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BSD Now episodes

February 17, 2016129: Synthesize all the Things!
Coming up this week, we will be talking to John Marino about his work on the ports-mgmt utility “Synth” and the cross-pollination between DragonFly and FreeBSD. That plus the latest news and your email here on
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glibc and the BSDs
You have likely already heard about CVE-2015-7547
“A stack-based buffer overflow was found in the way the libresolv library performed dual A/AAAA DNS queries. A remote attacker could create a specially crafted DNS response which could cause libresolv to crash or,
potentially, execute code with the permissions of the user running the library.”
“Note: this issue is only exposed when libresolv is called from the nss_dns NSS service module.”
More details from Google’s Online Security team blog
“Naturally, people have started asking whether FreeBSD is affected. The FreeBSD Security Officer has not yet released an official statement, but in the meantime, here is a brief look at the issue as far as FreeBSD is concerned.”
“First of all: neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected. While the resolver in FreeBSD’s libc and GNU libc share a common parentage, the bug was introduced when the latter was rewritten to send A and AAAA queries in parallel rather than sequentially when the application requests both.”
The same most likely applies to the other BSDs
“However, Linux applications running under emulation on a FreeBSD system use the GNU libc and are therefore vulnerable unless patched.”
A patch to update emulation/linux_base-c6 has been prepared and should be committed soon
Running ‘pkg audit’ will list any known vulnerable packages installed on your system
“The issue can be mitigated by only using resolvers you trust, and configuring them to avoid sending responses which can trigger the bug.”
“If you already have your own resolvers, you can configure them to avoid sending UDP responses larger than 2048 bytes. If the response does not fit in 2048 bytes, the server will send a truncated response, and the client should retry using TCP. While a similar bug exists in the code path for TCP requests, I believe that it can only be exploited by a malicious resolver, and interposing your own resolver will protect affected Linux systems and applications.”
Dag-Erling’s blog post also includes instructions and configuration examples for locking down your resolver, or setting up your own resolver if you don’t have one already
***
OpenBSD Foundation - 2016 Fundraising Campaign
The OpenBSD foundation has announced their 2016 fundraising campaign, and set the goal of raising $250k for the year.
While they mention that fundraising for 2015 didn’t hit 2014’s blockbuster numbers, it still exceeded the goal set, with an almost equal mix of corporate and community donors.
‘Our goal for 2016 is to increase the amount of support we offer for development, without compromising our regular support for the projects. We would like to:
Plan and support more developer events (hackathons), and allow for more developers to attend these events.
Continue to improve the project infrastructure.
Fund more dedicated developer time for targeted development of specific projects.‘
To give you an idea of how much OpenBSD technology is used around the world, they broke it down this way:
If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal.
If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal.
If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.
Getting Started with ION-DTN 3.4.0 on FreeBSD
“The Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) software distribution is an implementation of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture as described in Internet RFC 4838, suitable for use in spacecraft”
This tutorial covers setting up ION 3.4.0 on FreeBSD
The tutorial starts by downloading the ION software, and installing the relevant build tools
The instructions allow ION to be installed system-wide, or for a specific user
The each host is configured
Then pings are traded between the hosts to ensure everything works
Then a web page is served over the interplanetary network
Sadly I don’t have any hosts on other planets to test with.
The tutorial also includes a troubleshooting guide
***
Open Storage Issue – New BSD Mag is Out!
The next issue of BSDMag (The Open Storage Issue) just landed which features an interview with Matt Olander of iXsystems.
During the interview, Matt talks about the culture of support for open-source down at iX, not only FreeNAS and PC-BSD, but the FreeBSD foundation, Slackware and more.
He also gets to extol the virtues of the open-source development model itself, why it tends to lead to better code overall.
In addition to the lead interview with Matt, this issue also features some other great interviews with Open Source storage vendors, and even some ZFS howto’s about setting up your ZIL devive
***
Interview - John Marino - [email protected]
FreeNAS with FreeBSD as its base helped save taxpayers $36,000 for a small public school district
News Roundup
Getting Started With Tor Hidden Services on FreeBSD
Ever wondered how to setup and use a Tor hidden service? We have a walkthrough posted over on github.io which details how to do that on a FreeBSD -CURRENT system.
The basics are pretty simple, installing security/tor is the first step (although, he is using portmaster, you may wish to just ‘pkg install security/tor’)
The walkthrough provides an example server hosting just the date/time on port 8080, which you can use as an example and to verify it works, before serving anything real.
Once a local server is ready to serve something, the Tor setup is pretty quick, basically just two lines of config in torrc:
HiddenServiceDir /usr/home/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080
After starting the service, the walkthrough will show you how to get the new hostname for this hidden service and verify its functionality.
ZFS Remote Mirrors for Home Use
A recently updated tutorial on remotely mirroring your ZFS files
Using a spare old computer, or a SBC like a Raspberry Pi, and an (external) hard drive
It covers installing and configuring FreeBSD for both sides of the remote replication
The new appendix covers the creation of a Raspberry Pi image, although a prebuilt one is also provided
The setup uses GELI to ensure the data is encrypted at-rest
Updating and maintaining both systems is covered in detail
The article is very detailed, and covers pretty much every aspect of the setup, including suggestions on where to physically locate the remote system, and configuration tips to reduce the chance that local intervention will be required
Most importantly, it covers the disaster recovery steps. How to get your files back when bad things happen
***
Lumina Desktop 0.8.8 Released
PC-BSD’s very own Lumina desktop has issued a new release, 0.8.8
Notable in this release is support for NetBSD out of box, improvements to the start menu, and ability to change monitor resolutions in the X configuration tool. (Also the desktop font colors look better!)
0.8.8 is now available in PC-BSD via pkg, and FreeBSD ports/pkg system as well.
Lumina Desktop aims for v1.0 in July 2016
We also have a blog post from Larry over at FossForce, highlighting that 1.0 of Lumina is still targeted for July(ish)
***
NetBSD on Google's Compute Engine
A NetBSD developer has gotten NetBSD running on Google Compute Engine, a service somewhat similar to Amazon’s EC2, and Microsoft’s Azure
Support is still being worked on, but I imagine it will land in NetBSD before too long
NetBSD on GCE dmesg
OpenBSD on GCE
FreeBSD on GCE
***
BeastieBits
htop 2.0 released - an interactive process viewer for Unix (including FreeBSD and OpenBSD)
Full set of binary packages for 7.0 released for ARM v6 and v7 (hf)
DragonFly 4.4.2 released
LibertyBSD 5.8 has been released
Broadwell systems may want to take advantage of the patch by Imre Vadasz
Finding the hard-to-spot bugs in FreeBSD
Feedback/Questions
Johnny - The Daily Show
Randy - Let it BSD
Miguel - NullFS
Jaek - PC-BSD Hardware
***
1 hr 44 min
February 10, 2016128: The State of BSD
This week on BSDNow, we interview Nick Wolff about how FreeBSD is used across the State of Ohio and some of the specific technology used. That, plus the latest news is coming your way right now on BSDNow, the place to
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Doc like an Egyptian: Managing project documentation with Sphinx
In case you didn’t make it out to SCALE a few weeks back, we have a great interview with Dru Lavigne over at OpenSource.com which goes over her talk on “Doc like an Egyptian”.
In particular she discusses the challenges of running a wiki for documentation for PC-BSD and FreeNAS which prompted the shift to using Sphinx instead.
“While the main purpose of a wiki is to invite user contributions and to provide a low barrier to entry, very few people come to write documentation (however, every spambot on the planet will quickly find your wiki, which creates its own set of maintenance issues).
Wikis are designed for separate, one-ish page infobytes, such as how-tos. They really aren't designed to provide navigation in a Table of Contents or to provide a flow of Chapters, though you can hack your pages to provide navigational elements to match the document's flow. This gets more difficult as the document increases in size—our guides tend to be 300+ pages. It becomes a nightmare as you try to provide versioned copies of each of those pages so that the user is finding and reading the right page for their version of software.
While wiki translation extensions are available, how to configure them is not well documented, their use is slow and clunky, and translated pages only increase the number of available pages, getting you back to the problems in the previous bullet. This is a big deal for projects that have a global audience.
