Podcasts about FreeBSD

Switches in your ceiling, AI affecting interest in things, Commodore Phone and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines How you wind up with switches above your office's false ceiling On AI News Roundup Attempting to reproduce the missing etcmerge from 15.0 to 15.1 upgrade Commodore is releasing a flip phone running Sailfish OS! Why a Flip Phone? $399 - $640 preorder BSD Make extravaganza HardenedBSD June / July 2026 Status Report MidnightBSD 4.0.7 RELEASE 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. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Home Assistant Setup, OpenBSD Updates, Wine 11.14, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines My Home Assistant Setup Huge!!! OpenBSD Updates WPA3 support coming to OpenBSD Game of Trees 0.127 Released OpenBSD relayd(8) adds ECDSA support with CA engine code from smtpd(8) httpd(8) gains support for custom HTTP headers LLVM toolchain coming to OpenBSD/sparc64 Call for testing: OpenBSD vmm(4)/vmd(8) fd-ification News Roundup Wine 11.14 Brings New WoW64 Mode to FreeBSD I Built a FreeBSD Cloud to Use with FreeBSD How Unix Spell Ran in 64kB RAM 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. Feedback/Questions Tyler - IPv6 Question Reese - WebZFS Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

The Future of the FreeBSD Kernel LLDB Plugin, Stop Ruining "10 PRINT", BoxyBSD Returns to FreeBSD, The Apple Lisa inside an FPGA, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Future of the FreeBSD Kernel LLDB Plugin Please, Just Stop Ruining "10 PRINT". Seriously. News Roundup BoxyBSD Returns to FreeBSD Google Summer of Code 2026 Reports: Testing Compat Linux: Syscall testing The Apple Lisa inside an FPGA! The Virtual OS Museum 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. Feedback/Questions Marcus - Linuxulator vs Bhyve - Reese - Feedback on episode 673 Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

FreeBSD 16 goes GPL Free, The computer at the bottom of the lake, FreeBSD's new Board member, Phaethon, a new 68010 based Unix machine and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines The Computer at the bottom of a canal FreeBSD 16 goes GPL Free News Roundup FreeBSD Foundation Welcomes New Board Member: Dave Cottlehuber Phaethon 1 - a 68010-based Unix machine Add a new m68k port oriented towards home-brew m68k machines Bringing Swift to the Apple II Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD 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. Feedback/Questions Producer note : Ive been insanely busy this past week and I've fallen behind on a few things, including checking the show email. If you sent an email in and we havent covered it yet, we'll get caught back up soon. If yuo haven't sent in an email... shame on you. You should email us and ask us something. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

HB-5511, which will require Age data collection on all Operating Systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and others), was signed by Governor Pritzker.More from The Lunduke Journal:https://lunduke.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lunduke.substack.com/subscribe

PHP Alive and Kicking – August 4, 2026 Hosts: Chris Miller (standing in solo while Mike is on holiday) Mike escaped to a beach so Chris hosts alone with special guest Derick Rethans. Expect date-time philosophy, PHP 8.6 goodies, Xdebug secrets, deprecation drama, and a heated debate about how to queue at a pub. From University Websites to Committing to PHP Derick traces his PHP origins back to his university days, building websites that needed database connectivity. ASP.NET was an option, but nobody wanted to pay for it — Linux was cool, and PHP was easy to start using. That combination hooked him early. His very first accepted contribution came from a practical need: everyone wanted centered Shockwave Flash films on their pages, back before CSS even existed. Centering meant knowing the width of a file, and while getimagesize() already existed (and still works today), it didn’t understand Flash. Derick added that support. From there he fell into bug triage, spending several years working through the issue tracker alongside Jani Taskinen (whose “Sniper” name still shows up in commit logs). For a long time it was just the two of them reproducing and fixing bugs — an important task that gets neglected easily, which is exactly how backlogs of a thousand issues and pull requests build up. The Eternal Problem of Date and Time Chris and Derick dig into why date-time bugs are so hard to triage: date algorithms are genuinely complicated, and it takes real time to figure out whether a report is a user’s mistake or an actual PHP bug. Crashes are easy to reproduce; subtle date arithmetic is not. The core philosophical question is “what does adding a month even mean?” If it’s January 31st and you add a month, PHP historically just bumps the month number, producing February 31st, which overflows to March 2nd or 3rd. But most people who add a month really just want the next month and don’t care about day counts — so “next month” is conceptually distinct from “add a month.” Derick has been brainstorming better interfaces so people can’t make these mistakes, though it’s a lot of work. They touch on Carbon as a unified interface people understand, but agree that making Carbon the language standard isn’t the right move. At the language level you need something that works for everybody and ideally doesn’t break existing code. What’s Coming in PHP 8.6 The first new time class is landing: a Duration object representing seconds and nanoseconds within a specific range, living in the Time namespace. It’s a trial run for new APIs and immediately useful — for example, passing a duration to sleep or to timeouts in the new polling API, rather than juggling raw integers. Another highlight is partial function application. With the pipe operator from 8.5, piping into anything that takes more than one argument meant wrapping it in a closure (and extra parentheses because of how the parser works). Partials let you pre-fill some arguments so the resulting callable accepts just one — perfect for pipelines. There’s also TLS session resumption support for streams, which lets OpenSSL shortcut the expensive session setup on repeated TLS connections. Bigger stream-layer work by Jakub Zelenka of the PHP Foundation is underway too, but that’s a huge job on old code and won’t make 8.6 — Chris and Derick both note the pain of keeping a year-and-a-half-long project in sync with the master branch. Xdebug in 8.6 and the Xdebug Cloud Xdebug’s recent headline feature (shipped with 8.5) is native path mapping, which lets you configure remote-to-local path mappings inside Xdebug itself instead of your IDE — handy when your code runs in Docker or on a dev machine. Feedback since release is driving quality-of-life improvements. For 8.6, relatively little is broken, though a change to how PHP reports line numbers needs untangling so debugging stops on the correct lines. Derick also has a new code-coverage implementation that gives better, more correct results at roughly a 10% speed cost. He’d rather ship correct output than fast output — and points out that PHPCov may be quicker but skips path and branch coverage entirely. The pair discuss how branch coverage doubles your test count at every branching point, and how Xdebug has a hard limit (around 64K) to avoid running out of memory on pathological code. Finally, Chris asks about Xdebug Cloud — a paid service that enables debugging where networking otherwise wouldn’t, such as remote teams sharing a single development machine (an SSH tunnel only lets one person listen on the debug port). It’s £15/month or £150/year for an individual, priced similarly to Packagist’s private packages, and helps fund Derick’s ongoing Xdebug work. He plans to do more marketing about it this year. Deprecations, Consensus, and Two-Thirds Votes Every year PHP collects a big list of deprecations — around 20 to 25 this cycle — voted on separately. Derick is more reluctant than most to approve them, arguing many offer no clear user benefit. His examples: deprecating metaphone() (whose suggested Composer replacement ironically relies on the internal function) and the dechunk filter (which can’t really be removed because HTTP streams use it internally). The list() deprecation is another sore point — Chris uses it, and the vote is tied 21–21 with one abstention, so it won’t pass under the two-thirds rule. Derick reminds everyone that “yes” needs to be twice “no.” Returning from a finally block is another candidate that makes little sense to use but hurts nothing to keep. Chris and Derick reflect on how voting was originally meant to confirm consensus reached on the mailing list, not to be the decision itself. A 50%+1 result isn’t consensus; two-thirds is the compromise, even if true 75–80% agreement would be ideal. Joe notes many deprecations are groundwork to reserve keywords for future RFCs — which raises the perennial question of how you measure real-world usage across Composer’s dependency chains. Infrastructure, the Website, and the Next Generation The PHP infrastructure has been converted to an Ansible-based repository over the last year and a half (largely by Derick, with help from Joe), replacing a wild mix of individually maintained servers — one was still running FreeBSD 4.3. They’ve also migrated to a new CDN, which brought surprises: a default one-month cache, ignoring the query string in cache keys, and even dark/light mode being an organization-wide setting rather than per-user. On the website side, everything currently lives in a single root directory of 1999-vintage code, and there’s a long-pending patch to restructure it. The PHP Foundation’s ambassadors program — with speaking, marketing, and research streams — aims to make the very techy php.net homepage speak to CTOs and newcomers about who uses PHP and why it’s a thriving project (only 31-ish years old, versus C’s 60). The conversation closes on caretakers and the next generation of contributors. Triage, they stress, doesn’t require deep internals knowledge — just reading reports to see if they still make sense is hugely valuable. Security and infrastructure access necessarily stay gatekept for trust reasons, and both agree a bus factor of one (or even two) isn’t good enough. Chris admits he’s struggling to name people who are both nice and know infra. Links from the show: Join us live in Discord — discord.phparch.com Watch live on YouTube — youtube.com/phparch PHP Tek Conference 2027 — Call for Papers now open PHP Arch Swag Store — store.phparch.com Xdebug — and Xdebug Cloud for shared debugging Magazine discount code ALIVE3 — three free months on an annual digital subscription Host: Chris Miller X: @ccmiller2018 Mastodon: @miller@phpc.social Bluesky: @ccmiller2018.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @miller Mike Page Mastodon: @MikePageDev@phpc.social PHPArch.me: @mikepagedev Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. PHP Architect Consulting Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on. https://www.phparch.com/consulting/ Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post PHP Alive and Kicking 2026.08.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Scrub Design, WebZFS Updates, The Foundations role in the FreeBSD Ecosystem, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines If Scrubs Hurt, Your ZFS Design Is Broken WebZFS Updates Beta Announcement Why wont my pool export zfs iostat - Pictures so you can get a better idea of how it works News Roundup Understanding the Foundation Board's Role in the FreeBSD Ecosystem Monitor your devices with LibreNMS on FreeBSD Diskless Workstations Two Models 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. Feedback/Questions Davi - BSDCan 2026 Follow up Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Google wants you to use a selfie video for account recovery, LG will stop apps turning their smart TVs into residential proxy nodes, we disagree about how serious OpenAI’s agent hacking Hugging Face is, FreeBSD removes the last bits of GPL software and suffers an embarrassing git flub , and backing up to an encrypted NAS without ZFS. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes News/discussion Introducing selfie for sign-in: a new, easy way to access your Google Account LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps OpenAI says its AI agent broke out of testing sandbox to hack Hugging Face FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System Ports Repository Freeze Free consulting We were asked about backing up to an encrypted NAS without ZFS. See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Google wants you to use a selfie video for account recovery, LG will stop apps turning their smart TVs into residential proxy nodes, we disagree about how serious OpenAI’s agent hacking Hugging Face is, FreeBSD removes the last bits of GPL software and suffers an embarrassing git flub , and backing up to an encrypted NAS without ZFS. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes News/discussion Introducing selfie for sign-in: a new, easy way to access your Google Account LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps OpenAI says its AI agent broke out of testing sandbox to hack Hugging Face FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System Ports Repository Freeze Free consulting We were asked about backing up to an encrypted NAS without ZFS. See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Leaving Port 22 open to the internet, FreeBSD Foundationals, GhostBSD Finance Report, Making your own read-only device with NetBSD, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. Here's Who Showed Up. FreeBSD Foundationals: The Boot Process - From the Loader to Boot Environments News Roundup FreeBSD 15 on a Laptop GhostBSD - March 2026 Finance Report Make your own Read-Only Device with NetBSD NFS-problems I didn't expect at all 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Official native Linux Jagex Launcher for Old School RuneScape, revenue estimates for Valve's Steam Machine, a static recompilation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and FreeBSD 16 removing all GPL code from its base system.Video version of the show is available to Patrons, along with the Extended Chaos podcast featuring over an extra hour of LWDW content every week.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discord⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TIMESTAMPS00:00 Welcome to the Show & Weekly Catchup01:11 Testing NVENC, OBS, and NVIDIA Jetson Hardware04:35 Weekend Outing at the Park & Outdoor Fun06:12 Old School RuneScape Launches Official Linux Bet14:51 Steam Machine sales data 22:05 Castlevania Syphyony of the Night on Linux30:48 BSD is GPL freeTOPICSOld school penguins https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/jagex-launcher-for-linux-beta-out-now?oldschool=1Steam Machine Sales Uphttps://www.techspot.com/news/113169-valve-steam-machine-may-selling-between-12000-15000.htmlSymphony of the Night recomphttps://github.com/birabittoh/NocturneRecompFreeBSD - GPLhttps://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-16-Goes-GPL-Free

