Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/410

The post Ye Olde Linux Distro | LINUX Unplugged 410 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Coming up this week, we’ll be talking with Jun Ebihara about some lesser-known CPU architectures in NetBSD. He’ll tell us what makes these old (and often forgotten) machines so interesting. As usual, we’ve also got answers to your emails and all this week’s news on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Out with the old, in with the less

• Our friend Ted Unangst has a new article up, talking about “various OpenBSD replacements and reductions”
• “Instead of trying to fix known bugs, we’re trying to fix unknown bugs. It’s not based on the current buggy state of the code, but the anticipated future buggy state of the code. Past bugs are a bigger factor than current bugs.”
• In the post, he goes through some of the bigger (and smaller) examples of OpenBSD rewriting tools to be simpler and more secure
• It starts off with a lesser-known SCSI driver that “tried to do too much” being replaced with three separate drivers
• “Each driver can now be modified in isolation without unintentional side effects on other hardware, or the need to consider if and where further special cases need to be added. Despite the fact that these three drivers duplicate all the common boilerplate code, combined they only amount to about half as much code as the old driver.”
• In contrast to that example, he goes on to cite mandoc as taking a very non “unixy” direction, but at the same time being smaller and simpler than all the tools it replaced
• The next case is the new http daemon, and he talks a bit about the recently-added rewrite support being done in a simple and secure way (as opposed to regex and its craziness)
• He also talks about the rewritten “file” utility: “Almost by definition, its sole input will be untrusted input. Perversely, people will then trust what file tells them and then go about using that input, as if file somehow sanitized it.”
• Finally, sudo in OpenBSD’s base system is moving to ports soon, and the article briefly describes a new tool that may or may not replace it, called “doas”
• There’s also a nice wrap-up of all the examples at the end, and the “Pruning and Polishing” talk is good complementary reading material

More OpenZFS and BSDCan videos

• We mentioned last week that some of the videos from the second OpenZFS conference in Europe were being uploaded – here’s some more
• Matt Ahrens did a Q&A session and talked about ZFS send and receive, as well as giving an overview of OpenZFS
• George Wilson talked about a performance retrospective
• Toshiba, Syneto and HGST also gave some talks about their companies and how they’re using ZFS
• As for BSDCan, more of their BSD presentations have been uploaded too (this might be the last batch)
• Ryan Stone, PCI SR-IOV on FreeBSD
• George Neville-Neil, Measure Twice, Code Once
• Kris Moore, Unifying jail and package management for PC-BSD, FreeNAS and FreeBSD
• Warner Losh, I/O Scheduling in CAM
• Kirk McKusick, An Introduction to the Implementation of ZFS
• Midori Kato, Extensions to FreeBSD Datacenter TCP for Incremental Deployment Support
• Baptiste Daroussin, Packaging FreeBSD base system
• Matt Ahrens, New OpenZFS features supporting remote replication
• Ed Schouten, CloudABI Cloud computing meets fine-grained capabilities
• The audio of Ingo Schwarze’s talk “mandoc: becoming the main BSD manual toolbox” got messed up, but there’s an alternate recording here, and the slides are here

SMP steroids for PF

• An Oracle employee that’s been porting OpenBSD’s PF to an upcoming Solaris release has sent in an interesting patch for review
• Attached to the mail was what may be the beginnings of making native PF SMP-aware
• Before you start partying, the road to SMP (specifically, giant lock removal) is a long and very complicated one, requiring every relevant bit of the stack to be written with it in mind – this is just one piece of the puzzle
• The initial response has been quite positive though, with some back and forth between developers and the submitter
• For now, let’s be patient and see what happens

DragonFly 4.2.0 released

• DragonFlyBSD has released the next big update of their 4.x branch, complete with a decent amount of new features and fixes
• i915 and Radeon graphics have been updated, and DragonFly can claim the title of first BSD with Broadwell support in a release
• Sendmail in the base system has been replaced with their homegrown DragonFly Mail Agent, and there’s a wiki page about configuring it
• They’ve also switched the default compiler to GCC 5, though why they’ve gone in that direction instead of embracing Clang is a mystery
• The announcement page also contains a list of kernel changes, details on the audio and graphics updates, removal of the SCTP protocol, improvements to the temperature sensors, various userland utility fixes and a list of updates to third party tools
• Work is continuing on the second generation HAMMER filesystem, and Matt Dillon provides a status update in the release announcement
• There was also some hacker news discussion you can check out, as well as upgrade instructions

