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BSD Now episodes

March 05, 201427: BSD Now vs. BSDTalk
The long-awaited meetup is finally happening on today's show. We're going to be interviewing the original BSD podcaster, Will Backman, to discuss what he's been up to and what the future of BSD advocacy looks like. After that, we'll be showing you how to track (and even cross-compile!) the -CURRENT branch of NetBSD. We've got answers to user-submitted questions and the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
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FreeBSD and OpenBSD in GSOC2014
The Google Summer of Code is a way to encourage students to write code for open source projects and make some money
Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD were accepted, and we'd love for anyone listening to check out their GSOC pages
The FreeBSD wiki has a list of things that they'd be interested in someone helping out with
OpenBSD's want list was also posted
DragonflyBSD and NetBSD were sadly not accepted this year
***
Yes, you too can be an evil network overlord
A new blog post about monitoring your network using only free tools
OpenBSD is a great fit, and has all the stuff you need in the base system or via packages
It talks about the pflow pseudo-interface, its capabilities and relation to NetFlow (also goes well with pf)
There's also details about flowd and nfsen, more great tools to make network monitoring easy
If you're listening, Peter... stop ignoring our emails and come on the show! We know you're watching!
***
BSDMag's February issue is out
The theme is "configuring basic services on OpenBSD 5.4"
There's also an interview with Peter Hansteen (oh hey...)
Topics also include locking down SSH, a GIMP lesson, user/group management, and...
Linux and Solaris articles? Why??
***
Changes in bcrypt
Not specific to any OS, but the OpenBSD team is updating their bcrypt implementation
There is a bug in bcrypt when hashing long passwords - other OSes need to update theirs too! (FreeBSD already has)
"The length is stored in an unsigned char type, which will overflow and wrap at 256. Although we consider the existence of affected hashes very rare, in order to differentiate hashes generated before and after the fix, we are introducing a new minor 'b'."
As long as you upgrade your OpenBSD system in order (without skipping versions) you should be ok going forward
Lots of specifics in the email, check the full thing
***
Interview - Will Backman - [email protected] / @bsdtalk
The BSDTalk podcast, BSD advocacy, various topics
Tutorial
Tracking and cross-compiling -CURRENT (NetBSD)
News Roundup
X11 no longer needs root
Xorg has long since required root privileges to run the main server
With recent work from the OpenBSD team, now everything (even KMS) can run as a regular user
Now you can set the "machdep.allowaperture" sysctl to 0 and still use a GUI
***
OpenSSH 6.6 CFT
Shortly after the huge 6.5 release, we get a routine bugfix update
Test it out on as many systems as you can
Check the mailing list for the full bug list
***
Creating an OpenBSD USB drive
Since OpenBSD doesn't distribute any official USB images, here are some instructions on how to do it
Step by step guide on how you can make your very own
However, there's some recent emails that suggest official USB images may be coming soon... oh wait
***
PCBSD weekly digest
New PBI updates that allow separate ports from /usr/local
You need to rebuild pbi-manager if you want to try it out
Updates and changes to Life Preserver, App Cafe, PCDM
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 43 min
February 26, 201426: Port Authority
On today's show we have an interview with Joe Marcus Clark, one of the original portmgr members in FreeBSD, and one of the key GNOME porters. Keeping along with that topic, we have a FreeBSD ports tutorial for you as well. The latest news and answers to your BSD questions, right here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
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Tailoring OpenBSD for an old, strange computer
The author of this article had an OmniBook 800CT, which comes with a pop-out mouse, black and white display, 32MB of RAM and a 133MHz CPU
Obviously he had to install some kind of BSD on it!
This post goes through all his efforts of trimming down OpenBSD to work on such a limited device
He goes through the trial and error of "compile, break it, rebuild, try again"
After cutting a lot out from the kernel, saving a precious megabyte here and there, he eventually gets it working
***
pkgsrcCon and BSDCan
pkgsrccon is "a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure"
This year it will be on June 21st and 22nd
The schedule is still being worked out, so if you want to give a talk, submit it
BSDCan's schedule was also announced
We'll be having presentations about ARM on NetBSD and FreeBSD, PF on OpenBSD, Capsicum and casperd, ASLR in FreeBSD, more about migrating from Linux to BSD, FreeNAS stuff and much more
Kris' presentation was accepted!