video: https://youtu.be/CVkZvrh7qpw Ubuntu is shipping a kernel that can make certain AMD workloads up to 42 times slower. Linus Torvalds is drawing clearer boundaries around AI-generated code in the kernel. Secure Boot just passed a major certificate expiration deadline. COSMIC Desktop 1.3 brings a polished new Frosted Glass design. And one developer decided to add another place and that's a Sega Genesis from 1994. All of this and more on This Week in Linux. Now let's jump right into Your Source for Linux GNews! Download as MP3 Support the Show Become a Patron = tuxdigital.com/membership Store = tuxdigital.com/store Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:44 Ubuntu publishes Update that introduces regression for AMD users 03:52 Linus Torvalds talks on AI Code in Linux 07:12 Secure Boot Linux Certificates Expired? 09:27 COSMIC 1.3 with Frosted Glass 11:33 AppManager for AppImages 14:51 FreeBSD Removes All GPL Code 17:16 Rapid Fire Lightning Round 17:40 stillOS 10.2 Released 18:32 Blender 5.2 LTS Released 19:00 Clonezilla Live 3.3.3 Released 19:31 Linux on Sega Genesis and 32X Addon 20:26 Outro Links: Ubuntu publishes Update that introduces regression for AMD users https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/amdgpu-performance-regression-in-kernel-7-0-0-28-28/85237 Linus Torvalds talks on AI Code in Linux https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG_80KzsZ1syL9anBtmEh5Z40vg@mail.gmail.com/ https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Is-Not-Anti-AI https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-puts-foot-down-on-anti-ai-comments/ https://itsfoss.com/news/linus-torvalds-on-ai/ Secure Boot Linux Certificates Expired? https://lwn.net/Articles/1079808/ https://almalinux.org/blog/2026-07-14-secure-boot-2023-certificates/ https://linuxiac.com/debian-13-6-released-with-120-security-fixes-and-124-stability-updates/ COSMIC 1.3 with Frosted Glass https://9to5linux.com/cosmic-1-3-desktop-environment-released-with-frosted-glass-effect https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Epoch-1.3 AppManager for AppImages https://github.com/kem-a/AppManager https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/07/appmanager-appimage-installer-linux https://github.com/VHSgunzo/uruntime FreeBSD Removes All GPL Code https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-16-Goes-GPL-Free https://fossforce.com/2026/07/freebsd-16-cleans-house-no-gpl-left-in-the-base-system/ https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Intern-AMD-ROCm https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Laptops-June-2026 https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Desktop-Install-NVIDIA stillOS 10.2 Released https://stillhq.io/stillos-gets-gnome-49-a-better-first-boot-and-major-swai-improvements/ Blender 5.2 LTS Released https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ Clonezilla Live 3.3.3 Released https://clonezilla.org/downloads/stable/release-notes.php Linux on Sega Genesis and 32X Addon https://cakehonolulu.github.io/linux-on-32x/ https://github.com/LinuxMD/linuxmd https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/developer-successfully-ports-linux-to-1994-sega-32x-genesis-and-megadrive-expansion-runs-open-source-os-on-paltry-23mhz-processors-and-256kb-of-ram Support the show https://tuxdigital.com/membership https://store.tuxdigital.com/