OpenSMTPD 5.7.1 released

• The OpenSMTPD guys have just released version 5.7.1, a major milestone version that we mentioned recently
• Crypto-related bits have been vastly improved: the RSA engine is now privilege-separated, TLS errors are handled more gracefully, ciphers and curve preferences can now be specified, the PKI interface has been reworked to allow custom CAs, SNI and certificate verification have been simplified and the DH parameters are now 2048 bit by default
• The long-awaited filter API is now enabled by default, though still considered slightly experimental
• Documentation has been improved quite a bit, with more examples and common use cases (as well as exotic ones)
• Many more small additions and bugfixes were made, so check the changelog for the full list
• Starting with 5.7.1, releases are now cryptographically signed to ensure integrity
• This release has gone through some major stress testing to ensure stability – Gilles regularly asks their Twitter followers to flood a test server with thousands of emails per second, even offering prizes to whoever can DDoS them the hardest
• OpenSMTPD runs on all the BSDs of course, and seems to be getting pretty popular lately
• Let’s all encourage Kris to stop procrastinating on switching from Postfix

Interview – Jun Ebihara (蛯原純) – jun@soum.co.jp / @ebijun

Lesser-known CPU architectures, embedded NetBSD devices

News Roundup

FreeBSD foundation at BSDCan

• The FreeBSD foundation has posted a few BSDCan summaries on their blog
• The first, from Steven Douglas, begins with a sentiment a lot of us can probably identify with: “Where I live, there are only a handful of people that even know what BSD is, let alone can talk at a high level about it. That was one of my favorite things, being around like minded people.”
• He got to meet a lot of the people working on big-name projects, and enjoyed being able to ask them questions so easily
• Their second trip report is from Ahmed Kamal, who flew in all the way from Egypt
• A bit starstruck, he seems to have enjoyed all the talks, particularly Andrew Tanenbaum’s about MINIX and NetBSD
• There are also two more wrap-ups from Zbigniew Bodek and Vsevolod Stakhov, so you’ve got plenty to read

OpenBSD from a veteran Linux user perspective

• In a new series of blog posts, a self-proclaimed veteran Linux user is giving OpenBSD a try for the first time
• “For the first time I installed a BSD box on a machine I control. The experience has been eye-opening, especially since I consider myself an ‘old-school’ Linux admin, and I’ve felt out of place with the latest changes on the system administration.”
• The post is a collection of his thoughts about what’s different between Linux and BSD, what surprised him as a beginner – admittedly, a lot of his knowledge carried over, and there were just minor differences in command flags
• One of the things that surprised him (in a positive way) was the documentation: “OpenBSD’s man pages are so nice that RTFMing somebody on the internet is not condescending but selfless.”
• He also goes through some of the basics, installing and updating software, following different branches
• It concludes with “If you like UNIX, it will open your eyes to the fact that there is more than one way to do things, and that system administration can still be simple while modern.”

FreeBSD on the desktop, am I crazy

• Similar to the previous article, the guy that wrote the SSH two factor authentication post we covered last week has another new article up – this time about FreeBSD on the desktop
• He begins with a bit of forewarning for potential Linux switchers: “It certainly wasn’t an easy journey, and I’m tempted to say do not try this at home to anybody who isn’t going to leverage any of FreeBSD’s strong points. Definitely don’t try FreeBSD on the desktop if you haven’t used it on servers or virtual machines before. It’s got less in common with Linux than you might think.”
• With that out of the way, the list of positives is pretty large: a tidy base system, separation between base and ports, having the option to choose binary packages or ports, ZFS, jails, licensing and of course the lack of systemd
• The rest of the post talks about some of the hurdles he had to overcome, namely with graphics and the infamous Adobe Flash
• Also worth noting is that he found jails to be not only good for isolating daemons on a server, but pretty useful for desktop applications as well
• In the end, he says it was worth all the trouble, and is even planning on converting his laptop to FreeBSD soon too

