BSD Now

We try to answer what happens to an open source project after a developers death, we tell you about the last bootstrapped tech company in Silicon Valley, we have an update to the NetBSD Thread sanitizer, and show how to use use cabal on OpenBSD

YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER heard of the late Jim Weirich or his software. But you've almost certainly used apps built on his work.

The fewer people with ownership of a piece of software, the greater the risk that it could be orphaned. Developers even have a morbid name for this: the bus factor, meaning the number of people who would have to be hit by a bus before there's no one left to maintain the project. Libraries.io has identified about 3,000 open-source libraries that are used in many other programs but have only a handful of contributors.

That solved potential problems related to Rspec-Given, but it opened Searls' eyes to the many things that could go wrong. “It’s easy to see open source as a purely technical phenomenon,” Searls says. “But once something takes off and is depended on by hundreds of other people, it becomes a social phenomenon as well.”

Taking over Rspec-Given inspired Searls, who was only 30 at the time, to make a will and a succession plan for his own open-source projects. There are other things developers can do to help future-proof their work. They can, for example, transfer the copyrights to a foundation, such as the Apache Foundation. But many open-source projects essentially start as hobbies, so programmers may not think to transfer ownership until it is too late.

My business partner, Matt Olander, and I were intimately familiar with the ups and downs of the Silicon Valley tech industry when we acquired the remnants of our then-employer BSDi’s enterprise computer business in 2002 and assumed the roles of CEO and CTO. Fast-forward to today, and we still work in the same buildings where BSDi started in 1996, though you’d hardly recognize them today.

After careful consideration, Matt and I decided to bootstrap our company rather than seek funding. The first dot-com bubble had recently burst, and we were seeing close friends lose their jobs right and left at VC-funded companies based on dubious business plans. While we did not have much cash on hand, we did have a customer base and treasured those customers as our greatest asset. We concluded that meeting their needs was the surest path to meeting ours, and the rest would simply be details to address individually. This strategy ended up working so well that we have many of the same customers to this day.

By not having the external pressure from VCs or shareholders that your competitors have, you're free to set your own priorities and charge fair prices for your products. Our customers consistently tell us how refreshing our sales and marketing approaches are. We consider honesty, transparency and responsible marketing the only viable strategy when you’re bootstrapped. Your reputation with your customers and vendors should mean everything to you, and we can honestly say that the loyalty we have developed is priceless.

Looking back, I don't think I’d change a thing. We need to be in Silicon Valley for the prime customers, vendors and talent, and it’s a point of pride that our customers recognize how different we are from the norm. Free of a venture capital “runway” and driven by these principles, we look forward to the next 20 years in this highly-competitive industry.

At its core, the Internet is an interconnected fabric of separate networks. Each network which makes up the Internet is operated independently and only interconnects with other networks in clearly defined places.

So... I recently set up my own autonomous system... and I don't really have a fantastic justification for it...

But what the hell; I've figured out how to do it, so I figured it would make an entertaining blog post.

At this point, Hurricane Electric is feeding us all ~700k routes for the Internet, we're feeding them our two routes for our local IPv4 and IPv6 subnets, and all that's left to do is order all our cross-connects to other ASes in the building willing to peer with us (mostly for fun) and load in all our servers to build our own personal corner of the Internet.

The past year has been started with bugfixes and the development of regression tests for ptrace(2) and related kernel features, as well as the continuation of bringing LLDB support and LLVM sanitizers (ASan + UBsan and partial TSan + Msan) to NetBSD. My plan for the next year is to finish implementing TSan and MSan support, followed by a long run of bug fixes for LLDB, ptrace(2), and other related kernel subsystems

In the past month, I've developed Thread Sanitizer far enough to have a subset of its tests pass on NetBSD, started with addressing breakage related to the memory layout of processes. The reason for this breakage was narrowed down to the current implementation of ASLR, which was too aggressive and which didn't allow enough space to be mapped for Shadow memory. The fix for this was to either force the disabling of ASLR per-process, or globally on the system. The same will certainly happen for MSan executables. After some other corrections, I got TSan to work for the first time ever on October 14th. This was a big achievement, so I've made a snapshot available. Getting the snapshot of execution under GDB was pure hazard.

I was able to get the above execution results around 10% of the time (being under a tracer had no positive effect on the frequency of successful executions). I've managed to hit the following final results for this month, with another set of bugfixes and improvements:

At the end of the month, TSan can now reliably executabe the same (already-working) program every time. The majority of failures are in tests verifying sanitization of correct mutex locking usage. There are still problems with NetBSD-specific libc and libpthread bootstrap code that conflicts with TSan. Certain functions (pthread_create(3), pthread_key_create(3), _cxa_atexit()) cannot be started early by TSan initialization, and must be deferred late enough for the sanitizer to work correctly.

I've prepared a scratch support for MSan on NetBSD to help in researching how far along it is. I've also cloned and adapted the existing FreeBSD bits; however, the code still needs more work and isn't functional yet. The number of passed tests (5) is negligible and most likely does not work at all. The conclusion after this research is that TSan shall be finished first, as it touches similar code. In the future, there will be likely another round of iterating the system structs and types and adding the missing ones for NetBSD. So far, this part has been done before executing the real MSan code. I've added one missing symbol that was missing and was detected when attempting to link a test program with MSan.

The GCC team has merged the LLVM sanitizer code, which has resulted in almost-complete support for ASan and UBsan on NetBSD. It can be found in the latest GCC8 snapshot, located in pkgsrc-wip/gcc8snapshot. Though, do note that there is an issue with getting backtraces from libasan.so, which can be worked-around by backtracing ASan events in a debugger. UBsan also passes all GCC regression tests and appears to work fine. The code enabling sanitizers on the GCC/NetBSD frontend will be submitted upstream once the backtracing issue is fixed and I'm satisfied that there are no other problems. I've managed to upstream a large portion of generic+TSan+MSan code to compiler-rt and reduce local patches to only the ones that are in progress. This deals with any rebasing issues, and allows me to just focus on the delta that is being worked on. I've tried out the LLDB builds which have TSan/NetBSD enabled, and they built and started fine. However, there were some false positives related to the mutex locking/unlocking code.

The general goals are to finish TSan and MSan and switch back to LLDB debugging. I plan to verify the impact of the TSan bootstrap initialization on the observed crashes and research the remaining failures.

The NetBSD Foundation is a non-profit organization and welcomes any donations to help us continue funding projects and services to the open-source community. Please consider visiting the following URL, and chip in what you can:

Let's say every car manufacturer recently discovered a new technology named "doord", which lets you open up car doors much faster than before. It only takes 0.05 seconds, instead of 1.2 seconds on average. So every time you open a door, you are much, much faster!

