Show notes
Unix is 50, Hunting down Ken's PDP-7, OpenBSD and OPNSense have new releases, Clarification on what GhostBSD is, sshuttle - VPN over SSH, and more.
Headlines
In the summer of 1969 computer scientists Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created the first implementation of Unix with the goal of designing an elegant and economical operating system for a little-used PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs. That modest project, however, would have a far-reaching legacy. Unix made large-scale networking of diverse computing systems — and the Internet — practical. The Unix team went on to develop the C language, which brought an unprecedented combination of efficiency and expressiveness to programming. Both made computing more "portable". Today, Linux, the most popular descendent of Unix, powers the vast majority of servers, and elements of Unix and Linux are found in most mobile devices. Meanwhile C++ remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. Unix may be a half-century old but its influence is only growing.
In my prior blog post, I traced Ken's scrounged PDP-7 to SN 34. In this post I'll show that we have actual video footage of that PDP-7 due to an old film from Bell Labs. this gives us almost a minute of footage of the PDP-7 Ken later used to create Unix.
News Roundup
Hello friends and followers, Lots of plugin and ports updates this time with a few minor improvements in all core areas. Behind the scenes we are starting to migrate the base system to version
12.1 which is supposed to hit the next 20.1 release. Stay tuned for more infos in the next month or so.
Here are the full patch notes:
- system: show all swap partitions in system information widget
- system: flatten services_get() in preparation for removal
- system: pin Syslog-ng version to specific package name
- system: fix LDAP/StartTLS with user import page
- system: fix a PHP warning on authentication server page
- system: replace most subprocess.call use
- interfaces: fix devd handling of carp devices (contributed by stumbaumr)
- firewall: improve firewall rules inline toggles
- firewall: only allow TCP flags on TCP protocol
- firewall: simplify help text for direction setting
- firewall: make protocol log summary case insensitive
- reporting: ignore malformed flow records
- captive portal: fix type mismatch for timeout read
- dhcp: add note for static lease limitation with lease registration (contributed by Northguy)
- ipsec: add margintime and rekeyfuzz options
- ipsec: clear $dpdline correctly if not set
- ui: fix tokenizer reorder on multiple saves
- plugins: os-acme-client 1.26[1]
- plugins: os-bind will reload bind on record change (contributed by blablup)
- plugins: os-etpro-telemetry minor subprocess.call replacement
- plugins: os-freeradius 1.9.4[2]
- plugins: os-frr 1.12[3]
- plugins: os-haproxy 2.19[4]
- plugins: os-mailtrail 1.2[5]
- plugins: os-postfix 1.11[6]
- plugins: os-rspamd 1.8[7]
- plugins: os-sunnyvalley LibreSSL support (contributed by Sunny Valley Networks)
- plugins: os-telegraf 1.7.6[8]
- plugins: os-theme-cicada 1.21 (contributed by Team Rebellion)
- plugins: os-theme-tukan 1.21 (contributed by Team Rebellion)
- plugins: os-tinc minor subprocess.call replacement
- plugins: os-tor 1.8 adds dormant mode disable option (contributed by Fabian Franz)
- plugins: os-virtualbox 1.0 (contributed by andrewhotlab)
Since the release of 19.09, I have seen a lot of misunderstandings on what is GhostBSD and the future of GhostBSD. GhostBSD is based on TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE with our twist to it. We are still continuing to use TrueOS for OpenRC, and the new package's system for the base system that is built from ports. GhostBSD is becoming a slow-moving rolling release base on the latest TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE. When FreeBSD 13 STABLE gets released, GhostBSD will be upgraded to TrueOS with FreeBSD 13 STABLE.
Our official desktop is MATE, which means that the leading developer of GhostBSD does not officially support XFCE. Community releases are maintained by the community and for the community. GhostBSD project will provide help to build and to host the community release. If anyone wants to have a particular desktop supported, it is up to the community. Sure I will help where I can, answer questions and guide new community members that contribute to community release.
There is some effort going on for Plasma5 desktop. If anyone is interested in helping with XFCE and Plasma5 or in creating another community release, you are well come to contribute. Also, Contribution to the GhostBSD base system, to ports and new ports, and in house software are welcome. We are mostly active on Telegram https://t.me/ghostbsd, but you can also reach us on the forum.
Looking for a lightweight VPN client, but are not ready to spend a monthly recurring amount on a VPN? VPNs can be expensive depending upon the quality of service and amount of privacy you want. A good VPN plan can easily set you back by 10$ a month and even that doesn’t guarantee your privacy. There is no way to be sure whether the VPN is storing your confidential information and traffic logs or not. sshuttle is the answer to your problem it provides VPN over ssh and in this article we’re going to explore this cheap yet powerful alternative to the expensive VPNs. By using open source tools you can control your own privacy.
sshuttle is an awesome program that allows you to create a VPN connection from your local machine to any remote server that you have ssh access on. The tunnel established over the ssh connection can then be used to route all your traffic from client machine through the remote machine including all the dns traffic. In the bare bones sshuttle is just a proxy server which runs on the client machine and forwards all the traffic to a ssh tunnel. Since its open source it holds quite a lot of major advantages over traditional VPN.
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