Tales from a core file, Lenovo X260 BIOS Update with OpenBSD, the problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines, Hugo workflow using FreeBSD Jails, Caddy, Restic; extending NetBSD-7 branch support, a tale of two hypervisor bugs, and more.

On the side, I’ve been wrapping up some improvements to the classic Unix stdio libraries in illumos. stdio contains the classic functions like fopen(), printf(), and the security nightmare gets(). While working on support for fmemopen() and friends I got to reacquaint myself with some of the joys of the stdio ABI and its history from 7th Edition Unix. With that in mind, let’s dive into this, history, and some mistakes not to repeat. While this is written from the perspective of the C programming language, aspects of it apply to many other languages.

My X260 only runs OpenBSD and has no CD driver. But I still need to upgrade its BIOS from time to time. And this is possible using the ISO BIOS image.

First off all, you need to download the “BIOS Update (Bootable CD)” from the Lenovo Support Website.

Various Unixes have had a 'iowait' statistic for a long time now (although I can't find a source for where it originated; it's not in 4.x BSD, so it may have come through System V and sar). The traditional and standard definition of iowait is that it's the amount of time the system was idle but had at least one process waiting on disk IO. Rather than count this time as 'idle' (as you would if you had a three-way division of CPU time between user, system, and idle), some Unixes evolved to count this as a new category, 'iowait'.

After hosting with Netlify for a few years, I decided to head back to self hosting. Theres a few reasons for that but the main reasoning was that I had more control over how things worked.

In this post, i’ll show you my workflow for deploying my Hugo generated site (www.jaredwolff.com). Instead of using what most people would go for, i’ll be doing all of this using a FreeBSD Jails based server. Plus i’ll show you some tricks i’ve learned over the years on bulk image resizing and more.

Let’s get to it.

Typically, some time after releasing a new NetBSD major version (such as NetBSD 9.0), we will announce the end-of-life of the N-2 branch, in this case NetBSD-7.

We've decided to hold off on doing that to ensure our users don't feel rushed to perform a major version update on any remote machines, possibly needing to reach the machine if anything goes wrong.

Security fixes will still be made to the NetBSD-7 branch.

We hope you're all safe. Stay home.

VM escape has become a popular topic of discussion over the last few years. A good amount of research on this topic has been published for various hypervisors like VMware, QEMU, VirtualBox, Xen and Hyper-V. Bhyve is a hypervisor for FreeBSD supporting hardware-assisted virtualization. This paper details the exploitation of two bugs in bhyve - FreeBSD-SA-16:32.bhyve (VGA emulation heap overflow) and CVE-2018-17160 (Firmware Configuration device bss buffer overflow) and some generic techniques which could be used for exploiting other bhyve bugs. Further, the paper also discusses sandbox escapes using PCI device passthrough, and Control-Flow Integrity bypasses in HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT

We build the server you never should, a tricked out Arm box, and push it to the limit with a telnet torture test.

Plus what we're playing recently, community news, a handy self-hosted music pick, and more.

Special Guests: Alan Pope and Brent Gervais.

Links:

• Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

Heather, of SciByte fame, joins Chris and Wes to celebrate the incredible accomplishments and amazing resiliency of the Voyager probes.

Special Guest: Heather.

Links:

• SciByte Archive
• Voyager 2 is gathering science data again after recovering from a glitch in interstellar space
• All Alone in Interstellar Space, Voyager 2 Is About to Lose Contact With Home
• Revisiting Decades-Old Voyager 2 Data, Scientists Find One More Secret
• Decoding images from the Golden Record
• How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made
• Voyager - What's on the Golden Record
• Voyager 1 Takes the First Image of the Earth-Moon System in a Single Frame
• Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary
• Pale Blue Dot at 30: Voyager 1's iconic photo of Earth from space reveals our place in the universe
• ’Pale Blue Dot’ Revisited
• Voyager Mission Status
• How NASA nearly lost the Voyager spacecraft
• A Troubled Start to a Triumphant Mission: 37 Years Since the Launch of the Voyagers

Choose Linux enters indefinite hiatus.

In what turns out to be our final publication, we say goodbye.

NetBSD 8.2 is available, NextCloud on OpenBSD, X11 screen locking, NetBSD and RISC OS running parallel, community feedback about switching to BSD, and more.

The third release in the NetBSD-8 is now available.

This release includes all the security fixes in NetBSD-8 up until this point, and other fixes deemed important for stability.

NextCloud and OpenBSD are complementary to one another. NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for proprietary platforms, whereas OpenBSD forms the most secure and solid foundation to serve it on. Setting it up in the best way isn’t hard, especially using this step by step tutorial.

Back when this tutorial was initially written, things were different. The OpenBSD port relied on PHP 5.6 and there were no package updates. But the port improved (hats off, Gonzalo!) and package updates were introduced to the -stable branch (hats off, Solene!).

A rewrite of this tutorial was long overdue. Right now, it is written for 6.6 -stable and will be updated once 6.7 is released. If you have any questions or desire some help, feel free to reach out.

For years I’ve been using XScreenSaver as a default, but I recently learned about xsecurelock and re-evaluated my screen-saving requirements

I have been experimenting with running two systems at the same time on the RK3399 SoC.

We share some WiFi tips and essential network ideas.

And discuss one of our most significant compromises in the show so far.

Links:

• Self-Hosted Discord Server
• Rationale for using Discord — Let's grow a community around being the best place to discuss Self-Hosting.
• Barcodebuddy — Barcode system for Grocy
• Quarantine-o-meter Home Assistant Dashboard
• Apple acquires popular weather app Dark Sky and will shut down the Android version — The Android and Wear OS apps will work until July 1st
• Wyze firmware update lets you turn its security cameras into webcams — To solve webcam shortage issues if you’re stuck working from home