Show Notes/Links: https://www.bsdnow.tv/330

The post Happy Holidays, All(an) | BSD Now 330 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

ABI.chicago launched Oct 2015 as a 501.3c focused to women and men that are in all interests of technology. Its goal is to reach more beginners interested in transitioning to technology. LaShon Anthony is the Community Leader of the ABI.chicago chapter.

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Interview – LaShon Anthony – @visuals4u

• https://local.anitaborg.org/
• Anita Borg Institute
• Anita Borg Institute (@anitaborg_org) | Twitter
• Anita Borg Institute for Women In Technology

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• WTR Transcription Poll

The post Anita Borg Institute | WTR 56 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Jewel is cofounder of Workfrom, an online resource for remote workers, freelancers, digital nomads & travelers to find a place to work from!

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Interview – Jewel Mlnarik – @juellez

• Workfrom — Best Places to Work Remotely in a City
• jewel mlnarik (@juellez) | Twitter
• Workfrom (@workfrom) | Twitter

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The post Oops, We Went International | WTR 55 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Holly is a software engineer at BlackLocus, a big data analyzer for Home Depot. She discusses her journey into technology that started in college & took a big detour.

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• Holly Gibson (@hollyglot) | Twitter
• Women Who Code ATX (@wwcodeatx) | Twitter
• SSD Cloud Hosting – Linode
• BlackLocus
• Women Who Code Austin (Austin, TX) – Meetup
• Welcome | Women Who Code

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE:: So Angela, today we are going to talk to Holly Gibson. She is a programer for BlackLocus. Yes, it was awesome, which apparently has a reference to black hole, which is bad ass. Anyway, she is working kind of on data science and she went through boot camp and she does all sorts of cool things. And we talk about all of them.
ANGELA: Yes. It’s a very good interview that we are going to get into as soon as I mention that you can support this show. If you’re listening week after week and you like the content and you would like to help in some way, you can go to Patreaon.com/today. It is how the whole network of Jupiter Broadcasting is funded, but specifically, when you subscribe you are helping out Women’s Tech Radio as well. Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get started with today’s interview by asking Holly what she’s up to in tech today.
HOLLY: I’m a software engineer at BlackLocus. It’s a subsidiary of Home Depot and they do data science for Home Depot. They do a lot of web scraping and track all of Home Depot’s product catalog and their competitor’s prices so that they can price their products accurately. So lots of big data.
ANGELA: That’s really cool, because in a previous episode we were discussing that, was it Sears that needed a total IT aspect to it.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: And so now this is similar. BlackLocus, you said?
HOLLY: Yes.
ANGELA: Yeah, for Home Depot.
HOLLY: Uh, Locus means place. They’re kind of like the black hole of the internet. They’re sucking in everything.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: I like that. That’s really cool.
ANGELA: Yeah, it is.
PAIGE: So we were essentially touching on the idea that at this point all companies are become tech companies.
ANGELA: Yeah.
HOLLY: Yes. Yes. Home Depot acquired them three years ago. They had become a client and immediately started negotiating to buy them, because their tool was so awesome.
PAIGE: Awesome. So you do data science, which I think of as kind of like a magical unicorn at this point, because no one is quite willing to nail down what that means in the tech sphere, so can you enlighten me?
HOLLY: Sure. I’m more on the software engineer side so I”m not writing the fancy algorithms that the data science people are. We’re working in Python and Java and Javascript to consume the data and wrap it and make it beautiful so that an average person can look at it and understand what it means.
PAIGE: Okay. So you write tools in Python and Javascript and stuff and then you take what they’ve done and make it so that someone like me can get their head around it?
HOLLY: Yes.
PAIGE: Very cool. What’s your favorite piece of that stack?
HOLLY: I really like all of it still. I”m a generalist engineer. I’m, you know, full stack as they say, but generalist. I dabble in a little bit of everything. I came out of a boot camp two years ago and my first job was working at an education startup doing everything from supporting the IT for the office to managing the serve and the databases, doing the front end and the back end. So I really like all of it. Mainly I like solving problems. So just let me solve problems. Let me use logic and my brain and I’m happy.
PAIGE: So, boot camp, is that the way that you got into the technology field?
HOLLY: Sort of. It was a reboot. I studied Javascript and databases in college and I took over the college website and I managed it for five years. And i really enjoyed it, but I was a one woman team and solo. So it was very lonely. I didn’t have any mentors at that time. You know, web applications were just coming out and it was before Facebook, so that’s how old I am. So people were just figuring stuff out and so I didn’t know how much I knew. I thought, I’m just a beginner. I don’t know very much. I’ve done this for five years. This is fun, but now I”m going to go try a bunch of other stuff. So I sold antiques on Ebay. I managed a restaurant. I did summer camps for kids with disabilities. And then two years ago I found out about a boot camp here in Austin, Texas, where I live, and my husband I signed up to do it together. It was a three-month program over the summer. The hardest thing I’ve ever done, but got through it and really enjoyed having teachers I could ask questions from, classmates along side of me. We were learning together. Building actual applications and projects. It was a really, really great experience.
PAIGE: What do you think was the major difference between studying at a university level and being in the boot camp. Maybe, was it the timeliness of it? Where the internet has grown so much and we have so much more to work with and so many more resources, or more like the way that the instruction was done? What was the real standout to you that made it stick this time around and didn’t last time?
HOLLY: The way the instruction was done. I think sometimes universities are behind the ball so the technology I was learning in school was already a couple years old. I went to a very small school and the classes were really little. Most of them I was by myself so the professor would hand me a text book and say go read this. Which was great, I was learning, but having the hands on experience of the boot camp really resonated with me. I’m a mechanical person. I like building. I like learning by projects. So it cemented the theory much more in my brain when I was actually doing stuff.
PAIGE: That makes total sense. So you mentioned in talking about your university that it was really confusing to you to tell what the next steps were and understanding how much you knew. Do you think that was — and then you mentioned a lack of mentors. Do you think that those two are kind of related and how have you tackled that this time around?
HOLLY: Sure. Yeah. The program that I studied in school wasn’t a traditional computer science program. It was a degree in Theology and they had just added web design, because they thought, well people might want websites. So I took all the classes, because I actually thought theology was boring. So I loved the web design and I wanted a job afterwards, and i didn’t want to be a minister. So the web design seemed like a good route to go, but then I, you know, after I had built some sites and when I was thinking about leaving the university, I wasn’t sure how to go about that, because I didn’t have computer science degree on my resume. I didn’t know anybody in computer science. All I knew is I liked web design and I had built some stuff, but I wasn’t sure how to translate that into getting a different job. And so I kind of just gave up and went and did other stuff where I knew I could sale myself in marketing, graphic design, and stuff. Since going through the boot camp, it was great because they had relationships with local companies. They recommended we go to meetups, that we looked for mentors, that we meet people in the local tech scene. And so immediately in the boot camp we started as a class going to different meetups. Going to the Javascripts meetup. Going to the Rails meetup. And then I was really lucky to go to a Women Who Code meetup that had just started here in Austin at our bootcamp. They had the first night there and I went and it was an informational meeting and I said how can I help? And the women said how would you like to run Austin Women Who Code. So-
PAIGE: The same thing happened to me.
ANGELA: Wow.
HOLLY: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, not kidding.
HOLLY: So I took it over and now two years later we have 1,200 members and it’s been awesome. So that’s really been a great avenue for me to meet other women in tech, to find mentors. But what i tell the women in my group is go to the meetups. If you see someone talking intelligently about something and you want to know more, go ask them questions. They could turn into a mentor. Like I mentioned, my first job was at an education startup by myself. So again, that’s like a one woman team and I knew I needed help. And I knew where to go. So I went to the meetups. I met some people and I was like can you help me? Explain this code. I”m not understanding this. You know, I’m all by myself. And I said, yeah, let’s meet for coffee. And I said I”ll buy you coffee. I’ll buy you tacos, whatever you want. So one guy, we started meeting weekly for about four months and he explained code to me and design patterns and different things, and really got me over the first hump in my job. And since then I’ve been kind of networking through his friends and going, so do you know of someone who knows this, and someone who knows that. And just finding where the holes are in my knowledge and who can help me with those. There’s lots of online classes and blogs and videos and those are great. I learn mostly sitting with someone in pair programming and so I’ll read books and I will look up blogs. My best source of learning is from an actual physical person. So I really do like meeting. I write. Now I’m learning Haskell and functional programing so I meet weekly with my mentor, who came through my first mentor. And it’s great, because he has a master’s in Computer Science and he’s been doing this for 15 years and I can ask so many questions. I have this wealth of knowledge in that brain.
PAIGE: So did you find it with these mentors, were they resistant to the idea of being an official mentor or were they welcoming? How did you get over the fear of asking them for that relationship?
ANGELA: Or do they know that they’re your mentor?
PAIGE: Yeah, also that.
HOLLY: That’s a funny question. Yeah, a lot of them don’t like the label mentor, but they’re getting used to it. Most of them have been fascinated to teach a woman how to program, because some of them haven’t worked as often with a woman in programming. And I”m fine with being a social experiment for them.
PAIGE: You’re their token female programmer friend.
HOLLY: Yes. And I’m fine. If they want to explain things and teach me, that’s fine. I just make sure that it’s someone i connect with, you know, on a personality level. I’m not going to work with someone who’s going to speak down to me, you know, or be a programmer. And the guys I work with have been very nice and very supportive and want to start a mentorship program for Women Who Code so that they can get more women into tech. First of all, I didn’t say will you be my mentor. I would just say will you explain some code to me. And then if they’re willing to meet, then I”ll ask do you ever mentor people. And if they’re like, no I, I don’t and I’m not sure what that means, I’ll say well I’m learning this, would you mind explaining stuff with me. Could you work with me on a weekly or a bi-weekly, bi-monthly basis. What would fit in your schedule. So far, the people I’ve met, have said oh yeah I can meet with you weekly. I”ll buy them coffee. I make sure that I’m thanking them in some way. And they have all been really casual and nice about it. And I do the same. You know, I meet with women from my Women Who Code group. We have a Sunday morning ladies coding brunch and we code every Sunday morning. And I explain things to them that my mentors are teaching me. I think it’s important that people keep giving and raising up the people below them.
PAIGE: That was totally going to be my question for you and you answered it. Do you mentor as well? That’s very awesome that you do. I love that it’s a brunch.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: That’s perfect. It’s just perfect. Very cool. So you go from like mentor first dating. Like, can you explain this thing to me? And then if it goes well you ask for more.
HOLLY: Yes.
PAIGE: So you filled out our awesome guest form and you mentioned this and I just have to ask about it, that you rebuilt a server from a remote cabin in Finland?
HOLLY: Yeah. So, last summer our server was hacked while I was on a two-week vacation in Finland. My mother-in-law is Finnish and she has a cabin on a lake. A lot of people do there. They have saunas and cabins and stuff. And so we were on — I was on the train with my husband and they have WiFI. Finland is, you know, great tech country. You know, that’s where Linux came from and Angry Birds and everything. So there’s WiFi on the train and I was checking my email and I saw that our server had been quarantined and over the next week I got to rebuild our server. I got a hotspot from the only electronic store in the village and had about three hours of sleep a night for a week.
PAIGE: Wow, that’s crazy. I do love that though about the modern world. It’s like you can be anywhere and do what we do.
HOLLY: Yeah. I was Facetiming with my boss. There was an eight hour difference and it would be 3:00 in the morning for her, but I was awake and telling her what I had fixed, where the progress was. And what happened is our app had been built by a backend team in Siberia and they had forgot to put a firewall on our elasticsearch engine, it has an open facing port and it didn’t have a firewall and a robot got installed and was DDosing other servers.
PAIGE: Oh man. That’s not fun.
HOLLY: No, but I got it fixed and that actually, that experience really made me feel like I can do this, because up to that point I’d been at that job straight out of the boot camp nine months. And it was nine months of being terrified. Do I know what I’m doing? I’m all by myself. You know, even with my mentor you have fear and sometimes the imposter syndrome and you can make things bigger than they really are in your head, because you’re not sure what’s going to happen. This is a whole new experience. You don’t know what’s coming down the road. And the unknown is more scary than the known. Well the worst thing that can happen to you is having your server hacked. But once I got through that I was like I can do anything. I’m not afraid anymore. I can solve anything.
PAIGE: Totally. So I can’t imagine that you went through that much ops during boot camp. At least with the boot camps I’ve been exposed to and know about, they don’t do a ton of server stuff. How did you dive into that? Was that something you brought from before or were you just kind of teaching yourself on the fly to fix this thing?
HOLLY: Everything I learned on the job. We used Linode so they did have some documentation. I knew the services that we used so I knew how to install them and set them up. Thankfully we used New Relic as a monitoring tool so I could see what processes were running and see that elasticsearch had a crazy amount of data being processed, because it was DdoSing other stuff. So having the right tools I think is also really important and thankfully the team in Siberia, even though they forgot the firewall, did set up New Relic and we have now — that company I had, after I came back we switched over to Herope so we didn’t have to worry about security anymore, but I still kept New Relic because I said I need to be able to see the different processes. I need to know the health of our application and what’s going on. I Googled a lot.
PAIGE: Right.
ANGELA: Yeah.
HOLLY: And Linode did have a brief document on how to deal with a quarantined server what tools to install to scan your files and make sure they weren’t corrupted. But mainly it was just me solving this big riddle of what happened, what’s going on, and how do I fix it.
PAIGE: That’s how I do things. You kind of dive in and start Googling.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
HOLLY: Google knows.
PAIGE: How did you get to the point where you could kind of know what to Google? I’ve had that question from a lot of ladies as I start to mentor them or they come into Women Who Code and they’re like, well I don’t even know what to ask. Was a lot of that — where did that happen for you or did that happen for you?
HOLLY: Sure. That was one thing that I really appreciated from the boot camp. They worked with us on how do you Google. In the beginning the teachers would say oh well just Google it and I said I don’t know what to Google. Like what? What terms? Like if I’m trying to solve this how do I Google? Like what’s the tech speak. And so having them work with us a few times, then you started to get comfortable with realizing, okay these are the terms I need to search and is this bringing a result on Stack Overflow. Then I’m probably searching the right thing. You know, if I’m getting results for tech forums then, you just keep doing it and if it’s not returning the right thing, then switching out some terms and just trial and error.
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
HOLLY: Really helped. And time. As you do it more often and often then you’re going to start to know what are the key terms to search and it will get easier.
PAIGE: It is definitely a practiced skill, I would say, personally.
ANGELA: So I wanted to ask about your Ebay selling and you mentioned already a little bit that you were selling antiques.
HOLLY: Uh-huh.
ANGELA: So how did you even — did you get into Ebay when it was super — I think it was like ‘99 or 2000 that it really-
PAIGE: Yeah, right about then.
ANGELA: Became popular. When did you get into it and why?
HOLLY: 2009 is when I got into it, because my mother-in-law is a power seller. Her whole job is selling on Ebay. She had been doing it since ‘96. So after I left the university and I was looking at other things to do, she said well I can teach you a skill that you can use all the time, no matter what job you’re at. And so she showed me how to set up a store, so again, mentoring is so important.
ANGELA: Yes.
HOLLY: And she showed me how to take good pictures. She bought me a light box so that I could place the items in the light box and take quality photos and a scale so I could say how heavy the things were for jewelry. The different things that people want to know in the description of antique stuff. So having her as a resource was really great. And then also where to find the stuff. We went to a lot of estate sales and since my mother-in-law had been doing this for about 14 years she knew what kind of brands to look for and how to find good deals and we would buy box lots and sift through the stuff and she knew what could be sold by itself. What could be sold as an assortment. Having her as a mentor was great and it was fun. I never made enough money at it, because it’s something you have to really work at full time to build up enough inventory.
ANGELA: Yeah.
HOLLY: But my mother-in-law does it and she makes a good income and loves it.
PAIGE: Great.
ANGELA: I actually just went to a garage sale recently and it’s people that I actually know and they buy storage units that are unpaid and it’s just the luck of the draw. Everybody bids on it, whoever is the highest gets it. And then they have a garage sale. It’s a really interesting model, but a lot of work. A lot of footwork, but interesting.
HOLLY: A lot of footwork. So if you like that stuff, great. I was like man I don’t want to do this. This is taking me hours to make a few dollars.
ANGELA: Right. Right.
HOLLY: So I want to go work in an industry where I can make a nice amount of money for just an hour of work.
ANGELA: Yeah. If you’re passionate about finding really unique antiques or something I could see it being a fun thing to do on the side, but yeah, definitely not-
HOLLY: Definitely fun on the side.
ANGELA: A primary thing.
HOLLY: I got my furniture through an estate sale and so it’s nice to have that resource.
PAIGE: It’s amazing how, like, the skills we accumulate over a lifetime and how they affect everything.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes, definitely.
HOLLY: Yeah, it actually came back to be a benefit, because I judged at a Paypal Ebay Hackathon here in Austin and I got to say yeah I’m an Ebay seller.
PAIGE: Yeah, there you go. It’s always interesting. So one last question before we go. I wanted to know, since you mentioned it kind of before, like what tools do you use on a daily basis to do the work that you’re doing now? You said you’re in Python and Javascript, but what’s on your laptop kind of a thing?
HOLLY: Sure. The text editor I use is Sublime Text. I really like it. I have installed a bunch of different packages that help me work with the code. I use Mac, Macbook so I use iTerm as my terminal. I’m running in a virtual environment for Python using VIrtual ENBS and, let’s see, for (indiscernible) testing we like to use Gulp or Karma. We are using Elasticsearch and Redis for our search engine. The whole team is on HipChat and then Slack if HipChat breaks.
ANGELA: NIce to have an alternative.
HOLLY: Yes. And we have a lot of fun making our own little GIFs to have emoticons. I would say those are the main tools that I’m using. We use AWS for our servers and our fancy ops guys do all of our builds at Debian packages so builds have to be done on a Linux machine, but most of the team is on Macbooks.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find the full transcript of the show over at JupiterBroadcasting.com in the show notes. You can also catch us on Twitter, @HetyWTR or email us, WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com
PAIGE: You can also find us and subscribe on any podcasting network of your choice, including iTunes. Or check us out on YouTube if you are not a podcast person or have a friend who’s not a podcast person. Please feel free to recommend us. You can also email us directly if you have comments, feedback, or people you’d like to hear on the show’ we’d love to hear about it. Our email is WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com Thanks so much for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Not a Bro-grammer | WTR 42 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Coming up this week, we’ll be talking with Adrian Chadd about an infamous reddit thread he made. With a title like “what would you like to see in FreeBSD?” and hundreds of responses, well, we’ve got a lot to cover…

