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    Gadgets

    BSD Now

    Created by three guys who love BSD, we cover the latest news and have an extensive series of tutorials, as well as interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community. It also serves as a platform for support and questions. We love and advocate FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and TrueOS. Our show aims to be helpful and informative for new users that want to learn about them, but still be entertaining for the people who are already pros. The show airs on Wednesdays at 2:00PM (US Eastern time) and the edited version is usually up the following day.

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    Latest Episodes:
    87: On the List Apr 29, 2015
    Show notes

    Coming up this time on the show, we'll be speaking with Christos Zoulas, a NetBSD security officer. He's got a new project called blacklistd, with some interesting possibilities for stopping bruteforce attacks. We've also got answers to your emails and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

    iXsystems - Enterprise Servers and Storage for Open SourceDigitalOcean - Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for DevelopersTarsnap - Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

    Headlines

    New PAE support in OpenBSD

    • OpenBSD has just added Physical Address Extention support to the i386 architecture, but it's probably not what you'd think of when you hear the term
    • In most operating systems, PAE's main advantage is to partially circumvent the 4GB memory limit on 32 bit platforms - this version isn't for that
    • Instead, this change specifically allows the system to use the No-eXecute Bit of the processor for the userland, further hardening the in-place memory protections
    • Other operating systems enable the CPU feature without doing anything to the page table entries, so they do get the available memory expansion, but don't get the potential security benefit
    • As we discussed in a previous episode, the AMD64 platform already saw some major WX kernel and userland improvements - the i386 kernel reworking will begin shortly
    • Not all CPUs support this feature, but, if yours supports NX, this will improve upon the previous version of WX that was already there
    • The AMD64 improvements will be in 5.7, due out in just a couple days as of when we're recording this, but the i386 improvements will likely be in 5.8 ***

    Booting Windows in bhyve

    • Work on FreeBSD's bhyve continues, and a big addition is on the way
    • Thus far, bhyve has only been able to boot operating systems with a serial console - no VGA, no graphics, no Windows
    • This is finally changing, and a teasing screenshot of Windows Server was recently posted on Twitter
    • Graphics emulation is still in the works; this image was taken by booting headless and using RDP
    • A lot of the needed code is being committed to -CURRENT now, but the UEFI portion of it requires a bit more development (and the aim for that is around the time of BSDCan)
    • Not a lot of details on the matter currently, but we'll be sure to bring you more info as it comes out
    • Are you more interested in bhyve or Xen on FreeBSD? Email us your thoughts ***

    MidnightBSD 0.6 released

    • MidnightBSD is a smaller project we've not covered a lot on the show before
    • It's an operating system that was forked from FreeBSD back in the 6.1 days, and their focus seems to be on ease-of-use
    • They also have their own, smaller version of FreeBSD ports, called "mports"
    • If you're already using it, this new version is mainly a security and bugfix release
    • It syncs up with the most recent FreeBSD security patches and gets a lot of their ports closer to the latest versions
    • You can check their site for more information about the project
    • We're trying to get the lead developer to come on for an interview, but haven't heard anything back yet ***

    OpenBSD rewrites the file utility

    • We're all probably familiar with the traditional file command - it's been around since the 1970s
    • For anyone who doesn't know, it's used to determine what type of file something actually is
    • This tool doesn't see a lot of development these days, and it's had its share of security issues as well
    • Some of those security issues remain unfixed in various BSDs even today, despite being publicly known for a while
    • It's not uncommon for people to run file on random things they download from the internet, maybe even as root, and some of the previous bugs have allowed file to overwrite other files or execute code as the user running it
    • When you think about it, file was technically designed to be used on untrusted files
    • OpenBSD developer Nicholas Marriott, who also happens to be the author of tmux, decided it was time to do a complete rewrite - this time with modern coding practices and the usual OpenBSD scrutiny
    • This new version will, by default, run as an unprivileged user with no shell, and in a systrace sandbox, strictly limiting what system calls can be made
    • With these two things combined, it should drastically reduce the damage a malicious file could potentially do
    • Ian Darwin, the original author of the utility, saw the commit and replied, in what may be a moment in BSD history to remember
    • It'll be interesting to see if the other BSDs, OS X, Linux or other UNIXes consider adopting this implementation in the future - someone's already thrown together an unofficial portable version
    • Coincidentally, the lead developer and current maintainer of file just happens to be our guest today… ***

    Interview - Christos Zoulas - christos@netbsd.org

    blacklistd and NetBSD advocacy

    News Roundup

    GSoC-accepted BSD projects

    • The Google Summer of Code people have published a list of all the projects that got accepted this year, and both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are on that list
    • FreeBSD's list includes: NE2000 device model in userspace for bhyve, updating Ficl in the bootloader, type-aware kernel virtual memory access for utilities, JIT compilation for firewalls, test cluster automation, Linux packages for pkgng, an mtree parsing and manipulation library, porting bhyve to ARM-based platforms, CD-ROM emulation in CTL, libc security extensions, gptzfsboot support for dynamically discovering BEs during startup, CubieBoard support, a bhyve version of the netmap virtual passthrough for VMs, PXE support for FreeBSD guests in bhyve and finally.. memory compression and deduplication
    • OpenBSD's list includes: asynchronous USB transfer submission from userland, ARM SD/MMC & controller driver in libsa, improving USB userland tools and ioctl, automating module porting, implementing a KMS driver to the kernel and, wait for it... porting HAMMER FS to OpenBSD
    • We'll be sure to keep you up to date on developments from both projects
    • Hopefully the other BSDs will make the cut too next year ***

    FreeBSD on the Gumstix Duovero

    • If you're not familiar with the Gumstix Duovero, it's an dual core ARM-based computer-on-module
    • They actually look more like a stick of RAM than a mini-computer
    • This article shows you how to build a FreeBSD -CURRENT image to run on them, using crochet-freebsd
    • If anyone has any interesting devices like this that they use BSD on, write up something about it and send it to us ***

