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In this episode, we interview Michael W. Lucas about his latest book projects, including the upcoming SNMP Mastery book.

Special Guest: Michael W Lucas.

LLDB Threading support now ready, Multiple IPSec VPN tunnels with FreeBSD, Netflix Optimized FreeBSD's Network Stack More Than Doubled AMD EPYC Performance, happy eyeballs with unwind(8), AWS got FreeBSD ARM 12, OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support, and more.

Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.

In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report.

So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report.

The FreeBSD handbook describes an IPSec VPN tunnel between 2 FreeBSD hosts (see https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ipsec.html)

But it is also possible to have multiple, 2 or more, IPSec VPN tunnels created and running on a FreeBSD host. How to implement and configure this is described below.

The requirements is to have 3 locations (A, B and C) connected with IPSec VPN tunnels using FreeBSD (11.3-RELEASE).

Each location has 1 IPSec VPN host running FreeBSD (VPN host A, B and C).

VPN host A has 2 IPSec VPN tunnels: 1 to location B (VPN host B) and 1 to location C (VPN host C).

Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel.

Netflix has long been known to be using FreeBSD in their data centers particularly where network performance is concerned. But in wanting to deliver 200Gb/s throughput from individual servers led them to making NUMA optimizations to the FreeBSD network stack. Allocating NUMA local memory for kernel TLS crypto buffers and for backing files sent via sentfile were among their optimizations. Changes to network connection handling and dealing with incoming connections to Nginx were also made.

For those just wanting the end result, Netflix's NUMA optimizations to FreeBSD resulted in their Intel Xeon servers going from 105Gb/s to 191Gb/s while the NUMA fabric utilization dropped from 40% to 13%.

In case you are wondering why happy eyeballs: It's a variation on this:

unwind has a concept of a best nameserver type. It considers a configured DoT nameserver to be better than doing it's own recursive resolving. Recursive resolving is considered to be better than asking the dhcp provided nameservers.

This diff sorts the nameserver types by quality, as above (validation, resolving, dead...), and as a tie breaker it adds the median of the round trip time of previous queries into the mix.

One other interesting thing about this is that it gets us past captive portals without a check URL, that's why this diff is so huge, it rips out all the captive portal stuff (please apply with patch -E):

Please test this. I'm particularly interested in reports from people who move between networks and need to get past captive portals.

Product Overview

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power servers, desktops, and embedded systems. Derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley, FreeBSD has been continually developed by a large community for more than 30 years.

FreeBSD's networking, security, storage, and monitoring features, including the pf firewall, the Capsicum and CloudABI capability frameworks, the ZFS filesystem, and the DTrace dynamic tracing framework, make FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage systems.

I just committed all the dependencies for OpenSSH security key (U2F) support to base and tweaked OpenSSH to use them directly. This means there will be no additional configuration hoops to jump through to use U2F/FIDO2 security keys.

Hardware backed keys can be generated using "ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk" (or "ed25519-sk" if your token supports it). Many tokens require to be touched/tapped to confirm this step.

You'll get a public/private keypair back as usual, except in this case, the private key file does not contain a highly-sensitive private key but instead holds a "key handle" that is used by the security key to derive the real private key at signing time.

So, stealing a copy of the private key file without also stealing your security key (or access to it) should not give the attacker anything.

Once you have generated a key, you can use it normally - i.e. add it to an agent, copy it to your destination's authorized_keys files (assuming they are running -current too), etc. At authentication time, you will be prompted to tap your security key to confirm the signature operation - this makes theft-of-access attacks against security keys more difficult too.

Please test this thoroughly - it's a big change that we want to have stable before the next release.

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We read FreeBSD’s third quarterly status report, OpenBSD on Sparc64, ZoL repo move to OpenZFS, GEOM NOP, keeping NetBSD up-to-date, and more.

This quarter the reports team has been more active than usual thanks to a better organization: calls for reports and reminders have been sent regularly, reports have been reviewed and merged quickly (I would like to thank debdrup@ in particular for his reviewing work).

