Coming up this week, we'll be chatting with Shawn Webb about his recent work with ASLR and PIE in FreeBSD. After that, we'll be showing you how you can create a reverse SSH tunnel to a system behind a firewall... how sneaky. Answers to your emails plus the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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Headlines
FreeBSD foundation August update
The foundation has published a new PDF detailing some of their recent activitiesIt includes project development updates, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule and some of its new featuresThere is also a short interview with Dru Lavigne in the "voices from the community" sectionIf you're into hardware, there's another section about some new FreeBSD server equipmentIn closing, there's an update on funding too***
NSD for an authoritative nameserver
With BIND having been removed from FreeBSD 10.0, you might be looking to replace your old DNS setupThis article shows how to use NSD for an authoritative DNS nameserverIt's also got a link to a similar article on Unbound, the new favorite recursive and caching resolver (they work great together)All the instructions are presented very neatly, with all the little details includedLess BIND means less vulnerabilities, everybody's happy***
BIND and Nginx removed from OpenBSD
While we're on the topic of DNS servers, BIND was finally removed from OpenBSD as wellThe base system contains both NSD and Unbound, so users can transition over between 5.6 (November of this year) and 5.7 (May of next year)They've also removed nginx from the base system, in favor of the new custom HTTP daemonBIND and Nginx are still available in ports if you don't want to switchWe're hoping to have Reyk Floeter on the show next week to talk about it, but scheduling might not work out, so it may be a little later onWith Apache gone in the upcoming 5.6, It's also likely that sendmail will be removed before 5.7 - hooray for modern alternatives***
NetBSD demo videos
A Japanese NetBSD developer has been uploading lots of interesting videosUnsurprisingly, they're all featuring NetBSD running on exotic and weird hardwareMost of them are demoing sound or running a modern Twitter client on an ancient computerThey're from the same guy that did the conference wrap-up we mentioned recently***
Interview - Shawn Webb -
[email protected] / @lattera
Address space layout randomization in FreeBSD
Tutorial
Reverse SSH tunneling
News Roundup
Puppet master-agent installation on FreeBSD
If you've got a lot of BSD boxes under your control, or if you're just lazy, you've probably looked into Puppet beforeThe author claims a lack of BSD-specific Puppet documentation, so he decided to write up some notes of his ownHe goes through some advantages of using this type of tool for deployments, even when you don't have a huge number of systemsThe rest of the post explains how to set up both the master and the agent configurations***
Misc. pfSense items
We found a few miscellaneous pfSense articles this past week The first one is about the hunt for the "ultimate" free open source firewall, where pfSense is obviously a strong contenderThe second one shows how to log NAT firewall states (a good way to find out which family member has been torrenting!)In the third, you can see how to automatically back up your configuration filesThe fourth item shows how to set up PXE booting with pfSense, similar to one of our tutorials***
Time Machine backups on ZFS
If you've got a Mac you need to keep backed up, a FreeBSD server with ZFS can take the place of an expensive "time capsule"This post walks you through setting up netatalk and mDNS for a very versatile Time Machine backup systemWith a single command on the OS X side, you can write to and read from the BSD box just like a regular external driveSurprisingly simple to do, recommended for anyone with Macs on their network***
Lumina desktop preview
Lumina, the BSD-exclusive desktop environment, seems to be coming along nicelyThe main developer has posted an update on the PCBSD blog with some screenshotsLots of new features have been added, many of which are documented in the postThere just might be a BSD Now episode about Lumina coming up.. (cough cough)***
Feedback/Questions
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