Tons of topics, look forward to the recorded versions of all of them hopefully!
***
Two factor auth with pushover
A new write-up from our friend Ted Unangst
Pushover is "a web hook to smartphone push notification gateway" - you sent a POST to a web server and it sends a code to your phone
His post goes through the steps of editing your login.conf and setting it all up to work
Now you can get a two factor authenticated login for ssh!
***
The status of GNOME 3 on BSD
It's no secret that the GNOME team is a Linux-obsessed bunch, almost to the point of being hostile towards other operating systems
OpenBSD keeps their GNOME 3 ports up to date very well, and Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work on that and how easy it is to use
This post goes through the process of how simple it is to get GNOME 3 set up on OpenBSD and even includes a screencast
A few recent posts from some GNOME developers show that they're finally working with the BSD guys to improve portability
The FreeBSD and OpenBSD teams are working together to bring the latest GNOME to all of us - it's a beautiful thing
This goes right along with our interview today!
***
Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - [email protected]
The life and daily activities of portmgr, GNOME 3, Tinderbox, portlint, various topics
Tutorial
The FreeBSD Ports Collection
News Roundup
DragonflyBSD 3.8 goals and 3.6.1 release
The Dragonfly team is thinking about what should be in version 3.8
On their bug tracker, it lists some of the things they'd like to get done before then
In the meantime, 3.6.1 was released with lots of bugfixes
***
NYCBSDCon 2014 wrap-up piece
We've got a nice wrap-up titled "NYCBSDCon 2014 Heats Up a Cold Winter Weekend"
The author also interviews GNN about the conference
There's even a little "beginner introduction" to BSD segment
Includes a mention of the recently-launched journal and lots of pictures from the event
***
FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis
GNN in yet another story - he gave a presentation at the NYLUG about the differences between FreeBSD and Linux
He mentions the history of BSD, the patch set and 386BSD, the lawsuit, philosophy and license differences, a complete system vs "distros," development models, BSD-only features and technologies, how to become a committer, overall comparisons, different hats and roles, the different bsds and their goals and actual code differences
Serves as a good introduction you can show your Linux friends
***
PCBSD CFT and weekly digest
Upgrade tools have gotten a major rewrite
You have to help test it, there is no choice! Read more here
How dare Kris be "unimpressed with" freebsd-update and pkgng!?
Various updates and fixes
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 32 min
February 19, 201425: A Sixth pfSense
We have a packed show for you this week! We'll sit down for an interview with Chris Buechler, from the pfSense project, to learn just how easy it can be to deploy a BSD firewall. We'll also be showing you a walkthrough of the pfSense interface so you can get an idea of just how convenient and powerful it is. Answers to your questions and the latest headlines, here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
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EuroBSDCon and AsiaBSDCon
This year, EuroBSDCon will be in September in Sofia, Bulgaria
They've got a call for papers up now, so everyone can submit the talks they want to present
There will also be a tutorial section of the conference
AsiaBSDCon will be next month, in March!
All the info about the registration, tutorials, hotels, timetable and location have been posted
Check the link for all the details on the talks - if you plan on going to Tokyo next month, hang out with Allan and Kris and lots of BSD developers!