Unix Pipes under Load, Powering up a IBM Calculator from 1948, FreeBSD AI assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Unix Pipes Under Load: Streaming, Barriers, Backpressure, and Bottlenecks Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948 News Roundup FreeBSD AI-assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project launch Sometimes it actually is the network: a war story FreeBSD Tribal Knowledge: Boot Enviroment Management Beastie Bits OpenSSH 10.4/10.4p1 released! OpenBSD/amd64 kernel virtual address space is now 512GB OpenBSD's pledge(2) and unveil(2) are developer-friendly, study finds 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech, ZFS vs Cep, Detecting and removing dangerous secrets on dev workstations before Shai-Hulud does and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech ZFS vs Ceph: Do You Actually Need Ceph? News Roundup Detecting and removing dangerous secrets on dev workstations before Shai-Hulud does FreeBSD sh for MacOS syslogd(8) privileged and non-privileged parts now separate binaries Getting Victoria Logs running on FreeBSD 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. 01 Introduction In this episode I will describe how to calculate elapsed time in bash or other shell scripts. While this may sound like a very simple and basic thing to do, there is a slightly more complex aspect to it if you wish to calculate elapsed time to a higher resolution than one second. 02 There are many reasons for calculating elapsed time in a shell script. For example you may wish to simply report how long an operation took to run. Another reason may be that you are trying to speed up a script and need to calculate benchmark data to see how different alternative methods perform. 03 What may seem like a simple task gets a bit more complicated if you want to do it for multiple different operating systems even if they are all unix related, as we shall see. -------------------- 04 Operating Systems Tested For the purposes of this episode, I ran tests on the current version of the following operating systems. Alma Alpine Debian FreeBSD OpenBSD RaspberryPi OpenSuse Ubuntu 2604 Alma is a close copy of Red Hat that we can take as representing Red Hat style distros. -------------------- 05 Simple Low Resolution Timing I will start with the simple and obvious method before describing the less obvious ones. This uses the date command to get the current time in seconds since the unix epoch. This is simply date '+%s' 06 Save this to a variable using whatever method you prefer. For example. starttime=$(date '+%s') 07 Next, do whatever operations it is you wish to time. Use the date command to get the current time again. endtime=$(date '+%s') 08 Now simply subtract the start time from the end time using shell arithmetic. This should be very obvious and basic. -------------------- 09 Higher Resolution Timing However, suppose we wish to measure time to greater than one second of precision. We need to do two things. The first is to obtain the current time at a higher degree of precision. The second is to conduct the calculations to a higher degree of precision. 10 Unfortunately, the standard time precision for POSIX shells seems to be 1 second. Some shells offer a higher precision, but others do not. Furthermore, standard shell arithmatic uses integer, which limits calculations to 1 second of precision. -------------------- 11 Bash High Resolution Shell Variable Fortunately, bash is one that does offer a high precision date. If you are using bash 5.0 or newer, there is a shell variable called EPOCHREALTIME which offers time since the the unix epoch (that is, since the first of January 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC) in seconds to 6 decimals of precision. 12 Example echo $EPOCHREALTIME 1779634800.184926 13 This is related to the similar bash variable known as EPOCHSECONDS which gives the number of seconds since the unix epoch. 14 Example echo $EPOCHSECONDS 1779634800 15 So if you are using bash, measuring time is very simple. -------------------- 16 But is it Really Bash? Is your script however actually using bash? Debian and derivatives actually have two shells. The first, the interactive shell is bash. The second, the non-interactive shell is dash, which stands for "debian almquist shell". 17 If you open a terminal, you get bash. If your script starts with a "bin/bash" shebang line, you get bash. However, if your script starts with a "bin/sh" shebang line, you get dash. Some people find themselves getting caught out by this one when they try something out in a terminal but find that it doesn't work in their script which started with "bin/sh". 18 Many other, but not all, Linux distros use bash for both the interactive and non-interactive shells, so "bin/sh" and "bin/bash" work the same with those ones. So if you intend to use bash, make sure your script calls for bash in the first line. -------------------- 19 The SHELL Variable So how can a script tell what shell it is running under? There is a shell variable called "SHELL" which will tell you the name of the shell. Well, sort of. 20 On Debian and derivatives "SHELL" will say "bash" regardless of whether the actual shell is bash or dash. On some other operating systems "SHELL" will simply say "sh" even if it is something else entirely. So we need to do some additional levels of checking to see what we have. 21 To start with though, here's what each of the test distros reports for SHELL. Alma : bash Alpine : sh Debian : bash FreeBSD : sh OpenBSD : ksh Raspberry-Pi : bash Suse : bash ubuntu2604 : bash -------------------- 22 Bash Versus Dash First, let's try to see which ones are bash and which ones are dash. The first thing we can check is for the shell variable BASH_VERSION. 23 Example echo $BASH_VERSION If the shell is bash, then it will report a version string. If the shell is not bash, then it will return an empty value. 24 Using this test, we can see that Alma and Opensuse are indeed using bash. We however need to check Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Ubuntu when running in an "sh" script. To check this we can use the "which" command to see what "sh" actually is. 25 Example echo $( ls -l $(which sh ) | rev | cut -d" " -f1 | cut -d/ -f1 | rev ) 26 "which sh" shows us the path to "sh" However, that is a link so we need to use "ls -l" to find the actual executable. "rev" reverses the string. 27 "cut" takes the first element separated by spaces. The second "cut" takes the first element separated by the "/" characters. The final "rev" takes that string and reverses it again to get it in the correct order. 28 In the case of Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Ubuntu it tells us that this is "dash". -------------------- 29 Openbsd Openbsd reports its shell as "ksh", which stands for Korn Shell. It is indeed Korn Shell, so we simply leave that one as is. -------------------- 30 Alpine and Freebsd Next we have Alpine Linux and Freebsd, which both report as "sh". In the case Freebsd there doesn't appear to be any further we can go that I am aware of. It's simple "sh". It is a basic POSIX shell which seems to be similar to the original unix shell, the Bourne Shell. Older versions of Freebsd used a different shell known as tsch (the C shell), but I haven't tested that so I will ignore that here. 31 With Alpine Linux however, we can get the actual shell using the same method that we used for Debian Linux. This reports as being "busybox". 32 Busybox is a limited shell intended for use in embedded systems. Alpine was originally an embedded distro, but some people started using it for containers. Alpine is Linux, but it is not GNU/Linux, and there are a number of areas which can trip you up if you are not aware of them. So, be extra careful if you are using it for anything, and test everything. -------------------- 33 Summary of Actual Shells Here is our revised list with the actual shell used when asking for "sh", so far as we can determine. Alma : bash Alpine : busybox Debian : dash FreeBSD : sh OpenBSD : ksh Raspberry-Pi : dash Suse : bash ubuntu2604 : dash 34 There are other shells, but none of them are the default shell for any of the distros on our list, so I haven't tested them. -------------------- 35 Solutions for Measuring Time Now we need to find solutions for bash, dash, ksh, sh, and busybox. -------------------- 36 Bash For bash, we can simply use EPOCHREALTIME, as mentioned above. -------------------- 37 Dash For dash, we can use the date command. This is a very conventional method, and is probably the first answer that anyone would give for this situation. However, while it will work in most cases, it will not work in all cases, so it is not a universal solution. 38 To use date we simply call it with the correct format string. This uses %s to get seconds since the epoch, and %N to get nanoseconds of the current second. If you put a decimal separator between the two it will appear in the output. You can use the correct decimal separator for your locale, but I won't go into that here. Instead I will just assume a period or dot. 39 Example date '+%s.%N' 1779634800.358916385 -------------------- 40 Problems with Date on Alpine and Openbsd Date will work for bash, dash, and sh on Freebsd. However it will not work for ksh on Openbsd, or for busybox on Alpine. 41 With busybox on Alpine, it simply ignores the %N format specifier and prints out the epoch in seconds only followed by the decimal separator. = Example date '+%s.%N' 1779634800. 42 With ksh on Openbsd it prints the epoch in seconds followed by the decimal separator and then the %N as a literal N. date '+%s.%N' 1779634800.N 43 Fortunately we have alternatives for these two cases. -------------------- 44 Openbsd Openbsd has the "ts" or timestamp utility installed by default. ts prints a time stamp in front of every line it receives from standard input. I won't go into details on all aspects of ts here, I'll leave that to someone else. Instead I will focus on how to use it for our specific purposes here. 45 We need to provide a format specifier to ts, which in this case is "%.s" We also need to provide something for standard input, or otherwise ts will simply sit there and wait for input. So what we need to do is to echo nothing through a pipe to ts while also giving ts the proper format specifier. 46 Example echo | ts "%.s" 47 This will output the epoch time in seconds to six decimals of precision. ts is installed in Openbsd and Freebsd by default and can be used in either. It can also be installed in many other distros. -------------------- 48 Busybox on Alpine None of the methods discussed so far will work for busybox on Alpine though. However there is a way, but it's a bit non obvious and somewhat hacky. 49 Busybox includes a command called "adjtimex". This is normally used to adjust the time hardware. However if it is run without arguments, it will report the current settings. 50 These include the current epoch time in seconds , and in another field the time in microseconds. These are reported as key value pairs. So what we need to do is to do the following 51 Run adjtimex Capture the output. Grep for "time.tv_sec" Grep for "time.tv_usec" Use cut to extract the time value in each case. Use tr to get rid of excess spaces in each case. Combine the two in a string with a decimal separator between them. 52 This takes a total of 4 lines of shell script. I will just describe them breifly here, see the show notes for details. 53 First we want to capture the output of adjtimex in a single operation. Run adjtimex and pipe the output through grep to capture lines containing "time.tv_" and save this to a variable. # Extract the current high resolution time from adjtimex. # We want two key value pairs, identified by time.tv_sec and time.tv_usec. tvals=$( adjtimex | grep "time.tv_" ) 54 Next echo the contents of this variable and pipe it through grep, cut, and tr to get first the seconds and then the microseconds while also removing excess spaces. Save these to two separate variables. "time.tv_sec" is the time in seconds since the epoch. "time.tv_usec" is the number of microseconds in the current second. # Get the time since the unix epoch in seconds and micro-seconds. timesec=$( echo "$tvals" | grep "time.tv_sec" | cut -d: -f2 | tr -d " " ) timeusec=$( echo "$tvals" | grep "time.tv_usec" | cut -d: -f2 | tr -d " " ) 55 Adjtimex does not zero pad the microsecond time value to provide leading zeros, so we need to take care of this using printf before we can append it to the seconds value. We didn't need to do this with date where the %N format character does this automatically. In this instance, the printf format string is '%06d' padusec=$( printf '%06d' $timeusec ) Now, combine these into a single number with a decimal separator by using simple string concatenation. # Combine them into a single number. timehires="$timesec"".""$padusec" -------------------- 56 Summary of Methods Let's summarize where we are so far in terms of methods we can use to get the current time as a high resolution number. Alma : use EPOCHREALTIME or date Debian (bash) : use EPOCHREALTIME or date Raspberry-Pi (bash) : use EPOCHREALTIME or date ubuntu2604 (bash) : use EPOCHREALTIME or date Suse : use EPOCHREALTIME or date Debian (dash) : use date Raspberry-Pi (dash) : use date ubuntu2604 (dash) : use date Alpine : use adjtimex and parse the output FreeBSD : use date or ts OpenBSD : use ts -------------------- 57 Other alternatives There are a few alternatives that we haven't discussed yet. 58 Bash with Dash In the case of Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Ubuntu running dash, since bash is available it is possible to write a separate bash script which simply echos EPOCHREALTIME and then call it from the dash script and capture the output. While this would work, there's probably not a lot of point to it. If you can rely on bash being there, then just change the first line of the script and make it a bash script. 59 Adding Packages to Alpine The ts or timestamp utility is a common unix utility that can be installed if it is not present by default. This does produce high resolution timestamps on Alpine. On Alpine Linux this comes as part of the "moreutils" package. To add the package, use the following sudo apk add moreutils echo | ts "%.s" 1779634800.959948 60 You can also add the GNU coreutils, which will provide a high resolution date command which works like in the other examples. To add the package use the following sudo apk add coreutils date '+%s.%N' 1779634800.212897332 61 If you can install more packages into your Alpine system, either of the above two is probably going to be preferable to parsing the output of adjtimex. 62 Custom Timestamp Programs You can also write a very short program in python, perl, tcl, or some other language and have it output the current epoch time. I won't discuss that here though. -------------------- 63 Calculating Time Differences Shell arithmetic is integer only. If we wish to use high resolution timing data, we need to do something so we don't lose the precision we have worked so hard to get. There are several possible solutions. 64 Change the Time Base One method is to change the time base from seconds to milli, micro, or nanoseconds. This can be done by simply multiplying the time values by the appropriate amount (e.g. 1000, 1,000,000, etc.) before subtracting them. This allows for integer arithmetic on high resolution values without losing precision. 65 Use the Shell bc Arbitrary Precision Calculator The bc command line calculator will perform calculations using real numbers and is easy to use in scripts. It is present by default in most distros. echo "scale=9; $endtime - $starttime" | bc where endtime and starttime are variables containing time values. 66 However, for some inexplicable reason, neither Debian nor Opensuse install it by default. It is present in Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi which are Debian derivatives, and it can be added to distros which lack it. 67 Use awk awk can also perform calculations using real numbers and it is present in nearly all distros including in all of the ones we tested here. echo "$endtime $starttime" | awk '{printf "%.6fn", $1 - $2}' -------------------- 68 Benchmarks And of course no comparative evaluation would be complete without benchmarks where we see how each method compares to another in terms of speed. In the benchmark test I ran each method in a loop through multiple iterations, measured the elapsed time, subtracted out the time for an empty loop, and then compared it to alternate methods. For anything other than EPOCHREALTIME, the empty loop time is negligible and has no real effect on the results. 69 Rather interestingly I came across a bug which caused date to run very slowly if called immediately after using EPOCHREALTIME in bash. The effect of the bug was to make the date benchmark test roughly 24 times slower. This has been fixed in newer releases, but if you are using an older distro release then beware of this bug. I was able to get around it either putting a sleep delay between benchmarking EPOCHREALTIME and benchmarking date, or by simply testing date before testing EPOCHREALTIME. 70 To be able to conduct additional tests I installed ts in Ubuntu and Alpine, and the GNU version of date in Alpine. 71 EPOCHREALTIME Versus date in Ubuntu 2604 bash The EPOCHREALTIME method is 3103 times faster than date. However, when the same test is run on Ubuntu 2404 when the date test is run before the EPOCHREALTIME test, EPOCHREALTIME is 1240 faster than date. Other Linux distros show performance to Ubuntu 2404. It appears that a side effect of fixing whatever the bug is has the effect of slowing down date. However, this is probably not a significant issue in normal circumstances. 72 date versus ts in Ubuntu 2604 bash The date method is 3.7 times faster than ts 73 date versus ts in Ubuntu 2604 dash The date method is 4.9 times faster than ts 74 date versus ts in Freebsd sh The date method is 2.5 times faster than ts 75 date versus adjtimex in Alpine Busybox The date method is 6.0 times faster than adjtimex 76 date versus ts in Alpine Busybox The date method is 20.0 times faster than ts 77 bc versus awk in Ubuntu 2604 I compared calculating the difference between two numbers when using bc versus awk. The difference is negligible, with bc being only 7% faster than awk. 78 Conclusion for Benchmarks Based on these results, if you need to measure elapsed time to high resolution and care about runing the command with as little overhead as possible, then the order of preference should be the following. 79 If you are using a newer version of bash, then use EPOCHREALTIME. If that is not available, then use date, provided it allows for high resolution times. If the above two cannot be used, then use ts. If you are using Busybox and cannot install either GNU date or ts, then use adjtimex. Date is the closest in terms of being the universal portable solution, but it does not work in all cases. 80 I have not compared different platforms to each other in terms of performance, as that would be a much more involved problem that is outside the scope of this episode. However, different operating systems implement different commands in different ways. 81 For example, on Openbsd and Freebsd, ts appears to be an ELF binary. That is, it is executable machine code, possibly written in C. On Ubuntu however, ts appears to be a perl script. As a result of this, the advantage that date has over ts is much less in Freebsd than it is with Ubuntu (and likely other Linux distros) as on Freebsd it doesn't need to load a perl interpreter to run ts. -------------------- 82 Overall Conclusion You no doubt thought that measuring elapsed time was going to be so simple, and how could someone get an entire podcast out of such a simple subject? And yet here we are half an hour later with just a basic overview of the subject. 83 I hope you found this interesting and informative. Please let us know in the comments if you think that I have done anything incorrectly, or if you have another way of doing things. I hope to see you all again in another future episode of HPR. -------------------- Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. In UNIX Curio #8 ( HPR episode 4657 ), I talked about using standard utilities to compare files. Left unmentioned, however, was a method commonly used today—the hash function. As I've stated in previous entries, while I am an engineer, I don't have a background in computer science, so my understanding of the mathematics is limited. But I can give a practical description of what a hash function does. It takes an input, performs a set of calculations on it, and produces an output. As hash functions are practically used, the input is a set of bytes, such as a file or another piece of data like a password. The output is a numerical value in a fixed range—most often, expressed as hexadecimal characters. Because this "hash value" can always be represented in a certain number of bytes, its length as printed is usually a constant number of characters, padded with leading zeros if necessary. This episode will not cover the use of hashes in programming, focusing instead on using them to validate data. A hash function, or more specifically, a cryptographic hash function, has an additional property. It should be very difficult to predict what changes to the input would be required to produce a specific change in the output. An older, related concept is called a "checksum". While these are designed to vary when the input data is damaged or digits are transposed, they do not necessarily have that last property mentioned for cryptographic hashes. You have probably already encountered a checksum, even if you didn't recognize it. On a 16-digit number assigned to a Mastercard or Visa 1 credit or debit card, the first six digits identify the card issuer (such as a bank), the next nine digits are assigned to you by the issuer, and the last digit is a check digit. The check digit is calculated using the values of the previous 15 digits, and it is a simple way to avoid typos in entering a card number. In another example, every Ethernet frame that your devices send or receive includes a checksum 2 to help ensure that the contents weren't scrambled in transit. This is 32 bits long and is called a cyclical redundancy check, commonly referred to as a CRC. A CRC is also used in many other places—for example, the .zip file format includes one for each archive member, and this allows a program extracting files from the archive to identify if any were damaged. Our UNIX Curio for today is another example, the cksum utility 3 . It generates a 32-bit CRC based on the Ethernet algorithm. It operates on either a named file or standard input and outputs the CRC value, the length of the input, and the pathname if a file was given as an argument. Unlike most modern hashing programs, the checksum is printed as a decimal integer and is not padded, so it can be anywhere from one to ten digits long. The length value is the number of bytes in the input (actually specified as the number of octets , as systems could potentially use a byte that isn't eight bits long), also expressed as a decimal integer. There are two major ways that one could use cksum to check the validity of a file. First, if you are transferring a file from one UNIX-like system to another, you could run cksum against it on both systems and check that the CRC and length are the same. The utility can also be given multiple filenames as arguments, which would generate a list that can then be compared. The second way would be for someone publishing a file or set of files to also publish the CRC values, lengths, and names so that people downloading them could verify that they match. However, I don't think the practice of publishing lists like this really started until more recent hash functions like MD5 and SHA-1 came about so it is unlikely that anyone would publish CRC values instead. The advantage of these tools should be pretty obvious in comparison to cmp , one of the utilities discussed in UNIX Curio #8. To verify a file using cmp , you need two files to compare—if you're trying to check a large file you downloaded, you would need to spend the time and bandwidth to download a second copy. And if they didn't match, you would have no idea which of the two, if either, was correct. By contrast, cksum is quicker to run, doesn't require downloading a massive amount of excess data, and if run against the original file, makes clear what the correct value is. This utility is a follow-on from a program called sum , which operated very much the same. I had a bit of trouble tracking down the exact development history, but what seems clear is that two different variants 4 were popular: a BSD version and a System V version. Both output 16-bit checksums, but used different algorithms so they didn't give the same results. Also, the BSD version printed the length of the input data as the number of 1,024-byte blocks, while the System V version instead gave a count of 512-byte blocks. (Some sources claim that System V sum generates a 32-bit checksum 5 , which could possibly be true internal to the algorithm, but I have tested several independent implementations of the utility and all of them output a 16-bit value for both the System V and BSD algorithms.) From what I can tell, the BSD version 6,7 came first; it was in 3BSD but probably appeared even earlier. An identical copy of BSD's sum was included with UNIX/32V 8,9 , which was AT&T's 1979 port of Seventh Edition UNIX to the VAX and became one of the ancestors of System III. The divergence seems to have started with System III, released in 1980; its version of the sum utility 10,11 changed to a new default algorithm, though it could be made to use the BSD algorithm via the -r option. System V looks to have kept the same behavior as System III. It's not clear to me why this algorithm is universally called the "System V algorithm" rather than the "System III algorithm"; perhaps it is because System V saw much more widespread use. Instead of trying to reconcile these differences, the POSIX committee decided to create a new utility with a unique name, use a separate algorithm entirely, and avoid the block-length dispute by printing the length in octets instead of blocks. I should point out that POSIX states that the CRC algorithm for cksum does not strictly meet the mathematical definition of a "checksum". I don't know enough to say exactly why it doesn't qualify or to say whether either of the sum algorithms do. However, in less-formal usage the term "checksum" has gathered the meaning of any value used to represent or validate a set of data, so I am fine with using it no matter the technical details of the algorithm. When two different inputs produce the same checksum or hash value, this is called a "collision". Because the output value has a limited range, there are an infinite number of possible inputs that could produce a collision. From a practical standpoint the possibilities are more limited—the majority of these inputs are larger than the number of atoms in the universe, which can't fit on any machine. Unlike a cryptographic hash algorithm, the CRC is not specifically designed to resist an attacker crafting a malicious input that would cause a collision. However, it should be sufficient to detect accidental damage. Programs implementing more modern cryptographic hash algorithms are superior to the checksum utilities in avoiding collisions (whether malicious or accidental), but there are still three advantages that the older programs have. First, a system running a historical operating system might not have the hash programs available, but is more likely to have cksum or sum already included. Second, the checksum values are much shorter than the hashes output by the newer programs, making them easier for a user to compare by looking at them. This advantage is not as great as it might appear at first, because a common way to check a hash these days is to save a list of hashes and filenames—the hash programs can use that and do the comparison themselves, sparing the user from having to validate it character by character. The third advantage is that cksum prints the input length in bytes. This greatly limits the number of inputs that could be maliciously crafted to create a collision. I did a moderate amount of research on implementations of modern cryptographic hash algorithms and found that some, such as MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-2, do use the length of the input (often termed "message length" in the literature) as part of the material fed in to the algorithm, but none of the hashing utilities present this length to the user as part of its output. There are two possible reasons for this that seem evident to me. First, if one is hashing a password, you would certainly not want to give a clear indication of its length—that would give any attacker a massive head start on guessing the password. However, that doesn't explain why one would avoid printing the input length for a file that is made publicly available. Second, it is convenient in many contexts, such as database entries or in software (such as git ), for the hash to be a fixed length. Including an extra value that can be of variable length would complicate those use cases. However, the length value could simply be dropped and they would be no worse off than they are currently. Historically on UNIX, password hashing was treated differently from checksumming files— the crypt() function 12 was used for passwords while sum and later cksum were used to confirm a file's integrity. So even rather early on, these two use cases employed algorithms with different properties, but I haven't dived into the history deeply enough to know how intentional this was. My discussion in this episode focuses on the file use case, so understand that I'm largely avoiding the topic of password hashing. Digital signatures are yet another use case, one that I'm ignoring entirely. Every few years, some security researcher declares a particular hash algorithm to be "broken" and that everyone should move over to a new one, which generally has a longer hash. While the larger hash space certainly reduces the opportunity for collisions, this disrupts workflows, such as publishing information about software releases by e-mail, which still tends to observe a 78-character limit on each line 13 , making it harder to include a list of hashes with filenames next to them. This is in addition to the work of modifying software and scripts to use the new algorithm and managing how to treat past data. It seems to me that publishing the input length along with the hash would make it far more difficult to craft a malicious input that matches both, but I haven't found discussion of that during my investigation. (See the Appendix for a possible implementation.) Perhaps someone listening can record a response episode for HPR explaining that. References: Payment card number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number Ethernet frame: Frame check sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame#Frame_check_sequence Cksum specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/cksum.html GNU coreutils manual: sum https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sum-invocation.html FreeBSD 15.0 sum manual page https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sum&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+15.0-RELEASE+and+Ports 3BSD sum manual page https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=3BSD/usr/man/man1/sum.1 3BSD sum source https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=3BSD/usr/src/cmd/sum.c UNIX/32V sum manual page https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=32V/usr/man/man1/sum.1 UNIX/32V sum source https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=32V/usr/src/cmd/sum.c System III sum manual page https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/man/man1/sum.1 System III sum source https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/cmd/sum.c Crypt specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/crypt.html RFC 2822: Internet Message Format: Line Length Limits https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2822#section-2.1.1 OpenSSH 10.1 released https://lwn.net/ml/all/dd12623ae86aa5eb@cvs.openbsd.org/ Appendix The MD5 hash algorithm was (and still is) widely used, but many people characterize it as being "broken" and discourage its use. Let us imagine a variant of this, called MD5.L, where the normal MD5 hash is followed by a "." character and the input length expressed as a hexadecimal number. Take, for example, the e-mail message announcing the release of OpenSSH 10.1 14 . At the bottom, it includes an SHA-1 hash and an SHA-2 256-bit hash for the available gzipped tar files. That longer hash is encoded with Base64 because if it were given as a hexadecimal number, it would make the line longer than 78 bytes. The MD5.L hash of the file would be one character shorter than the SHA-1 hash, as shown below. (The extra length of the name makes them both consume the same number of characters. The hashes shown are for the "portable" version of OpenSSH.) Some people claim SHA-1 is also broken, seeking to have people use newer and longer hash functions. For an attacker to compromise MD5.L in this example, they would not only have to create a valid tar file compressed with gzip containing a malicious payload having the right MD5 hash, that file would have to be exactly 1,972,831 bytes long (the decimal equivalent of 1e1a5f). While there are still many possible inputs that could be tried (256 1972831 , to be exact*), this is far fewer than the infinite possibilities for plain MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-2. If for some reason it is super important to have a fixed hash length, let's imagine another variation called MD5+L. In this one, instead of L being the input length, it is the input length modulo one terabyte (2 40 bytes), which can be represented by 10 hexadecimal characters, left-padded with zeros. While this approach substantially increases the number of possible inputs an attacker could try, it is likely that an intended victim would notice that the file they downloaded is larger (or smaller) than expected by that much. The MD5+L hash is longer than a SHA-1 hash, but still shorter than a 256-bit SHA-2 hash. SHA1 (openssh-10.1p1.tar.gz) = 7fd17b99d1beffb47cd380d64079e920bb0bd91f SHA256 (openssh-10.1p1.tar.gz) = ufx6K4JXlGem8vQ+SoHI4d/aYU3bT5slWq/XAgu/B1g= MD5.L (openssh-10.1p1.tar.gz) = 80dd9bb00a86519934710d05903fdf07.1e1a5f MD5+L (openssh-10.1p1.tar.gz) = 80dd9bb00a86519934710d05903fdf07+00001e1a5f Of course, if MD5 is considered to be too weak even with the inclusion of the length, one could produce a ".L" or "+L" version of any hash function. However, longer hashes will end up running into the 78-character limit. *This is a number with 4.75 million digits that the bc utility on my laptop took almost 5 minutes to calculate. Provide feedback on this episode.

Why setting up commercial email and VPN services is incredibly hard, avoiding TrueNAS’s move from FreeBSD to Linux, why we avoid virtualising storage systems, and bridging WiFi to an external building. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Using Object Storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS Discussion Jeff Moss explains why setting up private email and VPN services are so difficult Feedback XigmaNAS Free consulting We were asked about bridging WiFi to an external building. Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings—the cheap and easy way See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Why setting up commercial email and VPN services is incredibly hard, avoiding TrueNAS’s move from FreeBSD to Linux, why we avoid virtualising storage systems, and bridging WiFi to an external building. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Using Object Storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS Discussion Jeff Moss explains why setting up private email and VPN services are so difficult Feedback XigmaNAS Free consulting We were asked about bridging WiFi to an external building. Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings—the cheap and easy way See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

inotify in FreeBSD, how changes to poudriere.conf affect the build time, Migrating mail servers from exim to OpenSMTPD, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Native inotify in FreeBSD News Roundup How changes to poudriere.conf affect the build time Follow on Giving poudriere a jump start Migrating mail servers from exim to OpenSMTPD (smtpd) is fun and useful Orion PDA Recap of the April 2026 Frankfurt Area FreeBSD Hackathon – Sven Ruediger 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

FreeBSD to OpenBSD Wireguard, Object storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS, a zfs script for labeling drives, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines FreeBSD to OpenBSD Wireguard Using Object Storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS News Roundup zfs – a helper script for labelling all those drives AI errno(2) values The vi Family Creating a Samba Active Directory Domain Controller on FreeBSD Beastie Bits Let's find out how to get predictable IPv6 addresses assigned to OpenBSD VMs 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. Feedback/Questions Davi - BSDCan 2026 Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

.NET on FreeBSD 15, Klara and TrueNAS fixing dedup, dhcpcd and unbound in FreeBSD Jails, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Running .NET 10.0 on FreeBSD 15.0 How Klara and TrueNAS collaborated to fix one of ZFS's longest standing limitations News Roundup Back to FreeBSD: Part 1 dhcpd and unbound in FreeBSD jails How our environment still needs the security boundary of Unix logins Increasing a bhyve vm disk 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

OpenBSD 7.9, Critical Infrastructure in FreeBSD, GhostBSD Finance report, Solaris 11.4 updates, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines OpenBSD 7.9 60th Edition has been released and Reported over on Undeadly Cleaning Up Critical Infrastructure in FreeBSD News Roundup Apple Wants to Kill Your Time Capsule but They Run NetBSD So They Can Not Oracle To Reduce The Frequency Of Solaris 11.4 Updates FreeBSD on a Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 Intel January 2026 Finance Report Beastie Bits The DragonFly site has a recently-updated page describing how DPorts is assembled and the process to contribute. TUHS - Unix use of VAX protection modes Origin of the rule that swap size should be 2x of the physical memory - The Duke and the Beastie - Improving OpenJDK support for FreeBSD 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. In UNIX Curio #4 ( HPR episode 4617 ), I teased the subject of file compression. Today I'm circling back to that. The history of data compression goes back at least to the 1970s, and in contexts outside UNIX and computers, probably even earlier. Somehow, it is refreshing to learn that humans have always struggled to have enough storage space to keep all the data they want to hang on to. One way around this limitation is to use some form of compression. I am only going to dive into lossless compression for this episode—that is, a compression method that can be reversed and will spit out the original data bit for bit. Lossy compression methods also have their places: you might be familiar with their use for audio (such as Ogg Vorbis or MP3); it's also used for images (such as JPEG). Lossy compression allows some of the original data to be thrown away, resulting in a smaller file than is possible with lossless compression, but the intent is for the result to still sound or look "good enough" to a human observer. Also, I am going to limit my discussion to generic methods used for many types of data; while FLAC does lossless compression, it is specifically designed just for audio. I should make clear that I have never studied computer science or information theory, so this episode will not get into the science behind various types of compression algorithms and how they differ. But in general, these methods take advantage of the fact that many types of data have recurring patterns. English text mostly consists of words that often re-appear many times—source code similarly has keywords and variable names that recur. Compression is accomplished by representing a piece of data that occurs multiple times with a symbol that is shorter in length. The first compression program in the UNIX world I could find is called pack , from 1978 1 . It was shortly followed in 1979 by a similar program called compact 2 . Both of these used a technique called Huffman coding, but with some differences between them. Files compressed with pack were given a .z extension and compact gave filenames a .C extension. Roughly every five or ten years after this, a new program would come along and achieve lasting popularity. There were, and still are, two opposing forces facing any new form of compression. Working in favor was the advantages it provided—first among these was achieving a better compression ratio, but performance improvements such as speed or reduced memory usage could also be compelling. The force against any new method was the fact that it was not yet widely supported—it doesn't much help to have a smaller file if the people you share it with cannot decompress it. The next major advance in compression arose out of three scientific papers: two in 1977 and 1978 by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv (called LZ77 and LZ78), and one by Terry Welch in 1984 which built on LZ78. This last method is typically referred to as LZW. Our UNIX Curio for today is a program called compress 3 that implements the LZW method. Files compressed this way are named with the extension .Z . I had always assumed that this was to honor Jacob Ziv, but now that I've researched the history, it seems more likely to be a follow-on from how files compressed by pack were named. Since pack did not use any of the Lempel-Ziv methods, I would guess that it used .z because that wasn't already taken by anything else, but that's pure speculation. I do recall encountering .Z files in the wild, but feel certain that hasn't happened in the last 25 years, maybe longer. If you need to expand one of these, uncompress 4 is the program to use ( GNU's gunzip can also handle them 5 ). However, there was a serious problem that arose with the LZ78 and LZW compression methods. Both of them were patented, and the owner became aggressive in seeking payment from developers and users. The compress utility was developed within two months of the publication of Welch's 1984 paper and was included in Bell Laboratories' Eighth Edition UNIX before these shakedowns started. The paper did not disclose that a patent had been filed, and apparently Spencer Thomas and the other developers of compress were unaware of it. The utility became popular for a while, and was even standardized by POSIX, but people moved away from LZW once the legal threats started. Another important advance came in 1991 and was called the DEFLATE compression method. It combined the un-patented LZ77 method with Huffman coding to achieve a similar level of compression as LZW (actually, often better) without the legal trouble. DEFLATE was developed for PKZIP and was soon adopted by the GNU project's gzip compressor. While Phil Katz (the "PK" in PKZIP ) patented one way of implementing the DEFLATE method, it was possible to write a compressor and decompressor without infringing 6 ; also, he apparently never tried to enforce the patent 7 . As I mentioned in UNIX Curio #4, .zip is both an archive and a compression format. Each archive member can be compressed with one of several possible methods (or stored without compression). Unlike a tar file where compression can be applied to the entire archive, in .zip each archive member is compressed individually. This often means a .zip file will be slightly bigger than a tar file with the same contents compressed with gzip , because the .zip format cannot take advantage of duplication that occurs among more than one member of the archive. The vast majority of .zip files use only the DEFLATE and uncompressed storage methods and these are the only options if you want to follow the profile standardized in ISO/IEC 21320-1. Actually, since they both use DEFLATE, gzip is able to extract a .zip file in the special case where it only holds one member compressed with that method. From the 1990s onward, people paid significant attention to avoiding patent landmines, so only methods that didn't have that problem became broadly popular. While the patents on LZ78 and LZW have since expired, I feel like their most successful legacy was in discouraging people from using those methods, leading to DEFLATE taking the popularity crown. The next step came in 1996 and 1997 with the development of bzip and bzip2 by Julian Seward. The original method was quickly followed by bzip2 , which was the version that achieved true popularity. They use the Burrows-Wheeler transform, which does not itself compress data but re-arranges it to make it more compressible; this is combined with other techniques 8 . (At least, that's my understanding. I told you, I'm not up on information theory.) This provides a significant reduction in the compressed size of the data compared to earlier methods—however, it is slower than DEFLATE both during compression and decompression. Separate projects have developed parallel versions of gzip and bzip2 that can take advantage of multi-processor machines, but the original utilities run single-threaded. Another five years later, in 2001, Igor Pavlov added the Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm (LZMA), an enhancement to LZ77, to his 7-Zip compression tool. This was followed a few years later by LZMA2, a container format that allowed for LZMA compression to be split between multiple threads. Broad LZMA2 support came to the UNIX world in 2009 with the xz utility 9 . It offers roughly similar compression ratios to bzip2 , though it can be better or worse depending on the data to be compressed. While compression generally takes even longer than bzip2 , decompression is significantly faster (though still not as fast as gzip ). The Linux kernel relatively quickly supported booting from xz-compressed images 10 because it was a good match for that use case—compression, the time-consuming activity, only has to be done once while the more frequent decompression during boot happens relatively fast. The last method I will cover is Zstandard 11 , often written as zstd . This came about in 2015, and is another variation on LZ77 that uses finite-state entropy (which means nothing to me, but you might understand it). It performs about as well as DEFLATE in terms of compression ratios, but is much faster both when compressing and decompressing data. I should say that these statements are true with the typical default settings—depending on the compression level selected, it can compress more slowly, but compress the data smaller. However, decompression is always speedier than DEFLATE. This makes it attractive for some uses, and it is heavily promoted by Meta/Facebook, where Yann Collet developed it. For example, shipping large amounts of actively-used data between machines in a data center can go more quickly when the size is reduced; however, if the compression and decompression steps take too long that benefit is lost. A speedy method can be valuable even if it doesn't result in the greatest reduction in size. This use case stands in contrast to, say, a compressed backup file which might only be accessed in a disaster recovery scenario or never accessed at all, making size more important than speed. Both the xz and zstd utilities have some built-in support for multi-threading, but the default is to run in a single thread. While xz can use multiple threads for decompression (but only if the file was compressed in multi-thread mode), the reference zstd utility can only use more than one thread for compression, not decompression. There are many other methods of lossless compression that have been developed over the decades, but I believe these are the ones you are most likely to encounter in the world of UNIX-like systems. This is a personal opinion, and others might choose a different set. As mentioned, it can be tough for a new method to gain popularity and 35-year-old DEFLATE is still probably the most commonly used despite not being the fastest or offering the greatest reduction in size. Even systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD that do not like to include GNU tools supported it by developing their own version of gzip based on the permissively-licensed zlib library. Technically, the LZW method used by the compress utility is still standardized by POSIX, so one might expect it to have the widest support. However, aggressive patent enforcement discouraged adoption, especially by Free and Open Source Software systems—even though the patent has expired, it is still out of favor compared to DEFLATE. For this reason, I feel justified in calling it a curio. References: Eighth Edition UNIX pack.c https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/pack/pack.c 2.9BSD compact.c https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/src/ucb/compact/compact.c Compress specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/compress.html Uncompress specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/uncompress.html GNU Gzip manual https://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/manual/gzip.html RFC 1951: DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification version 1.3 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1951 History of Lossless Data Compression Algorithms: The Rise of Deflate https://ethw.org/History_of_Lossless_Data_Compression_Algorithms#The_Rise_of_Deflate bzip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2 XZ Utils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils 2.6.38 merge window part 2 https://lwn.net/Articles/423541/ zstd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zstd Appendix The table below demonstrates the results of compressing different types of data using tools described in this episode. While not totally rigorous, I did run each compression and decompression multiple times to ensure I was getting consistent results. The laptop I used has an Intel Core i5-6200U CPU running at 2.30GHz, and the system had at least 5 GB of free memory for each run. While this processor has two cores and can run four simultaneous threads, all utilities were run single-threaded. The term "best" means the highest level of compression available (the exact level used is shown). For bzip2 , the default is the best. For zstd , "best" is -19, which is the highest "normal" level, but "ultra" levels that are even higher also exist. Ratios are the percentage of the original size that the file was reduced to (other sources might instead express the compression ratio as the reduction in size achieved). In all results, smaller numbers are better. ┌────────────────────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┐ │ │ gzip │ gzip │ bzip2 │ xz │ xz │ zstd │ zstd │ │ │(default -6) │ (best -9) │ (-9) │(default -6) │ (best -9) │(default -3) │ (best -19) │ ├──────────────┬─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Size (ratio) │ 22,036,508 │ 21,891,623 │ 15,795,698 │ 13,487,768 │ 12,938,464 │ 20,454,657 │ 13,709,078 │ │ │ │ (24%) │ (24%) │ (17%) │ (15%) │ (14%) │ (23%) │ (15%) │ │English Text ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │(90,532,092 │Compression │ 4.8s │ 7.6s │ 8.5s │ 49.8s │ 58.8s │ 0.6s │ 65.2s │ │bytes │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │uncompressed) ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Decompression│ 0.7s │ 0.8s │ 3.7s │ 1.2s │ 1.2s │ 0.4s │ 0.4s │ │ │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├──────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Size (ratio) │ 125,291,122 │ 124,189,544 │ 98,016,512 │ 84,882,492 │ 81,954,344 │ 120,604,855 │ 87,298,645 │ │ │ │ (21%) │ (21%) │ (17%) │ (14%) │ (14%) │ (20%) │ (15%) │ │Source Code ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │(590,008,320 │Compression │ 22.0s │ 39.3s │ 54.8s │ 241s │ 298s │ 3.7s │ 348s │ │bytes │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │uncompressed) ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Decompression│ 5.1s │ 5.1s │ 20.3s │ 8.1s │ 7.8s │ 2.4s │ 2.4s │ │ │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├──────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Size (ratio) │ 32,830,905 │ 32,371,241 │ 26,856,579 │ 20,717,288 │ 20,352,880 │ 28,538,810 │ 23,154,582 │ │ │ │ (19%) │ (19%) │ (16%) │ (12%) │ (12%) │ (17%) │ (13%) │ │Binary Program├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │(171,972,264 │Compression │ 6.4s │ 22.4s │ 18.6s │ 62.2s │ 67.8s │ 0.8s │ 111s │ │bytes │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │uncompressed) ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Decompression│ 1.5s │ 1.5s │ 5.6s │ 2.3s │ 2.3s │ 0.7s │ 0.7s │ │ │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├──────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Size (ratio) │ 146,397,772 │ 146,397,757 │ 144,485,451 │ 131,950,232 │ 130,926,780 │ 147,154,979 │ 145,703,840 │ │ │ │ (89%) │ (89%) │ (88%) │ (80%) │ (80%) │ (90%) │ (89%) │ │WAVE Audio ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │(164,396,302 │Compression │ 9.2s │ 9.2s │ 25.1s │ 70.4s │ 97.7s │ 0.7s │ 58.3s │ │bytes │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │uncompressed) ├─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │Decompression│ 2.0s │ 2.0s │ 13.5s │ 12.2s │ 12.1s │ 0.6s │ 0.8s │ │ │time │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├──────────────┴─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┤ │ │ gzip │ gzip │ bzip2 │ xz │ xz │ zstd │ zstd │ │ │(default -6) │ (best -9) │ (-9) │(default -6) │ (best -9) │(default -3) │ (best -19) │ └────────────────────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┘ English text consists of Titles 1 through 10 of the 2020 U.S. Code of Federal Regulations . Source code consists of a tar file containing the Linux kernel source, version 4.0. Binary program consists of an ELF-format executable of the pandoc application, version 2.17.1.1 found on Debian 12. Audio consists of a 24-bit Signed Integer PCM WAVE file with 2 channels at 44.1kHz, about 10:21 in length. For comparison, the audio-specific flac lossless compression utility reduced this file to 97,962,711 bytes (60%) in 2.6 seconds at the default (-5) level and to 97,714,876 bytes (59%) in 5.4 seconds at the highest (-8) level. Provide feedback on this episode.

The NetBSD/FreeBSD Merge announcement, the rise and fall of SPARC, GhoseBSD 26.2 and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines NetBSD/FreeBSD will not merge, November 1993 announcement Rise and Fall of SPARC: Why No One Misses It News Roundup Help needed testing GhostBSD 26.2 Redundant DHCP server and DNS Resolver using OpenBSD and FreeBSD Universities And In house Tech Beating my head on OpenVPN 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. Feedback/Questions Paul - Feedback Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Switching from Proxmox to Sylve, FreeBSD Quarterly report, FreeBSD's laptop program, Migrating ZFS, Haiku and OpenSSL news, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines I Switched from Proxmox to Its FreeBSD Counterpart on My Home Server – Here is How it Went FreeBSD Quarterly Report The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support Project News Roundup Migrating ZFS filesystems from one zpool to another – same host Haiku Isn't Just For X86 Anymore, Boots On ARM In QEMU OpneSSL 4.0 Other schedulers? Illumos? 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. I would imagine that most users of UNIX-like systems have heard of cron —certainly any system administrator should have. Briefly, cron is a way of running a job repeatedly based on the time and date; for example, a job could run every hour, at 5:00am every Tuesday, or the 3rd of every month. It is commonly used for administrative or maintenance tasks that should be done on a regular schedule, such as checking for software updates, rotating log files, or updating the database for the locate command. As well-known as cron is, there is a similar utility that very few seem to be aware of: at . This is the word "at", and has nothing to do with the at symbol "@". An at job is very much like a cron job, except that an at job only runs one time. A job is submitted by running at timespec 1 , where timespec is the time and date the job is to be run. The linked POSIX specification page describes acceptable formats for timespec ; some examples are " now ", " 14:00 ", " noon tomorrow ", " 14:00 + 3 months ", and " 14:00 January 19, 2038 ". The utility then waits on standard input for you to enter a set of commands to be run in the job. You end input by typing Control-D to mark the end of text. (As an alternative to typing in the job, you could instead use the "

Who survived the install, who made it to the desktop, and who learned the hard way that one little mistake will blow up the entire BSD box.Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:

The FCC relaxes its foreign router ban to allow for security updates, the ShinyHunters group disrupts schools across the globe, a 21-year-old remote code execution bug turns up in FreeBSD, and another Linux privilege escalation bug was disclosed… without a patch. Show notes Risky Bulletin: FCC relaxes foreign router ban to allow for security updates

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now, Compensating for RAM Constraints with L2ARC on ZFS, GhostBSD 26.1, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now Compensating for RAM Constraints with L2ARC on ZFS GhostBSD 26.1 News Roundup I connected a phone to my FreeBSD server My Journey to the BSDs The unseen hero of OpenBSD Beastie Bits BSD Can Schedule up OpenBSD Campaign 2025 OpenBSD Campaign 2026 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