    EU study recommends OpenBSD

    • A recent study by the European Parliament was published, explaining that more funding should go into critical open source projects and tools
    • This is especially important, in all countries, after the mass surveillance documents came out
    • "[...] the use of open source computer operating systems and applications reduces the risk of privacy intrusion by mass surveillance. Open source software is not error free, or less prone to errors than proprietary software, the experts write. But proprietary software does not allow constant inspection and scrutiny by a large community of experts."
    • The report goes on to mention users becoming more and more security and privacy-aware, installing additional software to help protect themselves and their traffic from being spied on
    • Alongside Qubes, a Linux distro focused on containment and isolation, OpenBSD got a special mention: "Proactive security and cryptography are two of the features highlighted in the product together with portability, standardisation and correctness. Its built-in cryptography and packet filter make OpenBSD suitable for use in the security industry, for example on firewalls, intrusion-detection systems and VPN gateways"
    • Reddit, Undeadly and Hacker News also had some discussion, particularly about corporations giving back to the BSDs that they make use of in their infrastructure - something we've discussed with Voxer and M:Tier before ***

    FreeBSD workflow with Git

    • If you're interested in contributing to FreeBSD, but aren't a big fan of SVN, they have a Github mirror too
    • This mailing list post talks about interacting between the official source repository and the Git mirror
    • This makes it easy to get pull requests merged into the official tree, and encourages more developers to get involved ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Sean writes in
    • Bryan writes in
    • Sean writes in
    • Charles writes in ***
    86: Business as Usual Apr 22, 2015
    Show notes

    Coming up this time on the show, we'll be chatting with Antoine Jacoutot about how M:Tier uses BSD in their business. After that, we'll be discussing the different release models across the BSDs, and which style we like the most. As always, answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

    iXsystems - Enterprise Servers and Storage for Open SourceDigitalOcean - Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for DevelopersTarsnap - Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

    Headlines

    Optimizing TLS for high bandwidth applications

    • Netflix has released a report on some of their recent activities, pushing lots of traffic through TLS on FreeBSD
    • TLS has traditionally had too much overhead for the levels of bandwidth they're using, so this pdf outlines some of their strategy in optimizing it
    • The sendfile() syscall (which nginx uses) isn't available when data is encrypted in userland
    • To get around this, Netflix is proposing to add TLS support to the FreeBSD kernel
    • Having encrypted movie streams would be pretty neat ***

    Crypto in unexpected places

    • OpenBSD is somewhat known for its integrated cryptography, right down to strong randomness in every place you could imagine (process IDs, TCP initial sequence numbers, etc)
    • One place you might not expect crypto to be used (or even needed) is in the "ping" utility, right? Well, think again
    • David Gwynne recently committed a change that adds MAC to the ping timestamp payload
    • By default, it'll be filled with a ChaCha stream instead of an unvarying payload, and David says "this lets us have some confidence that the timestamp hasn't been damaged or tampered with in transit"
    • Not only is this a security feature, but it should also help detect dodgy or malfunctioning network equipment going forward
    • Maybe we can look forward to a cryptographically secure "echo" command next... ***

    Broadwell in DragonFly

    • The DragonFlyBSD guys have started a new page on their wiki to discuss Broadwell hardware and its current status
    • Matt Dillon, the project lead, recently bought some hardware with this chipset, and lays out what works and what doesn't work
    • The two main show-stoppers right now are the graphics and wireless, but they have someone who's already making progress with the GPU support
    • Wireless support will likely have to wait until FreeBSD gets it, then they'll port it back over
    • None of the BSDs currently have full Broadwell support, so stay tuned for further updates ***

    DIY NAS software roundup

    • In this blog post, the author compares a few different software solutions for a network attached storage device
    • He puts FreeNAS, one of our favorites, up against a number of opponents - both BSD and Linux-based
    • NAS4Free gets an honorable mention as well, particularly for its lower hardware requirements and sleek interface
    • If you've been thinking about putting together a NAS, but aren't quite comfortable enough to set it up by yourself yet, this article should give you a good view of the current big names
    • Some competition is always good, gotta keep those guys on their toes ***

    Interview - Antoine Jacoutot - ajacoutot@openbsd.org / @ajacoutot

    OpenBSD at M:Tier, business adoption of BSD, various topics

    News Roundup

    OpenBSD on DigitalOcean

    • When DigitalOcean rolled out initial support for FreeBSD, it was a great step in the right direction - we hoped that all the other BSDs would soon follow
    • This is not yet the case, but a blog article here has details on how you can install OpenBSD (and likely the others too) on your VPS
    • Using a -current snapshot and some swapfile trickery, it's possible to image an OpenBSD ramdisk installer onto an unmounted portion of the virtual disk
    • After doing so, you just boot from their web UI-based console and can perform a standard installation
    • You will have to pay special attention to some details of the disk layout, but this article takes you through the entire process step by step ***

    Initial ARM64 support lands in FreeBSD

    • The ARM64 architecture, sometimes called ARMv8 or AArch64, is a new generation of CPUs that will mostly be in embedded devices
    • FreeBSD has just gotten support for this platform in the -CURRENT branch
    • Previously, it was only the beginnings of the kernel and enough bits to boot in QEMU - now a full build is possible
    • Work should now start happening in the main source code tree, and hopefully they'll have full support in a branch soon ***

    Scripting with least privilege

    • A new scripting language with a focus on privilege separation and running with only what's absolutely needed has been popular in the headlines lately
    • Shell scripts are used everywhere today: startup scripts, orchestration scripts for mass deployment, configuring and compiling software, etc.
    • Shill aims to answer the questions "how do we limit the authority of scripts" and "how do we determine what authority is necessary" by including a declarative security policy that's checked and enforced by the language runtime
    • If used on FreeBSD, Shill will use Capsicum for sandboxing
    • You can find some more of the technical information in their documentation pdf or watch their USENIX presentation video
    • Hacker News also had some discussion on the topic ***

    OpenBSD first impressions

    • A brand new BSD user has started documenting his experience through a series of blog posts
    • Formerly a Linux guy, he's tried out FreeBSD and OpenBSD so far, and is currently working on an OpenBSD desktop
    • The first post goes into why he chose BSD at all, why he's switching away from Linux, how the initial transition has been, what you'll need to relearn and what he's got planned going forward
    • He's only been using OpenBSD for a few days as of the time this was written - we don't usually get to hear from people this early in on their BSD journey, so it offers a unique perspective ***

    PCBSD and 4K oh my!

