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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:

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

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

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

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

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. As the zeroth entry of this series, we'll have a little introduction to what it is supposed to be about and why you might want to listen. So that you don't leave without getting at least one piece of useful information, it will end with a little curio that you might find helpful someday. Back in 2010, I was the editor of the newsletter, titled The Open Pitt, for the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group in Pittsburgh. We distributed it as a two-page PDF, so had to have enough material to fill each issue. Because we were having some trouble getting contributions, I started writing columns in a series called "UNIX Curio" to occupy the empty space. They were inspired in large part by examples I had seen of people re-inventing ways to do things when utilities for the same purpose had already existed for a long time. The obvious question is: just what is a UNIX Curio? Let's start with the first word, UNIX. While a lot of people write it "Unix" instead, I have chosen to put it in all capitals because that is the way The Open Group, which controls the trademark and the certification process to use it, spells the word 1 . The history of UNIX is complex (search online for more details 2 )—the short version is that many variants emerged, often introducing incompatibilities. Even within AT&T/Bell Laboratories, two major branches came out. The Research UNIX lineage, which includes Seventh Edition (sometimes called Version 7), was often used in universities and government while System III and its more popular successor System V were clearly intended as commercial products 3 . The University of California's BSD was also very influential. My intention is to talk about things that are relatively common; ideally, they would be present on a large majority of systems so you can actually use them. Luckily, there were people who recognized the value in compatibility, so in the mid-1980s they initiated the development of the POSIX standards 4 . Publication of these not only caused commercial UNIX versions to aim for conformance—it gave Free Software implementations of utilities and operating systems a stable base to shoot for rather than having to chase multiple moving targets. As a result, today's GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD systems generally behave as specified in POSIX, even if they haven't officially earned the UNIX or POSIX labels, so I treat them as part of the UNIX world. Moving on to the second word, "curio," it just means "an object of curiosity, often one considered novel, rare, or bizarre." There are many well-used utilities in the UNIX world, but people forget about others because they are only useful in specific circumstances. And when those circumstances arise, these obscure ones don't always get remembered. One purpose of this series is to point out some of them and describe where they can be appropriately put to use. With the flexible tools available on UNIX systems and the ability to string them together, it shouldn't be surprising that people come up with new ways to accomplish a task. I don't want to claim that these curios are always the best way to do something, just that it can be helpful to know they exist and see the way someone else solved the problem. Also, if you're using an unfamiliar system, sometimes programs you are accustomed to employing might not be installed so it's good to know about options that are widely available. So why am I the person to talk about this subject? I am not a UNIX graybeard with decades of professional computing experience. If I did grow a beard, it would only be partially gray, and my working life has been spent in the engineering world mainly around safety equipment. Sadly, there I have been forced to use Windows almost exclusively. However, in my academic and personal pursuits, I have been involved with using UNIX and Linux for more than 30 years, so I do have a bit of a historical perspective. For some reason, when I encounter an unusual or obscure tool, I want to learn more about it, especially so if I find it to be useful in some way. After gaining that information, I might as well share it with you. In addition, I have been involved with Toastmasters International, a public speaking organization, for about 15 years so I have experience in presenting things orally. I was inspired to turn this article series into podcasts by murph 5 , who delivered a presentation at the 2025 OLF Conference describing how and why to contribute to Hacker Public Radio 6 . The show notes for curios 1 through 3 will consist of the articles as they were originally written (though with references added). Because some examples, especially code, can be difficult to understand when they are read out loud, the podcasts will sometimes present the information in a different way. Show notes for this curio 0 and for curios 4 and later will be written with the podcast format in mind, so they will more closely match what I say. Let's end with an actual curio to kick off the series. Have you ever needed a quick reminder about whether the file you're looking for can be found under the /usr or /var directories? On many UNIX systems, man hier will give you an overview of how the file hierarchy is organized. This manual page is not a standard, but was present in Seventh Edition UNIX 7 and many descendents, direct and indirect, including every Linux distribution I have ever used. There are attempts to standardize the layout; in the Linux world, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) 8 , now hosted by Freedesktop.org 9 , intends to set a path to be followed. It should be noted that systemd has its own idea of how things should be laid out based on the FHS; if it is in use, try man file-hierarchy instead as it will likely be a more accurate description. I hope this gives you a good idea of what to expect in future episodes. The first one will be about shell archives, so keep an eye on Hacker Public Radio's schedule for it to appear. References: The Open Group Trademarks https://www.opengroup.org/trademarks History of Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix The Unix Tutorial, Part 3 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10/page/n133/mode/2up POSIX Impact https://sites.google.com/site/jimisaak/posix-impact Correspondent: murph https://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0444.html OLF Conference - December 6th, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyEunLtqbrA&t=25882 File system hierarchy https://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/7/hier Finding a successor to the FHS https://lwn.net/Articles/1032947/ Freedesktop.org now hosts the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard https://lwn.net/Articles/1045405/ Provide feedback on this episode.

