BSD Now

Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship, Toward an automated tracking of OpenBSD ports contributions, Trying OpenZFS 2 on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE, OpenBSD on TECLAST F7 Plus, Multi-volume support in HAMMER2, and more.

NOTES

Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.

A first step for the CI service would be to create a database of diffs sent to ports. This would allow people to track what has been sent and not yet committed and what the state of the contribution is (build/don’t build, apply/don’t apply).

OpenZFS 2 is a huge achievement, and makes me bullish about the long term prospects for the world’s most trustworthy and nicest to use storage system. You can even use try it today on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE, though I recommend tracking -CURRENT for these sorts of features.

I got myself a TECLAST F7 Plus laptop. It comes preinstalled with Windows 10 but I planned to use it as my daily driver. So I installed OpenBSD 6.8 on it.

FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin Final Milestone achieved, Tailscale for OpenBSD, macOS to FreeBSD migration, monitoring of our OpenBSD machines, OPNsense 20.7.6 released, and more

NOTES

Moritz Systems have been contracted by the FreeBSD Foundation to modernize the LLDB debugger’s support for FreeBSD. We are working on a new plugin utilizing the more modern client-server layout that is already used by Darwin, Linux, NetBSD and (unofficially) OpenBSD. The new plugin is going to gradually replace the legacy one.

I spent some time setting this up today evening and thought I’d post the steps here. Nothing fancy, just putting together various pieces actually.

This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.

We have a number of OpenBSD firewalls in service (along with some other OpenBSD servers for things like VPN endpoints), and I was recently asked how we monitor PF and overall network traffic on them. I had to disappoint the person who asked with my answer, because right now we mostly don't (although this is starting to change).

This update brings the usual mix of reliability fixes, plugin and third party software updates: FreeBSD, HardenedBSD, PHP, OpenSSH, StrongSwan, Suricata and Syslog-ng amongst others.

We asked for it, you answered our call. This episode features you interviewing us with questions that you sent in. JT, Allan, and Benedict answer everything that you ever wanted to know in this week’s special episode of BSDNow.

NOTES

Benedict: You work at a university right? Were you already into tech before you started working there? What do you do there?

JT: How did you get involved in BSD? Weren't you a Linux guy?

All: Is there any way you can create an entire episode of BSDnow on hardware that runs OpenBSD and FreeBSD? We see you audacity, etc on a mac.

All: if you could finish up one project right now... what would it be?

All: How did all of you guys meet?

All: My question is, do you guys use FreeBSD as your main desktop OS? If not, what do you use?

All: How old were you when you got your first computer and what was that computer?

All: Can we have a peek at your bookcase and what books are there?

All: What desktop/Window Manager/shell do each of you primarily use?

All: What spoken languages do you speak?

All: When COVID passes, when are either of you are coming to BSD pizza night in Portland, OR, USA so I can buy you a beer/wine/whisky or pizza/coffee/tea (or six)

All: What was the first car you ever owned?

All: Do you own a vehicle and if so what is the make/model?

All: Favorite Star franchise? Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar, etc.

JT: Will you ever host any more BSDNow episodes?

All: Favorite superhero? Marvel and/or DC.

All: Favorite game(s) of all time?

All: Pants or no pants on virtual meetings/presentations?

All: Do you or have you used alternative operating systems that are not "main stream or is considered retro" if so what are those?

All: Who has more animals at home?

Allan: Does Allan have any batteries for his tetris cubes? Can we see that thing light up?

Allan and Benedict: Are you guys going to go on JT's new show?

If you’re wondering what show this is, here are the two shows Im a host of:

https://www.opensourcevoices.org & https://www.theopiniondominion.org

Allan and Benedict: Have Allan or Benedict lost anything on the way to and from a conference?

Benedict: Is Benedict going to do his NOEL blocks again?

Benedict: Does Benedict make his bed every Wednesday morning? It always looks great!

All: What's your Daily Driver Hardware?

All: Who has more servers or VMs at home?

All: What book(s) are you currently reading?

All: Favorite mechanical keyboard switch? Cherry MX, Kalih, Gateron, etc.

The Origin of the Shell, Return to Plan 9, ArisbluBSD: Why a new BSD?, OPNsense 20.7.5 released, Midnight BSD 2.0 Release Status, HardenedBSD November 2020 Status Report, and more.

NOTES

CTSS was developed during 1963 and 64. I was at MIT on the computer center staff at that time. After having written dozens of commands for CTSS, I reached the stage where I felt that commands should be usable as building blocks for writing more commands, just like subroutine libraries. Hence, I wrote "RUNCOM", a sort of shell driving the execution of command scripts, with argument substitution. The tool became instantly most popular, as it became possible to go home in the evening while leaving behind long runcoms executing overnight. It was quite neat for boring and repetitive tasks such as renaming, moving, updating, compiling, etc. whole directories of files for system and application maintenance and monitoring.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs has held the same charm after my last visit that took a few days. This time I'll keep this operating system in an emulator where I can explore into it when I am distracted.

This article is to explain some decisions and plans made by the ArisbluBSD team, why we are making our own thing, and what the plan is for the OS. We mainly want to talk about five things: desktop, package management, software availability, custom software, and the future of the OS. We mostly want to explain what the goal of the OS is, and how we plan to expand in the near future. Without further ado, let's explain ArisbluBSD's plan.

We return briefly for a small patch set and plan to pin the 20.1 upgrade path to this particular version to avoid unnecessary stepping stones. We wish you all a healthy Friday. And of course: patch responsibly!

We identified some issues with the 2.0 ISOs slated for release with the ZFS bootloader not working.

We're getting close to the end of November. My wife and I have plans this weekend, so I thought I'd take the time to write November's status report today.

We read FreeBSD’s 3rd quarter status report, OpenZFS 2.0, adding check-hash checks in UFS filesystem, OpenSSL 3.0 /dev/crypto issues on FreeBSD, and more.

NOTES

The call for submissions for the 4th Quarter is out

This Monday, ZFS on Linux lead developer Brian Behlendorf published the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release to GitHub. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between "ZFS on Linux" and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out its side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official.

Various new check-hash checks have been added to the UFS filesystem

So, just learned that the OpenSSL devs decided to break /dev/crypto on FreeBSD.

Adventures in Freebernetes, tracing kernel functions, The better way of building FreeBSD networks, New beginnings: CDBUG virtual meetings, LibreSSL update in DragonFly, Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD, and more.

NOTES

Part 2 of experiments in FreeBSD and Kubernetes: Creating your first guest

In my previous post I described how FBT intercepts function calls and vectors them into the DTrace framework. That laid the foundation for what I want to discuss in this post: the implementation of the stack() action and built-in arg variables. These features rely on the precise layout of the stack, the details of which I touched on previously. In this post I hope to illuminate those details a bit more with the help of some visuals, and then guide you through the implementation of these two DTrace features as they relate to the FBT provider.

Dummynet is the FreeBSD traffic shaper, packet scheduler, and network emulator. Dummynet allows you to emulate a whole set of network environments in a straight-forward way. It has the ability to model delay, packet loss, and can act as a traffic shaper and policer. Dummynet is roughly equivalent to netem in Linux, but we have found that dummynet is easier to integrate and provides much more consistent results.

I had overwhelmingly positive responses from the broader *BSD community about restarting CDBUG meetings as virtual, at least for now. Hopefully this works well and even when we're back to in-person meetings we can still find a way to bring in virtual attendees.

DragonFly has a new version of libressl, noting cause it has a newer TLS1.3 implementation – something that may be necessary for you.

So couple of days ago I migrated from macOS on Macbook Pro to FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.

Interview with Michael W. Lucas: SNMP and TLS book, cashflow for creators, book sale and more.

NOTES

SNMP Book

Special Guest: Michael W Lucas.

History of FreeBD: BSDi and USL Lawsuits, Building a Website on Google Compute Engine, Firewall ban-sharing across machines, OpenVPN as default gateway on OpenBSD, Sorting out what the Single Unix Specification is, Switching from Apple to a Thinkpad for development, and more

NOTES

In this second part of our series on the history of FreeBSD, we continue to trace the pre-history of FreeBSD and the events that would eventually shape the project and the future of open source software.

Here's how I deployed a web site to the Google Cloud Platform. I used FreeBSD for good performance, stability, and minimal complexity. I set up HTTPS with free Let's Encrypt TLS certificates for both RSA and ECC. Then I adjusted the Apache configuration for a good score from the authoritative Qualys server analysis.

As described in My infrastructure as of 2019, my machines are located in three different sites and are loosely coupled. Nonetheless, I wanted to set things up so that if an IP address is acting maliciously toward one machine, all my machines block that IP at once so the meanie won't get to try one machine after another.

If you plan to use an OpenVPN tunnel to reach your default gateway, which would make the tun interface in the egress group, and use tun0 in your pf.conf which is loaded before OpenVPN starts?

Sorting out what the Single Unix Specification is and covers

The days of Apple products are behind me. I had been developing on a Macbook for over twelve years, but now, I’ve switched to an ever trending setup: OpenBSD on a Thinkpad.

FreeBSD 12.2 is available, ZFS Webinar, Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, how the OpenBSD -stable packages are built, OPNsense 20.7.4 released, and more

NOTES

The release notes for FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 12-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.

Join us on November 18th for a live discussion with Allan Jude (VP of Engineering at Klara Inc) in this webinar centred on “best practices of ZFS”

Sys2syz would give an extra edge to Syzkaller for NetBSD. It has a potential of efficiently automating the conversion of syscall definitions to syzkaller’s grammar. This can aid in increasing the number of syscalls covered by Syzkaller significantly with the minimum possibility of manual errors. Let’s delve into its internals.

In this long blog post, I will write about the technical details of the OpenBSD stable packages building infrastructure. I have setup the infrastructure with the help of Theo De Raadt who provided me the hardware in summer 2019, since then, OpenBSD users can upgrade their packages using pkg_add -u for critical updates that has been backported by the contributors. Many thanks to them, without their work there would be no packages to build. Thanks to pea@ who is my backup for operating this infrastructure in case something happens to me.

This release finally wraps up the recent Netmap kernel changes and tests.

bhyve - The FreeBSD Hypervisor, udf information leak, being a vim user instead of classic vi, FreeBSD on ESXi ARM Fling: Fixing Virtual Hardware, new FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin in LLDB, OpenBSD Laptop, and more.

NOTES

FreeBSD has had varying degrees of support as a hypervisor host throughout its history. For a time during the mid-2000s, VMWare Workstation 3.x could be made to run under FreeBSD’s Linux Emulation, and Qemu was ported in 2004, and later the kQemu accelerator in 2005. Then in 2009 a port for VirtualBox was introduced. All of these solutions suffered from being a solution designed for a different operating system and then ported to FreeBSD, requiring constant maintenance.

Klara offers flexible Support Subscriptions for your ZFS and FreeBSD infrastructure. Get a world class team of experts to back you up. Check it out on our website!

FreeBSD UDF driver info leak

In the past I've written entries (such as this one) where I said that I was pretty much a Vi user, not really a Vim user, because I almost entirely stuck to Vi features. In a comment on my entry on not using and exploring Vim features, rjc reinforced this, saying that I seemed to be using vi instead of vim (and that there was nothing wrong with this). For a long time I thought this way myself, but these days this is not true any more. These days I really want Vim, not classical Vi.

With the current state of FreeBSD on ARM in general, a number of hardware drivers are either set to not auto-load on boot, or are entirely missing altogether. This page is to document my findings with various bits of hardware, and if possible, list fixes.

Moritz Systems have been contracted by the FreeBSD Foundation to modernize the LLDB debugger’s support for FreeBSD. We are writing a new plugin utilizing the more modern client-server layout that is already used by Darwin, Linux, NetBSD and (unofficially) OpenBSD. The new plugin is going to gradually replace the legacy one.

Hi, I know it’s been a while. I recently had to nuke and re-pave my personal laptop and I thought it would be a nice thing to share with the community how I set up OpenBSD on it so that I have a useful, modern, secure environment for getting work done. I’m not going to say I’m the expert on this or that this is the BEST way to set up OpenBSD, but I thought it would be worthwhile for folks doing Google searches to at least get my opinion on this. So, given that, let’s go…