Efficiency could still be improved with the help of our community. In particular, the quarterly team has found that many reports have arrived in the last days before the deadline or even after. I would like to invite the community to follow the guidelines below that can help us sending out the reports sooner.

Starting from next quarter, all quarterly status reports will be prepared the last month of the quarter itself, instead of the first month after the quarter's end. This means that deadlines for submitting reports will be the 1st of January, April, July and October.

Next quarter will then be a short one, covering the months of November and December only and the report will probably be out in mid January.

OpenBSD, huh? Yes, I usually write about FreeBSD and that’s in fact what I tried installing on the machine first. But I ran into problems with it very early on (never even reached single user mode) and put it aside for later. Since I powered up the SunFire again last month, I needed an OS now and chose OpenBSD for the simple reason that I have it available.

First I wanted to call this article simply “OpenBSD on SPARC” – but that would have been misleading since OpenBSD used to support 32-bit SPARC processors, too. The platform was just put to rest after the 5.9 release.

Version 6.0 was the last release of OpenBSD that came on CD-ROM. When I bought it, I thought that I’d never use the SPARC CD. But here was the chance! While it is an obsolete release, it comes with the cryptographic signatures to verify the next release. So the plan is to start at 6.0 as I can trust the original CDs and then update to the latest release. This will also be an opportunity to recap on some of the things that changed over the various versions.

Because it will contain the ZFS source code for both Linux and FreeBSD, we will rename the "ZFSonLinux" code repository to "OpenZFS". Specifically, the repo at http://github.com/ZFSonLinux/zfs will be moved to the OpenZFS organization, at http://github.com/OpenZFS/zfs.

The next major release of ZFS for Linux and FreeBSD will be "OpenZFS 2.0", and is expected to ship in 2020.

A long time ago— like 15 years ago— I worked at Sun Microsystems. The company was nearly dead at the time (it died a couple years later) because they didn't make anything that anyone wanted to buy anymore. So they had a lot of strange ideas about how they'd make their comeback.

Sometimes while testing file systems or applications you want to simulate some errors on the disk level. The first time I heard about this need was from Baptiste Daroussin during his presentation at AsiaBSDCon 2016. He mentioned how they had built a test lab with it. The same need was recently discussed during the PGCon 2019, to test a PostgreSQL instance. If you are FreeBSD user, I have great news for you: there is a GEOM provider which allows you to simulate a failing device.

GNOP allows us to configure transparent providers from existing ones. The first interesting option of it is that we can slice the device into smaller pieces, thanks to the ‘offset option’ and ‘stripsesize’. This allows us to observe how the data on the disk is changing. Let’s assume that we want to observe the changes in the GPT table when the GPT flags are added or removed (for example the bootme flags which are described here). We can use dd every time and analyze it using absolute values from the disks.

This is a tutorial to guide you through the shiny new pkg_comp 2.0 on NetBSD.

Goals: to use pkg_comp 2.0 to build a binary repository of all the packages you are interested in; to keep the repository fresh on a daily basis; and to use that repository with pkgin to maintain your NetBSD system up-to-date and secure.

This tutorial is specifically targeted at NetBSD but should work on other platforms with some small changes. Expect, at the very least, a macOS-specific tutorial as soon as I create a pkg_comp standalone installer for that platform.

LPI releases BSD Certification, openzfs trip report, Using FreeBSD with ports, LLDB threading support ready, Linux versus Open Source Unix, and more.

Linux Professional Institute extends its Open Technology certification track with the BSD Specialist Certification. Starting October 30, 2019, BSD Specialist exams will be globally available. The certification was developed in collaboration with the BSD Certification Group which merged with Linux Professional Institute in 2018.

G. Matthew Rice, the Executive Director of Linux Professional Institute says that "the release of the BSD Specialist certification marks a major milestone for Linux Professional Institute. With this new credential, we are reaffirming our belief in the value of, and support for, all open source technologies. As much as possible, future credentials and educational programs will include coverage of BSD.”