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

FreeBSD's Future, 18 years of greytrapping, PF vs Linux firewalls, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon Headlines Powering the Future of FreeBSD Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? BSDCan Organisating committee Interview News Roundup How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner BSD PF versus Linux nftables for firewalls for us 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 Unix v4 recovery, webzfs, openbgpd 9.0, MidnightBSD 4.0, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines University of Utah team discovers rare computer relic (https://ksltv.com/science-technology/university-of-utah-discovers-rare-computer-relic/853296/) The attempt to read the UNIX V4 tape is underway! (https://mastodon.social/redirect/statuses/115747843746305391) UNIX V4 Tape from University of Utah (https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw) UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again (https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/) An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape (https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223/) WebZFS (https://github.com/webzfs/webzfs) News Roundup OpenBGPD 9.0 released (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251231070524) MidnightBSD 4.0 (https://www.midnightbsd.org/notes/4.0/index.html) Let's run FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (https://briancallahan.net/blog/20251216.html) Figuring out how I want to set up the TVPC (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/figuring-out-how-i-want-to-set-up-the-tvpc/) TVPC update (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/tvpc-update/) C&C Red Alert2 in your browser (https://chronodivide.com) 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 rick - shout out.md (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/646/feedback/rick%20-%20shout%20out.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Holidays 2025 - What you been do'in? NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines What tech did we enjoy playing with or found interesting in 2025? 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 - Storage Is Cheap (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/644/feedback/Gary%20-%20Storage%20Is%20Cheap.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Upwrapping OpenZFS gifs, Propolice the OpenBSD Stack Protector, refreshing zpools, and the FreeBSD 15.0 release. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Unwrapping ZFS: Gifts from the Open Source Community (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-community-contributions-2025/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system? (https://hidde.blog/filtered-open-web/) News Roundup We can't fund our way out of the free and open source maintenance problem (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/OpenSourceFundingNotSolution) The story of Propolice, the OpenBSD stack protector (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251212094310) Copying everything off a zpool, destroying it, creating a new one, and copying everything back (https://dan.langille.org/2025/12/11/copying-everything-off-a-zpool-destroying-it-creating-a-new-one-and-copying-everything-back/) All aboard the 15.0-RELEASE train! (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/all-aboard-the-150-release-train/) Beastie Bits Running A PDP-8 From 1965 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2r_GujSc6w) The library of time (https://libraryoftime.xyz) OPNsense 25.7.9 released (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=49986.0) - OPNsense 25.10.1 business edition released (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=50052.0) 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 Martin - recordings (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/643/feedback/Martin%20-%20recording%20of%20bsdnow.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

FreeBSD 15 release, moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD, ZFS Boot Environments explained, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Welcome to the world FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE Announcement (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/) and Release Notes (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/relnotes/) We're (now) moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for Firewalls (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/OpenBSDToFreeBSDMove) - Submitted by listener Gary News Roundup ZFS Boot Environments Explained (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/zfs-boot-environments-explained/) Why I (still) love Linux (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/11/24/why-i-still-love-linux/) rocinante - A configuration management tool by the BastilleBSD team (https://github.com/BastilleBSD/rocinante) A Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug (https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/master/2025_11_24.md) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srKYxF66A0c) 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 Claudio - A Silent Reflection (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/641/feedback/Claudio%20-%20Reflection.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

