Coming up this week, we'll be showing you how to chain SSH connections, as well as some cool tricks you can do with it. Going along with that theme, we also have an interview with Bryce Chidester about running a BSD-based shell provider. News, emails and cowsay turkeys, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
PIE and ASLR in FreeBSD update
A status update for Shawn Webb's ASLR and PIE work for FreeBSDOne major part of the code, position-independent executable support, has finally been merged into the -CURRENT tree"FreeBSD has supported loading PIEs for a while now, but the applications in base weren't compiled as PIEs. Given that ASLR is useless without PIE, getting base compiled with PIE support is a mandatory first step in proper ASLR support"If you're running -CURRENT, just add "WITH_PIE=1" to your /etc/src.conf and /etc/make.confThe next step is working on the ASLR coding style and getting more developers to look through itShawn will also be at EuroBSDCon (in September) giving an updated version of his BSDCan talk about ASLR***
Misc. pfSense news
Couple of pfSense news items this week, including some hardware newsSomeone's gotta test the pfSense hardware devices before they're sold, which involves powering them all on at least onceTo make that process faster, they're building a controllable power board (and include some cool pics)There will be more info on that device a bit later onOn Friday, June 27th, there will be another video session (for paying customers only...) about virtualized firewallspfSense University, a new paid training course, was also announcedA single two-day class costs $2000, ouch***
ZFS stripe width
A new blog post from Matt Ahrens about ZFS stripe width"The popularity of OpenZFS has spawned a great community of users, sysadmins, architects and developers, contributing a wealth of advice, tips and tricks, and rules of thumb on how to configure ZFS. In general, this is a great aspect of the ZFS community, but I’d like to take the opportunity to address one piece of misinformed advice"Matt goes through different situations where you would set up your zpool differently, each with their own advantages and disadvantagesHe covers best performance on random IOPS, best reliability, and best space efficiency use casesIt includes a lot of detail on each one, including graphs, and addresses some misconceptions about different RAID-Z levels' overhead factor***
FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 released
The third BETA in the 9.3 release cycle is out, we're slowly getting closer to the releaseThis is expected to be the final BETA, next will come the RCsThere have mostly just been small bug fixes since BETA2, but OpenSSL was also updated and the arc4random code was updated to match what's in -CURRENT (but still isn't using ChaCha20)The FreeBSD foundation has a blog post about it tooThere's a list of changes between 9.2 and 9.3 as well, but we'll be sure to cover it when the -RELEASE hits***
Interview - Bryce Chidester -
[email protected] / @brycied00d
Running a BSD shell provider
Tutorial
Chaining SSH connections
News Roundup
My FreeBSD adventure
A Slackware user from the "linux questions" forum decides to try out BSD, and documents his initial impressions and findingsAfter ruling out PCBSD due to the demanding hardware requirements and NetBSD due to "politics" (whatever that means, his words) he decides to start off with FreeBSD 10, but also mentions trying OpenBSD later onIn his forum post, he covers the documentation (and how easy it makes it for a switcher), dual booting, packages vs ports, network configuration and some other little thingsSo far, he seems to really enjoy BSD and thinks that it makes a lot of sense compared to LinuxMight be an interesting, ongoing series we can follow up on later***
Even more BSDCan trip reports
BSDCan may be over until next year, but trip reports are still pouring inThis time we have a summary from Li-Wen Hsu, who was paid for by the FreeBSD foundationHe's part of the "Jenkins CI for FreeBSD" group and went to BSDCan mostly for thatNice long post about all of his experiences at the event, definitely worth a readHe even talks about... the food***
FreeBSD disk partitioning
For his latest book series on FreeBSD's GEOM system, MWL asked the hackers mailing list for some clarificationThis erupted into a very long discussion about fdisk vs gnop vs gpartSo you don't have to read the 500 mailing list posts, he's summarized the findings in a blog postIt covers MBR vs GPT, disk sector sizes and how to handle all of them with which tools***
BSD Router Project version 1.51
A new version of the BSD Router Project has been released, 1.51It's now based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE instead of 10.0-RELEASEIncludes lots of bugfixes and small updates, as well as some patches from pfSense and elsewhereCheck the sourceforge page for the complete list of changesBad news... the minimum disk size requirement has increased to 512MB... getting pretty bloated***
Feedback/Questions
Fongaboo writes inDavid writes inKristian writes in***
View all episodes
