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BSD Now episodes

November 12, 201463: A Man's man(1)
This time on the show, we've got an interview with Kristaps Džonsons, the creator of mandoc. He tells us how the project got started and what its current status is across the various BSDs. We also have a mini-tutorial on using PF to throttle bandwidth. This week's news, answers to your emails and even some cheesy mailing list gold, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
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Updates to FreeBSD's random(4)
FreeBSD's random device, which presents itself as "/dev/random" to users, has gotten a fairly major overhaul in -CURRENT
The CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator) algorithm, Yarrow, now has a new alternative called Fortuna
Yarrow is still the default for now, but Fortuna can be used with a kernel option (and will likely be the new default in 11.0-RELEASE)
Pluggable modules can now be written to add more sources of entropy
These changes are expected to make it in 11.0-RELEASE, but there hasn't been any mention of MFCing them to 10 or 9
***
OpenBSD Tor relays and network diversity
We've talked about getting more BSD-based Tor nodes a few times in previous episodes
The "tor-relays" mailing list has had some recent discussion about increasing diversity in the Tor network, specifically by adding more OpenBSD nodes
With the security features and attention to detail, it makes for an excellent dedicated Tor box
More and more adversaries are attacking Tor nodes, so having something that can withstand that will help the greater network at large
A few users are even saying they'll convert their Linux nodes to OpenBSD to help out
Check the archive for the full conversation, and maybe run a node yourself on any of the BSDs
The Tor wiki page on OpenBSD is pretty out of date (nine years old!?) and uses the old pf syntax, maybe one of our listeners can modernize it
***
SSP now default for FreeBSD ports
SSP, or Stack Smashing Protection, is an additional layer of protection against buffer overflows that the compiler can give to the binaries it produces
It's now enabled by default in FreeBSD's ports tree, and the pkgng packages will have it as well - but only for amd64 (all supported releases) and i386 (10.0-RELEASE or newer)
This will only apply to regular ports and binary packages, not the quarterly branch that only receives security updates
If you were using the temporary "new Xorg" or SSP package repositories instead of the default ones, you need to switch back over
NetBSD made this the default on i386 and amd64 two years ago and OpenBSD made this the default on all architectures twelve years ago
Next time you rebuild your ports, things should be automatically hardened without any extra steps or configuration needed
***
Building an OpenBSD firewall and router
While we've discussed the software and configuration of an OpenBSD router, this Reddit thread focuses more on the hardware side
The OP lists some of his potential choices, but was originally looking for something a bit cheaper than a Soekris
Most agree that, if it's for a business especially, it's worth the extra money to go with something that's well known in the BSD community
They also list a few other popular alternatives: ALIX or the APU series from PC Engines, some Supermicro boards, etc.
Through the comments, we also find out that QuakeCon runs OpenBSD on their network
Hopefully most of our listeners are running some kind of BSD as their gateway - try it out if you haven't already
***
Interview - Kristaps Džonsons - [email protected]
Mandoc, historical man pages, various topics
Tutorial
Throttling bandwidth with PF
News Roundup
NetBSD at Kansai Open Forum 2014
Japanese NetBSD users invade yet another conference, demonstrating that they can and will install NetBSD on everything
From a Raspberry Pi to SHARP Netwalkers to various luna68k devices, they had it all
As always, you can find lots of pictures in the trip report
***
Getting to know your portmgr lurkers
The lovable "getting to know your portmgr" series makes its triumphant return
This time around, they interview Alex, one of the portmgr lurkers that joined just this month
"How would you describe yourself?" "Too lazy."