FreeBSD is an OCI runtime, ZFS Disaster Recovery, Cleaning up Hammer, and some historical information, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD Officially Supported in OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-officially-supported-in-oci-runtime-specification-v1-3) ZFS Enabled Disaster Recovery for Virtualization (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-enabled-disaster-recovery-virtualization?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup How I think OpenZFS's 'written' and 'written@' dataset properties work (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWrittenPropertyHowItWorks) Make sure your Hammer cleanup cleans up (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2025/11/13/make-sure-your-hammer-cleanup-cleans-up) [TUHS] David C Brock of CHM: 2024 oral history with Ken Thompson + Doug McIlroy (https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032751.html) Special Issue “Celebrating 60 Years of ELIZA? Critical Pasts and Futures of AI” (https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/announcement/view/8) Source and state limiters introduced in pf (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251112132639) 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 Göran - grafana (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/640/feedback/G%C3%B6ran%20-%20grafana.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Reproducible builds, Highly available ZFS Pools, Self Hosting on a Framework Laptop, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-now-builds-reproducibly-and-without-root-privilege) How to Set Up a Highly Available ZFS Pool Using Mirroring and iSCSI (https://klarasystems.com/articles/highly-available-zfs-pool-setup-with-iscsi-mirroring?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop + disks (https://jamesoclaire.com/2025/10/05/self-hosting-10tb-in-s3-on-a-framework-laptop-disks/) Crucial FreeBSD Toolkit (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/crucial-freebsd-toolkit/) Some notes on OpenZFS's 'written' dataset property (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSnapshotWrittenProperty) vi improvements on Dragonfly (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2025/10/28/vi-improvements) Big news for small /usr partitions (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251112121631) 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 Patrick - Feedback (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/639/feedback/patrick%20-%20notes.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

New Open Indiana Release, Understanding Storage Performance, a Unix OS for the TI99, FreeBSD Tribal knowledge, and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Signifier flotation devices (https://davidyat.es/2025/09/27/signifier-flotation-devices) Open Indiana Hipster Announcement (https://openindiana.org/announcements/openindiana-hipster-2025-10-announcement/) Understanding Storage Performance Metrics (https://klarasystems.com/articles/understanding-storage-performance-metrics?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/380883-unix99-a-unix-like-os-for-the-ti-994a) Making the veb(4) virtual Ethernet bridge VLAN aware (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251029114507) FreeBSD tribal knowledge: minor version upgrades (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/freebsd-tribal-knowledge-minor-version-upgrades) It's been 10 years since ZFS's 10th aniversary its integration into Solaris - A Reflection (https://blogs.oracle.com/oracle-systems/post/happy-10th-birthday-zfs) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Thunderbolt on FreeBSD, ZFS on Illumos and Linux and FreeBSD, ZFS Compression, Home networking monitoring, LibreSSH and OpenSSH releases and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Thunderbolt on FreeBSD (https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/10/thunderbolt-on-freebsd) The broad state of ZFS on Illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD (as I understand it) (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSOnIllumosLinuxAndFreeBSD) News Roundup zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/18/zfs-setting-compression-and-adding-new-vdevs) The hunt for a home network monitoring solution (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/the-hunt-for-a-home-network-monitoring-solution) LibreSSL 4.2.0 Released (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251015043527) OpenSSH 10.2 released (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251010131052) - Related to 10.x versions : Post-Quantum Cryptography (https://www.openssh.com/pq.html) Check your IP infos using nginx (https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/check-your-ip-infos-using-nginx) Experimenting with Compression (just given an overview, I dont exepect you to read the all three writeups fully) Experimenting with compression off (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/experimenting-with-compression-off/) Experimenting with compression=lz4 (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/experimenting-with-compressionlz4/) Experimenting with compression=zstd (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/experimenting-with-compressionzstd/) Compression results (https://dan.langille.org/2025/10/06/compression-results) 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 Anton - Boxybsd (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/636/feedback/anton%20-%20boxybsd.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

OpenBSD 7.8, Building Enterprise Storage with Proxmox, SSD performance, Virtual Machines and more... NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines OpenBSD 7.8 Released (https://www.openbsd.org/78.html) also (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251022025822) and (https://bsd.network/@brynet/115403567146395679) Building Enterprise-Grade Storage on Proxmox with ZFS (https://klarasystems.com/articles/building-enterprise-grade-storage-on-proxmox-with-zfs) News Roundup [TUHS] Was artifacts, now ethernet (https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-July/032268.html) I wish SSDs gave you CPU performance style metrics about their activity (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SSDWritePerfMetricsWish) Migrate a KVM virtual machine to OmniOS bhyve (https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/migrate-a-kvm-virtual-machine-to-omnios-bhyve) 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 brad - bhyve (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/635/feedback/brad%20-%20bhyve.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Why Self-host?, Advanced ZFS Dataset Management, Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD, Minimal pkgbase jails / chroots, WSL-For-FreeBSD, Yubico yubikey 5 nfc on FreeBSD, The Q3 2025 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Why Self-host? (https://romanzipp.com/blog/why-a-homelab-why-self-host) Advanced ZFS Dataset Management: Snapshots, Clones, and Bookmarks (https://klarasystems.com/articles/advanced-zfs-dataset-management/) News Roundup Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD (https://btxx.org/posts/openbsd-router/) Minimal pkgbase jails / chroots (https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/minimal-pkgbase-jails-chroots-docker-oci-like.99512/) WSL-For-FreeBSD (https://github.com/BalajeS/WSL-For-FreeBSD) Yubico yubikey 5 nfc on FreeBSD (https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/yubico-yubikey-5-nfc-on-freebsd.99529) The Q3 2025 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal is Now Available (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/the-q3-2025-issue-of-the-freebsd-journal-is-now-available/) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

ZFS Features, Roadmap, and Innovations, Magical systems thinking, How VMware's Debt-Fueled Acquisition Is Killing Open Source, OpenSSH 10.1 Released, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD, Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS, Balkanization of the Internet, GhostBSD 25.02 adds 'Gershwin' desktop for a Mac-like twist, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines What the Future Brings – ZFS Features, Roadmap, and Innovations (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-new-features-roadmap-innovations?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) Magical systems thinking (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/magical-systems-thinking) The $69 Billion Domino Effect: How VMware's Debt-Fueled Acquisition Is Killing Open Source, One Repository at a Time (https://fastcode.io/2025/08/30/the-69-billion-domino-effect-how-vmwares-debt-fueled-acquisition-is-killing-open-source-one-repository-at-a-time) News Roundup OpenSSH 10.1 Released (https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-10.1) KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD (https://euroquis.nl/kde/2025/09/07/wayland.html) Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS (https://thenewstack.io/unix-co-creator-brian-kernighan-on-rust-distros-and-nixos) GhostBSD 25.02 adds 'Gershwin' desktop for a Mac-like twist (https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/27/ghostbsd_2502/) Beastie Bits Adventures in porting a Wayland Compositor to NetBSD and OpenBSD by Jeff Frasca (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo_8gnWQ4xo) 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 Kylen - CVEs (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/633/feedback/Kylen%20-%20CVEs.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

zipbomb defeated, Optimizing ZFS for High-Throughput Storage Workloads, Open Source is one person, Omada SDN Controller on FreeBSD, Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD, Back to the origins, Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines zipbomb defeated (https://www.reddit.com/r/openzfs/comments/1niu6h7/when_a_decompression_zip_bomb_meets_zfs_19_pb/) Optimizing ZFS for High-Throughput Storage Workloads (https://klarasystems.com/articles/optimizing-zfs-for-high-throughput-storage-workloads?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup Open Source is one person (https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person) Omada SDN Controller on FreeBSD (https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/08/omada-on-freebsd) Back to the origins (https://failsafe.monster/posts/another-world/) Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc2025_nat64_protocol_translation) Undeadly Bits j2k25 - OpenBSD Hackathon Japan 2025 (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250601104254) OpenSSH will now adapt IP QoS to actual sessions and traffic (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250818113047) Preliminary support for Raspberry Pi 5 (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250903064251) OpenBSD enters 7.8-beta (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250911045955) Full BSDCan 2025 video playlist(s) available (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250912124932) OpenBGPD 8.9 released (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250926141610) 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 Brad - a few things (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/632/feedback/Brad%20-%20a%20few%20things.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

FreeBSD Foundation Q2 2025 Status Update, Keeping Data Safe with OpenZFS, Ollama on FreeBSD Using GPU Passthrough, ClonOS, Preliminary support for Raspberry Pi 5, Sylve: Manage bhyve VMs and Clusters on FreeBSD, Preventing Systemd DHCP RELEASE Behavior, Call for testing - Samba 4.22, and more

Secure Boot for FreeBSD, Systems lie about their proper functioning, Teching the tech and rushing the endorphins, Passing a Device Into A FreeBSD Jail With A Stable Name, ZFS snapshots aren't as immutable as I thought, due to snapshot metadata, Let's write a peephole optimizer for QBE's arm64 backend, Migrate a Peertube instance from Debian to FreeBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Secure Boot for FreeBSD (https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/how-to-set-up-secure-boot-for-freebsd.99169/) The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250716-00/?p=111383) News Roundup Teching the tech and rushing the endorphins (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/teching-the-tech-and-rushing-the-endorphins) Passing a Device Into A FreeBSD Jail With A Stable Name (https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/09/passing-device-freebsd-jail-with-stable-name/) ZFS snapshots aren't as immutable as I thought, due to snapshot metadata (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSnapshotsNotFullyImmutable) Let's write a peephole optimizer for QBE's arm64 backend (https://briancallahan.net/blog/20250901.html) Migrate a Peertube instance from Debian to FreeBSD (https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/migrate-a-peertube-instance-from-debian-to-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 -Steve - Interviews (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/631/feedback/Steve%20-%20Interviews.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

The Death of Industrial Design, Host naming Convensions, Symbian reflections, bash timeouts, nvme vs ssds, a system to organize your life, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics (https://hackaday.com/2025/07/23/the-death-of-industrial-design-and-the-era-of-dull-electronics) Host Naming Convention (https://vulcanridr.mataroa.blog/blog/host-naming-convention) News Roundup Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian (https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/symbian_forgotten_foss_phone_os/) TIL: timeout in Bash scripts (https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/timeout/) It seems like NVMe SSDs have overtaken SATA SSDs for high capacities (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/NVMeOvertakingSATAForSSDs) A system to organise your life (https://johnnydecimal.com) 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 - Nelson - Books (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/629/feedback/Nelson%20-%20books.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

The Hype is the Product, Programmers Aren't So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl, Is OpenBSD 10x faster than Linux?, How to install FreeBSD on providers that don't support it with mfsBSD, SSHX, Zvault Status Update, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines The Hype is the Product (https://rys.io/en/180.html) Programmers Aren't So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl (https://www.wired.com/story/programmers-arent-humble-anymore-nobody-codes-in-perl) News Roundup Is OpenBSD 10x faster than Linux? (https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/is-OpenBSD-10x-faster-than-Linux) How to install FreeBSD on providers that don't support it with mfsBSD (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/07/02/install_freebsd_providers_mfsbsd/) SSHX (https://github.com/ekzhang/sshx) Zvault Status Update (https://github.com/zvaultio/Community/blob/main/posts/2025-07-13.md) Undeadly Bits 4096 colours and flashing text on the console! (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250705081315) Font caching no longer runs as root (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250717061920) OpenSSH will now adapt IP QoS to actual sessions and traffic (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250818113047) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug, crawler plague and the fragility of the web, Classic CDE (Common Desktop Environment) coming to OpenBSD, Some notes on DMARC policy inheritance and a gotcha, GNAT (Ada) is in fact fully supported on illumos, Eighteen Years of Greytrapping, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too) (https://despairlabs.com/blog/posts/2025-07-10-an-openzfs-bug-and-the-humans-that-made-it) The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebIsKindOfFragile) News Roundup Classic CDE (Common Desktop Environment) coming to OpenBSD (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250730080301) Some notes on DMARC policy inheritance and a gotcha (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/spam/DMARCPolicyInheritanceNotes) Despite thoughts to the contrary, GNAT (Ada) is in fact fully supported on illumos (https://briancallahan.net/blog/20250817.html) Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/08/eighteen-years-of-greytrapping-is.html) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

FreeBSD Journal Summer 2025 Edition, Java hiding in plain sight, BSDCan 2025 Trip report, Call for testing OpenBSD webcams, recent new features in OpenSSH, Improved 802.11g AP compatibility check, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD Journal April/May/June 2025 Edition (https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based-edition/networking-3/) BSDCan 2025 Trip Report – Chuck Tuffli (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/bsdcan-2025-trip-report-chuck-tuffli/) News Roundup Call for testing: USB webcams (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250808083341) From Minecraft to Markets: Java Hiding in Plain Sight (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/from-minecraft-to-markets-java-hiding-in-plain-sight/) Recent new features in OpenSSH (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250802084523) NetBSD 11.0 release process underway (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_11_0_release_process) Interview: Nico Cartron 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow) Special Guest: Nico Cartron.

Why FreeBSD is the Right Choice for Embedded Devices, The Day GlusterFS Tried to Kill My Career, DragonFly DRM updated, NetBSD on Raspberry Pi, Speed up suspend/resume for FreeBSD, Revisiting ZFS's ZIL, separate log devices, and writes, One of my blog articles featured on the BSD Now podcast episode, New build cluster speeds up daily autobuilds, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Why FreeBSD is the Right Choice for Embedded Devices (https://klarasystems.com/articles/why-freebsd-is-the-right-choice-for-embedded-devices/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) The Day GlusterFS Tried to Kill My Career (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/05/21/the_day_glusterfs_tried_to_kill_my_career/) News Roundup DragonFly DRM updated (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2025/07/31/dragonfly-drm-updated/) NetBSD on Raspberry Pi! (https://www.ncartron.org/netbsd-on-raspberry-pi.html) Speed up suspend/resume for FreeBSD (https://eugene-andrienko.com/en/it/2025/07/28/speed-up-suspend-resume-freebsd.html) Revisiting ZFS's ZIL, separate log devices, and writes (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWritesAndZILIII) One of my blog articles featured on the BSD Now podcast episode! (https://www.ncartron.org/one-of-my-blog-articles-featured-on-the-bsd-now-podcast-episode.html) New build cluster speeds up daily autobuilds (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/new_build_cluster_speeds_up) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

OpenBSD chflags vs. Log Tampering, How to Defend Against Aggressive Web Scrapers With Anubis on FreeBSD 14, OpenBSD Innovations, Full Ada programming toolchain NOW on FreeBSD, Compute GPUs can have odd failures under Linux (still), A handy collection of shell aliases from my bash startup, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines When Root Meets Immutable: OpenBSD chflags vs. Log Tampering (https://rsadowski.de/posts/2025/openbsd-immutable-system-logs/) How to Defend Against Aggressive Web Scrapers With Anubis on FreeBSD 14 (https://herrbischoff.com/2025/07/how-to-defend-against-aggressive-web-scrapers-with-anubis-on-freebsd-14/) News Roundup OpenBSD Innovations (https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html) Full Ada programming toolchain NOW on FreeBSD (https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1m21t7o/ann_full_ada_programming_toolchain_now_on_freebsd/) Compute GPUs can have odd failures under Linux (still) (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ComputeGPUsStillFinicky) A handy collection of shell aliases from my bash startup (https://blog.petdance.com/2020/02/03/handy-collection-of-shell-aliases/) 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 Efraim - modernizing (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/624/feedback/Efraim%20-%20modernizing.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for FreeBSD Project, Your Guide to Lock-In Free Infrastructure, and we interview David Gwynne from the University of Queensland and developer on the OpenBSD project. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for FreeBSD Project (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/software-bill-of-materials-sbom-for-freebsd-project/) FreeBSD Summer 2025 Roundup: Your Guide to Lock-In Free Infrastructure (https://klarasystems.com/articles/freebsd-guide-to-lock-in-free-infrastructure) Interview David Gwynne from the University of Queensland and developer on the OpenBSD project. Interview thoughts from Benedict and Jason 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow) Special Guest: David Gwynne.

This week Benedict interviews Mark Phillips , the Technical Marketing Manager at the FreeBSD Foundation, while they both are at a Hackathon in Germany. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Interview Mark Phillips - Technical Marketing Manager at the FreeBSD Foundation (https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team) Personal website (https://probably.co.uk/) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow) Special Guest: Mark Phillips.

Designing a Storage Pool, The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration, Generic BSD installations on ARM64 UEFI, dmtargetcrypt_ng - Add next-generation implementation, The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals, The Book of PF 4th Edition Is Coming Soon, Periodical 20 Localized Computing, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Designing a Storage Pool: RAIDZ, Mirrors, and Hybrid Configurations (https://klarasystems.com/articles/designing-storage-pool-raidz-mirrors-hybrid-configurations/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/the-report-of-my-death-was-an-exaggeration/) News Roundup Generic BSD installations on ARM64 UEFI: results and first impressions (https://mekboy.ru/post/bsd-uefi-arm64/) dmtargetcrypt_ng - Add next-generation implementation (https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commit/14e6c73d4c479e4ab26571490758da27da5cbbad) The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XTerminalsNotImmediate) Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon (https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/07/yes-book-of-pf-4th-edition-is-coming.html) Periodical 20 — Localized Computing (https://www.chrbutler.com/2024-10-16) 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 -Aleksej - RockPro64 (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/621/feedback/Aleksej%20-%20RockPro64.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

The Server That Wasn't Meant to Exist, ZFS Performance Tuning – Optimizing for your Workload, what would a multi-user web server look like, That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List, rsync's defaults are not always enough, jemalloc Postmortem, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines The Server That Wasn't Meant to Exist (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/05/13/the_server_that_wasnt_meant_to_exist/) ZFS Performance Tuning – Optimizing for your Workload (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-performance-tuning-optimizing-for-your-workload/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) News Roundup What would a multi-user web server look like? (A thought experiment) (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/MultiUserWebServerWildIdea) That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List (https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/05/that-grumpy-bsd-guy-short-reading-list.html) rsync's defaults are not always enough (https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/05/31/sync/) jemalloc Postmortem (https://jasone.github.io/2025/06/12/jemalloc-postmortem/) Beastie Bits IPv6 and proxying on DragonFly (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2025/06/25/ipv6-and-proxying-on-dragonfly/) BoxyBSD (https://boxybsd.com) Sysctltui (https://alfonsosiciliano.gitlab.io/posts/2025-05-29-sysctltui.html) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

Disaster Recovery with ZFS: A Practical Guide, The best interfaces we never built, Choose Tools That Make You Happy, open source has turned into two worlds, TrueNAS CORE is Dead – Long Live zVault, You should start a computer club in the place that you live, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Disaster Recovery with ZFS: A Practical Guide (https://klarasystems.com/articles/disaster-recovery-with-zfs-practical-guide/?utm_source=BSD%20Now&utm_medium=Podcast) The best interfaces we never built (https://www.chrbutler.com/the-best-interfaces-we-never-built) News Roundup You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy (https://borretti.me/article/you-can-choose-tools-that-make-you-happy) I feel open source has turned into two worlds (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/OpenSourceTwoWorlds) UPDATE 2 – TrueNAS CORE is Dead – Long Live zVault (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versus-truenas-scale/#truenas-core-dead-long-live-zvault) You should start a computer club in the place that you live (https://startacomputer.club) 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 Brad - syslogng issue (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/618/feedback/Brad%20-%20syslogng%20issue.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

A year of funded FreeBSD, ZFS Performance Tuning – Optimizing for your Workload, Three Ways to Try FreeBSD in Under Five Minutes, FFS optimizations with dirhash, j2k25 hackathon report from kn@, NetBSD welcomes Google Summer of Code contributors, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines A year of funded FreeBSD (https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2025-06-06-A-year-of-funded-FreeBSD.html) ZFS Performance Tuning – Optimizing for your Workload (https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-performance-tuning-optimizing-for-your-workload/) News Roundup Three Ways to Try FreeBSD in Under Five Minutes (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/three-ways-to-try-freebsd-in-under-five-minutes/) FFS optimizations with dirhash (https://rsadowski.de/posts/2025/ffs-optimizations-dirhash/) j2k25 hackathon report from kn@: installer, low battery, and more (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250616082212) NetBSD welcomes Google Summer of Code contributors (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc2025_welcome_contributors) 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 (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)

FreeBSD version 14.3 is available, Reliable ZFS Storage on Commodity Hardware, My website is ugly because I made it, Semi distributed filesystems with ZFS and Sanoid, April 2025 Laptop Support and Usability Project Update, UDP sockets instead of BPF in dhcpd(8), and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD 14.3 released (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.3R/announce/) Reliable ZFS Storage on Commodity Hardware (https://klarasystems.com/articles/cost-efficient-storage-commodity-hardware/) News Roundup My website is ugly because I made it (https://goodinternetmagazine.com/my-website-is-ugly-because-i-made-it/) Semi distributed filesystems with ZFS and Sanoid (https://anil.recoil.org/notes/syncoid-sanoid-zfs) April 2025 Laptop Support and Usability Project Update (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/april-2025-laptop-support-and-usability-project-update/) dhcpd(8): use UDP sockets instead of BPF (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250613111800) 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 No feedback this week. Send more... Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)