Podcast appearances and mentions of dan langille

We're interviewing Dan Langille about his new server project. He'll talk to us about the things he's building, some of which are a bit out of the ordinary. We're also talking about BSDCan 2023 and what to expect after returning to an in-presence conference format. Enjoy! NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Interview - Dan Langille - dan@langille.org (mailto:dan@langille.org) / @twitter (https://twitter.com/dlangille) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Special Guest: Dan Langille.

Dan Langille Dan is a sysadmin at Cisco's Talos Intelligence Group, He's the organizer of BSDCan, the man behind the FreeBSD Diary, Fresh Ports, and Fresh Source. Twitter: https://twitter.com/DLangille LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danlangille/ Notes: Sites Dan Runs: https://www.freebsddiary.org https://www.freshports.org https://www.freshsource.org https://www.bsdcan.org/ https://www.langille.org Credits: Music by ikson: https://www.iksonmusic.com Special Guest: Dan Langille.

DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Linux benchmark on Ryzen 7, JFK Presidential Library chooses TrueNAS for digital archives, FreeBSD 12.1-beta is available, cool but obscure X11 tools, vBSDcon trip report, Project Trident 12-U7 is available, a couple new Unix artifacts, and more. Headlines DragonFlyBSD 5.6 vs. FreeBSD 12 vs. Linux - Ryzen 7 3700X (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsd-linux-3700x) For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04. Back in July I looked at FreeBSD 12 on the Ryzen 9 3900X but at that time at least DragonFlyBSD had troubles booting on that system. When trying out the Ryzen 7 3700X + MSI GODLIKE X570 motherboard on the latest BIOS, everything "just worked" without any compatibility issues for either of these BSDs. We've been eager to see how well DragonFlyBSD is performing on these new AMD Zen 2 CPUs with DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon having publicly expressed being impressed by the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. For comparison to those BSDs, Ubuntu 19.04 and openSUSE Tumbleweed were tested on the same hardware in their out-of-the-box configurations. While Clear Linux is normally the fastest, on this system Clear's power management defaults had caused issues in being unable to detect the Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD used for testing and so we left it out this round. All of the hardware was the same throughout testing as were the BIOS settings and running the Ryzen 7 3700X at stock speeds. (Any differences in the reported hardware for the system table just come down to differences in what is exposed by each OS for reporting.) All of the BSD/Linux benchmarks on this eight core / sixteen thread processor were run via the Phoronix Test Suite. In the case of FreeBSD 12.0, we benchmarked both with its default LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler as well as with GCC 9.1 so that it would match the GCC compiler being the default on the other operating systems under test. JFK Presidential Library Chooses iXsystems TrueNAS to Preserve Precious Digital Archives (https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/jfk-presidential-library-pr/) iXsystems is honored to have the TrueNAS® M-Series unified storage selected to store, serve, and protect the entire digital archive for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. This is in support of the collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (JFK Library). Over the next several years, the Foundation hopes to grow the digital collection from hundreds of terabytes today to cover much more of the Archives at the Kennedy Library. Overall there is a total of 25 million documents, audio recordings, photos, and videos once the project is complete. Having first deployed the TrueNAS M50-HA earlier in 2019, the JFK Library has now completed the migration of its existing digital collection and is now in the process of digitizing much of the rest of its vast collection. Not only is the catalog of material vast, it is also diverse, with files being copied to the storage system from a variety of sources in numerous file types. To achieve this ambitious goal, the library required a high-end NAS system capable of sharing with a variety of systems throughout the digitization process. The digital archive will be served from the TrueNAS M50 and made available to both in-person and online visitors. With precious material and information comes robust demands. The highly-available TrueNAS M-Series has multiple layers of protection to help keep data safe, including data scrubs, checksums, unlimited snapshots, replication, and more. TrueNAS is also inherently scalable with data shares only limited by the number of drives connected to the pool. Perfect for archival storage, the deployed TrueNAS M50 will grow with the library’s content, easily expanding its storage capacity over time as needed. Supporting a variety of protocols, multi-petabyte scalability in a single share, and anytime, uninterrupted capacity expansion, the TrueNAS M-Series ticked all the right boxes. Youtube Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rFjH5-0Fiw) News Roundup FreeBSD 12.1-beta available (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-12.1-Beta-Released) FreeBSD 12.0 is already approaching one year old while FreeBSD 12.1 is now on the way as the next installment with various bug/security fixes and other alterations to this BSD operating system. FreeBSD 12.1 has many security/bug fixes throughout, no longer enables "-Werror" by default as a compiler flag (Update: This change is just for the GCC 4.2 compiler), has imported BearSSL into the FreeBSD base system as a lightweight TLS/SSL implementation, bzip2recover has been added, and a variety of mostly lower-level changes. More details can be found via the in-progress release notes. For those with time to test this weekend, FreeBSD 12.1 Beta 1 is available for all prominent architectures. The FreeBSD release team is planning for at least another beta or two and around three release candidates. If all goes well, FreeBSD 12.1 will be out in early November. Announcement Link (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-September/091533.html) Cool, but obscure X11 tools. More suggestions in the source link (https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/) ASClock Free42 FSV2 GLXGears GMixer GVIM Micropolis Sunclock Ted TiEmu X026 X48 XAbacus XAntfarm XArchiver XASCII XBiff XBill XBoard XCalc XCalendar XCHM XChomp XClipboard XClock XClock/Cat Clock XColorSel XConsole XDiary XEarth XEdit Xev XEyes XFontSel XGalaga XInvaders 3D XKill XLennart XLoad XLock XLogo XMahjongg XMan XMessage XmGrace XMixer XmMix XMore XMosaic XMOTD XMountains XNeko XOdometer XOSView Xplore XPostIt XRoach XScreenSaver XSnow XSpread XTerm XTide Xv Xvkbd XWPE XZoom vBSDCon 2019 trip report from iXSystems (https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/vbsdcon-2019/) The fourth biennial vBSDCon was held in Reston, VA on September 5th through 7th and attracted attendees and presenters from not only the Washington, DC area, but also Canada, Germany, Kenya, and beyond. While MeetBSD caters to Silicon Valley BSD enthusiasts on even years, vBSDcon caters to East Coast and DC area enthusiasts on odd years. Verisign was again the key sponsor of vBSDcon 2019 but this year made a conscious effort to entrust the organization of the event to a team of community members led by Dan Langille, who you probably know as the lead BSDCan organizer. The result of this shift was a low key but professional event that fostered great conversation and brainstorming at every turn. Project Trident 12-U7 now available (https://project-trident.org/post/2019-09-21_stable12-u7_available/) Package Summary New Packages: 130 Deleted Packages: 72 Updated Packages: 865 Stable ISO - https://pkg.project-trident.org/iso/stable/Trident-x64-TOS-12-U7-20190920.iso A Couple new Unix Artifacts (https://minnie.tuhs.org//pipermail/tuhs/2019-September/018685.html) I fear we're drifting a bit here and the S/N ratio is dropping a bit w.r.t the actual history of Unix. Please no more on the relative merits of version control systems or alternative text processing systems. So I'll try to distract you by saying this. I'm sitting on two artifacts that have recently been given to me: by two large organisations of great significance to Unix history who want me to keep "mum" about them as they are going to make announcements about them soon* and I am going slowly crazy as I wait for them to be offically released. Now you have a new topic to talk about :-) Cheers, Warren * for some definition of "soon" Beastie Bits NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2019 Hiroshima (https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2019/09/16/msg000813.html) Hyperbola a GNU/Linux OS is using OpenBSD's Xenocara (https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-xorg-support/) Talos is looking for a FreeBSD Engineer (https://www.talosintelligence.com/careers/freebsd_engineer) GitHub - dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible: A collection of pure POSIX sh alternatives to external processes. (https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible) dsynth: you’re building it (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/09/23/23523.html) Percy Ludgate, the missing link between Babbage’s machine and everything else (http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/2019-September/001606.html) Feedback/Questions Bruce - Down the expect rabbithole (http://dpaste.com/147HGP3#wrap) Bruce - Expect (update) (http://dpaste.com/37MNVSW#wrap) David - Netgraph answer (http://dpaste.com/2SE1YSE) Mason - Beeps? (http://dpaste.com/00KKXJM) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

vBSDcon 2019 recap, Unix at 50, OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook, humungus - an hg server, how to configure a network dump in FreeBSD, and more. Headlines vBSDcon Recap Allan and Benedict attended vBSDcon 2019, which ended last week. It was held again at the Hyatt Regency Reston and the main conference was organized by Dan Langille of BSDCan fame.The two day conference was preceded by a one day FreeBSD hackathon, where FreeBSD developers had the chance to work on patches and PRs. In the evening, a reception was held to welcome attendees and give them a chance to chat and get to know each other over food and drinks. The first day of the conference was opened with a Keynote by Paul Vixie about DNS over HTTPS (DoH). He explained how we got to the current state and what challenges (technical and social) this entails. If you missed this talk and are dying to see it, it will also be presented at EuroBSDCon next week John Baldwin followed up by giving an overview of the work on “In-Kernel TLS Framing and Encryption for FreeBSD” abstract (https://www.vbsdcon.com/schedule/2019-09-06.html#talk:132615) and the recent commit we covered in episode 313. Meanwhile, Brian Callahan was giving a separate session in another room about “Learning to (Open)BSD through its porting system: an attendee-driven educational session” where people had the chance to learn about how to create ports for the BSDs. David Fullard’s talk about “Transitioning from FreeNAS to FreeBSD” was his first talk at a BSD conference and described how he built his own home NAS setup trying to replicate FreeNAS’ functionality on FreeBSD, and why he transitioned from using an appliance to using vanilla FreeBSD. Shawn Webb followed with his overview talk about the “State of the Hardened Union”. Benedict’s talk about “Replacing an Oracle Server with FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and PostgreSQL” was well received as people are interested in how we liberated ourselves from the clutches of Oracle without compromising functionality. Entertaining and educational at the same time, Michael W. Lucas talk about “Twenty Years in Jail: FreeBSD Jails, Then and Now” closed the first day. Lucas also had a table in the hallway with his various tech and non-tech books for sale. People formed small groups and went into town for dinner. Some returned later that night to some work in the hacker lounge or talk amongst fellow BSD enthusiasts. Colin Percival was the keynote speaker for the second day and had an in-depth look at “23 years of software side channel attacks”. Allan reprised his “ELI5: ZFS Caching” talk explaining how the ZFS adaptive replacement cache (ARC) work and how it can be tuned for various workloads. “By the numbers: ZFS Performance Results from Six Operating Systems and Their Derivatives” by Michael Dexter followed with his approach to benchmarking OpenZFS on various platforms. Conor Beh was also a new speaker to vBSDcon. His talk was about “FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS”. Two OpenBSD talks closed the talk session: Kurt Mosiejczuk with “Care and Feeding of OpenBSD Porters” and Aaron Poffenberger with “Road Warrior Disaster Recovery: Secure, Synchronized, and Backed-up”. A dinner and reception was enjoyed by the attendees and gave more time to discuss the talks given and other things until late at night. We want to thank the vBSDcon organizers and especially Dan Langille for running such a great conference. We are grateful to Verisign as the main sponsor and The FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the tote bags. Thanks to all the speakers and attendees! humungus - an hg server (https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/humungus) Features View changes, files, changesets, etc. Some syntax highlighting. Read only. Serves multiple repositories. Allows cloning via the obvious URL. Supports go get. Serves files for downloads. Online documentation via mandoc. Terminal based admin interface. News Roundup OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook 14″ v2. (https://hazardous.org/archive/blog/openbsd/2019/09/02/OpenBSD-on-Infinitybook14) The InfinityBook 14” v2 is a fanless 14” notebook. It is an excellent choice for running OpenBSD - but order it with the supported wireless card (see below.). I’ve set it up in a dual-boot configuration so that I can switch between Linux and OpenBSD - mainly to spot differences in the drivers. TUXEDO allows a variety of configurations through their webshop. The dual boot setup with grub2 and EFI boot will be covered in a separate blogpost. My tests were done with OpenBSD-current - which is as of writing flagged as 6.6-beta. See Article for breakdown of CPU, Wireless, Video, Webcam, Audio, ACPI, Battery, Touchpad, and MicroSD Card Reader Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/) Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans like Bell Labs, GE, and MIT. Largely the brainchild of a few programmers at Bell Labs, the unlikely story of Unix begins with a meeting on the top floor of an otherwise unremarkable annex at the sprawling Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was a bright, cold Monday, the last day of March 1969, and the computer sciences department was hosting distinguished guests: Bill Baker, a Bell Labs vice president, and Ed David, the director of research. Baker was about to pull the plug on Multics (a condensed form of MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service), a software project that the computer sciences department had been working on for four years. Multics was two years overdue, way over budget, and functional only in the loosest possible understanding of the term. Trying to put the best spin possible on what was clearly an abject failure, Baker gave a speech in which he claimed that Bell Labs had accomplished everything it was trying to accomplish in Multics and that they no longer needed to work on the project. As Berk Tague, a staffer present at the meeting, later told Princeton University, “Like Vietnam, he declared victory and got out of Multics.” Within the department, this announcement was hardly unexpected. The programmers were acutely aware of the various issues with both the scope of the project and the computer they had been asked to build it for. Still, it was something to work on, and as long as Bell Labs was working on Multics, they would also have a $7 million mainframe computer to play around with in their spare time. Dennis Ritchie, one of the programmers working on Multics, later said they all felt some stake in the success of the project, even though they knew the odds of that success were exceedingly remote. Cancellation of Multics meant the end of the only project that the programmers in the Computer science department had to work on—and it also meant the loss of the only computer in the Computer science department. After the GE 645 mainframe was taken apart and hauled off, the computer science department’s resources were reduced to little more than office supplies and a few terminals. Some of Allan’s favourite excerpts: In the early '60s, Bill Ninke, a researcher in acoustics, had demonstrated a rudimentary graphical user interface with a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer. Acoustics still had that computer, but they weren’t using it and had stuck it somewhere out of the way up on the sixth floor. And so Thompson, an indefatigable explorer of the labs’ nooks and crannies, finally found that PDP-7 shortly after Davis and Baker cancelled Multics. With the rest of the team’s help, Thompson bundled up the various pieces of the PDP-7—a machine about the size of a refrigerator, not counting the terminal—moved it into a closet assigned to the acoustics department, and got it up and running. One way or another, they convinced acoustics to provide space for the computer and also to pay for the not infrequent repairs to it out of that department’s budget. McIlroy’s programmers suddenly had a computer, kind of. So during the summer of 1969, Thompson, Ritchie, and Canaday hashed out the basics of a file manager that would run on the PDP-7. This was no simple task. Batch computing—running programs one after the other—rarely required that a computer be able to permanently store information, and many mainframes did not have any permanent storage device (whether a tape or a hard disk) attached to them. But the time-sharing environment that these programmers had fallen in love with required attached storage. And with multiple users connected to the same computer at the same time, the file manager had to be written well enough to keep one user’s files from being written over another user’s. When a file was read, the output from that file had to be sent to the user that was opening it. It was a challenge that McIlroy’s team was willing to accept. They had seen the future of computing and wanted to explore it. They knew that Multics was a dead-end, but they had discovered the possibilities opened up by shared development, shared access, and real-time computing. Twenty years later, Ritchie characterized it for Princeton as such: “What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form.” Eventually when they had the file management system more or less fleshed out conceptually, it came time to actually write the code. The trio—all of whom had terrible handwriting—decided to use the Labs’ dictating service. One of them called up a lab extension and dictated the entire code base into a tape recorder. And thus, some unidentified clerical worker or workers soon had the unenviable task of trying to convert that into a typewritten document. Of course, it was done imperfectly. Among various errors, “inode” came back as “eye node,” but the output was still viewed as a decided improvement over their assorted scribbles. In August 1969, Thompson’s wife and son went on a three-week vacation to see her family out in Berkeley, and Thompson decided to spend that time writing an assembler, a file editor, and a kernel to manage the PDP-7 processor. This would turn the group’s file manager into a full-fledged operating system. He generously allocated himself one week for each task. Thompson finished his tasks more or less on schedule. And by September, the computer science department at Bell Labs had an operating system running on a PDP-7—and it wasn’t Multics. By the summer of 1970, the team had attached a tape drive to the PDP-7, and their blossoming OS also had a growing selection of tools for programmers (several of which persist down to this day). But despite the successes, Thompson, Canaday, and Ritchie were still being rebuffed by labs management in their efforts to get a brand-new computer. It wasn’t until late 1971 that the computer science department got a truly modern computer. The Unix team had developed several tools designed to automatically format text files for printing over the past year or so. They had done so to simplify the production of documentation for their pet project, but their tools had escaped and were being used by several researchers elsewhere on the top floor. At the same time, the legal department was prepared to spend a fortune on a mainframe program called “AstroText.” Catching wind of this, the Unix crew realized that they could, with only a little effort, upgrade the tools they had written for their own use into something that the legal department could use to prepare patent applications. The computer science department pitched lab management on the purchase of a DEC PDP-11 for document production purposes, and Max Mathews offered to pay for the machine out of the acoustics department budget. Finally, management gave in and purchased a computer for the Unix team to play with. Eventually, word leaked out about this operating system, and businesses and institutions with PDP-11s began contacting Bell Labs about their new operating system. The Labs made it available for free—requesting only the cost of postage and media from anyone who wanted a copy. The rest has quite literally made tech history. See the link for the rest of the article How to configure a network dump in FreeBSD? (https://www.oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/68/) A network dump might be very useful for collecting kernel crash dumps from embedded machines and machines with a larger amount of RAM then available swap partition size. Besides net dumps we can also try to compress the core dump. However, often this may still not be enough swap to keep whole core dump. In such situation using network dump is a convenient and reliable way for collecting kernel dump. So, first, let’s talk a little bit about history. The first implementation of the network dumps was implemented around 2000 for the FreeBSD 4.x as a kernel module. The code was implemented in 2010 with the intention of being part of FreeBSD 9.0. However, the code never landed in FreeBSD. Finally, in 2018 with the commit r333283 by Mark Johnston the netdump client code landed in the FreeBSD. Subsequently, many other commitments were then implemented to add support for the different drivers (for example r333289). The first official release of FreeBSD, which support netdump is FreeBSD 12.0. Now, let’s get back to the main topic. How to configure the network dump? Two machines are needed. One machine is to collect core dump, let’s call it server. We will use the second one to send us the core dump - the client. See the link for the rest of the article Beastie Bits Sudo Mastery 2nd edition is not out (https://mwl.io/archives/4530) Empirical Notes on the Interaction Between Continuous Kernel Fuzzing and Development (http://users.utu.fi/kakrind/publications/19/vulnfuzz_camera.pdf) soso (https://github.com/ozkl/soso) GregKH - OpenBSD was right (https://youtu.be/gUqcMs0svNU?t=254) Game of Trees (https://gameoftrees.org/faq.html) Feedback/Questions BostJan - Another Question (http://dpaste.com/1ZPCCQY#wrap) Tom - PF (http://dpaste.com/3ZSCB8N#wrap) JohnnyK - Changing VT without keys (http://dpaste.com/3QZQ7Q5#wrap) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