    • Yesterday, Kris got ahold of some 4K monitor hardware to test PC-BSD out
    • The short of it - It works great!
    • Minor tweaks being made to some of the PC-BSD defaults to better accommodate 4K out of box
    • This particular model monitor ships with DisplayPort set to 1.1 mode only, switching it to 1.2 mode enables 60Hz properly ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Darin writes in
    • Mitch writes in ***

    Discussion

    Comparison of BSD release cycles

    • FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD ***
    85: PIE in the Sky Apr 15, 2015
    Show notes

    This time on the show, we'll be talking with Pascal Stumpf about static PIE in the upcoming OpenBSD release. He'll tell us what types of attacks it prevents, and why it's such a big deal. We've also got answers to questions from you in the audience and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

    iXsystems - Enterprise Servers and Storage for Open SourceDigitalOcean - Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for DevelopersTarsnap - Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

    Headlines

    Solaris' networking future is with OpenBSD

    • A curious patch from someone with an Oracle email address was recently sent in to one of the OpenBSD mailing lists
    • It was revealed that future releases of Solaris are going to drop their IPFilter firewall entirely, in favor of a port of the current version of PF
    • For anyone unfamiliar with the history of PF, it was actually made as a replacement for IPFilter in OpenBSD, due to some licensing issues
    • What's more, Solaris was the original development platform for IPFilter, so the fact that it would be replaced in its own home is pretty interesting
    • This blog post goes through some of the backstory of the two firewalls
    • PF is in a lot of places - other BSDs, Mac OS X and iOS - but there are plenty of other OpenBSD-developed technologies end up ported to other projects too
    • "Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you're neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD's PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project's emphasis on correctness, quality and security"
    • You're welcome, Oracle ***

    BAFUG discussion videos

    • The Bay Area FreeBSD users group has been uploading some videos from their recent meetings
    • Sean Bruno gave a recap of his experiences at EuroBSDCon last year, including the devsummit and some proposed ideas from it (as well as their current status)
    • Craig Rodrigues also gave a talk about Kyua and the FreeBSD testing framework
    • Lastly, Kip Macy gave a talk titled "network stack changes, user-level FreeBSD"
    • The main two subjects there are some network stack changes, and how to get more people contributing, but there's also open discussion about a variety of FreeBSD topics
    • If you're close to the Bay Area in California, be sure to check out their group and attend a meeting sometime ***

    More than just a makefile

    • If you're not a BSD user just yet, you might be wondering how the various ports and pkgsrc systems compare to the binary way of doing things on Linux
    • This blog entry talks about the ports system in OpenBSD, but a lot of the concepts apply to all the ports systems across the BSDs
    • As it turns out, the ports system really isn't that different from a binary package manager - they are what's used to create binary packages, after all
    • The author goes through what makefiles do, customizing which options software is compiled with, patching source code to build and getting those patches back upstream
    • After that, he shows you how to get your new port tested, if you're interesting in doing some porting yourself, and getting involved with the rest of the community
    • This post is very long and there's a lot more to it, so check it out (and more discussion on Hacker News) ***

    Securing your home fences

    • Hopefully all our listeners have realized that trusting your network(s) to a consumer router is a bad idea by now
    • We hear from a lot of users who want to set up some kind of BSD-based firewall, but don't hear back from them after they've done it.. until now
    • In this post, someone goes through the process of setting up a home firewall using OPNsense on a PCEngines APU board
    • He notes that you have a lot of options software-wise, including vanilla FreeBSD, OpenBSD or even Linux, but decided to go with OPNsense because of the easy interface and configuration
    • The post covers all the hardware you'll need, getting the OS installed to a flash drive or SD card and going through the whole process
    • Finally, he goes through setting up the firewall with the graphical interface, applying updates and finishing everything up
    • If you don't have any experience using a serial console, this guide also has some good info for beginners about those (which also applies to regular FreeBSD)
    • We love super-detailed guides like this, so everyone should write more and send them to us immediately ***

    Interview - Pascal Stumpf - pascal@openbsd.org

    Static PIE in OpenBSD

    News Roundup

    LLVM's new libFuzzer

    • We've discussed fuzzing on the show a number of times, albeit mostly with the American Fuzzy Lop utility
    • It looks like LLVM is going to have their own fuzzing tool too now
    • The Clang and LLVM guys are no strangers to this type of code testing, but decided to "close the loop" and start fuzzing parts of LLVM (including Clang) using LLVM itself
    • With Clang being the default in both FreeBSD and Bitrig, and with the other BSDs considering the switch, this could make for some good bug hunting across all the projects in the future ***

    HardenedBSD upgrades secadm

    • The HardenedBSD guys have released a new version of their secadm tool, with the showcase feature being integriforce support
    • We covered both the secadm tool and integriforce in previous episodes, but the short version is that it's a way to prevent files from being altered (even as root)
    • Their integriforce feature itself has also gotten a couple improvements: shared objects are now checked too, instead of just binaries, and it uses more caching to speed up the whole process now ***

    RAID5 returns to OpenBSD

    • OpenBSD's softraid subsystem, somewhat similar to FreeBSD's GEOM, has had experimental RAID5 support for a while
    • However, it was exactly that - experimental - and required a recompile to enable
    • With some work from recent hackathons, the final piece was added to enable resuming partial array rebuilds
    • Now it's on by default, and there's a call for testing being put out, so grab a snapshot and put the code through its paces
    • The bioctl softraid command also now supports DUIDs during pseudo-device detachment, possibly paving the way for the installer to drop the "do you want to enable DUIDs?" question entirely ***

    pkgng 1.5.0 released

    • Going back to what we talked about last week, the final version of pkgng 1.5.0 is out
    • The "provides" and "requires" support is finally in a regular release
    • A new "-r" switch will allow for direct installation to a chroot or alternate root directory
    • Memory usage should be much better now, and some general code speed-ups were added
    • This version also introduces support for Mac OS X, NetBSD and EdgeBSD - it'll be interesting to see if anything comes of that
    • Many more bugs were fixed, so check the mailing list announcement for the rest (and plenty new bugs were added, according to bapt) ***

    p2k15 hackathon reports

    • There was another OpenBSD hackathon that just finished up in the UK - this time it was mainly for ports work
    • As usual, the developers sent in reports of some of the things they got done at the event
    • Landry Breuil, both an upstream Mozilla developer and an OpenBSD developer, wrote in about the work he did on the Firefox port (specifically WebRTC) and some others, as well as reviewing lots of patches that were ready to commit
    • Stefan Sperling wrote in, detailing his work with wireless chipsets, specifically when the vendor doesn't provide any hardware documentation, as well as updating some of the games in ports
    • Ken Westerback also sent in a report, but decided to be a rebel and not work on ports at all - he got a lot of GPT-related work done, and also reviewed the RAID5 support we talked about earlier ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Shaun writes in
    • Hrishi writes in
    • Randy writes in
    • Zach writes in
    • Ben writes in ***

    Mailing List Gold

    • Gstreamer hates us
    • At least he's honest
    • I find myself in a situation ***
    84: pkg remove freebsd-update Apr 08, 2015
    Show notes

    On this week's mini-episode, we'll be talking with Baptiste Daroussin about packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng. Is this the best way going forward, or are we getting dangerously close to being Linux-like? We'll find out, and also get to a couple of your emails while we're at it, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

    iXsystems - Enterprise Servers and Storage for Open SourceDigitalOcean - Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for DevelopersTarsnap - Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

    Headlines

    Xen dom0 in FreeBSD 11-CURRENT

    • FreeBSD has just gotten dom0 support for the Xen hypervisor, something NetBSD has had for a while now
    • The ports tree will now have a Xen kernel and toolstack, meaning that they can be updated much more rapidly than if they were part of base
    • It's currently limited to Intel boxes with EPT and a working IOMMU, running a recent version of the -CURRENT branch, but we'll likely see it when 11.0 comes out
    • How will this affect interest in Bhyve? ***

    A tale of two educational moments

    • Here we have a blog post from an OpenBSD developer about some experiences he had helping people get involved with the project
    • It's split into two stories: one that could've gone better, and one that went really well
    • For the first one, he found that someone was trying to modify a package from their ports tree to have fewer dependencies
    • Experience really showed its worth, and he was able to write a quick patch to do exactly what the other person had been working on for a few hours - but wasn't so encouraging about getting it committed
    • In the second story, he discussed updating a different port with a user of a forum, and ended up improving the new user's workflow considerably with just a few tips
    • The lesson to take away from this is that we can all help out to encourage and assist new users - everyone was a newbie once ***

    What's coming in NetBSD 7

    • We first mentioned NetBSD 7.0 on the show in July of 2014, but it still hasn't been released and there hasn't been much public info about it
    • This blog post outlines some of the bigger features that we can expect to see when it actually does come out
    • Their total platform count is now over 70, so you'd be hard-pressed to find something that it doesn't run on
    • There have been a lot of improvements in the graphics area, particularly with DRM/KMS, including Intel Haswell and Nouveau (for nVidia cards)
    • Many ARM boards now have full SMP support
    • Clang has also finally made its way into the base system, something we're glad to see, and it should be able to build the base OS on i386, AMD64 and ARM - other architectures are still a WIP
    • In the crypto department: their PNRG has switched from the broken RC4 to the more modern ChaCha20, OpenSSL has been updated in base and LibreSSL is in pkgsrc
    • NetBSD's in-house firewall, npf, has gotten major improvements since its initial debut in NetBSD 6.0
    • Looking to the future, NetBSD hopes to integrate a stable ZFS implementation later on ***

    OpenZFS office hours

    • We mentioned a couple weeks back that the OpenZFS office hours series was starting back up
    • They've just uploaded the recording of their most recent freeform discussion, with Justin Gibbs being the main presenter
    • In it, they cover how Justin got into ZFS, running in virtualized environments, getting patches into the different projects, getting more people involved, reviewing code, spinning disks vs SSDs, defragging, speeding up resilvering, zfsd and much more ***

    Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

    Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng

    Discussion

    Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng (follow-up)

    Feedback/Questions

    • Jeff writes in
    • Anonymous writes in
    • Alex writes in
    • Joris writes in ***

    Mailing List Gold

    • ok feedback@ ***
    83: woN DSB Apr 01, 2015
    Show notes

    Coming up this week on the show, we'll be talking to Kamila Součková, a Google intern. She's been working on the FreeBSD pager daemon, and also tells us about her initial experiences trying out BSD and going to a conference. As always, all the week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

    iXsystems - Enterprise Servers and Storage for Open SourceDigitalOcean - Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for DevelopersTarsnap - Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

    Headlines

    Major changes coming in PCBSD 11

    • The PCBSD team has announced that version 11.0 will have some more pretty big changes (as they've been known to do lately with NTP daemons and firewalls)
    • Switching from PF to IPFW provided some benefits for VIMAGE, but the syntax was just too complicated for regular everyday users
    • To solve this, they've ported over Linux's iptables, giving users a much more straightforward configuration
    • While ZFS has served them well as the default filesystem for a while, Kris decided that Btrfs would be a better choice going forward
    • Since the FreeBSD kernel doesn't support it natively, all filesystem calls will be through FUSE from now on - performance is Good Enough
    • People often complain about PCBSD's huge ISO download, so, to save space, the default email client will be switched to mutt, and KDE will be replaced with DWM as the default window manager
    • To reconfigure it, or make any appearance changes, users just need to edit a simple C header file and recompile - easy peasy
    • As we've mentioned on the show, PCBSD has been promoting safe backup solutions for a long time with its "life preserver" utility, making it simple to manage multiple snapshots too
    • To test if people have been listening to this advice, Kris recently activated the backdoor he put in life preserver that deletes all the users' files - hope you had that stuff backed up ***

