We're back, and this week we'll be showing you how to tunnel out of a restrictive network using only DNS queries. We also sat down with Bryan Drewery, from the FreeBSD portmgr team, to talk all about their building cluster and some recent changes. All the latest news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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EuroBSDCon 2014 registration open
September is getting closer, and that means it's time for EuroBSDCon - held in Bulgaria this yearRegistration is finally open to the public, with prices for businesses ($287), individuals ($217) and students ($82) for the main conference until August 18thTutorials, sessions, dev summits and everything else all have their own pricing as wellRegistering between August 18th - September 12th will cost more for everythingYou can register online here and check hotels in the areaThe FreeBSD foundation is also accepting applications for travel grants***
OpenBSD SMP PF update
A couple weeks ago we talked about how DragonflyBSD updated their PF to be multithreadedWith them joining the SMP ranks along with FreeBSD, a lot of users have been asking about when OpenBSD is going to make the jumpIn a recent mailing list thread, Henning Brauer addresses some of the concernsThe short version is that too many things in OpenBSD are currently single-threaded for it to matter - just reworking PF by itself would be uselessHe also says PF on OpenBSD is over four times faster than FreeBSD's old version, presumably due to those extra years of development it's gone throughThere's also been even more recent concern about the uncertain future of FreeBSD's PF, being mostly unmaintained since their SMP patchesWe reached out to four developers (over week ago) about coming on the show to talk about OpenBSD network performance and SMP, but they all ignored us***
Introduction to NetBSD pkgsrc
An article from one of our listeners about how to create a new pkgsrc port or fix one that you needThe post starts off with how to get the pkgsrc tree, shows how to get the developer tools and finally goes through the Makefile formatIt also lists all the different bmake targets and their functions in relation to the porting processFinally, the post details the whole process of creating a new port***
FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE
After three RCs, FreeBSD 9.3 was scheduled to be finalized and announced today but actually came out yesterdayThe full list of changes is available, but it's mostly a smaller maintenance releaseLots of driver updates, ZFS issues fixed, hardware RNGs are entirely disabled by default, netmap framework updates, read-only ext4 support was added, the vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, new hardware support (including radeon KMS), various userland tools got new features, OpenSSL and OpenSSH were updated... and much moreIf you haven't jumped to the 10.x branch yet (and there are a lot of people who haven't!) this is a worthwhile upgrade - 9.2-RELEASE will reach EOL soonGood news, this will be the first release with PGP-signed checksums on the FTP mirrors - a very welcome changeWith that out of the way, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule was posted***
Interview - Bryan Drewery -
[email protected] / @bdrewery
The FreeBSD package building cluster, pkgng, ports, various topics
Tutorial
Tunneling traffic through DNS
News Roundup
SSH two-factor authentication on FreeBSD
We've previously mentioned stories on how to do two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or via a third party websiteThis blog post tells you how to do exactly that, but with your Google account and the pam_google_authenticator portUsing this setup, every user that logs in with a password will have an extra requirement before they can gain access - but users with public keys can login normallyIt's a really, really simple process once you have the port installed - full details on the page***
Ditch tape backup in favor of FreeNAS
The author of this post shares some of his horrible experiences with tape backups for a clientHaving constant, daily errors and failed backups, he needed to find another solutionWith 1TB of backups, tapes just weren't a good option anymore - so he switched to FreeNAS (after also ruling out a pre-built NAS)The rest of the article details his experiences with it and tells about his setup***
NetBSD vs FreeBSD, desktop experiences
A NetBSD and pkgsrc developer details his experiences running NetBSD on a workstation at his jobBecoming more and more disappointed with graphics performance, he finally decides to give FreeBSD 10 a try - especially since it has a native nVidia driver"Running on VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga is fun, but I’ll tell you a little secret: nobody cares anymore about VAX, PlayStation 2 and Amiga."He's become pretty satisfied with FreeBSD, a modern choice for a 2014 desktop system***
PCBSD not-so-weekly digest
Speaking of choices for a desktop system, it's the return of the PCBSD digest!Warden and PBI_add have gotten some interesting new featuresYou can now create jails "on the fly" when adding a new PBI to your application libraryBulk jail creation is also possible now, and it's really easyNew Jenkins integration, with public access to poudriere logs as wellPkgNG 1.3.0.rc2 testing for EDGE users***
Feedback/Questions
Jeff writes in - Sending Encrypted Backups over SSH + Sending ZFS snapshots via userBruce writes inRichard writes inJeff writes in - NYCBUG dmesg listSteve writes in***
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