OpenBSD 6.4 released, GhostBSD RC2 released, MeetBSD - the ultimate hallway track, DragonflyBSD desktop on a Thinkpad, Porting keybase to NetBSD, OpenSSH 7.9, and draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag in FreeBSD. ##Headlines OpenBSD 6.4 released See a detailed log of changes between the 6.3 and 6.4 releases. See the information on the FTP page for a list of mirror machines. Have a look at the 6.4 errata page for a list of bugs and workarounds. signify(1) pubkeys for this release: base: RWQq6XmS4eDAcQW4KsT5Ka0KwTQp2JMOP9V/DR4HTVOL5Bc0D7LeuPwA fw: RWRoBbjnosJ/39llpve1XaNIrrQND4knG+jSBeIUYU8x4WNkxz6a2K97 pkg: RWRF5TTY+LoN/51QD5kM2hKDtMTzycQBBPmPYhyQEb1+4pff/H6fh/kA ###GhostBSD 18.10 RC2 Announced This second release candidate of GhostBSD 18.10 is the second official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood. The official desktop of GhostBSD is MATE. However, in the future, there might be an XFCE community release, but for now, there is no community release yet. What has changed since RC1 Removed drm-stable-kmod and we will let users installed the propper drm-*-kmod Douglas Joachin added libva-intel-driver libva-vdpau-driver to supports accelerated some video driver for Intel Issues that got fixed Bug #70 Cannot run Octopi, missing libgksu error. Bug #71 LibreOffice doesn’t start because of missing libcurl.so.4 Bug #72 libarchive is a missing dependency Again thanks to iXsystems, TrueOS, Joe Maloney, Kris Moore, Ken Moore, Martin Wilke, Neville Goddard, Vester “Vic” Thacker, Douglas Joachim, Alex Lyakhov, Yetkin Degirmenci and many more who helped to make the transition from FreeBSD to TrueOS smoother. Updating from RC1 to RC2: sudo pkg update -f sudo pkg install -f libarchive curl libgksu sudo pkg upgrade Where to download: All images checksum, hybrid ISO(DVD, USB) and torrent are available here: https://www.ghostbsd.org/download [ScreenShots] https://www.ghostbsd.org/sites/default/files/Screenshotat2018-10-2013-22-41.png https://www.ghostbsd.org/sites/default/files/Screenshotat2018-10-20_13-27-26.png ###OpenSSH 7.9 has been released and it has support for OpenSSL 1.1 Changes since OpenSSH 7.8 This is primarily a bugfix release. New Features ssh(1), sshd(8): allow most port numbers to be specified using service names from getservbyname(3) (typically /etc/services). ssh(1): allow the IdentityAgent configuration directive to accept environment variable names. This supports the use of multiple agent sockets without needing to use fixed paths. sshd(8): support signalling sessions via the SSH protocol. A limited subset of signals is supported and only for login or command sessions (i.e. not subsystems) that were not subject to a forced command via authorizedkeys or sshdconfig. bz#1424 ssh(1): support "ssh -Q sig" to list supported signature options. Also "ssh -Q help" to show the full set of supported queries. ssh(1), sshd(8): add a CASignatureAlgorithms option for the client and server configs to allow control over which signature formats are allowed for CAs to sign certificates. For example, this allows banning CAs that sign certificates using the RSA-SHA1 signature algorithm. sshd(8), ssh-keygen(1): allow key revocation lists (KRLs) to revoke keys specified by SHA256 hash. ssh-keygen(1): allow creation of key revocation lists directly from base64-encoded SHA256 fingerprints. This supports revoking keys using only the information contained in sshd(8) authentication log messages. Bugfixes ssh(1), ssh-keygen(1): avoid spurious "invalid format" errors when attempting to load PEM private keys while using an incorrect passphrase. bz#2901 sshd(8): when a channel closed message is received from a client, close the stderr file descriptor at the same time stdout is closed. This avoids stuck processes if they were waiting for stderr to close and were insensitive to stdin/out closing. bz#2863 ssh(1): allow ForwardX11Timeout=0 to disable the untrusted X11 forwarding timeout and support X11 forwarding indefinitely. Previously the behaviour of ForwardX11Timeout=0 was undefined. sshd(8): when compiled with GSSAPI support, cache supported method OIDs regardless of whether GSSAPI authentication is enabled in the main section of sshd_config. This avoids sandbox violations if GSSAPI authentication was later enabled in a Match block. bz#2107 sshd(8): do not fail closed when configured with a text key revocation list that contains a too-short key. bz#2897 ssh(1): treat connections with ProxyJump specified the same as ones with a ProxyCommand set with regards to hostname canonicalisation (i.e. don't try to canonicalise the hostname unless CanonicalizeHostname is set to 'always'). bz#2896 ssh(1): fix regression in OpenSSH 7.8 that could prevent public- key authentication using certificates hosted in a ssh-agent(1) or against sshd(8) from OpenSSH

FreeBSD 11.2 has been released, setting up an MTA behind Tor, running pfsense on DigitalOcean, one year of C, using OpenBGPD to announce VM networks, the power to serve, and a BSDCan trip report. ##Headlines FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE Available FreeBSD 11.2 was released today (June 27th) and is ready for download Highlights: OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.5p1. OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.2o. The clang, llvm, lldb and compiler-rt utilities have been updated to version 6.0.0. The libarchive(3) library has been updated to version 3.3.2. The libxo(3) library has been updated to version 0.9.0. Major Device driver updates to: cxgbe(4) – Chelsio 10/25/40/50/100 gigabit NICs – version 1.16.63.0 supports T4, T5 and T6 ixl(4) – Intel 10 and 40 gigabit NICs, updated to version 1.9.9-k ng_pppoe(4) – driver has been updated to add support for user-supplied Host-Uniq tags New drivers: + drm-next-kmod driver supporting integrated Intel graphics with the i915 driver. mlx5io(4) – a new IOCTL interface for Mellanox ConnectX-4 and ConnectX-5 10/20/25/40/50/56/100 gigabit NICs ocs_fc(4) – Emulex Fibre Channel 8/16/32 gigabit Host Adapters smartpqi(4) – HP Gen10 Smart Array Controller Family The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to support RFC5424-compliant messages when rotating system logs The diskinfo(8) utility has been updated to include two new flags, -s which displays the disk identity (usually the serial number), and -p which displays the physical path to the disk in a storage controller. The top(1) utility has been updated to allow filtering on multiple user names when the -U flag is used The umount(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -N, which is used to forcefully unmount an NFS mounted filesystem. The ps(1) utility has been updated to display if a process is running with capsicum(4) capability mode, indicated by the flag ‘C’ The service(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -j, which is used to interact with services running within a jail(8). The argument to -j can be either the name or numeric jail ID The mlx5tool(8) utility has been added, which is used to manage Connect-X 4 and Connect-X 5 devices supported by mlx5io(4). The ifconfig(8) utility has been updated to include a random option, which when used with the ether option, generates a random MAC address for an interface. The dwatch(1) utility has been introduced The efibootmgr(8) utility has been added, which is used to manipulate the EFI boot manager. The etdump(1) utility has been added, which is used to view El Torito boot catalog information. The linux(4) ABI compatibility layer has been updated to include support for musl consumers. The fdescfs(5) filesystem has been updated to support Linux®-specific fd(4) /dev/fd and /proc/self/fd behavior Support for virtio_console(4) has been added to bhyve(4). The length of GELI passphrases entered when booting a system with encrypted disks is now hidden by default. See the configuration options in geli(8) to restore the previous behavior. In addition to the usual CD/DVD ISO, Memstick, and prebuilt VM images (raw, qcow2, vhd, and vmdk), FreeBSD 11.2 is also available on: Amazon EC2 Google Compute Engine Hashicorp/Atlas Vagrant Microsoft Azure In addition to a generic ARM64 image for devices like the Pine64 and Raspberry Pi 3, specific images are provided for: GUMSTIX BANANAPI BEAGLEBONE CUBIEBOARD CUBIEBOARD2 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD RASPBERRY PI 2 PANDABOARD WANDBOARD Full Release Notes ###Setting up an MTA Behind Tor This article will document how to set up OpenSMTPD behind a fully Tor-ified network. Given that Tor’s DNS resolver code does not support MX record lookups, care must be taken for setting up an MTA behind a fully Tor-ified network. OpenSMTPD was chosen because it was easy to modify to force it to fall back to A/AAAA lookups when MX lookups failed with a DNS result code of NOTIMP (4). Note that as of 08 May 2018, the OpenSMTPD project is planning a configuration file language change. The proposed change has not landed. Once it does, this article will be updated to reflect both the old language and new. The reason to use an MTA behing a fully Tor-ified network is to be able to support email behind the .onion TLD. This setup will only allow us to send and receive email to and from the .onion TLD. Requirements: A fully Tor-ified network HardenedBSD as the operating system A server (or VM) running HardenedBSD behind the fully Tor-ified network. /usr/ports is empty Or is already pre-populated with the HardenedBSD Ports tree Why use HardenedBSD? We get all the features of FreeBSD (ZFS, DTrace, bhyve, and jails) with enhanced security through exploit mitigations and system hardening. Tor has a very unique threat landscape and using a hardened ecosystem is crucial to mitigating risks and threats. Also note that this article reflects how I’ve set up my MTA. I’ve included configuration files verbatim. You will need to replace the text that refers to my .onion domain with yours. On 08 May 2018, HardenedBSD’s version of OpenSMTPD just gained support for running an MTA behind Tor. The package repositories do not yet contain the patch, so we will compile OpenSMTPD from ports. Steps Installation Generating Cryptographic Key Material Tor Configuration OpenSMTPD Configuration Dovecot Configuration Testing your configuration Optional: Webmail Access iXsystems https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/06/21/strings-attached-knowing-when-and-when-not-to-accept-vc-funding/#30f9f18f46ec https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/self-2018-recap/ ###Running pfSense on a Digital Ocean Droplet I love pfSense (and opnSense, no discrimination here). I use it for just about anything, from homelab to large scale deployments and I’ll give out on any fancy for a pfSense setup on a decent hardware. I also love DigitalOcean, if you ever used them, you know why, if you never did, head over and try, you’ll understand why. . Unfortunately, while DO offers tremendous amount of useful distros and applications, pfSense isn’t one of them. But, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and here’s how to get pfSense up and running on DO so you can have it as the gatekeeper to your kingdom. Start by creating a FreeBSD droplet, choose your droplet size (for modest setups, I find the 5$ to be quite awesome): There are many useful things you can do with pfSense on your droplet, from OpenVPN, squid, firewalling, fancy routing, url filtering, dns black listing and much much more. One note though, before we wrap up: You have two ways to initiate the initial setup wizard of the web-configurator: Spin up another droplet, log into it and browse your way to the INTERNAL ip address of the internal NIC you’ve set up. This is the long and tedious way, but it’s also somewhat safer as it eliminates the small window of risk the second method poses. or Once your WAN address is all setup, your pfSense is ready to accept https connection to start the initial web-configurator setup. Thing is, there’s a default, well known set of credential to this initial wizard (admin:pfsense), so, there is a slight window of opportunity that someone can swoop in (assuming they know you’ve installed pfsense + your wan IP address + the exact time window between setting up the WAN interface and completing the wizard) and do . I leave it up to you which of the path you’d like to go, either way, once you’re done with the web-configurator wizard, you’ll have a shiny new pfSense installation at your disposal running on your favorite VPS. Hopefully this was helpful for someone, I hope to get a similar post soon detailing how to get FreeNAS up and running on DO. Many thanks to Tubsta and his blogpost as well as to Allan Jude, Kris Moore and Benedict Reuschling for their AWESOME and inspiring podcast, BSD Now. ##News Roundup One year of C It’s now nearly a year that I started writing non-trivial amounts of C code again (the first sokol_gfx.h commit was on the 14-Jul-2017), so I guess it’s time for a little retrospective. In the beginning it was more of an experiment: I wanted to see how much I would miss some of the more useful C++ features (for instance namespaces, function overloading, ‘simple’ template code for containers, …), and whether it is possible to write non-trivial codebases in C without going mad. Here are all the github projects I wrote in C: sokol: a slowly growing set of platform-abstraction headers sokol-samples - examples for Sokol chips - 8-bit chip emulators chips-test - tests and examples for the chip- emulators, including some complete home computer emulators (minus sound) All in all these are around 32k lines of code (not including 3rd party code like flextGL and HandmadeMath). I think I wrote more C code in the recent 10 months than any other language. So one thing seems to be clear: yes, it’s possible to write a non-trivial amount of C code that does something useful without going mad (and it’s even quite enjoyable I might add). Here’s a few things I learned: Pick the right language for a problem C is a perfect match for WebAssembly C99 is a huge improvement over C89 The dangers of pointers and explicit memory management are overrated Less Boilerplate Code Less Language Feature ‘Anxiety’ Conclusion All in all my “C experiment” is a success. For a lot of problems, picking C over C++ may be the better choice since C is a much simpler language (btw, did you notice how there are hardly any books, conferences or discussions about C despite being a fairly popular language? Apart from the neverending bickering about undefined behaviour from the compiler people of course ;) There simply isn’t much to discuss about a language that can be learned in an afternoon. I don’t like some of the old POSIX or Linux APIs as much as the next guy (e.g. ioctl(), the socket API or some of the CRT library functions), but that’s an API design problem, not a language problem. It’s possible to build friendly C APIs with a bit of care and thinking, especially when C99’s designated initialization can be used (C++ should really make sure that the full C99 language can be used from inside C++ instead of continuing to wander off into an entirely different direction). ###Configuring OpenBGPD to announce VM’s virtual networks We use BGP quite heavily at work, and even though I’m not interacting with that directly, it feels like it’s something very useful to learn at least on some basic level. The most effective and fun way of learning technology is finding some practical application, so I decided to see if it could help to improve networking management for my Virtual Machines. My setup is fairly simple: I have a host that runs bhyve VMs and I have a desktop system from where I ssh to VMs, both hosts run FreeBSD. All VMs are connected to each other through a bridge and have a common network 10.0.1/24. The point of this exercise is to be able to ssh to these VMs from desktop without adding static routes and without adding vmhost’s external interfaces to the VMs bridge. I’ve installed openbgpd on both hosts and configured it like this: vmhost: /usr/local/etc/bgpd.conf AS 65002 router-id 192.168.87.48 fib-update no network 10.0.1.1/24 neighbor 192.168.87.41 { descr "desktop" remote-as 65001 } Here, router-id is set vmhost’s IP address in my home network (192.168.87/24), fib-update no is set to forbid routing table update, which I initially set for testing, but keeping it as vmhost is not supposed to learn new routes from desktop anyway. network announces my VMs network and neighbor describes my desktop box. Now the desktop box: desktop: /usr/local/etc/bgpd.conf AS 65001 router-id 192.168.87.41 fib-update yes neighbor 192.168.87.48 { descr "vmhost" remote-as 65002 } It’s pretty similar to vmhost’s bgpd.conf, but no networks are announced here, and fib-update is set to yes because the whole point is to get VM routes added. Both hosts have to have the openbgpd service enabled: /etc/rc.conf.local openbgpdenable="YES" Conclusion As mentioned already, similar result could be achieved without using BGP by using either static routes or bridging interfaces differently, but the purpose of this exercise is to get some basic hands-on experience with BGP. Right now I’m looking into extending my setup in order to try more complex BGP schema. I’m thinking about adding some software switches in front of my VMs or maybe adding a second VM host (if budget allows). You’re welcome to comment if you have some ideas how to extend this setup for educational purposes in the context of BGP and networking. As a side note, I really like openbgpd so far. Its configuration file format is clean and simple, documentation is good, error and information messages are clear, and CLI has intuitive syntax. Digital Ocean ###The Power to Serve All people within the IT Industry should known where the slogan “The Power To Serve” is exposed every day to millions of people. But maybe too much wishful thinking from me. But without “The Power To Serve” the IT industry today will look totally different. Companies like Apple, Juniper, Cisco and even WatsApp would not exist in their current form. I provide IT architecture services to make your complex IT landscape manageable and I love to solve complex security and privacy challenges. Complex challenges where people, processes and systems are heavily interrelated. For this knowledge intensive work I often run some IT experiments. When you run experiments nowadays you have a choice: Rent some cloud based services or DIY (Do IT Yourself) on premise Running your own developments experiments on your own infrastructure can be time consuming. However smart automation saves time and money. And by creating your own CICD pipeline (Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment) you stay on top of core infrastructure developments. Even hands-on. Knowing how things work from a technical ‘hands-on’ perspective gives great advantages when it comes to solving complex business IT problems. Making a clear distinguish between a business problem or IT problem is useless. Business and IT problems are related. Sometimes causal related, but more often indirect by one or more non linear feedback loops. Almost every business depends of IT systems. Bad IT means often that your customers will leave your business. One of the things of FeeBSD for me is still FreeBSD Jails. In 2015 I had luck to attend to a presentation of the legendary hacker Poul-Henning Kamp . Check his BSD bio to see what he has done for the FreeBSD community! FreeBSD jails are a light way to visualize your system without enormous overhead. Now that the development on Linux for LXD/LXD is more mature (lxd is the next generation system container manager on linux) there is finally again an alternative for a nice chroot Linux based system again. At least when you do not need the overhead and management complexity that comes with Kubernetes or Docker. FreeBSD means control and quality for me. When there is an open source package I need, I want to install it from source. It gives me more control and always some extra knowledge on how things work. So no precompiled binaries for me on my BSD systems! If a build on FreeBSD fails most of the time this is an alert regarding the quality for me. If a complex OSS package is not available at all in the FreeBSD ports collection there should be a reason for it. Is it really that nobody on the world wants to do this dirty maintenance work? Or is there another cause that running this software on FreeBSD is not possible…There are currently 32644 ports available on FreeBSD. So all the major programming language, databases and middleware libraries are present. The FreeBSD organization is a mature organization and since this is one of the largest OSS projects worldwide learning how this community manages to keep innovation and creates and maintains software is a good entrance for learning how complex IT systems function. FreeBSD is of course BSD licensed. It worked well! There is still a strong community with lots of strong commercial sponsors around the community. Of course: sometimes a GPL license makes more sense. So beside FreeBSD I also love GPL software and the rationale and principles behind it. So my hope is that maybe within the next 25 years the hard battle between BSD vs GPL churches will be more rationalized and normalized. Principles are good, but as all good IT architects know: With good principles alone you never make a good system. So use requirements and not only principles to figure out what OSS license fits your project. There is never one size fits all. June 19, 1993 was the day the official name for FreeBSD was agreed upon. So this blog is written to celebrate 25th anniversary of FreeBSD. ###Dave’s BSDCan trip report So far, only one person has bothered to send in a BSDCan trip report. Our warmest thanks to Dave for doing his part. Hello guys! During the last show, you asked for a trip report regarding BSDCan 2018. This was my first time attending BSDCan. However, BSDCan was my second BSD conference overall, my first being vBSDCon 2017 in Reston, VA. Arriving early Thursday evening and after checking into the hotel, I headed straight to the Red Lion for the registration, picked up my badge and swag and then headed towards the ‘DMS’ building for the newbies talk. The only thing is, I couldn’t find the DMS building! Fortunately I found a BSDCan veteran who was heading there themselves. My only suggestion is to include the full building name and address on the BSDCan web site, or even a link to Google maps to help out with the navigation. The on-campus street maps didn’t have ‘DMS’ written on them anywhere. But I digress. Once I made it to the newbies talk hosted by Dan Langille and Michael W Lucas, it highlighted places to meet, an overview of what is happening, details about the ‘BSDCan widow/widower tours’ and most importantly, the 6-2-1 rule! The following morning, we were present with tea/coffee, muffins and other goodies to help prepare us for the day ahead. The first talk, “The Tragedy of systemd” covered what systemd did wrong and how the BSD community could improve on the ideas behind it. With the exception of Michael W Lucas, SSH Key Management and Kirk McKusick, The Evolution of FreeBSD Governance talk, I pretty much attended all of the ZFS talks including the lunchtime BoF session, hosted by Allan Jude. Coming from FreeNAS and being involved in the community, this is where my main interest and motivation lies. Since then I have been able to share some of that information with the FreeNAS community forums and chatroom. I also attended the “Speculating about Intel” lunchtime BoF session hosted by Theo de Raddt, which proved to be “interesting”. The talks ended with the wrap up session with a few words from Dan, covering the record attendance and made very clear there “was no cabal”. Followed by the the handing over of Groff the BSD goat to a new owner, thank you’s from the FreeBSD Foundation to various community committers and maintainers, finally ending with the charity auction, where a things like a Canadian $20 bill sold for $40, a signed FreeBSD Foundation shirt originally worn by George Neville-Neil, a lost laptop charger, Michael’s used gelato spoon, various books, the last cookie and more importantly, the second to last cookie! After the auction, we all headed to the Red Lion for food and drinks, sponsored by iXsystems. I would like to thank the BSDCan organizers, speakers and sponsors for a great conference. I will certainly hope to attend next year! Regards, Dave (aka m0nkey) Thanks to Dave for sharing his experiences with us and our viewers ##Beastie Bits Robert Watson (from 2008) on how much FreeBSD is in Mac OS X Why Intel Skylake CPUs are sometimes 50% slower than older CPUs Kristaps Dzonsons is looking for somebody to maintain this as mentioned at this link camcontrol(8) saves the day again! Formatting floppy disks in a USB floppy disk drive 32+ great indie games now playable on OpenBSD -current; 7 currently on sale! Warsaw BSD User Group. June 27 2018 18:30-21:00, Wheel Systems Office, Aleje Jerozolimskie 178, Warsaw Tarsnap ##Feedback/Questions Ron - Adding a disk to ZFS Marshall - zfs question Thomas - Allan, the myth perpetuator Ross - ZFS IO stats per dataset Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