While output-generation wiki extensions are available (for example, to convert your wiki pages to HTML or PDF), how to configure them is not well documented, and they provide very little control for the layout of the generated format. This is a big deal for projects that need to make their documentation available in multiple formats.“
She then discusses some of the hurdles of migration from the Wiki to Sphinx, and follows up with some of the differences using Sphinx you should be aware of for any documentation project.
“While Sphinx is easy to learn, it does have its quirks. For example, it does not support stacked tags. This means, for example, you can not bold italic a phrase using tags—to achieve that requires a CSS workaround. And, while Sphinx does have extensive documentation, a lot of it assumes you already know what you are doing. When you don't, it can be difficult to find an example that does what you are trying to achieve.
Sphinx is well suited for projects with an existing repository—say, on github—a build infrastructure, and contributors who are comfortable with using text editors and committing to the repo (or creating, say, git pull requests).“
Initial FreeBSD RISC-V Architecture Port Committed.
Touching on a story we mentioned a few weeks back, we have a blog post from from Annie over at the FreeBSD foundation talking about the details behind the initial support for RISC-V.
To start us off, you may be wondering what is RISC-V and what makes it special?RISC-V is an exciting new open-source Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA) developed at the University of California at Berkeley, which is seeing increasing interest in the embedded systems and hardware-software research communities.
Currently the improvements allows booting FreeBSD in the Spike simulator, from the university of Berkeley, with enough reliability to do various things, such as SSH, shell, mail, etc.
The next steps include getting multi-core support working, and getting it working in simulations of Cambridge’s open-source LowRISC System-on-Chip functioning, and ready for early hardware.
Both ports and packages are expected to land in the coming days, so if you love hacking on branch new architectures, this may be your time to jump in.
***
FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor supporting Windows UEFI guests
If you have not been following bhyve lately, you’re in for a treat when FreeBSD 10.3 ships in the coming weeks
bhyve now supports UEFI and CSM booting, in addition to its existing FreeBSD userboot loader, and grub-bhyve port
The EFI support allows Windows guests to be run on FreeBSD
Due to the lack of graphics, this requires making a custom .iso to do an ‘Unattended Install’ of Windows, but this is easily done just editing and including a .xml file
The bootrom can now allocate memory
Added some SATA command emulations (no-op)
Increased the number of virtio-blk indirect descriptors
Added a Firmware guest query interface
Add -l option to specify userboot path
FreeBSD Bhyve Hypervisor Running Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
In related news, TidalScale officially released their product today
TidalScale is a commercial product based on bhyve that allows multiple physical machines to be combined into a single massive virtual machine, with the combined processor power, memory, disk I/O, and network capacity of all of the machines
***
FreeBSD TACACS+ GNS3 and Cisco 3700 Router
“TACACS+ – (Terminal Access Controller Access Control System plus) — is a session protocol developed by Cisco.”
This tutorial covers configuring FreeBSD and the tac_plus4 port to act as an authentication, authorization, and accounting server for Cisco routers
The configuration of FreeBSD, the software, and the router are covered
It also includes how to set the FreeBSD server up as a VM on windows, and bridge it to the network
I am sure there are some network administrators out there that would appreciate this
***
Interview - Nick Wolff - [email protected] / @darkfiberiru
News Roundup
Papers We Love Presents : Bryan Cantrill on Jails & Solaris Zones
The folks over at NYCBug point us to “Papers We Love”, a New York based meetup group where past papers are presented. They have a talk scheduled for tomorrow (Feb 11th) with Bryan Cantrill discussing Jails and Solaris Zones
The talk starts at 7PM at the Tumblr building, located between 5th and Park Ave South on 21st street
“We're crazy excited to have Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent, formerly of Sun Microsystems, presenting on Jails: Confining the omnipotent root.
by Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson and Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads by Dan Price and Andy Tucker!”
The abstract posted gives us a sneak peak of what to expect, first covering jails as a method to “partition” the operating system environment, but maintaining the UNIX “root” model.
Next it looks like he will compare and contrast with the Solaris Zones functionality, which creates virtualized application execution environments, within the single OS instance.
Sounds like a fantastic talk, hopefully somebody remembers to record and post it for us to enjoy later!
There will not be a live stream, but a video of the event should appear online after it has been edited
***
FreeBSD Storage Summit
The FreeBSD Foundation will be hosting a Storage Summit, co-located at the USENIX FAST (Filesystems And Storage Technology) conference
Developers and Vendors are invited to work on storage related issues
This summit will be a hackathon focused event, rather than a discussion focused devsummit
After setup and introductions, the summit will start with a “Networking Synergies Panel”, to discuss networking as it relates to storage
After a short break, the attendees will break up into a number of working groups focused on solving actual problems
The current working groups include:
CAM Scheduling & Locking, led by Justin Gibbs: “Updating CAM queuing/scheduling and locking models to minimize cross-cpu contention and support multi-queue controllers”
ZFS, led by Matt Ahrens: topics will include enabling the new cryptographic hashes supported by OpenZFS on FreeBSD, Interaction with the kernel memory subsystem, and other upcoming features.
User Space Storage Stack, led by George Neville-Neil
This event offers a unique opportunity for developers and vendors from the storage industry to meet at an event they will likely already be attending
***
Tor Browser 5.5 for OpenBSD/amd64 -current is completed
“The Tor BSD Diversity Project (TDP) is proud to announce the release of Tor Browser (TB) version 5.5 for OpenBSD. Please note that this version of TB remains in development mode, and is not meant to ensure strong privacy, anonymity or security.”
“TDP (https://torbsd.github.io) is an effort to extend the use of the BSD Unixes into the Tor ecosystem, from the desktop to the network. TDP is focused on diversifying the Tor network, with TB being the flagship project.
Additional efforts are made to increase the number of *BSD relays on the Tor network among other sub-projects”
Help test the new browser bundle, or help diversify the Tor network
***
“FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” Table of Contents
We brought you the news about sponsoring the Advanced ZFS book that MWL is working on, now Michael has given us the tentative chapter layout of the (sure to be a classic) tome coming from him and Allan.
0: Introduction
1: Boot Environments
2: Delegation and Jails
3: Sharing
4: Replication
5: zvols
6: Advanced Hardware
7: Caches
8: Performance
9: Tuning
10: ZFS Potpourri
In addition to the tease about the upcoming book, michael has asked the community for assistance in coming up with the cover art for it as well.
In particular it should probably be in-line with his previous works, with a parody of some other classic art-work.
If you have something, go tweet out to him at @mwlauthor
Beastie Bits
Online registration for AsiaBSDCon 2016 now open SOON
BhyveCon 2016
NYC*BUG shell-fu talk slides
Possible regression in DragonFly i915 graphics on older Core2Duos
Videos from FOSDEM 2016. BSD dev room was k4601
Feedback/Questions
Andrew - SMART Tests
JT - Secure File Delete
Jordan - Migrate
Lars - Pros and Cons of VM
Alex - IPSEC
***
1 hr 31 min
February 03, 2016127: DNS, Black Holes & Willem
Today on the show, we welcome Allan back from FOSSDEM, and enjoy an interview with Willem about DNS and MTU Black Holes. That plus all the weeks news, keep it turned here to BSD
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FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report
It is that time of year again, reviewing the progress of the FreeBSD project over the last quarter of 2015
There are a huge number of projects that have recently been completed or that are planned to finish in time for FreeBSD 10.3 or 11.0
This is just a sample of the of the items that stood out most to us:
A number of new teams have been created, and existing teams report in. The Issue Triage, bugmeister, jenkins, IPv6 advocacy, and wiki-admin teams are all mentioned in the status report
Progress is reported on the i915 project to update the Intel graphics drivers
In the storage subsystem: RCTL I/O rate limiting, Warner Losh’s CAM I/O Scheduler is progressing, Mellanox iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) was added, Chelsio iSCSI offload drivers, Mellanox 100 gbit/s drivers
In Security: Encrypted crash dumps, OpenBSM updates, and a status report on HardenedBSD
For embedded: Support for Ralink/Mediatek MIPS devices, Raspberry Pi Video Code packages, touch screen support for RPI and BBB, new port to the Marvell Armada38x, and the work on arm64 and RISC-V
kib@ rewrote the out-of-memory handler, specifically to perform better in situations where a system does not have swap. Was tested on systems ranging from 32 MB of memory, to 512 GB
Various improvements to the tool chain, build system, and nanobsd
It was nice to see a bunch of reports from ports committers
An overview of the different proposed init replacements, with a report on each
***
First timer’s guide to FOSS conferences
This post provides a lot of good information for those considering going to their first conference
The very first item says the most: “Conference talks are great because they teach you new skills or give you ideas. However, what conference talks are really for is giving you additional topics of conversation to chat with your fellow conference goers with. Hanging out after a talk ends to chat with the speaker is a great way to connect with speakers or fellow attendees that are passionate about a particular subject.”