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Headlines

OpenBSD, from distribution to project

• Ted Unangst has yet another interesting blog post up, this time covering a bit of BSD history and some different phases OpenBSD has been through
• It’s the third part of his ongoing series of posts about OpenBSD removing large bits of code in favor of smaller replacements
• In the earliest days, OpenBSD collected and maintained code from lots of other projects (Apache, lynx, perl..)
• After importing new updates every release cycle, they eventually hit a transitional phase – things were updated, but nothing new was imported
• When the need arose, instead of importing a known tool to do the job, homemade replacements (OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD, etc) were slowly developed
• In more recent times, a lot of the imported code has been completely removed in favor of the homegrown daemons
• More discussion on HN and reddit

Remote ZFS mirrors, the hard way

• Backups to “the cloud” have become a hot topic in recent years, but most of them require trade-offs between convenience and security
• You have to trust (some of) the providers not to snoop on your data, but even the ones who allow you to locally encrypt files aren’t without some compromise
• As the author puts it: “We don’t need live synchronisation, cloud scaling, SLAs, NSAs, terms of service, lock-ins, buy-outs, up-sells, shut-downs, DoSs, fail whales, pay-us-or-we’ll-deletes, or any of the noise that comes with using someone else’s infrastructure.”
• This guide walks you through setting up a FreeBSD server with ZFS to do secure offsite backups yourself
• The end result is an automatic system for incremental backups that’s backed (pun intended) by ZFS
• If you’re serious about keeping your important data safe and sound, you’ll want to give this one a read – lots of detailed instructions

Various DragonFlyBSD updates

• The DragonFly guys have been quite busy this week, making an assortment of improvements throughout the tree
• Intel ValleyView graphics support was finally committed to the main repository
• While on the topic of graphics, they’ve also issued a call for testing for a DRM update (matching Linux 3.16’s and including some more Broadwell fixes)
• Their base GCC compiler is also now upgraded to version 5.2
• If your hardware supports it, DragonFly will now use an accelerated console by default