OpenIKED and Cisco CSR 1000v IPSEC

• This article covers setting up a site-to-site IPSEC tunnel between a Cisco CSR 1000v router and an OpenBSD gateway running OpenIKED
• What kind of networking blog post would be complete without a diagram where the internet is represented by a big cloud
• There are lots of details (and example configuration files) for using IKEv2 and OpenBSD’s built-in IKE daemon
• It also goes to show that the BSDs generally play well with existing network infrastructure, so if you were a business that’s afraid to try them… don’t be

HardenedBSD improves stack randomization

• The HardenedBSD guys have improved their FreeBSD ASLR patchset, specifically in the stack randomization area
• In their initial implementation, the stack randomization was a random gap – this update makes the base address randomized as well
• They’re now stacking the new on top of the old as well, with the goal being even more entropy
• This change triggered an ABI and API incompatibility, so their major version has been bumped

OpenSSH 6.9 released

• The OpenSSH team has announced the release of a new version which, following their tick/tock major/minor release cycle, is focused mainly on bug fixes
• There are a couple new things though – the “AuthorizedKeysCommand” config option now takes custom arguments
• One very notable change is that the default cipher has changed as of this release
• The traditional pairing of AES128 in counter mode with MD5 HMAC has been replaced by the ever-trendy ChaCha20-Poly1305 combo
• Their next release, 7.0, is set to get rid a number of legacy items: PermitRootLogin will be switched to “no” by default, SSHv1 support will be totally disabled, the 1024bit diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 KEX will be disabled, old ssh-dss and v00 certs will be removed, a number of weak ciphers will be disabled by default (including all CBC ones) and RSA keys will be refused if they’re under 1024 bits
• Many small bugs fixes and improvements were also made, so check the announcement for everything else
• The native version is in OpenBSD -current, and an update to the portable version should be hitting a ports or pkgsrc tree near you soon

Feedback/Questions

• Brad writes in
• Mason writes in
• Jochen writes in
• Simon writes in

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• We’d love to see more participation from the listeners – get in touch with us if you’re doing something interesting you’d like to talk about (or have already written about)
• If you’re using DNSCrypt on your router to protect your DNS lookups, as mentioned in a few of our tutorials, you may want to consider switching the authoritative resolver away from OpenDNS (since Cisco recently bought them and doesn’t have the best security record)

The post Lost Technology | BSD Now 96 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.

We’re back and this week we’ll be showing you how to tunnel out of a restrictive network using only DNS queries.

We also sat down with Bryan Drewery, from the FreeBSD portmgr team, to talk all about their building cluster and some recent changes.

All the latest news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open

• September is getting closer, and that means it’s time for EuroBSDCon – held in Bulgaria this year
• Registration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18th
• Tutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as well
• Registering between August 18th – September 12th will cost more for everything
• You can register online here and check hotels in the area
• The FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants

OpenBSD SMP PF update

• A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreaded
• With them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jump
• In a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concerns
• The short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter – just reworking PF by itself would be useless
• He also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD’s old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it’s gone through
• There’s also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD’s PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patches
• We reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us

Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc

• An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you need
• The post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile format
• It also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting process
• Finally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE

• After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterday
• The full list of changes is available, but it’s mostly a smaller maintenance release
• Lots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated… and much more
• If you haven’t jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven’t!) this is a worthwhile upgrade – 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soon
• Good news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors – a very welcome change
• 9.2’s EOL was extended until December of this year
• With that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted

Interview – Bryan Drewery – bdrewery@freebsd.org / @bdrewery

The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics

Tutorial

Tunneling traffic through DNS

News Roundup

SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD

• We’ve previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party website
• This blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator port
• Using this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access – but users with public keys can login normally
• It’s a really, really simple process once you have the port installed – full details on the page

Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS

• The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a client
• Having constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solution
• With 1TB of backups, tapes just weren’t a good option anymore – so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)
• The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup

NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences

• A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his job
• Becoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try – especially since it has a native nVidia driver
• “Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga.”
• He’s become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system

PCBSD not-so-weekly digest

• Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it’s the return of the PCBSD digest!
• Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new features
• You can now create jails “on the fly” when adding a new PBI to your application library
• Bulk jail creation is also possible now, and it’s really easy
• New Jenkins integration, with public access to Poudriere logs as well (https://builds.pcbsd.org)
• PkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users

Feedback/Questions

• Jeff writes in – Sending Encrypted Backups over SSH + Sending ZFS snapshots via user
• Bruce writes in
• Richard writes in
• Jeff writes in
• Steve writes in