DragonflyBSD’s hammer1 encrypted master/slave setup, second part of our BSDCan recap, NomadBSD 1.1-RC1 available, OpenBSD adds an LDAP client to base, FreeBSD gets pNFS support, Intel FPU Speculation Vulnerability confirmed, and what some Unix command names mean. ##Headlines DragonflyBSD: Towards a HAMMER1 master/slave encrypted setup with LUKS I just wanted to share my experience with setting up DragonFly master/slave HAMMER1 PFS’s on top of LUKS So after a long time using an Synology for my NFS needs, I decided it was time to rethink my setup a little since I had several issues with it : You cannot run NFS on top of encrypted partitions easily I suspect I am having some some data corruption (bitrot) on the ext4 filesystem the NIC was stcuk to 100 Mbps instead of 1 Gbps even after swapping cables, switches, you name it It’s proprietary I have been playing with DragonFly in the past and knew about HAMMER, now I just had the perfect excuse to actually use it in production :) After setting up the OS, creating the LUKS partition and HAMMER FS was easy : kdload dm cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/serno/ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/serno/ fort_knox newfs_hammer -L hammer1_secure_master /dev/mapper/fort_knox cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/serno/ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/serno/ fort_knox_slave newfs_hammer -L hammer1_secure_slave /dev/mapper/fort_knox_slave Mount the 2 drives : mount /dev/mapper/fort_knox /fort_knox mount /dev/mapper_fort_know_slave /fort_knox_slave You can now put your data under /fort_knox Now, off to setting up the replication, first get the shared-uuid of /fort_knox hammer pfs-status /fort_knox Create a PFS slave “linked” to the master hammer pfs-slave /fort_knox_slave/pfs/slave shared-uuid=f9e7cc0d-eb59-10e3-a5b5-01e6e7cefc12 And then stream your data to the slave PFS ! hammer mirror-stream /fort_knox /fort_knox_slave/pfs/slave After that, setting NFS is fairly trivial even though I had problem with the /etc/exports syntax which is different than Linux There’s a few things I wish would be better though but nothing too problematic or without workarounds : Cannot unlock LUKS partitions at boot time afaik (Acceptable tradeoff for the added security LUKS gives me vs my old Synology setup) but this force me to run a script to unlock LUKS, mount hammer and start mirror-stream at each boot No S1/S3 sleep so I made a script to shutdown the system when there’s no network neighborgs to serve the NFS As my system isn’t online 24/7 for energy reasons, I guess will have to run hammer cleanup myself from time to time Some uncertainty because hey, it’s kind of exotic but exciting too :) Overall, I am happy, HAMMER1 and PFS are looking really good, DragonFly is a neat Unix and the community is super friendly (Matthew Dillon actually provided me with a kernel patch to fix the broken ACPI on the PC holding this setup, many thanks!), the system is still a “work in progress” but it is already serving my files as I write this post. Let’s see in 6 months how it goes in the longer run ! Helpful resources : https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/how_to_implement_hammer_pseudo_file_system__40___pfs___41___slave_mirroring_from_pfs_master/ ###BSDCan 2018 Recap As promised, here is our second part of our BSDCan report, covering the conference proper. The last tutorials/devsummit of that day lead directly into the conference, as people could pick up their registration packs at the Red Lion and have a drink with fellow BSD folks. Allan and I were there only briefly, as we wanted to get back to the “Newcomers orientation and mentorship” session lead by Michael W. Lucas. This session is intended for people that are new to BSDCan (maybe their first BSD conference ever?) and may have questions. Michael explained everything from the 6-2-1 rule (hours of sleep, meals per day, and number of showers that attendees should have at a minimum), to the partner and widowers program (lead by his wife Liz), to the sessions that people should not miss (opening, closing, and hallway track). Old-time BSDCan folks were asked to stand up so that people can recognize them and ask them any questions they might have during the conferences. The session was well attended. Afterwards, people went for dinner in groups, a big one lead by Michael Lucas to his favorite Shawarma place, followed by gelato (of course). This allowed newbies to mingle over dinner and ice cream, creating a welcoming atmosphere. The next day, after Dan Langille opened the conference, Benno Rice gave the keynote presentation about “The Tragedy of Systemd”. Benedict went to the following talks: “Automating Network Infrastructures with Ansible on FreeBSD” in the DevSummit track. A good talk that connected well with his Ansible tutorial and even allowed some discussions among participants. “All along the dwatch tower”: Devin delivered a well prepared talk. I first thought that the number of slides would not fit into the time slot, but she even managed to give a demo of her work, which was well received. The dwatch tool she wrote should make it easy for people to get started with DTrace without learning too much about the syntax at first. The visualizations were certainly nice to see, combining different tools together in a new way. ZFS BoF, lead by Allan and Matthew Ahrens SSH Key Management by Michael W. Lucas. Yet another great talk where I learned a lot. I did not get to the SSH CA chapter in the new SSH Mastery book, so this was a good way to wet my appetite for it and motivated me to look into creating one for the cluster that I’m managing. The rest of the day was spent at the FreeBSD Foundation table, talking to various folks. Then, Allan and I had an interview with Kirk McKusick for National FreeBSD Day, then we had a core meeting, followed by a core dinner. Day 2: “Flexible Disk Use in OpenZFS”: Matthew Ahrens talking about the feature he is implementing to expand a RAID-Z with a single disk, as well as device removal. Allan’s talk about his efforts to implement ZSTD in OpenZFS as another compression algorithm. I liked his overview slides with the numbers comparing the algorithms for their effectiveness and his personal story about the sometimes rocky road to get the feature implemented. “zrepl - ZFS replication” by Christian Schwarz, was well prepared and even had a demo to show what his snapshot replication tool can do. We covered it on the show before and people can find it under sysutils/zrepl. Feedback and help is welcome. “The Evolution of FreeBSD Governance” by Kirk McKusick was yet another great talk by him covering the early days of FreeBSD until today, detailing some of the progress and challenges the project faced over the years in terms of leadership and governance. This is an ongoing process that everyone in the community should participate in to keep the project healthy and infused with fresh blood. Closing session and auction were funny and great as always. All in all, yet another amazing BSDCan. Thank you Dan Langille and your organizing team for making it happen! Well done. Digital Ocean ###NomadBSD 1.1-RC1 Released The first – and hopefully final – release candidate of NomadBSD 1.1 is available! Changes The base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 11.2-RC3 EFI booting has been fixed. Support for modern Intel GPUs has been added. Support for installing packages has been added. Improved setup menu. More software packages: benchmarks/bonnie++ DSBDisplaySettings DSBExec DSBSu mail/thunderbird net/mosh ports-mgmt/octopkg print/qpdfview security/nmap sysutils/ddrescue sysutils/fusefs-hfsfuse sysutils/fusefs-sshfs sysutils/sleuthkit www/lynx x11-wm/compton x11/xev x11/xterm Many improvements and bugfixes The image and instructions can be found here. ##News Roundup LDAP client added to -current CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: reyk@cvs.openbsd.org 2018/06/13 09:45:58 Log message: Import ldap(1), a simple ldap search client. We have an ldapd(8) server and ypldap in base, so it makes sense to have a simple LDAP client without depending on the OpenLDAP package. This tool can be used in an ssh(1) AuthorizedKeysCommand script. With feedback from many including millert@ schwarze@ gilles@ dlg@ jsing@ OK deraadt@ Status: Vendor Tag: reyk Release Tags: ldap_20180613 N src/usr.bin/ldap/Makefile N src/usr.bin/ldap/aldap.c N src/usr.bin/ldap/aldap.h N src/usr.bin/ldap/ber.c N src/usr.bin/ldap/ber.h N src/usr.bin/ldap/ldap.1 N src/usr.bin/ldap/ldapclient.c N src/usr.bin/ldap/log.c N src/usr.bin/ldap/log.h No conflicts created by this import ###Intel® FPU Speculation Vulnerability Confirmed Earlier this month, Philip Guenther (guenther@) committed (to amd64 -current) a change from lazy to semi-eager FPU switching to mitigate against rumored FPU state leakage in Intel® CPUs. Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) discussed this in his BSDCan 2018 session. Using information disclosed in Theo’s talk, Colin Percival developed a proof-of-concept exploit in around 5 hours. This seems to have prompted an early end to an embargo (in which OpenBSD was not involved), and the official announcement of the vulnerability. FPU change in FreeBSD Summary: System software may utilize the Lazy FP state restore technique to delay the restoring of state until an instruction operating on that state is actually executed by the new process. Systems using Intel® Core-based microprocessors may potentially allow a local process to infer data utilizing Lazy FP state restore from another process through a speculative execution side channel. Description: System software may opt to utilize Lazy FP state restore instead of eager save and restore of the state upon a context switch. Lazy restored states are potentially vulnerable to exploits where one process may infer register values of other processes through a speculative execution side channel that infers their value. · CVSS - 4.3 Medium CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:N/A:N Affected Products: Intel® Core-based microprocessors. Recommendations: If an XSAVE-enabled feature is disabled, then we recommend either its state component bitmap in the extended control register (XCR0) is set to 0 (e.g. XCR0[bit 2]=0 for AVX, XCR0[bits 7:5]=0 for AVX512) or the corresponding register states of the feature should be cleared prior to being disabled. Also for relevant states (e.g. x87, SSE, AVX, etc.), Intel recommends system software developers utilize Eager FP state restore in lieu of Lazy FP state restore. Acknowledgements: Intel would like to thank Julian Stecklina from Amazon Germany, Thomas Prescher from Cyberus Technology GmbH (https://www.cyberus-technology.de/), Zdenek Sojka from SYSGO AG (http://sysgo.com), and Colin Percival for reporting this issue and working with us on coordinated disclosure. iXsystems iX Ad Spot iX Systems - BSDCan 2018 Recap ###FreeBSD gets pNFS support Merge the pNFS server code from projects/pnfs-planb-server into head. This code merge adds a pNFS service to the NFSv4.1 server. Although it is a large commit it should not affect behaviour for a non-pNFS NFS server. Some documentation on how this works can be found at: Merge the pN http://people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem/pnfs-planb-setup.txt and will hopefully be turned into a proper document soon. This is a merge of the kernel code. Userland and man page changes will come soon, once the dust settles on this merge. It has passed a "make universe", so I hope it will not cause build problems. It also adds NFSv4.1 server support for the "current stateid". Here is a brief overview of the pNFS service: A pNFS service separates the Read/Write operations from all the other NFSv4.1 Metadata operations. It is hoped that this separation allows a pNFS service to be configured that exceeds the limits of a single NFS server for either storage capacity and/or I/O bandwidth. It is possible to configure mirroring within the data servers (DSs) so that the data storage file for an MDS file will be mirrored on two or more of the DSs. When this is used, failure of a DS will not stop the pNFS service and a failed DS can be recovered once repaired while the pNFS service continues to operate. Although two way mirroring would be the norm, it is possible to set a mirroring level of up to four or the number of DSs, whichever is less. The Metadata server will always be a single point of failure, just as a single NFS server is. A Plan B pNFS service consists of a single MetaData Server (MDS) and K Data Servers (DS), all of which are recent FreeBSD systems. Clients will mount the MDS as they would a single NFS server. When files are created, the MDS creates a file tree identical to what a single NFS server creates, except that all the regular (VREG) files will be empty. As such, if you look at the exported tree on the MDS directly on the MDS server (not via an NFS mount), the files will all be of size 0. Each of these files will also have two extended attributes in the system attribute name space: pnfsd.dsfile - This extended attrbute stores the information that the MDS needs to find the data storage file(s) on DS(s) for this file. pnfsd.dsattr - This extended attribute stores the Size, AccessTime, ModifyTime and Change attributes for the file, so that the MDS doesn't need to acquire the attributes from the DS for every Getattr operation. For each regular (VREG) file, the MDS creates a data storage file on one (or more if mirroring is enabled) of the DSs in one of the "dsNN" subdirectories. The name of this file is the file handle of the file on the MDS in hexadecimal so that the name is unique. The DSs use subdirectories named "ds0" to "dsN" so that no one directory gets too large. The value of "N" is set via the sysctl vfs.nfsd.dsdirsize on the MDS, with the default being 20. For production servers that will store a lot of files, this value should probably be much larger. It can be increased when the "nfsd" daemon is not running on the MDS, once the "dsK" directories are created. For pNFS aware NFSv4.1 clients, the FreeBSD server will return two pieces of information to the client that allows it to do I/O directly to the DS. DeviceInfo - This is relatively static information that defines what a DS is. The critical bits of information returned by the FreeBSD server is the IP address of the DS and, for the Flexible File layout, that NFSv4.1 is to be used and that it is "tightly coupled". There is a "deviceid" which identifies the DeviceInfo. Layout - This is per file and can be recalled by the server when it is no longer valid. For the FreeBSD server, there is support for two types of layout, call File and Flexible File layout. Both allow the client to do I/O on the DS via NFSv4.1 I/O operations. The Flexible File layout is a more recent variant that allows specification of mirrors, where the client is expected to do writes to all mirrors to maintain them in a consistent state. The Flexible File layout also allows the client to report I/O errors for a DS back to the MDS. The Flexible File layout supports two variants referred to as "tightly coupled" vs "loosely coupled". The FreeBSD server always uses the "tightly coupled" variant where the client uses the same credentials to do I/O on the DS as it would on the MDS. For the "loosely coupled" variant, the layout specifies a synthetic user/group that the client uses to do I/O on the DS. The FreeBSD server does not do striping and always returns layouts for the entire file. The critical information in a layout is Read vs Read/Writea and DeviceID(s) that identify which DS(s) the data is stored on. At this time, the MDS generates File Layout layouts to NFSv4.1 clients that know how to do pNFS for the non-mirrored DS case unless the sysctl vfs.nfsd.default_flexfile is set non-zero, in which case Flexible File layouts are generated. The mirrored DS configuration always generates Flexible File layouts. For NFS clients that do not support NFSv4.1 pNFS, all I/O operations are done against the MDS which acts as a proxy for the appropriate DS(s). When the MDS receives an I/O RPC, it will do the RPC on the DS as a proxy. If the DS is on the same machine, the MDS/DS will do the RPC on the DS as a proxy and so on, until the machine runs out of some resource, such as session slots or mbufs. As such, DSs must be separate systems from the MDS. *** ###[What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?](http://www.unixguide.net/unix/faq/1.3.shtml) + awk = "Aho Weinberger and Kernighan" + grep = "Global Regular Expression Print" + fgrep = "Fixed GREP". + egrep = "Extended GREP" + cat = "CATenate" + gecos = "General Electric Comprehensive Operating Supervisor" + nroff = "New ROFF" + troff = "Typesetter new ROFF" + tee = T + bss = "Block Started by Symbol + biff = "BIFF" + rc (as in ".cshrc" or "/etc/rc") = "RunCom" + Don Libes' book "Life with Unix" contains lots more of these tidbits. *** ##Beastie Bits + [RetroBSD: Unix for microcontrollers](http://retrobsd.org/wiki/doku.php) + [On the matter of OpenBSD breaking embargos (KRACK)](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=152910536208954&w=2) + [Theo's Basement Computer Paradise (1998)](https://zeus.theos.com/deraadt/hosts.html) + [Airport Extreme runs NetBSD](https://jcs.org/2018/06/12/airport_ssh) + [What UNIX shell could have been](https://rain-1.github.io/shell-2.html) *** Tarsnap ad *** ##Feedback/Questions + We need more feedback and questions. Please email feedback@bsdnow.tv + Also, many of you owe us BSDCan trip reports! We have shared what our experience at BSDCan was like, but we want to hear about yours. What can we do better next year? What was it like being there for the first time? + [Jason writes in](https://slexy.org/view/s205jU58X2) + https://www.wheelsystems.com/en/products/wheel-fudo-psm/ + [June 19th was National FreeBSD Day](https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23FreeBSDDay) *** - Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [feedback@bsdnow.tv](mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***

