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Mitigating Spectre/Meltdown on HP Proliant servers, omniOS installation setup, debugging a memory corruption issue on OpenBSD, CfT for OpenZFS native encryption, Asigra TrueNAS backup appliance shown at VMworld, NetBSD 6 EoL, and more.
##Headlines
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing you’re carrying on for ages) you may take the necessary extra steps to protect your environment. I never planned to do any article on patching anything. Nowadays it’s a no brainer and operating systems have provided the necessary tools for this to be easy and as smooth as possible. So why this article?
###A look beyond the BSD teacup: OmniOS installation
Five years ago I wrote a post about taking a look beyond the Linux teacup. I was an Arch Linux user back then and since there were projects like ArchBSD (called PacBSD today) and Arch Hurd, I decided to take a look at and write about them. Things have changed. Today I’m a happy FreeBSD user, but it’s time again to take a look beyond the teacup of operating systems that I’m familiar with.
There are a couple of reasons. The Solaris derivatives are the other big community in the *nix family besides Linux and the BSDs and we hadn’t met so far. Working with ZFS on FreeBSD, I now and then I read messages that contain a reference to Illumos which certainly helps to keep up the awareness. Of course there has also been a bit of curiosity – what might the OS be like that grew ZFS?
That’s it for part one. In part two I’ll try to make the system useful. So far I have run into a problem that I haven’t been able to solve. But I have some time now to figure things out for the next post. Let’s see if I manage to get it working or if I have to report failure!
###What are all these types of memory in top(1)?
Active - Contains memory “actively” (recently) being used by applications
##News Roundup
Yesterday, I came across a third-part library issue, which crashes at allocating memory:
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
It is obvious that the memory tags are corrupted, but who is the murder? Since the library involves a lot of maths computation, it is not an easy task to grasp the code quickly. So I need to find another way:
valgrind: the 'impossible' happened:
(3) Change compiler, use clang instead of gcc, and hope it can give me some clues. Still no effect.
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
I figure out the issue quickly, and not bother to understand the whole code. OpenBSD saves me again, thanks!
###Native Encryption for ZFS on FreeBSD (Call for Testing)
To anyone with an interest in native encryption in ZFS please test the projects/zfs-crypto-merge-0820 branch in my freebsd repo: https://github.com/mattmacy/networking.git
git clone https://github.com/mattmacy/networking.git -b projects/zfs-crypto-merge-0820
The UI is quite close to the Oracle Solaris ZFS crypto with minor differences for specifying key location.
###VMworld 2018: Showcasing Hybrid Cloud, Persistent Memory and the Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance
During its last year in Las Vegas before moving back to San Francisco, VMworld was abuzz with all the popular buzzwords, but the key focus was on supporting a more agile approach to hybrid cloud.
###End of life for NetBSD 6.x
In keeping with NetBSD’s policy of supporting only the latest (8.x) and next most recent (7.x) major branches, the recent release of NetBSD 8.0 marks the end of life for NetBSD 6.x. As in the past, a month of overlapping support has been provided in order to ease the migration to newer releases.
As of now, the following branches are no longer maintained:
netbsd-6-1
netbsd-6-0
netbsd-6
This means:
There will be no more pullups to those branches (even for security issues)
There will be no security advisories made for any those branches
The existing 6.x releases on ftp.NetBSD.org will be moved into /pub/NetBSD-archive/
May NetBSD 8.0 serve you well! (And if it doesn’t, please submit a PR!)
##Beastie Bits
##Feedback/Questions
4.9
8989 ratings
Mitigating Spectre/Meltdown on HP Proliant servers, omniOS installation setup, debugging a memory corruption issue on OpenBSD, CfT for OpenZFS native encryption, Asigra TrueNAS backup appliance shown at VMworld, NetBSD 6 EoL, and more.
##Headlines
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing you’re carrying on for ages) you may take the necessary extra steps to protect your environment. I never planned to do any article on patching anything. Nowadays it’s a no brainer and operating systems have provided the necessary tools for this to be easy and as smooth as possible. So why this article?
###A look beyond the BSD teacup: OmniOS installation
Five years ago I wrote a post about taking a look beyond the Linux teacup. I was an Arch Linux user back then and since there were projects like ArchBSD (called PacBSD today) and Arch Hurd, I decided to take a look at and write about them. Things have changed. Today I’m a happy FreeBSD user, but it’s time again to take a look beyond the teacup of operating systems that I’m familiar with.
There are a couple of reasons. The Solaris derivatives are the other big community in the *nix family besides Linux and the BSDs and we hadn’t met so far. Working with ZFS on FreeBSD, I now and then I read messages that contain a reference to Illumos which certainly helps to keep up the awareness. Of course there has also been a bit of curiosity – what might the OS be like that grew ZFS?
That’s it for part one. In part two I’ll try to make the system useful. So far I have run into a problem that I haven’t been able to solve. But I have some time now to figure things out for the next post. Let’s see if I manage to get it working or if I have to report failure!
###What are all these types of memory in top(1)?
Active - Contains memory “actively” (recently) being used by applications
##News Roundup
Yesterday, I came across a third-part library issue, which crashes at allocating memory:
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
It is obvious that the memory tags are corrupted, but who is the murder? Since the library involves a lot of maths computation, it is not an easy task to grasp the code quickly. So I need to find another way:
valgrind: the 'impossible' happened:
(3) Change compiler, use clang instead of gcc, and hope it can give me some clues. Still no effect.
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
I figure out the issue quickly, and not bother to understand the whole code. OpenBSD saves me again, thanks!
###Native Encryption for ZFS on FreeBSD (Call for Testing)
To anyone with an interest in native encryption in ZFS please test the projects/zfs-crypto-merge-0820 branch in my freebsd repo: https://github.com/mattmacy/networking.git
git clone https://github.com/mattmacy/networking.git -b projects/zfs-crypto-merge-0820
The UI is quite close to the Oracle Solaris ZFS crypto with minor differences for specifying key location.
###VMworld 2018: Showcasing Hybrid Cloud, Persistent Memory and the Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance
During its last year in Las Vegas before moving back to San Francisco, VMworld was abuzz with all the popular buzzwords, but the key focus was on supporting a more agile approach to hybrid cloud.
###End of life for NetBSD 6.x
In keeping with NetBSD’s policy of supporting only the latest (8.x) and next most recent (7.x) major branches, the recent release of NetBSD 8.0 marks the end of life for NetBSD 6.x. As in the past, a month of overlapping support has been provided in order to ease the migration to newer releases.
As of now, the following branches are no longer maintained:
netbsd-6-1
netbsd-6-0
netbsd-6
This means:
There will be no more pullups to those branches (even for security issues)
There will be no security advisories made for any those branches
The existing 6.x releases on ftp.NetBSD.org will be moved into /pub/NetBSD-archive/
May NetBSD 8.0 serve you well! (And if it doesn’t, please submit a PR!)
##Beastie Bits
##Feedback/Questions
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