BSD Now

Latest Episodes:

407: The jail Detail Jun 17, 2021

Show notes

Confining the omnipotent root, Jails with ZFS and PF on DigitalOcean, NomadBSD 130R is out, KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD, Firefox under FreeBSD with Privacy, Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere, and more.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Jails: Confining the omnipotent root

A dramatic reading of portions of the paper: Papers We Love: FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones *** ### Using Jails with ZFS and PF on DigitalOcean *** ## News Roundup ### NomadBSD 130R is out *** ### KDE Plasma Wayland - a week in FreeBSD *** ### Install Firefox under FreeBSD and Set it Up with Privacy *** Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can ***

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

Malcolm - restoring a single file
Nathan - wireless support
bluefire - zfs special vdev Push to next show with Allan

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

406: Jailed Gemini Capsule Jun 10, 2021

Show notes

Gemini Capsule in a FreeBSD Jail, FreeBSD Quarterly status report 2021Q1, NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS), Interview with Michael Lucas, WireGuard Returns as Experimental Package in pfSense, CGI with Awk on OpenBSD httpd, and more.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Gemini Capsule in a FreeBSD Jail

With the recent release of FreeBSD 13, I wanted to test it out on a spare RaspberryPi 3 that was part of my old Kubernetes cluster.
In particular, FreeBSD Jails have always interested me, although I’ve never used them in practice. Over the years I’ve managed operating system virtualization through Solaris Zones and Docker containers, and Jails seem like and good middle ground between the two - easier to manage than zones and closer to the OS than Docker.
I also want to run my own Gemini capsule locally to use some of the features that my other hosted capsules don’t have (like SCGI/CGI) and setting up a capsule in a Jail is a good way to learn both at the same time.

FreeBSD Quarterly status report 2021Q1

News Roundup

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS)

My new NAS at home is running TrueNAS Core. So far, it has been excellent, however I struggled a bit setting up a NetBSD VM on it. Part of the problem is that a lot of the docs and how-tos I found are stale, and the information in it no longer applies.
TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI :) But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with one caveat (see below).

Interview with Michael Lucas *BSD, Unix, IT and other books author

Michael Lucas is a famous IT book author. Perhaps best know for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Unix book series. He worked as a system administrator for many years and has now become a full-time book writer. Lately, I did a quick Q and A with Michael about his journey as a professional book author and his daily workflow for writing books.
+

pfSense – WireGuard Returns as Experimental Package

CGI with Awk on OpenBSD httpd

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questionsing

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

405: OOM Killer Feature Jun 03, 2021

Show notes

NetBSD 9.2 released, DragonFly 6.0 is out, Home Network Monitoring using Prometheus, Preventing FreeBSD to kill PostgreSQL, Customizing Emacs for Git Commit Messages, Deleting old FreeBSD boot environments, Always be quitting, and more

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

NetBSD 9.2 Released

DragonFly 6.0 is out!

Release Notes *** ### EuroBSDCon 2021 will be online *** ## News Roundup ### Home Network Monitoring using Prometheus > This blog post describes my setup for monitoring various devices on my home network suh as servers, laptops/desktops, networking gear etc. The setup and configuration is squarely geared towards small/medium sized network monitoring. A similar setup might work for large networks, but you will need to plan your compute/storage/bandwidth capacities accordingly. I’m running all the monitoring software on FreeBSD, but you can run it on your choice of OS. Just make sure to install the packages using your OS’s package manager. *** ### Preventing FreeBSD to kill PostgreSQL (aka OOM Killer prevention) > There are a lot of interesting articles on how to prevent the Out of Memory Killer (OOM killer in short) on Linux to ruin your day, or better your night. One particularly well done explanation about how the OOM Killer works, and how to help PostgreSQL to survive, is, in my humble opinion, the one from Percona Blog. *** ### Customizing Emacs for Git Commit Messages >I do a lot of commits to the FreeBSD project and elsewhere. It would be nice if I could setup emacs in a custom way for each commit message that I'm editing. > Fortunately, GNU Emacs provides a nice way to do just that. While I likely could do some of these things with git commit hooks, I find this to be a little nicer. *** ### Deleting old FreeBSD boot environments > I like boot environments (BE) on FreeBSD. They were especially handy when building the AWS host for FreshPorts, since I had no serial console. I would create a BE saving the current status, then make some changes. I’d mark the current BE as boot once, so I could boot back in the known good BE. Worst case, I could mount the storage onto a rescue EC2 instance and adjust the bootfs value of the zpool. ***

Always be quitting

A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job. But act as if you might leave on short notice. Counterintuitively, this will make you a better engineer and open up growth opportunities.