We recap EuroBSDcon in Paris, tell the story behind a pf PR, and show you how to do screencasting with OpenBSD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Recap of EuroBSDcon 2017 in Paris, France (https://2017.eurobsdcon.org) EuroBSDcon was held in Paris, France this year, which drew record numbers this year. With over 300 attendees, it was the largest BSD event I have ever attended, and I was encouraged by the higher than expected number of first time attendees. The FreeBSD Foundation held a board meeting on Wednesday afternoon with the members who were in Paris. Topics included future conferences (including a conference kit we can mail to people who want to represent FreeBSD) and planning for next year. The FreeBSD Devsummit started on Thursday at the beautiful Mozilla Office in Paris. After registering and picking up our conference bag, everyone gathered for a morning coffee with lots of handshaking and greeting. We then gathered in the next room which had a podium with microphone, screens as well as tables and chairs. After developers sat down, Benedict opened the devsummit with a small quiz about France for developers to win a Mogics Power Bagel (https://www.mogics.com/?page_id=3824). 45 developers participated and DES won the item in the end. After introductions and collecting topics of interest from everyone, we started with the Work in Progress (WIP) session. The WIP session had different people present a topic they are working on in 7 minute timeslots. Topics ranged from FreeBSD Forwarding Performance, fast booting options, and a GELI patch under review to attach multiple providers. See their slides on the FreeBSD wiki (https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/201709). After lunch, the FreeBSD Foundation gave a general update on staff and funding, as well as a more focused presentation about our partnership with Intel. People were interested to hear what was done so far and asked a few questions to the Intel representative Glenn Weinberg. After lunch, developers worked quietly on their own projects. The mic remained open and occasionally, people would step forward and gave a short talk without slides or motivated a discussion of common interest. The day concluded with a dinner at a nice restaurant in Paris, which allowed to continue the discussions of the day. The second day of the devsummit began with a talk about the CAM-based SDIO stack by Ilya Bakulin. His work would allow access to wifi cards/modules on embedded boards like the Raspberry Pi Zero W and similar devices as many of these are using SDIO for data transfers. Next up was a discussion and Q&A session with the FreeBSD core team members who were there (missing only Benno Rice, Kris Moore, John Baldwin, and Baptiste Daroussin, the latter being busy with conference preparations). The new FCP (FreeBSD community proposals) were introduced for those who were not at BSDCan this year and the hows and whys about it. Allan and I were asked to describe our experiences as new members of core and we encouraged people to run for core when the next election happens. After a short break, Scott Long gave an overview of the work that's been started on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture), what the goals of the project are and who is working on it. Before lunch, Christian Schwarz presented his work on zrepl, a new ZFS replication solution he developed using Go. This sparked interest in developers, a port was started (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12462) and people suggested to Christian that he should submit his talk to AsiaBSDcon and BSDCan next year. Benedict had to leave before lunch was done to teach his Ansible tutorial (which was well attended) at the conference venue. There were organized dinners, for those two nights, quite a feat of organization to fit over 100 people into a restaurant and serve them quickly. On Saturday, there was a social event, a river cruise down the Seine. This took the form of a ‘standing' dinner, with a wide selection of appetizer type dishes, designed to get people to walk around and converse with many different people, rather than sit at a table with the same 6-8 people. I talked to a much larger group of people than I had managed to at the other dinners. I like having both dinner formats. We would also like to thank all of the BSDNow viewers who attended the conference and made the point of introducing themselves to us. It was nice to meet you all. The recordings of the live video stream from the conference are available immediately, so you can watch the raw versions of the talks now: Auditorium Keynote 1: Software Development in the Age of Heroes (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=179) by Thomas Pornin (https://twitter.com/BearSSLnews) Tuning FreeBSD for routing and firewalling (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=1660) by Olivier Cochard-Labbé (https://twitter.com/ocochardlabbe) My BSD sucks less than yours, Act I (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=7040) by Antoine Jacoutot (https://twitter.com/ajacoutot) and Baptiste Daroussin (https://twitter.com/_bapt_) My BSD sucks less than yours, Act II (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=14254) by Antoine Jacoutot (https://twitter.com/ajacoutot) and Baptiste Daroussin (https://twitter.com/_bapt_) Reproducible builds on NetBSD (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=23351) by Christos Zoulas Your scheduler is not the problem (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=26845) by Martin Pieuchot Keynote 2: A French story on cybercrime (https://youtu.be/4iR8g9-39LM?t=30540) by Éric Freyssinet (https://twitter.com/ericfreyss) Case studies of sandboxing base system with Capsicum (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=731) by Mariusz Zaborski (https://twitter.com/oshogbovx) OpenBSD's small steps towards DTrace (a tale about DDB and CTF) (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=6030) by Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse The Realities of DTrace on FreeBSD (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=13096) by George Neville-Neil (https://twitter.com/gvnn3) OpenSMTPD, current state of affairs (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=16818) by Gilles Chehade (https://twitter.com/PoolpOrg) Hoisting: lessons learned integrating pledge into 500 programs (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=21764) by Theo de Raadt Keynote 3: System Performance Analysis Methodologies (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=25463) by Brendan Gregg (https://twitter.com/brendangregg) Closing Session (https://youtu.be/jqdHYEH_BQY?t=29355) Karnak “Is it done yet ?” The never ending story of pkg tools (https://youtu.be/1hjzleqGRYk?t=71) by Marc Espie (https://twitter.com/espie_openbsd) A Tale of six motherboards, three BSDs and coreboot (https://youtu.be/1hjzleqGRYk?t=7498) by Piotr Kubaj and Katarzyna Kubaj State of the DragonFly's graphics stack (https://youtu.be/1hjzleqGRYk?t=11475) by François Tigeot From NanoBSD to ZFS and Jails – FreeBSD as a Hosting Platform, Revisited (https://youtu.be/1hjzleqGRYk?t=16227) by Patrick M. Hausen Bacula – nobody ever regretted making a backup (https://youtu.be/1hjzleqGRYk?t=20069) by Dan Langille (https://twitter.com/DLangille) Never Lose a Syslog Message (https://youtu.be/qX0BS4P65cQ?t=325) by Alexander Bluhm Running CloudABI applications on a FreeBSD-based Kubernetes cluster (https://youtu.be/qX0BS4P65cQ?t=5647) by Ed Schouten (https://twitter.com/EdSchouten) The OpenBSD web stack (https://youtu.be/qX0BS4P65cQ?t=13255) by Michael W. Lucas (https://twitter.com/mwlauthor) The LLDB Debugger on NetBSD (https://youtu.be/qX0BS4P65cQ?t=16835) by Kamil Rytarowski What's in store for NetBSD 8.0? (https://youtu.be/qX0BS4P65cQ?t=21583) by Alistair Crooks Louxor A Modern Replacement for BSD spell(1) (https://youtu.be/6Nen6a1Xl7I?t=156) by Abhinav Upadhyay (https://twitter.com/abhi9u) Portable Hotplugging: NetBSD's uvm_hotplug(9) API development (https://youtu.be/6Nen6a1Xl7I?t=5874) by Cherry G. Mathew Hardening pkgsrc (https://youtu.be/6Nen6a1Xl7I?t=9343) by Pierre Pronchery (https://twitter.com/khorben) Discovering OpenBSD on AWS (https://youtu.be/6Nen6a1Xl7I?t=14874) by Laurent Bernaille (https://twitter.com/lbernail) OpenBSD Testing Infrastructure Behind bluhm.genua.de (https://youtu.be/6Nen6a1Xl7I?t=18639) by Jan Klemkow The school of hard knocks – PT1 (https://youtu.be/8wuW8lfsVGc?t=276) by Sevan Janiyan (https://twitter.com/sevanjaniyan) 7 years of maintaining firefox, and still looking ahead (https://youtu.be/8wuW8lfsVGc?t=5321) by Landry Breuil Branch VPN solution based on OpenBSD, OSPF, RDomains and Ansible (https://youtu.be/8wuW8lfsVGc?t=12385) by Remi Locherer Running BSD on AWS (https://youtu.be/8wuW8lfsVGc?t=15983) by Julien Simon and Nicolas David Getting started with OpenBSD device driver development (https://youtu.be/8wuW8lfsVGc?t=21491) by Stefan Sperling A huge thanks to the organizers, program committee, and sponsors of EuroBSDCon. Next year, EuroBSDcon will be in Bucharest, Romania. *** The story of PR 219251 (https://www.sigsegv.be//blog/freebsd/PR219251) The actual story I wanted Kristof to tell, the pf bug he fixed at the Essen Hackathon earlier this summer. As I threatened to do in my previous post, I'm going to talk about PR 219251 for a bit. The bug report dates from only a few months ago, but the first report (that I can remeber) actually came from Shawn Webb on Twitter, of all places Despite there being a stacktrace it took quite a while (nearly 6 months in fact) before I figured this one out. It took Reshad Patuck managing to distill the problem down to a small-ish test script to make real progress on this. His testcase meant that I could get core dumps and experiment. It also provided valuable clues because it could be tweaked to see what elements were required to trigger the panic. This test script starts a (vnet) jail, adds an epair interface to it, sets up pf in the jail, and then reloads the pf rules on the host. Interestingly the panic does not seem to occur if that last step is not included. Obviously not the desired behaviour, but it seems strange. The instances of pf in the jails are supposed to be separate. We try to fetch a counter value here, but instead we dereference a bad pointer. There's two here, so already we need more information. Inspection of the core dump reveals that the state pointer is valid, and contains sane information. The rule pointer (rule.ptr) points to a sensible location, but the data is mostly 0xdeadc0de. This is the memory allocator being helpful (in debug mode) and writing garbage over freed memory, to make use-after-free bugs like this one easier to find. In other words: the rule has been free()d while there was still a state pointing to it. Somehow we have a state (describing a connection pf knows about) which points to a rule which no longer exists. The core dump also shows that the problem always occurs with states and rules in the default vnet (i.e. the host pf instance), not one of the pf instances in one of the vnet jails. That matches with the observation that the test script does not trigger the panic unless we also reload the rules on the host. Great, we know what's wrong, but now we need to work out how we can get into this state. At this point we're going to have to learn something about how rules and states get cleaned up in pf. Don't worry if you had no idea, because before this bug I didn't either. The states keep a pointer to the rule they match, so when rules are changed (or removed) we can't just delete them. States get cleaned up when connections are closed or they time out. This means we have to keep old rules around until the states that use them expire. When rules are removed pfunlinkrule() adds then to the Vpfunlinkedrules list (more on that funny V prefix later). From time to time the pf purge thread will run over all states and mark the rules that are used by a state. Once that's done for all states we know that all rules that are not marked as in-use can be removed (because none of the states use it). That can be a lot of work if we've got a lot of states, so pfpurgethread() breaks that up into smaller chuncks, iterating only part of the state table on every run. We iterate over all of our virtual pf instances (VNETFOREACH()), check if it's active (for FreeBSD-EN-17.08, where we've seen this code before) and then check the expired states with pfpurgeexpiredstates(). We start at state 'idx' and only process a certain number (determined by the PFTMINTERVAL setting) states. The pfpurgeexpiredstates() function returns a new idx value to tell us how far we got. So, remember when I mentioned the odd V_ prefix? Those are per-vnet variables. They work a bit like thread-local variables. Each vnet (virtual network stack) keeps its state separate from the others, and the V_ variables use a pointer that's changed whenever we change the currently active vnet (say with CURVNETSET() or CURVNETRESTORE()). That's tracked in the 'curvnet' variable. In other words: there are as many Vpfvnetactive variables as there are vnets: number of vnet jails plus one (for the host system). Why is that relevant here? Note that idx is not a per-vnet variable, but we handle multiple pf instances here. We run through all of them in fact. That means that we end up checking the first X states in the first vnet, then check the second X states in the second vnet, the third X states in the third and so on and so on. That of course means that we think we've run through all of the states in a vnet while we really only checked some of them. So when pfpurgeunlinkedrules() runs it can end up free()ing rules that actually are still in use because pfpurgethread() skipped over the state(s) that actually used the rule. The problem only happened if we reloaded rules in the host, because the active ruleset is never free()d, even if there are no states pointing to the rule. That explains the panic, and the fix is actually quite straightforward: idx needs to be a per-vnet variable, Vpfpurge_idx, and then the problem is gone. As is often the case, the solution to a fairly hard problem turns out to be really simple. As you might expect, finding the problem takes a lot more work that fixing it Thanks to Kristof for writing up this detailed post explaining how the problem was found, and what caused it. *** vBSDcon 2017: BSD at Work (https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/vbsdcon-2017-dexter/) The third biennial vBSDcon hosted by Verisign took place September 7th through 9th with the FreeBSD Developer Summit taking place the first day. vBSDcon and iXsystems' MeetBSD event have been alternating between the East and West coasts of the U.S.A. and these two events play vital roles in reaching Washington, DC-area and Bay Area/Silicon Valley audiences. Where MeetBSD serves many BSD Vendors, vBSDcon attracts a unique government and security industry demographic that isn't found anywhere else. Conference time and travel budgets are always limited and bringing these events to their attendees is a much-appreciated service provided by their hosts. The vBSDcon FreeBSD DevSummit had a strong focus on OpenZFS, the build system and networking with the FreeBSD 12 wish list of features in mind. How to best incorporate the steady flow of new OpenZFS features into FreeBSD such as dataset-level encryption was of particular interest. This feature from a GNU/Linux-based storage vendor is tribute to the growth of the OpenZFS community which is vital in light of the recent “Death of Solaris and ZFS” at Oracle. There has never been more demand for OpenZFS on FreeBSD and the Oracle news further confirms our collective responsibility to meet that demand. The official conference opened with my talk on “Isolated BSD Build Environments” in which I explained how the bhyve hypervisor can be used to effortlessly tour FreeBSD 5.0-onward and build specific source releases on demand to trace regressions to their offending commit. I was followed by a FreeNAS user who made the good point that FreeNAS is an exemplary “entry vector” into Unix and Enterprise Storage fundamentals, given that many of the vectors our generation had are gone. Where many of us discovered Unix and the Internet via console terminals at school or work, smart phones are only delivering the Internet without the Unix. With some irony, both iOS and Android are Unix-based yet offer few opportunities for their users to learn and leverage their Unix environments. The next two talks were The History and Future of Core Dumps in FreeBSD by Sam Gwydir and Using pkgsrc for multi-platform deployments in heterogeneous environments by G. Clifford Williams. I strongly recommend that anyone wanting to speak at AsiaBSDCon read Sam's accompanying paper on core dumps because I consider it the perfect AsiaBSDCon topic and his execution is excellent. Core dumps are one of those things you rarely think about until they are a DROP EVERYTHING! priority. G. Clifford's talk was about what I consider a near-perfect BSD project: pkgsrc, the portable BSD package manager. I put it up there with OpenSSH and mandoc as projects that have provided significant value to other Open Source operating systems. G. Clifford's real-world experiences are perfectly inline with vBSDcon's goal to be more production-oriented than other BSDCons. Of the other talks, any and all Dtrace talks are always appreciated and George Neville-Neil's did not disappoint. He based it on his experiences with the Teach BSD project which is bringing FreeBSD-based computer science education to schools around the world. The security-related talks by John-Mark Gurney, Dean Freeman and Michael Shirk also represented vBSDcon's consideration of the local community and made a convincing point that the BSDs should make concerted efforts to qualify for Common Criteria, FIPS, and other Government security requirements. While some security experts will scoff at these, they are critical to the adoption of BSD-based products by government agencies. BSD Now hosts Allan Jude and Benedict Reuschling hosted an OpenZFS BoF and Ansible talk respectively and I hosted a bhyve hypervisor BoF. The Hallway Track and food at vBSDcon were excellent and both culminated with an after-dinner dramatic reading of Michael W. Lucas' latest book that raised money for the FreeBSD Foundation. A great time was had by all and it was wonderful to see everyone! News Roundup FreeBSD 10.4-RC2 Available (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2017-September/087848.html) FreeBSD 10.4 will be released soon, this is the last chance to find bugs before the official release is cut. Noteworthy Changes Since 10.4-RC1: Given that the amd64 disc1 image was overflowing, more of the base components installed into the disc1 (live) file systems had to be disabled. Most notably, this removed the compiler toolchain from the disc1 images. All disabled tools are still available with the dvd1 images, though. The aesni(4) driver now no longer shares a single FPU context across multiple sessions in multiple threads, addressing problems seen when employing aesni(4) for ipsec(4). Support for netmap(4) by the ixgbe(4) driver has been brought into line with the netmap(4) API present in stable/10. Also, ixgbe(4) now correctly handles VFs in its netmap(4) support again instead of treating these as PFs. During the creation of amd64 and i386 VM images, etcupdate(8) and mergemaster(8) databases now are bootstrapped, akin to what happens along the extraction of base.txz as part of a new installation via bsdinstall(8). This change allows for both of these tools to work out-of-box on the VM images and avoids errors seen when upgrading these images via freebsd-update(8). If you are still on the stable/10 branch, you should test upgrading to 10.4, and make sure there are no problems with your workload Additional testing specifically of the features that have changed since 10.4-BETA1 would also be most helpful This will be the last release from the stable/10 branch *** OpenBSD changes of note 628 (https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/openbsd-changes-of-note-628) EuroBSDCon in two weeks. Be sure to attend early and often. Many and various documentation improvements for libcrypto. New man pages, rewrites, expanded bugs sections, and more. Only allow upward migration in vmd. There's a README for the syspatch build system if you want to run your own. Move the kernel relinking code from /etc/rc into a seperate script usable by syspatch. Kernel patches can now be reduced to just the necessary files. Make the callers of sogetopt() responsible for allocating memory. Now allocation and free occur in the same place. Use waitpid() instead of wait() in most programs to avoid accidentally collecting the wrong child. Have cu call isatty() before making assumptions. Switch mandoc rendering of mathematical symbols and greek letters from trying to imitate the characters' graphical shapes, which resulted in unintelligible renderings in many cases, to transliterations conveying the characters' meanings. Update libexpat to 2.2.4. Fix copying partial UTF-8 characters. Sigh, here we go again. Work around bug in F5's handling of the supported elliptic curves extension. RFC 4492 only defines elliptic_curves for ClientHello. However, F5 is sending it in ServerHello. We need to skip over it since our TLS extension parsing code is now more strict. After a first install, run syspatch -c to check for patches. If SMAP is present, clear PSL_AC on kernel entry and interrupt so that only the code in copy{in,out}* that need it run with it set. Panic if it's set on entry to trap() or syscall(). Prompted by Maxime Villard's NetBSD work. Errata. New drivers for arm: rktemp, mvpinctrl, mvmpic, mvneta, mvmdio, mvpxa, rkiic, rkpmic. No need to exec rm from within mandoc. We know there's exactly one file and directory to remove. Similarly with running cmp. Revert to Mesa 13.0.6 to hopefully address rendering issues a handful of people have reported with xpdf/fvwm on ivy bridge with modesetting driver. Rewrite ALPN extension using CBB/CBS and the new extension framework. Rewrite SRTP extension using CBB/CBS and the new extension framework. Revisit 2q queue sizes. Limit the hot queue to 1/20th the cache size up to a max of 4096 pages. Limit the warm and cold queues to half the cache. This allows us to more effectively notice re-interest in buffers instead of losing it in a large hot queue. Add glass console support for arm64. Probably not yet for your machine, though. Replace heaps of hand-written syscall stubs in ld.so with a simpler framework. 65535 is a valid port to listen on. When xinit starts an X server that listens only on UNIX socket, prefer DISPLAY=unix:0 rather than DISPLAY=:0. This will prevent applications from ever falling back to TCP if the UNIX socket connection fails (such as when the X server crashes). Reverted. Add -z and -Z options to apmd to auto suspend or hibernate when low on battery. Remove the original (pre-IETF) chacha20-poly1305 cipher suites. Add urng(4) which supports various USB RNG devices. Instead of adding one driver per device, start bundling them into a single driver. Remove old deactivated pledge path code. A replacement mechanism is being brewed. Fix a bug from the extension parsing rewrite. Always parse ALPN even if no callback has been installed to prevent leaving unprocessed data which leads to a decode error. Clarify what is meant by syslog priorities being ordered, since the numbers and priorities are backwards. Remove a stray setlocale() from ksh, eliminating a lot of extra statically linked code. Unremove some NPN symbols from libssl because ports software thinks they should be there for reasons. Fix saved stack location after resume. Somehow clang changed it. Resume works again on i386. Improve error messages in vmd and vmctl to be more informative. Stop building the miniroot installer for OMAP3 Beagleboards. It hasn't worked in over a year and nobody noticed. Have the callers of sosetopt() free the mbuf for symmetry. On octeon, let the kernel use the hardware FPU even if emulation is compiled in. It's faster. Fix support for 486DX CPUs by not calling cpuid. I used to own a 486. Now I don't. Merge some drm fixes from linux. Defer probing of floppy drives, eliminating delays during boot. Better handling of probes and beacons and timeouts and scans in wifi stack to avoid disconnects. Move mutex, condvar, and thread-specific data routes, pthreadonce, and pthreadexit from libpthread to libc, along with low-level bits to support them. Let's thread aware (but not actually threaded) code work with just libc. New POSIX xlocale implementation. Complete as long as you only use ASCII and UTF-8, as you should. Round and round it goes; when 6.2 stops, nobody knows. A peak at the future? *** Screencasting with OpenBSD (http://eradman.com/posts/screencasting.html) USB Audio Any USB microphone should appear as a new audio device. Here is the dmesg for my mic by ART: uaudio0 at uhub0 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "M-One USB" rev 1.10/0.01 addr 2 uaudio0: audio rev 1.00, 8 mixer controls audio1 at uaudio0 audioctl can read off all of the specific characterisitcs of this device $ audioctl -f /dev/audio1 | grep record mode=play,record record.rate=48000 record.channels=1 record.precision=16 record.bps=2 record.msb=1 record.encoding=slinear_le record.pause=0 record.active=0 record.block_size=1960 record.bytes=0 record.errors=0 Now test the recording from the second audio device using aucat(1) aucat -f rsnd/1 -o file.wav If the device also has a headset audio can be played through the same device. aucat -f rsnd/1 -i file.wav Screen Capture using Xvfb The rate at which a framebuffer for your video card is a feature of the hardware and software your using, and it's often very slow. x11vnc will print an estimate of the banwidth for the system your running. x11vnc ... 09/05/2012 22:23:45 fb read rate: 7 MB/sec This is about 4fps. We can do much better by using a virtual framebuffer. Here I'm setting up a new screen, setting the background color, starting cwm and an instance of xterm Xvfb :1 -screen 0 720x540x16 & DISPLAY=:1 xsetroot -solid steelblue & DISPLAY=:1 cwm & DISPLAY=:1 xterm +sb -fa Hermit -fs 14 & Much better! Now we're up around 20fps. x11vnc -display :1 & ... 11/05/2012 18:04:07 fb read rate: 168 MB/sec Make a connection to this virtual screen using raw encoding to eliminate time wasted on compression. vncviewer localhost -encodings raw A test recording with sound then looks like this ffmpeg -f sndio -i snd/1 -y -f x11grab -r 12 -s 800x600 -i :1.0 -vcodec ffv1 ~/out.avi Note: always stop the recording and playback using q, not Ctrl-C so that audio inputs are shut down properly. Screen Capture using Xephyr Xephyr is perhaps the easiest way to run X with a shadow framebuffer. This solution also avoids reading from the video card's RAM, so it's reasonably fast. Xephyr -ac -br -noreset -screen 800x600 :1 & DISPLAY=:1 xsetroot -solid steelblue & DISPLAY=:1 cwm & DISPLAY=:1 xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults & DISPLAY=:1 xterm +sb -fa "Hermit" -fs 14 & Capture works in exactally the same way. This command tries to maintain 12fps. ffmpeg -f sndio -i snd/1 -y -f x11grab -r 12 -s 800x600 -i :1.0 -vcodec ffv1 -acodec copy ~/out.avi To capture keyboard and mouse input press Ctrl then Shift. This is very handy for using navigating a window manager in the nested X session. Arranging Windows I have sometimes found it helpful to launch applications and arrange them in a specific way. This will open up a web browser listing the current directory and position windows using xdotool DISPLAY=:1 midori "file:///pwd" & sleep 2 DISPLAY=:1 xdotool search --name "xterm" windowmove 0 0 DISPLAY=:1 xdotool search --class "midori" windowmove 400 0 DISPLAY=:1 xdotool search --class "midori" windowsize 400 576 This will position the window precisely so that it appears to be in a tmux window on the right. Audio/Video Sync If you find that the audio is way out of sync with the video, you can ajust the start using the -ss before the audio input to specify the number of seconds to delay. My final recording command line, that delays the audio by 0.5 seconds, writing 12fps ffmpeg -ss 0.5 -f sndio -i snd/1 -y -f x11grab -r 12 -s 800x600 -i :1.0 -vcodec ffv1 -acodec copy ~/out.avi Sharing a Terminal with tmux If you're trying to record a terminal session, tmux is able to share a session. In this way a recording of an X framebuffer can be taken without even using the screen. Start by creating the session. tmux -2 -S /tmp/tmux0 Then on the remote side connect on the same socket tmux -2 -S /tmp/tmux0 attach Taking Screenshots Grabbing a screenshots on Xvfb server is easily accomplished with ImageMagick's import command DISPLAY=:1 import -window root screenshot.png Audio Processing and Video Transcoding The first step is to ensure that the clip begins and ends where you'd like it to. The following will make a copy of the recording starting at time 00:00 and ending at 09:45 ffmpeg -i interactive-sql.avi -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:09:45 interactive-sql-trimmed.avi mv interactive-sql-trimmed.avi interactive-sql.avi Setting the gain correctly is very important with an analog mixer, but if you're using a USB mic there may not be a gain option; simply record using it's built-in settings and then adjust the levels afterwards using a utility such as normalize. First extact the audio as a raw PCM file and then run normalize ffmpeg -i interactive-sql.avi -c:a copy -vn audio.wav normalize audio.wav Next merge the audio back in again ffmpeg -i interactive-sql.avi -i audio.wav -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -c copy interactive-sql-normalized.avi The final step is to compress the screencast for distribution. Encoding to VP8/Vorbis is easy: ffmpeg -i interactive-sql-normalized.avi -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis -q:a 6 interactive-sql.webm H.264/AAC is tricky. For most video players the color space needs to be set to yuv420p. The -movflags puts the index data at the beginning of the file to enable streaming/partial content requests over HTTP: ffmpeg -y -i interactive-sql-normalized.avi -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 14 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart -c:a aac -q:a 6 interactive-sql.mp4 TrueOS @ Ohio Linuxfest '17! (https://www.trueos.org/blog/trueos-ohio-linuxfest-17/) Dru Lavigne and Ken Moore are both giving presentations on Saturday the 30th. Sit in and hear about new developments for the Lumina and FreeNAS projects. Ken is offering Lumina Rising: Challenging Desktop Orthodoxy at 10:15 am in Franklin A. Hear his thoughts about the ideas propelling desktop environment development and how Lumina, especially Lumina 2, is seeking to offer a new model of desktop architecture. Elements discussed include session security, application dependencies, message handling, and operating system integration. Dru is talking about What's New in FreeNAS 11 at 2:00 pm in Franklin D. She'll be providing an overview of some of the new features added in FreeNAS 11.0, including: Alert Services Starting specific services at boot time AD Monitoring to ensure the AD service restarts if disconnected A preview of the new user interface support for S3-compatible storage and the bhyve hypervisor She's also giving a sneak peek of FreeNAS 11.1, which has some neat features: A complete rewrite of the Jails/Plugins system as FreeNAS moves from warden to iocage Writing new plugins with just a few lines of code A brand new asynchronous middleware API Who's going? Attending this year are: Dru Lavigne (dlavigne): Dru leads the technical documentation team at iX, and contributes heavily to open source documentation projects like FreeBSD, FreeNAS, and TrueOS. Ken Moore (beanpole134): Ken is the lead developer of Lumina and a core contributor to TrueOS. He also works on a number of other Qt5 projects for iXsystems. J.T. Pennington (q5sys): Some of you may be familiar with his work on BSDNow, but J.T. also contributes to the TrueOS, Lumina, and SysAdm projects, helping out with development and general bug squashing. *** Beastie Bits Lumina Development Preview: Theme Engine (https://www.trueos.org/blog/lumina-development-preview-theme-engine/) It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/04/retro_thinkpad_spotted_in_the_wild/) LLVM libFuzzer and SafeStack ported to NetBSD (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/llvm_libfuzzer_and_safestack_ported) Remaining 2017 FreeBSD Events (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar/2017-openzfs-developer-summit/) *** Feedback/Questions Andrew - BSD Teaching Material (http://dpaste.com/0YTT0VP) Seth - Switching to Tarsnap after Crashplan becomes no more (http://dpaste.com/1SK92ZX#wrap) Thomas - Native encryption in ZFS (http://dpaste.com/02KD5FX#wrap) Coding Cowboy - Coding Cowboy - Passwords and clipboards (http://dpaste.com/31K0E40#wrap) ***

This episode gives you the full dose of BSDCan 2017 recap as well as a blog post on conference speaking advice. Headlines Pre-conference activities: Goat BoF, FreeBSD Foundation Board Meeting, and FreeBSD Journal Editorial Board Meeting The FreeBSD Foundation has a new President as Justin Gibbs is busy this year with building a house, so George Neville-Neil took up the task to serve as President, with Justin Gibbs as Secretary. Take a look at the updated Board of Directors (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/board-of-directors/). We also have a new staff member (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/staff/): Scott Lamons joined the Foundation team as senior program manager. Scott's work for the Foundation will focus on managing and evangelizing programs for advanced technologies in FreeBSD including preparing project plans, coordinating resources, and facilitating interactions between commercial vendors, the Foundation, and the FreeBSD community. The Foundation also planned various future activities, visits of upcoming conferences, and finding new ways to support and engage the community. The Foundation now has interns in the form of co-op students from the University of Waterloo, Canada. This is described further in the May 2017 Development Projects Update (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/may-2017-development-projects-update/). Both students (Siva and Charlie) were also the conference, helping out at the Foundation table, demonstrating the tinderbox dashboard. Follow the detailed instructions (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/blog/blog-post/building-a-physical-freebsd-build-status-dashboard/) to build one of your own. The Foundation put out a call for Project Proposal Solicitation for 2017 (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-foundation-2017-project-proposal-solicitation/). If you think you have a good proposal for work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure for FreeBSD, we'd be happy to review it. Don't miss the deadlines for travel grants to some of the upcoming conferences. You can find the necessary forms and deadlines at the Travel Grant page (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/travel-grants/travel-grants/) on the Foundation website. Pictures from the Goat BoF can be found on Keltia.net (https://assets.keltia.net/photos/BSDCan-2017/Royal%20Oak/index.html) Overlapping with the GoatBoF, members of the FreeBSD Journal editorial board met in a conference room in the Novotel to plan the upcoming issues. Topics were found, authors identified, and new content was discussed to appeal to even more readers. Check out the FreeBSD Journal website (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/journal/) and subscribe if you like to support the Foundation in that way. FreeBSD Devsummit Day 1 & 2 (https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/201706) The first day of the Devsummit began with introductory slides by Gordon Tetlow, who organized the devsummit very well. Benno Rice of the FreeBSD core team presented the work done on the new Code of Conduct, which will become effective soon. A round of Q&A followed, with positive feedback from the other devsummit attendees supporting the new CoC. After that, Allan Jude joined to talk about the new FreeBSD Community Proposal (FCP) (https://github.com/freebsd/fcp) process. Modelled after IETF RFCs, Joyent RFDs, and Python PEP, it is a new way for the project to reach consensus on the design or implementation of new features or processes. The FCP repo contains FCP#0 that describes the process, and a template for writing a proposal. Then, the entire core team (except John Baldwin, who could not make it this year) and core secretary held a core Q&A session, Answering questions, gathering feedback and suggestions. After the coffee break, we had a presentation about Intel's QAT integration in FreeBSD. When the lunch was over, people spread out into working groups about BearSSL, Transport (TCP/IP), and OpenZFS. OpenZFS working group (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBu_IMsWAAId2sN.jpg:large): Matt Ahrens lead the group, and spent most of the first session providing a status update about what features have been recently committed, are out for review, on the horizon, or in the design phase. Existing Features Compressed ARC Compressed Send/Recv Recently Upstreamed A recent commit improved RAID-Z write speeds by declaring writes to padding blocks to be optional, and to always write them if they can be aggregated with the next write. Mostly impacts large record sizes. ABD (ARC buffer scatter/gather) Upstreaming In Progress Native Encryption Channel Programs Device Removal (Mirrors and Stripes) Redacted Send/recv Native TRIM Support (FreeBSD has its own, but this is better and applies to all ZFS implementations) Faster (mostly sequential) scrub/resilver DRAID (A great deal of time was spent explaining how this works, with diagrams on the chalk board) vdev metadata classes (store metadata on SSDs with data is on HDDs, or similar setups. Could also be modified to do dedup to SSD) Multi-mount protection (“safe import”, for dual-headed storage shelves) zpool checkpoint (rollback an entire pool, including zfs rename and zfs destroy) Further Out Import improvements Import with missing top-level vdevs (some blocks unreadable, but might let you get some data) Improved allocator performance -- vdev spacemap log ZIL performance Persistent L2ARC ZSTD Compression Day 2 Day two started with the Have/Want/Need session for FreeBSD 12.0. A number of features that various people have or are in the process of building, were discussed with an eye towards upstreaming them. Features we want to have in time for 12.0 (early 2019) were also discussed. After the break was the Vendor summit, which continued the discussion of how FreeBSD and its vendors can work together to make a better operating system, and better products based on it After lunch, the group broke up into various working groups: Testing/CI, Containers, Hardening UFS, and GELI Improvements Allan lead the GELI Improvements session. The main thrust of the discussions was fixing an outstanding bug in GELI when using both key slots with passphrases. To solve this, and make GELI more extensible, the metadata format will be extended to allow it to store more than 512 bytes of data (currently 511 bytes are used). The new format will allow arbitrarily large metadata, defined at creation time by selecting the number of user key slots desired. The new extended metadata format will contain mostly the same fields, except the userkey will no longer be a byte array of IV-key, Data-key, HMAC, but a struct that will contain all data about that key This new format will store the number of pkcs5v2 iterations per key, instead of only having a single location to store this number for all keys (the source of the original bug) A new set of flags per key, to control some aspects of the key (does it require a keyfile, etc), as well as possibly the role of the key. An auxdata field related to the flags, this would allow a specific key with a specific flag set, to boot a different partition, rather than decrypt the main partition. A URI to external key material is also stored per key, allowing GELI to uniquely identify the correct data to load to be able to use a specific decryption key And the three original parts of the key are stored in separate fields now. The HMAC also has a type field, allowing for a different HMAC algorithm to be used in the future. The main metadata is also extended to include a field to store the number of user keys, and to provide an overall HMAC of the metadata, so that it can be verified using the master key (provide any of the user keys) Other topics discussed: Ken Merry presented sedutil, a tool for managing Self Encrypting Drives, as may be required by certain governments and other specific use cases. Creating a deniable version of GELI, where the metadata is also encrypted The work to implemented GELI in the UEFI loader was discussed, and a number of developers volunteered to review and test the code Following the end of the Dev Summit, the “Newcomers orientation and mentorship” session was run by Michael W. Lucas, which attempts to pair up first time attendees with oldtimers, to make sure they always know a few people they can ask if they have questions, or if they need help getting introduced to the right people. News Roundup Conference Day 1 (http://www.bsdcan.org/2017/schedule/day_2017-06-09.en.html) The conference opened with some short remarks from Dan Langille, and then the opening keynote by Dr Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. The keynote focused on what some of the currently issues are, and how the technical community needs to get involved at all levels. In Canada especially, contacting your representatives is quite effective, and when it does not happen, they only hear the other side of the story, and often end up spouting talking points from lobbyists as if they were facts. The question period for the keynote ran well overtime because of the number of good questions the discussion raised, including how do we fight back against large telcos with teams of lawyers and piles of money. Then the four tracks of talks started up for the day The day wrapped up with the Work In Progress (WIP) session. Allan Jude presented work on ZSTD compression in ZFS Drew Gallatin presented about work at Netflix on larger mbufs, to avoid the need for chaining and to allow more data to be pushed at once. Results in an 8% CPU time reduction when pushing 90 gbps of TLS encrypted traffic Dan Langille presented about letsencrypt (the acme.sh tool specifically), and bacula Samy Al Bahra presented about Concurrency Kit *** Conference Day 2 (http://www.bsdcan.org/2017/schedule/day_2017-06-10.en.html) Because Dan is a merciful soul, BSDCan starts an hour later on the second day Another great round of talks and BoF sessions over lunch The hallway track was great as always, and I spent most of the afternoon just talking with people Then the final set of talks started, and I was torn between all four of them Then there was the auction, and the closing party *** BSDCan 2017 Auction Swag (https://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2962) Groff Fundraiser Pins: During the conference, You could get a unique Groff pin, by donating more than the last person to either the FreeBSD or OpenBSD foundation Michael W. Lucas and his wife Liz donated some interesting home made and local items to the infamous Charity Auction I donated the last remaining copy of the “Canadian Edition” of “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS”, and a Pentium G4400 (Skylake) CPU (Supports ECC or non-ECC) Peter Hessler donated his pen (Have you read “Git Commit Murder” yet?) Theo De Raadt donated his autographed conference badge David Maxwell donated a large print of the group photo from last years FreeBSD Developers Summit, which was purchased by Allan There was also a FreeBSD Dev Summit T-Shirt (with the Slogan: What is Core doing about it?) autographed by all of the attending members of core, with a forged jhb@ signature. Lastly, someone wrote “I

