How Intel docs were misinterpreted by almost any OS, a look at the mininet SDN emulator, do’s and don’ts for FreeBSD, OpenBSD community going gold, ed mastery is a must read, and the distributed object store minio on FreeBSD.

A statement in the System Programming Guide of the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual (SDM) was mishandled in the development of some or all operating-system kernels, resulting in unexpected behavior for #DB exceptions that are deferred by MOV SS or POP SS, as demonstrated by (for example) privilege escalation in Windows, macOS, some Xen configurations, or FreeBSD, or a Linux kernel crash.

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2018 is the third consecutive year that the community has reached Gold status or better.

These monthly paypal commitments by the community are our most reliable source of funds and thus the most useful for financial planning purposes. We are extremely thankful for the continuing support and hope the community matches their 2017 achievement of Platinum status. Or even their 2016 achievement of Iridium status.

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Note that Bitcoin contributions have been re-enabled now that our Bitcoin intermediary has re-certified our Canadian paperwork.

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In some circles on the Internet, your choice of text editor is a serious matter.

We've all seen the threads on mailing lits, USENET news groups and web forums about the relative merits of Emacs vs vi, including endless iterations of flame wars, and sometimes even involving lesser known or non-portable editing environments.

And then of course, from the Linux newbies we have seen an endless stream of tweeted graphical 'memes' about the editor vim (aka 'vi Improved') versus the various apparently friendlier-to-some options such as GNU nano. Apparently even the 'improved' version of the classical and ubiquitous vi(1) editor is a challenge even to exit for a significant subset of the younger generation.

Yes, your choice of text editor or editing environment is a serious matter. Mainly because text processing is so fundamental to our interactions with computers.

But for those of us who keep our systems on a real Unix (such as OpenBSD or FreeBSD), there is no real contest. The OpenBSD base system contains several text editors including vi(1) and the almost-emacs mg(1), but ed(1) remains the standard editor.

Now Michael Lucas has written a book to guide the as yet uninitiated to the fundamentals of the original Unix text editor. It is worth keeping in mind that much of Unix and its original standard text editor written back when the standard output and default user interface was more likely than not a printing terminal.

To some of us, reading and following the narrative of Ed Mastery is a trip down memory lane. To others, following along the text will illustrate the horror of the world of pre-graphic computer interfaces. For others again, the fact that ed(1) doesn't use your terminal settings much at all offers hope of fixing things when something or somebody screwed up your system so you don't have a working terminal for that visual editor.

DigitalOcean

Free and open source distributed object storage server compatible with Amazon S3 v2/v4 API. Offers data protection against hardware failures using erasure code and bitrot detection. Supports highly available distributed setup. Provides confidentiality, integrity and authenticity assurances for encrypted data with negligible performance overhead. Both server side and client side encryption are supported. Below is the image of example Minio setup.

The Minio identifies itself as the ZFS of Cloud Object Storage. This guide will show You how to setup highly available distributed Minio storage on the FreeBSD operating system with ZFS as backend for Minio data. For convenience we will use FreeBSD Jails operating system level virtualization.

The setup will assume that You have 3 datacenters and assumption that you have two datacenters in whose the most of the data must reside and that the third datacenter is used as a ‘quorum/witness’ role. Distributed Minio supports up to 16 nodes/drives total, so we may juggle with that number to balance data between desired datacenters. As we have 16 drives to allocate resources on 3 sites we will use 7 + 7 + 2 approach here. The datacenters where most of the data must reside have 7/16 ratio while the ‘quorum/witness’ datacenter have only 2/16 ratio. Thanks to built in Minio redundancy we may loose (turn off for example) any one of those machines and our object storage will still be available and ready to use for any purpose.

First we will create 3 jails for our proof of concept Minio setup, storage1 will have the ‘quorum/witness’ role while storage2 and storage3 will have the ‘data’ role. To distinguish commands I type on the host system and storageX Jail I use two different prompts, this way it should be obvious what command to execute and where.

Let's set the record straight for securing kcgi CGI and FastCGI applications with pledge(2). This is focussed on secure OpenBSD deployments.

Internally, kcgi makes considerable use of available security tools. But it's also designed to be invoked in a secure environment. We'll start with pledge(2), which has been around on OpenBSD since version 5.9. If you're reading this tutorial, you're probably on OpenBSD, and you probably have knowledge of pledge(2).

How to begin? Read kcgi(3). It includes canonical information on which pledge(2) promises you'll need for each function in the library. This is just a tutorial—the manpage is canonical and overrides what you may read here.

Next, assess the promises that your application needs. From kcgi(3), it's easy to see which promises we'll need to start. You'll need to augment this list with whichever tools you're also using. The general push is to start with the broadest set of required promises, then restrict as quickly as possible. Sometimes this can be done in a single pledge(2), but other times it takes a few.

• HAST + ZFS