Another post includes a short interview with Emanuel, another new lurker
We discussed the portmgr lurkers initiative with Steve Wills a while back
***
NetBSD's ARM port gets SMP
The ARM port of NetBSD now has SMP support, allowing more than one CPU to be used
This blog post on the website has a list of supported boards: Banana Pi, Cubieboard 2, Cubietruck, Merrii Hummingbird A31, CUBOX-I and NITROGEN6X
NetBSD's release team is working on getting these changes into the 7 branch before 7.0 is released
There are also a few nice pictures in the article
***
A high performance mid-range NAS
This blog post is about FreeNAS and optimizing iSCSI performance
It talks about using mid-range hardware with FreeNAS and different tunables you can change to affect performance
There are some nice graphs and lots of detail if you're interested in tweaking some of your own settings
They conclude "there is no optimal configuration; rather, FreeNAS can be configured to suit a particular workload"
***
Feedback/Questions
Heto writes in
Brad writes in
Tyler writes in
Tim writes in
Brad writes in
***
Mailing List Gold
Suspicious contributions
La puissance du fromage
Nothing unusual here
***
1 hr 38 min
November 05, 2014 62: Gift from the Sun
We're away at MeetBSD this week, but we've still got a great show for you. We'll be joined by Pawel Dawidek, who's done quite a lot of things in FreeBSD over the years, including the initial ZFS port. We'll get to hear how that came about, what he's up to now and a whole lot more. We'll be back next week with a normal episode of BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Interview - Pawel Jakub Dawidek - [email protected]
Porting ZFS, GEOM, GELI, Capsicum, various topics
35 min
October 29, 201461: IPSECond Wind
This week on the show, we sat down with John-Mark Gurney to talk about modernizing FreeBSD's IPSEC stack. We'll learn what he's adding, what needed to be fixed and how we'll benefit from the changes. As always, answers to your emails and all of this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
BSD panel at Phoenix LUG
The Phoenix, Arizona Linux users group had a special panel so they could learn a bit more about BSD
It had one FreeBSD user and one OpenBSD user, and they answered questions from the organizer and the people in the audience
They covered a variety of topics, including filesystems, firewalls, different development models, licenses and philosophy
It was a good "real world" example of things potential switchers are curious to know about
They closed by concluding that more diversity is always better, and even if you've got a lot of Linux boxes, putting a few BSD ones in the mix is a good idea
***
Book of PF signed copy auction
Peter Hansteen (who we've had on the show) is auctioning off the first signed copy of the new Book of PF
All the profits from the sale will go to the OpenBSD Foundation
The updated edition of the book includes all the latest pf syntax changes, but also provides examples for FreeBSD and NetBSD's versions (which still use ALTQ, among other differences)
If you're interested in firewalls, security or even just advanced networking, this book is a great one to have on your shelf - and the money will also go to a good cause
Michael Lucas has challenged Peter to raise more for the foundation than his last book selling - let's see who wins
Pause the episode, go bid on it and then come back!
***
FreeBSD Foundation goes to EuroBSDCon
Some people from the FreeBSD Foundation went to EuroBSDCon this year, and come back with a nice trip report
They also sponsored four other developers to go
The foundation was there "to find out what people are working on, what kind of help they could use from the Foundation, feedback on what we can be doing to support the FreeBSD Project and community, and what features/functions people want supported in FreeBSD"
They also have a second report from Kamil Czekirda
A total of $2000 was raised at the conference
***
OpenBSD 5.6 released
Note: we're doing this story a couple days early - it's actually being released on November 1st (this Saturday), but we have next week off and didn't want to let this one slip through the cracks - it may be out by the time you're watching this
Continuing their always-on-time six month release cycle, the OpenBSD team has released version 5.6
It includes support for new hardware, lots of driver updates, network stack improvements (SMP, in particular) and new security features
5.6 is the first formal release with LibreSSL, their fork of OpenSSL, and lots of ports have been fixed to work with it
You can now hibernate your laptop when using a fully-encrypted filesystem (see our tutorial for that)
ALTQ, Kerberos, Lynx, Bluetooth, TCP Wrappers and Apache were all removed
This will serve as a "transitional" release for a lot of services: moving from Sendmail to OpenSMTPD, from nginx to httpd and from BIND to Unbound
Sendmail, nginx and BIND will be gone in the next release, so either migrate to the new stuff between now and then or switch to the ports versions
As always, 5.6 comes with its own song and artwork - the theme this time was obviously LibreSSL
Be sure to check the full changelog (it's huge) and pick up a CD or tshirt to support their efforts
