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.
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376: Build stable packages
FreeBSD 12.2 is available, ZFS Webinar, Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, how the OpenBSD -stable packages are built, OPNsense 20.7.4 released, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD 12.2 Release (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/relnotes.html) The release notes for FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 12-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented. ZFS Webinar: November 18th (https://klarasystems.com/learning/best-practices-for-optimizing-zfs1/) Join us on November 18th for a live discussion with Allan Jude (VP of Engineering at Klara Inc) in this webinar centred on “best practices of ZFS” Building Your Storage Array – Everything from picking the best hardware to RAID-Z and using mirrors. Keeping up with Data Growth – Expanding and growing your pool, and of course, shrinking with device evacuation. Datasets and Properties – Controlling settings with properties and many other tricks! News Roundup Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/google_summer_of_code_20202) Sys2syz would give an extra edge to Syzkaller for NetBSD. It has a potential of efficiently automating the conversion of syscall definitions to syzkaller’s grammar. This can aid in increasing the number of syscalls covered by Syzkaller significantly with the minimum possibility of manual errors. Let’s delve into its internals. How the OpenBSD -stable packages are built (https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2020-10-29-official-openbsd-stable-architecture.html) In this long blog post, I will write about the technical details of the OpenBSD stable packages building infrastructure. I have setup the infrastructure with the help of Theo De Raadt who provided me the hardware in summer 2019, since then, OpenBSD users can upgrade their packages using pkg_add -u for critical updates that has been backported by the contributors. Many thanks to them, without their work there would be no packages to build. Thanks to pea@ who is my backup for operating this infrastructure in case something happens to me. OPNsense 20.7.4 released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-20-7-4-released/) This release finally wraps up the recent Netmap kernel changes and tests. The Realtek vendor driver was updated as well as third party software cURL, libxml2, OpenSSL, PHP, Suricata, Syslog-ng and Unbound just to name a couple of them. Beastie Bits Binutils and linker changes (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2020/11/03/25120.html) 28 Years of NetBSD contributions (https://github.com/NetBSD/src/graphs/contributors) Bluetooth Audio on OpenBSD (https://ifconfig.se/bluetooth-audio-openbsd.html) K8s Bhyve (https://k8s-bhyve.convectix.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 Sean - C Flags (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/376/feedback/Sean%20-%20C%20Flags.md) Thierry - RPI ZFS question (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/376/feedback/Thierry%20-%20RPI%20ZFS%20question.md) Thierry's script (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/376/feedback/script.md) *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
375: Virtually everything
bhyve - The FreeBSD Hypervisor, udf information leak, being a vim user instead of classic vi, FreeBSD on ESXi ARM Fling: Fixing Virtual Hardware, new FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin in LLDB, OpenBSD Laptop, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines bhyve - The FreeBSD Hypervisor (https://klarasystems.com/articles/bhyve-the-freebsd-hypervisor/) FreeBSD has had varying degrees of support as a hypervisor host throughout its history. For a time during the mid-2000s, VMWare Workstation 3.x could be made to run under FreeBSD’s Linux Emulation, and Qemu was ported in 2004, and later the kQemu accelerator in 2005. Then in 2009 a port for VirtualBox was introduced. All of these solutions suffered from being a solution designed for a different operating system and then ported to FreeBSD, requiring constant maintenance. ZFS and FreeBSD Support Klara offers flexible Support Subscriptions for your ZFS and FreeBSD infrastructure. Get a world class team of experts to back you up. Check it out on our website! (https://klarasystems.com/support/) udf info leak (https://gist.github.com/CTurt/a00fb4164e13342567830b052aaed94b) FreeBSD UDF driver info leak Analysis done on FreeBSD release 11.0 because that's what I had around. + Fix committed to FreeBSD (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/366005) News Roundup I'm now a user of Vim, not classical Vi (partly because of windows) (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/VimNowAUser) In the past I've written entries (such as this one) where I said that I was pretty much a Vi user, not really a Vim user, because I almost entirely stuck to Vi features. In a comment on my entry on not using and exploring Vim features, rjc reinforced this, saying that I seemed to be using vi instead of vim (and that there was nothing wrong with this). For a long time I thought this way myself, but these days this is not true any more. These days I really want Vim, not classical Vi. FreeBSD on ESXi ARM Fling: Fixing Virtual Hardware (https://vincerants.com/freebsd-on-esxi-arm-fling-fixing-virtual-hardware/) With the current state of FreeBSD on ARM in general, a number of hardware drivers are either set to not auto-load on boot, or are entirely missing altogether. This page is to document my findings with various bits of hardware, and if possible, list fixes. Introduction of a new FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin in LLDB (https://www.moritz.systems/blog/introduction-of-a-new-freebsd-remote-process-plugin-in-lldb/) Moritz Systems have been contracted by the FreeBSD Foundation to modernize the LLDB debugger’s support for FreeBSD. We are writing a new plugin utilizing the more modern client-server layout that is already used by Darwin, Linux, NetBSD and (unofficially) OpenBSD. The new plugin is going to gradually replace the legacy one. OpenBSD Laptop (https://functionallyparanoid.com/2020/10/14/openbsd-laptop/) Hi, I know it’s been a while. I recently had to nuke and re-pave my personal laptop and I thought it would be a nice thing to share with the community how I set up OpenBSD on it so that I have a useful, modern, secure environment for getting work done. I’m not going to say I’m the expert on this or that this is the BEST way to set up OpenBSD, but I thought it would be worthwhile for folks doing Google searches to at least get my opinion on this. So, given that, let’s go… 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 Ethan - Linux user wanting to try out OpenBSD (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/375/feedback/Ethan%20-%20Linux%20user%20wanting%20to%20try%20out%20OpenBSD.md) iian - Learning IT (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/375/feedback/iian%20-%20Learning%20IT.md) johnny - bsd swag (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/375/feedback/johnny%20-%20bsd%20swag.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
374: OpenBSD’s 25th anniversary
OpenBSD 6.8 has been released, NetBSD 9.1 is out, OpenZFS devsummit report, BastilleBSD’s native container management for FreeBSD, cleaning up old tarsnap backups, Michael W. Lucas’ book sale, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines OpenBSD 6.8 (https://www.openbsd.org/68.html) Released Oct 18, 2020. (OpenBSD's 25th anniversary) NetBSD 9.1 Released (https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.1.html) The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.1, the first update of the NetBSD 9 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 (https://klarasystems.com/articles/openzfs-developer-summit-part-1/) As with most other conferences in the last six months, this year’s OpenZFS Developer’s Summit was a bit different than usual. Held via Zoom to accommodate for 2020’s new normal in terms of social engagements, the conference featured a mix of talks delivered live via webinars, and breakout sessions held as regular meetings. This helped recapture some of the “hallway track” that would be lost in an online conference. • After attending the conference, I wrote up some of my notes from each of the talks • Part 2 (https://klarasystems.com/articles/openzfs-developer-summit-part-2/) ZFS and FreeBSD Support Klara offers flexible Support Subscriptions for your ZFS and FreeBSD infrastructure, simply sign up for our monthly subscription! What's even better is that for the month of October we are giving away 3 months for free, for every yearly subscription, and one month free when you sign up for a 6-months subscription! Check it out on our website! (https://klarasystems.com/support/) News Roundup BastilleBSD - native container management for FreeBSD (https://fibric.hashnode.dev/bastillebsd-native-container-management-for-freebsd) Some time ago, I had the requirement to use FreeBSD in a project, and soon the question came up if Docker and Kubernetes can be used. On FreeBSD, Docker is not very well supported, and even if you can get it running, Linux is used in a Docker container. My experience with Docker on FreeBSD is awful, and so I started looking for alternatives. A quick search on one of the most significant online search engines led me to Jails and then to BastilleBSD. Tarsnap – cleaning up old backups (https://dan.langille.org/2020/09/10/tarsnap-cleaning-up-old-backups/) I use Tarsnap for my critical data. Case in point, I use it to backup my Bacula database dump. I use Bacula to backup my hosts. The database in question keeps track of what was backed up, from what host, the file size, checksum, where that backup is now, and many other items. Losing this data is annoying but not a disaster. It can be recreated from the backup volumes, but that is time consuming. As it is, the file is dumped daily, and rsynced to multiple locations. MWL - BookSale (https://mwl.io/archives/8009) For those interested in such things, I recently posted my 60,000th tweet. This prodded me to try an experiment I’ve been pondering for a while. Over at my ebookstore, two of my books are now on a “Name Your Own Price” sale. You can get git commit murder and PAM Mastery for any price you wish, with a minimum of $1. Beastie Bits Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #109 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9upVbGSBFo) The UNIX Time-Sharing System - Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson - July 1974 (https://chsasank.github.io/classic_papers/unix-time-sharing-system.html#) Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE) *** ###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 lars - infosec handbook (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/374/feedback/lars%20-%20infosec%20handbook.md) scott - zfs import (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/374/feedback/scott%20-%20zfs%20import.md) zhong - first episode (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/374/feedback/zhong%20-%20first%20episode.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
373: Kyle Evans Interview
We have an interview with Kyle Evans for you this week. We talk about his grep project, lua and flua in base, as well as bectl, being on the core team and a whole lot of other stuff. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Interview - Kyle Evans - kevans@freebsd.org (mailto:kevans@freebsd.org) / @kaevans91 (https://twitter.com/kaevans91) 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)
372: Slow SSD scrubs
Wayland on BSD, My BSD sucks less than yours, Even on SSDs, ongoing activity can slow down ZFS scrubs drastically, OpenBSD on the Desktop, simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines Wayland on BSD (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and) After I posted about the new default window manager in NetBSD I got a few questions, including "when is NetBSD switching from X11 to Wayland?", Wayland being X11's "new" rival. In this blog post, hopefully I can explain why we aren't yet! My BSD sucks less than yours (https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-full_paper.pdf) This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different "visions" and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way. Video + EuroBSDCon 2017 Part 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhpaKuXKob4) + EuroBSDCon 2017 Part 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYp70KWD824) News Roundup Even on SSDs, ongoing activity can slow down ZFS scrubs drastically (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSSDActivitySlowsScrubs) Back in the days of our OmniOS fileservers, which used HDs (spinning rust) across iSCSI, we wound up changing kernel tunables to speed up ZFS scrubs and saw a significant improvement. When we migrated to our current Linux fileservers with SSDs, I didn't bother including these tunables (or the Linux equivalent), because I expected that SSDs were fast enough that it didn't matter. Indeed, our SSD pools generally scrub like lightning. OpenBSD on the Desktop (Part I) (https://paedubucher.ch/articles/2020-09-05-openbsd-on-the-desktop-part-i.html) Let's install OpenBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad X270. I used this computer for my computer science studies. It has both Arch Linux and Windows 10 installed as dual boot. Now that I'm no longer required to run Windows, I can ditch the dual boot and install an operating system of my choice. A simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm(1) (https://www.tumfatig.net/20200923/a-simple-shell-status-bar-for-cwm/) These days, I try to use simple and stock software as much as possible on my OpenBSD laptop. I’ve been playing with cwm(1) for weeks and I was missing a status bar. After trying things like Tint2, Polybar etc, I discovered @gonzalo’s termbar. Thanks a lot! As I love scripting, I decided to build my own. Beastie Bits DragonFly v5.8.3 released to address to issues (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2020-September/769777.html) OpenSSH 8.4 released (http://www.openssh.com/txt/release-8.4) 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 Dane - FreeBSD vs Linux in Microservices and Containters (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/372/feedback/Dane%20-%20FreeBSD%20vs%20Linux%20in%20Microservices%20and%20Containters.md) Mason - questions.md (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/372/feedback/Mason%20-%20questions.md) Michael - Tmux License.md (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/372/feedback/Michael%20-%20Tmux%20License.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
371: Wildcards running wild
New Project: zedfs.com, TrueNAS CORE Ready for Deployment, IPC in FreeBSD 11: Performance Analysis, Unix Wildcards Gone Wild, Unix Wars, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines My New Project: zedfs.com (https://www.oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/80/) Have you ever had an idea that keeps coming back to you over and over again? For a week? For a month? I know that feeling. My new project was born from this feeling. On this blog, I mix content a lot. I have written personal posts (not many of them, but still), FreeBSD development posts, development posts, security posts, and ZFS posts. This mixed content can be problematic sometimes. I share a lot of stuff here, and readers don’t know what to expect next. I am just excited by so many things, and I want to share that excitement with you! TrueNAS CORE is Ready for Deployment (https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/truenas-12-rc-1/) TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 was released yesterday and with it, TrueNAS CORE is ready for deployment. The merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image can now begin its path into mainstream use. TrueNAS CORE is the new FreeNAS and is on schedule. The TrueNAS 12.0 BETA process started in June and has been the most successful BETA release ever with more than 3,000 users and only minor issues. Ars Technica provided a detailed technical walkthrough of the original BETA. There is a long list of features and performance improvements. During the BETA process, TrueNAS 12.0 demonstrated over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60. News Roundup Interprocess Communication in FreeBSD 11: Performance Analysis (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.02145.pdf) Interprocess communication, IPC, is one of the most fundamental functions of a modern operating system, playing an essential role in the fabric of contemporary applications. This report conducts an investigation in FreeBSD of the real world performance considerations behind two of the most common IPC mechanisms; pipes and sockets. A simple benchmark provides a fair sense of effective bandwidth for each, and analysis using DTrace, hardware performance counters and the operating system’s source code is presented. We note that pipes outperform sockets by 63% on average across all configurations, and further that the size of userspace transmission buffers has a profound effect on performance — larger buffers are beneficial up to a point (∼ 32-64 KiB) after which performance collapses as a result of devastating cache exhaustion. A deep scrutiny of the probe effects at play is also presented, justifying the validity of conclusions drawn from these experiments. Back To The Future: Unix Wildcards Gone Wild (https://www.defensecode.com/public/DefenseCode_Unix_WildCards_Gone_Wild.txt) First of all, this article has nothing to do with modern hacking techniques like ASLR bypass, ROP exploits, 0day remote kernel exploits or Chrome's Chain-14-Different-Bugs-To-Get-There... Nope, nothing of the above. This article will cover one interesting old-school Unix hacking technique, that will still work nowadays in 2013. Unix Wars (https://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_unix_war.htm) Dozens of different operating systems have been developed over the years, but only Unix has grown in so many varieties. There are three main branches. Four factors have facilitated this growth... 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 Chris - installing FreeBSD 13-current (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/371/feedback/Chris%20-%20installing%20FreeBSD%2013-current.md) Dane - FreeBSD History Lesson (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/371/feedback/Dane%20-%20FreeBSD%20History%20Lesson.md) Marc - linux compat (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/371/feedback/Marc%20-%20linux%20compat.md) Mason - apropos battery (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/371/feedback/Mason%20-%20apropos%20battery.md) Paul - a topic idea (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/371/feedback/Paul%20-%20a%20topic%20idea.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
370: Testing shutdown
The world’s first OpenZFS based live image, FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration video, FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020, testing the shutdown mechanism, login_ldap added to OpenBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines FuryBSD 2020-Q3 The world’s first OpenZFS based live image (https://www.furybsd.org/furybsd-2020-q3-the-worlds-first-openzfs-based-live-image/) FuryBSD is a tool to test drive stock FreeBSD desktop images in read write mode to see if it will work for you before installing. In order to provide the most reliable experience possible while preserving the integrity of the system the LiveCD now leverages ZFS, compression, replication, a memory file system, and reroot (pivot root). FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration: Pt 1 Why? (https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/09/freebsd-subversion-to-git-migration.html) FreeBSD moving to Git: Why? With luck, I'll be writing a few blogs on FreeBSD's move to git later this year. Today, we'll start with "why"? Video from Warner Losh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9lKr_M-DI) News Roundup FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020 (https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2020/09/17/instant-workstation.html) A little over a year ago I published an instant-workstation script for FreeBSD. The idea is to have an installed FreeBSD system, then run a shell script that uses only base-system utilities and installs and configures a workstation setup for you. nut – testing the shutdown mechanism (https://dan.langille.org/2020/09/10/nut-testing-the-shutdown-mechanism/) Following on from my recent nut setup, this is the second in a series of three posts. The next post will deal with adjusting startup and shutdown times to be sure everything proceeds as required. login_ldap added to OpenBSD -current (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200913081040) With this commit, Martijn van Duren (martijn@) added login_ldap(8) to -current + https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=159992319027593&w=2 Beastie Bits NetBSD current now has GCC 9.3.0 for x86/ARM (https://twitter.com/netbsd/status/1305082782457245696) MidnightBSD 1.2.8 (https://www.justjournal.com/users/mbsd/entry/33802) MidnightBSD 2.0-Current (https://www.justjournal.com/users/mbsd/entry/33806) Retro UNIX 8086 v1 operating system has been developed by Erdogan Tan as a special purposed derivation of original UNIX v1 (https://www.singlix.com/runix/) *** 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 - rcorder (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/370/feedback/Rick%20-%20rcorder.md) Dan - machiatto bin (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/370/feedback/dan%20-%20machiatto%20bin.md) Luis - old episodes (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/370/feedback/luis%20-%20old%20episodes.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
369: Where rc.d belongs
High Availability Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD, CARP, pfsync, and ifstated, Building the Development Version of Emacs on NetBSD, rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc, FreeBSD 11.3 EOL, OPNsense 20.7.1 Released, MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) Headlines High Availability Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD, CARP, pfsync, and ifstated (https://dzone.com/articles/high-availability-routerfirewall-using-openbsd-car) I have been running OpenBSD on a Soekris net5501 for my router/firewall since early 2012. Because I run a multitude of services on this system (more on that later), the meager 500Mhz AMD Geode + 512MB SDRAM was starting to get a little sluggish while trying to do anything via the terminal. Despite the perceived performance hit during interactive SSH sessions, it still supported a full 100Mbit connection with NAT, so I wasn’t overly eager to change anything. Luckily though, my ISP increased the bandwidth available on my plan tier to 150Mbit+. Unfortunately, the Soekris only contained 4xVIA Rhine Fast Ethernet. So now, I was using a slow system and wasting money by not being able to fully utilize my connection. Building the Development Version of Emacs on NetBSD (https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/08/25/building-the-development-version-of-emacs-on-netbsd/) I hadn’t really planned on installing a NetBSD VM (after doing all the other two BSDs), but then a NetBSD-related Emacs bug report arrived. News Roundup rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc (https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html) Let’s open with the controversy: the scripts that live under /etc/rc.d/ in FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are in the wrong place. They all should live in /libexec/rc.d/ because they are code, not configuration. This misplacement is something that has bugged me for ages but I never had the energy to open this can of worms back when I was very involved in NetBSD. I suspect it would have been a draining discussion and a very difficult thing to change. FreeBSD 11.3 EOL (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2020-September/001982.html) As of September 30, 2020, FreeBSD 11.3 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 11.3 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible. OPNsense 20.7.1 Released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-20-7-1-released/) Overall, the jump to HardenedBSD 12.1 is looking promising from our end. From the reported issues we still have more logging quirks to investigate and especially Netmap support (used in IPS and Sensei) is lacking in some areas that were previously working. Patches are being worked on already so we shall get there soon enough. Stay tuned. MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out (https://www.justjournal.com/users/mbsd/entry/33801) MidnightBSD 1.2.7 is available via the FTP/HTTP and mirrors as well as github. It includes several bug fixes and security updates over the last ISO release and is recommended for new installations. Users who don't want to updatee the whole OS, should consider at least updating libmport as there are many package management fixes Beastie Bits Tarsnap podcast (https://blog.firosolutions.com/2020/08/tarsnap-podcast/) NetBSD Tips and Tricks (http://students.engr.scu.edu/~sschaeck/netbsd/index.html) FreeBSD mini-git Primer (https://hackmd.io/hJgnfzd5TMK-VHgUzshA2g) GhostBSD Financial Reports (https://ghostbsd.org/financial_reports_from_January_to_June_2020) *** 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 Daniel - Documentation Tooling (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/369/feedback/Daniel%20-%20Documentation%20Tooling.md) Fongaboo - Where did the ZFS tutorial Go? (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/369/feedback/Fongaboo%20-%20Where%20did%20the%20ZFS%20Tutorial%20Go.md) Johnny - Browser Cold Wars (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/369/feedback/Johnny%20-%20Browser%20Cold%20Wars.md) *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
368: Changing OS roles