***
FreeBSD 10 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite
The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a router that costs less than $100 and has a MIPS CPU
This article goes through the process of installing and configuring FreeBSD on it to use as a home router
Lots of good pictures of the hardware and specific details needed to get you set up
It also includes the scripts to create your own images if you don't want to use the ones rolled by someone else
For such a cheap price, might be a really fun weekend project to replace your shitty consumer router
Of course if you're more of an OpenBSD guy, you can always see our tutorial for that too
***
Signed pkgsrc package guide
We got a request on IRC for more pkgsrc stuff on the show, and a listener provided a nice write-up
It shows you how to set up signed packages with pkgsrc, which works on quite a few OSes (not just NetBSD)
He goes through the process of signing packages with a public key and how to verify the packages when you install them
The author also happens to be an EdgeBSD developer
***
Big batch of OpenBSD hackathon reports
Five trip reports from the OpenBSD hackathon in New Zealand! In the first one, jmatthew details his work on fiber channel controller drivers, some octeon USB work and ARM fixes for AHCI
In the second, ketennis gets into his work with running interrupt handlers without holding the kernel lock, some SPARC64 improvements and a few other things
In the third, jsg updated libdrm and mesa and did various work on xenocara
In the fourth, dlg came with the intention to improve SMP support, but got distracted and did SCSI stuff instead - but he talks a little bit about the struggle OpenBSD has with SMP and some of the work he's done
In the fifth, claudio talks about some stuff he did for routing tables and misc. other things
***
Interview - Chris Buechler - [email protected] / @cbuechler
pfSense
Tutorial
pfSense walkthrough
News Roundup
FreeBSD challenge continues
Our buddy from the Linux foundation continues his switching to BSD journey
In day 13, he covers some tips for new users, mentions trying things out in a VM first
In day 14, he starts setting up XFCE and X11, feels like he's starting over as a new Linux user learning the ropes again - concludes that ports are the way to go
In day 15, he finishes up his XFCE configuration and details different versions of ports with different names, as well as learns how to apply his first patch
In day 16, he dives into the world of FreeBSD jails!
***
BSD books in 2014
BSD books are some of the highest quality technical writings available, and MWL has written a good number of them
In this post, he details some of his plans for 2014
In includes at least one OpenBSD book, at least one FreeBSD book and...
Very strong possibility of Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition (watch our interview with him)
Check the link for all the details
***
How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images
Our friend Colin Percival details how to build EC2 images in a new blog post
Most people just use the images he makes on their instances, but some people will want to make their own from scratch
You build a regular disk image and then turn it into an AMI
It requires a couple ports be installed on your system, but the whole process is pretty straightforward
***
PCBSD weekly digest
This time around we discuss how you can become a developer
Kris also details the length of supported releases
Expect lots of new features in 10.1
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 8 min
February 12, 201424: The Cluster & The Cloud
This week on BSD Now... a wrap-up from NYCBSDCon! We'll also be talking to Luke Marsden, CEO of HybridCluster, about how they use BSD at large. Following that, our tutorial will show you how to securely share files with SFTP in a chroot. The latest news and answers to your questions, of course it's BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
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FreeBSD 10 as a firewall
Back in 2012, the author of this site wrote an article stating you should avoid FreeBSD 9 for a firewall and use OpenBSD instead
Now, with the release of 10.0, he's apparently changed his mind and switched back over
It mentions the SMP version of pf, general performance advantages and more modern features
The author is a regular listener of BSD Now, hi Joe!
***
Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools
Really long blog post, based on a BSDCan presentation, about fighting spam with OpenBSD
Peter Hansteen, author of the book of PF, goes through how he uses OpenBSD's spamd and other security features to combat spam and malware
He goes through his experiences with content filtering and disappointment with a certain proprietary vendor
Not totally BSD-specific, lots of people can enjoy the article - lots of virus history as well
***
FreeBSD ASLR patches submitted
So far, FreeBSD hasn't had Address Space Layout Randomization
ASLR is a nice security feature, see wikipedia for more information
With a giant patch from Shawn Webb, it might be integrated into a future version (after a vicious review from the security team of course)
We might have Shawn on the show to talk about it, but he's also giving a presentation at BSDCan about his work with ASLR
***
Old-style pkg_ tools retired
At last the old pkg_add tools are being retired in FreeBSD
pkgng is a huge improvement, and now portmgr@ thinks it's time to cut the cord on the legacy toolset
Ports aren't going away, and probably never will, but for binary package fans and new users that are used to things like apt, pkgng is the way to go
All pkg_ tools will be considered unsupported on September 1, 2014 - even on older branches
***
Interview - Luke Marsden - [email protected] / @lmarsden
BSD at HybridCluster
Tutorial
Filesharing with chrooted SFTP
News Roundup
FreeBSD on OpenStack
OpenStack is a cloud computing project
It consists of "a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API."