The hallway track is the best part of the conference. I’ve ended up missing as much as 2/3rds of a conference, and still found it to be a very valuable conference, sometimes more so than if I attend a talk in every slot
It is important to remember that missing a talk is not the end of the world, that discussion in the hallway may be much more valuable. Most of the talks end up on youtube anyway. The point of the conference is being in the same place as the other people at the conference, the talks are just a means to get us all there.
There is even a lot of good advice for people with social anxiety, and those like Allan who do not partake in alcohol
Know the conference perks and the resources available to you. The author of the post commented on twitter about originally being unaware of the resources that some conferences provide for speakers, but also of discounts for students, and travel grants from Google and others like the FreeBSD Foundation
There are also tips about swag, including watching out for booth wranglers (not common at BSD events, but many larger conferences have booths where your personal information can be exchanged for swag), as well as advice for following up with the people you meet at conferences.
Lastly, it provides thoughts on avoiding “Project Passion Explosion“, or what I call “overcharging your BSD battery”, where after hearing about the interesting stuff other people are doing, or about the things other need, you try to do everything at once, and burn yourself out
I know for myself, there are at least 10 projects I would love to work on, but I need to balance my free time, my work schedule, the FreeBSD release schedule, and which items might be better for someone else to work on.
***
FreeBSD 10.1 based WiFi Captive Portal
Captive portals, the bane of many a traveler’s existence, however a necessary evil in the era of war-driving and other potentially nefarious uses of “free-wifi”.
This week we have an article from the folks at “unixmen”, showing (in great detail) how they setup a FreeBSD 10.1 based captive portal, and yes those are manual MySQL commands.
First up is a diagram showing the layout of their new portal system, using multiple APs for different floors of the apartment / hotel?
The walkthrough assumes you have Apache/MySQL and PHP already installed, so you’ll need to prep those bits beforehand.
Some Apache configuration is up next, which re-directs all port 80 requests over to 443/SSL and the captive portal web-login
At this point we have to install “pear” from ports or packages and begin to do the database setup which is fairly typical if you done any SQL before, such as create user / database / table, etc.
With the database finished, the article provides a nice and clean rc.conf which enables all the necessary services.
Next up is the firewall configuration, which is using IPFW, specifically DUMMYNET/IPALIAS/IPDIVERT and friends. The article does mention to compile a new minimal kernel with these features, if you plan on doing so they I would recommend starting off with that.
The article then continues, with setting up DHCP server, SUDO and the PHP file creation that will act as the interface between the client and mysql/firewall rules.
When it’s all said and done, you end up with a nice web-interface for clients, plus a bonus Admin interface to manage creating and removing users.
For convenience at the very end is a link to all the files / configurations used, so grab that and avoid some of the copy-n-paste
***
Sailor, a 'wannabe' portable container system {their own words!}
In the world of docker / jails / VMs, containers are all the rage right now, and now we can introduce “Sailor” to this mix
A unique thing about this new solution, is that its based upon chroot/pkgin, and available on NetBSD / OSX and CentOS
Since it is not using “jail” or other security mechanism, they to give us this cavet “Note that sailor's goal is not to provide bullet-proof security, chroot is definitely not a trustable isolator; instead, sailor is a really convenient way of trying / testing an environment without compromising your workstation filesystem.”
Creating a new “ship” is relatively straight-forward, a simple shell define file can supply most of the relevant information. Nginx for example is only a few lines: https://github.com/NetBSDfr/sailor/blob/master/examples/nginx.conf
In addition to the basic pkg configuration, it also provides methods to do rw/ro mounts into the chroot, as well as IP aliases and copying of specific host binaries into the container
***
Interview - Willem Toorop - [email protected] / @WillemToorop
GetDNS
vBSDCon 2015 Talk
***
News Roundup
A Quarter Century of Unix
An oldie, but goodie, the book “A Quarter Century of UNIX” is now available for free download via PDF format.
This provides an invaluable look into the history of UNIX, which of course we wouldn’t have BSD without.
There is also a print version still available via Amazon (link at the above URL also). If you find the book useful, consider buying a copy, since a % still goes to the original author
***
Bjoern Zeeb has been awarded grant to finalize VIMAGE fixes
“Bjoern Zeeb has been awarded a project grant to finalize and integrate the work done to make the VIMAGE network stack virtualization infrastructure production ready.”
VIMAGE is the network virtualization kernel component that can be used to give jails their own network interfaces, so they can have their own firewalls, be assign addresses via DHCP, etc.
Currently, a number of bugs prevent this feature from being enabled by default, or used in production
The main areas of focus for the work are: network stack teardown, interface ordering, locking, and addressing the remaining memory leaks at teardown
The work is expected to be completed by the end of March and to be included in FreeBSD 11.0
***
Building a smtpd Mail Server on OpenBSD
The OpenSMTPd FAQ has been updated with a new walkthrough of a complete installation
Following this guide, the resulting installation will:
Accepting mails for multiple domains and virtual users
Allowing virtual users to authenticate and send mails
Applying anti-spam and anti-virus filters on mails
Providing IMAP access for the virtual users
Providing log statistics
It covers setting up the new filter system, configuring TLS, creating the domain and user tables, configuring spamassassin and clamav, and setting up dovecot
There is even a crontab to send you weekly stats on what your email server is doing
***
Introduction to the FreeBSD Open Source Operating System LiveLessons
Dr. Kirk McKusick has been one of the foremost authorities on FreeBSD for some time now, as co-author of the D&I of FreeBSD (along with George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson) and teaching numerous classes on the same. (Another good reason to come to a *BSD conference)
As part of the Addison-Wesley Professional / LiveLessons series, he has made a 10+ hour video lecture you can now purchase to take his class from the comfort of your own home/couch/office/etc
Aspiring FreeBSD developers, kernel developers, Application Developers and other interested individuals should really consider this invaluable resource in their learning.
The video starts with an introduction to the FreeBSD community and explains how it differs from the Linux ecosystem. The video then goes on to provide a firm background in the FreeBSD kernel. The POSIX kernel interfaces are used as examples where they are defined. Where they are not defined, the FreeBSD interfaces are described.
The video covers basic kernel services, locking, process structure, scheduling, signal handling, jails, and virtual and physical memory management.
The kernel I/O structure is described showing how I/O is multiplexed and the virtual filesystem interface is used to support multiple filesystems.
Devices are described showing disk management and their auto-configuration.
The organization and implementation of the fast filesystem is described concluding with a discussion of how to maintain consistency in the face of hardware or software failures.
The video includes an overview of the ZFS filesystem and covers the socket-based network architecture, layering and routing issues.
The presentations emphasize code organization, data structure navigation, and algorithms.
Normally the video will set you back $299, but right now you can pick it up for $239 (USD). We can’t recommend this enough, but also don’t forget to try and make it out to BSDCan or MeetBSD, where you can usually talk to Dr. McKusick in person.
***
BeastieBits
Faces of FreeBSD: Sean Bruno
Support Michael W. Lucas writing BSD books, and get your name in the credits
bhyve windows support merged to stable/10 branch, will be included in FreeBSD 10.3
FreeBSD Outsells Windows by almost 2-1
A rant about the whois protocol
Kris Moore talks about Jails and system management on BSDTalk
FOSDEM 2016: Slides from the 5 years of IllumOS talk
A tweet from the first day of FOSDEM showed only 1 FreeBSD machine. Many of the FreeBSD developers were at a devsummit offsite that day, and more users arrived for the BSD dev room which was on the Sunday
Feedback/Questions
Antonio - ZFS Book Formatting
Simon - ZFS Corruption?