If you don't already have the public key releases are signed with, getting a physical CD is a good "out of bounds" way to obtain it safely
Here are some cool images of the set
After you do your installation or upgrade, don't forget to head over to the errata page and apply any patches listed there
***
Interview - John-Mark Gurney - [email protected] / @encthenet
Updating FreeBSD's IPSEC stack
News Roundup
Clang in DragonFly BSD
As we all know, FreeBSD got rid of GCC in 10.0, and now uses Clang almost exclusively on i386/amd64
Some DragonFly developers are considering migrating over as well, and one of them is doing some work to make the OS more Clang-friendly
We'd love to see more BSDs switch to Clang/LLVM eventually, it's a lot more modern than the old GCC most are using
***
reallocarray(): integer overflow detection for free
One of the less obvious features in OpenBSD 5.6 is a new libc function: "reallocarray()"
It's a replacement function for realloc(3) that provides integer overflow detection at basically no extra cost
Theo and a few other developers have already started a mass audit of the entire source tree, replacing many instances with this new feature
OpenBSD's explicit_bzero was recently imported into FreeBSD, maybe someone could also port over this too
***
Switching from Linux blog
A listener of the show has started a new blog series, detailing his experiences in switching over to BSD from Linux
After over ten years of using Linux, he decided to give BSD a try after listening to our show (which is awesome)
So far, he's put up a few posts about his initial thoughts, some documentation he's going through and his experiments so far
It'll be an ongoing series, so we may check back in with him again later on
***
Owncloud in a FreeNAS jail
One of the most common emails we get is about running Owncloud in FreeNAS
Now, finally, someone made a video on how to do just that, and it's even jailed
A member of the FreeNAS community has uploaded a video on how to set it up, with lighttpd as the webserver backend
If you're looking for an easy way to back up and sync your files, this might be worth a watch
***
Feedback/Questions
Ernõ writes in
David writes in
Kamil writes in
Torsten writes in
Dominik writes in
***
Mailing List Gold
That's not our IP
Is this thing on?
***
1 hr 15 min
October 22, 201460: Don't Buy a Router
This week on the show we're joined by Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the creator of both FreeNAS and the BSD Router Project! We'll be discussing what the BSD Router Project is, what it's for and where it's going. All this week's headlines and answers to viewer-submitted questions, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
BSD Devroom CFP
This year's FOSDEM conference (Belgium, Jan 31st - Feb 1st) is having a dedicated BSD devroom
They've issued a call for papers on anything BSD-related, and we always love more presentations
If you're in the Belgium area or plan on going, submit a talk about something cool you're doing
There's also a mailing list and some more information in the original post
***
Bhyve SVM code merge
The bhyve_svm code has been in the "projects" tree of FreeBSD, but is now ready for -CURRENT
This changeset will finally allow bhyve to run on AMD CPUs, where it was previously limited to Intel only
All the supported operating systems and utilities should work on both now
One thing to note: bhyve doesn't support PCI passthrough on AMD just yet
There may still be some issues though
***
NetBSD at Open Source Conference Tokyo
The Japanese NetBSD users group held a booth at another recent open source conference
As always, they were running NetBSD on everything you can imagine
One of the users reports back to the mailing list on their experience, providing lots of pictures and links
Here's an interesting screenshot of NetBSD running various other BSDs in Xen
***
More BSD switchers every day
A decade-long Linux user is considering making the switch, and asks Reddit about the BSD community
Tired of the pointless bickering he sees in his current community, he asks if the same problems exist over here and what he should expect
So far, he's found that BSD people seem to act more level-headed about things, and are much more practical, whereas some FSF/GNU/GPL people make open source a religion
There's also another semi-related thread about another Linux user wanting to switch to BSD because of systemd and GNU people
There are some extremely well written and thought-out comments in the replies (in both threads), be sure to give them all a read
Maybe the OPs should've just watched this show
***
Interview - Olivier Cochard-Labbé - [email protected] / @ocochardlabbe
The BSD Router Project
News Roundup
FreeBSD -CURRENT on a T420
Thinkpads are quite popular with BSD developers and users
Most of the hardware seems to be supported across the BSDs (especially wifi)
This article walks through installing FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Thinkpad T420 with UEFI
If you've got a Thinkpad, or especially this specific one, have a look at some of the steps involved
***
FreeNAS on a Supermicro 5018A-MHN4
More and more people are migrating their NAS devices to BSD-based solutions
In this post, the author goes through setting up FreeNAS on some of his new hardware
