April 20, 2016

138: Rushing into BSD

1 hour 36 minutes

This week on the show, we will be talking to Benedict Reushling about his role with the FreeBSD foundation and the journey that took him

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

HardenedBSD introduces full PIE support

PIE base for amd64 and i386

Only nine applications are not compiled as PIEs

Tested PIE base on several amd64 systems, both virtualized and bare metal

Hoped to be to enabled it for ARM64 before or during BSDCan.

Shawn will be bringing ten Raspberry Pi 3 devices (which are ARM64) with to BSDCan, eight of which will be given out to lucky individuals. “We want the BSD community to hack on them and get ARM64/Aarch64 fully functional on them.”

***

Lessons learned from 30 years of MINIX

Eat your own dog food.

By not relying on idiosyncratic features of the hardware, one makes porting to new platforms much easier.

The Internet is like an elephant; it never forgets.

When standards exist (such as ANSI Standard C) stick to them.

Even after you have adopted a strategy, you should nevertheless reexamine it from time to time.

Keep focused on your real goal, Einstein was right: Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler.

***

pfSense 2.3 released

Rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap

TLS v1.0 disabled for the GUI

Moved to a FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE base

PHP Upgraded to 5.6

The "Full Backup" feature has been deprecated

Closed 760 total tickets of which 137 are fixed bugs

Known Regressions

OpenVPN topology change

IP aliases with CARP IP parent lose their parent interface association post-upgrade

IPsec IPComp does not work.

IGMP Proxy does not work with VLAN interfaces.

Many other updates and changes

***

OPNsense 16.1.10 released

openvpn: revive windows installer binaries

system: improved config history and backup pages layout

system: increased backup count default from 30 to 60

system: /var /tmp MFS awareness for crash dumps added

trust: add “IP security IKE intermediate” to server key usage

firmware: moved reboot, halt and defaults pages to new home

languages: updates to Russian, French, German and Japanese

Many other updates and changes

***

Interview - Benedict Reuschling - [email protected]

FreeBSD Foundation in Europe

***

News Roundup

Write opinionated workarounds

Colin Percival has written a great blog post this past week, specifically talking about his policy of writing “opinionated workarounds”.

The idea came about due to his working on multi-platform software, and the frustrations of dealing with POSIX violations

The crux of the post is how he deals with these workarounds. Specifically by only applying them to the particular system in which it was required. And doing so loudly.

This has some important benefits. First, it doesn’t potentially expose other systems to bugs / security flaws when a workaround doesn’t

“work” on a system for which it wasn’t designed. Secondly it’s important to complain. Loudly. This lets the user know that they are running on a system that doesn’t adhere to POSIX compliance, and maybe even get the attention of a developer who could remedy the situation.

***

Privilege escalation in calendar(1)

File this one under “Ouch that hurts” a new security vuln has been posted, this time against NetBSD’s ‘calendar’ command.

Specifically it looks like some of the daily scripts uses the ‘-a’ flag, which requires super-user privs in order to process all users calendar files and mail the results.

However the bug occurred because the calendar command didn’t drop priv properly before executing external commands (whoops!)

To workaround you can set run_calendar=NO in the daily.conf file, or apply the fixed binary from upstream.

***

PGCon 2016

PGCon 2016 is now only 4 weeks away

The conference will be held at the University of Ottawa (same venue as BSDCan) from May 17th to 20th

Tutorials: 17-18 May 2016 (Tue & Wed)

Talks: 19-20 May 2016 (Thu-Fri)

Wednesday is a developer unconference.

Saturday is a user unconference.

“PGCon is an annual conference for users and developers of PostgreSQL, a leading relational database, which just happens to be open source. PGCon is the place to meet, discuss, build relationships, learn valuable insights, and generally chat about the work you are doing with PostgreSQL. If you want to learn why so many people are moving to PostgreSQL, PGCon will be the place to find out why. Whether you are a casual user or you've been working with PostgreSQL for years, PGCon will have something for you.”

New to PGSQL? Just a user? Long time developers? This conference has something for you. A great lineup of talks, plus unconference days focused on both users and developers

***

CfP EuroBSDCon 2016

The call for papers has been issued for EuroBSDCon 2016 in Belgrade, Serbia

The conference will be held from the 22nd to 25th of September, 2016

The deadline for talk submissions is: Sunday the 8th of May, 2016

Submit your talk or tutorial proposal before it is too late

***

Beastie Bits

“FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” has officially been released

Support of OpenBSD pledge(2) in programming Languages

pkgsrcCon 2016 -Call for Presentations

Christos Zoulas talks about blacklistd

Penguicon 2016 Lucas Track Schedule

Feedback/Questions

Peter - NVME

Jeremy - Wireless Gear

Ted - Rpi2 Packages - Cross Building Wiki

Geoff - Jail Failover

Zach - Graphical Bhyve?

***

...more

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By JT Pennington

4.9

8989 ratings

April 20, 2016

138: Rushing into BSD

1 hour 36 minutes

This week on the show, we will be talking to Benedict Reushling about his role with the FreeBSD foundation and the journey that took him

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

HardenedBSD introduces full PIE support

PIE base for amd64 and i386

Only nine applications are not compiled as PIEs

Tested PIE base on several amd64 systems, both virtualized and bare metal

Hoped to be to enabled it for ARM64 before or during BSDCan.

***

Lessons learned from 30 years of MINIX

Eat your own dog food.

By not relying on idiosyncratic features of the hardware, one makes porting to new platforms much easier.

The Internet is like an elephant; it never forgets.

When standards exist (such as ANSI Standard C) stick to them.

Even after you have adopted a strategy, you should nevertheless reexamine it from time to time.

Keep focused on your real goal, Einstein was right: Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler.

***

pfSense 2.3 released

Rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap

TLS v1.0 disabled for the GUI

Moved to a FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE base

PHP Upgraded to 5.6

The "Full Backup" feature has been deprecated

Closed 760 total tickets of which 137 are fixed bugs

Known Regressions

OpenVPN topology change

IP aliases with CARP IP parent lose their parent interface association post-upgrade

IPsec IPComp does not work.

IGMP Proxy does not work with VLAN interfaces.

Many other updates and changes

***

OPNsense 16.1.10 released

openvpn: revive windows installer binaries

system: improved config history and backup pages layout

system: increased backup count default from 30 to 60

system: /var /tmp MFS awareness for crash dumps added

trust: add “IP security IKE intermediate” to server key usage

firmware: moved reboot, halt and defaults pages to new home

languages: updates to Russian, French, German and Japanese

Many other updates and changes

***

Interview - Benedict Reuschling - [email protected]

FreeBSD Foundation in Europe

***

News Roundup

Write opinionated workarounds

Colin Percival has written a great blog post this past week, specifically talking about his policy of writing “opinionated workarounds”.

The idea came about due to his working on multi-platform software, and the frustrations of dealing with POSIX violations

The crux of the post is how he deals with these workarounds. Specifically by only applying them to the particular system in which it was required. And doing so loudly.

This has some important benefits. First, it doesn’t potentially expose other systems to bugs / security flaws when a workaround doesn’t

***

Privilege escalation in calendar(1)

File this one under “Ouch that hurts” a new security vuln has been posted, this time against NetBSD’s ‘calendar’ command.

Specifically it looks like some of the daily scripts uses the ‘-a’ flag, which requires super-user privs in order to process all users calendar files and mail the results.

However the bug occurred because the calendar command didn’t drop priv properly before executing external commands (whoops!)

To workaround you can set run_calendar=NO in the daily.conf file, or apply the fixed binary from upstream.

***

PGCon 2016

PGCon 2016 is now only 4 weeks away

The conference will be held at the University of Ottawa (same venue as BSDCan) from May 17th to 20th

Tutorials: 17-18 May 2016 (Tue & Wed)

Talks: 19-20 May 2016 (Thu-Fri)

Wednesday is a developer unconference.

Saturday is a user unconference.

New to PGSQL? Just a user? Long time developers? This conference has something for you. A great lineup of talks, plus unconference days focused on both users and developers

***

CfP EuroBSDCon 2016

The call for papers has been issued for EuroBSDCon 2016 in Belgrade, Serbia

The conference will be held from the 22nd to 25th of September, 2016

The deadline for talk submissions is: Sunday the 8th of May, 2016

Submit your talk or tutorial proposal before it is too late

***

Beastie Bits

“FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” has officially been released

Support of OpenBSD pledge(2) in programming Languages

pkgsrcCon 2016 -Call for Presentations

Christos Zoulas talks about blacklistd