Christian - rm -rOOOPSSS
Phillipp - ZFS Send/Recv
***
2 hr 10 min
January 27, 2016126: Illuminating the future on PC-BSD
This week on BSDNow, we are going to be talking to Ken Moore about the Lumina desktop environment, where it stands now & looking ahead. Then Allan turns the tables & interviews both Kris & Ken about new ongoings in PC-BSD land. Stay tuned, lots of exciting show is coming your way right now on BSDNow, the place to B...SD!
This episode was brought to you by
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Linuxvoice reviews six NAS designed OSes and states that FreeNAS has the largest amount of features
The review compares the features of: FreeNAS, NAS4Free, Open Media Vault, Openfiler Community Edition, EasyNAS, and Turnkey Linux File Server
“Many NAS solutions can do a lot more than just back up and restore files – you can extend them with plugins to do a variety of tasks. Some enable you to stream media to computers and others devices. Others can hook up with apps and services and allow them to use the NAS for storing and retrieving data”
Open Media Vault: 4/5, “A feature-rich NAS distro that’s easy to deploy and manage”. Many plugins, good UI
Turnkey Linux File Server: 2/5, “A no-fuss distro that’ll set up a fully functional file sharing server in no time”. No RAID, LVM must be down manually
Openfiler Community Edition: 1/5, “There is a target segment for Openfiler, but we can’t spot it”. In the middle of rebasing on CentOS, lacking documentation, confusing UI
EasyNAS: 3/5, “A simple NAS distro that balances the availability of features with reasonable assumptions”. Major updates require reinstall, lacks advanced features and advanced protocols
FreeNAS: 3/5, “FreeNAS The most feature-rich NAS distribution requires some getting used to”. Best documentation, best snapshot management, most plugins, jailed plugins, most enterprise features
NAS4Free: 3/5, “NAS4Free An advanced NAS distro that’s designed for advanced users”, additional flexibility with disk layout (partition the first disk to install the OS there, use remaining space for data storage)
“If we had to award this group test to the distro with the biggest number of features then the top two challengers would have been FreeNAS and its protegée NAS4Free. While both of these solutions pitch themselves to users outside the corporate environment, they’d simply be overkill for most home users. Furthermore, their FreeBSD base and the ZFS filesystem, while a boon to enterprise users, virtually makes them alien technology to the average Linux household.”
It is not clear why they gave NAS4Free and FreeNAS the same score when they wrote a list of reasons why FreeNAS was better.
It seems the goal of their rundown was to find the best Linux NAS, not the best NAS.
***
FreeBSD based Snort IPS
UnixMen.com provides a new tutorial on setting up Snort, the IPS (Intrusion Prevention system) on FreeBSD
Install Apache, PHP, and MySQL, then Snort
Download the latest Snort rules from the official website
Disable the Packet Filter on the USB interfaces to avoid issues with Snort
Install oinkmaster and barnyard2, and configure them
Then install the Snorby WEB interface, which will give you a nice overview of the data generated by the IPS
Then install SnortSAM, and connect it to ipfw
Now when Snort detects a potential intrusion, it will be displayed in Snorby, and automatically blocked with IPFW
***
Opensource.com features two BSD developers as examples of how open source can help your career
“When contributing to open source projects and communities, one of the many benefits is that you can improve your tech skills. In this article, hear from three contributors on how their open source helped them get a job or improved their career.”
Alexander Yurchenko, an OpenBSD developer who now works at Yandex says: “Participating in such a project yields colossal experience. A good, large open source project has everything that is typically required from a developer at job interviews: good planning, good coding, use of versioning systems and bug trackers, peer reviews, teamwork, and such. So, after stewing in such an environment for a year or two, you have a good opportunity to grow to a senior developer level.”
“That is, in fact, what happened to me. I was hired as a senior developer without having any formal work experience on my service record. After the first week, my probation period was reduced from three months to zero.”
While you may not have “formal work experience”, you do have a body of work, a (code/documentation/etc) portfolio, you can point to
Having spent a year working somewhere may say something about you, but showing some code you wrote that other people use every day, is usually more valuable
Alexander Polyakov, a DragonFly contributor, worked on updating support for other languages and on ACPI.
“I even made some money in the process—a customer found me via git log. He wanted to use DragonFlyBSD in production and needed better ACPI support and some RAID driver or something.”
“In a nutshell, contributing to various open source projects is how you gain great experience. Don't be afraid to send in bad code (happens to the best of us), keep calm (while being scolded for sending in that bad code), and choose projects you are really interested in. Then you'll both gain experience and have fun while you doing it.”
Kirill Gorkunov talks about his experience with turning open source into a career: “For a few years, I've been fixing the code, sending patches, getting scolded for bad code and complimented for good code. That experience was priceless. And you can be sure that as soon as you get good at it, job offers will follow. This is, in fact, how I met the kernel developers working on OpenVZ. Together, we decided to continue working on the OpenVZ kernel and related stuff as well”
When you contribute to open source, you end up being the person who wrote “Foo”, and this can often turn into work, when someone wants to build something with “Foo”, or like “Foo”
This same point was focus of a panel the FreeBSD Foundation organized at the womENcourage conference in Sweden last year: Open Source as a Career Path
***
FreeBSD, LibreSSL and LetsEncrypt oh my!
Over on the FreeBSD Wiki, Bernard Spil (whom we’ve interviewed before) has started a walkthrough talking about how he uses LibreSSL and LetsEncrypt, without using the heavy python client
The article provides detailed instructions on prepping the system and automating the process of updating the SSL certificates
If you’ve used the “official” letsencrypt client in the past, you’ll note some differences in his method, which keeps all the ‘acme-challenge’ files in a single-directory, which is aliased into domains.
Using this method also drops the requirement to run the letsencrypt auth as root, and allows you to run it as the unprivileged “letsencrypt” user instead.
He mentions that the bash/zsh scripts used may be added to ports at some point as well
***
Interview - Ken Moore & Kris Moore - [email protected] / @pcbsdkris
PC-BSD’s new SysAdm Project and Lumina Update
***
News Roundup
DragonFly Intel i915 support to match what’s in the Linux 4.1 kernel
In DragonFly’s ongoing quest for DRM awesomeness, they have now merged changes to bring them up to Linux 4.1 kernel features.
Some of the notables include that “Valleyview” support is greatly improved, and not considered preliminary anymore
Skylake got some support improvements as well, including runtime power management, and that turbo and sleep states should be functional.
Some great improvements to power usage have been added, such as setting GPU frequencies to hardware minimum and enabling of DRRS (Dynamic Refresh Rate Switching) being enabled by default
They’ve even begun importing some of the prelim work for Broxton, the upcoming Atom SOC
***
FreeNAS Home Server Build
We have a nice article to share with you this week by John Ramsden, which walks us through his home-brew FreeNAS server setup.
As is typical with most home users, he will be using the system to both serve media, and as a backup target for other systems.
His hardware setup is pretty impressive for a home-brew, made up of the following:
Fractal Design Node 804 Chassis
Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard
Xeon E3-1231 v3 CPU
4x Samsung DDR3 1.35v-1600 M391B1G73QH0 RAM
2x 32GB SATA III SMC DOM Boot Drive
SeaSonic G-550 Power Supply
Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD 1500VA 900W PFC UPS
6x Western Digital 6TB Red HDD
2 x ENERMAX T.B. Silence UCTB12P Case Fan
3x Noctua NF-P14s redux-1200 Case Fan
The SATA DOM was neat to see in use, in his case in a mirror
He then walks us through his burn-in process, which involved memory testing for 46 hours, and then disk testing with the smartctl long tests.
There is even details on how the fan thresholds were set up, which may be of use to other DiY’ers out there.
The SATA DOM was neat to see in use, in his case in a mirror
He then walks us through his burn-in process, which involved memory testing for 46 hours, and then disk testing with the smartctl long tests.
