Coming up this week, we'll be talking with Michael Lucas about his newest BSD book, "FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials." It's got lots of great information about the disk subsystems, GEOM, filesystems, you name it. We've also got the usual round of news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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More BSD conference videos
We mentioned it a few times, but the "New Directions in Operating Systems" conference was held in November in the UKThe presentations videos are now online, with a few BSD-related talks of interestAntti Kantee, Rump kernels and why / how we got hereFranco Fichtner, An introduction to userland networkingRobert Watson, New ideas about old OS securityLots of other interesting, but non-BSD-related, talks were also presented, so check the full list if you're interested in operating systems in generalThe 2014 AsiaBSDCon videos are also slowly being uploaded (better late than never)Kirk McKusick, An Overview of Security in the FreeBSD KernelMatthew Ahrens, OpenZFS ensures the continued excellence of ZFSEric Allman, Bambi Meets Godzilla: They Elope - Open Source Meets the Commercial WorldScott Long, Modifying the FreeBSD kernel Netflix streaming serversDru Lavigne, ZFS for the MassesKris Moore, Snapshots, Replication, and Boot EnvironmentsDavid Chisnall, The Future of LLVM in the FreeBSD ToolchainLuba Tang, Bold, fast optimizing linker for BSDJohn Hixson, Introduction to FreeNAS developmentZbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARMMichael Dexter, Visualizing Unix: Graphing bhyve, ZFS and PF with GraphitePeter Grehan, Nested Paging in BhyveMartin Matuška, Deploying FreeBSD systems with Foreman and mfsBSDJames Brown, Analysys of BSD Associate Exam ResultsMindaugas Rasiukevicius, NPF - progress and perspectiveLuigi Rizzo, Netmap as a core networking technologyMichael W. Lucas, Sudo: You're Doing it Wrong (not from a BSD conference, but still good)They should make for some great material to watch during the holidays***
OpenBSD vs FreeBSD security features
From the author of both the OpenBSD and FreeBSD secure gateway articles we've featured in the past comes a new entry about securityThe article goes through a list of all the security features enabled (and disabled) by default in both FreeBSD and OpenBSDIt covers a wide range of topics, including: memory protection, randomization, encryption, privilege separation, Capsicum, securelevels, MAC, Jails and chroots, network stack hardening, firewall features and much moreThis is definitely one of the most in-depth and complete articles we've seen in a while - the author seems to have done his homeworkIf you're looking to secure any sort of BSD box, this post has some very detailed explanations of different exploit mitigation techniques - be sure to read the whole thingThere are also some good comments on DaemonForums and lobste.rs that you may want to read***
The password? You changed it, right?
Peter Hansteen has a new blog post up, detailing some weird SSH bruteforcing he's seen recentlyHe apparently reads his auth logs when he gets bored at an airportThis new bruteforcing attempt seems to be targetting D-Link devices, as evidenced by the three usernames the bots try to useMore than 700 IPs have tried to get into Peter's BSD boxes using these names in combination with weak passwordsLots more details, including the lists of passwords and IPs, can be found in the full articleIf you're using a BSD router, things like this can be easily prevented with PF or fail2ban (and you probably don't have a "d-link" user anyway)***
Get started with FreeBSD, an intro for Linux users
Another new BSD article on a mainstream technology news site - seems we're getting popularThis article is written for Linux users who may be considering switching over to BSD and wondering what it's all aboutIt details installing FreeBSD 9.3 and getting a basic system setup, while touching on ports and packages, and explaining some terminology along the way"Among the legions of Linux users and admins, there seems to be a sort of passive curiosity about FreeBSD and other BSDs. Like commuters on a packed train, they gaze out at a less crowded, vaguely mysterious train heading in a slightly different direction and wonder what traveling on that train might be like"**
Interview - Michael W. Lucas -
[email protected] / @mwlauthor
FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials
News Roundup
OpenSMTPD status update
The OpenSMTPD guys, particularly Gilles, have posted an update on what they've been up to latelyAs of 5.6, it's become the default MTA in OpenBSD, and sendmail will be totally gone in 5.7Email is a much more tricky protocol than you might imagine, and the post goes through some of the weirdness and problems they've had to deal withThere's also another post that goes into detail on their upcoming filtering API - a feature many have requestedThe API is still being developed, but you can test it out now if you know what you're doing - full details in the articleOpenSMTPD also has portable versions in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, so check it out***
OpenCrypto changes in FreeBSD
A little while back, we talked to John-Mark Gurney about updating FreeBSD's OpenCrypto framework, specifically for IPSECSome of that work has just landed in the -CURRENT branch, and the commit has a bit of detailsThe ICM and GCM modes of AES were added, and both include support for AESNIThere's a new port - "nist-kat" - that can be used to test the new modes of operationSome things were fixed in the process as well, including an issue that would leak timing info and result in the ability to forge messagesCode was also borrowed from both OpenBSD and NetBSD to make this possible***
First thoughts on OpenBSD's httpd
Here we have a blog post from a user of OpenBSD's new homegrown web server that made its debut in 5.6The author loves that it has proper privilege separation, a very simple config syntax and that it always runs in a chrootHe also mentions dynamic content hosting with FastCGI, and provides an example of how to set it upBe sure to check our interview with Reyk about the new httpd if you're curious on how it got startedAlso, if you're running the version that came with 5.6, there's a huge patch you can apply to get a lot of the features and fixes from -current without waiting for 5.7***
Steam on PCBSD
One of the most common questions people who want to use BSD as a desktop ask us is "can I run games?" or "can I use steam?"Steam through the Linux emulation layer (in FreeBSD) may be possible soon, but it's already possible to use it with WINEThis video shows how to get Steam set up on PCBSD using the Windows versionThere are also some instructions in the video description to look overA second video details getting streaming set up***
Feedback/Questions
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