    NetBSD and FreeBSD join forces

    • The BSD community has been running into one of the same problems Linux has lately: we just have too many different BSDs to choose from
    • What's more, none of them have any specific areas they focus on or anything like that (they're all basically the same)
    • That situation is about to improve somewhat, as FreeBSD and NetBSD have just merged codebases... say hello to FretBSD
    • Within a week, all mailing lists and webservers for the legacy NetBSD and FreeBSD projects will be terminated - the mailing list for the new combined project will be hosted from the United Nations datacenter on a Microsoft Exchange server
    • As UN monitors will be moderating the mailing lists to prevent disagreements and divisive arguments before they begin, this system is expected to be adequate for the load
    • With FretBSD, your toaster can now run ZFS, so you'll never need to worry about the bread becoming silently corrupted again ***

    Puffy in the cloud

    • If you've ever wanted to set up a backup server, especially for family members or someone who's not as technology-savvy, you've probably realized there are a lot of options
    • This post explores the option of setting up your own Dropbox-like service with Owncloud and PostgreSQL, running atop the new OpenBSD http daemon
    • Doing it this way with your own setup, you can control all the security aspects - disk encryption, firewall rules, who can access what and from where, etc
    • He also mentions our pf tutorial being helpful in blocking script kiddies from hammering the box
    • Be sure to encourage your less-technical friends to always back up their important data ***

    NetBSD at AsiaBSDCon

    • Some NetBSD developers have put together a report of what they did at the most recent event in Tokyo
    • It includes a wrap-up of the event, as well as a list of presentations that NetBSD developers gave
    • Have you ever wanted even more pictures of NetBSD running on lots of devices? There's a never-ending supply, apparently
    • At the BSD research booth of AsiaBSDCon, there were a large number of machines on display, and someone has finally uploaded pictures of all of them
    • There's also a video of an OMRON LUNA-II running the luna68k port ***

    Interview - Kamila Součková - kamila@ksp.sk / @anotherkamila

    BSD conferences, Google Summer of Code, various topics

    News Roundup

    FreeBSD foundation March update

    • The FreeBSD foundation has published their March update for fundraising and sponsored projects
    • In the document, you'll find information about upcoming ARMv8 enhancements, some event recaps and a Google Summer of Code status update
    • They also mention our interview with the foundation president - be sure to check it out if you haven't ***

    Inside OpenBSD's new httpd

    • BSD news continues to dominate mainstream tech news sites… well not really, but they talk about it once in a while
    • The SD Times is featuring an article about OpenBSD's in-house HTTP server, after seeing Reyk's AsiaBSDCon presentation about it (which he's giving at BSDCan this year, too)
    • In this article, they talk about the rapid transition of webservers in the base system - apache being replaced with nginx, only to be replaced with httpd shortly thereafter
    • Since the new daemon has had almost a full release cycle to grow, new features and fixes have been pouring in
    • The post also highlights some of the security features: everything runs in a chroot with privsep by default, and it also leverages strong TLS 1.2 defaults (including Perfect Forward Secrecy) ***

    Using poudriere without OpenSSL

    • Last week we talked about using LibreSSL in FreeBSD for all your ports
    • One of the problems that was mentioned is that some ports are configured improperly, and end up linking against the OpenSSL in the base system even when you tell them not to
    • This blog post shows how to completely strip OpenSSL out of the poudriere build jails, something that's a lot more difficult than you'd think
    • If you're a port maintainer, pay close attention to this post, and get your ports fixed to adhere to the make.conf options properly ***

    HAMMER and GPT in OpenBSD

    • Someone, presumably a Google Summer of Code student, wrote in to the lists about his HAMMER FS porting proposal
    • He outlined the entire process and estimated timetable, including what would be supported and which aspects were beyond the scope of his work (like the clustering stuff)
    • There's no word yet on if it will be accepted, but it's an interesting idea to explore, especially when you consider that HAMMER really only has one developer
    • In more disk-related news, Ken Westerback has been committing quite a lot of GPT-related fixes recently
    • Full GPT support will most likely be finished before 5.8, but anything involving HAMMER FS is still anyone's guess ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Morgan writes in
    • Dustin writes in
    • Stan writes in
    • Mica writes in ***

    Mailing List Gold

    • Developers in freefall
    • Xorg thieves pt. 1
    • Xorg thieves pt. 2 ***
    82: SSL in the Wild Mar 25, 2015
    Show notes

    Coming up this week, we'll be chatting with Bernard Spil about wider adoption of LibreSSL in other communities. He's been doing a lot of work with FreeBSD ports specifically, but also working with upstream projects. As usual, all this weeks news and answers to your questions, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

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    Headlines

    EuroBSDCon 2015 call for papers

    • The call for papers has been announced for the next EuroBSDCon, which is set to be held in Sweden this year
    • According to their site, the call for presentation proposals period will start on Monday the 23rd of March until Friday the 17th of April
    • If giving a full talk isn't your thing, there's also a call for tutorials - if you're comfortable teaching other people about something BSD-related, this could be a great thing too
    • You're not limited to one proposal - several speakers gave multiple in 2014 - so don't hesitate if you've got more than one thing you'd like to talk about
    • We'd like to see a more balanced conference schedule than BSDCan's having this year, but that requires effort on both sides - if you're doing anything cool with any BSD, we'd encourage you submit a proposal (or two)
    • Check the announcement for all the specific details and requirements
    • If your talk gets accepted, the conference even pays for your travel expenses ***