The seventh annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place on November 4th and 5th in San Francisco and brought together a healthy mix of familiar faces and new community participants. Several folks from iXsystems took part in the talks, hacking, and socializing at this amazing annual event. The messages of the event can be summed up as Unification, Refinement, and Ecosystem Tooling.

In the previous post I explained why sometimes building your software from ports may make sense on FreeBSD. I also introduced the reader to the old-fashioned way of using tools to make working with ports a bit more convenient.

In this follow-up post we’re going to take a closer look at portmaster and see how it especially makes updating from ports much, much easier. For people coming here without having read the previous article: What I describe here is not what every FreeBSD admin today should consider good practice (any more)! It can still be useful in special cases, but my main intention is to discuss this for building up the foundation for what you actually should do today.

Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.

In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report.

So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report.

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FreeBSD 12.1 is here, A history of Unix before Berkeley, FreeBSD development setup, HardenedBSD 2019 Status Report, DNSSEC, compiling RainbowCrack on OpenBSD, and more.

Nobody needs to be told that UNIX is popular today. In this article we will show you a little of where it was yesterday and over the past decade. And, without meaning in the least to minimise the incredible contributions of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, we will bring to light many of the others who worked on early versions, and try to show where some of the key ideas came from, and how they got into the UNIX of today.

Our title says we are talking about UNIX evolution. Evolution means different things to different people. We use the term loosely, to describe the change over time among the many different UNIX variants in use both inside and outside Bell Labs. Ideas, code, and useful programs seem to have made their way back and forth - like mutant genes - among all the many UNIXes living in the phone company over the decade in question.

Part One looks at some of the major components of the current UNIX system - the text formatting tools, the compilers and program development tools, and so on. Most of the work described in Part One took place at Research'', a part of Bell Laboratories (now AT&T Bell Laboratories, then as nowthe Labs''), and the ancestral home of UNIX. In planned (but not written) later parts, we would have looked at some of the myriad versions of UNIX - there are far more than one might suspect. This includes a look at Columbus and USG and at Berkeley Unix. You'll begin to get a glimpse inside the history of the major streams of development of the system during that time.

I do my FreeBSD development using git, tmux, vim and cscope.

I keep a FreeBSD fork on my github, I have forked https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd to https://github.com/adventureloop/freebsd

As we are experiencing the Suricata community first hand in Amsterdam we thought to release this version a bit earlier than planned. Included is the latest Suricata 5.0.0 release in the development version. That means later this November we will releasing version 5 to the production version as we finish up tweaking the integration and maybe pick up 5.0.1 as it becomes available.

LDAP TLS connectivity is now integrated into the system trust store, which ensures that all required root and intermediate certificates will be seen by the connection setup when they have been added to the authorities section. The same is true for trusting self-signed certificates. On top of this, IPsec now supports public key authentication as contributed by Pascal Mathis.

We at HardenedBSD have a lot of news to share. On 05 Nov 2019, Oliver Pinter resigned amicably from the project. All of us at HardenedBSD owe Oliver our gratitude and appreciation. This humble project, named by Oliver, was born out of his thesis work and the collaboration with Shawn Webb. Oliver created the HardenedBSD repo on GitHub in April 2013. The HardenedBSD Foundation was formed five years later to carry on this great work.

DNSSEC validation has been enabled in the default unbound.conf(5) in -current. The relevant commits were from Job Snijders (job@)

Shopware is the next generation of open source e-commerce software. Based on bleeding edge technologies like Symfony 3, Doctrine2 and Zend Framework Shopware comes as the perfect platform for your next e-commerce project. This tutorial will walk you through the Shopware Community Edition (CE) installation on FreeBSD 12 system by using NGINX as a web server.

Make sure your system meets the following minimum requirements:

Project RainbowCrack was originally Zhu Shuanglei's implementation, it's not clear to me if the project is still just his or if it's even been maintained for a while. His page seems to have been last updated in August 2007.

