BSD Now

90: ZFS Armistice


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This time on the show, we'll be chatting with Jed Reynolds about ZFS. He's been using it extensively on a certain other OS, and we can both learn a bit about the other side's implementation. Answers to your questions and all this week's news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Playing with sandboxing
  • Sandboxing and privilege separation are popular topics these days - they're the goal of the new "shill" scripting language, they're used heavily throughout OpenBSD, and they're gaining traction with the capsicum framework
  • This blog post explores capsicum in FreeBSD, some of its history and where it's used in the base system
  • They also include some code samples so you can verify that capsicum is actually denying the program access to certain system calls
  • Check our interview about capsicum from a while back if you haven't seen it already
  • ***
    OpenNTPD on by default
    • OpenBSD has enabled ntpd by default in the installer, rather than prompting the user if they want to turn it on
    • In nearly every case, you're going to want to have your clock synced via NTP
    • With the HTTPS constraints feature also enabled by default, this should keep the time checked and accurate, even against spoofing attacks
    • Lots of problems can be traced back to the time on one system or another being wrong, so this will also eliminate some of those cases
    • For those who might be curious, they're using the "pool.ntp.org" cluster of addresses and google for HTTPS constraints (but these can be easily changed)
    • ***
      FreeBSD workshop in Landshut
      • We mentioned a BSD installfest happening in Germany a few weeks back, and the organizer wrote in with a review of the event
      • The installfest instead became a "FreeBSD workshop" session, introducing curious new users to some of the flagship features of the OS
      • They covered when to use UFS or ZFS, firewall options, the release/stable/current branches and finally how to automate installations with Ansible
      • If you're in south Germany and want to give similar introduction talks or Q&A sessions about the other BSDs, get in touch
      • We'll hear more from him about how it went in the feedback section today
      • ***
        Swap encryption in DragonFly
        • Doing full disk encryption is very important, but something that people sometimes overlook is encrypting their swap
        • This can actually be more important than the contents of your disks, especially if an unencrypted password or key hits your swap (as it can be recovered quite easily)
        • DragonFlyBSD has added a new experimental option to automatically encrypt your swap partition in fstab
        • There was another way to do it previously, but this is a lot easier
        • You can achieve similar results in FreeBSD by adding ".eli" to the end of the swap device in fstab, there are a few steps to do it in NetBSD and swap in OpenBSD is encrypted by default
        • A one-time key will be created and then destroyed in each case, making recovery of the plaintext nearly impossible
        • ***
          Interview - Jed Reynolds - [email protected] / @jed_reynolds

          Comparing ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

          News Roundup
          USB thermometer on OpenBSD
          • So maybe you've got BSD on your server or router, maybe NetBSD on a toaster, but have you ever used a thermometer with one?
          • This blog post introduces the RDing TEMPer Gold USB thermometer, a small device that can tell the room temperature, and how to get it working on OpenBSD
          • Wouldn't you know it, OpenBSD has a native "ugold" driver to support it with the sensors framework
          • How useful such a device would be is another story though
          • ***
            NAS4Free now on ARM
            • We talk a lot about hardware for network-attached storage devices on the show, but ARM doesn't come up a lot
            • That might be changing soon, as NAS4Free has just released some ARM builds
            • These new (somewhat experimental) images are based on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT
            • Included in the announcement is a list of fully-supported and partially-supported hardware that they've tested it with
            • If anyone has experience with running a NAS on slightly exotic hardware, write in to us
            • ***
              pkgsrcCon 2015 CFP and info
              • This year's pkgsrcCon will be in Berlin, Germany on July 4th and 5th
              • They're looking for talk proposals and ideas for things you'd like to see
              • If you or your company uses pkgsrc, or if you're just interested in NetBSD in general, it would be a good event to check out
              • ***
                BSDTalk episode 253
                • BSDTalk has released another new episode
                • In it, he interviews George Neville-Neil about the 2nd edition of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"
                • They discuss what's new since the last edition, who the book's target audience is and a lot more
                • We're up to 90 episodes now, slowly catching up to Will...
                • ***
                  Feedback/Questions
                  • Dominik writes in
                  • Brad writes in
                  • Corvin writes in
                  • James writes in
                  • ***
                    ...more
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