We dig into the Copy Fail vulnerability and test a proof-of-concept against our own box. Plus, Jon Seager, VP of Engineering at Canonical joins us, and we kick off the BSD Challenge!Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:

Danger of Libredtail https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Danger%20of%20Libredtail%20%5BGuest%20Diary%5D/32936 FreeBSD dhclient vulnerability https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-26:12.dhclient.asc Linux Copy-Fail Vulnerability CVE-2026-31431 https://copy.fail Bryan Nice Research Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryannice/ https://www.sans.edu/cyber-research/detecting-ai-pickling

In March 2012, the FBI surrounded a hurricane-rated steel door in Galveston, Texas. Behind it sat 30 year old Higinio Ochoa, drinking coffee in his boxers, flushing his one-time pad passwords down the toilet before letting federal agents inside. The operation to capture "w0rmer" had finally terminated.The process had initialized years earlier in childhood IRC rooms and 2600 chat channels. Ochoa taught himself to hack on dial-up connections, installing FreeBSD from thirty floppy disks at eleven years old. By his twenties, he was running cameras and internet infrastructure for Occupy Wall Street camps. When he witnessed police beating a woman having a seizure during a raid, something switched. The technical skills pivoted toward purpose.Cabin Crew launched with surgical precision. Ochoa mass-scanned police systems for SQL injections and admin pages, often not knowing which department he'd compromised until crafting the press release. He signed every hack, tagged every defacement, live-tweeted FBI taunts. His girlfriend posed in a bikini outside the Alabama Department of Public Safety holding signs that read "PwN3D by w0rmer" with GPS coordinates embedded in the photo metadata.Today he consults for governments and holds battlefield accommodations from Ukraine. The smooth hands that once broke into Secret Service-designed systems now defend critical infrastructure at levels where people could die if information leaks.TIMSTAMPS00:00 The Early Days of Hacking04:22 From Hobbyist to Activist08:30 The Shift to Purposeful Hacking13:16 The Rise of Cabin Crew17:58 The Psychology of Hacking and Branding21:11 The Origins of Wormer: A Hacker's Journey25:10 The FBI's Approach: How They Caught Me27:50 The Day of Reckoning: My Arrest Experience32:44 Life in the System: Mental Struggles and Adaptations36:18 Navigating Post-Prison Life: Challenges and Restrictions44:40 Navigating Life Post-Incarceration47:27 The Struggles of Redemption51:19 Finding Opportunities in a Stigmatized Field55:23 The Evolution of a Hacker's Journey58:46 Contributions to Information Security01:01:19 Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Hackers01:05:42 The Dream of a Cybersecurity Bar[Higinio “w0rmer” Ochoa – LinkedIn] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/x0hig Professional profile of Higinio Ochoa, a former Anonymous-affiliated hacktivist turned cybersecurity consultant, where he shares insights on security, research, and his work in the industry.[DEF CON Hacker Conference] - https://defcon.org/ One of the world's largest and most influential cybersecurity and hacker conferences, referenced in the episode as a key part of early hacker culture and later professional engagement.[Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)] - https://www.cisa.gov/ A U.S. government agency focused on cybersecurity and infrastructure protection, mentioned in relation to responsible disclosure and ethical hacking initiatives.[Cloudflare] - https://www.cloudflare.com/ A global web infrastructure and cybersecurity company where the guest briefly worked after prison, playing a role in his transition into legitimate security work.[The Pirate Bay] - https://thepiratebay.org/ A well-known file-sharing platform referenced in the discussion about monitored internet usage and security research environments post-release.

Breaking up Big Tech, Porting MacOS to the Nintendo Wii, OpenBSD on the Pomera DM250, Postgres is your friend and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Breaking up with Big Tech Porting MacOS to the Nintendo Wii News Roundup Installing OpenBSD on the Pomera DM250 Postgres is Your Friend. ORM is Not Java Sun SPOTs I like to use Soviet control panels as a starting point Beastie Bits OSHintosh - an open source 68000 Macintosh Time to update 2.11BSD: biggest patch ever landed before 35th anniversary A quick and easy Guide to Tmux 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. Feedback/Questions Producer Note, If you have emailed in and you havent heard back and we havent covered your message, email again. Our email is flooded with spam and I might have missed your message. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Proxmox to FreeBSD, Hidden values of CPU-Intensive Compression, Cells for NetBSD, OpenBSD 7.8 on RPIs, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in Our Office Lab The Hidden Value of CPU-Intensive Compression on Modern Hardware News Roundup Cells for NetBSD – Kernel Enforced Jail Like Isolation with User Friendly Operations OpenBSD 7.8 on Raspberry Pi Zero 2W OpenSSH 10.3/10.3p1 released I'm just the Barista 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. Feedback/Questions Tim - Are OCI Images useful for Freebsd.md Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Wayland setting back Linux, Dr Callahan's semi retirement, holding onto your hardware, PF queues breaking the 4gbps barrier, and mroe... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years Semi-retirement, or, really, changing my relationship with the BSDs [Hold on to Your Hardware](https://マリウス.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/) News Roundup PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier Nobody said there was math on this exam! The web is bearable with RSS The Pipe 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

When Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, the headline was the capability: an AI model that found a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD and a 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability in FreeBSD — fully autonomously, no human in the loop after the initial prompt. But the story underneath the capability is a structural one about who gets early intelligence, who sets the disclosure timeline, and what happens to every organization that wasn't in the room. In this edition of Lens Four, Sean Martin examines Project Glasswing through three lenses: the intelligence asymmetry it creates for security programs, what it reveals about the broken assumptions underneath CVE, CVSS, and NIST, and why the equity framing in Glasswing's messaging doesn't survive contact with the data.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems. When you think about creating and managing archives on a UNIX system, tar is probably the utility that comes to mind. But this was not the first archiving program; ar was in First Edition UNIX 1 and cpio also pre-dates it, sort of 2 . According to the NetBSD manual page, cpio was developed within AT&T before tar , but did not get widely released until System III UNIX after tar was already well known from the earlier release of Seventh Edition UNIX (a.k.a. Version 7). You might think that ar and cpio are old and irrelevant these days, but these formats do live on. Each Debian package file 3 is an ar archive which in turn contains two tar files. On Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, and some other distributions, each .rpm package file 4 contains a cpio payload. So these may very well still be in use on your modern Linux system. But let's get back to the subject of what you might want to use to create archives today. The tar utility has persisted in its popularity over the decades, and you most probably have a version installed on your UNIX-like systems. One of the problems with tar , however, is that it has not kept a consistent file format. Also, different implementations have used differing syntax at times. There are excellent reasons for the file format changing 5 . The names people give files have gotten longer over time, and the original Seventh Edition tar format could only handle a total pathname length of 100 bytes for each archive member. In addition, filenames were in ASCII format, and modern filesystems now accommodate richer encodings with characters that aren't in ASCII. The size of each archive member was limited to 8 gigabytes—unthinkably large back then, but not so big these days. User and group ownership could only be specified by numeric ID, which can vary from one system to another. Many other types of files and information simply couldn't be stored: block and character device nodes, FIFOs, sockets, extended attributes, access control lists, and SELinux contexts. As a result, the tar format had to evolve over the years. One important version was the ustar format, created for the 1988 POSIX standard. The POSIX committee wanted to try standardizing both the file format and syntax for the tar command. While the ustar format addressed some shortcomings, progress marched on. Filesystems started allowing filenames in different character sets and more types of information to be attached to files, so for the 2001 revision of POSIX they gave up on standardizing the tar utility and came up with a new format and utility, which is our actual UNIX Curio for this episode: pax 6 . Since the pax program didn't have historical baggage, they could specify its options, behavior, and file format and be sure everyone's implementation would match. Developers of different tar implementations had been reluctant to change away from their historical option syntax to the standard. The pax utility was also an attempt to avoid taking sides between those who advocated for tar and fans of cpio . The pax file format was an extension of ustar with the ability to add arbitrary new attributes tied to each archive member as UTF-8 Unicode. Some of these attribute names were standardized, but implementers could also define their own, making the format more future-proof. Older versions of tar that could handle the ustar format should still be able to process pax archives, but might not know what to do with the extra attributes. GNU tar developed its current archive format 7 alongside the standardization of the ustar format. The GNU format was based on an early draft which later underwent incompatible changes, so the two unfortunately are not interchangable. Unlike ustar , the GNU format has no limits on the size of files or the length of their names. In addition to its own format, GNU tar is able to detect and correctly process both ustar and pax archives. In situations where its native format can't store necessary information about a file (such as POSIX access control lists or extended attributes), GNU tar will automatically output the pax format instead (called "posix" in documentation). However, it still uses the GNU format by default, though the documentation has been threatening to move to the POSIX format for at least 20 years 8 . The good news is that the ustar , pax , GNU tar , and Seventh Edition tar formats are well documented and utilities across many UNIX-like systems 2,7,9,10,11 are able to handle these, depending on which formats existed when the utility was developed. While your system may not have pax itself installed, there are other archiving utilities that can read the file format, including GNU tar . (Somewhat amusingly, Debian and some other Free Software operating systems package a pax utility developed by MirBSD 12 which largely follows the POSIX-specified interface, but doesn't support reading or writing archives in pax format!) Look at the manual page for the tar , cpio , or pax utilities on your system to see if they can handle pax archives. Perhaps one aspect that has worked in favor of tar and other UNIX archive formats is that they only concern themselves with storing files and make no attempt at compression. Instead, it is common for a complete archive file to be compressed after creation; many utilities can be told to do this step for you, but it is not typically the default behavior. Therefore, if a better compression method comes along, the archive format doesn't need to change. If you do use compression, be careful to choose a method that is available on the destination system. Compressing files is a big enough subject to deserve its own episode, so we won't talk more about it here. So which format should you use when creating an archive? Unfortunately, there is no single answer that applies in all circumstances. The pax format is supported among modern UNIX-like systems and can represent all types of files and metadata. While other systems, their filesystems, and archive utilities might not be able to properly make use of all the metadata, they should at least be able to extract the data contained in files and, if Unicode is supported, give them appropriate filenames. If you intend to unpack the archive on an older system, more research might be needed to figure out what formats it is able to handle. The Seventh Edition tar format (often called "v7") is widely supported, including by older systems, but has limitations in what it can contain as described earlier. Moving beyond the UNIX world, things get even more complicated. Apple's macOS, with its FreeBSD underpinnings, easily handles tar files. However, when it comes to MS-DOS and Windows, it's a bit different. There, a multitude of archiving programs and formats arose, usually combining archiving with compression. PKZIP was probably the most popular of these and its .zip format became common in many places, helped by the fact that PKWARE openly published the specification. While there is only a single .zip format, it has many options, some proprietary, and different implementations have diverged in the way some aspects are handled (or not handled). An ISO/IEC standard for .zip 13 was published in 2015 giving a baseline profile, and sticking to it produces files that can be widely extracted successfully. Other file formats like OpenDocument use the .zip format and typically hew to the standardized profile. Windows' File Explorer, starting with Windows XP, can natively extract .zip files 14 . The Info-ZIP program 15 is a Free Software implementation for a wide variety of systems (even rather obscure ones); while it might not be installed on yours, if you're copying the archive file over, you can probably copy over its unzip utility at the same time to unpack it. So .zip probably has the broadest support, although it might not already be present on every system. However, as Klaatu points out in Hacker Public Radio episode 4557 16 , .zip files and applications handling them aren't always great at maintaining metadata about files. The .zip format doesn't seem to have any way to represent UNIX file permissions, and user/group ownership can only be included as numeric IDs. Other types of metadata on UNIX-like systems are not saved at all. This is probably not a problem in some cases, such as with a collection of photos, but for others it might be a concern. While pax as a utility does not seem to have gained much popularity or support, except on commercial UNIX systems where including it was required to conform to the POSIX standard, its file format has persisted. Free Software systems have generally avoided the pax interface, preferring to stick with the tar utility on the command line, but usually have good support for archive files in the pax format. Outside of UNIX-like systems, .zip seems to have become the most common file format, and support for it is also good in the UNIX world, though it might not be built in. References: Archive (library) file format https://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/5/archive NetBSD 10.0 cpio manual page https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-10.0/cpio.1 Debian binary package format https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/dpkg-dev/deb.5.en.html RPM V6 Package format https://rpm.org/docs/6.0.x/manual/format_v6.html NetBSD 10.0 libarchive-formats manual page https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-10.0/libarchive-formats.5 Pax specification https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/pax.html GNU tar manual https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html GNU tar manual for version 1.15.90 https://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/*checkout*/tar/tar/manual/tar.html?revision=1.3 FreeBSD 15.0 libarchive-formats manual page https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=libarchive-formats&sektion=5&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+15.0-RELEASE+and+Ports OpenBSD 7.8 tar manual page https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-7.8/tar HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2) https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=c01922474&docLocale=en_US MirBSD pax(1) manual page http://www.mirbsd.org/htman/i386/man1/pax.htm#Sh.STANDARDS ISO/IEC 21320-1:2015 Information technology - Document Container File Part 1: Core https://www.iso.org/standard/60101.html Mastering File Compression on Windows https://windowsforum.com/threads/mastering-file-compression-on-windows-how-to-zip-and-unzip-files-effortlessly.369235/ About Info-ZIP https://infozip.sourceforge.net/ HPR4557::Why I prefer tar to zip https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr4557/index.html Provide feedback on this episode.