    Making security sausage

    • Ted Unangst has a new blog post up, detailing his experiences with some recent security patches both in and out of OpenBSD
    • "Unfortunately, I wrote the tool used for signing patches which somehow turned into a responsibility for also creating the inputs to be signed. That was not the plan!"
    • The post first takes us through a few OpenBSD errata patches, explaining how some can get fixed very quickly, but others are more complicated and need a bit more review
    • It also covers security in upstream codebases, and how upstream projects sometimes treat security issues as any other bug
    • Following that, it leads to the topic of FreeType - and a much more complicated problem with backporting patches between versions
    • The recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities were also mentioned, with an interesting story to go along with them
    • Just 45 minutes before the agreed-upon announcement, OpenBSD devs found a problem with the patch OpenSSL planned to release - it had to be redone at the last minute
    • It was because of this that FreeBSD actually had to release a security update to their security update
    • He concludes with "My number one wish would be that every project provide small patches for security issues. Dropping enormous feature releases along with a note 'oh, and some security too' creates downstream mayhem." ***

    Running FreeBSD on the server, a sysadmin speaks

    • More BSD content is appearing on mainstream technology sites, and, more importantly, BSD Now is being mentioned
    • ITWire recently did an interview with Allan about running FreeBSD on servers (possibly to go with their earlier interview with Kris about desktop usage)
    • They discuss some of the advantages BSD brings to the table for sysadmins that might be used to Linux or some other UNIX flavor
    • It also covers specific features like jails, ZFS, long-term support, automating tasks and even… what to name your computers
    • If you've been considering switching your servers over from Linux to FreeBSD, but maybe wanted to hear some first-hand experience, this is the article for you ***

    NetBSD ported to Hardkernel ODROID-C1

    • In their never-ending quest to run on every new board that comes out, NetBSD has been ported to the Hardkernel ODROID-C1
    • This one features a quad-core ARMv7 CPU at 1.5GHz, has a gig of ram and gigabit ethernet... all for just $35
    • There's a special kernel config file for this board's hardware, available in both -current and the upcoming 7.0
    • More info can be found on their wiki page
    • After this was written, basic framebuffer console support was also committed, allowing a developer to run XFCE on the device ***

    Interview - Bernard Spil - brnrd@freebsd.org / @sp1l

    LibreSSL adoption in FreeBSD ports and the wider software ecosystem

    News Roundup

    Monitoring pf logs with Gource

    • If you're using pf on any of the BSDs, maybe you've gotten bored of grepping logs and want to do something more fancy
    • This article will show you how to get set up with Gource for a cinematic-like experience
    • If you've never heard of Gource, it's "an OpenGL-based 3D visualization tool intended for visualizing activity on source control repositories"
    • When you put all the tools together, you can end up with some pretty eye-catching animations of your firewall traffic
    • One of our listeners wrote in to say that he set this up and, almost immediately, noticed his girlfriend's phone had been compromised - graphical representations of traffic could be useful for detecting suspicious network activity ***

    pkgng 1.5.0 alpha1 released

    • The development version of pkgng was updated to 1.4.99.14, or 1.5.0 alpha1
    • This update introduces support for provides/requires, something that we've been wanting for a long time
    • It will also now print which package is the reason for direct dependency change
    • Another interesting addition is the "pkg -r" switch, allowing cross installation of packages
    • Remember this isn't the stable version, so maybe don't upgrade to it just yet on any production systems
    • DragonFly will also likely pick up this update once it's marked stable ***

    Welcome to OpenBSD

    • We mentioned last week that our listener Brian was giving a talk in the Troy, New York area
    • The slides from that talk are now online, and they've been generating quite a bit of discussion online
    • It's simply titled "Welcome to OpenBSD" and gives the reader an introduction to the OS (and how easy it is to get involved with contributing)
    • Topics include a quick history of the project, who the developers are and what they do, some proactive security techniques and finally how to get involved
    • As you may know, NetBSD has almost 60 supported platforms and their slogan is "of course it runs NetBSD" - Brian says, with 17 platforms over 13 CPU architectures, "it probably runs OpenBSD"
    • No matter which BSD you might be interested in, these slides are a great read, especially for any beginners looking to get their feet wet
    • Try to guess which font he used... ***

    BSDTalk episode 252

    • And somehow Brian has snuck himself into another news item this week
    • He makes an appearance in the latest episode of BSD Talk, where he chats with Will about running a BSD-based shell provider
    • If that sounds familiar, it's probably because we did the same thing, albeit with a different member of their team
    • In this interview, they discuss what a shell provider does, hardware requirements and how to weed out the spammers in favor of real people
    • They also talk a bit about the community aspect of a shared server, as opposed to just running a virtual machine by yourself ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Christian writes in
    • Stefan writes in
    • Possnfiffer writes in
    • Ruudsch writes in
    • Shane writes in ***

    Mailing List Gold

    • Accidental support
    • Larry's tears
    • The boy who sailed with BSD ***
    81: Puffy in a Box Mar 18, 2015
    Show notes

    We're back from AsiaBSDCon! This week on the show, we'll be talking to Lawrence Teo about how Calyptix uses OpenBSD in their line of commercial routers. They're getting BSD in the hands of Windows admins who don't even realize it. We also have all this week's news and answer to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

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    Headlines

    Using OpenBGPD to distribute pf table updates

    • For those not familiar, OpenBGPD is a daemon for the Border Gateway Protocol - a way for routers on the internet to discover and exchange routes to different addresses
    • This post, inspired by a talk about using BGP to distribute spam lists, details how to use the protocol to distribute some other useful lists and information
    • It begins with "One of the challenges faced when managing our OpenBSD firewalls is the distribution of IPs to pf tables without manually modifying /etc/pf.conf on each of the firewalls every time. This task becomes quite tedious, specifically when you want to distribute different types of changes to different systems (eg administrative IPs to a firewall and spammer IPs to a mail server), or if you need to distribute real time blacklists to a large number of systems."
    • If you manage a lot of BSD boxes, this might be an interesting alternative to some of the other ways to distribute configuration files
    • OpenBGPD is part of the OpenBSD base system, but there's also an unofficial port to FreeBSD and a "work in progress" pkgsrc version ***