The Project RainbowCrack web page now has just binaries for Windows XP and Linux, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Earlier versions were available as source code. The version 1.2 source code does not compile on OpenBSD, and in my experience it doesn't compile on Linux, either. It seems to date from 2004 at the earliest, and I think it makes some version-2.4 assumptions about Linux kernel headers.

Migrating drives and zpool between hosts, OpenBSD in 2019, Dragonfly’s new zlib and dhcpcd, Batch renaming images and resolution with awk, a rant on the X11 ICCCM selection system, hammer 2 emergency space mode, and more.

Today is the day.

Today I move a zpool from an R710 into an R720. The goal: all services on that zpool start running on the new host.

Fortunately, that zpool is dedicated to jails, more or less. I have done some planning about this, including moving a poudriere on the R710 into a jail.

Now it is almost noon on Saturday, I am sitting in the basement (just outside the server room), and I’m typing this up.

I’ve used OpenBSD on and off since 2.1. More back then than in the last 10 years or so though, so I thought I’d try it again.

What triggered this was me finding a silly bug in GNU cpio that has existed with a “FIXME” comment since at least 1994. I checked OpenBSD to see if it had a related bug, but as expected no it was just fine.

I don’t quite remember why I stopped using OpenBSD for servers, but I do remember filesystem corruption on “unexpected power disconnections” (even with softdep turned on), which I’ve never really seen on Linux.

That and that fewer things “just worked” than with Linux, which matters more when I installed more random things than I do now. I’ve become a lot more minimalist. Probably due to less spare time. Life is better when you don’t run things like PHP (not that OpenBSD doesn’t support PHP, just an example) or your own email server with various antispam tooling, and other things.

This is all experience from running OpenBSD on a server. On my next laptop I intend to try running OpenBSD on the dektop, and will see if that more ad-hoc environment works well. E.g. will gnuradio work? Lack of other-OS VM support may be a problem.

Ouch, that’s a long list of bad stuff. Still, I like it. I’ll continue to run it, and will make sure my stuff continues working on OpenBSD.

And maybe in a year I’ll have a review of OpenBSD on a laptop.

zlib and dhcpcd are both updated in DragonFly… but my quick perusal of the commits makes it sound like bugfix only; no usage changes needed.

The most recent item on my list of “Geeky things I did that made me feel pretty awesome” is an hour’s adventure that culminated in this code:

The last item on the aforementioned list is “TODO: come up with a shorter title for this list.”

d00d, that document is devilspawn. I've recently spent my nights in pain

I didn't know what I was getting myself in to. Nobody knows until they try it. And once you start, you're unable to stop. You can't stop, if you stop then you haven't completed it to spec. You can't fail on this, it's just a few pages of text, how can that be so hard? So what if they use Atoms for everything. So what if there's no explicit correlation between the target type of a SelectionNotify event and the type of the property it indicates?

So what if the distinction is ambiguous? So what if the document is littered with such atrocities? It's not the spec's fault, the spec is authoritative. It's obviously YOUR (the implementor's) fault for misunderstanding it. If you didn't misunderstand it, you wouldn't be here complaining about it would you?

As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn’t changing much. There’s now an ‘emergency mode‘ for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn’t space for the normal history activity. It’s dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don’t leave it on!

The earliest Unix code, how to replace fail2ban with blacklistd, OpenBSD crossed 400k commits, how to install Bolt CMS on FreeBSD, optimized hammer2, appeasing the OSI 7-layer burrito guys, and more.

What is it that runs the servers that hold our online world, be it the web or the cloud? What enables the mobile apps that are at the center of increasingly on-demand lives in the developed world and of mobile banking and messaging in the developing world? The answer is the operating system Unix and its many descendants: Linux, Android, BSD Unix, MacOS, iOS—the list goes on and on. Want to glimpse the Unix in your Mac? Open a Terminal window and enter “man roff” to view the Unix manual entry for an early text formatting program that lives within your operating system.