QuakeCon runs on OpenBSD

• QuakeCon, everyone’s favorite event full of rocket launchers, recently gave a mini-tour of their network setup
• For such a crazy network, unsurprisingly, they seem to be big fans of OpenBSD and PF
• In this video interview, one of the sysadmins discusses why he chose OpenBSD, what he likes about it, different packet queueing systems, how their firewalls and servers are laid out and much more
• He also talks about why they went with vanilla PF, writing their ruleset from the ground up rather than relying on a prebuilt solution
• There’s also some general networking talk about nginx, reverse proxies, caching, fiber links and all that good stuff
• Follow-up questions can be asked in this reddit thread
• The host doesn’t seem to be that familiar with the topics at hand, mentioning “OpenPF” multiple times among other things, so our listeners should get a kick out of it

Interview – Adrian Chadd – adrian@freebsd.org / @erikarn

Rethinking ways to improve FreeBSD

News Roundup

CII contributes to OpenBSD

• If you recall back to when we talked to the OpenBSD foundation, one of the things Ken mentioned was the Core Infrastructure Initiative
• In a nutshell, it’s an organization of security experts that helps facilitate (with money, in most cases) the advancement of the more critical open source components of the internet
• The group is organized by the Linux foundation, and gets its multi-million dollar backing from various big companies in the technology space (and donations from volunteers)
• To ensure that OpenBSD and its related projects (OpenSSH, LibreSSL and PF likely being the main ones here) remain healthy, they’ve just made a large donation to the foundation – this makes them the first “platinum” level donor as well
• While the exact amount wasn’t disclosed, it was somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000
• The donation comes less than a month after Microsoft’s big donation, so it’s good to see these large organizations helping out important open source projects that we depend on every day

Another BSDCan report

• The FreeBSD foundation is still getting trip reports from BSDCan, and this one comes from Mark Linimon
• In his report, he mainly covers the devsummit and some discussion with the portmgr team
• One notable change for the upcoming 10.2 release is that the default binary repository is now the quarterly branch – Mark talks a bit about this as well
• He also gives his thoughts on using QEMU for cross-compiling packages and network performance testing

Lumina 0.8.6 released

• The PC-BSD team has released another version of Lumina, their BSD-licensed desktop environment
• This is mainly a bugfix and performance improvement release, rather than one with lots of new features
• The on-screen display widget should be much faster now, and the configuration now allows for easier selection of default applications (which browser, which terminal, etc)
• Lots of non-English translation updates and assorted fixes are included as well
• If you haven’t given it a try yet, or maybe you’re looking for a new window manager, Lumina runs on all the BSDs

More c2k15 hackathon reports

• Even more reports from OpenBSD’s latest hackathon are starting to pour in
• The first one is from Alexandr Nedvedicky, one of their brand new developers (the guy from Oracle)
• He talks about his experience going to a hackathon for the first time, and lays out some of the plans for integrating their (very large) SMP PF patch into OpenBSD
• Second up is Andrew Fresh, who went without any specific plans, but still ended up getting some UTF8 work done
• On the topic of ARMv7, “I did enjoy being there when things weren’t working so [Brandon Mercer] could futilely try to explain the problem to me (I wasn’t much help with kernel memory layouts). Fortunately others overheard and provided words of encouragement and some help which was one of my favorite parts of attending this hackathon.”
• Florian Obser sent in a report that includes a little bit of everything: setting up the hackathon’s network, relayd and httpd work, bidirectional forwarding detection, airplane stories and even lots of food
• Paul Irofti wrote in as well about his activities, which were mainly focused on the Octeon CPU architecture
• He wrote a new driver for the onboard flash of a DSR-500 machine, which was built following the Common Flash Interface specification
• This means that, going forward, OpenBSD will have out-of-the-box support for any flash memory device (often the case for MIPS and ARM-based embedded devices)

Feedback/Questions

• Hamza writes in
• Florian writes in
• Dominik writes in

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

The post I'll Fix Everything | BSD Now 101 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We’ve finally reached a hundred episodes, and this week we’ll be talking to Sebastian Wiedenroth about pkgsrc. Though originally a NetBSD project, now it runs pretty much everywhere & he even runs a conference about it!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Remote DoS in the TCP stack

• A pretty devious bug in the BSD network stack has been making its rounds for a while now, allowing remote attackers to exhaust the resources of a system with nothing more than TCP connections
• While in the LAST_ACK state, which is one of the final stages of a connection’s lifetime, the connection can get stuck and hang there indefinitely
• This problem has a slightly confusing history that involves different fixes at different points in time from different people
• Juniper originally discovered the bug and announced a fix for their proprietary networking gear on June 8th
• On June 29th, FreeBSD caught wind of it and fixed the bug in their -current branch, but did not issue a security notice or MFC the fix back to the -stable branches
• On July 13th, two weeks later, OpenBSD fixed the issue in their -current branch with a slightly different patch, citing the FreeBSD revision from which the problem was found
• Immediately afterwards, they merged it back to -stable and issued an errata notice for 5.7 and 5.6
• On July 21st, three weeks after their original fix, FreeBSD committed yet another slightly different fix and issued a security notice for the problem (which didn’t include the first fix)
• After the second fix from FreeBSD, OpenBSD gave them both another look and found their single fix to be sufficient, covering the timer issue in a more general way
• NetBSD confirmed they were vulnerable too, and applied another completely different fix to -current on July 24th, but haven’t released a security notice yet
• DragonFly is also investigating the issue now to see if they’re affected as well

c2k15 hackathon reports

• Reports from OpenBSD’s latest hackathon, held in Calgary this time, are starting to roll in (there were over 40 devs there, so we might see a lot more of these)
• The first one, from Ingo Schwarze, talks about some of the mandoc work he did at the event
• He writes, “Did you ever look at a huge page in man, wanted to jump to the definition of a specific term – say, in ksh, to the definition of the “command” built-in command – and had to step through dozens of false positives with the less ‘/’ and ‘n’ search keys before you finally found the actual definition?”
• With mandoc’s new internal jump targets, this is a problem of the past now
• Jasper also sent in a report, doing his usual work with Puppet (and specifically “Facter,” a tool used by Puppet to gather various bits of system information)
• Aside from that and various ports-related work, Jasper worked on adding tame support to some userland tools, fixing some Octeon stuff and introduced something that OpenBSD has oddly lacked until now: an “-i” flag for sed (hooray!)
• Antoine Jacoutot gave a report on what he did at the hackathon as well, including improvements to the rcctl tool (for configuring startup services)
• It now has an “ls” subcommand with status parsing, allowing you to list running services, stopped services or even ones that failed to start or are supposed to be running (he calls this “the poor man’s service monitoring tool”)
• He also reworked some of the rc.d system to allow smoother operation of multiple instances of the same daemon to run (using tor with different config files as an example)
• His list also included updating ports, updating ports documentation, updating the hotplug daemon and laying out some plans for automatic sysmerge for future upgrades
• Foundation director Ken Westerback was also there, getting some disk-related and laptop work done
• He cleaned up and committed the 4k sector softraid code that he’d been working on, as well as fixing some trackpad issues
• Stefan Sperling, OpenBSD’s token “wireless guy,” had a lot to say about the hackathon and what he did there (and even sent in his write-up before he got home)
• He taught tcpdump about some new things, including 802.11n metadata beacons (there’s a lot more specific detail about this one in the report)
• Bringing a bag full of USB wireless devices with him, he set out to get the unsupported ones working, as well as fix some driver bugs in the ones that already did work
• One quote from Stefan’s report that a lot of people seem to be talking about: “Partway through the hackathon tedu proposed an old diff of his to make our base ls utility display multi-byte characters. This led to a long discussion about how to expand UTF-8 support in base. The conclusion so far indicates that single-byte locales (such as ISO-8859-1 and KOI-8) will be removed from the base OS after the 5.8 release is cut. This simplifies things because the whole system only has to care about a single character encoding. We’ll then have a full release cycle to bring UTF-8 support to more base system utilities such as vi, ksh, and mg. To help with this plan, I started organizing a UTF-8-focused hackathon for some time later this year.”
• Jeremy Evans wrote in to talk about updating lots of ports, moving the ruby ports up to the latest version and also creating perl and ruby wrappers for the new tame subsystem
• While he’s mainly a ports guy, he got to commit fixes to ports, the base system and even the kernel during the hackathon
• Rafael Zalamena, who got commit access at the event, gives his very first report on his networking-related hackathon activities
• With Rafael’s diffs and help from a couple other developers, OpenBSD now has support for VPLS
• Jonathan Gray got a lot done in the area of graphics, working on OpenGL and Mesa, updating libdrm and even working with upstream projects to remove some GNU-specific code
• As he’s become somewhat known for, Jonathan was also busy running three things in the background: clang’s fuzzer, cppcheck and AFL (looking for any potential crashes to fix)
• Martin Pieuchot gave an write-up on his experience: “I always though that hackathons were the best place to write code, but what’s even more important is that they are the best (well actually only) moment where one can discuss and coordinate projects with other developers IRL. And that’s what I did.”
• He laid out some plans for the wireless stack, discussed future plans for PF, made some routing table improvements and did various other bits to the network stack
• Unfortunately, most of Martin’s secret plans seem to have been left intentionally vague, and will start to take form in the next release cycle
• We’re still eagerly awaiting a report from one of OpenBSD’s newest developers, Alexandr Nedvedicky (the Oracle guy who’s working on SMP PF and some other PF fixes)
• OpenBSD 5.8’s “beta” status was recently reverted, with the message “take that as a hint,” so that may mean more big changes are still to come…

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• FreeBSD has published their quarterly status report for the months of April to June, citing it to be the largest one so far
• It’s broken down into a number of sections: team reports, projects, kernel, architectures, userland programs, ports, documentation, Google Summer of Code and miscellaneous others
• Starting off with the cluster admin, some machines were moved to the datacenter at New York Internet, email services are now more resilient to failure, the svn mirrors (now just “svn.freebsd.org”) are now using GeoGNS with official SSL certs and general redundancy was increased
• In the release engineering space, ARM and ARM64 work continues to improve on the Cavium ThunderX, more focus is being put into cloud platforms and the 10.2-RELEASE cycle is reaching its final stages
• The core team has been working on phabricator, the fancy review system, and is considering to integrate oauth support soon
• Work also continues on bhyve, and more operating systems are slowly gaining support (including the much-rumored Windows Server 2012)
• The report also covers recent developments in the Linux emulation layer, and encourages people using 11-CURRENT to help test out the 64bit support
• Multipath TCP was also a hot topic, and there’s a brief summary of the current status on that patch (it will be available publicly soon)
• ZFSguru, a project we haven’t talked about a lot, also gets some attention in the report – version 0.3 is set to be completed in early August
• PCIe hotplug support is also mentioned, though it’s still in the development stages (basic hot-swap functions are working though)
• The official binary packages are now built more frequently than before with the help of additional hardware, so AMD64 and i386 users will have fresher ports without the need for compiling
• Various other small updates on specific areas of ports (KDE, XFCE, X11…) are also included in the report
• Documentation is a strong focus as always, a number of new documentation committers were added and some of the translations have been improved a lot
• Many other topics were covered, including foundation updates, conference plans, pkgsrc support in pkgng, ZFS support for UEFI boot and much more