FreeBSD and OpenZFS in the Quest for Technical Independence, Reviews make you 10x slower, OpenBSD on a Motorola 88000, Jailrun, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines FreeBSD and OpenZFS in the Quest for Technical Independence: A Storage Architect's View Every layer of review makes you 10x slower News Roundup The story of OpenBSD on Motorola 88000 series processors Jailrun + jailrun github FreeBSD Users: We Need to Talk About Claude Code Vibe-coded ext4 for OpenBSD 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

The Real Cost of Technology Dependence, FreeBSD 15 Linuxator with CUDA, Bidirectional OPNsense/pfSense, Netbase, a SYN attack, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines The Real Cost of Technology Dependence: Building Independence with Open-Source Storage News Roundup Building Hierarchical Jails (Podman x Native Jail) on FreeBSD 15 FreeBSD 15.0 Linuxulator with CUDA Setup Bidirectional OPNsense/pfSense Firewall Configuration Migration/Conversion CLI SYN attack Syn attack follow up Netbase is Port of NetBSD Utilities to Another UNIX Like Operating Systems Beastie Bits OpenBSD -current moves to 7.9-beta - Delayed hibernation comes to OpenBSD/amd64 laptops 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on April 01, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guideOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597085&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Live: Artemis II Launch Day UpdatesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603657&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin securityOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602832&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC marketOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47606840&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:17): I quit. The clankers wonOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598511&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:43): CERN levels up with new superconducting kartsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597935&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:10): SpaceX files to go publicOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:37): Claude wrote a full FreeBSD remote kernel RCE with root shellOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597119&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:04): U.S. exempts oil industry from protecting Gulf animals, for 'national security'Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47595620&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:31): Is BGP safe yet?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47600382&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performance networking infrastructure to game consoles and content delivery networks. Over three decades, it has evolved through major architectural shifts, from symmetric multiprocessing The post FreeBSD with John Baldwin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performance networking infrastructure to game consoles and content delivery networks. Over three decades, it has evolved through major architectural shifts, from symmetric multiprocessing and kernel scalability to modern storage systems and predictable release engineering. John Baldwin has spent more than 25 years working on FreeBSD as a developer, contributor, and consultant. In this episode, John joins Gregor Vand to discuss the origins of FreeBSD, how its governance model differs from other open-source projects, its role inside systems like Netflix's CDN and the PlayStation 4, the challenges of maintaining a 30-year-old codebase, and much more. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post FreeBSD with John Baldwin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Designing OpenZFS Storage for Independence, The day Telnet died, PiDP 11/70, OpenBSD on SGI and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Designing OpenZFS Storage for Independence: Pool Architecture, Failure Domains, and Migration Paths 2026-01-14: The Day the telnet Died Reports of Telnet's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated News Roundup PiDP-11/70 Build Workshop OpenBSD on SGI: a rollercoaster story Terminals Should Generate 256 Color Palette FreeBSD tribal knowledge: Changes to snapshot strategy Beastie Bits BSDCan reg is now open An Oral History of Unix Major update to drm(4) code in OpenBSD-current (to linux 6.18.16) Patched FreeBSD AMIs 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Jails for NetBSD, ARC and L2ARC sizing for Proxmox, Anatomy of bsd.rd, Docker Containers on FreeBSD, Running Time Machine inside a FreeBSD Jail, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Jails for NetBSD ARC and L2ARC Sizing on Proxmox News Roundup Lab: Anatomy of bsd.rd — No Reboot Required Exploring Docker containers on FreeBSD Time Machine inside a FreeBSD jail After decades on Linux, FreeBSD finally gave me a reason to switch operating systems Beastie Bits - - 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. Feedback/Questions Emelio - openbsd Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

Pool and Vdev topology for promox, KDE Plasma is not forcing systemd, Running a 2.11 BSD system, Booting NetBSD from a wedge and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Pool and VDEV Topology for Proxmox Workloads News Roundup KDE Plasma 6.6 is Not Forcing systemd(1) but Arguments Rage On. An old article with covering : Running and administrating a 2.11 BSD system Booting NetBSD from a wedge, the hard way Beastie Bits The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2026! Solaris 11.4 SRU90: Preserve Boot Environments zfs-2.4.1 Hardening OPNsense: Using Q-Feeds to Block Malicious Traffic 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. Feedback/Questions Gary - A nice blog Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines ZFS vs BTRFS Architects features and stability RHEL on ZFS Root: An Unholy Experiment News Roundup Slackware on Encrypted ZFS Root. https://tumfatig.net/2026/slackware-on-encrypted-zfs-root/ OpenIndiana Is Porting Solaris' IPS Package Management To Rust FreeBSD Jail Memory Metrics Tcl: The Most Underrated, But The Most Productive Programming Language How to Setup WireGuard on OpenBSD: The Ultimate Self-Hosted VPN Guide (2026) 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

OpenZFS monitoring, hellosystems 0.8, GhostBSD and XLibre, Bhyve Exporters and 30 year old LibC issues. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines OpenZFS Monitoring and Observability: What to Track and Why It Matters helloSystem 0.8 Released FreeBSD Based OS Inspired by macOS. https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/hellosystem-08-released-freebsd-based-os-inspired-by-macos/ News Roundup [Default GhostBSD to XLibre](https://github.com/ghostbsd/ghostbsd-build/pull/259] Addressing XLibre Change and GhostBSD Future Bhyve Prometheus Exporter for Sylve on FreeBSD. Linux GNU C Library Fixes Security Issue Present Since 1996 Beastie Bits NetBSD 11.0 RC1 available! The Book of PF, 4th Edition is now available December 2025 Finance Report LLDB improvements on FreeBSD Any desire for OnmiOS/Illumos Support : Now's your chance to convince me 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

GeoIP PF FreeBSD, ZFs in production, linuxulator feels like magic, XFCE is great, the scariest boot code, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines GeoIP-Aware Firewalling with PF on FreeBSD ZFS in Production: Real-World Deployment Patterns and Pitfalls News Roundup Xfce is great Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic The scariest boot loader code OpenBSD-current now runs as guest under Apple Hypervisor 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. Feedback/Questions Matt - Audio Levels Interviews can be troublesome because there's only so much we can do with multiple guests with multiple feeds, and mulitple audio conditions. We can try to normalize but sometimes it's just not easy to do without editing taking an entire day.. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

AT&T's $2000 shell, ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity, FFS Backups, FreeBSD Home Nas, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines One too many words on AT&T's $2,000 Korn shell and other Usenet topics Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity News Roundup FFS Backup FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1) 8 more parts! Beastie Bits The BSD Proposal UNIX Magic Poster Haiku OS Pulls In Updated Drivers From FreeBSD 15 FreeBSD 15.0 VNET Jails Call for NetBSD testing 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. Feedback/Questions Gary - Links Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

ZFS Scrubs and Data integrity, Propolice, FreeBSD vs Slackware and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity The story of Propolice Desk reviews describe comment ask questions No reponses, no justications. [Tj's Desk](media/bsdnow649-tjs-desk.jpg) [Ruben's Desk](media/bsdnow649-rubens-desk.jpg) News Roundup FreeBSD vs. Slackware: Which super stable OS is right for you? Prometheus, Let's Encrypt, and making sure all our TLS certificates are monitored Wait, a repairable ThinkPad!? 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. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel