
Created by three guys who love BSD, we cover the latest news and have an extensive series of tutorials, as well as interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community. It also serves as a platform for support and questions. We love and advocate FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and TrueOS. Our show aims to be helpful and informative for new users that want to learn about them, but still be entertaining for the people who are already pros. The show airs on Wednesdays at 2:00PM (US Eastern time) and the edited version is usually up the following day.
53: It's HAMMER Time
It's our one year anniversary episode, and we'll be talking with Reyk Floeter about the new OpenBSD webserver - why it was created and where it's going. After that, we'll show you the ins and outs of DragonFly's HAMMER FS. Answers to viewer-submitted questions and the latest headlines, on a very special BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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FreeBSD foundation's new IPSEC project
- The FreeBSD foundation, along with Netgate, is sponsoring some new work on the IPSEC code
- With bandwidth in the 10-40 gigabit per second range, the IPSEC stack needs to be brought up to modern standards in terms of encryption and performance
- This new work will add AES-CTR and AES-GCM modes to FreeBSD's implementation, borrowing some code from OpenBSD
- The updated stack will also support AES-NI for hardware-based encryption speed ups
- It's expected to be completed by the end of September, and will also be in pfSense 2.2 ***
NetBSD at Shimane Open Source Conference 2014
- The Japanese NetBSD users group held a NetBSD booth at the Open Source Conference 2014 in Shimane on August 23
- One of the developers has gathered a bunch of pictures from the event and wrote a fairly lengthy summary
- They had NetBSD running on all sorts of devices, from Raspberry Pis to Sun Java Stations
- Some visitors said that NetBSD had the most chaotic booth at the conference ***
pfSense 2.1.5 released
- A new version of the pfSense 2.1 branch is out
- Mostly a security-focused release, including three web UI fixes and the most recent OpenSSL fix (which FreeBSD has still not patched in -RELEASE after nearly a month)
- It also includes many other bug fixes, check the blog post for the full list ***
Systems, Science and FreeBSD
- Our friend George Neville-Neil gave a presentation at Microsoft Research
- It's mainly about using FreeBSD as a platform for research, inside and outside of universities
- The talk describes the OS and its features, ports, developer community, documentation, who uses BSD and much more ***
Interview - Reyk Floeter - reyk@openbsd.org / @reykfloeter
OpenBSD's HTTP daemon
Tutorial
A crash course on HAMMER FS
News Roundup
OpenBSD's rcctl tool usage
- OpenBSD recently got a new tool for managing /etc/rc.conf.local in -current
- Similar to FreeBSD's "sysrc" tool, it eliminates the need to manually edit rc.conf.local to enable or disable services
- This blog post - from a BSD Now viewer - shows the typical usage of the new tool to alter the startup services
- It won't make it to 5.6, but will be in 5.7 (next May) ***
pfSense mini-roundup
- We found five interesting pfSense articles throughout the week and wanted to quickly mention them
- The first item in our pfSense mini-roundup details how you can stream Netflix to in non-US countries using a "smart" DNS service
- The second post talks about setting ip IPv6, in particular if Comcast is your ISP
- The third one features pfSense on Softpedia, a more mainstream tech site
- The fourth post describes how to filter HTTPS traffic with Squid and pfSense
- The last article describes setting up a VPN using the "tinc" daemon and pfSense
- It seems to be lesser known, compared to things like OpenVPN or SSH tunnels, so it's interesting to read about
- This pfSense HQ website seems to have lots of other cool pfSense items, check it out ***
OpenBSD's new buffer cache
- OpenBSD has traditionally used the tried-and-true LRU algorithm for buffer cache, but it has a few problems
- Ted Unangst has just switched to a new algorithm in -current, partially based on 2Q, and details some of his work
- Initial tests show positive results in terms of cache responsiveness
- Check the post for all the fine details ***
BSDTalk episode 244
- Another new BSDTalk is up and, this time around, Will Backman interviews Ken Moore, the developer of the new BSD desktop environment
- They discuss the history of development, differences between it and other DEs, lots of topics
- If you're more of a visual person, fear not, because...
- We'll have Ken on next week, including a full "virtual walkthrough" of Lumina and its applications ***