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Unix. In the summer of 1969, that same summer that saw humankind’s first steps on the surface of the Moon, computer scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—most centrally Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—began the construction of a new operating system, using a then-aging DEC PDP-7 computer at the labs.

It was supposed to say "log," but the computer sending the message — based at UCLA — crashed before the letter "g" was typed. A computer at Stanford 560 kilometres away was supposed to fill in the remaining characters "in," as in "log in."

"The idea of the network was you could sit at one computer, log on through the network to a remote computer and use its services there,"

50 years later, the internet has become so ubiquitous that it has almost been rendered invisible. There's hardly an aspect in our daily lives that hasn't been touched and transformed by it.

Q: Take us back to that day 50 years ago. Did you have the sense that this was going to be something you'd be talking about a half a century later?

A: Well, yes and no. Four months before that message was sent, there was a press release that came out of UCLA in which it quotes me as describing what my vision for this network would become. Basically what it said is that this network would be always on, always available. Anybody with any device could get on at anytime from any location, and it would be invisible.

Well, what I missed ... was that this is going to become a social network. People talking to people. Not computers talking to computers, but [the] human element.

Q: Can you briefly explain what you were working on in that lab? Why were you trying to get computers to actually talk to one another?

A: As an MIT graduate student, years before, I recognized I was surrounded by computers and I realized there was no effective [or efficient] way for them to communicate. I did my dissertation, my research, on establishing a mathematical theory of how these networks would work. But there was no such network existing. AT&T said it won't work and, even if it does, we want nothing to do with it.

So I had to wait around for years until the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Defence decided they needed a network to connect together the computer scientists they were supervising and supporting.

Q: For all the promise of the internet, it has also developed some dark sides that I'm guessing pioneers like yourselves never anticipated.

A: We did not. I knew everybody on the internet at that time, and they were all well-behaved and they all believed in an open, shared free network. So we did not put in any security controls.

When the first spam email occurred, we began to see the dark side emerge as this network reached nefarious people sitting in basements with a high-speed connection, reaching out to millions of people instantaneously, at no cost in time or money, anonymously until all sorts of unpleasant events occurred, which we called the dark side.

But in those early days, I considered the network to be going through its teenage years. Hacking to spam, annoying kinds of effects. I thought that one day this network would mature and grow up. Well, in fact, it took a turn for the worse when nation states, organized crime and extremists came in and began to abuse the network in severe ways.

Q: Is there any part of you that regrets giving birth to this?

A: Absolutely not. The greater good is much more important.

blacklistd(8) provides an API that can be used by network daemons to communicate with a packet filter via a daemon to enforce opening and closing ports dynamically based on policy.

The interface to the packet filter is in /libexec/blacklistd-helper (this is currently designed for npf) and the configuration file (inspired from inetd.conf) is in etc/blacklistd.conf

Now, blacklistd(8) will require bpfjit(4) (Just-In-Time compiler for Berkeley Packet Filter) in order to properly work, in addition to, naturally, npf(7) as frontend and syslogd(8), as a backend to print diagnostic messages. Also remember npf shall rely on the npflog* virtual network interface to provide logging for tcpdump() to use.

Unfortunately (dont' ask me why ??) in 8.1 all the required kernel components are still not compiled by default in the GENERIC kernel (though they are in HEAD), and are rather provided as modules. Enabling NPF and blacklistd services would normally result in them being automatically loaded as root, but predictably on securelevel=1 this is not going to happen.

Sometime in the last week OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits (*) upon all our repositories since starting at 1995/10/18 08:37:01 Canada/Mountain. That's a lot of commits by a lot of amazing people.

(*) by one measure. Since the repository is so large and old, there are a variety of quirks including ChangeLog missing entries and branches not convertible to other repo forms, so measuring is hard. If you think you've got a great way of measuring, don't be so sure of yourself -- you may have overcounted or undercounted.