Until now, there wasn't a good way to run a full BSD instance on OpenStack
With a project in the vein of Colin Percival's AWS startup scripts, now that's no longer the case!
***
FOSDEM BSD videos
This year's FOSDEM had seven BSD presentations
The videos are slowly being uploaded for your viewing pleasure
Not all of the BSD ones are up yet, but by the time you're watching this they might be!
Check this directory for most of 'em
The BSD dev room was full, lots of interest in what's going on from the other communities
***
The FreeBSD challenge finally returns!
Due to prodding from a certain guy of a certain podcast, the "FreeBSD Challenge" series has finally resumed
Our friend from the Linux foundation picks up with day 11 and day 12 on his switching from Linux journey
This time he outlines the upgrade process of going from 9 to 10, using freebsd-update
There's also some notes about different options for upgrading ports and some extra tips
***
PCBSD weekly digest
After the big 10.0 release, the PCBSD crew is focusing on bug fixes for a while
During their "fine tuning phase" users are encouraged to submit any and all bugs via the trac system
Warden got some fixes and the package manager got some updates as well
Huge size reduction in PBI format
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 10 min
February 11, 2014 The Cluster & The Cloud | BSD Now 24
This week on BSD Now… a wrap-up from NYCBSDCon! We’ll also be talking to Luke Marsden, CEO of HybridCluster, about how they use BSD at large. Following that, our tutorial will show you how to securely share files with SFTP in a chroot. The latest news and answers to your questions, of course it’s BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.
1 hr 10 min
February 05, 201423: Time Signatures
On this week's episode, we'll be talking with Ted Unangst of the OpenBSD team about their new signing infrastructure. After that, we've got a tutorial on how to run your own NTP server. News, your feedback and even... the winner of our tutorial contest will be announced! So stay tuned to BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results
The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
$768,562 from 1659 donors
Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
"We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook)
***
OpenSSH 6.5 released
We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL!
***
Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower
In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone."
***
OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black
Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices
***
Interview - Ted Unangst - [email protected] / @tedunangst
OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD
Tutorial
Running an NTP server
News Roundup
Getting started with FreeBSD
A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far
***
More OpenBSD hackathon reports
As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there
***
X11 in a jail
We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas
***
PCBSD weekly digest
10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
AMD graphics are now officially supported
GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
Grub updates and fixes
PCBSD also got a mention in eweek
***
Feedback/Questions
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Alex writes in - unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
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***
1 hr 16 min
January 29, 201422: Journaled News-Updates
This time on the show, we'll be talking with George Neville-Neil about the brand new FreeBSD Journal and what it's all about. After that, we've got a tutorial on how to track the -stable and -current branches of OpenBSD. Answers to all your BSD questions and the latest headlines, only on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD quarterly status report
Gabor Pali sent out the October-December 2013 status report to get everyone up to date on what's going on
The report contains 37 entries and is very very long... various reports from all the different teams under the FreeBSD umbrella, probably too many to even list in the show notes
Lots of work going on in the ARM world, EC2/Xen and Google Compute Engine are also improving
Secure boot support hopefully coming [by mid-year](www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/62855-freebsd-to-support-secure-boot-by-mid-year)
There's quite a bit going on in the FreeBSD world, many projects happening at the same time
***
n2k14 OpenBSD Hackathon Report
Recently, OpenBSD held one of their hackathons in New Zealand
15 developers gathered there to sit in a room and write code for a few days
Philip Guenther brings back a nice report of the event
If you've been watching the -current CVS logs, you've seen the flood of commits just from this event alone
Fixes with threading, Linux compat, ACPI, and various other things - some will make it into 5.5 and others need more testing
Another report from Theo details his work
Updates to the random subsystem, some work-in-progress pf fixes, suspend/resume fixes and more signing stuff
***
Four new NetBSD releases
NetBSD released versions 6.1.3, 6.0.4, 5.2.2 and 5.1.4
These updates include lots of bug fixes and some security updates, not focused on new features
You can upgrade depending on what branch you're currently on
Confused about the different branches? See this graph.