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

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

404: 404 BSD Now Hosts Not Found May 27, 2021

Show notes

Allan, Benedict and Tom are MIA, so JT fills in with two friends.

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap
CoHosts this week:
• Ash Gokhale: https://twitter.com/xpi
• Jeff Propes : CoHost of The Opinion Dominion

This weeks format follows the format of one of JT's other shows: The Opinion Dominion.

Centralized vs Decentralized Management

Ash’s draid article at Klara

openbsd’s 50th release + Release Notes

Beastie Bits

•  Interesting dtrace papers I found this week.  The first is unfortunately paywalled by an industry journal but hopefully it’ll be publicly available soon.    
    ◦ [Using Dtrace for Machine Learning Solutions in Malware Detection](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9225633)
    ◦ [Process Monitoring on Sequences of System Call Count Vectors](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.03821.pdf)
    ◦ Sounds Similar to:

Optimyze Cloud](https://twitter.com/OptimyzeCloud/status/1386424419418099712)
CADETS that GNN is working on]

• Practical IOT Hacking book out by no starch press

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Open Source Voices episode with Colin Percival

RIP Dan kaminski

• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/technology/daniel-kaminsky-dead.html
• https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/in-appreciation-dan-kaminsky/d/d-id/1340830
• https://www.securityweek.com/security-researcher-dan-kaminsky-passes-away

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

403: The Linuxulator Investment May 20, 2021

Show notes

Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product, Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator, OPNsense 21.1.5 released, FreeBSD meetings on the Desktop, Running FreeBSD jails with containerd 1.5, Markdown, DocBook, and the quest for semantic documentation on NetBSD.org, and more.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product

The term “open source” has its origins in the context of software development, designating a specific approach to developing computer programs. Nowadays, however, it stands for a broad set of values – open source means open exchange, transparency, collaborative participation and development for the benefit of the entire community.

Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator

Dr. Emmett Brown’s similar-sounding Flux Capacitor from the movie Back to the Future bridged the dimension of time, uniting past, present, and future for the McFlys. Similarly, the FreeBSDⓇ Linuxulator project also bridges dimensions – in our case, these are LinuxⓇ and FreeBSD.

News Roundup

OPNsense 21.1.5 released

This is mainly a security and reliablility update. There are several FreeBSD
security advisories and updates for third party tools such as curl.

OPNsense to rebase on FreeBSD 13 *** ### FreeBSD meetings on the Desktop FreeBSD on the desktop is a whole stack - X11, Qt, KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma and KDE Gear, and Wayland, and Poppler and GTK - o my! *** ### Running FreeBSD jails with containerd 1.5 containerd 1.5.0 was released today and now works on a new operating system: FreeBSD! This new release includes a series of patches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) which allow containerd to build, enable the native and zfs snapshotters, and use a compatible runtime like runj. *** ### Markdown, DocBook, and the quest for semantic documentation on NetBSD.org Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of maintenance of the NetBSD website. It contains a boatload of documentation, much of which was originally written in the 2000s. It has some special requirements: it has to work in text-based web browsers like lynx, or maybe even without any working browser installed at all, or just ftp(1) for downloading plain text over HTTP. Naturally, the most important parts are static, suitable for serving from the standard NetBSD http server, which runs from inetd by default. ***

Beastie Bits

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

Alrekur - An Interesting FreeBSD Find They presented at the FreeBSD Vendor summit last year too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUdZseNrpE
Sven - feedback
Robert - firewalling

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

402: Goodbye GPL May 13, 2021

Show notes

It's time to say goodbye to the GPL, a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails, A bit of Xenix history, On Updating QEMU's bsd-user fork, FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop, and more.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

It's time to say goodbye to the GPL

The trigger for this post is the reinstating of Richard Stallman, a very problematic character, to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I am appalled by this move, and join others in the call for his removal.
This occasion has caused me to reevaluate the position of the FSF in computing. It is the steward of the GNU project (a part of Linux distributions, loosely speaking), and of a family of software licenses centred around the GNU General Public License (GPL). These efforts are unfortunately tainted by Stallman’s behaviour. However, this is not what I actually want to talk about today.

runj: a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails

Today, I open-sourced runj, a new experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. For the past 6.5 years I’ve been working on Linux containers, but never really had much experience with FreeBSD jails. runj (pronounced “run jay”) is a vehicle for me to learn more about FreeBSD in general and jails in particular. With my position on the Technical Oversight Board of the Open Containers Initiative, I’m also interested in understanding how the OCI runtime specification can be adapted to other operating systems like FreeBSD.