Bolt is a sophisticated, lightweight and simple CMS built with PHP. It is released under the open-source MIT-license and source code is hosted as a public repository on Github. A bolt is a tool for Content Management, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It is quick to set up, easy to configure, uses elegant templates. Bolt is created using modern open-source libraries and is best suited to build sites in HTML5 with modern markup. In this tutorial, we will go through the Bolt CMS installation on FreeBSD 12 system by using Nginx as a web server, MySQL as a database server, and optionally you can secure the transport layer by using acme.sh client and Let's Encrypt certificate authority to add SSL support.

Refactor the XOP groups in order to be able to queue strategy calls, whenever possible, to the same CPU as the issuer. This optimizes several cases and reduces unnecessary IPI traffic between cores. The next best thing to do would be to not queue certain XOPs to an H2 support thread at all, but I would like to keep the threads intact for later clustering work.

This will tend to increase the number of H2 support threads since we need a certain degree of multiplication for domain separation.

This should significantly increase I/O performance for multi-threaded workloads.

I've seen the writing on the wall, and while for now you can configure Firefox not to use DoH, I'm not confident enough to think it will remain that way. To that end, I've finally set up my own DoH server for use at Chez Boca. It only involved setting up my own CA to generate the appropriate certificates, install my CA certificate into Firefox, configure Apache to run over HTTP/2 (THANK YOU SO VERY XXXXX­XX MUCH GOOGLE FOR SHOVING THIS HTTP/2 XXXXX­XXX DOWN OUR THROATS!—no, I'm not bitter) and write a 150 line script that just queries my own local DNS, because, you know, it's more XXXXX­XX secure or some XXXXX­XXX reason like that.

Sigh.

Unix is 50, Hunting down Ken's PDP-7, OpenBSD and OPNSense have new releases, Clarification on what GhostBSD is, sshuttle - VPN over SSH, and more.

In the summer of 1969 computer scientists Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created the first implementation of Unix with the goal of designing an elegant and economical operating system for a little-used PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs. That modest project, however, would have a far-reaching legacy. Unix made large-scale networking of diverse computing systems — and the Internet — practical. The Unix team went on to develop the C language, which brought an unprecedented combination of efficiency and expressiveness to programming. Both made computing more "portable". Today, Linux, the most popular descendent of Unix, powers the vast majority of servers, and elements of Unix and Linux are found in most mobile devices. Meanwhile C++ remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. Unix may be a half-century old but its influence is only growing.

In my prior blog post, I traced Ken's scrounged PDP-7 to SN 34. In this post I'll show that we have actual video footage of that PDP-7 due to an old film from Bell Labs. this gives us almost a minute of footage of the PDP-7 Ken later used to create Unix.

Hello friends and followers, Lots of plugin and ports updates this time with a few minor improvements in all core areas. Behind the scenes we are starting to migrate the base system to version

12.1 which is supposed to hit the next 20.1 release. Stay tuned for more infos in the next month or so.

Here are the full patch notes:

Since the release of 19.09, I have seen a lot of misunderstandings on what is GhostBSD and the future of GhostBSD. GhostBSD is based on TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE with our twist to it. We are still continuing to use TrueOS for OpenRC, and the new package's system for the base system that is built from ports. GhostBSD is becoming a slow-moving rolling release base on the latest TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE. When FreeBSD 13 STABLE gets released, GhostBSD will be upgraded to TrueOS with FreeBSD 13 STABLE.

Our official desktop is MATE, which means that the leading developer of GhostBSD does not officially support XFCE. Community releases are maintained by the community and for the community. GhostBSD project will provide help to build and to host the community release. If anyone wants to have a particular desktop supported, it is up to the community. Sure I will help where I can, answer questions and guide new community members that contribute to community release.

There is some effort going on for Plasma5 desktop. If anyone is interested in helping with XFCE and Plasma5 or in creating another community release, you are well come to contribute. Also, Contribution to the GhostBSD base system, to ports and new ports, and in house software are welcome. We are mostly active on Telegram https://t.me/ghostbsd, but you can also reach us on the forum.