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• We love hearing from listeners – tell us what you think of the show or what you’d like to see!
• If you want to come on for an interview or have a tutorial you’d like to see, let us know
• Congrats to the new FreeBSD core team members
• The first (and second.. and third..) portable release of LibreSSL is available on the OpenBSD FTP sites, with a brief announcement email
• Test it on your platform of choice, including building ports against it, and report your findings to either the LibreSSL team or the port maintainers so we can increase compatibility
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post Network Iodometry | BSD Now 46 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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

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

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

pfSense 2.1.4 released

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

DragonflyBSD’s pf gets SMP

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

ChaCha usage and deployment

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

BSDMag June 2014 issue

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

Interview – Craig Rodrigues – rodrigc@freebsd.org

FreeBSD’s continuous testing infrastructure

Tutorial

Creating pre-patched OpenBSD ISOs

News Roundup

Preauthenticated decryption considered harmful

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

FreeBSD 9.3-RC2 is out

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

pkgsrcCon 2014 wrap-up

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

PostgreSQL FreeBSD performance and scalability

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

Feedback/Questions

• James writes in
• Klemen writes in
• John writes in
• Brad writes in
• Adam writes in

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

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

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.

This week on BSD Now… a wrap-up from NYCBSDCon! We\’ll also be talking to Luke Marsden, CEO of HybridCluster, about how they use BSD at large. Following that, our tutorial will show you how to securely share files with SFTP in a chroot. The latest news and answers to your questions, of course it\’s 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 10 as a firewall

• Back in 2012, the author of this site wrote an article stating you should avoid FreeBSD 9 for a firewall and use OpenBSD instead
• Now, with the release of 10.0, he\’s apparently changed his mind and switched back over
• It mentions the SMP version of pf, general performance advantages and more modern features
• The author is a regular listener of BSD Now, hi Joe!

Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

• Really long blog post, based on a BSDCan presentation, about fighting spam with OpenBSD
• Peter Hansteen, author of the book of PF, goes through how he uses OpenBSD\’s spamd and other security features to combat spam and malware
• He goes through his experiences with content filtering and disappointment with a certain proprietary vendor
• Not totally BSD-specific, lots of people can enjoy the article – lots of virus history as well

FreeBSD ASLR patches submitted

• So far, FreeBSD hasn\’t had Address Space Layout Randomization
• ASLR is a nice security feature, see wikipedia for more information
• With a giant patch from Shawn Webb, it might be integrated into a future version (after a vicious review from the security team of course)
• We might have Shawn on the show to talk about it, but he\’s also giving a presentation at BSDCan about his work with ASLR

Old-style pkg_ tools retired

• At last the old pkg_add tools are being retired in FreeBSD
• pkgng is a huge improvement, and now portmgr@ thinks it\’s time to cut the cord on the legacy toolset
• Ports aren\’t going away, and probably never will, but for binary package fans and new users that are used to things like apt, pkgng is the way to go
• All pkg_ tools will be considered unsupported on September 1, 2014 – even on older branches

This episode was brought to you by

Interview – Luke Marsden – luke@hybridcluster.com / @lmarsden

BSD at HybridCluster

Tutorial

Filesharing with chrooted SFTP

News Roundup

FreeBSD on OpenStack

• OpenStack is a cloud computing project
• It consists of \”a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API.\”
• Until now, there wasn\’t a good way to run a full BSD instance on OpenStack
• With a project in the vein of Colin Percival\’s AWS startup scripts, now that\’s no longer the case!

FOSDEM BSD videos

• This year\’s FOSDEM had seven BSD presentations
• The videos are slowly being uploaded for your viewing pleasure
• Not all of the BSD ones are up yet, but by the time you\’re watching this they might be!
• Check this directory for most of \’em
• The BSD dev room was full, lots of interest in what\’s going on from the other communities

The FreeBSD challenge finally returns!