This week on BSDNow, we're going to be leading off with the latest news about Wayland and Xorg support on FreeBSD, then a look at OpenBSD ARM64 This episode was brought to you by Headlines Wayland is now in the FreeBSD Ports tree (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=432406) This commit brings Wayland, the new windowing system, into the FreeBSD ports tree “This port was first created by Koop Mast (kwm@) then updated and improved by Johannes Lundberg” “Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it.” Wayland is designed for desktop and laptop use, rather than X, which was designed for use over the network, where clients were not powerful enough to run the applications locally. “Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.” “Please report bugs to the FreeBSD bugtracker!” It is good to see this project progressing, as it seems in a few generations, high performance graphics drivers may only be actively developed for Wayland. *** Call For Testing: xorg 1.18.4 and newer intel/ati DDX (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2017-January/018738.html) Baptiste Daroussin, and the FreeBSD X11 team, have issued a call for testing for the upgrade to Xorg 1.18.4 Along with it comes newer ATI/AMD and Intel drivers “Note that you will need to rebuild all the xf86-* packages to work with thatnewer xorg (hence the bump of the revision)” “Do not expect newer gpu supported as this is not the kernel part”, it only provides the newer Xorg driver, not the kernel mode setting driver (this is a separate project) “If you experience any issue with intel or radeon driver please try to use the new modesetting driver provided by xorg directly (note that fedora and debian recommend the use of the new driver instead of the ati/intel one)” *** Error handling in C (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/to-errno-or-to-error) “Unlike other languages which have one preferred means of signalling an error, C is a multi error paradigm language. Error handling styles in C can be organized into one of several distinct styles, such as popular or correct. Some examples of each.” “One very popular option is the classic unix style. -1 is returned to indicate an error.” “Another option seen in the standard C library is NULL for errors.” “The latter has the advantage that NULL is a false value, which makes it easier to write logical conditions. File descriptor 0 is valid (stdin) but false, while -1 is invalid but true.” “And of course, there's the worst of both worlds approach requiring a special sentinel that you'll probably forget to use” “Other unix functions, those that don't need to return a file descriptor, stick to just 0 and -1” “Of course, none of these functions reveal anything about the nature of the error. For that, you need to consult the errno on the side” The article goes on to describe different ways of dealing with the issue, and return values. There is also coverage of more complex examples and involve a context that might contain the error message It is really interesting to see the differences, and the pitfalls of each approach *** Fixing POSIX Filenames (http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html) “Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX pathnames and filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes. A pathname lets you select a particular file, and may include zero or more “/” characters. Each pathname component (separated by “/”) is a filename; filenames cannot contain “/”. Neither filenames nor pathnames can contain the ASCII NUL character (), because that is the terminator.” “This lack of limitations is flexible, but it also creates a legion of unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws). It also makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users.” “This article will try to convince you that adding some tiny limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations — so it'd be better to make these (reasonable) assumptions true in the first place. This article will discuss, in particular, the three biggest problems: control characters in filenames (including newline, tab, and escape), leading dashes in filenames, and the lack of a standard character encoding scheme (instead of using UTF-8). These three problems impact programs written in any language on Unix/Linux/POSIX system. There are other problems, of course. Spaces in filenames can cause problems; it's probably hopeless to ban them outright, but resolving some of the other issues will simplify handling spaces in filenames. For example, when using a Bourne shell, you can use an IFS trick (using IFS=printf 'nt') to eliminate some problems with spaces. Similarly, special metacharacters in filenames cause some problems; I suspect few if any metacharacters could be forbidden on all POSIX systems, but it'd be great if administrators could locally configure systems so that they could prevent or escape such filenames when they want to. I then discuss some other tricks that can help.” “After limiting filenames slightly, creating completely-correct programs is much easier, and some vulnerabilities in existing programs disappear. This article then notes some others' opinions; I knew that some people wouldn't agree with me, but I'm heartened that many do agree that something should be done. Finally, I briefly discuss some methods for solving this long-term; these include forbidding creation of such names (hiding them if they already exist on the underlying filesystem), implementing escaping mechanisms, or changing how tools work so that these are no longer problems (e.g., when globbing/scanning, have the libraries prefix “./” to any filename beginning with “-”). Solving this is not easy, and I suspect that several solutions will be needed. In fact, this paper became long over time because I kept finding new problems that needed explaining (new “worms under the rocks”). If I've convinced you that this needs improving, I'd like your help in figuring out how to best do it!” “Filename problems affect programs written in any programming language. However, they can be especially tricky to deal with when using Bourne shells (including bash and dash). If you just want to write shell programs that can handle filenames correctly, you should see the short companion article Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to do it correctly (http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html).” Imagine that you don't know Unix/Linux/POSIX (I presume you really do), and that you're trying to do some simple tasks. For our purposes we will create simple scripts on the command line (using a Bourne shell) for these tasks, though many of the underlying problems affect any program. For example, let's try to print out the contents of all files in the current directory, putting the contents into a file in the parent directory: cat * > ../collection # WRONG cat ./* > ../collection # CORRECT cat find . -type f > ../collection # WRONG ( set -f ; for file in find . -type f ; do # WRONG cat "$file" done ) > ../collection ( find . -type f | xargs cat ) > ../collection # WRONG, WAY WRONG Just think about trying to remove a file named: -rf / *** News Roundup OpenBSD ARM64 (https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html) A new page has appeared on the OpenBSD website, offering images for ARM64 “The current target platforms are the Pine64 and the Raspberry Pi 3.” “OpenBSD/arm64 bundles various platforms sharing the 64-bit ARM architecture. Due to the fact that there are many System on a Chips (SoC) around, OpenBSD/arm64 differentiates between various SoCs and may have a different level of support between them” The page contains a list of the devices that are supported, and which components have working drivers At the time of recording, the link to download the snapshots did not work yet, but by time this airs a week from now, it should be working. *** The design of Chacha20 (http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/chacha20-design) Seems like every few episodes we end up discussing Ciphers (With their o-so amusing naming) and today is no exception. We have a great writeup on the D & I of the ‘chacha20' cipher written by “Loup Vaillant” First of all, is this story for you? Maybe the summary will help make that call: “Quick summary: Chacha20 is ARX-based hash function, keyed, running in counter mode. It embodies the idea that one can use a hash function to encrypt data.” If your eyes didn't glaze over, then you are cleared to proceed. Chacha20 is built around stream ciphers: While Chacha20 is mainly used for encryption, its core is a pseudo-random number generator. The cipher text is obtained by XOR'ing the plain text with a pseudo-random stream: ciphertext = plaintext XOR chacha_stream(key, nonce) Provided you never use the same nonce with the same key twice, you can treat that stream as a one time pad. This makes it very simple: unlike block ciphers, you don't have to worry about padding, and decryption is the same operation as encryption: plaintext = ciphertext XOR chacha_stream(key, nonce) Now we just have to get that stream. The idea that the streams can mimic the concept of a one-time pad does make chacha20 very attractive, even to a non-crypto guy such as myself. From here the article goes into depth on how the cipher scrambles 512bit blocks using the quarter-round method (A forth of a block or 4 32bit numbers) Some ascii art is used here to help visualize how this done, in the quarter round-phase, then to the complete block as the 4 quarters are run in parallel over the entire 512 bit block. From here the article goes more into depth, looking at the complete chacha block, and the importance of a seemingly unnecessary 32byte constant (Hint: it's really important) If crypto is something you find fascinating, you'll want to make sure you give this one a full read-through. *** CyberChef - Coming to a FreeBSD Ports tree near you (https://twitter.com/DLangille/status/823915729430913025) Dan Langille tweets that he will be creating a port of GCHQ's CyberChef tool “CyberChef is a simple, intuitive web app for carrying out all manner of "cyber" operations within a web browser. These operations include creating hexdumps, simple encoding like XOR or Base64, more complex encryption like AES, DES and Blowfish, data compression and decompression, calculating hashes and checksums, IPv6 and X.509 parsing, and much more.” “The tool is designed to enable both technical and non-technical analysts to manipulate data in complex ways without having to deal with complex tools or algorithms. It was conceived, designed, built and incrementally improved by an analyst in their 10% innovation time over several years. Every effort has been made to structure the code in a readable and extendable format, however it should be noted that the analyst is not a professional developer and the code has not been peer-reviewed for compliance with a formal specification.” Some handy functions, beyond stuff like base64 encoding: Network Enumeration (CIDR to list of IPS) (https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/?recipe=%5B%7B%22op%22%3A%22Parse%20IP%20range%22%2C%22args%22%3A%5Btrue%2Ctrue%2Cfalse%5D%7D%5D&input=MTcyLjIxLjAuMzIvMjcK) Browser User Agent Parser (what browser is that, based on your HTTP logs) XOR Brute Force: enter some XOR'd text, and try every possible key to find plaintext. Optionally give it a regex of known plaintext to find the right key. Calculate the “Shannon Entropy” of the input (how random is this data) It also has a number of built in regular expressions for common things, very useful The project is up on github if you want to play with the code *** Building Electron and VSCode in FreeBSD11 (https://gist.github.com/prash-wghats/89be1ee069d2acf23c289e9c606616e1) A patch and set of instructions for building Electron and VSCode on FreeBSD “Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring. It is also customizable, so users can change the editor's theme, keyboard shortcuts, and preferences. It is free and open-source, although the official download is under a proprietary license.” “Visual Studio Code is based on Electron, a framework which is used to deploy Node.js applications for the desktop running on the Blink layout engine. Although it uses the Electron framework, the software is not a fork of Atom, it is actually based on Visual Studio Online's editor (codename "Monaco")” It would be interesting to see official support for VSCode on FreeBSD Has anyone tried VSCode on the FreeBSD Code base? *** Beastie Bits Soft Label Keys (http://roy.marples.name/blog/blog/soft-label-keys) WPA1 (TKIP) disabled by default (OpenBSD) (https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg84599.html) Cool but obscure unix tools (https://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools) KDE Frameworks and Plasma on FreeBSD (http://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=1521) Initiative to migrate OpenBSD mirrors to HTTPS (https://www.mail-archive.com/source-changes@openbsd.org/msg84904.html) That moment you realize FreeBSD has got some Star Wars fans (http://i.imgur.com/dC7c1y4.png) Pagelink (https://wiki.freebsd.org/PortsSubversionPrimer)

This week on the show, we have a very full news roster to rundown, plus an oldie, but goodie with Igor of the nginx project. That plus all your questions and feedback, iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSDJournal! *** FreeNAS Logo Design Contest (https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-logo-contest/) Rules and Requirements (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/) For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using. Softbox Light Diffuser (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OTG6474?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00&pldnSite=1) Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00198U6U6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00) *** This episode was brought to you by Headlines Clearing the air (http://blog.randi.io/2015/12/31/the-developer-formerly-known-as-freebsdgirl/) A number of you have written in the past few weeks asking why Allan and I didn't talk about one of the biggest stories to make headlines last week. Both of us are quite aware of the details surrounding the incidents between former FreeBSD developers “freebsdgirl” and “xmj”, however the news was still ongoing and we didn't feel it right to discuss until some of the facts had time to shake out and a more clear (and calm) discussion could be had. However, without getting into all the gory details here's some of the key points that we want to highlight for our listeners. We each have our own thoughts on this. Kris: The FreeBSD that I know has been VERY open and inclusive to all who want to contribute. The saying “Shut up and code” is there for a reason. We've seen developers of all types, different race / gender / creed, and the one thing we all have in common is the love for BSD. This particular incident has been linked to FreeBSD, which isn't exactly a fair association, since the project and other members of community were not directly involved. What started out as a disagreement (over something non-BSD related) turned into an ugly slugfest all across social media and (briefly) on a BSD chatroom. In this case after reviewing lots of the facts, I think both sides were WAY out of line, and hope they recognize that. There has been slamming of the core team and foundation in social media, as somehow the delay / silence is an admission of wrong-doing. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are serious people doing a serious job, and much like BSD they would rather take the time to do it right instead of just going off on social media and making things worse. (Plus they all are volunteers who are spread across many different time-zones) Also, if you hear rumors of incidents of harassment, remember that without details all those will ever be is rumors. Obviously those in the project would take any incident like that seriously, but without coming forward and sharing the details it's impossible to take any action or make changes for the better. Allan: The FreeBSD community is the best group of people I have ever worked with, but that doesn't mean that it is immune to the same problems that every other group of people faces. As much as all of us wish it didn't, harassment and other ill-behavior does happen, and must be dealt with The FreeBSD Core team has previously sanctioned committers and revoked commit bits for things that happened entirely offline and outside of the FreeBSD community. Part of being a committer is representing the project in everything that you do, so anything you do that reflects badly upon the project is grounds for your removal There was something written about this in the project documentation somewhere (that I can not find for the live of me), specifically about the prestige that comes with (or used to) an @freebsd.org account, and how new members of the community need to keep that in mind as they work to earn, and keep, a commit bit In this specific situation, I am not sure what core did exactly, we'll have to wait for their report to find out, but I am not sure what more they could have done. “Individual members of core have the power to temporarily suspend commit privileges until core as a whole has the chance to review the issue. Only a 2/3 majority of core has the authority to suspend commit privileges for longer than a week or to remove them permanently. Core's “special powers” only kick in when it acts as a group, not on an individual basis. As individuals, the core team members are all committers first and core second” So, an individual member of core can revoke the commit bit of someone who is reported to have acted in a manner not conducive with the rules, but I don't know how that would have made a difference in this case. The only point from Randi's list of 10 things the project should change that I do not think is possible is #6. As stated in the “Committers' Big List of Rules” that I quoted earlier, the core team can only take action after they have had time for everyone to review and discuss a matter, and then vote on it. The core team is made up of 9 people with other responsibilities and commitments. Further, they are currently spread across 6 different countries, and 6 different times zones (even the countries and time zones do not line up). We eagerly await Cores report on this matter, and more importantly, Core and the Foundation's work to come up with a better framework and response policy to deal with such situations in the future. The important thing is to ensure that incident reports are properly handled, so that those reporting issues feel safe in doing so While we hope there is never another incident of harassment in the FreeBSD community, the realities of the world we live in mean we need to be ready to deal with it *** Dan Langille discussing his rig (https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/3zv64t/the_home_lab_9_servers_about_98tb_working_url/) Pictures of Dan Langille's Home Lab (http://imgur.com/gallery/nuBBD) Ever read FreeBSD Diary? How about used FreshPorts or FreshSource? Gone to BSDCan? If so you may be interested in seeing exactly where those sites are served from. Dan Langille posts to reddit with information about his home lab, with the obligatory pictures to back it up As most good home racks do, this one starts at Home Depot and ends up with a variety of systems and hardware living on it. All in all an impressive rig and nice job wiring (I wonder what that ASUS RT‑N66U is doing, if it's running FreeBSD or just an access point??) Reminder: Get your BSDCan talk proposal submitted before the deadline, January 19th *** Pre-5.9 pledge(2) update (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160107174436) Theo gives us a status update on pledge() for pre OpenBSD 5.9“For the next upcoming release, we will disable the 'paths' argument.Reasoning: We have been very busy making as much of the tree set thepromises right in applications, and building a few new promises aswell. We simply don't have enough time to review the kernel code andmake sure it is bug-free. We'll use the next 6 months developmentcycle to decide on paths, and then re-audit the tree to use theinterface where it is suitable. The base tree (/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/libexec /usr/games)contains 652 ELF binaries. 451 use pledge. 201 do not. Approximately47 do not need or cannot use pledge. Leaving 154 we could potentiallypledge in the future. Most of those are not very important. Thereare a few hot spots, but most of what people use has been handled wellby the team.“ Chromium: now with OpenBSD pledge(2) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160107075227) In addition to the pledge news, we also have a story about the Chromium browser being converted to use pledge on OpenBSD.“The renderer, gpu, plugin and utility processes are now using pledge(2)Unfortunately the GPU process only requires an rpath pledge because ofMesa trying to parse two configuration files, /etc/drirc and ${HOME}/.drircSo currently the GPU process will use an rpath pledge in the nextweek or so so that people can test, but this situation has to beresolved because it is not acceptable that a mostly unused configurationfile is being parsed from a library and that stops us from using lesspledges and thus disallowing the GPU process to have read accessto the filesystem ... like your ssh keys.” UPDATE: the rpath pledge has been removed. *** iXsystems https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/ Interview - Igor Sysoev - igor@sysoev.ru (mailto:igor@sysoev.ru) / @isysoev (https://twitter.com/isysoev) NGINX and FreeBSD News Roundup FreeBSD on EdgeRouter Lite - no serial port required (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2016-01-10-FreeBSD-EdgeRouter-Lite.html) A few years back there was a neat story on how to setup FreeBSD on the EdgeRouter-Lite This last week we get to revisit this, as Colin Percival posts a script, and a very detailed walkthrough of using it to generate your own custom image which does NOT require hooking up a serial cable. Currently the script only works on -CURRENT, but may work later for 10.3 The script is pretty complete, does the buildworld and creation of a USB image for you. It also does a basic firewall configuration and even growfs for expanding to the full-size of your USB media. Using the ‘firstboot' keyword, an rc.d script does all the initial configuration allowing you access to the system If you have one, or are looking at switching to a FreeBSD based router, do yourself a favor and take a look at this article. *** John Marino reaches out to the community for testing of Synth, a new custom package repo builder (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-January/228540.html) A hybrid of poudriere and portmaster/portupgrade Uses your regular ports tree and your running system, but built builds packages faster, the poudriere way Requires no setup, no downloading or building reference versions of the OS, no checking out yet another copy of the ports tree In the future may have support for using binary packages for dependencies, build only the apps you actually want to customize Looks very promising *** OpenBSD malloc finds use-after-free in Android OS (https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/196090/) Score one for OpenBSD's rigorous security and attention to detail. We have an interesting commit / comment from Android It looks like this particular mistake was found in the uncrypt routines, in particular the using of a variable memory which had already gone out of scope. Through the usage of OpenBSD's malloc junk filling feature, the developers were able to identify and correct the issue. Maybe there is a case to be made that this be used more widely, especially during testing? *** Netflix's async sendfile now in FreeBSD-current (http://www.slideshare.net/facepalmtarbz2/new-sendfile-in-english) We have some slides presented by Gleb Smirnoff at last years FreeBSD storage summit, talking about changes to sendfile made by Netflix. It starts off with a bit of history, showing the misery of life without sendfile(2) back in FreeBSD 1.0, specifically the ftpd daemon. Then in 1997 that all changed, HP-UX 11.00 grew the sendfile function, and FreeBSD 3.0 / Linux 2.2 added it in ‘98 The slides then go into other details, on how the first implementations would map the userland cycle into the kernel. Then in 2004 the SF_NODISKIO flag was added, followed by changes in 2006 and 2013 to using sbspace() bytes and sending shared memory descriptor data respectively. The idea is that instead of the web server waiting for the send to complete, it calls sendfile then goes about its other work, then it gets a notification when the work is done, and finishes up any of the request handling, like logging how many bytes were sent The new sendfile implementation took the maximum load of an older netflix box from 25 gigabits/sec to 35 gigabits/sec Separately, Netflix has also done work on implementing a TLS version of sendfile(), to streamline the process of sending encrypted data There is still a todo list, including making sendfile() play nice with ZFS. Currently files sent via sendfile from ZFS are stored in memory twice, once in the ARC, and once in the buffer cache that sendfile uses *** Beastie Bits Unix Timeline of how Unix versions have evolved (http://www.levenez.com/unix/) netmap support now in bhyve in FreeBSD -Current (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293459) McCabe complexity and Dragonfly BSD (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2016/01/12/17478.html) Bourne Basic - a BASIC interpreter implemented (painfully) in pure Bourne shell (https://gist.github.com/cander/2785819) NixOS on FreeBSD (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/10816#issuecomment-169298385) Turning an ordinary OpenBSD system into a router (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html) nvidia releases beta 361.16 driver for FreeBSD (https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/908423/unix-graphics-announcements-and-news/linux-solaris-and-freebsd-driver-361-16-beta-/) Feedback/Questions Bryson - SmartOS / KVM / ZFS (http://slexy.org/view/s2BLZeBrSK) Samba 1969 (http://slexy.org/view/s2OQIxkZst) DO / VPN / PF (http://slexy.org/view/s206j2ekTZ) Unstable VM / Update (http://slexy.org/view/s20kyrKSH9) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)

This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System by Siju George (http://bsdmag.org/siju_george/) We have a new article this week by Siju George posted over at BSDMag, talking about his reasons for using DragonFlyBSD in production. He ran through periods of using both Free/OpenBSD, but different reasons led him away from each. Specifically problems doing port upgrades on FreeBSD, and the time required to do fsck / raid parity checks on OpenBSD. During his research, he had heard about the HAMMER file-system, but didn't know of anybody running it in production. After some mailing list conversions, and pointers from Matthew Dillon, he took the plunge and switched. Now he has fallen in love with the operating system, some of the key strengths he notes at: Rolling-Release model, which can be upgraded every few weeks or whenever he has the time No time-consuming fsck after a unclean shutdown No RAID parity checks while still having redundancy Able to add volumes to HAMMER on the fly He also mentions looking forward to HAMMER2, and its potential for easy clustering support, along with eventual CARP implementation so he can run two systems on the same IP. *** The Devil & BSD - Larry Cafiero (http://fossforce.com/2015/11/devil-bsd-leaving-linux-behind/) A story that has been making the rounds on social media is by Larry Cafiero, on his reasons for deciding to switch from Linux over to the BSD side of things. While most of the reasons are over the conflicts surrounding behavior by Linux leaders towards those in the community, he does mention that he has converted his main workstation over to PC-BSD. According to Larry, “With a couple of hours of adding backup files and tweaking (augmented by a variety of “oh, look” moments which could easily make me the ADHD Foundation Poster Boy), it looks exactly like my personally modified Korora 22 Xfce which graced the machine earlier. “ He also gave a great compliment to the quality of the docs / applications in PC-BSD: “In addition, you have to like a operating system which gives you a book — in this case, the PC-BSD Handbook — which should be the gold standard of documentation. It's enviable, as in, “man, I wish I had written that.” Also programs like AppCafe provide a plethora of FOSS software, so there's no shortage of programs. Side by side, there's nothing on the Linux side of things that is lacking on the BSD side of things.” Regardless the initial reason for the switch, we are glad to have him and any other switchers join us on the BSD side of FOSS. *** New resource for BSD-schoolin' (http://teachbsd.org/) “The initial repository (https://github.com/teachbsd/course) contains all of the material for the practitioner and masters style courses as well as a PDF for the teaching guide. All of the material is licensed under a BSD doc team license, also visible in the repo and on the github site.” “we expect all other work, including the extension of the practitioner course to 5 days, and the adaptation of the graduate course to undergraduates will be in the github repo” “Our goal now is to recruit a small number of universities to partner with us to teach this material. We will keep you posted on our progress.” We are working on getting an interview lined up to talk more about this project If I somehow find the time, I am try to contribute towards a sysadmin course similar to what I used to teach at an Arts&Tech College here in Canada *** A Few thoughts on OpenBSD 5.8 (http://lippard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-few-thoughts-on-openbsd-58.html) A user details their thoughts, reactions, and concerns after upgrading to OpenBSD 5.8 Among the changes: sudo was removed and replaced as doas. The user decided to make the switch, but ran into a bug with line continuation ( to escape newline to continue a long line) The removal of TCP Wrappers support from ssh - this caused a number of rules in hosts.allow to no longer be respected. The FreeBSD port of openssh-portable has a patch to readd TCP wrappers because many people find it useful, including myself, when the ssh is in a jail and cannot run a firewall The removal of the pfrules= rc.conf variable. “I used to just put the default pf.conf rules file in place with each release and upgrade, and keep my changes in a pf.conf.local file that was specified in the pfrules variable. The effect was that from the period after the upgrade until I noticed the change, my systems were using the default rules and thus more exposed than they were supposed to be” This is what is often called a “POLA Violation”, Policy of Least Astonishment. When deciding what the system should do after some change or new feature is introduced, it should be the thing that will be the least “surprising” to the user. Having your firewall rules suddenly not apply, is surprising. “A minor annoying change that was made in 5.8 was putting the file /var/unbound/db/root.key into /etc/changelist, so that the file gets checked daily by the security script. The issue with this is that if you are actually using unbound with DNSSEC, this file changes daily, though only in the comments” It is very helpful to see a list of feedback like this after a release, so that the next release can be better I would be interested in seeing similar feedback for the other BSDs *** Interview - Bryan Cantrill - @bcantrill (https://twitter.com/bcantrill) Linux Interface Rants News Roundup FreeBSD AMI building AMI - Colin's Corner (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-11-21-FreeBSD-AMI-builder-AMI.html) Colin Percival (Of TarSnap Fame) has brought us a new article this week on how to create your own custom EC2 AMI builds. This new tool and instructions allows the creation of AMI files, without needing to go through the hassle of doing a fresh FreeBSD release build each time. Essentially it works similar to Colin's previous “de-penguinator” utility, by running a FreeBSD in a memory instance, allowing the disk to be unmounted and prepped for becoming an AMI. The hope is that this new work allows easier creation of a new variety of “customized” FreeBSD instances, for end users to download and deploy at will. *** Peter Hessler on OpenBSD / OpenBGPd (https://ripe71.ripe.net/archives/video/1200/) Last week a new video landed of Peter Hessler giving us a status update on OpenBSD tech, and OpenBGPd specifically Of interest, he notes that LibreSSL is being used in iOS / OSX, and of course PF is used all over, Apple, BSD, Solaris and even a Windows port! OpenNTPD gets a mention as well, still ZERO CVEs for the lifetime of the project On the OpenBGPd side, it is considered production ready, so no reason to hold back deployment Very “feature-complete”, able to handle Edge Router, Route server, Multi-RIB. Slew of optional features like route reflector, looking glass, mrt dumps, mpls / mpls vpn. Bugs fixed, crashers, memory constraints and performance has been improved Filtering Performance, in example provided, importing 561K rules / 60K prefixes, went from 35 minutes down to 30 seconds. *** Onion Omega Updates (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/wiki/Onion-Omega) I have a newer kernel config that will be committed soon that hooks up the system LED, and the three LEDs on the expansion dock via /dev/led I also have the I2C interface working to talk to the Relay and Servo expansions I have not determined the exact protocol for the Servo expansions, but the relay expansion is fairly simple to operate Instructions have been added to the wiki I have managed to use the GPIO to toggle external LEDs and to read the value from a switch I have also used the Servo PWM controller to dim an LED and control the speed of a PWM computer case fan My plan is to operate a 32x32 multi colour LED matrix from the device for an interactive christmas display *** FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS Book review (http://www.cyberciti.biz/datacenter/book-review-freebsd-mastery-zfs/) Book can be purchased here (http://smile.amazon.com/FreeBSD-Mastery-ZFS-7/dp/0692452354/) or from the list of vendors including directly from the author here (http://www.zfsbook.com/) *** Beastie Bits Computer History Museum is looking for Bell Labs UNIX (http://www.computerhistory.org/artifactdonation/) ACM Queue Portrait: Robert Watson (https://youtu.be/rA_5Cz99z28) Video Collection about BSD History, put together by FreeBSDNews (https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/11/12/bsd-videos/) Minix announces its 2016 conference (http://www.minix3.org/conference/2016/) Chris Henschen from fP Technologies' talk about BSD is now online (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2015/10/bsdtalk258-chris-henschen-from-fp.html) Mike Larkin and Theo de Raadt's talks from Hackfest this year in Quebec are online (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151123161651&mode=expanded) FreeBSD on a BeagleBoneBlack with a Touchscreen Display (http://kernelnomicon.org/?p=534) Dan Langille will be talking at CINLUG (http://www.cinlug.org/meetings/2015/December) Feedback/Questions John - Rpi2 and BSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Gm06eC0Y) Roger - Win10 + FreeBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Kf2FG84H) Anonymous - Sharing Socket (http://slexy.org/view/s21bOG5UhS) Brad - Scrub Repaired (http://slexy.org/view/s20bKjCNXW) Kelly - Automated Provisioning (http://slexy.org/view/s2qb07BC2G) ***

Coming up on this weeks episode, we have BSD news, tidbits and articles out the wazoo to share. Also, be sure to stick around for our interview with Brandon Mercer as he tells us about OpenBSD being used in the healthcare industry. This episode was brought to you by Headlines NetBSD 7.0 Release Announcement (http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-7/NetBSD-7.0.html) DRM/KMS support brings accelerated graphics to x86 systems using modern Intel and Radeon devices (Linux 3.15) Multiprocessor ARM support. Support for many new ARM boards, including the Raspberry Pi 2 and BeagleBone Black Major NPF improvements: BPF with just-in-time (JIT) compilation by default support for dynamic rules support for static (stateless) NAT support for IPv6-to-IPv6 Network Prefix Translation (NPTv6) as per RFC 6296 support for CDB based tables (uses perfect hashing and guarantees lock-free O(1) lookups) Multiprocessor support in the USB subsystem. GPT support in sysinst via the extended partitioning menu. Lua kernel scripting GCC 4.8.4, which brings support for C++11 Experimental support for SSD TRIM in wd(4) and FFS tetris(6): Add colours and a 'down' key, defaulting to 'n'. It moves the block down a line, if it fits. *** CloudFlare develops interesting new netmap feature (https://blog.cloudflare.com/single-rx-queue-kernel-bypass-with-netmap/) Normally, when Netmap is enabled on an interface, the kernel is bypassed and all of the packets go to the Netmap consumers CloudFlare has developed a feature that allows all but one of the RX queues to remain connected to the kernel, and only a single queue be passed to Netmap The change is a simple modification to the nm_open API, allowing the application to open only a specific queue of the NIC, rather than the entire thing The RSS or other hashing must be modified to not direct traffic to this queue Then specific flows are directed to the netmap application for matching traffic For example under Linux: ethtool -X eth3 weight 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 ethtool -K eth3 lro off gro off ethtool -N eth3 flow-type udp4 dst-port 53 action 4 Directs all name server traffic to NIC queue number 4 Currently there is no tool like ethtool to accomplish this same under FreeBSD I wonder if the flows could be identified more specifically using something like ipfw-netmap *** Building your own OpenBSD based Mail server! (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/12/feature_last_post_build_mail_server/?mt=1442858572214) part 2 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/19/feature_last_post_build_mailserver_part_2/) part 3 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/26/feature_last_post_build_mailserver_part_3/) The UK Register gives us a great writeup on getting your own mail server setup specifically on OpenBSD 5.7 In this article they used a MiniPC the Acer Revo One RL85, which is a decently priced little box for a mail server (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/review_acer_revo_one_rl85_/) While a bit lengthy in 3 parts, it does provide a good walkthrough of getting OpenBSD setup, PostFix and DoveCot configured and working. In the final installment it also provides details on spam filtering and antivirus scanning. Getting started with the UEFI bootloader on OpenBSD (http://blog.jasper.la/openbsd-uefi-bootloader-howto/) If you've been listening over the past few weeks, you've heard about OpenBSD.s new UEFI boot-loader. We now have a blog post with detailed instructions on how to get setup with this on your own system. The initial setup is pretty straightforward, and should only take a few minutes at most. In involves the usual fdisk commands to create a FAT EFI partition, and placing the bootx64.efi file in the correct location. As a bonus, we even get instructions on how to enable the frame-buffer driver on systems without native Intel video support (ThinkPad x250 in this example) *** Recipe for building a 10Mpps FreeBSD based router (http://blog.cochard.me/2015/09/receipt-for-building-10mpps-freebsd.html) Olivier, (of FreeNAS and BSD Router Project fame) treats us this week to a neat blog post about building your own high-performance 10Mpps FreeBSD router As he first mentions, the hardware required will need to be beefy, no $200 miniPC here. In his setup he uses a 8 core Intel Xeon E5-2650, along with a Quad port 10 Gigabit Chelsio TS540-CR. He mentions that this doesn't work quite on stock FreeBSD yet, you will need to pull code in from the projects/routing (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/routing/) which fixes an issue with scaling on cores, in this case he is shrinking the NIC queues down to 4 from 8. If you don't feel like doing the compiles yourself, he also includes links to experimental BSDRouter project images which he used to do the benchmarks Bonus! Nice graphic of the benchmarks from enabling IPFW or PF and what that does to the performance. *** Interview - Brandon Mercer - bmercer@openbsd.org (mailto:bmercer@openbsd.org) / @knowmercymod (https://twitter.com/knowmercymod) OpenBSD in Healthcare Sorry about the audio quality degradation. The last 7 or 8 minutes of the interview had to be cut, a problem with the software that captures the audio from skype and adds it to our compositor. My local monitor is analogue and did not experience the issue, so I was unaware of the issue during the recording *** News Roundup Nvidia releases new beta FreeBSD driver along with new kernel module (https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/884727/unix-graphics-announcements-and-news/linux-solaris-and-freebsd-driver-358-09-beta-/) Includes a new kernel module, nvidia-modeset.ko While this module does NOT have any user-settable features, it works with the existing nvidia.ko to provide kernel-mode setting (KMS) used by the integrated DRM within the kernel. The beta adds support for 805A and 960A nvidia cards Also fixes a memory leak and some regressions *** MidnightBSD 0.7-RELEASE (http://www.midnightbsd.org/pipermail/midnightbsd-users/Week-of-Mon-20150914/003462.html) We missed this while away at Euro and elsewhere, but MidnightBSD (A desktop-focused FreeBSD 6.1 Fork) has come out with a new 0.7 release This release primarily focuses on stability, but also includes important security fixes as well. It cherry-picks updates to a variety of FreeBSD base-system updates, and some important ZFS features, such as TRIM and LZ4 compression Their custom .mports. system has also gotten a slew of updates, with almost 2000 packages now available, including a WiP of Gnome3. It also brings support for starting / stopping services automatically at pkg install or removal. They note that this will most likely be the last i386 release, joining the club of other projects that are going 64bit only. *** "Open Source as a Career Path" (http://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/5400) The FreeBSD Project held a panel discussion (http://www.cb.uu.se/~kristina/WomENcourage/2014/2015-09-25_Friday/2015-09-25%20113238.JPG) of why Open Source makes a good career path at the ACM.s womENcourage conference in Uppsala, Sweden, the weekend before EuroBSDCon The Panel was lead by Dru Lavigne, and consisted of Deb Goodkin, Benedict Reuschling, Dan Langille, and myself We attempted to provide a cross section of experiences, including women in the field, the academic side, the community side, and the business side During the question period, Dan gave a great answer (https://gist.github.com/dlangille/e262bccdea08b89b5360) to the question of .Why do open source projects still use old technologies like mailing lists and IRC. The day before, the FreeBSD Foundation also had a booth at the career fair. We were the only open source project that attended. Other exhibitors included: Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Google, and Oracle. The following day, Dan also gave a workshop (http://www.cb.uu.se/~kristina/WomENcourage/2014/2015-09-25_Friday/2015-09-25%20113238.JPG) on how to contribute to an open source project *** Beastie-Bits NetBSD 2015PkgSrc Freeze (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2015/09/12/msg022186.html) Support for 802.11N for RealTek USB in FreeBSD (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commits/master/sys/dev/usb/wlan/if_rsu.c) Wayland ported to DragonFlyBSD (https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DeltaPorts/pull/123) OpenSMTPd developer debriefs on audit report (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151013161745) FreeBSD fixes issue with pf under Xen with TSO. Errata coming soon (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=289316) Xinuos funds the HardenedBSD project (http://slexy.org/view/s2EBjrxQ9M) Feedback/Questions Evan (http://slexy.org/view/s21PMmNFIs) Darin writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20qH07ox0) Jochen writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2d0SFmRlD) ***

A rant on Desktop BSD.Interview with Dan Langille from BSDCan

I would like to also have an OGG RSS feed, but blogger only creates a single feed.Interview with Dan Langille, founder of BSDCan.File info: 5MB, 11Min

News:The first Beta build for the FreeBSD-6.2 Release Cycle is now available.Interview with Dan Langille about backups. Check out http://www.bacula.org/File info: 10MB, 22MinOgg Link:https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk067/bsdtalk067.ogg

Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about his new job with Afilias, and BSDCan 2008.File info: 22Min, 10MB.Ogg Link:https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk144/bsdtalk144.ogg

Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about BSDCan 2009. More information at http://www.bsdcan.org.File Info: 13Min, 6MB.Ogg Link:https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk172/bsdtalk172.ogg

Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about the 2010 BSDCan and PGCon conferences. More information at www.bsdcan.org and www.pgcon.org. We also talk briefly about FreeBSD 8.File Info: 16Min, 8MB.Ogg Link:https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk181/bsdtalk181.ogg

Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about BSDCan and PGCon 2011. More information on these conferences at http://www.bsdcan.org/2011/ and http://www.pgcon.org/2011/File info: 14min, 7MB.Ogg Link:https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk203/bsdtalk203.ogg

This week we continue our two-part series on the activities of various BSD foundations. Ken Westerback joins us today to talk all about the OpenBSD foundation and what it is they do. We've also got answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines BSDCan 2015 schedule (https://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/) The list of presentations for the upcoming BSDCan conference has been posted, and the time schedule should be up shortly as well Just a reminder: it's going to be held on June 12th and 13th at the University of Ottawa in Canada This year's conference will have a massive fifty talks, split up between four tracks instead of three (but unfortunately a person can only be in one place at a time) Both Allan and Kris had at least one presentation accepted, and Allan will also be leading a few "birds of a feather" gatherings In total, there will be three NetBSD talks, five OpenBSD talks, eight BSD-neutral talks, thirty-five FreeBSD talks and no DragonFly talks That's not the ideal balance (https://twitter.com/bsdcan/status/570394627158773760) we'd hope for, but BSDCan says (https://twitter.com/bsdcan/status/570398181864972288) they'll try to improve that next year Those numbers are based on the speaker's background, or any past presentations, for the few whose actual topic wasn't made obvious from the title (so there may be a small margin of error) Michael Lucas (who's on the BSDCan board) wrote up a blog post (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2325) about the proposals and rejections this year If you can't make it this year, don't worry, we'll be sure to announce the recordings when they're made available We also interviewed Dan Langille (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_12_31-daemons_in_the_north) about the conference and what to expect this year, so check that out too *** SSL interception with relayd (http://www.reykfloeter.com/post/41814177050/relayd-ssl-interception) There was a lot of commotion recently about superfish (http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/superfish-need-to-know/), a way that Lenovo was intercepting HTTPS traffic and injecting advertisements If you're running relayd (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man8/relayd.8), you can mimic this evil setup on your own networks (just for testing of course…) Reyk Floeter (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_09_03-its_hammer_time), the guy who wrote relayd, came up a blog post about how to do just that (https://gist.github.com/reyk/4b42858d1eab3825f9bc#file-relayd-superfish-conf) It starts off with some backstory and some of the things relayd is capable of relayd can run as an SSL server to terminate SSL connections and forward them as plain TCP and, conversely, run as an SSL client to terminal plain TCP connections and tunnel them through SSL When you combine these two, you end up with possibilities to filter between SSL connections, effectively creating a MITM scenario The post is very long, with lots of details (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=135887624714548&w=2) and some sample config files - the whole nine yards *** OPNsense 15.1.6.1 released (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=77.0) The OPNsense team has released yet another version in rapid succession, but this one has some big changes It's now based on FreeBSD 10.1, with all the latest security patches and driver updates (as well as some in-house patches) This version also features a new tool for easily upgrading between versions, simply called "opnsense-update" (similar to freebsd-update) It also includes security fixes for BIND (https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01235) and PHP (http://php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.6.6), as well as some other assorted bug fixes The installation images have been laid out in a clean way: standard CD and USB images that default to VGA, as well as USB images that default to a console output (for things like Soekris and PCEngines APU boards that only have serial ports) With the news of m0n0wall shutting down last week, they've also released bare minimum hardware specifications required to run OPNsense on embedded devices Encouraged by last week's mention of PCBSD trying to cut ties with OpenSSL, OPNsense is also now providing experimental images built against LibreSSL (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=78.0) for testing (and have instructions on how to switch over without reinstalling) *** OpenBSD on a Minnowboard Max (http://www.countersiege.com/2015/02/22/minnowboard_max_openbsd.html) What would our show be without at least one story about someone installing BSD on a weird device For once, it's actually not NetBSD… This article is about the minnowboard max (http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard-max/), a very small X86-based motherboard that looks vaguely similar to a Raspberry Pi It's using an Atom CPU instead of ARM, so overall application compatibility should be a bit better (and it even has AES-NI, so crypto performance will be much better than a normal Atom) The author describes his entirely solid-state setup, noting that there's virtually no noise, no concern about hard drives dying and very reasonable power usage You'll find instructions on how to get OpenBSD installed and going throughout the rest of the article Have a look at the spec sheet if you're interested, they make for cool little BSD boxes *** Netmap for 40gbit NICs in FreeBSD (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-February/054717.html) Luigi Rizzo posted an announcement to the -current mailing list, detailing some of the work he's just committed The ixl(4) driver, that's one for the X1710 40-gigabit card, now has netmap support It's currently in 11-CURRENT, but he says it works in 10-STABLE and will be committed there too This should make for some serious packet-pushing power If you have any network hardware like this, he would appreciate testing for the new code *** Interview - Ken Westerback - directors@openbsdfoundation.org (mailto:directors@openbsdfoundation.org) The OpenBSD foundation (http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html)'s activities News Roundup s2k15 hackathon report: dhclient/dhcpd/fdisk (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150221222235) The second trip report from the recent OpenBSD hackathon has been published, from the very same guy we just talked to Ken was also busy, getting a few networking-related things fixed and improved in the base system He wrote a few new small additions for dhclient and beefed up the privsep security, as well as some fixes for tcpdump and dhcpd The fdisk tool also got worked on a bit, enabling OpenBSD to properly wipe GPT tables on a previously-formatted disk so you can do a normal install on it There's apparently plans for "dhclientng" - presumably a big improvement (rewrite?) of dhclient *** FreeBSD beginner video series (https://www.youtube.com/user/bsdtutorial/videos) A new series of videos has started on YouTube, aimed at helping total beginners learn about FreeBSD We usually assume that people who watch the show are already familiar with basic concepts, but they'd be a great introduction to any of your friends that are looking to get started with BSD and need a helping hand So far, he's covered how to get FreeBSD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D26rOHkI-iE), an introduction to installing in VirtualBox (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCyYW19bPDU), a simple installation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCE89kObutA) or a more in-depth manual installation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwqCjz9Fgao), navigating the filesystem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YJhdOGjN50), basic ssh use (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl5Bg2qz21I), managing users and groups (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioB73i7QUjI) and finally some basic editing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxxbO-gt9FA) with vi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16FNtCj-uS4) and a few other topics Everyone's gotta start somewhere and, with a little bit of initial direction, today's newbies could be tomorrow's developers It should be an ongoing series with more topics to come *** NetBSD tests: zero unexpected failures (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/regular_test_runs_down_to) The NetBSD guys have a new blog post up about their testing suite (http://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/atf/) for all the CPU architectures They've finally gotten the number of "expected" failures down to zero on a few select architectures Results are published (http://releng.netbsd.org/test-results.html) on a special release engineering page, so you can have a look if you're interested The rest of the post links to the "top performers" (ones with less than ten failure) in the -current branch *** PCBSD switches to IPFW (https://github.com/pcbsd/pcbsd/commit/b80f78d8a5d002396c28ac0e5fd6f69699beaace) The PCBSD crew continues their recent series of switching between major competing features This time, they've switched the default firewall away from PF to FreeBSD's native IPFW firewall Look forward to Kris wearing a "keep calm and use IPFW" shir- wait *** Feedback/Questions Sean writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s21U6Ln6wC) Dan writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2Kp0xdfIb) Florian writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s216DcA8DP) Sean writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s271iJjqtQ) Chris writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s21zerHI9P) *** Mailing List Gold VCS flamebait (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=142454205416445&w=2) Hidden agenda (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-gnome/2015-February/031561.html) ***

It's our last episode of 2014, and we'll be chatting with Dan Langille about the upcoming BSDCan conference. We'll find out what's planned and what sorts of presentations they're looking for. As usual, answers to viewer-submitted questions and all the week's news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines More conference presentation videos (http://2014.asiabsdcon.org/timetable.html.en) Some more of the presentation videos from AsiaBSDCon are appearing online Masanobu Saitoh, Developing CPE Routers Based on NetBSD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApruZrU5fVs) Reyk Floeter (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_09_03-its_hammer_time), VXLAN and Cloud-based Networking with OpenBSD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufeEP_hzFN0) Jos Jansen, Adapting OS X to the enterprise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOPfRQgTjNo) Pierre Pronchery (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_04_01-edgy_bsd_users) & Guillaume Lasmayous, Carve your NetBSD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh-TjLUj6os) Colin Percival (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_01_22-tendresse_for_ten), Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY3m5Kv7Y8) (not from AsiaBSDCon) The "bsdconferences" YouTube channel has quite a lot of interesting older BSD talks (https://www.youtube.com/user/bsdconferences/videos?sort=da&view=0&flow=grid) too - you may want to go back and watch them if you haven't already *** OpenBSD PIE enhancements (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=141922027318727&w=2) ASLR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization) and PIE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position-independent_executable) are great security features that OpenBSD has had enabled by default for a long time, in both the base system and ports, but they have one inherent problem They only work with dynamic libraries and binaries, so if you have any static binaries, they don't get the same treatment For example, the default shells (and many other things in /bin and /sbin) are statically linked In the case of the static ones, you can always predict the memory layout, which is very bad and sort of defeats the whole purpose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented_programming) With this and a few related commits (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=141927571832106&w=2), OpenBSD fixes this by introducing static self-relocation More and more CPU architectures are being tested and getting support too; this isn't just for amd64 and i386 - VAX users can rest easy It'll be available in 5.7 in May, or you can use a -current snapshot (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#BldBinary) if you want to get a slice of the action now *** FreeBSD foundation semi-annual newsletter (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2014dec-newsletter.html) The FreeBSD foundation publishes a huge newsletter twice a year, detailing their funded projects and some community activities As always, it starts with a letter from the president of the foundation - this time it's about encouraging students and new developers to get involved The article also has a fundraising update with a list of sponsored projects, and they note that the donations meter has changed from dollars to number of donors (since they exceeded the goal already) You can read summaries of all the BSD conferences of 2014 and see a list of upcoming ones next year too There are also sections about the FreeBSD Journal (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_01_29-journaled_news_updates)'s progress, a new staff member and a testimonial from NetApp It's a very long report, so dedicate some time to read all the way through it This year was pretty great for BSD: both the FreeBSD and OpenBSD foundations exceeded their goals and the NetBSD foundation came really close too As we go into 2015, consider donating to whichever (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate) BSD (http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html) you (https://www.netbsd.org/donations/) use (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/donations/), it really can make a difference *** Modernizing OpenSSH fingerprints (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=141920089614758&w=4) When you connect to a server for the first time, you'll get what's called a fingerprint of the host's public key - this is used to verify that you're actually talking to the same server you intended to Up until now, the key fingerprints have been an MD5 hash, displayed as hex This can be problematic (https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2014-November/033117.html), especially for larger key types like RSA that give lots of wiggle room for collisions, as an attacker could generate a fake host key that gives the same MD5 string as the one you wanted to connect to This new change replaces the default MD5 and hex with a base64-encoded SHA256 fingerprint You can add a "FingerprintHash" line in your ssh_config to force using only the new type There's also a new option (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=141923470520906&w=2) to require users to authenticate with more than one public key, so you can really lock down login access to your servers - also useful if you're not 100% confident in any single key type The new options should be in the upcoming 6.8 release *** Interview - Dan Langille - info@bsdcan.org (mailto:info@bsdcan.org) / @bsdcan (https://twitter.com/bsdcan) Plans for the BSDCan 2015 conference News Roundup Introducing ntimed, a new NTP daemon (https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed) As we've mentioned before in our tutorials (http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/ntpd), there are two main daemons for the Network Time Protocol - ISC's NTPd and OpenBSD's OpenNTPD With all the recent security problems with ISC's NTPd, Poul-Henning Kamp (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2013_10_16-go_directly_to_jail) has been working on a third NTP daemon It's called "ntimed" and you can try out a preview version of it right now - it's in FreeBSD ports (https://www.freshports.org/net/ntimed/) or on Github PHK also has a few blog entries (http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/) about the project, including status updates *** OpenBSD-maintained projects list (http://mdocml.bsd.lv/openbsd_projects.html) There was recently a read on the misc mailing list (https://www.marc.info/?t=141961588200003&r=1&w=2) asking about different projects started by OpenBSD developers The initial list had marks for which software had portable versions to other operating systems (OpenSSH being the most popular example) A developer compiled a new list from all of the replies to that thread into a nice organized webpage Most people are only familiar with things like OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, OpenNTPD and more recently LibreSSL, but there are quite a lot more This page also serves as a good history lesson for BSD in general: FreeBSD and others have ported some things over, while a couple OpenBSD tools were born from forks of FreeBSD tools (mergemaster, pkg tools, portscout) *** Monitoring network traffic with FreeBSD (https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-monitor-network-traffic-with-netflow-nfdump-nfsen-on-freebsd.49724/) If you've ever been curious about monitoring network traffic on your FreeBSD boxes, this forum post may be exactly the thing for you It'll show you how to combine the Netflow, NfDump and NfSen suite of tools to get some pretty detailed network stats (and of course put them into a fancy webpage) This is especially useful for finding out what was going on at a certain point in time, for example if you had a traffic spike *** Trapping spammers with spamd (http://www.protoc.org/blog/2014/12/22/trapping-spammers-with-the-openbsd-spam-deferral-daemon) This is a blog post about OpenBSD's spamd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamd) - a spam email deferral daemon - and how to use it for your mail It gives some background on the greylisting approach to spam, rather than just a typical host blacklist "Greylisting is a method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the sender re-attempts mail delivery at a later time, the sender may be allowed to continue the mail delivery conversation." The post also shows how to combine it with PF and other tools for a pretty fancy mail setup You can find spamd in the OpenBSD base system (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man8/spamd.8), or use it with FreeBSD (https://www.freshports.org/mail/spamd) or NetBSD (http://pkgsrc.se/mail/spamd) via ports and pkgsrc You might also want to go back and listen to BSDTalk episode 68 (https://archive.org/details/bsdtalk068), where Will talks to Bob Beck about spamd *** Feedback/Questions Sean writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20rUK9XVJ) Brandon writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20nfzIuT2) Anders writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20wCBhFLO) David writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20xGrBIyl) Kyle writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2QHRaiZJW) *** Mailing List Gold NTP code comparison (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=141903858708123&w=2) - 192870 vs. 2898 (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=141905854411370&w=2) NICs have feelings too (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2014-December/046741.html) Just think about it (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=141998130824977&w=2) ***