His new rack-mounted FreeNAS machine has a low power Atom with eight cores and 64GB of RAM - quite a lot for its small form factor
The rest of the post details all of the hardware he chose and goes through the build process (with lots of cool pictures)
***
Hardening procfs and linprocfs
There was an exploit published recently for SFTP in OpenSSH, but it mostly just affected Linux
There exists a native procfs in FreeBSD, which was the target point of that exploit, but it's not used very often
The Linux emulation layer also supports its own linprocfs, which was affected as well
The HardenedBSD guys weigh in on how to best solve the problem, and now support an additional protection layer from writing to memory with procfs
If you want to learn more about ASLR and HardenedBSD, be sure to check out our interview with Shawn too
***
pfSense monitoring with bandwidthd
A lot of people run pfSense on their home network, and it's really useful to monitor the bandwidth usage
This article will walk you through setting up bandwidthd to do exactly that
bandwidthd monitors based on the IP address, rather than per-interface
It can also build some cool HTML graphs, and we love those pfSense graphs
Have a look at our bandwidth monitoring and testing tutorial for some more ideas
***
Feedback/Questions
Dave writes in
Chris writes in
Zeke writes in
Bostjan writes in
Patrick writes in
***
Mailing List Gold
More old bugs
The Right Font™ (see also)
***
1 hr 9 min
October 15, 201459: BSDって聞いたことある？
This week on the show we'll be talking with Hiroki Sato about the status of BSD in Japan. We also get to hear about how he got on the core team, and we just might find out why NetBSD is so popular over there! Answers to all your emails, the latest news, and even a brand new segment, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
BSD talks at XDC 2014
This year's Xorg conference featured a few BSD-related talks
Matthieu Herrb, Status of the OpenBSD graphics stack
Matthieu's talk details what's been done recently in Xenocara the OpenBSD kernel for graphics (slides here)
Jean-Sébastien Pédron, The status of the graphics stack on FreeBSD
His presentation gives a history of major changes and outlines the current overall status of graphics in FreeBSD (slides here)
Francois Tigeot, Porting DRM/KMS drivers to DragonFlyBSD
Francois' talk tells the story of how he ported some of the DRM and KMS kernel drivers to DragonFly (slides here)
***
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report
The FreeBSD project has a report of their activities between July and September of this year
Lots of ARM work has been done, and a goal for 11.0 is tier one support for the platform
The release includes reports from the cluster admin team, release team, ports team, core team and much more, but we've already covered most of the items on the show
If you're interested in seeing what the FreeBSD community has been up to lately, check the full report - it's huge
***
Monitoring pfSense logs using ELK
If you're one of those people who loves the cool graphs and charts that pfSense can produce, this is the post for you
ELK (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) is a group of tools that let you collect, store, search and (most importantly) visualize logs
It works with lots of different things that output logs and can be sent to one central server for displaying
This post shows you how to set up pfSense to do remote logging to ELK and get some pretty awesome graphs
***
Some updates to IPFW
Even though PF gets a lot of attention, a lot of FreeBSD people still love IPFW
While mostly a dormant section of the source tree, some updates were recently committed to -CURRENT
The commit lists the user-visible changes, performance changes, ABI changes and internal changes
It should be merged back to -STABLE after a month or so of testing, and will probably end up in 10.2-RELEASE
Also check this blog post for some more information and fancy graphs
***
Interview - Hiroki Sato (佐藤広生) - [email protected] / @hiroki_sato
BSD in Japan, technology conferences, various topics
News Roundup
pfSense on Hyper-V
In case you didn't know, the latest pfSense snapshots support running on Hyper-V
Unfortunately, the current stable release is based on an old, unsupported FreeBSD 8.x base, so you have to use the snapshots for now
The author of the post tells about his experience running pfSense and gives lots of links to read if you're interested in doing the same
He also praises pfSense above other Linux-based solutions for its IPv6 support and high quality code
***
OpenBSD as a daily driver
A curious Reddit user posts to ask the community about using OpenBSD as an everyday desktop OS
The overall consensus is that it works great for that, stays out of your way and is quite reliable
Caveats would include there being no Adobe Flash support (though others consider this a blessing..) and it requiring a more hands-on approach to updating
If you're considering running OpenBSD as a "daily driver," check all the comments for more information and tips
***
Getting PF log statistics
The author of this post runs an OpenBSD box in front of all his VMs at his colocation, and details his experiences with firewall logs
He usually investigates any IPs of interest with whois, nslookup, etc. - but this gets repetitive quickly, so..