***
The future of open source ZFS development
On February 11, 2014, Matt Ahrens will be giving a presentation about ZFS
The talk will be about the future of ZFS and the open source development since Oracle closed the code
It's in San Jose, California - go if you can!
***
Interview - George Neville-Neil - [email protected] / @gvnn3
The FreeBSD Journal
Tutorial
Tracking -STABLE and -CURRENT (OpenBSD)
News Roundup
pfSense news and 2.1.1 snapshots
pfSense has some snapshots available for the upcoming 2.1.1 release
They include FreeBSD security fixes as well as some other updates
There are recordings posted of some of the previous hangouts
Unfortunately they're only for subscribers, so you'll have to wait until next month when we have Chris on the show to talk about pfSense!
***
FreeBSD on Google Compute Engine
Recently we mentioned some posts about getting OpenBSD to run on GCE, here's the FreeBSD version
Nice big fat warning: "The team has put together a best-effort posting that will get most, if not all, of you up and running. That being said, we need to remind you that FreeBSD is being supported on Google Compute Engine by the community. The instructions are being provided as-is and without warranty."
Their instructions are a little too Linuxy (assuming wget, etc.) for our taste, someone should probably get it updated!
Other than that it's a pretty good set of instructions on how to get up and running
***
Dragonfly ACPI update
Sascha Wildner committed some new ACPI code
There's also a "heads up" to update your BIOS if you experience problems
Check the mailing list post for all the details
***
PCBSD weekly digest
10.0-RC4 users need to upgrade all their packages for 10.0-RC5
PBIs needed to be rebuilt.. actually everything did
Help test GNOME 3 so we can get it in the official ports tree
By the way, I think Kris has an announcement - PCBSD 10.0 is out!
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 31 min
January 22, 201421: Tendresse for Ten
This time on the show, we've got some great news for OpenBSD, as well as the scoop on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE - yes it's finally here! We're gonna talk to Colin Percival about running FreeBSD 10 on EC2 and lots of other interesting stuff. After that, we'll be showing you how to do some bandwidth monitoring and network performance testing in a combo tutorial. We've got a round of your questions and the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE is out
The long awaited, giant release of FreeBSD is now official and ready to be downloaded
One of the biggest releases in FreeBSD history, with tons of new updates
Some features include: LDNS/Unbound replacing BIND, Clang by default (no GCC anymore), native Raspberry Pi support and other ARM improvements, bhyve, hyper-v support, AMD KMS, VirtIO, Xen PVHVM in GENERIC, lots of driver updates, ZFS on root in the installer, SMP patches to pf that drastically improve performance, Netmap support, pkgng by default, wireless stack improvements, a new iSCSI stack, FUSE in the base system... the list goes on and on
Start up your freebsd-update or do a source-based upgrade
***
OpenSSH 6.5 CFT
Our buddy Damien Miller announced a Call For Testing for OpenSSH 6.5
Huge, huge release, focused on new features rather than bugfixes (but it includes those too)
New ciphers, new key formats, new config options, see the mailing list for all the details
Should be in OpenBSD 5.5 in May, look forward to it - but also help test on other platforms!
***
DIY NAS story, FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA
Another new blog post about FreeNAS!
Instead of updating the older tutorials, the author started fresh and wrote a new one for 2014
"I did briefly consider suggesting nas4free for the EconoNAS blog, since it’s essentially a fork off the FreeNAS tree but may run better on slower hardware, but ultimately I couldn’t recommend anything other than FreeNAS"
Really long article with lots of nice details about his setup, why you might want a NAS, etc.