News Roundup

A Bit of Xenix History

From 1986 to 1989, I worked in the Xenix1 group at Microsoft. It was my first job out of school, and I was the most junior person on the team. I was hopelessly naive, inexperienced, generally clueless, and borderline incompetent, but my coworkers were kind, supportive and enormously forgiving – just a lovely bunch of folks.

On Updating QEMU's bsd-user fork

FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop

My old (2009) HP laptop now runs FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.

Beastie Bits

Registration is now open for the June 2021 #FreeBSD Developers Summit
6.0RC1 images available
Lexical File Names in Plan 9 or Getting Dot-Dot Right
The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike
Initial Support for the riscv64 Architecture *** ###Tarsnap
This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

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

401: OpenBSD Dog Garage May 06, 2021

Show notes

Dog's Garage Runs OpenBSD, EuroBSDcon 2021 Call for Papers, FreeBSD’s iostat, The state of toolchains in NetBSD, Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8, FreeBSD's ports migration to git and its impact on HardenedBSD, TrueNAS 12.0-U3 has been released, and more.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

My Dog's Garage Runs OpenBSD

I was inspired by the April 2017 article in undeadly.org about getting OpenBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. My goal was to use a Raspberry Pi running OpenBSD to monitor the temperature in my garage from my home. My dog has his own little "apartment" inside the garage, so I want to keep an eye on the temperature. (I don't rely on this device. He sleeps inside the house whenever he wants.)

EuroBSDcon 2021 Call for Papers

FreeBSD iostat

The state of toolchains in NetBSD

While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn't mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license, and the NetBSD Foundation's has issued a statement about its position on the subject.

NetBSD’s statement ***

News Roundup

Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8

I will explain how to limit bandwidth on OpenBSD using its firewall PF (Packet Filter) queuing capability. It is a very powerful feature but it may be hard to understand at first. What is very important to understand is that it's technically not possible to limit the bandwidth of the whole system, because once data is getting on your network interface, it's already there and got by your router, what is possible is to limit the upload rate to cap the download rate.

FreeBSD's ports migration to git and its impact on HardenedBSD

FreeBSD completed their ports migration from subversion to git. Prior to the official switch, we used the read-only mirror FreeBSD had at GitHub[1]. The new repo is at [2]. A cursory glance at the new repo will show that the commit hashes changed. This presents an issue with HardenedBSD's ports tree in our merge-based workflow.

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 has been released

iXsystems is excited to announce TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released today and marks an important milestone in the transition from FreeNAS to TrueNAS. TrueNAS 12.0 is now considered by iXsystems to be a higher quality release than FreeNAS 11.3-U5, our previous benchmark. The new TrueNAS documentation site has also reached a point where it has more content and capabilities than FreeNAS. TrueNAS 12.0 is ready for mission-critical enterprise deployments.

Beastie Bits

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

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

400: FreeBSD became 13 Apr 29, 2021

Show notes

FreeBSD 13 is here, multi-factor authentication on OpenBSD, KDE on FreeBSD 2021o2, NetBSD GSoC report, a working D compiler on OpenBSD, and more

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

FreeBSD 13.0 R Annoucement

• OpenZFS 2.0 (almost 2.1) is included in 13.0
• Removed support for previously-deprecated algorithms in geli(8).
• The armv8crypto(4) driver now supports AES-GCM which is used by IPsec and kernel TLS.

Enable multi-factor authentication on OpenBSD

In this article I will explain how to add a bit more security to your OpenBSD system by adding a requirement for user logging into the system, locally or by ssh. I will explain how to setup 2 factor authentication (2FA) using TOTP on OpenBSD

News Roundup

KDE on FreeBSD 2021o2

Gosh, second octant already! Well, let’s take a look at the big things that happened in KDE-on-FreeBSD in these six-and-a-half weeks.

GSoC Reports: Make system(3), popen(3) and popenve(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally (Final report)

My code can be found at github.com/teknokatze/src in the gsoc2020 branch, at the time of writing some of it is still missing. The test facilities and logs can be found in github.com/teknokatze/gsoc2020. A diff can be found at github which will later be split into several patches before it is sent to QA for merging.
The initial and defined goal of this project was to make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally, which had been completed in June. For the second part I was given the task to replace fork+exec calls in our standard shell (sh) in one scenario. Similar to the previous goal we determined through implementation if the initial motivation, to get performance improvements, is correct otherwise we collect metrics for why posix_spawn() in this case should be avoided. This second part meant in practice that I had to add and change code in the kernel, add a new public libc function, and understand shell internals.

A working D compiler on OpenBSD

Dr. Brian Robert Callahan (bcallah@) blogged about his work in getting D compiler(s) working under OpenBSD.

Full Post ***

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

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

399: Comparing Sandboxes Apr 22, 2021

Show notes

Comparing sandboxing techniques, Statement on FreeBSD development processes, customizing FreeBSD ports and packages, the quest for a comfortable NetBSD desktop, Nginx as a TCP/UDP relay, HardenedBSD March 2021 Status Report, Detailed Behaviors of Unix Signal, and more

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Comparing sandboxing techniques

I had the opportunity to implement a sandbox and I'd like to write about the differences between the various sandboxing techniques available on three different operating systems: FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD.

Statement on FreeBSD development processes

In light of the recent commentary on FreeBSD's development practices, members of the Core team would like to issue the following statement.

Customizing FreeBSD Ports and Packages

A basic intro to building your own packages

News Roundup

FVWM(3) and the quest for a comfortable NetBSD desktop

FVWM substantially allows one to build a fully-fledged lightweight desktop environment from scratch, with an almost unparalleled degree of freedom. Although using FVWM does not require any knowledge of programming languages, it is possible to extend it with M4, C, and Perl preprocessing.

Nginx as a TCP/UDP relay

In this tutorial I will explain how to use Nginx as a TCP or UDP relay as an alternative to Haproxy or Relayd. This mean nginx will be able to accept requests on a port (TCP/UDP) and relay it to another backend without knowing about the content. It also permits to negociates a TLS session with the client and relay to a non-TLS backend. In this example I will explain how to configure Nginx to accept TLS requests to transmit it to my Gemini server Vger, Gemini protocol has TLS as a requirement.

HardenedBSD March 2021 Status Report

This month, I worked on finding and fixing the regression that caused kernel panics on our package builders. I think I found the issue: I made it so that the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel just included GENERIC so that we follow FreeBSD's toggling of features. Doing so added QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH to our kernel config. That option is the likely culprit. If the next package build (with the option removed) completes, I will commit the change that removes QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH from the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel.

Detailed Behaviors of Unix Signal

When Unix is mentioned in this document it means macOS or Linux as they are the mainly used Unix at this moment. When shell is mentioned it means Bash or Zsh. Most demos are written in C for macOS with Apple libc and Linux with glibc.

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

andrew - flatpak
chris - mac and truenas
robert - some questions
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

398: Coordinated Mars Time Apr 15, 2021

Show notes

FreeBSD 13.0 Full Desktop Experience, FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud, Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace, Inferno is open source as well, NetBSD hits donation milestone, grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD, Random Programming Challenge, OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC) and more

NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud

Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace!

The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.

Inferno is open source as well *** ## News Roundup ### Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020 We nearly hit our 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000. ***

grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

Random Programming Challenge

This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?

OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)

To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).
OpenZFS had a good one too

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

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

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Headlines

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

Headlines

News Roundup

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questionsing

Headlines

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

This weeks format follows the format of one of JT's other shows: The Opinion Dominion.

Centralized vs Decentralized Management

openbsd’s 50th release + Release Notes

Beastie Bits

Tarsnap

RIP Dan kaminski

Headlines

News Roundup

Beastie Bits

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

Headlines

News Roundup

Beastie Bits

Feedback/Questions

Headlines

News Roundup

Beastie Bits

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

Headlines

News Roundup

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

Headlines

News Roundup

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

Headlines

This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?

Tarsnap

Feedback/Questions

Related Podcasts

1

2

3

4

5

6