Looking for a lightweight VPN client, but are not ready to spend a monthly recurring amount on a VPN? VPNs can be expensive depending upon the quality of service and amount of privacy you want. A good VPN plan can easily set you back by 10$ a month and even that doesn’t guarantee your privacy. There is no way to be sure whether the VPN is storing your confidential information and traffic logs or not. sshuttle is the answer to your problem it provides VPN over ssh and in this article we’re going to explore this cheap yet powerful alternative to the expensive VPNs. By using open source tools you can control your own privacy.

sshuttle is an awesome program that allows you to create a VPN connection from your local machine to any remote server that you have ssh access on. The tunnel established over the ssh connection can then be used to route all your traffic from client machine through the remote machine including all the dns traffic. In the bare bones sshuttle is just a proxy server which runs on the client machine and forwards all the traffic to a ssh tunnel. Since its open source it holds quite a lot of major advantages over traditional VPN.

An interview with Trenton Schulz about his early days with FreeBSD, Robot OS, Qt, and more.

Robot OS on FreeBSD

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Tags: freebsd, openbsd, netbsd, dragonflybsd, trueos, trident, hardenedbsd, tutorial, howto, guide, bsd, interview, google pixelbook, pixelbook, case study, portability, porting, zfs, zfs performance, performance, quota, quota limits, zfs quota, ka9q, unix, hammer2, fsck, startx

Back in 2015, I jumped on the ThinkPad bandwagon by getting an X240 to run FreeBSD on. Unlike most people in the ThinkPad crowd, I actually liked the clickpad and didn\u2019t use the trackpoint much. But this summer I\u2019ve decided that it was time for something newer. I wanted something..

I was considering a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from an old generation - the one from the same year as the X230 is corebootable, so that\u2019s fun. But going back in processor generations just doesn\u2019t feel great. I want something more efficient, not less!

And then I discovered the Pixelbook. Other than the big huge large bezels around the screen, I liked everything about it. Thin aluminum design, a 3:2 HiDPI screen, rubber palm rests (why isn\u2019t every laptop ever doing that?!), the \u201cconvertibleness\u201d (flip the screen around to turn it into.. something rather big for a tablet, but it is useful actually), a Wacom touchscreen that supports a pen, mostly reasonable hardware (Intel Wi-Fi), and that famous coreboot support (Chromebooks\u2019 stock firmware is coreboot + depthcharge).

So here it is, my new laptop, a Google Pixelbook.

Pixelbook, FreeBSD, coreboot, EDK2 good.

Seriously, I have no big words to say, other than just recommending this laptop to FOSS enthusiasts :)

NetBSD is known as a very portable operating system, currently running on 44 different architectures (12 different types of CPU). This paper takes a look at what has been done to make it portable, and how this has decreased the amount of effort needed to port NetBSD to a new architecture. The new AMD x86-64 architecture, of which the specifications were published at the end of 2000, with hardware to follow in 2002, is used as an example.

Supporting multiple platforms was a primary goal of the NetBSD project from the start. As NetBSD was ported to more and more platforms, the NetBSD kernel code was adapted to become more portable along the way.

Generally, code is shared between ports as much as possible. In NetBSD, it should always be considered if the code can be assumed to be useful on other architectures, present or future. If so, it is machine-independent and put it in an appropriate place in the source tree. When writing code that is intended to be machine-independent, and it contains conditional preprocessor statements depending on the architecture, then the code is likely wrong, or an extra abstraction layer is needed to get rid of these statements.

Assumptions about the size of any type are not made. Assumptions made about type sizes on 32-bit platforms were a large problem when 64-bit platforms came around. Most of the problems of this kind had to be dealt with when NetBSD was ported to the DEC Alpha in 1994. A variation on this problem had to be dealt with with the UltraSPARC (sparc64) port in 1998, which is 64-bit, but big endian (vs. the little-endianness of the Alpha). When interacting with datastructures of a fixed size, such as on-disk metadata for filesystems, or datastructures directly interpreted by device hardware, explicitly sized types are used, such as uint32_t, int8_t, etc.