Speaking of FreeNAS, they released 9.2.1-BETA with lots of bugfixes
***
OpenBSD needed funding for electricity.. and they got it
Briefly mentioned at the end of last week's show, but has blown up over the internet since
OpenBSD in the headlines of major tech news sites: slashdot, zdnet, the register, hacker news, reddit, twitter.. thousands of comments
They needed about $20,000 to cover electric costs for the server rack in Theo's basement
Lots of positive reaction from the community helping out so far, and it appears they have reached their goal and got $100,000 in donations
From Bob Beck: "we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately $100,000 in donations to the foundation"
This is a shining example of the BSD community coming together, and even the Linux people realizing how critical BSD is to the world at large
***
Interview - Colin Percival - [email protected] / @cperciva
FreeBSD on Amazon EC2, backups with Tarsnap, 10.0-RELEASE, various topics
Tutorial
Bandwidth monitoring and testing
News Roundup
pfSense talk at Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyoukai
Isaac Levy will be presenting "pfSense Practical Experiences: from home routers, to High-Availability Datacenter Deployments"
He's also going to be looking for help to translate the pfSense documentation into Japanese
The event is on February 17, 2014 if you're in the Tokyo area
***
m0n0wall 1.8.1 released
For those who don't know, m0n0wall is an older BSD-based firewall OS that's mostly focused on embedded applications
pfSense was forked from it in 2004, and has a lot more active development now
They switched to FreeBSD 8.4 for this new version
Full list of updates in the changelog
This version requires at least 128MB RAM and a disk/CF size of 32MB or more, oh no!
***
Ansible and PF, plus NTP
Another blog post from our buddy Michael Lucas
There've been some NTP amplification attacks recently in the news
The post describes how he configured ntpd on a lot of servers without a lot of work
He leverages pf and ansible for the configuration
OpenNTPD is, not surprisingly, unaffected - use it
***
ruBSD videos online
Just a quick followup from a few weeks ago
Theo and Henning's talks from ruBSD are now available for download
There's also a nice interview with Theo
***
PCBSD weekly digest
10.0-RC4 images are available
Wine PBI is now available for 10
9.2 systems will now be able to upgrade to version 10 and keep their PBI library
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 48 min
January 15, 201420: Bhyve Mind
It's our big 20th episode! We're going to sit down for a chat with Neel Natu and Peter Grehan, the developers of bhyve. Not familiar with bhyve? Our tutorial will show you all you need to know about this awesome new virtualization technology. Answers to your questions and all the latest news, here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
OpenBSD automatic installation
A CFT (call for testing) was posted for OpenBSD's new automatic installer process
Using this new system, you can spin up fully-configured OpenBSD installs very quickly
It will answer all the questions for you and can put files into place and start services
Great for large deployments, help test it and report your findings
***
FreeNAS install guide and blog posts
A multipart series on YouTube about installing FreeNAS
In part 1, the guy (who is possibly Dracula, with his very Transylvanian accent..) builds his new file server and shows off the hardware
In part 2, he shows how to install and configure FreeNAS, uses IPMI, sets up his pools
He pronounces gigabytes as jiggabytes and it's hilarious
We've also got an unrelated blog post about a very satisfied FreeNAS user who details his setup
As well as another blog post from our old pal Devin Teske about his recent foray into the FreeNAS development world
***
FreeBSD 10.0-RC5 is out
Another, unexpected RC is out for 10.0
Minor fixes included, please help test and report any bugs
You can update via freebsd-update or from source
Hopefully this will be the last one before 10.0-RELEASE, which has tons of new features we'll talk about
It's been tagged -RELEASE in SVN already too!
***
OpenBSD 5.5-beta is out
Theo updated the branch status to 5.5-beta
A list of changes
Help test and report any bugs you find
Lots of rapid development with signify (which we mentioned last week), the beta includes some "test keys"
Does that mean it'll be part of the final release? We'll find out in May.. or when we interview Ted (soon)
***
Interview - Neel Natu & Peter Grehan - [email protected] & [email protected]
BHyVe - the BSD hypervisor
Tutorial
Virtualization with bhyve
News Roundup
Hostname canonicalisation in OpenSSH
Blog post from our friend Damien Miller
This new feature allows clients to canonicalize unqualified domain names
SSH will know if you typed "ssh bsdnow" you meant "ssh bsdnow.tv" with new config options
This will help clean up some ssh configs, especially if you have many hosts
Should make it into OpenSSH 6.5, which is "due really soon"
***
Dragonfly on a Chromebook
Some work has been done by Matthew Dillon to get DragonflyBSD working on a Google Chromebook
These couple of posts detail some of the things he's got working so far
Changes were needed to the boot process, trackpad and wifi drivers needed updating...