    Mounting removable media with autofs

    • The FreeBSD foundation has a new article in the "FreeBSD from the trenches" series, this time about the sponsored autofs tool
    • It's written by one of the autofs developers, and he details his work on creating and using the utility
    • "The purpose of autofs(5) is to mount filesystems on access, in a way that's transparent to the application. In other words, filesystems get mounted when they are first accessed, and then unmounted after some time passes."
    • He talks about all the components that need to work together for smooth operation, how to configure it and how to enable it by default for removable drives
    • It ends with a real-world example of something we're all probably familiar with: plugging in USB drives and watching the magic happen
    • There's also some more advanced bonus material on GEOM classes and all the more technical details ***

    The Tor Browser on BSD

    • The Tor Project has provided a "browser bundle" for a long time, which is more or less a repackaged Firefox with many security and privacy-related settings preconfigured and some patches applied to the source
    • Just tunneling your browser through a transparent Tor proxy is not safe enough - many things can lead to passive fingerprinting or, even worse, anonymity being completely lost
    • It has, however, only been released for Windows, OS X and Linux - no BSD version
    • "[...] we are pushing back against an emerging monoculture, and this is always a healthy thing. Monocultures are dangerous for many reasons, most importantly to themselves."
    • Some work has begun to get a working port on BSD going, and this document tells about the process and how it all got started
    • If you've got porting skills, or are interested in online privacy, any help would be appreciated of course (see the post for details on getting involved) ***

    OpenSSH 6.8 released

    • Continuing their "tick tock" pattern of releases alternating between new features and bugfixes, the OpenSSH team has released 6.8 - it's a major upgrade, focused on new features (we like those better of course)
    • Most of the codebase has gone through refactoring, making it easier for regression tests and improving the general readability
    • This release adds support for SHA256-hashed, base64-encoded host key fingerprints, as well as making that the default - a big step up from the previously hex-encoded MD5 fingerprints
    • Experimental host key rotation support also makes it debut, allowing for easy in-place upgrading of old keys to newer (or refreshed) keys
    • You can now require multiple, different public keys to be verified for a user to authenticate (useful if you're extra paranoid or don't have 100% confidence in any single key type)
    • The native version will be in OpenBSD 5.7, and the portable version should hit a ports tree near you soon
    • Speaking of the portable version, it now has a configure option to build without OpenSSL or LibreSSL, but doing so limits you to Ed25519 key types and ChaCha20 and AES-CTR ciphers ***

    NetBSD at AsiaBSDCon

    • The NetBSD guys already have a wrap-up of the recent event, complete with all the pictures and weird devices you'd expect
    • It covers their BoF session, the six NetBSD-related presentations and finally their "work in progress" session
    • There was a grand total of 34 different NetBSD gadgets on display at the event ***

    Interview - Lawrence Teo - lteo@openbsd.org / @lteo

    OpenBSD at Calyptix

    News Roundup

    HardenedBSD introduces Integriforce

    • A little bit of background on this one first: NetBSD has something called veriexec, used for checking file integrity at the kernel level
    • By doing it at the kernel level, similar to securelevels, it offers some level of protection even when the root account is compromised
    • HardenedBSD has introduced a similar mechanism into their "secadm" utility
    • You can list binaries in the config file that you want to be protected from changes, then specify whether those can't be run at all, or if they just print a warning
    • They're looking for some more extensive testing of this new feature ***

    More s2k15 hackathon reports

    • A couple more Australian hackathon reports have poured in since the last time
    • The first comes from Jonathan Gray, who's done a lot of graphics-related work in OpenBSD recently
    • He worked on getting some newer "Southern Islands" and "Graphics Core Next" AMD GPUs working, as well as some OpenGL and DRM-related things
    • Also on his todo list was to continue hitting various parts of the tree with American Fuzzy Lop, which ended up fixing a few crashes in mandoc
    • Ted Unangst also sent in a report to detail what he hacked on at the event
    • With a strong focus on improving SMP scalability, he tackled the virtual memory layer
    • His goal was to speed up some syscalls that are used heavily during code compilation, much of which will probably end up in 5.8
    • All the trip reports are much more detailed than our short summaries, so give them a read if you're interested in all the technicalities ***

    DragonFly 4.0.4 and IPFW3

    • DragonFly BSD has put out a small point release to the 4.x branch, 4.0.4
    • It includes a minor list of fixes, some of which include a HAMMER FS history fix, removing the no-longer-needed "new xorg" and "with kms" variables and a few LAGG fixes
    • There was also a bug in the installer that prevented the rescue image from being installed correctly, which also gets fixed in this version
    • Shortly after it was released, their new IPFW2 firewall was added to the tree and subsequently renamed to IPFW3 (since it's technically the third revision) ***

    NetBSD gets Raspberry Pi 2 support

    • NetBSD has announced initial support for the second revision of the ever-popular Raspberry Pi board
    • There are -current snapshots available for download, and multiprocessor support is also on the way
    • The NetBSD wiki page about the Raspberry Pi also has some more information and an installation guide
    • The usual Hacker News discussion on the subject
    • If anyone has one of these little boards, let us know - maybe write up a blog post about your experience with BSD on it ***

    OpenIKED as a VPN gateway

    • In our first discussion segment, we talked about a few different ways to tunnel your traffic
    • While we've done full tutorials on things like SSH tunnels, OpenVPN and Tor, we haven't talked a whole lot about OpenBSD's IPSEC suite
    • This article should help fill that gap - it walks you through the complete IKED setup
    • From creating the public key infrastructure to configuring the firewall to configuring both the VPN server and client, this guide's got it all ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Gary writes in
    • Robert writes in
    • Joris writes in
    • Mike writes in
    • Anders writes in ***

    Mailing List Gold

    • Can you hear me now
    • He must be GNU here
    • I've seen some... ***
    80: The PC-BSD Tour II Mar 11, 2015
    Show notes

    We're away at AsiaBSDCon this week, but we've still got a packed episode for you. First up is a sequel to the "PC-BSD tour" segment from a while back, highlighting how ZFS boot environments work. After that, Justin Gibbs joins us to talk about the FreeBSD foundation's 15th anniversary. We'll return next week with a normal episode of BSD Now - which is of course, the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