The port of NetBSD to AMD's x86-64 architecture was done in six weeks, which confirms NetBSD's reputation as being a very portable operating system. One week was spent setting up the cross-toolchain and reading the x86-64 specifications, three weeks were spent writing the kernel code, one week was spent writing the userspace code, and one week testing and debugging it all. No problems were observed in any of the machine-independent parts of the kernel during test runs; all (simulated) device drivers, file systems, etc, worked without modification.

Every so often (currently monthly), there is an "OpenZFS leadership meeting". What this really means is 'lead developers from the various ZFS implementations get together to talk about things'. Announcements and meeting notes from these meetings get sent out to various mailing lists, including the ZFS on Linux ones.

This is very interesting to me because of two reasons. First, in the past we have definitely seen significant problems on our OmniOS machines, both when an entire pool hits a quota limit and when a single filesystem hits a refquota limit. It's nice to know that this wasn't just our imagination and that there is a real issue here. Even better, it might someday be improved (and perhaps in a way that we can use at least some of the time).

Second, any number of people here run very close to and sometimes at the quota limits of both filesystems and pools, fundamentally because people aren't willing to buy more space. We have in the past assumed that this was relatively harmless and would only make people run out of space. If this is a known issue that causes serious performance degradation, well, I don't know if there's anything we can do, but at least we're going to have to think about it and maybe push harder at people. The first step will have to be learning the details of what's going on at the ZFS level to cause the slowdown. (It's apparently similar to what happens when the pool is almost full, but I don't know the specifics of that either.)

With that said, we don't seem to have seen clear adverse effects on our Linux fileservers, and they've definitely run into quota limits (repeatedly). One possible reason for this is that having lots of RAM and SSDs makes the effects mostly go away. Another possible reason is that we haven't been looking closely enough to see that we're experiencing global slowdowns that correlate to filesystems hitting quota limits. We've had issues before with somewhat subtle slowdowns that we didn't understand (cf), so I can't discount that we're having it happen again.

I'll preface this by saying - yes, I'm still neck deep in FreeBSD's wifi stack and 802.11ac support, but it turns out it's slow work to fix 15 year old locking related issues that worked fine on 11abg cards, kinda worked ok on 11n cards, and are terrible for these 11ac cards. I'll .. get there.

Anyhoo, I've finally been mucking around with AX.25 packet radio. I've been wanting to do this since I was a teenager and found out about its existence, but back in high school and .. well, until a few years ago really .. I didn't have my amateur radio licence. But, now I do, and I've done a bunch of other stuff with a bunch of other radios. The main stumbling block? All my devices are either Apple products or run FreeBSD - and none of them have useful AX.25 stacks. The main stacks of choice these days run on Linux, Windows or are a full hardware TNC.

So yes, I was avoiding hacking on AX.25 stuff because there wasn't a BSD compatible AX.25 stack. I'm 40 now, leave me be.

But! A few weeks ago I found that someone was still running a packet BBS out of San Francisco. And amazingly, his local node ran on FreeBSD! It turns out Jeremy (KK6JJJ) ported both an old copy of KA9Q and N0ARY-BBS to run on FreeBSD! Cool!

I grabbed my 2m radio (which is already cabled up for digital modes), compiled up his KA9Q port, figured out how to get it to speak to Direwolf, and .. ok. Well, it worked. Kinda.

HAMMER2 is Copy on Write, meaning changes are made to copies of existing data. This means operations are generally atomic and can survive a power outage, etc. (You should read up on it!) However, there\u2019s now a fsck command, useful if you want a report of data validity rather than any manual repair process.

Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) has recently committed changes which restore a certain amount of startx(1)/xinit(1) functionality for non-root users. The commit messages explain the situation: