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 frameworkThis blog post explores capsicum in FreeBSD, some of its history and where it's used in the base systemThey also include some code samples so you can verify that capsicum is actually denying the program access to certain system callsCheck 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 onIn nearly every case, you're going to want to have your clock synced via NTPWith the HTTPS constraints feature also enabled by default, this should keep the time checked and accurate, even against spoofing attacksLots of problems can be traced back to the time on one system or another being wrong, so this will also eliminate some of those casesFor 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 eventThe installfest instead became a "FreeBSD workshop" session, introducing curious new users to some of the flagship features of the OSThey covered when to use UFS or ZFS, firewall options, the release/stable/current branches and finally how to automate installations with AnsibleIf you're in south Germany and want to give similar introduction talks or Q&A sessions about the other BSDs, get in touchWe'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 swapThis 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 fstabThere was another way to do it previously, but this is a lot easierYou 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 defaultA 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 OpenBSDWouldn't you know it, OpenBSD has a native "ugold" driver to support it with the sensors frameworkHow 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 lotThat might be changing soon, as NAS4Free has just released some ARM buildsThese new (somewhat experimental) images are based on FreeBSD 11-CURRENTIncluded in the announcement is a list of fully-supported and partially-supported hardware that they've tested it withIf 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 5thThey're looking for talk proposals and ideas for things you'd like to seeIf 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 episodeIn 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 moreWe're up to 90 episodes now, slowly catching up to Will...***
Feedback/Questions
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