He sets out to find the best way to gather firewall log statistics
After coming across a perl script to do this, he edited it a bit and is now a happy, lazy admin once again
You can try out his updated PF script here
***
FlashRD 1.7 released
In case anyone's not familiar, flashrd is a tool to create OpenBSD images for embedded hardware devices, executing from a virtualized environment
This new version is based on (the currently unreleased) OpenBSD 5.6, and automatically adapts to the number of CPUs you have for building
It also includes fixes for 4k drives and lots of various other improvements
If you're interested in learning more, take a look at some of the slides and audio from the main developer on the website
***
Feedback/Questions
Antonio writes in
Don writes in
Andriy writes in
Richard writes in
Robert writes in
***
Mailing List Gold
Subtle trolling
Old bugs with old fixes
A pig reinstall
Strange DOS-like environment
***
1 hr 21 min
October 08, 201458: Behind the Masq
Coming up this week on the show, we'll be talking to Matt Ranney and George Kola about how they use FreeBSD at Voxer, and how to get more companies to switch over. After that, we'll show you how to filter website ads at the gateway level, using DNSMasq. All this week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
NetBSD's EuroBSDCon report
This year's EuroBSDCon had the record number of NetBSD developers attending
The NetBSD guys had a small devsummit as well, and this blog post details some of their activities
Pierre Pronchery also talked about EdgeBSD there (also see our interview if you haven't already)
Hopefully this trend continues, and NetBSD starts to have even more of a presence at the conferences
***
Upcoming features in OpenBSD 5.6
OpenBSD 5.6 is to be released in just under a month from now, and one of the developers wrote a blog post about some of the new features
The post is mostly a collection of various links, many of which we've discussed before
It'll be the first version with LibreSSL and many other cool things
We will, of course, have all the details on the day of release
There are some good comments on hacker news about 5.6 as well
***
FreeBSD ARMv8-based implementation
The FreeBSD foundation is sponsoring some work to port FreeBSD to the new ThunderX ARM CPU family
With the potential to have up to 48 cores, this type of CPU might make ARM-based servers a more appealing option
Cavium, the company involved with this deal, seems to have lots of BSD fans
This collaboration is expected to result in Tier 1 recognition of the ARMv8 architecture
***
Updating orphaned OpenBSD ports
We discussed OpenBSD porting over portscout from FreeBSD a while back
Their ports team is making full use of it now, and they're also looking for people to help update some unmaintained ports
A new subdomain, portroach.openbsd.org, will let you view all the ports information easily
If you're interested in learning to port software, or just want to help update a port you use, this is a good chance to get involved
***
Interview - Matt Ranney & George Kola - [email protected] & [email protected]
BSD at Voxer, companies switching from Linux, community interaction
Tutorial
Adblocking with DNSMasq & Pixelserv
News Roundup
GhostBSD 4.0 released
The 4.0 branch of GhostBSD has finally been released, based on FreeBSD 10
With it come all the big 10.0 changes: clang instead of gcc, pkgng by default, make replaced by bmake
Mate is now the default desktop, with different workstation styles to choose from
***
Reports from PF about banned IPs
If you run any kind of public-facing server, you've probably seen your logs fill up with unwanted traffic
This is especially true if you run SSH on port 22, which the author of this post seems to
A lot can be done with just PF and some brute force tables
He goes through some different options for blocking Chinese IPs and break-in attempts
It includes a useful script he wrote to get reports about the IPs being blocked via email
***
NetBSD 6.1.5 and 6.0.6 released
The 6.1 and 6.0 branches of NetBSD got some updates
They include a number of security and stability fixes - plenty of OpenSSL mentions
Various panics and other small bugs also got fixed
***
OpenSSH 6.7 released
After a long delay, OpenSSH 6.7 has finally been released
Major internal refactoring has been done to make part of OpenSSH usable as a library
SFTP transfers can now be resumed
Lots of bug fixes, a few more new features - check the release notes for all the details
This release disables some insecure ciphers by default, so keep that in mind if you connect with legacy clients that use Arcfour or CBC modes
***
Feedback/Questions
Andriy writes in
Karl writes in
Possnfiffer writes in
Brad writes in
Solomon writes in
***
1 hr 16 min
October 01, 201457: The Daemon's Apprentice
We're back from EuroBSDCon! This week we'll be talking with Steve Wills about mentoring new BSD developers. If you've ever considered becoming a developer or helping out, it's actually really easy to get involved. We've also got all the BSD news for the week and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