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    Special segment

    Demystifying Boot Environments in PC-BSD

    Interview - Justin Gibbs - gibbs@freebsd.org / @freebsdfndation

    The FreeBSD foundation's 15th anniversary

    Discussion

    The story of PC-BSD

    79: Just Add QEMU Mar 04, 2015
    Show notes

    Coming up this time on the show, we'll be talking to Sean Bruno. He's been using poudriere and QEMU to cross compile binary packages, and has some interesting stories to tell about it. We've also got answers to viewer-submitted questions and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

    This episode was brought to you by

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    Headlines

    AsiaBSDCon 2015 schedule

    • Almost immediately after we finished recording an episode last week, the 2015 AsiaBSDCon schedule went up
    • This year's conference will be between 12-15 March at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan
    • The first and second days are for tutorials, as well as the developer summit and vendor summit
    • Days four and five are the main event with the presentations, which Kris and Allan both made the cut for once again
    • Not counting the ones that have yet to be revealed (as of the day we're recording this), there will be thirty-six different talks in all - four BSD-neutral, four NetBSD, six OpenBSD and twenty-two FreeBSD
    • Summaries of all the presentations are on the timetable page if you scroll down a bit ***

    FreeBSD foundation updates and more

    • The FreeBSD foundation has posted a number of things this week, the first of which is their February 2015 status update
    • It provides some updates on the funded projects, including PCI express hotplugging and FreeBSD on the POWER8 platform
    • There's a FOSDEM recap and another update of their fundraising goal for 2015
    • They also have two new blog posts: a trip report from SCALE13x and a featured "FreeBSD in the trenches" article about how a small typo caused a lot of ZFS chaos in the cluster
    • "Then panic ensued. The machine didn't panic -- I did." ***

    OpenBSD improves browser security

    • No matter what OS you run on your desktop, the most likely entry point for an exploit these days is almost certainly the web browser
    • Ted Unangst writes in to the OpenBSD misc list to introduce a new project he's working on, simply titled "improving browser security"
    • He gives some background on the WX memory protection in the base system, but also mentions that some applications in ports don't adhere to it
    • For it to be enforced globally instead of just recommended, at least one browser (or specifically, one JIT engine) needs to be fixed to use it
    • "A system that is 'all WX except where it's not' is the same as a system that's not WX. We've worked hard to provide a secure foundation for programs; we'd like to see them take advantage of it."
    • The work is being supported by the OpenBSD foundation, and we'll keep you updated on this undertaking as more news about it is released
    • There's also some discussion on Hacker News and Undeadly about it ***

    NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Tokyo

    • The Japanese NetBSD users group has once again invaded a conference, this time in Tokyo
    • There's even a spreadsheet of all the different platforms they were showing off at the booth (mostly ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Landisk this time around)
    • If you just can't get enough strange devices running BSD, check the mailing list post for lots of pictures
    • Their next target is, as you might guess, AsiaBSDCon 2015 - maybe we'll run into them ***

    Interview - Sean Bruno - sbruno@freebsd.org / @franknbeans

    Cross-compiling packages with poudriere and QEMU

    News Roundup

    The Crypto Bone

    • The Crypto Bone is a new device that's aimed at making encryption and secure communications easier and more accessible
    • Under the hood, it's actually just a Beaglebone board, running stock OpenBSD with a few extra packages
    • It includes a web interface for configuring keys and secure tunnels
    • The source code is freely available for anyone interested in hacking on it (or auditing the crypto), and there's a technical overview of how everything works on their site
    • If you don't want to teach your mom how to use PGP, buy her one of these(?) ***

    BSD in the 2015 Google Summer of Code

    • For those who don't know, GSoC is a way for students to get paid to work on a coding project for an open source organization
    • Good news: both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted for the 2015 event
    • FreeBSD has a wiki page of ideas for people to work on
    • OpenBSD also has an ideas page where you can see some of the initial things that might be interesting
    • If you're a student looking to get involved with BSD development, this might be a great opportunity to even get paid to do it
    • Who knows, you may even end up on the show if you work on a cool project
    • GSoC will be accepting idea proposals starting March 16th, so you have some time to think about what you'd like to hack on ***

    pfSense 2.3 roadmap

    • The pfSense team has posted a new blog entry, detailing some of their plans for future versions
    • PPTP will finally be deprecated, PHP will be updated to 5.6 and other packages will also get updated to newer versions
    • PBIs are scheduled to be replaced with native pkgng packages
    • Version 3.0, something coming much later, will be a major rewrite that gets rid of PHP entirely
    • Their ultimate goal is for pfSense to be a package you can install atop of a regular FreeBSD install, rather than a repackaged distribution ***

    PCBSD 10.1.2 security features

    • PCBSD 10.1.2 will include a number of cool security features, some of which are detailed in a new blog post
    • A new "personacrypt" utility is introduced, which allows for easy encryption and management of external drives for your home directory
    • Going along with this, it also has a "stealth mode" that allows for one-time temporary home directories (but it doesn't self-destruct, don't worry)
    • The LibreSSL integration also continues, and now packages will be built with it by default
    • If you're using the Life Preserver utility for backups, it will encrypt the remote copy of your files in the next update
    • They've also been working on introducing some new options to enable tunneling your traffic through Tor
    • There will now be a fully-transparent proxy option that utilizes the switch to IPFW we mentioned last week
    • A small disclaimer: remember that many things can expose your true IP when using Tor, so use this option at your own risk if you require full anonymity
    • Look forward to Kris wearing a Tor shirt in future episodes ***

    Feedback/Questions

    • Antonio writes in
    • Chris writes in
    • Van writes in
    • Stu writes in ***

    Mailing List Gold

    • H
    • Pay up, mister Free
    • Heritage protected
    • Blind leading the blind
    • What are the chances ***
    78: From the Foundation (Part 2) Feb 25, 2015
    Show notes

    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.

    This episode was brought to you by

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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

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    Mailing List Gold

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