Modernizing the OpenBSD Console, OS roles have changed, FreeBSD Cluster with Pacemaker and Corosync, Wine in a 32-bit sandbox on 64-bit NetBSD, Find package which provides a file in OpenBSD, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines Modernizing the OpenBSD Console (https://www.cambus.net/modernizing-the-openbsd-console/) At the beginning were text mode consoles. Traditionally, *BSD and Linux on i386 and amd64 used text mode consoles which by default provided 25 rows of 80 columns, the "80x25 mode". This mode uses a 8x16 font stored in the VGA BIOS (which can be slightly different across vendors). OpenBSD uses the wscons(4) console framework, inherited from NetBSD OS roles have changed (https://rubenerd.com/the-roles-of-oss-have-changed/) Though I do wonder sometimes, with just a slight tweak to history, how things might have been different. In another dimension somewhere, I’m using the latest BeOS-powered PowerPC laptop, and a shiny new Palm smartphone. Both of these represented the pinnacle of UI design in the 1990s, and still in the 2020s have yet to be surpassed. People call me an Apple fanboy, but I’d drop all of it in a second for that gear. News Roundup FreeBSD Cluster with Pacemaker and Corosync (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/freebsd-cluster-with-pacemaker-and-corosync/) I always missed ‘proper’ cluster software for FreeBSD systems. Recently I got to run several Pacemaker/Corosync based clusters on Linux systems. I thought how to make similar high availability solutions on FreeBSD and I was really shocked when I figured out that both Pacemaker and Corosync tools are available in the FreeBSD Ports and packages as net/pacemaker2 and net/corosync2 respectively. Wine in a 32-bit sandbox on 64-bit NetBSD (https://washbear.neocities.org/wine-sandbox.html) "Mainline pkgsrc" can't do strange multi-arch Wine builds yet, so a 32-bit sandbox seems like a reasonable way to use 32-bit Wine on amd64 without resorting to running real Windows in NVMM. We'll see if this was a viable alternative to re-reviewing the multi-arch support in pkgsrc-wip... We're using sandboxctl, which is a neat tool for quickly shelling into a different NetBSD userspace. Maybe you also don't trust the Windows applications you're running too much - sandboxctl creates a chroot based on a fresh system image, and chroot on NetBSD is fairly bombproof. Find package which provides a file in OpenBSD (https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2020-09-04-pkglocate-openbsd.html) There is one very handy package on OpenBSD named pkglocatedb which provides the command pkglocate. If you need to find a file or binary/program and you don’t know which package contains it, use pkglocate. Beastie Bits OpenBSD for 1.5 Years: Confessions of a Linux Heretic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTShQIXSdqM) OpenBSD 6.8 Beta Tagged (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200831192811) Hammer2 and growth (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2020/09/08/24933.html) Understanding a FreeBSD kernel vulnerability (https://www.thezdi.com/blog/2020/9/1/cve-2020-7460-freebsd-kernel-privilege-escalation) *** 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 Rob - 7 years (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/368/feedback/Bruce%20-%207%20years.md) Kurt - Microserver (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/368/feedback/Kurt%20-%20Microserver.md) Rob - Interviews (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/368/feedback/Rob%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) ***
367: Changing jail datasets
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch, Sandbox for FreeBSD, Changing from one dataset to another within a jail, You don’t need tmux or screen for ZFS, HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch (http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-35-year-old-bug-in-patch-found-in.html) Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's been a faithful alley for a long, long time. I've never had a problem with patch until I embarked on the 2.11BSD restoration project. In going over the logs very carefully, I've discovered a bug that bites this effort twice. It's quite interesting to use 27 year old patches to find this bug while restoring a 29 year old OS... Sandbox for FreeBSD (https://www.relkom.sk/en/fbsd_sandbox.shtml) A sandbox is a software which artificially limits access to the specific resources on the target according to the assigned policy. The sandbox installs hooks to the kernel syscalls and other sub-systems in order to interrupt the events triggered by the application. From the application point of view, application working as usual, but when it wants to access, for instance, /dev/kmem the sandbox software decides against the assigned sandbox scheme whether to grant or deny access. In our case, the sandbox is a kernel module which uses MAC (Mandatory Access Control) Framework developed by the TrustedBSD team. All necessary hooks were introduced to the FreeBSD kernel. Source Code (https://gitlab.com/relkom/sandbox) Documentation (https://www.relkom.sk/en/fbsd_sandbox_docs.shtml) News Roundup Changing from one dataset to another within a jail (https://dan.langille.org/2020/08/16/changing-from-one-dataset-to-another-within-a-freebsd-iocage-jail/) ZFS has a the ability to share itself within a jail. That gives the jail some autonomy, and I like that. I’ve written briefly about that, specifically for iocage. More recently, I started using a zfs snapshot for caching clearing. The purpose of this post is to document the existing configuration of the production FreshPorts webserver and outline the plan on how to modify it for more zfs-snapshot-based cache clearing. You don’t need tmux or screen for ZFS (https://rubenerd.com/you-dont-need-tmux-or-screen-for-zfs/) Back in January I mentioned how to add redundancy to a ZFS pool by adding a mirrored drive. Someone with a private account on Twitter asked me why FreeBSD—and NetBSD!