporarily abandoned for Linux, since it didn’t have a color “ls” command) and how he started using the OS
Nowadays, there’s a formal mentoring system in FreeBSD
While he talks about FreeBSD in the post, a lot of the concepts apply to all the BSDs (or even just life in general)

Feedback/Questions

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you’re in or around the Calgary, Alberta area in Canada, there’s an OpenBSD developer speaking event at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology on July 20th
It’s right after the hackathon, and they’ll be discussing some of the work that was done (maybe with a Q&A session)
We’re looking for some new interviews – get in touch if you’re doing anything cool with BSD that you’d like to talk about (or want to suggest someone else)

The post Our Code is Your Code | BSD Now 98 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Edgy BSD Users | BSD Now 31

chris — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 21:02:03 +0000

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This week we\’ll be talking to Richard Stallman about the upcoming GPLv4 and how it will protect our software from being stolen. After that, we\’ll show you how to recover from those pesky ZFS on Linux corruption issues, as well as some tips on how to explain to your boss that all the production boxes were compromised. Your questions and all the latest GNUs, on Linux Now – the place to Lin.. ux.

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Headlines

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
While we\’re on the topic of FreeNAS…

This episode was brought to you by

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

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\’ve got something cool to talk about and want to come on for an interview, shoot us an email
Also if you have any tutorial requests, we\’d be glad to show whatever the viewers want to see
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post Edgy BSD Users | BSD Now 31 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Time Signatures | BSD Now 23

chris — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 22:08:15 +0000

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We\’ll be talking with Ted Unangst of the OpenBSD team about their new signing infrastructure. After that, we\’ve got a tutorial on how to run your own NTP server. News, your feedback and even… the winner of our tutorial contest! It\’s a big show, so stay tuned to BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

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
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 idiocy 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

This episode was brought to you by

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

OpenBSD\’s signify infrastructure

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
Ongoing Discussion

PCBSD weekly digest

10.0 \”Joule Edition\” finally released!
AMD graphics are now officially supported
GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
PCBSD also got a mention in eweek

Feedback/Questions

Justin writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21VnbKZsH
Daniel writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2nD7RF6bo
Martin writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2jwRrj7UV
Alex writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s201koMD2c
+ unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
James writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2AntZmtRU
John writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20bGjMsIQ

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
The ssh tutorial has been updated with some new 6.5 stuff
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)
Reminder: if you\’re on FreeBSD 8.3 for some reason, upgrade soon – it\’s reaching EOL
Reminder: if you\’re using pkgng, be sure to update to 1.2.6 for a security issue
The winner of the tutorial contest is… Dusko! We didn\’t get as many submissions as we wanted, but his Nagios monitoring tutorial was extremely well-done. It\’ll be featured in a future episode. Congrats! Send us a picture when it arrives.
Allan got his pillow in the mail as well, it\’s super awesome

The post Time Signatures | BSD Now 23 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.