• Due to prodding from a certain guy of a certain podcast, the \”FreeBSD Challenge\” series has finally resumed
• Our friend from the Linux foundation picks up with day 11 and day 12 on his switching from Linux journey
• This time he outlines the upgrade process of going from 9 to 10, using freebsd-update
• There\’s also some notes about different options for upgrading ports and some extra tips

PCBSD weekly digest

• After the big 10.0 release, the PCBSD crew is focusing on bug fixes for a while
• During their \”fine tuning phase\” users are encouraged to submit any and all bugs via the trac system
• Warden got some fixes and the package manager got some updates as well
• Huge size reduction in PBI format

Feedback/Questions

• After today\’s questions, our email backlog will be just about caught up. Now\’s a great time to send us something – questions, stories, ideas, requests, anything you want
• Derrick writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21nbJKYmb
• Sean writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s2yhziVsBP
• Patrick writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20PuccWbo
• Peter writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s22PL0SbUO
• Sean writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20dkbjuOK

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• Last week\’s NTP tutorial got a small update if you\’re running a LAN-only server, as well as a couple links on how to turn it into a stratum 1 server with a GPS device
• The SSH tutorial also got some updates
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
• Lastly, the BSD Now t-shirt is close to being ready… stay tuned!

The post The Cluster & The Cloud | BSD Now 24 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We\’ve got an interview with Henning Brauer about OpenBSD\’s pf firewall, a tutorial on how to follow the -STABLE and -CURRENT branches of FreeBSD, a recap of what happened at vBSDCon this year and.. As always, lots of news to cover, so stay tuned to BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Direct Download:

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RSS Feeds:

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Managed services using FreeBSD

• New York Internet, a huge ISP and service provider, details how they use FreeBSD
• Mentions using BSD technologies: pf, pfsync, carp, haproxy, zfs, jails and more
• Explains FreeBSD\’s role in commercial workloads on a massive scale
• Lots of cool graphs and info, check out the full write-up

OpenBSD boot support for keydisk-based crypto volumes

• So far, only passphrase-based crypto volumes were bootable
• Full disk encryption with key disks required a non-crypto partition to load the kernel
• The bootloader now scans all BIOS-visible disks for RAID partitions and automatically associates key disk partitions with their crypto volume
• No need to re-create existing volumes. Moving the root partition onto the crypto disk and running \”installboot\” is all that\’s needed

More Dragonfly SMP speedups

• Matthew Dillon has been committing lots of various SMP improvements
• Using dports builds on a 48-processor machine as a test
• The machine’s now building more than 1000 packages an hour
• Super technical details in the show notes, check \’em out

Getting to know portmgr

• Start of an ongoing series profiling members of the FreeBSD Ports Management Team
• In the first interview, they talk to longest serving member of the team, Joe Marcus Clarke
• In the second, Bernhard Frölich (who\’s also the creator of redports.org)
• Future segments will include the other members
• Topics include their inspiration for using FreeBSD, first time using it, lots of other interesting stuff

BSD Now at the top of iTunes

• BSD Now is on the front-and-center page of iTunes\’ technology podcast section
• We\’re better than everyone else and Leo is fat

Interview – Henning Brauer – henning@openbsd.org / @henningbrauer

OpenBSD\’s pf firewall, privilege separation, various topics

Tutorial

Tracking -STABLE and -CURRENT

• The BSDs have development branches you can follow
• This guide shows the differences between FreeBSD -RELEASE, -STABLE and -CURRENT
• Will do OpenBSD and NetBSD versions in the future, their methods are all pretty different

News Roundup

OpenBSD gets XBox360 controller support

• Adds support for Microsoft XBox 360 controller as a uhid
• Will make things easier for emulators in OpenBSD
• Are there people who regularly play games on BSD? Email us, might do a segment on it

PCBSD 10-STABLE ISOs available

• Early cut of the new stable/10 branch, not recommended for everyone
• A pkgng repository is available, but is missing a number of packages
• AMD KMS, new text installer, UEFI loader support, much more

Switching from Linux to BSD

• Yet another Linux user switching to BSD makes a thread about it
• Asks the community what some differences and advantages are
• Good response from the community, worth reading if you\’re a Linux guy

Unattended OpenBSD installations

• Unattended installations possible using DHCP and a \”response\” file
• The system gets an IP via DHCP, then fetches a config file with key=value pairs
• Can do automatic network setup, SSH, passwords, etc
• Still a work in progress

Feedback/Questions

• Kjell-Aleksander writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21hxDpzjO
• Alex writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s21ibNDb5y
• Chad writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20D6K2NUe
• Joshua writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20UZLFHAg
• Craig writes in: https://slexy.org/view/s20S15bbZ4

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

The post -CURRENT Events | BSD Now 9 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.