Since WX became mandatory in OpenBSD, WX’d binaries are only allowed to be executed from designated locations (mount points). If you used the auto partition layout during install, your /usr/local/ will be mounted with wxallowed. For example, here is the entry for my current machine:

This is a great feature, but if you build applications outside of the wxallowed partition, you are going to run into some issues, especially in the case of cabal (python as well).

The error isn’t actually what it says. The untrained eye would assume permissions issue. A quick check of dmesg reveals what is really happening:

OpenBSD is killing the above binary because it is violating WX and hasn’t been safely kept in its /usr/local corral!

We are almost there! Some cabal packages build outside of ~/.cabal:

Fortunately, all of the packages I have come across that do this all respect the TMPDIR environment variable!

With this alias, you should be able to cabal without issue (so far pandoc, shellcheck and hakyll have all built fine)!

Here's another point along my quest for amateur radio on FreeBSD - bring up basic APRS support. Yes, someone else has done the work, but in the normal open source way it was .. inconsistently documented.

The PTT bit isn't that hard - one of the microphone jack pins is actually PTT (if you ground it, it engages PTT) so when you make the cable just ensure you expose a ground pin and PTT pin so you can upgrade it later.

The cable itself isn't that hard either - I had a baofeng handmic lying around (they're like $5) so I pulled it apart for the cable. I'll try to remember to take pictures of that.

Now, I went a bit further. I bought a bunch of 600 ohm isolation transformers for audio work, so I wired it up as follows:

Ok, so that bit is easy. Then on to the software side. The normal way people do this stuff is "direwolf" on Linux. So, "pkg install direwolf" installed it. That was easy.

Editing it isn't that hard - you need to change your callsign and the audio device.

OK, here is the main undocumented bit for FreeBSD - the sound device can just be /dev/dsp . It isn't an ALSA name! Don't waste time trying to use ALSA names. Instead, just find the device you want and reference it. For me the USB sound card shows up as /dev/dsp3 (which is very non specific as USB sound devices come and go, but that's a later problem!) but it's enough to bring it up.

So yes, following the above guide, using the right sound device name resulted in a working APRS modem.

Next up - something to talk to it. This is called 'xastir'. It's .. well, when you run it, you'll find exactly how old an X application it is. It's very nostalgically old. But, it is enough to get APRS positioning up and test both the TCP/IP side of APRS and the actual radio radio side.

So, that was it! So far so good. It actually works well enough to decode and watch APRS traffic around me. I managed to get out position information to the APRS network over both TCP/IP and relayed via VHF radio.

Picking a compiler for debuggability, how to port Rust apps to FreeBSD, what the point of Docker is on FreeBSD/Solaris, another EuroBSDcon recap, and network manager control in OpenBSD

Have you ever had an assert get triggered only to result in a useless core dump with missing variable information or an invalid callstack?

If the program receives a first argument of 1, then function is called with the argument of "a". If the program receives a first argument of 2, then function is called with the argument of "b". However, if we compile this program with clang, the stack traces in both cases are identical! clang informs the debugger that the function f invoked the function("b") branch where x = 2 even if x = 1.

We have shown some common optimizations that may get in the way of the debuggability of your application and demonstrated a disparity in debug information quality across two popular compilers. In the next blog post of this series, we will examine how gcc and clang stack up with regards to debug information quality across a myriad of synthetic applications and real world applications.

The FreeBSD Ports Collection is the way almost everyone installs applications (“ports”) on FreeBSD. Like everything else about FreeBSD, it is primarily a volunteer effort. It is important to keep this in mind when reading this document.

Sometimes you might get asked to show poudriere build log, sometimes you won’t. It’s good to have anyway. If you choose to use poudriere, use ZFS. There are plenty of guides on the subject. FreeBSD Porter’s Handbook is the most complete source of information on porting to FreeBSD.

Whole porting process in most cases is writing one Makefile. I recommend doing something like this.

Each port must have one primary category in case of fd it will be sysutils, therefore it's located in /usr/ports/systuils/fd.

Since this port conflicts with other util named fd I specified package suffix as: PKGNAMESUFFIX= -find and indicate conflict: CONFLICTS_INSTALL= fd-[0-9]*. That means to install it from packages user will have to type:

This section is different for every port, but in case of fd it's pretty straightforward:

Since fd includes the text of licenses you should do this as well:

FreeBSD has a requirement that all ports must allow offline building. That means you have specified which files are needed to be downloaded. Luckily we now have helpers to download GitHub sources directly from GitHub:

Since PORTNANE is fd it will try to download sources for sharkdp/fd. By default it's going to download tag:

fd uses v as the prefix, therefore we need to specify: DISTVERSIONPREFIX= v.

There are very few rust projects that are standalone and use no crates dependencies. It’s used to be PITA to make it work offline, but now cargo is a first class citizen in ports:

Yes, you have to specify each dependency. Luckily, there is a magic awk script that turns Cargo.lock into what you need. Execute make cargo-crates in the port root. This will fail because you're missing checksum for the original source files:

This will give you what you need. Double check that result is correct. There is a way to ignore checksum error, but I can’t remember… Execute make makesum again.

If. build.rs relies on that you have to change it. fd allows you to use SHELL_COMPLETIONS_DIR to specify where completions go, while ripgrep doesn't. In our case we just specify SHELL_COMPLETIONS_DIR:

FreeBSD is very strict about files it’s installing and it won’t allow you to install random files that get lost. You have to specify which files you’re installing. In this case, it’s just two:

Note that sources for fd have uncompressed man file, while here it’s listed as compressed. If port installs a lot of files, specify them in pkg-plist like here. To actually install them:

clap-rs can generate shell completions for you, it's usually handled by build.rs script. First, we need to define options:

To actually install them:

Sometimes you have to patch it and send the patch upstream. Merging it upstream can take awhile, so you can patch it as part of the install process. An easy way to do it:

First, make sure portlint -AC doesn't give you any errors or warnings. Second, make sure poudriere can build it on both amd64 and i386. If it can't?—?you have to either fix it or mark port broken for that arch.

The location was wonderful and I loved sneaking out and exploring the city when I could. From what I heard, it was the largest BSD conference in history, with over 320 attendees!

Finding something to install on it

I downloaded miniroot62.fs, dd'ed it on the micro SD card. I was afraid I'd need to fiddle with some things like sysutils/dtb because I don't know what I would have needed to do. That's because I don't know what it does and for this precise reason I was wrong and I didn't need to do anything. So just dd the miniroot62.fs and you can go to next checkpoint.

$ cu -dl /dev/cuaU0 -s 115200

Penguinisters are very keen on their docker, but for the rest of us it may be difficult to see what the fuss is all about – it’s only been around a few years and everyone’s talking about it. And someone asked again today. What are we missing?

I propose you a small script allowing you to easily manage your networks connections. This script is integrated within the openbox dynamic menus. Moreover, it allow you to automatically have the connections you have pre-defined based.

Nmctl a small tool that allow you to manage your network connections.

I've put nmctl on my sourceforge account here

First you have to create a config and store it in /etc/nmctl.conf.

The keyword "dhcp" will trigger a command like "dhclient <-interface->".

Let me show you one nmctl.conf example. It speaks by itself.

In this config we have several cable's networks associated with my interface "em0" and several wifi networks associated with my wireless interface "iwn0".

Thanks to the dynamic menu feature of oenbox[sic], you can have your different pre-defined networks under one click of your mouse.

In this case, you see the different networks as defined in the config file just above.

But the most interesting part, is coming from a loop through all of your defined networks.

No cable connected, no pre-defined wifi around me:

I'm at home and my wifi router is running:

I'm at home but tethering is active on my mobile:

Same situation, but I cut the tethering just after the scan. Thus the dhcp command will not succeed.

A VPN allows you to securely extend a private network over the internet via tunneling protocols and traffic encryption. For most people, a VPN offers two primary features: (1) the ability to access services on your local network over the internet, and (2) secure internet connectivity over an untrusted network. In this guide, I'll describe how to set up a personal VPN using OpenVPN on FreeBSD. The configuration can use both SSL certificates and LDAP credentials for authentication. We'll also be using the PF firewall to NAT traffic from our VPN out to the internet.

We take a look at two-faced Oracle, cover a FAMP installation, how Netflix works the complex stuff, and show you who the patron of yak shaving is.

Except when the database giant hates open source. Which, according to its recent lobbying of the US federal government, seems to be "most of the time". Yes, Oracle has recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to up its support for open-source Kubernetes and, yes, it has long supported (and contributed to) Linux. And, yes, Oracle has even gone so far as to (finally) open up Java development by putting it under a foundation's stewardship. Yet this same, seemingly open Oracle has actively hammered the US government to consider that "there is no math that can justify open source from a cost perspective as the cost of support plus the opportunity cost of forgoing features, functions, automation and security overwhelm any presumed cost savings." That punch to the face was delivered in a letter to Christopher Liddell, a former Microsoft CFO and now director of Trump's American Technology Council, by Kenneth Glueck, Oracle senior vice president.

Now change Oracle has never been particularly warm and fuzzy about open source. As founder Larry Ellison might put it, Oracle is a profit-seeking corporation, not a peace-loving charity. To the extent that Oracle embraces open source, therefore it does so for financial reward, just like every other corporation. Few, however, are as blunt as Oracle about this fact of corporate open-source life. As Ellison told the Financial Times back in 2006: "If an open-source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. "So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane... We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source." "Exploit" sounds about right. While Oracle doesn't crack the top-10 corporate contributors to the Linux kernel, it does register a respectable number 12, which helps it influence the platform enough to feel comfortable building its IaaS offering on Linux (and Xen for virtualisation). Oracle has also managed to continue growing MySQL's clout in the industry while improving it as a product and business. As for Kubernetes, Oracle's decision to join the CNCF also came with P&L strings attached. "CNCF technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC and OpenTracing are critical parts of both our own and our customers' development toolchains," said Mark Cavage, vice president of software development at Oracle. One can argue that Oracle has figured out the exploitation angle reasonably well. This, however, refers to the right kind of exploitation, the kind that even free software activist Richard Stallman can love (or, at least, tolerate). But when it comes to government lobbying, Oracle looks a lot more like Mr Hyde than Dr Jekyll.

The current US president has many problems (OK, many, many problems), but his decision to follow the Obama administration's support for IT modernisation is commendable. Most recently, the Trump White House asked for feedback on how best to continue improving government IT. Oracle's response is high comedy in many respects. As TechDirt's Mike Masnick summarises, Oracle's "latest crusade is against open-source technology being used by the federal government – and against the government hiring people out of Silicon Valley to help create more modern systems. Instead, Oracle would apparently prefer the government just give it lots of money." Oracle is very good at making lots of money. As such, its request for even more isn't too surprising. What is surprising is the brazenness of its position. As Masnick opines: "The sheer contempt found in Oracle's submission on IT modernization is pretty stunning." Why? Because Oracle contradicts much that it publicly states in other forums about open source and innovation. More than this, Oracle contradicts much of what we now know is essential to competitive differentiation in an increasingly software and data-driven world.

The thing is, Oracle doesn't need to do this and, for its own good, shouldn't do this. After all, we already know how this plays out. We need only look at what happened with Microsoft. Remember when Microsoft wanted us to "get the facts" about Linux? Now it's a big-time contributor to Linux. Remember when it told us open source was anti-American and a cancer? Now it aggressively contributes to a huge variety of open-source projects, some of them homegrown in Redmond, and tells the world that "Microsoft loves open source." Of course, Microsoft loves open source for the same reason any corporation does: it drives revenue as developers look to build applications filled with open-source components on Azure. There's nothing wrong with that.

Note: You don't need to upgrade FreeBSD but make sure all patches have been installed and your port tree is up-2-date if you plan to update by ports.

portsnap fetch

To install Apache 2.4 using pkg. The apache 2.4 user account managing Apache is www in FreeBSD.

If you do not know what your server's public IP address is, there are a number of ways that you can find it. Usually, this is the address you use to connect to your server through SSH.

Now that we have our web server up and running, it is time to install MySQL, the relational database management system. The MySQL server will organize and provide access to databases where our server can store information. Install MySQL 5.7 using pkg by typing

pkg search php70

PHP is the component of our setup that will process code to display dynamic content. It can run scripts, connect to MySQL databases to get information, and hand the processed content over to the web server to display. We're going to install the mod_php, php-mysql, and php-mysqli packages. To install PHP 5.7 with pkg, run this command

To enhance the functionality of PHP, we can optionally install some additional modules. To see the available options for PHP 5.6 modules and libraries, you can type this into your system

pkg install php56-calendar

Now restart Apache to put the changes into effect

By default, the DocumentRoot is set to /usr/local/www/apache24/data. We can create the info.php file under that location by typing

info.php file gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP. It' useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being applied correctly.

Not long ago, House of Cards came back for the fifth season, finally ending a long wait for binge watchers across the world who are interested in an American politician’s ruthless ascendance to presidency. For them, kicking off a marathon is as simple as reaching out for your device or remote, opening the Netflix app and hitting Play. Simple, fast and instantly gratifying. What isn’t as simple is what goes into running Netflix, a service that streams around 250 million hours of video per day to around 98 million paying subscribers in 190 countries. At this scale, providing quality entertainment in a matter of a few seconds to every user is no joke. And as much as it means building top-notch infrastructure at a scale no other Internet service has done before, it also means that a lot of participants in the experience have to be negotiated with and kept satiated?—?from production companies supplying the content, to internet providers dealing with the network traffic Netflix brings upon them.

It looked so simple before, right?

Today I moved the FreshPorts website from one server to another. My goal is for nobody to notice.

I turned off commit processing on the new server, but I did not do this on the old server. I should have:

That stops processing of incoming commits. No data is lost, but it keeps the two databases at the same spot in history. Commit processing could continue during the database dumping, but that does not affect the dump, which will be consistent regardless.

Here is the basic stuff I used to put the website into offline mode. The main points are:

I move the DocumentRoot to a new directory, containing only index.php. Every error invokes index.php, which returns a 503 code.

The database dump just started (Sun Nov 5 17:07:22 UTC 2017).

That should take about 30 minutes. I have set a timer to remind me. Total time was:

The MD5 is:

The rsync should take about 10-20 minutes. I have already done an rsync of yesterday’s dump file. The rsync today should copy over only the deltas (i.e. differences). The rsync started at about Sun Nov 5 17:36:05 UTC 2017 That took 2m9.091s The MD5 matches.

The restore should take about 30 minutes. I ran this test yesterday. It is now Sun Nov 5 17:40:03 UTC 2017.

```$ createdb -T template0 -E SQL_ASCII freshports.testing

It is now Sun Nov 5 18:06:22 UTC 2017.

About here, I took a 30 minute break to run an errand. It was worth it.

I’m ready to change DNS now. It is Sun Nov 5 19:49:20 EST 2017 Done. And nearly immediately, traffic started.

During this process, XXXXX requests were declined:

Total elapsed time: 1 hour 48 minutes. There are still a number of things to follow up on, but that was the transfers.

rbd --dest-pool rbd_data --no-progress import memstick.img memstick

kldload vmm

bhyveload -c /dev/nmdm11A -m 2G -d /dev/ggate1 FB11

bhyve -H -P -A -c 1 -m 2G -l com1,/dev/nmdm11A -s 0:0,hostbridge -s

cu -l /dev/nmdm11B

root@:/ # dd if=/dev/ada0 of=/dev/null bs=32M

In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves. The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX. I figured this is worth repeating.

The ultimate yak shave is the combination of improbable circumstance, the privilege to be able to shave at your hearts will and the will to follow things through to the end. Here’s the way it was achieved with TeX. The recount is purely mine, inaccurate and obviously there for fun. I’ll avoid the most boring facts that everyone always tells, such as why Knuth’s checks have their own Wikipedia page.

Since the release of TeX, the community has been busy working on using it as a platform. If you ever downloaded the full TeX distribution, please bear in mind that you are downloading the amassed work of over 40 years, to make sure that each and every TeX document ever written builds. We’re talking about documents here.

Whenever you feel like “can’t we just replace this whole thing, it can’t be so hard” when handling TeX, don’t forget how many years of work and especially knowledge were poured into that system. Typesetting isn’t the most popular knowledge around programmers. Especially see it in the context of the space it is in: they can’t remove legacy. Ever. That would break documents.

This comes out of a enjoyable discussion with [Arne from Lambda Island](https://lambdaisland.com/https://lambdaisland.com/, who listened and said “you should totally turn this into a talk”.

Let me just share my feedback on those 2 days spent in Paris for the EuroBSDCon. My 1st BSDCon. I'm not a developer, contributor, ... Do not expect to improve your skills with OpenBSD with this text :-) I know, we are on October 16th, and the EuroBSDCon of Paris was 3 weeks ago :( I'm not quick !!! Sorry for that

In the last Fosdem, I've already hear Antoine and Baptiste presenting the OpenBSD and FreeBSD battle, I decide to listen Marc Espie in the medium room called Karnak. Marc explains that he has rewritten completely the pkg_add command. He explains that, at contrario with other elements of OpenBSD, the packages tools must be backward compatible and stable on a longer period than 12 months (the support period for OpenBSD). On the funny side, he explains that he has his best idea inside his bath. Hackathons are also used to validate some ideas with other OpenBSD developers. All in all, he explains that the most time consuming part is to imagine a good solution. Coding it is quite straightforward. He adds that better an idea is, shorter the implementation will be.

After the lunch I decide to listen the talk about Coreboot. Indeed, 1 or 2 years ago I had listened the Libreboot project at Fosdem. Since they did several references to Coreboot, it's a perfect occasion to listen more carefully to this project. Piotr and Katazyba Kubaj explains us how to boot a machine without the native Bios. Indeed Coreboot can replace the bios, and de facto avoid several binaries imposed by the vendor. They explain that some motherboards are supporting their code. But they also show how difficult it is to flash a Bios and replace it by Coreboot. They even have destroyed a motherboard during the installation. Apparently because the power supply they were using was not stable enough with the 3v. It's really amazing to see that open source developers can go, by themselves, to such deep technical level.

After this Coreboot talk, I decide to stay in the room to follow the presentation of Fran?ois Tigeot. Fran?ois is now one of the core developer of DrangonflyBSD, an amazing BSD system having his own filesystem called Hammer. Hammer offers several amazing features like snapshots, checksum data integrity, deduplication, ... Francois has spent his last years to integrate the video drivers developed for Linux inside DrangonflyBSD.

Then I move to the small room at the upper level to follow a presentation made by Laurent Bernaille on OpenBSD and AWS. First Laurent explains that he is re-using the work done by Antoine Jacoutot concerning the integration of OpenBSD inside AWS. But on top of that he has integrated several other Open Source solutions allowing him to build OpenBSD machines very quickly with one command. Moreover those machines will have the network config, the required packages, ... On top of the slides presented, he shows us, in a real demo, how this system works. Amazing presentation which shows that, by putting the correct tools together, a machine builds and configure other machines in one go.

Here Jan Klemkow explains us that he has setup a lab where he is able to run different OpenBSD architectures. The system has been designed to be able to install, on demand, a certain version of OpenBSD on the different available machines. On top of that a regression test script can be triggered. This provides reports showing what is working and what is not more working on the different machines. If I've well understood, Jan is willing to provide such lab to the core developers of OpenBSD in order to allow them to validate easily and quickly their code. Some more effort is needed to reach this goal, but with what exists today, Jan and his colleague are quite close. Since his company is using OpenBSD business, to his eyes this system is a "tit for tat" to the OpenBSD community.

Then comes the second keynote of the day in the big auditorium. This talk is performed by the colonel of french gendarmerie. Mr Freyssinet, who is head of the Cyber crimes unit inside the Gendarmerie. Mr Freyssinet explains that the "bad guys" are more and more volatile across countries, and more and more organized. The small hacker in his room, alone, is no more the reality. As a consequence the different national police investigators are collaborating more inside an organization called Interpol. What is amazing in his talk is that Mr Freyssinet talks about "Crime as a service". Indeed, more and more hackers are selling their services to some "bad and temporary organizations".

It's now time for the famous social event on the river: la Seine. The organizers ask us to go, by small groups, to a station. There is a walk of 15 minutes inside Paris. Hopefully the weather is perfect. To identify them clearly several organizers takes a "beastie fork" in their hands and walk on the sidewalk generating some amazing reactions from some citizens and toursits. Some of them recognize the Freebsd logo and ask us some details. Amazing :-)

On the second day, I decide to sleep enough in order to have enough resources to drive back to my home (3 hours by car). So I miss the 1st presentations, and arrive at the event around 10h30. Lot of persons are already present. Some faces are less "fresh" than others.

Then I decide to follow the presentation of Michael W Lucas. Well know person for his different books about "Absolute OpenBSD", Relayd", ... Michael talks about the httpd daemon inside OpenBSD. But he also present his integration with Carp, Relayd, PF, FastCGI, the rules based on LUA regexp (opposed to perl regexp), ... For sure he emphasis on the security aspect of those tools: privilege separation, chroot, ...

Then I follow the presentation of Gilles Chehade about the OpenSMTPD project. Amazing presentation that, on top of the technical challenges, shows how to manage such project across the years. Gilles is working on OpenSMTPD since 2007, thus 10 years !!!. He explains the different decisions they took to make the software as simple as possible to use, but as secure as possible, too: privilege separation, chroot, pledge, random malloc, ? . The development starts on BSD systems, but once quite well known they received lot of contributions from Linux developers.

After a small break, I decide to listen to Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD. In his own style, with trekking boots, shorts, backpack. Theo starts by saying that Pledge is the outcome of nightmares. Theo explains that the book called "Hacking blind" presenting the BROP has worried him since few years. That's why he developed Pledge as a tool killing a process as soon as possible when there is an unforeseen behavior of this program. For example, with Pledge a program which can only write to disk will be immediately killed if he tries to reach network. By implementing Pledge in the +-500 programs present in the "base", OpenBSD is becoming more secured and more robust.

My first EuroBSDCon was a great, interesting and cool event. I've discussed with several BSD enthusiasts. I'm using OpenBSD since 2010, but I'm not a developer, so I was worried to be "lost" in the middle of experts. In fact it was not the case. At EuroBSDCon you have many different type of enthusiasts BSD's users. What is nice with the EuroBSDCon is that the organizers foresee everything for you. You just have to sit and listen. They foresee even how to spend, in a funny and very cool attitude, the evening of Saturday. > The small draw back is that all of this has a cost. In my case the whole weekend cost me a bit more than 500euro. Based on what I've learned, what I've saw this is very acceptable price. Nearly all presentations I saw give me a valuable input for my daily job. For sure, the total price is also linked to my personal choice: hotel, parking. And I'm surely biased because I'm used to go to the Fosdem in Brussels which cost nothing (entrance) and is approximately 45 minutes of my home. But Fosdem is not the same atmosphere and presentations are less linked to my daily job.

Allan reports on his trip to BSD Taiwan, new versions of Lumina and GhostBSD are here, a bunch of OpenBSD p2k17 hackathon reports.

I also want to give a shout-out to the trueos/lumina-themes github repository contributors. All of the wallpapers in the 1.4.0 screenshots I posted come from that package, and they are working on making more wallpapers, color palettes, and desktop styles for use with the Lumina Theme Engine. If your operating system does not currently provide a package for lumina-themes, I highly recommend that you make one as soon as possible!

One significant change of note for people who are packaging Lumina for their particular operating system is that the minimum supported versions of Qt for Lumina have been changed with this release:

Of course, using the latest version of the Qt5 libraries is always recommended.

So, I did it. Now the kernel sections are split in sub-blocks, and are all randomized independently. See my drawing [1]. What it means in practice, is that Kernel ASLR is much more difficult to defeat: a cache attack will at most allow you to know that a given range is mapped as executable for example, but you don't know which sub-block of .text it is; a kernel pointer leak will at most allow you to reconstruct the layout of one sub-block, but you don't know the layout and address of the remaining blocks, and there can be many.

As I said in the previous episode, I added in October a Kernel ASLR implementation in NetBSD for 64bit x86 CPUs. This implementation would randomize the location of the kernel in virtual memory as one block: a random VA would be chosen, and the kernel ELF sections would be mapped contiguously starting from there.

In the new design, each kernel ELF section is randomized independently. That is to say, the base addresses of .text, .rodata, .data and .bss are not correlated. KASLR is already at this stage more difficult to defeat, since you would need a leak or cache attack on each of the kernel sections in order to reconstruct the in-memory kernel layout.

The kernel ELF sections are themselves split in sub-blocks of approximately 1MB. The kernel therefore goes from having:

to having

As of today, this produces a kernel with ~33 sections, each of which is mapped at a random address and in a random order.

Each section is put in a 2MB-sized physical memory chunk. Given that the sections are 1MB in size, this leaves half of the 2MB chunk unused. Once in control, the prekern shifts the section within the chunk using a random offset, aligned to the ELF alignment constraint. This offset has a maximum value of 1MB, so that once shifted the section still resides in its initial 2MB chunk:

Of course, we are talking about one .text.i section here; the sections that will be mapped afterwards will have fewer location possibilities because some slots will be already occupied. However, this does not alter the fact that the resulting entropy is still higher than that of the other implementations. Note also that several sections have an alignment constraint smaller than 64 bytes, and that in such cases the entropy is even higher.

There is also a reason we chose to use 2MB-aligned 2MB-sized ranges of VAs: when the kernel is in control and initializes itself, it can now use large pages to map the physical 2MB chunks. This greatly improves memory access performance at the CPU level.

With the memory shift explained above, randomness is therefore enforced at both the physical and virtual levels: the address of the first page of a section does not equal the address of the section itself anymore.

This KASLR implementation, which splits the kernel in dozens of sub-blocks, randomizes them independently, while at the same time allowing for higher entropy in a way that offers large page support and some countermeasures against TLB cache attacks, appears to be the most advanced KASLR implementation available publicly as of today.

Even if it is in a functional state, this implementation is still a work in progress, and some of the issues mentioned in the previous blog post haven't been addressed yet. But feel free to test it and report any issue you encounter. Instructions on how to use this implementation can still be found in the previous blog post, and haven’t changed since.

After a year of development, testing, debugging and working on our software package repository, we are pleased to announce the release of GhostBSD 11.1 is now available on 64-bit(amd64) architecture with MATE and XFCE Desktop on direct and torrent download. With 11.1 we drop 32-bit i386 supports, and we currently maintain our software packages repository for more stability.

Ken Moore of the TrueOS project presented a talk to the AITP group at Pellissippi State today entitled “It’s A Unix(-like) system? An Introduction to TrueOS and Open source”. Joshua Smith of the TrueOS project was also in attendance.

So, again this release the tradition of making Theo do art has continued!

We have a first PS4 kernel exploit, the long awaited OpenZFS devsummit report by Allan, DragonflyBSD 5.0 is out, we show you vmadm to manage jails, and parallel processing with Unix tools.

Plenty of time has passed since we first demonstrated Linux running on the PS4. Now we will step back a bit and explain how we managed to jump from the browser process into the kernel such that ps4-kexec et al. are usable. Over time, ps4 firmware revisions have progressively added many mitigations and in general tried to lock down the system. This post will mainly touch on vulnerabilities and issues which are not present on the latest releases, but should still be useful for people wanting to investigate ps4 security.

As previously explained, we were able to get a dump of the ps4 firmware 1.01 kernel via a PCIe man-in-the-middle attack. Like all FreeBSD kernels, this image included “export symbols” - symbols which are required to perform kernel and module initialization processes. However, the ps4 1.01 kernel also included full ELF symbols (obviously an oversight as they have been removed in later firmware versions). This oversight was beneficial to the reverse engineering process, although of course not a true prerequisite. Indeed, we began exploring the kernel by examining built-in metadata in the form of the syscall handler table - focusing on the ps4-specific entries.

To an exploiter without ps4 background, it might seem that the easiest way to exploit this bug would be to take advantage of the write off the end of the malloc’d namedobj_usr_t object. However, this turns out to be impossible (as far as I know) because of a side effect of the ps4 page size being changed to 0x4000 bytes (from the normal of 0x1000). It appears that in order to change the page size globally, the ps4 kernel developers opted to directly change the related macros. One of the many changes resulting from this is that the smallest actual amount of memory which malloc may give back to a caller becomes 0x40 bytes. While this also results in tons of memory being completely wasted, it does serve to nullify certain exploitation techniques (likely completely by accident…).

The namedobj exploit was present and exploitable (albeit using a slightly different method than described here) until it was fixed in firmware version 4.06. This vulnerability was also found and exploited by (at least) Chaitin Tech, so props to them! Taking a quick look at the 4.07 kernel, we can see a straightforward fix (4.06 is assumed to be identical - only had 4.07 on hand while writing this post):

And so we say goodbye to a nice exploit. I hope you enjoyed this blast from the past :) Keep hacking!

The 5th annual OpenZFS Developer Summit was held in San Francisco on October 24-25. Hosted by Delphix at the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, over a hundred OpenZFS contributors from a wide variety of companies attended and collaborated during the conference and developer summit. iXsystems was a Gold sponsor and several iXsystems employees attended the conference, including the entire Technical Documentation Team, the Director of Engineering, the Senior Analyst, a Tier 3 Support Engineer, and a Tier 2 QA Engineer.

We are releasing the first version (0.1.0) of our clone of vmadm for FreeBSD jails today. It is not done or feature complete, but it does provides basic functionality. At this point, we think it would be helpful to get it out there and get some feedback. As of today, it allows basic management of datasets, as well as creating, starting, stopping, and destroying jails.

However, before we go into details let’s talk why we build yet another jail manager? It is not the frequent NIH syndrome, actually quite the opposite. In FiFo 0.9.2 we experimented with iocage as a way to control jails. While iocage is a useful tool when used as a CLI utility it has some issues when used programmatically.

Today we can manage datasets, which are jail templates in the form of ZFS volumes. We can list and serve them from a dataset-server, and fetch those we like want. At this point, we provide datasets for FreeBSD 10.0 to 11.1, but it is very likely that the list will grow. As an idea here is a community-driven list of datasets that exist for SmartOS today. Moreover, while those datasets will not work, we hope to see the same for BSD jails.

First and foremost we hope to get some feedback and perhaps community engagement. In the meantime, as announced earlier this year, we are hard at work integrating FreeBSD hypervisors in FiFo, and as of writing this, the core actions work quite well.

piping

The examples below will compare the above methods for implementing multi-processing, for the function of counting lines in a file. First of all let's generate some test data. We use both long and short lines to compare the overhead of the various methods compared to the core cost of the function being performed:

We'll also define the add() { paste -d+ -s | bc; } helper function to add a list of numbers.

$ time for i in $(seq $(nproc)); do

$ time split -nr/$(nproc) --filter='wc -l' lines.txt | add

$ time parallel --will-cite --block=200M --pipe 'wc -l' < lines.txt | add

split -d -n l/$(nproc) lines.txt l.

%: FORCE # Always run the command

$ time find -name 'l.*' -exec make -j$(nproc) {} + | add

int main(void)

}

Papers we love: ARC by Bryan Cantrill, SSD caching adventures with ZFS, OpenBSD full disk encryption setup, and a Perl5 Slack Syslog BSD daemon.

When doing your research about xargs you did it for a purpose, right? You had a specific need that was reading standard output and executing commands based on that output.

Use man -k or apropos (they are equivalent). If I don't know how to find a file: man -k file | grep search. Read the descriptions and find one that will better fit your needs.

xargs reads from STDIN and executes the command needed. This also means that you will need to have some knowledge of how standard input works, and how to manipulate it through pipes to chain commands

When this method will not work so well...

Generally, -v means verbose. -vvv is a variation "very very verbose" on some software.

At the pager chunk of this answer, we saw that less -is is the pager of man. The default behavior of commands are not always shown at a separated section on manpages, or at the section that is most top placed.

After getting all the information needed to execute the command, you can combine options, option-arguments and operands inline to make your job done. Overview of concepts:

Recently I decided to throw away my old defunct 2009 MacBook Pro which was rotting in my cupboard and I decided to retrieve the only useful part before doing so, the 80GB Intel SSD I had installed a few years earlier. Initially I thought about simply adding it to my desktop as a bit of extra space but in 2017 80GB really wasn’t worth it and then I had a brainwave… Lets see if we can squeeze some additional performance out of my HP Microserver Gen8 NAS running ZFS by installing it as a cache disk.

Now lets prep the drive for use in the zpool using gpart. I want to split the SSD into two seperate partitions, one for L2ARC (read caching) and one for ZIL (write caching). I have decided to split the disk into 20GB for ZIL and 50GB for L2ARC. Be warned using 1 SSD like this is considered unsafe because it is a single point of failure in terms of delayed writes (a redundant configuration with 2 SSDs would be more appropriate) and the heavy write cycles on the SSD from the ZIL is likely to kill it over time.

Ok, so the initial result is a little dissapointing, but hardly unexpected, my NAS sucks and there are lots of bottle necks, CPU, memory and the fact only 2 of the SATA ports are 6gbps. There is no real difference performance wise in comparison between the results, the IOPS, bandwidth and latency appear very similar. However lets bare in mind fio is a pretty hardcore disk benchmark utility, how about some real world use cases?

Not bad once the data becomes hot in the L2ARC cache reads appear to gain a decent advantage compared to reading from the disk directly. How does it perform when writing the same file back accross the network using the ZIL vs no ZIL.

Another good result in the real world test, this certainately helps the write transfer speed however I do wonder what would happen if you filled the ZIL transferring a very large file, however this is unlikely with my use case as I typically only deal with a couple of files of several hundred megabytes at any given time so a 20GB ZIL should suit me reasonably well.

I would imagine with a big beefy ZFS server running in a company somewhere with a large disk pool and lots of users with multiple enterprise level SSD ZIL and L2ARC would be well worth the investment, however at home I am not so sure. Yes I did see an increase in read speeds with cached data and a general increase in write speeds however it is use case dependant. In my use case I rarely access the same file frequently, my NAS primarily serves as a backup and for archived data, and although the write speeds are cool I am not sure its a deal breaker. If I built a new home NAS today I’d probably concentrate the budget on a better CPU, more RAM (for ARC cache) and more disks. However if I had a use case where I frequently accessed the same files and needed to do so in a faster fashion then yes, I’d probably invest in an SSD for caching. I think if you have a spare SSD lying around and you want something fun todo with it, sure chuck it in your ZFS based NAS as a cache mechanism. If you were planning on buying an SSD for caching then I’d really consider your needs and decide if the money can be spent on alternative stuff which would improve your experience with your NAS. I know my NAS would benefit more from an extra stick of RAM and a more powerful CPU, but as a quick evening project with some parts I had hanging around adding some SSD cache was worth a go.

(I)nstall: I

Using a SSD, my disk is named : sd0, the name may vary, for example : wd0.

Let's resume the OpenBSD's installer. We follow the install procedure

We select our new volume, in this case: sd1

It's time to choose how we'll install our system (network install by http in my case)

Put your passphrase. Welcome to OpenBSD 6.2 with a full encrypted file system.

The swap is actually part of the encrypted filesystem, we don't need OpenBSD to encrypt it. Sysctl is giving us this possibility.

In the past week, I read the ldd source code on OpenBSD to get a better understanding of how it works. And this post should also be a reference for other*NIX OSs.

When LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS is set to 1 or true, running executable file will show shared objects needed instead of running it, so you even not needldd to check executable file. See the following outputs:

Why the condition of checking a ELF file is shared object or not is like this:

That’s because the file type of position-independent executable (PIE) is the same as shared object, but normally PIE contains a interpreter program header since it needs dynamic linker to load it while shared object lacks (refer this article). So the above condition will filter PIE file.

In fact, you can also implement a simple application which outputs dynamic object information for shared object yourself:

Compile and use it to analyze /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2:

The same as using ldd directly:

Through the studying of ldd source code, I also get many by-products: such as knowledge of ELF file, linking and loading, etc. So diving into code is a really good method to learn *NIX deeper!

So I have been working on my little Perl daemon for a week now.

The situation arose today that the internet went down and I thought to myself what would happen to all my important syslog messages when they couldn’t be sent? Before the script only ran an eval block on the botsend() function. The error was returned, handled, but nothing was done and the unsent message was discarded. So I added a function that appended unsent messengers to an array that are later sent when the server is not busy sending messages to slack.

There is a neat command, lscpu, which is very handy to display CPU information on GNU/Linux OS:

But unfortunately, the BSD OSs lack this command, maybe one reason is lscpu relies heavily on /proc file system which BSD don’t provide, :-). TakeOpenBSD as an example, if I want to know CPU information, dmesg should be one choice:

But the output makes me feeling messy, not very clear. As for dmidecode, it used to be another option, but now can’t work out-of-box because it will access /dev/mem which for security reason, OpenBSD doesn’t allow by default (You can refer this discussion):

Based on above situation, I want a specified command for showing CPU information for my BSD box. So in the past 2 weeks, I developed a lscpu program for OpenBSD/FreeBSD, or more accurately, OpenBSD/FreeBSD on x86 architecture since I only have some Intel processors at hand. The application getsCPU metrics from 2 sources:

FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE is here, more EuroBSDcon travel notes, the KRACK attack, ZFS and DTrace on NetBSD, and pfsense 2.4.

10.4-RELEASE is the first FreeBSD release to feature full support for eMMC storage, including eMMC partitions, TRIM and bus speed modes up to HS400. Please note, though, that availability of especially the DDR52, HS200 and HS400 modes requires support in the actual sdhci(4) front-end as well as by the hardware used. Also note, that the SDHCI controller part of Intel® Apollo Lake chipsets is affected by several severe silicon bugs. Apparently, it depends on the particular Apollo Lake platform whether the workarounds in place so far are sufficient to avoid timeouts on attaching sdhci(4) there.

Let me tell you about my experience at EuroBSDcon 2017 in Paris, France. We will see what was presented during the NetBSD developer summit on Friday and then we will give a look to all of the NetBSD and pkgsrc presentations given during the conference session on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, a lot of fun also happened on the "hall track", the several breaks during the conference and the dinners we had together with other *BSD developers and community! This is difficult to describe and I will try to just share some part of that with photographs that we have taken. I can just say that it was a really beautiful experience, I had a great time with others and, after coming back home... ...I miss all of that! :) So, if you have never been in any BSD conferences I strongly suggest you to go to the next ones, so please stay tuned via NetBSD Events. Being there this is probably the only way to understand these feelings!

Arriving in Paris via a night train from Italy I literally sleep-walked through Paris getting lost again and again. After getting in touch with other developers we had a dinner together and went sightseeing for aWseveral beers!

A Modern Replacement for BSD spell(1) -- Abhinav Upadhyay (abhinav)

The social event on Saturday evening took place on a boat that cruised on the Seine river.

After the conference we did some sightseeing in Paris, had a dinner together and then enjoyed some beers!

It was a very nice weekend and conference. It is worth to mention that EuroBSDcon 2017 was the biggest BSD conference (more than 300 people attended it!).

“We discovered serious weaknesses in WPA2, a protocol that secures all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. An attacker within range of a victim can exploit these weaknesses using key reinstallation attacks (KRACKs). Concretely, attackers can use this novel attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted. This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos, and so on. The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites.”

“What happened is that he told me on July 15, and gave a 6 weeks embargo until end of August. We already complained back then that this was way too long and leaving people exposed. Then he got CERT (and, thus, US gov agencies) involved and had to extend the embargo even further until today. At that point we already had the ball rolling and decided to stick to the original agreement with him, and he gave us an agreeing nod towards that as well.”

“To avoid this problem in the future, OpenBSD will now receive vulnerability notifications closer to the end of an embargo.”

I've been working on updating netbsd's copy of the dtrace and zfs code to rebase from the existing ancient opensolaris version to a recent freebsd version. most of the freebsd changes are pretty close to what netbsd needs, so that seems like a more useful upstream for us. I have things working well enough now that I want to share the code in preparation for committing.

picks up all the upstream zfs fixes and enhancements from the last decade

freebsd's dtrace/zfs code as of r315983 (2017-03-26), adapted for netbsd.

unloading the zfs module fails even with no zpools imported if you've done much with zfs since it was loaded. there's some refcounting problem that I haven't tracked down yet.

the ".zfs" virtual directory, eg. ".zfs/snapshot/foo@bar"

We are excited to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4, now available for new installations and upgrades!

FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE as the base Operating System

32-bit x86 and NanoBSD have been deprecated and are not supported on pfSense 2.4.

I showed up at t2k17 with a couple hold-over diffs from e2k17 that weren't stable then and hadn't gotten much better since, so after a red-eye through Chicago I arrived in the hackroom, fired up my laptop and synced trees.

OpenBSD 6.2 is here, style arguments, a second round of viewer interview questions, how to set CPU affinity for FreeBSD jails, containers on FreeNAS & more!

Improved hardware support on modern platforms including ARM64/ARMv7 and octeon, while amd64 users will appreciate additional support for the Intel Kaby Lake video cards.

I've been thinking about why we argue about code, and how we might transform vehement differences of opinion into active forces for good.

Most programmers agree with the prior paragraph, but here's where things begin to break down. As far as I'm concerned, my personal formatting style is clearly the best. However, I'm quite sure that you feel the same. It's easy for a group of programmers to agree that all code should follow a common style, but surprisingly difficult to get them to agree on just what that common style should be.

If you disagree with the style guide upon which your team agrees, you have only two honorable options:

Press 1 to get into the command line.

usb reset

fatload usb 0:1 0x80800000 kernel.MT7628_FDT.lzma.uImage

bootm 0x80800000

I just got a new home server: a HP ProLiant ML110 G6. Being a FreeBSD person myself, it was natural that I used it on my server instead of Linux

ezjail-admin config -c [CORE_NUMBER_FIRST],[CORE_NUMBER_SECOND],...,[CORE_NUMBER_N] [JAIL_NAME]

You know that jails are dope and I know that jails are dope, yet no one else knows it. So here we are stuck with docker. Two years ago I would be the last person to recommend using docker, but a whole lot of things has changes past years…

There are many Linux variants you can choose from — RancherOS, CoreOS are the most popular for docker-only hosts. We going to use RancherOS because it’s more lightweight out of the box.

sudo iohyve setup pool=zpool kmod=1 net=em0

The whole point of this guide is to reduce pain, and using the docker CLI is still painful. There are a lot of Web UIs to control docker. Most of them include a lot of orchestrating services, so it’s just overkill. Portainer is very lightweight and can be run even on Raspberry Pi

After reboot you will be able to access WebUI on 9000 port. Setup is very easy, so I won’t go over it

EuroBSDcon trip report, how to secure OpenBSD’s LDAP server, ZFS channel programs in FreeBSD HEAD and why software is storytelling.

My attendance at the EuroBSDCon 2017 conference in Paris was sprinkled with

You might have been noticing the amount of commits to ports regarding autoconf and nested functions and asking yourself… what the hell is this all about?

-GDK_HIDDEN_VISIBILITY_CFLAGS = -fvisibility=hidden

-lt_cv_prog_compiler_rtti_exceptions=no

-#define GDK_EXTERN __attribute_((visibility("default"))) extern

-lt_prog_compiler_no_builtin_flag=' -fno-builtin'

configure:29137: checking for -fvisibility=hidden compiler flag

configure:29150: cc -c -fvisibility=hidden -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/X11R6/include conftest.c >&5

int main (void) { return 0; }

Okay that's clearly an error but why exactly? autoconf basically generates a huge shell script that will check for whatever you throw at it by creating a file called conftest.c and putting chunks of code into it and then trying to compile it. In this case the relevant part of the code was:

| int

That is a nested function declaration which is a GNU extension and it is not supported by clang, but that's okay, the question is why the hell would you use nested functions to check for simple compiler flags. The next step was to go and check what is going on in configure.ac to see how the configure script is generated. In the gtk+3 case the following snippet is used:

AC_TRY_COMPILE([], [int main (void) { return 0; }],

According to the autoconf manual the AC_TRY_COMPILE macro accepts the following parameters:

OpenBSD has its own LDAP server, ldapd. Here's how to configure it for use with StartTLS and SASL authentication

/usr/sbin/ldapd -n

rcctl enable ldapd

TLS_CACERT /etc/ssl/trusted.crt

rcctl enable saslauthd

ldapsearch -H ldap://ldapserver -ZZ

ZFS channel programs (ZCP) adds support for performing compound ZFS administrative actions via Lua scripts in a sandboxed environment (with time and memory limits).

Software engineering is more a practice in archeology than it is in building. As an industry, we undervalue storytelling and focus too much on artifacts and tools and deliverables. How many times have you been left scratching your head while looking at a piece of code, system, or process? It’s the story, the legacy left behind by that artifact, that is just as important—if not more—than the artifact itself.

We look at how Netflix serves 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance, read through the 2nd quarter FreeBSD status report, show you a freebsd-update speedup via nginx reverse proxy, and customize your OpenBSD default shell.

In the summer of 2015, the Netflix Open Connect CDN team decided to take on an ambitious project. The goal was to leverage the new 100GbE network interface technology just coming to market in order to be able to serve at 100 Gbps from a single FreeBSD-based Open Connect Appliance (OCA) using NVM Express (NVMe)-based storage.

Normally, most of an OCA’s content is served from disk, with only 10–20% of the most popular titles being served from memory (see our previous blog, Content Popularity for Open Connect for details). However, our early pre-NVMe prototypes were limited by disk bandwidth. So we set up a contrived experiment where we served only the very most popular content on a test server. This allowed all content to fit in RAM and therefore avoid the temporary disk bottleneck. Surprisingly, the performance actually dropped from being CPU limited at 40 Gbps to being CPU limited at only 22 Gbps!

FreeBSD Team Reports

• FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

• BSD Meetups at Rennes (France)

• HardenedBSD

Either because you're a good netizen and don't want to repeatedly hammer the FreeBSD mirrors to upgrade all your systems, or you want to benefit from the speed of having a local "mirror" (cache, more precisely), running a freebsd update reverse proxy cache with, say, nginx is dead simple.

The operating system uses FreeBSD's development branch (12.0-CURRENT) as its base. ClonOS uses ZFS as the default file system and includes web-based administration tools for managing virtual machines and jails. The project's website also mentions the availability of templates for quickly setting up new containers and web-based VNC access to jails. Puppet, we are told, can be used for configuration management.

While playing with ClonOS, I wanted to perform a couple of simple tasks. I wanted to use the Wordpress template to set up a blog inside a jail. I wanted a generic, empty jail in which I could play and run commands without harming the rest of the operating system. I also wanted to try installing an operating system other than FreeBSD inside a Bhyve virtual environment. I thought this would give me a pretty good idea of how quick and easy ClonOS would make common tasks.

ClonOS appears to be in its early stages of development, more of a feature preview or proof-of-concept than a polished product. A few of the settings pages have not been finished yet, the web-based controls for jails are unable to create jails that connect to the network and I was unable to upload even small ISO files to create virtual machines.

The default shell for OpenBSD is ksh, and it looks a little monotonous.

I tagged DragonFly 5.0 (commit message list in that link) over the weekend, and there’s a 5.0 release candidate for download.