—doesn’t ship with a tmux or screen equivilent in base in order to daemonise the process and let them run in the background. ZFS already does this for its internal commands. HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations (https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2020-08-15/hardenedbsd-august-2020-status-report-and-call-donations) This last month has largely been a quiet one. I've restarted work on porting five-year-old work from the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) project into HardenedBSD. Chiefly, I've started forward-porting the libc and rtld bits from the CPI project and now need to look at llvm compiler/linker enhancements. We need to be able to apply SafeStack to shared objects, not just application binaries. This forward-porting work I'm doing is to support that effort. The infrastructure has settled and is now churning normally and happily. We're still working out bandwidth issues. We hope to have a new fiber line ran by the end of September. As part of this status report, I'm issuing a formal call for donations. I'm aiming for $4,000.00 USD for a newer self-hosted Gitea server. I hope to purchase the new server before the end of 2020. Important parts of Unix's history happened before readline support was common (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TimeBeforeReadline) Unix and things that run on Unix have been around for a long time now. In particular, GNU Readline was first released in 1989 (as was Bash), which is long enough ago for it (or lookalikes) to become pretty much pervasive, especially in Unix shells. Today it's easy to think of readline support as something that's always been there. But of course this isn't the case. Unix in its modern form dates from V7 in 1979 and 4.2 BSD in 1983, so a lot of Unix was developed before readline and was to some degree shaped by the lack of it. 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 Mason - mailserver (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/367/feedback/Mason%20-%20mailserver.md) casey - freebsd on decline (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/367/feedback/casey%20-%20freebsd%20on%20decline.md) denis - postgres (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/367/feedback/denis%20-%20postgres.md) *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
366: Bootloader zpool checkpoints
OpenZFS with ZSTD lands in FreeBSD 13, LibreSSL doc status update, FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead), Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines OpenZFS with ZSTD land in FreeBSD 13 (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=364746) ZStandard Compression for OpenZFS (https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/commit/10b3c7f5e424f54b3ba82dbf1600d866e64ec0a0) > The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base with the community allowing FreeBSD to receive new features sooner and with less effort. > I would advise against doing 'zpool upgrade' or creating indispensable pools using new features until this change has had a month+ to soak. Rebasing FreeBSD’s OpenZFS on the new upstream was sponsored by iXsystems The competition of ZSTD support for OpenZFS was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation *** LibreSSL documentation status update (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200817063735) More than six years ago, LibreSSL was forked from OpenSSL, and almost two years ago, i explained the status of LibreSSL documentation during EuroBSDCon 2018 in Bucuresti. So it seems providing an update might be in order. Note that this is not an update regarding LibreSSL status in general because i'm not the right person to talk about the big picture of working on the LibreSSL code, my work has been quite focussed on documentation. All the same, it is fair to say that even though the number of developers working on it is somewhat limited, the LibreSSL project is quite alive, typically having a release every few months. Progress continues being made with respect to porting and adding new functionality (for example regarding TLSv1.3, CMS, RSA-PSS, RSA-OAEP, GOST, SM3, SM4, XChaCha20 during the last two years), OpenSSL compatibility improvements (including providing additional OpenSSL-1.1 APIs), and lots of bug fixes and code cleanup. FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead) (https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/freebsd-on-sparc64-is-dead/) ’m coming pretty late to the party, because SPARC64 support in FreeBSD is apparently doomed: After the POWER platform made the switch to a LLVM/Clang-based toolchain, SPARC64 is one of the last ones that still uses the ancient GCC 4.2-based toolchain that the project wants to finally get rid off (it has already happened as I was writing this – looks like the firm plan was not so firm after all, since they killed it off early). And compared to the other platforms it has seen not too much love in recent