There is even details on how the fan thresholds were set up, which may be of use to other DiY’ers out there.
claviger manages your SSH authorized_keys files for you
An application to manage your SSH authorized_keys files for you
Make a list of your keys (laptop, desktop, work)
Then a list of your ssh accounts
List which keys should be present, and which should be absent
Optional setting to keep all “other” keys, such as those added by other users
Optional list of specific “other” keys to allow (does not add them, but does not remove them if they are present)
You say say ‘server2 like server1’, and it will inherit all of the settings from that server
There is a “default” server, that all others inherit
***
FreeBSD 9.2 x64 OpenVPN AD authentication with crypt
A few days back unixmen.com posted a nice tutorial walkthrough of a OpenVPN setup on FreeBSD 9.2 using Active Directory for auth
In this particular setup, FreeBSD is running the gateway / OpenVPN server, the client desktops are running Windows 7 and domain controller on Windows 2008
The setup on FreeBSD pretty straightforward, thanks to the openvpn-auth-ldap port. (Unknown why they didn’t use the package)
In addition to showing the details on how configuration was done on BSD, what makes this walkthrough nice is the addition of so many screenshots of how the windows configuration was done.
Part of the walkthrough will also detail how they created their .ovpn files for importing on the OpenVPN clients.
***
Beastie Bits
dtrace included by default in NetBSD
FOSDEM16 is approaching, get ready to follow the BSD devroom
Call for testing: Concurrent: malloc(3) calls (to speed up Firefox)
"With the PV drivers in -CURRENT, it is now possible to run OpenBSD within AWS."
PC-BSD Handbook in Spanish
Feedback/Questions
Clint - ZIL on Partition
Federico - LibreSSL and DMA
Ghislain - FreeBSD vs Linux vs Illumos
Cary - ZFS - Caching - Replication
***
1 hr 49 min
January 20, 2016125: DevSummits, Core and the Baldwin
This week on the show, we will be talking to FreeBSD developer and former core-team member John Baldwin about a variety of topics, including running a DevSummit, everything you needed or wanted to know. Coming up right now on BSDNow, the place to B...SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD server retired after almost 19 years
We’ve heard stories about this kind of thing before, that box that often sits under-appreciated, but refuses to die. Well the UK register has picked up on a story of a FreeBSD server finally being retired after almost 19 years of dedicated service.
“In its day, it was a reasonable machine - 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive's a Seagate, for those of you looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.
This system in particular had been running FreeBSD 2.2.1 over the years. Why not upgrade you ask? Ross has an answer for that:
“It was heavily firewalled and only very specific services were visible to anyone, and most only visible to our directly connected customers,” Ross told Vulture South. “By the time it was probably due for a review, things had moved so far that all the original code was so tightly bound to the operating system itself, that later versions of the OS would have (and ultimately, did) require substantial rework. While it was running and not showing any signs of stress, it was simply expedient to leave sleeping dogs lie.”
All in all, an amazing story of the longevity of a system and its operating system. Do you have a server with a similar or even greater uptime? Let us know so we can try and top this story.
***
Roundup of all the BSDs
The magazine LinuxVoice recently did a group test of a variety of “BSD Distros”.
Included in their review were Free/Open/Net/Dragon/Ghost/PC
It starts with a pretty good overview of BSD in general, its starts and the various projects / forks that spawned from it, such as FreeNAS / Junos / Playstation / PFSense / etc
The review starts with a look at OpenBSD, and the consensus reached is that it is good, but does require a bit more manual work to run as a desktop. (Most of the review focuses on desktop usage). It ends up with a solid ⅘ stars though.
Next it moves into GhostBSD, discusses it being a “Live” distro, which can optionally be installed to disk. It loses a few points for lacking a graphical package management utility, and some bugs during the installation, but still earns a respectable ⅗ stars.
Dragonfly gets the next spin and gets praise for its very-up to date video driver support and availability of the HAMMER filesystem. It also lands at ⅗ stars, partly due to the reviewer having to use the command-line for management. (Notice a trend here?)
NetBSD is up next, and gets special mention for being one of the only “distros” that doesn’t do frequent releases. However that doesn’t mean you can’t have updated packages, since the review mentions pkgsrc and pkg as both available to customize your desktop. The reviewer was slightly haunted by having to edit files in /etc by hand to do wireless, but still gives NetBSD a ⅗ overall.
Last up are FreeBSD and PC-BSD, which get a different sort of head-to-head review. FreeBSD goes first, with mention that the text-install is fairly straight-forward and most configuration will require being done by hand. However the reviewer must be getting use to the command-line at this point, because he mentions:
“This might sound cumbersome, but is actually pretty straightforward and at the end produces a finely tuned aerodynamic system that does exactly what you want it to do and nothing else.”
He does mention that FreeBSD is the ultimate DIY system, even to the point of not having the package management tools provided out of box.
PC-BSD ultimately gets a lot of love in this review, again with it being focused on desktop usage this follows. Particularly popular are all the various tools written to make PC-BSD easier to use, such as Life-Preserver, Warden, the graphical installer and more. (slight mistake though, Life-Preserver does not use rsync to backup to FreeNAS, it does ZFS replication)
In the end he rates FreeBSD ⅘ and PC-BSD a whopping 5/5 for this roundup.
While reviews may be subjective to the particular use-case being evaluated for, it is still nice to see BSD getting some press and more interest from the Linux community in general.
***
OpenBSD Laptops
Our buddy Ted Unangst has posted a nice “planning ahead” guide for those thinking of new laptops for 2016 and the upcoming OpenBSD 5.9
He starts by giving us a status update on several of the key driver components that will be in 5.9 release“5.9 will be the first release to support the graphics on Broadwell CPUs. This is anything that looks like i5-5xxx. There are a few minor quirks, but generally it works well. There’s no support for the new Skylake models, however. They’ll probably work with the VESA driver but minus suspend/resume/acceleration (just as 5.8 did with Broadwell).”
He then goes on to mention that the IWM driver works well with most of the revisions (7260, 7265, and 3160) that ship with broadwell based laptops, however the newer skylake series ships with the 8260, which is NOT yet supported.
He then goes on to list some of the more common makes and models to look for, starting with the broadwell based X1 carbons which work really well (Kris gives +++), but make sure its not the newer skylake model just yet.
The macbook gets a mention, but probably should be avoided due to broadcom wifi
The Dell XPS he mentions as a good choice for a powerful (portable) desktops
***
Significant changes from NetBSD 7.0 to 8.0
Updated to GCC 4.8.5
Imported dhcpcd and replaced rtsol and rtsold
gpt(8) utility gained the ability to resize partitions and disks, as well as change the type of a partition
OpenSSH 7.1 and OpenSSL 1.0.1q
FTP client got support for SNI for https
Imported dtrace from FreeBSD
Add syscall support
Add lockstat support
***
Interview - John Baldwin - [email protected] / @BSDHokie
FreeBSD Kernel Debugging
News Roundup
Dragonfly Mail Agent spreads to FreeBSD and NetBSD
DMA, the Dragonfly Mail Agent is now available not only in Dragonfly’s dports, but also FreeBSD ports, and NetBSD pkgsrc
“dma is a small Mail Transport Agent (MTA), designed for home and office use. It accepts mails from locally installed Mail User Agents (MUA) and delivers the mails either locally or to a remote destination. Remote delivery includes several features like TLS/SSL support and SMTP authentication. dma is not intended as a replacement for real, big MTAs like sendmail(8) or postfix(1). Consequently, dma does not listen on port 25 for incoming connections.”
There was a project looking at importing DMA into the FreeBSD base system to replace sendmail, I wonder of the port signals that some of the blockers have been fixed
***
ZFS UEFI Support has landed!
Originally started by Eric McCorkle
Picked up by Steven Hartland
Including modularizing the existing UFS boot code, and adding ZFS boot code
General improvements to the EFI loader including using more of libstand instead of containing its own implementations of many common functions
Thanks to work by Toomas Soome, there is now a Beastie Menu as part of the EFI loader, similar to the regular loader
As soon as this was committed, I added a few lines to it to connect the ZFS BE Menu to it, thanks to all of the above, without whom my work wouldn’t be usable
It should be relatively easy to hook my GELI boot stuff in as a module, and possibly just stack the UFS and ZFS modules on top of it
I might try to redesign the non-EFI boot code to use a similar design instead of what I have now
***
How three BSD OSes compare to ten Linux Distros
After benchmarking 10 of the latest Linux distros, Phoronix took to benchmarking 3 of the big BSDs
DragonFlyBSD 4.4.1 - The latest DragonFly release with GCC 5.2.1 and the HAMMER file-system.
OpenBSD 5.8 - OpenBSD 5.8 with GCC 4.2.1 as the default compiler and FFS file-system.
PC-BSD 10.2 - Derived off FreeBSD 10.2, the defaults were the Clang 3.4.1 compiler and ZFS file-system.
In the SQLite test, PCBSD+ZFS won out over all of the Linux distros, including those that were also using ZFS
In the first compile benchmark, PCBSD came second only to Intel’s Linux distro, Clear Linux. OpenBSD can last, although it is not clear if the benchmark was just comparing the system compiler, which would be unfair to OpenBSD
In Disk transaction performance, against ZFS won the day, with PCBSD edging out the Linux distros. OpenBSD’s older ffs was hurt by the lack of soft updates, and DragonFly’s Hammer did not perform well. Although in an fsync() heavy test, safety is more important that speed
As with all benchmarks, these obviously need to be taken with a grain of salt
In some of them you can clearly see that the ‘winner’ has a much higher standard error, suggesting that the numbers are quite variable
***
OPNSense 15.7.24 Released
We are just barely into the new year and OPNSense has dropped a new release on us to play with.
This new version, 15.7.24 brings a bunch of notable changes, which includes improvements to the firewall UI and a plugin management section of the firmware page. Additionally better signature verification using PKG’s internal verification mechanisms was added for kernel and world updates.
The announcement contains the full rundown of changes, including the suricata, openvpn and ntp got package bumps as well.
***
Beastie Bits
A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to (A bit old, but still one of the most complete walkthroughs of a desktop FreeBSD setup from scratch)
BSD and Scale 14
Xen support enabled in OpenBSD -current
Feedback/Questions
Matt - Zil Sizes
Drin - IPSEC
John - ZFS + UEFI
Jake - ZFS Cluster SAN
Phillip - Media Server
***
2 hr 14 min
January 13, 2016124: Get your engine(x) started!
This week on the show, we have a very full news roster to rundown, plus an oldie, but goodie with Igor of the nginx project. That plus all your questions and feedback,
iX Systems Mission Complete
Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSDJournal!
***
FreeNAS Logo Design Contest
Rules and Requirements
For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using.
Softbox Light Diffuser
Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb
***
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
Clearing the air
A number of you have written in the past few weeks asking why Allan and I didn’t talk about one of the biggest stories to make headlines last week.
Both of us are quite aware of the details surrounding the incidents between former FreeBSD developers “freebsdgirl” and “xmj”, however the news was still ongoing and we didn’t feel it right to discuss until some of the facts had time to shake out and a more clear (and calm) discussion could be had.
However, without getting into all the gory details here’s some of the key points that we want to highlight for our listeners. We each have our own thoughts on this.
Kris:
The FreeBSD that I know has been VERY open and inclusive to all who want to contribute. The saying “Shut up and code” is there for a reason. We’ve seen developers of all types, different race / gender / creed, and the one thing we all have in common is the love for BSD.
This particular incident has been linked to FreeBSD, which isn’t exactly a fair association, since the project and other members of community were not directly involved. What started out as a disagreement (over something non-BSD related) turned into an ugly slugfest all across social media and (briefly) on a BSD chatroom.
In this case after reviewing lots of the facts, I think both sides were WAY out of line, and hope they recognize that.
There has been slamming of the core team and foundation in social media, as somehow the delay / silence is an admission of wrong-doing. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are serious people doing a serious job, and much like BSD they would rather take the time to do it right instead of just going off on social media and making things worse. (Plus they all are volunteers who are spread across many different time-zones)
Also, if you hear rumors of incidents of harassment, remember that without details all those will ever be is rumors. Obviously those in the project would take any incident like that seriously, but without coming forward and sharing the details it’s impossible to take any action or make changes for the better.
Allan:
The FreeBSD community is the best group of people I have ever worked with, but that doesn’t mean that it is immune to the same problems that every other group of people faces. As much as all of us wish it didn’t, harassment and other ill-behavior does happen, and must be dealt with
The FreeBSD Core team has previously sanctioned committers and revoked commit bits for things that happened entirely offline and outside of the FreeBSD community. Part of being a committer is representing the project in everything that you do, so anything you do that reflects badly upon the project is grounds for your removal
There was something written about this in the project documentation somewhere (that I can not find for the live of me), specifically about the prestige that comes with (or used to) an @freebsd.org account, and how new members of the community need to keep that in mind as they work to earn, and keep, a commit bit
In this specific situation, I am not sure what core did exactly, we’ll have to wait for their report to find out, but I am not sure what more they could have done.
“Individual members of core have the power to temporarily suspend commit privileges until core as a whole has the chance to review the issue. Only a 2/3 majority of core has the authority to suspend commit privileges for longer than a week or to remove them permanently. Core's “special powers” only kick in when it acts as a group, not on an individual basis. As individuals, the core team members are all committers first and core second”
So, an individual member of core can revoke the commit bit of someone who is reported to have acted in a manner not conducive with the rules, but I don’t know how that would have made a difference in this case.
The only point from Randi’s list of 10 things the project should change that I do not think is possible is #6. As stated in the “Committers' Big List of Rules” that I quoted earlier, the core team can only take action after they have had time for everyone to review and discuss a matter, and then vote on it.
The core team is made up of 9 people with other responsibilities and commitments. Further, they are currently spread across 6 different countries, and 6 different times zones (even the countries and time zones do not line up).
We eagerly await Cores report on this matter, and more importantly, Core and the Foundation's work to come up with a better framework and response policy to deal with such situations in the future.
The important thing is to ensure that incident reports are properly handled, so that those reporting issues feel safe in doing so
While we hope there is never another incident of harassment in the FreeBSD community, the realities of the world we live in mean we need to be ready to deal with it
***
Dan Langille discussing his rig
Pictures of Dan Langille's Home Lab
Ever read FreeBSD Diary? How about used FreshPorts or FreshSource? Gone to BSDCan? If so you may be interested in seeing exactly where those sites are served from.
Dan Langille posts to reddit with information about his home lab, with the obligatory pictures to back it up
As most good home racks do, this one starts at Home Depot and ends up with a variety of systems and hardware living on it.
All in all an impressive rig and nice job wiring
(I wonder what that ASUS RT‑N66U is doing, if it’s running FreeBSD or just an access point??)
Reminder: Get your BSDCan talk proposal submitted before the deadline, January 19th
***
Pre-5.9 pledge(2) update
Theo gives us a status update on pledge() for pre OpenBSD 5.9“For the next upcoming release, we will disable the 'paths' argument.Reasoning: We have been very busy making as much of the tree set thepromises right in applications, and building a few new promises aswell. We simply don't have enough time to review the kernel code andmake sure it is bug-free. We'll use the next 6 months developmentcycle to decide on paths, and then re-audit the tree to use theinterface where it is suitable.
The base tree (/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/libexec /usr/games)contains 652 ELF binaries. 451 use pledge. 201 do not. Approximately47 do not need or cannot use pledge. Leaving 154 we could potentiallypledge in the future. Most of those are not very important. Thereare a few hot spots, but most of what people use has been handled wellby the team.“
Chromium: now with OpenBSD pledge(2)
In addition to the pledge news, we also have a story about the Chromium browser being converted to use pledge on OpenBSD.“The renderer, gpu, plugin and utility processes are now using pledge(2)Unfortunately the GPU process only requires an rpath pledge because ofMesa trying to parse two configuration files, /etc/drirc and ${HOME}/.drircSo currently the GPU process will use an rpath pledge in the nextweek or so so that people can test, but this situation has to beresolved because it is not acceptable that a mostly unused configurationfile is being parsed from a library and that stops us from using lesspledges and thus disallowing the GPU process to have read accessto the filesystem ... like your ssh keys.”
UPDATE: the rpath pledge has been removed.
***
iXsystems
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/
Interview - Igor Sysoev - [email protected] / @isysoev
NGINX and FreeBSD
News Roundup
FreeBSD on EdgeRouter Lite - no serial port required
A few years back there was a neat story on how to setup FreeBSD on the EdgeRouter-Lite
This last week we get to revisit this, as Colin Percival posts a script, and a very detailed walkthrough of using it to generate your own custom image which does NOT require hooking up a serial cable.
Currently the script only works on -CURRENT, but may work later for 10.3
The script is pretty complete, does the buildworld and creation of a USB image for you. It also does a basic firewall configuration and even growfs for expanding to the full-size of your USB media.
Using the ‘firstboot’ keyword, an rc.d script does all the initial configuration allowing you access to the system
If you have one, or are looking at switching to a FreeBSD based router, do yourself a favor and take a look at this article.
***
John Marino reaches out to the community for testing of Synth, a new custom package repo builder
A hybrid of poudriere and portmaster/portupgrade
Uses your regular ports tree and your running system, but built builds packages faster, the poudriere way
Requires no setup, no downloading or building reference versions of the OS, no checking out yet another copy of the ports tree
In the future may have support for using binary packages for dependencies, build only the apps you actually want to customize
Looks very promising
***
OpenBSD malloc finds use-after-free in Android OS
Score one for OpenBSD’s rigorous security and attention to detail. We have an interesting commit / comment from Android
It looks like this particular mistake was found in the uncrypt routines, in particular the using of a variable memory which had already gone out of scope.
Through the usage of OpenBSD’s malloc junk filling feature, the developers were able to identify and correct the issue.
Maybe there is a case to be made that this be used more widely, especially during testing?
***
Netflix's async sendfile now in FreeBSD-current
We have some slides presented by Gleb Smirnoff at last years FreeBSD storage summit, talking about changes to sendfile made by Netflix.
It starts off with a bit of history, showing the misery of life without sendfile(2) back in FreeBSD 1.0, specifically the ftpd daemon.
Then in 1997 that all changed, HP-UX 11.00 grew the sendfile function, and FreeBSD 3.0 / Linux 2.2 added it in ‘98
The slides then go into other details, on how the first implementations would map the userland cycle into the kernel. Then in 2004 the SF_NODISKIO flag was added, followed by changes in 2006 and 2013 to using sbspace() bytes and sending shared memory descriptor data respectively.
The idea is that instead of the web server waiting for the send to complete, it calls sendfile then goes about its other work, then it gets a notification when the work is done, and finishes up any of the request handling, like logging how many bytes were sent
The new sendfile implementation took the maximum load of an older netflix box from 25 gigabits/sec to 35 gigabits/sec
Separately, Netflix has also done work on implementing a TLS version of sendfile(), to streamline the process of sending encrypted data
There is still a todo list, including making sendfile() play nice with ZFS. Currently files sent via sendfile from ZFS are stored in memory twice, once in the ARC, and once in the buffer cache that sendfile uses
***
Beastie Bits
Unix Timeline of how Unix versions have evolved
netmap support now in bhyve in FreeBSD -Current
McCabe complexity and Dragonfly BSD
Bourne Basic - a BASIC interpreter implemented (painfully) in pure Bourne shell
NixOS on FreeBSD
Turning an ordinary OpenBSD system into a router
nvidia releases beta 361.16 driver for FreeBSD
Feedback/Questions
Bryson - SmartOS / KVM / ZFS
Samba 1969
DO / VPN / PF
Unstable VM / Update
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]
1 hr 16 min
January 07, 2016 ZFS in the trenches | BSD Now 123
This week on BSDNow, we will be talking shop with Josh Paetzel of FreeNAS fame, hearing about his best dos and don'ts of using ZFS in production. Also, a quick look back at 2015 & lots of stuff to start talking about for 2016; Welcome to another exciting year of BSD Now!
2 hr 2 min
January 06, 2016123: ZFS in the trenches
This week on BSDNow, we will be talking shop with Josh Paetzel of FreeNAS fame, hearing about his best do’s and do-nots of using ZFS in production. Also, a quick
iX Systems Mission Complete
Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD
Journal!
***
FreeNAS Logo Design Contest
Rules and Requirements
For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using.
Softbox Light Diffuser
Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb
***
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
A Brief look back at 2015
As we start the show this week, we begin with a brief look back at BSD in 2015, brought to us by Larry at FOSS force.
Aside from his issue with tap-to-click on the touchpad, his PC-BSD experience has been pretty good. (Larry, if you hear this, jump on #pcbsd on FreeNode and we will lend a hand)
He mentions that this really isn’t his first time running BSD, apparently back in ye-olden days he got NetBSD up and running on a PowerBook G3, until an update brought that experience to abrupt ending.
He gives a shout-out to the FreeBSD Foundation as being a great go-to source for wrapup on the previous year in FreeBSD land, while also mentioning the great 4.4 release of DragonFly, and some of the variants, such as RetroBSD and LiteBSD
He leaves us with a tease for 2016 that work is ongoing on Twitter to port over Mopidy, a python based extensible music server
***
A look forward at BSD events throughout 2016
After a quick look back at 2015, now its time to start planning your 2016 schedule. The BSDEvents site has a calendar of all the upcoming conferences / shows where BSD will have a presence this year.
There are quite a few items on the agenda, including non BSD specific conferences, such as SCALE / Fosdem and more.
Take a look and see, you may be able to find something close your location where you can come hang out with other BSD developers.
(or better yet), if a linux conference is coming to your town, think about submitting a BSD talk!
Additionally, if getting BSD Certification is something on your 2016 resolutions, you can often take the test at one of these shows, avoiding the need to travel to a testing center.
***
The 'Hidden' Cost of Using ZFS for Your Home NAS
An article was recently posted that seems to be trying to dissuade people from using ZFS for their home NAS
It points out what experienced users already know, but many newcomers are not strictly aware of: Expanding a ZFS pool is not always as straightforward as you think it should be
ZFS was designed to be expanded, and it handled this very well
However, a ZFS pool is made up of VDEVs, and it is these VDEVs that provide the redundancy. RAID-Z VDEVs cannot be changed once they are created. You can replace each disk individually, and the VDEV will grow to its new larger size, but you cannot add additional disks to a RAID-Z VDEV
At this point, your option is to add an additional VDEV, although best practises dictate that the new VDEV should use an equal number of disks, to avoid uneven performance
So, if you started with a 6 disk RAID-Z2, having to add 6 more disks to grow the pool does seem excessive
For the best flexibility, use mirrors. If you had used 6 disks as 3 mirrors of 2 disks each, you could then just add 2 more disks at a time. The downside is that using 2TB disks, you’d only have 6TB of usable space, versus the 8TB you would get from those disks in a RAID-Z2
This is the trade-off, mirrors give you better performance and flexibility, but less space efficiency
It is important to note that the diagrams in this article make it appear as if all parity information is stored on specific drives. In ZFS parity is spread across all drives. Often times, the data written to the drive is not of a size that can evenly be split across all drives, so the data actually ends up looking like this
The errors as I see it in the original article are:
It notes that the hidden cost of ZFS is that if you add a second RAID-Z VDEV, you will have a whole second set of parity drives. While this is a cost, it is the cost of making sure your data is safe. If you had an array with more than 12 drives, it is likely that you would to be able to withstand the failure of the larger number of drives
The article does not consider the resilver time. If you did create a configuration with a very wide RAID-Z stripe, the failure of a disk would leave the pool degraded for a much longer time, leaving your pool at risk for that longer period.
The article does not consider performance. Two RAID-Z2 VDEVs of 6 disks each will give much better performance than a single VDEV of 10 or 12 disks, especially when it comes to IOPS.
***
ZFS Boot Enviroments now availble in the FreeBSD bootloader
It’s been in phabricator for a while (and PC-BSD), but the support for Boot-Environments has now landed upstream in -CURRENT
This work was helped by cross-project collaboration when an IllumOS Developer, Toomas Soome, started porting the FreeBSD loader to IllumOS to replace GRUB there
This gives Beastie menu the ability to look at the ZFS disk, and dynamically list boot-environments that it finds. (Much nicer than GRUB, which required a pre-written configuration file)
This work was extended further, when Toomas Soome also ported the Beastie Menu to the UEFI loader which is now enabled by default for UEFI
All of these changes are scheduled to be merged back in time for FreeBSD 10.3 as well.