Also includes a guide written by Dillon on how to get yours working
***
Spider in a box
"Spiderinabox" is a new OpenBSD-based project
Using a combination of OpenBSD, Firefox, XQuartz and VirtualBox, it creates a secure browsing experience for OS X
Firefox runs encapsulated in OpenBSD and doesn't have access to OS X in any way
The developer is looking for testers on other operating systems!
***
PCBSD weekly digest
PCBSD 10 has entered into the code freeze phase
They're focusing on fixing bugs now, rather than adding new features
The update system got a lot of improvements
PBI load times reduced by up to 40%! what!!!
***
Feedback/Questions
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***
1 hr 24 min
January 08, 201419: The Installfest
We've got some special treats for you this week on the show. It's the long-awaited "installfest" segment, where we go through the installer of each of the different BSDs. Of course we also have your feedback and the latest news as well... and... we even have our very first viewer contest! There's a lot to get to today on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD's new testing infrastructure
A new test suite was added to FreeBSD, with 3 powerful machines available
Both -CURRENT and stable/10 have got the test suite build infrastructure in place
Designed to help developers test and improve major scalability across huge amounts of CPUs and RAM
More details available here
Could the iXsystems monster server be involved...?
***
OpenBSD gets signify
At long last, OpenBSD gets support for signed releases!
For "the world's most secure OS" it was very easy to MITM kernel patches, updates, installer isos, everything
A commit to the -current tree reveals a new "signify" tool is currently being kicked around
More details in a blog post from the guy who committed it
Quote: "yeah, briefly, the plan is to sign sets and packages. that's still work in progress."
***
Faces of FreeBSD
This time they interview Isabell Long
She's a volunteer staff member on the freenode IRC network
In 2011, she participated in the Google Code-In contest and became involved with documentation
"The new committer mentoring process proved very useful and that, plus the accepting community of FreeBSD, are reasons why I stay involved."
***
pkgsrc-2013Q4 branched
The quarterly pkgsrc branch from NetBSD is out
13472 total packages for NetBSD-current/amd64 + 13049 binary packages built with clang!
Lots of numbers and stats in the announcement
pkgsrc works on quite a few different OSes, not just NetBSD
See our interview with Amitai Schlair for a bit about pkgsrc
***
OpenBSD on Google's Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine is a "cloud computing" platform similar to EC2
Unfortunately, they only offer poor choices for the OS (Debian and CentOS)
Recently it's been announced that there is a custom OS option
It's using a WIP virtio-scsi driver, lots of things still need more work
Lots of technical and networking details about the struggles to get OpenBSD working on it
***
The Installfest
We'll be showing you the installer of each of the main BSDs. As of the date this episode airs, we're using:
FreeBSD 10.0
OpenBSD 5.4
NetBSD 6.1.2
DragonflyBSD 3.6
PCBSD 10.0
***
News Roundup
Building an OpenBSD wireless access point
A neat write up we found around the internet about making an OpenBSD wifi router
Goes through the process of PXE booting, installing base, using a serial console, setting up networking and wireless
Even includes a puffy sticker on the Soekris box at the end, how cute
***
FreeBSD 4.X jails on 10.0
Blog entry from our buddy Michael Lucas
For whatever reason (an "in-house application"), he needed to run a FreeBSD 4 jail in FreeBSD 10
Talks about the options he had: porting software, virtualizing, dealing with slow old hardware
He goes through the whole process of making an ancient jail
It's "an acceptable trade-off, if it means I don’t have to touch actual PHP code."
***
Unscrewed: a story about OpenBSD
Pretty long blog post about how a network admin used OpenBSD to save the day
To set the tone, "It was 5am, and the network was down"
Great war story about replacing expensive routers and networking equipment with cheaper hardware and BSD
Mentions a lot of the built in tools and how OpenBSD is great for routers and high security applications
***
PCBSD weekly digest
10.0-RC3 is out and ready to be tested
New detection of ATI Hybrid Graphics, they're working on nVidia next
Re-classifying Linux jails as unsupported / experimental
***
Feedback/Questions
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Samuel writes in
***
1 hr 22 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…