The OpenSSH bug that wasn’t

• There’s been a lot of discussion about a supposed flaw in OpenSSH, allowing attackers to substantially amplify the number of password attempts they can try per session (without leaving any abnormal log traces, even)
• There’s no actual exploit to speak of; this bug would only help someone get more bruteforce tries in with a fewer number of connections
• FreeBSD in its default configuration, with PAM and ChallengeResponseAuthentication enabled, was the only one vulnerable to the problem – not upstream OpenSSH, nor any of the other BSDs, and not even the majority of Linux distros
• If you disable all forms of authentication except public keys, like you’re supposed to, then this is also not a big deal for FreeBSD systems
• Realistically speaking, it’s more of a PAM bug than anything else
• OpenSSH added an additional check for this type of setup that will be in 7.0, but simply changing your sshd_config is enough to mitigate the issue for now on FreeBSD (or you can run freebsd-update)

Interview – Sebastian Wiedenroth – wiedi@netbsd.org / @wied0r

pkgsrc and pkgsrcCon

News Roundup

Now served by OpenBSD

• We’ve mentioned that you can also install OpenBSD on DO droplets, and this blog post is about someone who actually did it
• The use case for the author was for a webserver, so he decided to try out the httpd in base
• Configuration is ridiculously simple, and the config file in his example provides an HTTPS-only webserver, with plaintext requests automatically redirecting
• TLS 1.2 by default, strong ciphers with LibreSSL and HSTS combined give you a pretty secure web server

FreeBSD laptop playbooks

• A new project has started up on Github for configuring FreeBSD on various laptops, unsurprisingly named “freebsd-laptops”
• It’s based on ansible, and uses the playbook format for automatic set up and configuration
• Right now, it’s only working on a single Lenovo laptop, but the plan is to add instructions for many more models
• Check the Github page for instructions on how to get started, and maybe get involved if you’re running FreeBSD on a laptop

NetBSD on the NVIDIA Jetson TK1

• If you’ve never heard of the Jetson TK1, we can go ahead and spoil the secret here: NetBSD runs on it
• As for the specs, it has a quad-core ARMv7 CPU at 2.3GHz, 2 gigs of RAM, gigabit ethernet, SATA, HDMI and mini-PCIE
• This blog post shows which parts of the board are working with NetBSD -current (which seems to be almost everything)
• You can even run X11 on it, pretty sweet

DragonFly power mangement options

• DragonFly developer Sepherosa, who we’ve had on the show, has been doing some ACPI work over there
• In this email, he presents some of DragonFly’s different power management options: ACPI P-states, C-states, mwait C-states and some Intel-specific bits as well
• He also did some testing with each of them and gave his findings about power saving
• If you’ve been thinking about running DragonFly on a laptop, this would be a good one to read

OpenBSD router under FreeBSD bhyve

• If one BSD just isn’t enough for you, and you’ve only got one machine, why not run two at once
• This article talks about taking a FreeBSD server running bhyve and making a virtualized OpenBSD router with it
• If you’ve been considering switching over your router at home or the office, doing it in a virtual machine is a good way to test the waters before committing to real hardware
• The author also includes a little bit of history on how he got into both operating systems
• There are lots of mixed opinions about virtualizing core network components, so we’ll leave it up to you to do your research
• Of course, the next logical step is to put that bhyve host under Xen on NetBSD…

Feedback/Questions

• Kevin writes in
• Logan writes in
• Peter writes in
• Randy writes in

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• We’re always looking for 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 Straight from the Src | BSD Now 100 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Lisha is the Executive director of Geeks without bounds, an accelerator for humanitarian projects. She has found a great way to mix her desire to do humanitarian work along with technology!

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Show Notes:

• Geeks Without Bounds » Support “Canoe Net” in the Ecuadoran Amazon!
• Geeks Without Bounds (@GWOBorg) | Twitter
• Geeks Without Bounds
• Random Hacks (@randomhacks) | Twitter
• Random Hacks of Kindness
• Lisha Sterling (@lishevita) | Twitter
• Worried Monkey (@worriedmonk) | Twitter
• Taarifa – Building the infrastructure of nations :: Home
• LDLN: Off-Grid Communications for Disaster Relief Agencies
• Mailvelope
• Early Tech Obsession | WTR 30 | Jupiter Broadcasting

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below:

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we interviewed Lisha Sterling. She is the executive director for Geeks Without Bounds. She has a pretty awesome story where she started out actually doing humanitarian aid work, ended up in programing, and then wound back up in humanitarian aid work with programing. It’s a fascinating story. Geeks Without Bounds is a great program, and I’m super excited to have her on the show.
ANGELA: Me too. But before we get into the show, I want to tell you about DigitalOcean. If you go to digitalocean.com and you use the promo code heywtr, you can save $10.00, which turns out is a two month rental of a server. Right? Because it’s only $5.00 a month. They have datacenter locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, AMsterdam, and London. And basically, they’re a cloud hosting provider. You can spin up a cloud server in 55 seconds. That include 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSDS, i CPU, and i terabyte transfer. And they also pay authors $100 to $200.00 to technical tutorials. So, if you happen to already use DIgitalOcean or want to try it, and then like it so much that you want to write about it, you can get paid for that. After, of course, you save on two months of service.
PAIGE: Yeah, and their tutorials are bar none some of the best on the internet. I even end up there for things not for my DIgitalOcean VPS, which by the way, with those SSDs is disgustingly fast.
ANGELA: So, if you use heywtr, you support Women’s Tech Radio. ANd turns out, if you did not remember to enter a promo code when you started DigitalOcean, just go try to put in in there.
PAIGE: Yeah. I actually did that and it totally worked for mine.
ANGELA: After the fact.
PAIGE: Like a couple years ago when Coder Radio had it. That was sweet.
ANGELA: Yep, so you can still use it. So heywtr. Go to digitalocena.com
PAIGE: Yeah. And we got started with our interview with Lisha by asking her to explain her current position and what she’s up to in technology.
LISHA: I’m the Executive Director at Geeks Without Bounds and we support humanitarian open source projects through a combination of hackathons and an accelerator program. So, my work these days sort of entangles both my early career in international aid work and charity work and my academic side. I studied Latin American studies in college. And the rest of my professional life, which has been software development and systems engineering. And now I get to use technology to do disaster response and humanitarian aid and international development work.
PAIGE: Wow. That’s a pretty awesome way to use technology.
ANGELA: Yeah it is.
PAIGE: So that sounds like a pretty big jump from, you know, international aid work into software development. Can you tell me the story of like how that came to be for you?
LISHA: Yeah. So, first off, being, you know, a privileged white kid, i had my first computer when I was eight years old. Actually, my dad got me two Timex Sinclair 1000s. One for his house and one for my moms’ house. And connected it up to the black and white TV and put rubber bands around it so that the extra 16K of memory wouldn’t disconnect while we programmed. And thus I began my journey as a new programer learning basic and then going there’s a thing called Assembly Language. And I got involved with a computer club and was your basic tomboy geek girl. Then I had my first kid when I was 17 and went off to El Salvador. Did aid work during the war and during the first year of the peace. Came back to the US, did a bunch of work with refugees. Had another kid. Decided that I should probably go to college. And since I’d been working with Central American and in Central America, it was obvious what I was going to study. I was going to study Latin American studies and go do more of the same sort of stuff. But being a mom with two small kids, I, and no real skills or degree, I was able to make $4.25 an hour and my childcare cost like $7.50 an hour. The math doesn’t add up.
ANGELA: No. Now that I have three, daycare just isn’t even an option.
LISHA: Yeah. So one of my friends from my young computing days, a young man that I dated when I was like 11 and 12, and our first date was actually to a tech conference at the Moscone Center.
ANGELA: That’s adorable.
LISHA: So, you know, we’re still friends as adults. And he said to me, why don’t you get a job as a programer? And I was like, you’re crazy. I don’t have a degree in CS. I can’t program. He’s like, don’t be stupid. Nobody cares about your CS degree. Just tell them you can program. Show them some code and they’ll let you do it. But his caveat came. You must charge $25 an hour. I was like, I can’t charge $25 an hour. He’s like, no if you do not charge $25 an hour I will never speak to you again.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
PAIGE: So I’m going to pause you there, because this is a really interesting question that I always dig around. Why could you not charge $25 an hour?
LISHA: Well, because I was getting $4.25 an hour. The idea-
ANGELA: Perceived value. Perceived value.
LISHA: Right. The idea that I was going to go to somebody and have balls enough to say, yeah I’m a programer. I don’t have any degrees or any proof that i can actually do this, but you should totally pay me $25 an hour for it.
ANGELA: Inferiority complex. Yep. I’m familiar with all of that.
LISHA: Yeah. Yeah. So, but, you know my friendship was on the line and my need to take care of my children was on the line. So I did it and just about keeled over the first time somebody said, yes we will hire you.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: What did it take to get your foot in the door? Was it really just like you friend said? You just showed up and were like, look I can program. Let’s go.
LISHA: Actually, yeah. It literally was that easy. So I went for low hanging fruit right at the start, since I was at community college at the time. And so at the time I was working as an administrative assistant for Sybase. This probably puts the timing into, into perspective.
PAIGE: Your choice of computerm, your choice of computer at the top made that pretty clear.
LISHA: Right. Right. Right. Yeah, so I was working for Sybase as an administrative assistant and had gotten the opportunity to play with web stuff there on the side. The first browsers were out, but nobody was really using them. So even at Sybase they were like, this is stupid. Why are you wasting your time with this? But of course I was going to college so I went to all of my professors and I said have you seen this thing called the web? You should check this out. You can put your research up and you can put your classwork stuff up.
PAIGE: Which is exactly what the web was originally built for, was to share research.
LISHA: Right. Exactly. And they said, oh wow that’s neat. And yeah could you do that for me. So that was how i got my foot in the door. ANd then, you know, I got a little bit braver and I went to the administrators of the Parelta College District. So I went to the administrators at the Parelta COllege District and said, you know, you guys should really have a better website. And they said, you know what, you’re right. And so I got to do some contracting for them. And then I found out about dice.com and atually the saem friend that told me that I had to charge $25 or neer speak to me again told me about Dice. And at the time, almost nobody knew about it and you had to get your Dice listings off of Gopher. And he told me, don’t tell anyone about this, because when everyone knows about it then it’s going to start getting harder to get jobs. So you’re not allowed to tell anybody about it. So, you know, there I was in the early ‘90s using Dice by Gopher. But I found some jobs and then recruiters started contacting me and I found that I could actually work from home, which by that time was actually the UC Berkeley family housing. I was able to basically pay for my own schooling with scholarships, pay for my kids’ daycare and private school with programming. And everybody kept saying why aren’t you studying computer science, and I would say I’m already working in computer science, why would I get a degree in it? But then eventually I finished my bachelor’s degree and I intended to on with grad school, but I had that moment where it’s like I need some time without poverty and working just enough hours to keep us afloat is, we’ve done that for a while. I need to spend some time working full time. And then work ended up eating my life for oh, 20 years.
PAIGE: So at that point you got a full time job in computer science somewhere?
LISHA: Yeah. At that time I ended up getting full time work. I worked, while in the mid-90s I worked at Wells Fargo Bank doing problem and change tracking during the Y2K reprograming stuff. Anybody who says that the Y2K thing was nothing, was not there to program all the fixes.
PAIGE: Yeah. It only wasn’t a thing because you guys were doing it.
ANGELA: Yeah.
LISHA: Right. Exactly. It wasn’t a thing because there were a lot of people working really hard to make sure it was not a thing. So I was there. I worked, i did random contracts for media companies and whatnot in the San Francisco Bay area. Amazon, I worked at Amazon in the UK. That kind of thing.
PAIGE: And then eventually stumbled back into Geeks Without Bounds?
LISHA: Yeah. So my first sort of hit between the eyes was 2001 and after 911 I said I’m not working on any more Microsoft or any more closed sourced from here on out. I’m only going to do open source, because I’ve already sold my soul and I’m not doing humanitarian work, at least I’m going to do code work that I care about. So from 2001 onward I was working almost exclusively on open source software. And then even that kind of hit me at some point. I’m like, I went to college so that I could do humanitarian work. Why am I still writing code? And so I decided to just quit everything and figure out what I was going to do with my life, when I grow up. And I declared myself an un-graduate student. If you’re familiar with the idea of unschooling, which is like homeschooling without a curriculum.
ANGELA: Yep.
LISHA: There’s also such a thing as un-college. And I don’t know, there might be somebody else in the world who came up the with idea at about the same time I did, or even before I did, but I came up with this sort of independently. Where I had been thinking about going back to grad school and then said why would I get myself into more debt? I’m going to un-grad school. So that’s what I did. And that ended up getting me into an organization called The School Factory, which is the fiscal sponsor for Geeks Without Bounds. And then that, of course, led me into Geeks Without Bounds. I started out as a volunteer. Then i was the developer coordinator. And then last year I became the executive director.
PAIGE: Congratulations.
ANGELA: Yeah.
LISHA: Thank you.
PAIGE: That’s a really awesome journey. It’s all over the map, but it’s very personal . And I love that about tech. It’s not a straight and narrow path.
LISHA: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s lots of ways you can come to tech and there’s lots of things you can do with the tech once you’re in it or playing with it. It’s not just one tool. It’s like all these different tools. It’s kind of like saying, what can you do with wood? Well, you can do all sorts of things with wood.
PAIGE: Right. What do you want to do with wood?
LISHA: RIght.
PAIGE: Yeah. So, I think a lot of people would hear you story and stay, well you kind of had perfect timing. You’re like in the Bill Gates timing era, where if you just caught on to the right thing at the right time you were good to go. How would you respond to somebody saying that in today’s climate? Oh, I couldn’t just show up and say I know how to code, pay me $25 an hour, let’s go, kind of a thing. Because I would argue that in some ways we’re kind of seeing that again, but what’s your thoughts?
LISHA: I think we’re absolutely seeing that again. I think that right now is a really good time to ride the wave of open source into your dream job. ANd so, a little shameless promotion here. At Geeks Without Bounds, one of the programs that we have is an internship program and we take novice developers who have, who have learned some programming skills but have either never gotten any job experience or they don’t know how to use GitHub and work in a team, or go through issue tracking and figure out how to pick a project out of the issues, you know, that kind of thing. We give them mentorship. We have them work on some of the humanitarian projects in our ecosystem and we try to shove them at as many other opportunities to get a real job as possible. Sometimes we also manage to get a grant here or there to get them a stipend, but most of them are sort of slave labor in exchange for lots of mentorship. And they’re code up on GitHub so that they can show it to other people. And we have had some really great success with people coming into that program. Doing some amazing work on one project or another over the course of three months, five months, six months, and then going on to get a real job in programming. We had one guy who had studied aeronautical engineering. Got all the way through his degree and realized that that was not what he wanted to do with his life and what he really wanted to do was be a programer.
PAIGE: That’s a big investment to make that shift.
LISHA: Exactly. And I snagged him and I was like, let me put you to work. And it was fantastic. He got projects that he really enjoyed working on. He learned a whole bunch of stuff very fast. He managed to get a stipend and then he got a paid internship and then, you know, he’s working full time as a developer in Chicago and, you know, you can totally do that. And you don’t have to have to have a bachelor’s degree to begin with either. Anybody really can do that.
PAIGE: So do you take a lot of people who have maybe done either a lot of self-taught stuff on the internet now or boot camp graduates? How do you people kind of end up ready to go into Geeks Without Bounds internships?
LISHA: All of the above. I’ve had people who were in their junior or senior year of college decide to spend the summer working on projects with us. I’ve had people that were totally and completely self-taught. And there’ve been people who’ve done some sort of boot camp like experience. So they knew a bit more about how to work in teams and things like that, but they just wanted to get some more work experience while they were looking for a job. They already knew how to look for a job, they just wanted to keep their, the code lines on GitHub up while they were looking for that job. So, yes.
PAIGE: And that’s, I mean that’s one of the biggest recommendations I give to anybody who’s going through boot camp is keep committing. Just keep getting it up there.
LISHA: Absolutely.
PAIGE: So that’s kind of the intern side of it. How about in the nonprofit side. How does a nonprofit get involved with you? Are they just finding you online? Are you doing events or something to kind of bring them in? What does that look like?
LISHA: We end up meeting people in all sorts of situations. Sometimes as conferences or at say disaster response drills. Sometime we’ll meet people there. Sometimes it’s literally look for who’s in the area that needs support right now. And sometimes people come to us. And then, basically we just kind of have lots of conversations and develop relationship over time and let people know that if they have challenges that they think that technology could help them with, that we are happy to help them craft that into a challenge that somebody can actually address. And when we’re crafting or curating challenges for hackathons, we try to create a challenge that can actually be addressed in a weekend. So there might be back story and a problem that clearly this is not going to be solved in a weekend, but here’s the backstory and here’s the piece we want to accomplish this weekend.
PAIGE: So you guys kind of handle the project managy end of that prepping it to go into the hackathon?
LISHA: Right. Exactly. And then, so once you get a starting point basically, if you’ve got, say an app that sort of is attempting to deal with the big pictures, um, then you can break that down into lots of different challenges and you can take that from one humanitarian hackathon to next to the next. And the great thing about that is that you start with a couple of people who got interested in the project at the first hackathon and maybe on those, maybe two people will stay on board and keep working on the project over time.
PAIGE: Which is one of the biggest challenges with hackathons is actually getting people to commit, almost.
LISHA: Exactly. So you take the project to the next hackathon. And let’s say four or five people work on it and one of those people decides they want to keep working on the project long term. So now you’ve just snowballed your team. You’ve got two people or three people instead of just the people from the original hackathon. And then you take it to the next one and it gets stickier. And the more work has been done and the larger the core team is, the stickier the ball gets as it goes from one hackathon to the next.
PAIGE: It builds momentum.
LISHA: Yeah. It builds momentum and you get to a certain point where you can actually have a whole hackathon where all the challenges that are being presented are all based around that one piece of software. So, for instance, one of the projects that started at a hackathon, Taarifa, that project has had multiple hackathons that are just about Taarifa. Where all of the challenges are all, either bug fixes or feature request for Taarifa that have ranged from improved the documentation to create a Swahili translation for all of the text, to fix the security bugs, to create new features. And that team is one of, one of the most amazing teams that we’re working with right now, actually. I’m pretty impressed with where that project has ended up. It’s being used by the World’s Bank in many countries in Africa. We at Geeks Without Bounds are part of a consortium that is being supported by HDAF, UK aid to put Taarifa into the water system in Tanzania in order to allow citizens to report to the government when water pumps and spigots and other water points are broken. And allows the government to keep track of what is working and what is broken in the water infrastructure everywhere in the country.
PAIGE: Crowdsourcing water maintenance. That’s awesome.
ANGELA: That is awesome.
LISHA: Exactly. Exactly. And Taarifa was originally developed for water management, actually. But now it’s being used for tracking education systems, healthcare systems, and this summer I’m going down to Ecuador to work with people from the Kofan community in Northern Ecuador in order to use Taarifa to track pollution and encroachment in the Amazon Jungle. So pretty awesome little piece of software there.
PAIGE: Yeah. So you have a formal commitment in your life to only work on open source software. Is that something that’s carried forward that Geeks Without Bounds is also doing when they’re doing these projects with nonprofits?
LISHA: Yes.
PAIGE: Are you largely open source, mostly? What’s the deal?
LISHA: It’s all open source. We specifically work on open source humanitarian projects. So open source projects that for whatever reason we can’t find a way to call it humanitarian, we don’t work on those. We’ve managed to find ways to call lots of ways humanitarian though. Today we were working in PGP email app for Firefox OS phones.
PAIGE: Wow.
LISHA: And I consider that to be a humanitarian issue because Firefox OS phones are marketed to low income people in developed countries. And to people in the least developed countries on the planet. So, in other words, Firefox OS phones are being marketed to vulnerable people. And as a system it doesn’t have the security and privacy pulls that an iPhone or an Android phone has. And at the moment there’s no guardian project for Firefox OS. So we’re trying to kick one off, basically.
PAIGE: Yeah. So I’m going to jump in just for anybody listening who doesn’t know, PGP is an email encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy. It’s kind of the de facto standard right now for email encryption. Usable by anybody. If you’re interested in having encrypted email, there’s tons of stuff online. And one of our former guests, uh Snubs, has some awesome tutorials on Hak5 about how to do that if you want to check it out. But yeah, so privacy and security.
LISHA: And for newbies to PGP who use hotmail or yahoo mail or Gmail, I would recommend looking up a program called Mailvelope. It’s a Firefox and Chrome plugin. So you just plug it into your browser and then it recognizes that you’re on a webmail site and it will allow you to encrypt your email in webmail. Which is pretty cool.
PAIGE: Yeah. That’s pretty awesome. I mean this project you’re involved with, I’m not going to lie, it touches my heart in a very special way. I think that technology can change the world if we let it. And I think getting more people involved at that level is just phenomenal. The way that you’re doing it is great. If people want to find you how do they do that? To find Geeks WIthout Bounds, to get involved either as a nonprofit or as a coder, whatever?
LISHA: Whatever, yeah. So we’re online at gwob.org.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com for the show notes and a full transcription, as well as the contact form. Drop down the show drop down to Women’s Tech Radio and send us your feedback or suggestions on who you’d like to hear on the show.
PAIGE: You can also check us out on iTunes and our RSS feed is linked at our show page on Jupiter Broadcasting. If you have a moment, please leave us a review on iTunes. Those help out the show and also lets us know what you think. And also, follow us @heywtr on Twitter. We’ll talk to you soon.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Humanitarian Tech | WTR 31 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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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

• Sean writes in
• Dan writes in
• Florian writes in
• Sean writes in
• Chris writes in

Mailing List Gold

• VCS flamebait
• Hidden agenda

• 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

The post From the Foundation (Part 2) | BSD Now 78 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Kaylyn Gibilterra is a hackathon addict & a GEMS challenge advocate currently working as a developer at Capital One.

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

• Nova Labs
• GEMS – Girls Excelling in Math/Science
• Meetup.com
• Women Who Code
• Hear Me Code
• Girl Develop It
• Capitol One
• Arduino
• The Iron Yard
• Code For Progress

The post Kaylyn Gibilterra | WTR 7 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We’ll be showing you how to set up a secure, SSL-only webserver. There’s also an interview with Eric Le Blan about community participation and FreeBSD’s role in the commercial server space. All that and more, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Password gropers take spamtrap bait

• Our friend Peter Hansteen, who keeps his eyes glued to his log files, has a new blog post
• He seems to have discovered another new weird phenomenon in his pop3 logs
• “yes, I still run one, for the same bad reasons more than a third of my readers probably do: inertia”
• Someone tried to log in to his service with an address that was known to be invalid
• The rest of the post goes into detail about his theory of why someone would use a list of invalid addresses for this purpose

Inside the Atheros wifi chipset

• Adrian Chadd – sometimes known in the FreeBSD community as “the wireless guy” – gave a talk at the Defcon Wireless Village 2014
• He covers a lot of topics on wifi, specifically on Atheros chips and why they’re so popular for open source development
• There’s a lot of great information in the presentation, including cool (and evil) things you can do with wireless cards
• Very technical talk; some parts might go over your head if you’re not a driver developer
• The raw video file is also available to download on archive.org
• Adrian has also recently worked on getting Kismet and Aircrack-NG to work better with FreeBSD, including packet injection and other fun things

Trip report and hackathon mini- roundup

• A few more (late) reports from BSDCan and the latest OpenBSD hackathon have been posted
• Mark Linimon mentions some of the future plans for FreeBSD’s release engineering and ports
• Bapt also has a BSDCan report detailing his work on ports and packages
• Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work at the most recent hackathon, working with rc configuration and a new /etc/examples layout
• Peter Hessler, a latecomer to the hackathon, details his experience too, hacking on the installer and built-in upgrade function
• Christian Weisgerber talks about starting some initial improvements of OpenBSD’s ports infrastructure

DragonFly BSD 3.8.2 released

• Although it was already branched, the release media is now available for DragonFly 3.8.2
• This is a minor update, mostly to fix the recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities
• It also includes some various other small fixes

Interview – Eric Le Blan – info@xinuos.com

Xinuos’ recent FreeBSD integration, BSD in the commercial server space

Tutorial

Building a hardened, feature-rich webserver

News Roundup

Defend your network and privacy, FreeBSD version

• Back in episode 39, we covered a blog post about creating an OpenBSD gateway – partly based on our router tutorial
• This is a follow-up post, by the same author, about doing a similar thing with FreeBSD
• He mentions some of the advantages and disadvantages between the two operating systems, and encourages users to decide for themselves which one suits their needs
• The rest is pretty much the same things: firewall, VPN, DHCP server, DNSCrypt, etc.

Don’t encrypt all the things

• Another couple of interesting blog posts from Ted Unangst about encryption
• It talks about how Google recently started ranking sites with HTTPS higher in their search results, and then reflects on how sometimes encryption does more harm than good
• After heartbleed, the ones who might be able to decrypt your emails went from just a three-letter agency to any script kiddie
• He also talks a bit about some PGP weaknesses and a possible future replacement
• He also has another, similar post entitled “in defense of opportunistic encryption“

New automounter lands in FreeBSD

• The work on the new automounter has just landed in 11-CURRENT
• With help from the FreeBSD Foundation, we’ll have a new “autofs” kernel option
• Check the SVN viewer online to read over the man pages if you’re not running -CURRENT
• You can also read a bit about it in the recent newsletter

OpenSSH 6.7 CFT

• It’s been a little while since the last OpenSSH release, but 6.7 is almost ready
• Our friend Damien Miller issued a call for testing for the upcoming version, which includes a fair amount of new features
• It includes some old code removal, some new features and some internal reworkings – we’ll cover the full list in detail when it’s released
• This version also officially supports being built with LibreSSL now
• Help test it out and report any findings, especially if you have access to something a little more exotic than just a BSD system

Feedback/Questions

• David writes in
• Lachlan writes in
• Francis writes in
• Frank writes in
• Sean writes in

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• We want to give a special thanks to our viewer Remy for writing the basis of today’s tutorial
• 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 (18:00 UTC)
• Final reminder: OpenBSD is moving to a new distributor in September (which is very soon!) so this is your last chance to buy any of their tshirts, CDs or posters – grab them now while you still can, and support the project

The post Engineering Nginx | BSD Now 51 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Coming up this week on the show!

We’ve got an interview with Dag-Erling Smørgrav, the current security officer of FreeBSD, to discuss what exactly being in such an important position is like.

The latest news, answers to your emails and even some LibreSSL drama, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

g2k14 hackathon reports

• Nearly 50 OpenBSD developers gathered in Ljubljana, Slovenia from July 8-14 for a hackathon
• Lots of work got done – in just the first two weeks of July, there were over 1000 commits to their CVS tree
• Some of the developers wrote in to document what they were up to at the event
• Bob Beck planned to work on kernel stuff, but then “LibreSSL happened” and he spent most of his time working on that
• Miod Vallat also tells about his LibreSSL experiences
• Brent Cook, a new developer, worked mainly on the portable version of LibreSSL (and we’ll be interviewing him next week!)
• Henning Brauer worked on VLAN bpf and various things related to IPv6 and network interfaces (and he still hates IPv6)
• Martin Pieuchot fixed some bugs in the USB stack, softraid and misc other things
• Marc Espie improved the package code, enabling some speed ups, fixed some ports that broke with LibreSSL and some of the new changes and also did some work on ensuring snapshot consistency
• Martin Pelikan integrated read-only ext4 support
• Vadim Zhukov did lots of ports work, including working on KDE4
• Theo de Raadt created a new, more secure system call, “sendsyslog” and did a lot of work with /etc, sysmerge and the rc scripts
• Paul Irofti worked on the USB stack, specifically for the Octeon platform
• Sebastian Benoit worked on relayd filters and IPv6 code
• Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse did work with puppet, packages and the bootloader
• Jonathan Gray imported newer Mesa libraries and did a lot with Xenocara, including work in the installer for autodetection
• Stefan Sperling fixed a lot of issues with wireless drivers
• Florian Obser did many things related to IPv6
• Ingo Schwarze worked on mandoc, as usual, and also rewrote the openbsd.org man.cgi interface
• Ken Westerback hacked on dhclient and dhcpd, and also got dump working on 4k sector drives
• Matthieu Herrb worked on updating and modernizing parts of xenocara

FreeBSD pf discussion takes off

• A thread started on the freebsd-questions and freebsd-current mailing lists this week concerning FreeBSD’s version of pf being old and seemingly unmaintained (unfortunately people didn’t always use reply-all so you have to cross-reference the two lists to follow the whole conversation sometimes)
• Straight from the SMP FreeBSD pf maintainer: “no one right now [is actively developing pf on FreeBSD]” and “Following OpenBSD on features would be cool, but no bulk imports would be made again. Bulk imports produce bad quality of port,
  and also pf in OpenBSD has no multi thread support”
• Baptiste Daroussin was quick to point out that multi-thread support is not the only difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD versions of pf, including work that was done to support VIMAGE (network virtualization, to support have entire network stacks in jails)
• Baptiste Daroussin also reports on his efforts to update FreeBSD pf. He ran into problems and after breaking pf on head, his changes were reverted. He reports that he is still interested in porting individual OpenBSD pf features that are relevant to him, but not in a ‘full sync’ or being the overall maintainer of FreeBSD pf
• The project is looking for volunteers to continue the work. Mentorship is available for a number of people familiar with the FreeBSD networking stack, and Henning Brauer (one of the authors of OpenBSD pf) has stated his willingness to help on a number of occasions, and candidates can apply to the FreeBSD Foundation for funding
• Searching for documentation online for pf is troublesome because there are two incompatible syntaxes
• FreeBSD’s pf man pages are lacking, and some of FreeBSD’s documentation still links to OpenBSD’s pages, which are not compatible anymore
• The discussion also touched on importing pf patches from pfSense, although the license that these patches are under is not clear at this time
• Things quickly got off topic as further disagreement among individual developers vs. users derailed the conversation somewhat
• Many users are very vocal about wanting it updated, saying they are willing to deal with the syntax change and it is worth the benefits
• Some developers wonder which features of OpenBSD pf users actually want, other than just ‘the latest shiny’
• Currently the only known problem with FreeBSD pf is with ipv6 fragments, and the VIMAGE subsystem
• Gleb Smirnoff, author of the FreeBSD-specific SMP patches, says Henning’s claims about OpenBSD’s improved speed are “uncorroborated claims” (but neither side has provided any public benchmarks)
• Olivier Cochard-Labbé (of the BSD Router Project) provided his benchmarks from Nov 2013 of packet forwarding rates with various configurations of FreeBSD 9.2 and 10, vs OpenBSD 5.4. Here is the raw data and scripts to reproduce and a graph of the results
• There seem to be many opinions about what to do about pf, but so far no one willing to do the work

LibreSSL progress update

• LibreSSL’s first few portable releases have come out and they’re making great progress, releasing 2.0.3 two days ago
• Lots of non-OpenBSD people are starting to contribute, sending in patches via the tech mailing list
• However, there has already been some drama… with Linux users
• There was a problem with Linux’s PRNG, and LibreSSL was unforgiving of it, not making an effort to randomize something that could not provide real entropy
• This “problem” doesn’t affect OpenBSD’s native implementation, only the portable version
• The developers decide to weigh in to calm the misinformation and rage
• A fix was added in 2.0.2, and Linux may even get a new system call to handle this properly now – remember to say thanks, guys
• Ted Unangst has a really good post about the whole situation, definitely check it out
• As a follow-up from last week, bapt says they’re working on building the whole FreeBSD ports tree against LibreSSL, but lots of things still need some patching to work properly – if you’re a port maintainer, please test your ports against it

Preparation for NetBSD 7

• The release process for NetBSD 7.0 is finally underway
• The netbsd-7 CVS branch should be created around July 26th, which marks the start of the first beta period, which will be lasting until September
• If you run NetBSD, that’ll be a great time to help test on as many platforms as you can (this is especially true on custom embedded applications)
• They’re also looking for some help updating documentation and fixing any bugs that get reported
• Another formal announcement will be made when the beta binaries are up

Interview – Dag-Erling Smørgrav – des@freebsd.org / @RealEvilDES

The role of the FreeBSD Security Officer, recent ports features, various topics

News Roundup

BSDCan ports and packages WG

• Back at BSDCan this year, there was a special event for discussion of FreeBSD ports and packages
• Bapt talked about package building, poudriere and the systems the foundation funded for compiling packages
• There’s also some detail about the signing infrastructure and different mirrors
• Ports people and source people need to talk more often about ABI breakage
• The post also includes information about pkg 1.3, the old pkg tools’ EOL, the quarterly stable package sets and a lot more (it’s a huge post!)

Cross-compiling ports with QEMU and poudriere

• With recent QEMU features, you can basically chroot into a completely different architecture
• This article goes through the process of building ARMv6 packages on a normal X86 box
• Note though that this requires 10-STABLE or 11-CURRENT and an extra patch for QEMU right now
• The poudriere-devel port now has a “qemu user” option that will pull in all the requirements
• Hopefully this will pave the way for official pkgng packages on those lesser-used architectures

Cloning FreeBSD with ZFS send

• For a FreeBSD mail server that MWL runs, he wanted to have a way to easily restore the whole system if something were to happen
• This post shows his entire process in creating a mirror machine, using ZFS for everything
• The “zfs send” and “zfs snapshot” commands really come in handy for this
• He does the whole thing from a live CD, pretty impressive

FreeBSD Overview series

• A new blog series we stumbled upon about a Linux user switching to BSD
• In part one, he gives a little background on being “done with Linux distros” and documents his initial experience getting and installing FreeBSD 10
• He was pleasantly surprised to be able to use ZFS without jumping through hoops and doing custom kernels
• Most of what he was used to on Linux was already in the default FreeBSD (except bash…)
• Part two documents his experiences with pkgng and ports

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in
• Rick writes in
• Clint writes in
• Esteban writes in
• Ben writes in
• Matt sends in pictures of his FreeBSD CD collection

• 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
• Last week we talked a bit about hardware compatibility, check out the NYC BSD Users’ Group’s dmesgd , a database of user submitted dmesg output from various hardware on various BSD’s. Help the community, submit your dmesg today!
• If you want to come on for an interview or have a tutorial you’d like to see, let us know – we want to do what the viewers want to see
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post DES Challenge IV | BSD Now 47 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

This week on the show we\’ll be showing you how to set up RAID arrays in FreeBSD. There\’s also an interview with David Chisnall – of the FreeBSD core team – about the switch to Clang and a lot more.

Sit back and enjoy some BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

OpenBSD 5.5 released

• If you ordered a CD set then you\’ve probably had it for a little while already, but OpenBSD has formally announced the public release of 5.5
• This is one of the biggest releases to date, with a very long list of changes and improvements
• Some of the highlights include: time_t being 64 bit on all platforms, release sets and binary packages being signed with the new signify tool, a new autoinstall feature of the installer, SMP support on Alpha, a new AViiON port, lots of new hardware drivers including newer NICs, the new vxlan driver, relayd improvements, a new pf queue system for bandwidth shaping, dhcpd and dhclient fixes, OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 and all its new features, position-independent executables being default for i386, the RNG has been replaced with ChaCha20 as well as some other security improvements, FUSE support, tmpfs, softraid partitions larger than 2TB and a RAID 5 implementation, OpenSSH 6.6 with all its new features and fixes… and a lot more
• The full list of changes is HUGE, be sure to read through it all if you\’re interested in the details
• If you\’re doing an upgrade from 5.4 instead of a fresh install, pay careful attention to the upgrade guide as there are some very specific steps for this version
• Also be sure to apply the errata patches on your new installations… especially those OpenSSL ones (some of which still aren\’t fixed in the other BSDs yet)
• On the topic of errata patches, the project is now going to also send them out (signed) via the announce mailing list, a very welcome change
• Congrats to the whole team on this great release – 5.6 is going to be even more awesome with \”Libre\”SSL and lots of other stuff that\’s currently in development

FreeBSD foundation funding highlights

• The FreeBSD foundation posts a new update on how they\’re spending the money that everyone donates
• \”As we embark on our 15th year of serving the FreeBSD Project and community, we are proud of what we\’ve done to help FreeBSD become the most innovative, reliable, and high-performance operation system\”
• During this spring, they want to highlight the new UEFI boot support and newcons
• There\’s a lot of details about what exactly UEFI is and why we need it going forward
• FreeBSD has also needed some updates to its console to support UTF8 and wide characters
• Hopefully this series will continue and we\’ll get to see what other work is being sponsored

OpenSSH without OpenSSL

• The OpenSSH team has been hard at work, making it even better, and now OpenSSL is completely optional
• Since it won\’t have access to the primitives OpenSSL uses, there will be a trade-off of features vs. security
• This version will drop support for legacy SSH v1, and the only two cryptographic algorithms supported are an in-house implementation of AES (in counter mode) and the new combination of the Chacha20 stream cipher with Poly1305 for packet integrity
• Key exchange is limited to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman and the newer Curve25519 KEXs
• No support for RSA, DSA or ECDSA public keys – only Ed25519
• It also includes a new buffer API and a set of wrappers to make it compatible with the existing API
• Believe it or not, this was planned before all the heartbleed craziness
• Maybe someday soon we\’ll have a mini-openssh-portable in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc… would be really cool

BSDMag\’s April 2014 issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine has got a new issue available for download
• This time the articles include: pascal on BSD, an introduction to revision control systems and configuration management, deploying NetBSD on AWS EC2, more GIMP tutorials, an AsiaBSDCon 2014 report and a piece about how easily credit cards are stolen online
• Anyone can contribute to the magazine, just send the editors an email about what you want to write
• No Linux articles this time around

Interview – David Chisnall – theraven@freebsd.org

The LLVM/Clang switch, FreeBSD\’s core team, various topics

Tutorial

RAID in FreeBSD and OpenBSD

News Roundup

BSDTalk episode 240

• The original BSD podcaster Will Backman has uploaded a new episode of BSDTalk, this time with our other buddy GNN as the guest – mainly to talk about NTP and keeping reliable time
• Topics include the specific details of crystals used in watches and computers to keep time, how temperature affects the quality, different sources of inaccuracy, some general NTP information, why you might want extremely precise time, different time sources (GPS, satellite, etc), differences in stratum levels, the problem of packet delay and estimating the round trip time, some of the recent NTP amplification attacks, the downsides to using UDP instead of TCP and… much more
• GNN also talks a little about the Precision Time Protocol and how it\’s different than NTP
• Two people we\’ve interviewed talking to each other, awesome
• If you\’re interested in NTP, be sure to see our tutorial too

m2k14 trip reports

• We\’ve got a few more reports from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Morocco
• The first one is from Antoine Jacoutot (who is a key GNOME porter, and gave us the screenshots for the OpenBSD desktop tutorial)
• \”Since I always fail at actually doing whatever I have planned for a hackathon, this time I decided to come to m2k14 unprepared about what I was going to do\”
• He got lots of work done with ports and pushing GNOME-related patches back up to the main project, then worked on fixing ports\’ compatibility with LibreSSL
• Speaking of LibreSSL, there\’s an article all would-be portable version writers should probably read and take into consideration
• Jasper Adriaanse also writes about what he got done over there
• He cleaned up and fixed the puppet port to work better with OpenBSD

Why you should use FreeBSD on your cloud VPS

• Here we have a blog post from Atlantic, a VPS and hosting provider, about 10 reasons for using FreeBSD
• Starts off with a little bit of BSD history for those who are unfamiliar with it and only know Linux and Windows
• (Spoiler) the 10 reasons are: community, stability, collaboration, ease of use, ports, security, ZFS, GEOM, sound and having lots of options
• The post goes into detail about each of them and why FreeBSD makes a great choice for a VPS OS

PCBSD weekly digest

• Big changes coming in the way PCBSD manages software
• The PBI system, AppCafe and related tools are all going to use pkgng now
• The AppCafe will no longer be limited to PBIs, so much more software will be easily available from the ports tree
• New rating system coming soon and much more

Feedback/Questions

• Martin writes in
• John writes in
• Alex writes in
• Goetz writes in
• Jarrad writes in

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• The Tor and mailing list tutorials have gotten some fixes and updates
• The OpenBSD router tutorial has also gotten a bit of a makeover, and now includes new scripts for 5.5 and signify
• 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
• If any listeners have a collection of old FreeBSD or OpenBSD CDs, we\’d love for you to send in a picture of the whole set together so we can show it off
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)
• We will be at BSDCan next week – be sure to say hi if you run into us!

The post Let's Get RAID | BSD Now 36 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We\’re back again! On this week\’s packed show, we\’ve got one of the biggest tutorials we\’ve done in a while. It\’s an in-depth look at PF, OpenBSD\’s firewall, with some practical examples and different use cases.

We\’ll also be talking to Peter Hansteen about the new edition of \”The Book of PF.\” Of course, we\’ve got news and answers to your emails too, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

Direct Download:

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

ALTQ removed from PF

• The classic packet queueing system, ALTQ, was recently removed from OpenBSD -current
• There will be a transitional phase between 5.5 and 5.6 where you can still use it by replacing the \”queue\” keyword with \”oldqueue\” in your pf.conf
• As of 5.6, due about six months from now, you\’ll have to change your ruleset to the new syntax if you\’re using it for bandwidth shaping
• After more than ten years, bandwidth queueing has matured quite a bit and we can finally put ALTQ to rest, in favor of the new queueing subsystem
• This doesn\’t affect FreeBSD, PCBSD, NetBSD or DragonflyBSD since all of their PFs are older and maintained separately

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

• The quarterly status report from FreeBSD is out, detailing some of the project\’s ongoing tasks
• Some highlights include the first \”stable\” branch of ports, ARM improvements (including SMP), bhyve improvements, more work on the test suite, desktop improvements including the new vt console driver and UEFI booting support finally being added
• We\’ve got some specific updates from the cluster admin team, core team, documentation team, portmgr team, email team and release engineering team
• LOTS of details and LOTS of topics to cover, give it a read

OpenBSD\’s OpenSSL rewrite continues with m2k14

• A mini OpenBSD hackathon begins in Morocco, Africa
• You can follow the changes in the -current CVS log, but a lot of work is mainly going towards the OpenSSL cleaning
• We\’ve got two trip reports so far, hopefully we\’ll have some more to show you in a future episode
• You can see some of the more interesting quotes from the tear-down or see everything
• Apparently they are going to call the fork \”LibreSSL\” ….
• What were the OpenSSL developers thinking? The RSA private key was used to seed the entropy!
• We also got some mainstream news coverage and another post from Ted about the history of the fork
• OpenBSD developer Reyk Floeter implemented privilege separation to store RSA keys in a separate process as an additional mitigation against key leakage from attacks such as heartbleed in relayd and OpenSMTPD
• You can compile libressl for other OSes
• Consider donating to the OpenBSD foundation – this fork will benefit all the other BSDs too

NetBSD 6.1.4 and 6.0.5 released

• New updates for the 6.1 and 6.0 branches of NetBSD, focusing on bugfixes
• The main update is – of course – the heartbleed vulnerability
• Also includes fixes for other security issues and even a kernel panic… on Atari
• Patch your Ataris right now, this is serious business

Interview – Peter Hansteen – peter@bsdly.net / @pitrh

The Book of PF: 3rd edition

Tutorial

BSD Firewalls: PF

News Roundup

New Xorg now the default in FreeBSD

• For quite a while now, FreeBSD has had two versions of X11 in ports
• The older, stable version was the default, but you could install a newer one by having \”WITH_NEW_XORG\” in /etc/make.conf
• They\’ve finally made the switch for 10-STABLE and 9-STABLE
• Check this wiki page for more info

GSoC-accepted BSD projects

• The Google Summer of Code team has got the list of accepted project proposals uploaded so we can see what\’s planned
• OpenBSD\’s list includes DHCP configuration parsing improvements, systemd replacements, porting capsicum, GPT and UEFI support, and modernizing the DHCP daemon
• The FreeBSD list was also posted
• Theirs includes porting FreeBSD to the Android emulator, CTF in the kernel debugger, improved unicode support, converting firewall rules to a C module, pkgng improvements, MicroBlaze support, PXE fixes, bhyve caching, bootsplash and lots more
• Good luck to all the students participating, hopefully they become full time BSD users

Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example

• HybridCluster posted the second part of their VFS and ZFS series
• This new post has lots of technical details once again, definitely worth reading if you\’re a ZFS guy
• Of course, also watch episode 24 for our interview with HybridCluster – they do really interesting stuff

PCBSD weekly digest

• Preload has been ported over, it\’s a daemon that prefetches applications
• PCBSD is developing their own desktop environment, Lumina (there\’s also an FAQ)
• It\’s still in active development, but you can try it out by installing from ports
• We\’ll be showing a live demo of it in a few weeks (when development settles down a bit)

• 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
• It looks like OpenBSD 5.5 CD sets are already starting to show up in people\’s mail boxes – we\’ll have the full details of the release next week
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post Puffy Firewall | BSD Now 35 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We sit down for an interview with Chris Buechler, from the pfSense project, to learn just how easy it can be to deploy a BSD firewall. We\’ll also be showing you a walkthrough of the pfSense interface so you can get an idea of just how convenient and powerful it is. Answers to your questions and the latest headlines, here on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

Direct Download:

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RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | HD Vid Feed | HD Torrent Feed

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon

• This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria
• They\’ve got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present
• There will also be a tutorial section of the conference
• AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!
• All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted
• Check the link for all the details on the talks – if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers!

FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

• The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU
• This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router
• Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up
• It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don\’t want to use the ones rolled by someone else
• For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router
• Of course if you\’re more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too

Signed pkgsrc package guide

• We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up
• It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)
• He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them
• The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer

Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports

• Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI
• In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things
• In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara
• In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead – but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he\’s done
• In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things

This episode was brought to you by

Interview – Chris Buechler – cmb@pfsense.com / @cbuechler

pfSense

Tutorial

pfSense walkthrough

News Roundup

FreeBSD challenge continues

• Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey
• In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first
• In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he\’s starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again – concludes that ports are the way to go
• In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch
• In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails!

BSD books in 2014

• BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them
• In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014
• In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and…
• Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)
• Check the link for all the details

How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images

• Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post
• Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch
• You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI
• It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward

PCBSD weekly digest

• This time around we discuss how you can become a developer
• Kris also details the length of supported releases
• Expect lots of new features in 10.1

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s216xJoCVG
• Jake writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2gLrR3VVf
• Niclas writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21gfG3Iho
• Steffan writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2JNyw5BCn
• Antonio writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2kg3zoRfm
• Chris writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2ZwSIfRjm

• Our email backlog is pretty much caught up. Now\’s a great time to send us something – questions, stories, ideas, requests for something you want to see, anything
• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• The OpenBSD router tutorial got a couple improvements and fixes
• Just because our tutorial contest is over doesn\’t mean you can\’t submit any, we would love if more listeners wrote up a tutorial on interesting things they\’re doing with BSD
• 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)
• The BSD Now shirt design has been finalized, we have the files and are working out the printing details… expect them to be available in early-to-mid March!

The post A Sixth pfSense | BSD 25 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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.

Thanks to:

Direct Download:

Video | HD Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | HD Vid Feed | HD Torrent Feed

– Show Notes: –

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.

We talk with George Neville-Neil about the brand new FreeBSD Journal and what it\’s all about. After that, we\’ve got a tutorial on how to track the -stable and -current branches of OpenBSD. Answers to all your BSD questions and the latest headlines, only on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

Direct Download:

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RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | HD Vid Feed | HD Torrent Feed

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• Gabor Pali sent out the October-December 2013 status report to get everyone up to date on what\’s going on
• The report contains 37 entries and is very very long… various reports from all the different teams under the FreeBSD umbrella, probably too many to even list in the show notes
• Lots of work going on in the ARM world, EC2/Xen and Google Compute Engine are also improving
• Secure boot support hopefully coming by mid-year
• There\’s quite a bit going on in the FreeBSD world, many projects happening at the same time
• Jordan (jkh), one of the co-founders of the FreeBSD project, is once again a FreeBSD committer

n2k14 OpenBSD Hackathon Report

• Recently, OpenBSD held one of their hackathons in New Zealand
• 15 developers gathered there to sit in a room and write code for a few days
• Philip Guenther brings back a nice report of the event
• If you\’ve been watching the -current CVS logs, you\’ve seen the flood of commits just from this event alone
• Fixes with threading, Linux compat, ACPI, and various other things – some will make it into 5.5 and others need more testing
• Another report from Theo details his work
• Updates to the random subsystem, some work-in-progress pf fixes, suspend/resume fixes and more signing stuff

Four new NetBSD releases

• NetBSD released versions 6.1.3, 6.0.4, 5.2.2 and 5.1.4
• These updates include lots of bug fixes and some security updates, not focused on new features
• You can upgrade depending on what branch you\’re currently on
• Confused about the different branches? See this graph.

The future of open source ZFS development

• On February 11, 2014, Matt Ahrens will be giving a presentation about ZFS
• The talk will be about the future of ZFS and the open source development since Oracle closed the code
• It\’s in San Jose, California – go if you can!

This episode was brought to you by

Interview – George Neville-Neil – gnn@freebsd.org / @gvnn3

The FreeBSD Journal

Tutorial

Tracking -STABLE and -CURRENT (OpenBSD)

News Roundup

pfSense news and 2.1.1 snapshots

• pfSense has some snapshots available for the upcoming 2.1.1 release
• They include FreeBSD security fixes as well as some other updates
• There are recordings posted of some of the previous hangouts
• Unfortunately they\’re only for subscribers, so you\’ll have to wait until next month when we have Chris on the show to talk about pfSense!

FreeBSD on Google Compute Engine

• Recently we mentioned some posts about getting OpenBSD to run on GCE, here\’s the FreeBSD version
• Nice big fat warning: \”The team has put together a best-effort posting that will get most, if not all, of you up and running. That being said, we need to remind you that FreeBSD is being supported on Google Compute Engine by the community. The instructions are being provided as-is and without warranty.\”
• Their instructions are a little too Linuxy (assuming wget, etc.) for our taste, someone should probably get it updated!
• Other than that it\’s a pretty good set of instructions on how to get up and running

Dragonfly ACPI update

• Sascha Wildner committed some new ACPI code
• There\’s also a \”heads up\” to update your BIOS if you experience problems
• Check the mailing list post for all the details

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 users need to upgrade all their packages for 10.0-RC5
• Help test GNOME 3 so we can get it in the official ports tree
• By the way, PCBSD 10.0 is out!
• Special thanks to developers, testers, translators and docs team!
• Upcoming: Working on a 11-CURRENT PC-BSD and 10-STABLE

Feedback/Questions

• Tony writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21ZlfOdTt
• Jeff writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2BFZ68Na5
• Remy writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20epArsQI
• Nils writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s213CoNvLt
• Solomon writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21XWnThNS

• 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
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
• A BSD Now t-shirt design is in the works, we\’ll update you on the progress (but we have to get permission to use the mascots and get a rough sketch first)
• NYCBSDCon will be on February 8th in NYC
• We\’ll announce the winner of our tutorial contest on next week\’s episode! Get your last minute tutorial submissions in for our contest

The post Journaled News-Updates | BSD Now 22 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.