There is also a patch being worked on to support booting from ZFS in UEFI
This is exciting times for doing neat things with ZFS on root, these plus Allans forthcoming GELI support will negate the necessity for GRUB on PC-BSD for example (Kris is very happy)
***
Interview - Josh Paetzel - email@email / @bsdunix4ever
ZFS Support
***
News Roundup
RetroBSD being tested on ESP32
More hardware news for RetroBSD and LiteBSD
I don’t know much about this hardware, but there is a lot of discussion in the forum threads about it
Not sure what you are supposed to accomplish with only 400kb of ram
LITEBSD Brings 4.4BSD to PIC32
It is interesting to see these super-small boards with only 512kb of memory, but will crypto offload support
It is also interesting to see talk of 140mbps WiFi, can the processor actually handle that much traffic?
BSD Unix-like OS is Resurrected for Embedded IoT Market
Related to the above stories, we also have an article about BSD making a resurgence on various Internet of things devices, which mentions both RetroBSD and LiteBSD
The article mentions that this is an exciting development for embedded vars who now have an alternative licensed open-source OS to potentially use
***
HardenedBSD’s new Binary Updater
It looks like there is now another way to update your FreeBSD(hardened) system
The post by Shawn Web, details how the new updater will work in future releases of HBSD
Right now it looks fairly straight-forward, creating both the base.txz and kernel.txz, along with some data for etcupdate
It includes a nice option for the kernel name in the update, allowing different kernels to be installed / updated at will
Everything is cryptographically signed and verified using the base system openssl
The build system is fairly simple, only requiring “sh/git/openssl” to create the binary updates
Planned features also include updating of jails, and ZFS boot-environments
***
Sometimes, processors need (BSD) love too
We have a blog post from Brian Everly, talking about his long journey into legacy processors and the plans for the future to work on better supporting them on OpenBSD ports
He begins with the story of his UNIX journey to today, and why this fostered his love for many of these old (and not so old) architectures, such as Sparc64, PPC32, i386.
This journey ended up with the purchase of some legacy hardware (ebay is your friend), and the creation of a database listing the major port blockers on each platform
This is the great kind of thing folks can do to step up and help a project, even as a weekend hobby it’s great to run some hardware and help test / fix up issues that other developers maybe don’t interact with as much anymore.
***
Beastie Bits
The standard MWL disclaimer
PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTJAN2016 Available
NetBSD pkgsrc-2015Q3 statistics
NetBSD pkgsrc-2015Q4 released
First Reproducible builds conference in Athens
The creator of the original ThinkPad design passes away
Feedback/Questions
Andrew - High Contrast
John - FreeNAS followup
Giorgio - Custom Install
Don - ZFS Slowdowns
Fred - Dual Boot PC-BSD/Linux
***
2 hr 2 min
December 31, 2015 The BSD Black Box | BSD Now 122
This week on the show, we will be interviewing Alex Rosenberg to discuss his work on LLVM/Clang & his work with BSD at a large console gaming company. (Hint, it wasn’t Microsoft). All this, and the latest BSD news coming your way right now!
2 hr 24 min
December 30, 2015122: The BSD Black Box
This week on the show, we will be interviewing Alex Rosenberg, to
This episode was brought to you by
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***
Headlines
Life with an OpenBSD Laptop: A UNIX-lover's tale of migrating away from the Mac. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
OpenBSD user Isaac (.ike) Levy details his switch from a Mac to an OpenBSD laptop
He covers a bit about selecting hardware and dealing with wifi
Talks about binary packages and system upgrades
Talks about power management, suspend/resume, battery life
Show screenshots of some of his favourite window managers
Browsers and email clients are also discussed
Things he found missing in OpenBSD:
A journaling file system, every unclean shutdown means a full fsck(1)
UTF-8/unicode was not everywhere
Syncing pictures and contacts to his phone
Drawing tools
***
DragonFlyBSD matches its Intel kernel graphics driver against Linux 4.0
The DragonFlyBSD DRM stack continues to rapidly advance, now bringing in support from Linux 4.0!
Some of the notable features:
Basic Skylake support
Panel Self-Refresh (PSR) now supported on Valleyview and Cherryview
Preparations for atomic display updates
Performance improvements on various GPU families, including Cherryview, Broadwell and Haswell
GPU frequencies are now kept at a minimum of 450MHz when possible on Haswell and Broadwell, ensuring a minimum experience level for various types of workloads
Improved reset support for gen3/4 GPUs, which should fix some OpenGL crashes on Core 2 and pre-2012 Atom machine
Better sound/graphics driver synchronization for audio over hdmi support
As usual, small bugfixes and stability improvements here and there
***
A BSD Wish List for 2016
Larry over at Foss Force brings us his wish list for BSD support in 2016.
Since he has converted most of his daily desktop usage to PC-BSD, he is specifically wanting support for some desktop applications. Namely Google hangouts and Spotify.
This is something which has come up periodically among the PC-BSD community. At the moment most users are dual-booting or using alternatives, like WebRTC. However the Google Hangouts plugin is available for Linux, and perhaps this will encourage some developers to see if we can get it running with the newer Linux stack on -CURRENT.
Spotify also has a native Linux version, which may need testing on FreeBSD - CURRENT. It may be closer now, and should be updated on the Wanted Ports Page
https://wiki.freebsd.org/WantedPorts
***
Hard Float API coming soon by default to armv6
Warner Losh talks about upcoming changes to armv6 on FreeBSD
“All the CPUs that FreeBSD supports have hard floating point in them. We've supported hard float for quite some time in the FreeBSD kernel. However, by default, we still use a soft-float ABI.”
First, “A new armv6hf (architecture) was created, but that caused some issues with some ports, and the meaning of 'soft float' sadly was ambiguous between the soft-float ABI, and the soft-float libraries that implement floating point when there's no hardware FPU”
“Over the spring and summer, I fixed ld.so so that it can load both soft ABI and hard ABI libraries on the same system, depending on markings in the binaries themselves. Soft float ABI and hard float ABI binaries have different flags in the ELF headers, so it is relatively straightforward to know which is which.”
“So, in the coming days, I'll commit the first set of changes to move to armv6 as a hard float ABI by default. The kernel doesn't care: it can execute both. The new ld.so will allow you to transition through this change by allowing old, compat soft ABI libraries to co-exist on the system with new hard ABI libraries. This change alone isn't enough, but it will be good to get it out into circulation.”
“armv6hf will be removed before FreeBSD 11”
A LIBSOFT will be created, similar in concept to the LIB32 available on AMD64
***
Interview - Alex Rosenberg - [email protected] / @alexr
Former Manager of Platform Architecture at Sony
***
Beastie Bits
Tuesday, Dec 20, 2005 was the release date of the very first bsdtalkpodcast
Patch: Server side support for TCP FastOpen
Learn to tame OpenBSD quickly
Hardware Accerated iSCSI lands in FreeBSD
Settings for full HD resolution on DragonFlyBSD under QEMU/KVM, thanks to reddit user Chapo_Rouge
Patch: An IllumOS developer has been porting the FreeBSD boot loader to replace their old version of GRUB. In doing so, he has also made improvements to the block caching in the boot loader
A FreeBSD user working at Microsoft talks about Microsoft’s shift to Open Source
BSDCG Exam Session at FOSDEM'16
Schedule for the BSD devroom at FOSDEM'16
OpenBSD snapshots are now 5.9
Notes on making BSD grep faster
Intel’s Platform Application Engineering (PAE) group within the Networking Division (ND) is looking for a Network Software Engineer
Did you watch Die Hard at Christmas? Get the Die Hard FreeBSD boot screen: install this file in /boot and set loader_logo="tribute" in /boot/loader.conf
Feedback/Questions
Jeremy - ZFS without root
Dan - Getting PC-BSD Media
Chris - VMs and FreeBSD
Ben - Haswell and IRC
Instructions for trying the Haswell patch
Matt - Donation to foundation
***
2 hr 24 min

About BSD Now

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Created by three guys who love BSD, we cover the latest news and have an extensive series of tutorials, as well as interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community. It also serves as…