NetBSD at Hiroshima Open Source Conference
NetBSD developers are hard at work, putting NetBSD on everything they can find
At a technology conference in Hiroshima, some developers brought their exotic machines to put on display
As usual, there are lots of pictures and a nice report from the conference
***
FreeBSD's Linux emulation overhaul
For a long time, FreeBSD's emulation layer has been based on an ancient Fedora 10 system
If you've ever needed to install Adobe Flash on BSD, you'll be stuck with all this extra junk
With some recent work, that's been replaced with a recent CentOS release
This opens up the door for newer versions of Skype to run on FreeBSD, and maybe even Steam someday
***
pfSense 2.2-BETA
Big changes are coming in pfSense land, with their upcoming 2.2 release
We talked to the developer a while back about future plans, and now they're finally out there
The 2.2 branch will be based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE (instead of 8.3) and include lots of performance fixes
It also includes some security updates, lots of package changes and updates and much more
You can check the full list of changes on their wiki
***
NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi
This article shows how you can install NetBSD on the ever-so-popular Raspberry Pi
As of right now, you'll need to use a -CURRENT snapshot to do it
It also shows how to grow the filesystem to fill up an SD card, some pkgsrc basics and how to get some initial things set up
Can anyone find something that you can't install NetBSD on?
***
Interview - Steve Wills - [email protected] / @swills
Mentoring new BSD developers
News Roundup
MidnightBSD 0.5 released
We don't hear a whole lot about MidnightBSD, but they've just released version 0.5
It's got a round of the latest FreeBSD security patches, driver updates and various small things
Maybe one of their developers could come on the show sometime and tell us more about the project
***
BSD Router Project 1.52 released
The newest update for the BSD Router Project is out
This version is based on a snapshot of 10-STABLE that's very close to 10.1-RELEASE
It's mostly a bugfix release, but includes some small changes and package updates
***
Configuring a DragonFly BSD desktop
We've done tutorials on how to set up a FreeBSD or OpenBSD desktop, but maybe you're more interested in DragonFly
In this post from Justin Sherrill, you'll learn some of the steps to do just that
He pulled out an old desktop machine, gave it a try and seems to be pleased with the results
It includes a few Xorg tips, and there are some comments about the possibility of making a GUI DragonFly installer
***
Building a mini-ITX pfSense box
Another week, another pfSense firewall build post
This time, the author is installing to a Jetway J7F2, a mini-ITX device with four LAN ports
He used to be a m0n0wall guy, but wanted to give the more modern pfSense a try
Lots of great pictures of the hardware, which we always love
***
Feedback/Questions
Damian writes in
Jan writes in
Dale writes in
Joe writes in
Bostjan writes in
***
1 hr 31 min
September 24, 201456: Beastly Infrastructure
This week we're on the other side of the Atlantic, attending EuroBSDCon. For now, we've got an awesome interview with Peter Wemm about the FreeBSD web cluster and infrastructure. It's an inside look that you probably won't hear about anywhere else! We'll also get to a couple of your emails today, and be back next week with all the usual goodies, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Interview - Peter Wemm - [email protected] / @karinjiri
The FreeBSD web cluster and infrastructure
Feedback/Questions
Todd writes in
Brandon writes in
***
58 min
September 17, 201455: The Promised WLAN
Coming up this week, we'll be talking with Adrian Chadd about all things wireless, his experience with FreeBSD on various laptop hardware and a whole lot more. As usual, we've got the latest news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD 10.1-BETA1 is out
The first maintenance update in the 10.x series of FreeBSD is on its way
Since we can't see a changelog yet, the 10-STABLE release notes offer a glimpse at some of the new features and fixes that will be included in 10.1
The vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, lots of drivers were updated, lots of bugs were fixed and bhyve also got many improvements from 11
Initial UEFI support, multithreaded softupdates for UFS and many more things were added
You can check the release schedule for the planned release dates
Details for the various forms of release media can be found in the announcement
***
Remote headless OpenBSD installation
A lot of server providers only offer a limited number of operating systems to be easily installed on their boxes
Sometimes you'll get lucky and they'll offer FreeBSD, but it's much harder to find ones that natively support other BSDs
This article shows how you can use a Linux-based rescue system, a RAM disk and QEMU to install OpenBSD on the bare metal of a server, headlessly and remotely
It required a few specific steps you'll want to take note of, but is extremely useful for those pesky hosting providers
***
Building a firewall appliance with pfSense
In this article, we learn how to easily set up a gateway and wireless access point with pfSense on a Netgate ALIX2C3 APU
After the author's modem died, he decided to look into a more do-it-yourself option with pf and a tiny router board
The hardware he used has gigabit ports and a BSD-compatible wireless card, as well as enough CPU power for a modest workload and a few services (OpenVPN, etc.)
There's a lot of great pictures of the hardware and detailed screenshots, definitely worth a look
***
Receive Side Scaling - UDP testing
Adrian Chadd has been working on RSS (Receive Side Scaling) in FreeBSD, and gives an update on the progress
He's using some quad core boxes with 10 gigabit ethernet for the tests
The post gives lots of stats and results from his network benchmark, as well as some interesting workarounds he had to do
He also provides some system configuration options, sysctl knobs, etc. (if you want to try it out)
And speaking of Adrian Chadd...
***
Interview - Adrian Chadd - [email protected] / @erikarn
BSD on laptops, wifi, drivers, various topics
News Roundup
Sendmail removed from OpenBSD
Mail server admins around the world are rejoicing, because sendmail is finally gone from OpenBSD
With OpenSMTPD being a part of the base system, sendmail became largely redundant and unneeded
If you've ever compared a "sendmail.cf" file to an "smtpd.conf" file... the different is as clear as night and day
5.6 will serve as a transitional release, including both sendmail and OpenSMTPD, but 5.7 will be the first release without it
If you still need it for some reason, sendmail will live in ports from now on
Hopefully FreeBSD will follow suit sometime in the future as well, possibly including DragonFly's mail transfer agent in base (instead of an entire mail server)
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pfSense backups with pfmb
We've mentioned the need for a tool to back up pfSense configs a number of times on the show
This script, hosted on github, does pretty much exactly that
It can connect to one (or more!) pfSense installations and back up the configuration
You can roll back or replace failed hardware very easily with its restore function
Everything is done over SSH, so it should be pretty secure
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The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
We mentioned when the pre orders were up, but now "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2nd edition" seems to be shipping out
If you're interested in FreeBSD development, or learning about the operating system internals, this is a great book to buy
We've even had all three authors on the show before!
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OpenBSD's systemd replacement updates
We mentioned last week that the news of OpenBSD creating systemd wrappers was getting mainstream attention
One of the developers writes in to Undeadly, detailing what's going on and what the overall status is
He also clears up any confusion about "porting systemd to BSD" (that's not what's going on) or his code ever ending up in base (it won't)
The top comment as of right now is a Linux user asking if his systemd wrappers can be ported back to Linux... poor guy
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Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 20 min
September 10, 201454: Luminary Environment
This week on the show, it's all about Lumina. We'll be giving you a visual walkthrough of the new BSD-exclusive desktop environment, as well as chatting with the main developer. There's also answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
Portscout ported to OpenBSD
Portscout is a popular utility used in the FreeBSD ports infrastructure
It lets port maintainers know when there's a new version of the upstream software available by automatically checking the distfile mirror
Now OpenBSD porters can enjoy the same convenience, as it's been ported over
You can view the status online to see how it works and who maintains what
The developer who ported it is working to get all the current features working on OpenBSD, and added a few new features as well
He decided to fork and rename it a few days later
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Sysadmins and systemd refugees flocking to BSD
With all the drama in Linux land about the rapid changes to their init system, a lot of people are looking at BSD alternatives
This "you got your Windows in my Linux" article (and accompanying comments) give a nice glimpse into the minds of some of those switchers
Both server administrators and regular everyday users are switching away from Linux, as more and more distros give them no choice but to use systemd
Fortunately, the BSD communities are usually very welcoming of switchers - it's pretty nice on this side!
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OpenBSD's versioning schemes
Ted Unangst explains the various versioning systems within OpenBSD, from the base to libraries to other included software
In contrast to FreeBSD's release cycle, OpenBSD isn't as concerned with breaking backwards compatibility (but only if it's needed to make progress)
This allows them to innovate and introduce new features a lot more easily, and get those features in a stable release that everyone uses
He also details the difference between branches, their errata system and lack of "patch levels" for security
Some other things in OpenBSD don't have version numbers at all, like tmux
"Every release adds some new features, fixes some old bugs, probably adds a new bug or two, and, if I have anything to say about it, removes some old features."
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VAXstation 4000 Model 90 booting NetBSD
We found a video of NetBSD booting on a 22 year old VAX workstation, circa 1992
This system has a monstrous 71 MHz CPU and 128MB of ECC RAM
It continues in part two, where we learn that it would've cost around $25,000 when it was released!
The uploader talks about his experiences getting NetBSD on it, what does and doesn't work, etc
It's interesting to see that such old hardware isn't necessarily obsolete just because newer things have come out since then (but maybe don't try to build world on it...)
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Interview - Ken Moore - [email protected]
The Lumina desktop environment
Special segment
Lumina walkthrough
News Roundup
Suricata for IDS on pfSense
While most people are familiar with Snort as an intrusion detection system, Suricata is another choice
This guide goes through the steps of installing and configuring it on a public-facing pfSense box
Part two details some of the configuration steps
One other cool thing about Suricata - it's compatible with Snort rules, so you can use the same updates
There's also another recent post about snort as well, if that's more your style
If you run pfSense (or any BSD) as an edge router for a lot of users, this might be worth looking into
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OpenBSD's systemd API emulation project
This story was pretty popular in the mainstream news this week
For the Google Summer of Code, a student is writing emulation wrappers for some of systemd's functions
There was consideration from some Linux users to port over the finished emulation back to Linux, so they wouldn't have to run the full systemd
One particularly interesting Slashdot comment snippet: "We are currently migrating a large number (much larger than planned after initial results) of systems from RHEL to BSD - a decision taken due to general unhappiness with RHEL6, but SystemD pushed us towards BSD rather than another Linux distro - and in some cases are seeing throughput gains of greater than 10% on what should be equivalent Linux and BSD server builds. The re-learning curve wasn't as steep as we expected, general system stability seems to be better too, and BSD's security reputation goes without saying."
It will NOT be in the base system - only in ports, and only installed as a dependency for things like newer GNOME that require such APIs
In the long run, BSD will still be safe from systemd's reign of terror, but will hopefully still be compatible with some third party packages like GNOME that insist on using it
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GhostBSD 4 previewed
The GhostBSD project is moving along, slowly getting closer to the 4 release
This article shows some of the progress made, and includes lots of screenshots and interesting graphical frontends
If you're not too familiar with GhostBSD, we interviewed the lead developer a little while back
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NetBSD on the Banana Pi
The Banana Pi is a tasty alternative to the Raspberry Pi, with similar hardware specs
In this blog post, a NetBSD developer details his experiences in getting NetBSD to run on it
After studying how the prebuilt Linux image booted, he made some notes and started hacking
Ethernet, one of the few things not working, is being looked into and he's hoping to get it fully supported for the upcoming NetBSD 7.0
They're only about $65 as of the time we're recording this, so it might be a fun project to try
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Feedback/Questions
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1 hr 19 min

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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…