times… SPARC64 being a great platform, I’d be quite sad to see it go. But before that happens let’s see what the current status is and what would need to be done if it were to survive, shall we? News Roundup Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader (https://www.oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/79/) Almost two years ago I wrote a blog post about checkpoints in ZFS. I didn’t hide that I was a big fan of them. That said, after those two years, I still feel that there are underappreciated features in the ZFS world, so I decided to do something about that. Currently, one of the best practices for upgrading your operating system is to use boot environments. They are a great feature for managing multiple kernels and userlands. They are based on juggling which ZFS datasets are mounted. Each dataset has its own version of the system. Unfortunately, boot environments have their limitations. If we, for example, upgrade our ZFS pool, we may not be able to use older versions of the system anymore. The big advantage of boot environments is that they have very good tools. Two main tools are beadm (which was created by vermaden) and bectl (which currently is in the FreeBSD base system). These tools allow us to create and manage boot environments. Beastie Bits The First Unix Port (https://documents.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@inf/@scsse/documents/doc/uow103747.pdf) TLS Mastery updates, August 2020 (https://mwl.io/archives/7346) What is the Oldest BSD Distribution still around today (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww60o940kEk) 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 ben - zfs send questions (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/366/feedback/ben%20-%20zfs%20send%20questions.md) lars - zfs pool question (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/366/feedback/lars%20-%20zfs%20pool%20question.md) neutron - bectl vs beadm (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/366/feedback/neutron%20-%20bectl%20vs%20beadm.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
365: Whole year round
FreeBSD USB Audio, Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users, Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around, CLI Tools 235x Faster than Hadoop, FreeBSD Laptop Battery Life Status Command, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines FreeBSD USB Audio (https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/freebsd-usb-audio) I recently got a Behringer UMC22 sound card for video conferencing and DJing. This page documents what I’ve learned about using this sound card, and USB audio in general, on FreeBSD. tl;dr: Everything works as long as the sound card follows the USB audio device class specification. Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users (https://wiki.netbsd.org/kyua/) Kyua's current goal is to reimplement only the ATF tools while maintaining backwards compatibility with the tests written with the ATF libraries (i.e. with the NetBSD test suite). Because Kyua is a replacement of some ATF components, the end goal is to integrate Kyua into the NetBSD base system (just as ATF is) and remove the deprecated ATF components. Removing the deprecated components will allow us to make the above-mentioned improvements to Kyua, as well as many others, without having to deal with the obsolete ATF code base. Discussing how and when this transition might happen is out of the scope of this document at the moment. News Roundup Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSOnLinuxModuleBackups) I'm a long term user of ZFS on Linux and over pretty much all of the time I've used it, I've built it from the latest development version. Generally this means I update my ZoL build at the same time as I update my Fedora kernel, since a ZoL update requires a kernel reboot anyway. This is a little bit daring, of course, although the ZoL development version has generally been quite solid (and this way I get the latest features and improvements long before I otherwise would). Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html) As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to compute some statistics on win/loss ratios for chess games he downloaded from the millionbase archive, and generally have fun with EMR. Since the data volume was only about 1.75GB containing around 2 million chess games, I was skeptical of using Hadoop for the task, but I can understand his goal of learning and having fun with mrjob and EMR. Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results, it seems ideally suited to stream processing with shell commands. I tried this out, and for the same amount of data I was able to use my laptop to get the results in about 12 seconds (processing speed of about 270MB/sec), while the Hadoop processing took about 26 minutes (processing speed of about 1.14MB/sec). FreeBSD Laptop Find Out Battery Life Status Command (https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/freebsd-finding-out-battery-life-state-on-laptop/) I know how to find out battery life status using Linux operating system. How do I monitor battery status on a laptop running FreeBSD version 9.x/10.x/11.x/12.x? You can use any one of the following commands to get battery status under FreeBSD laptop including remaining battery life and more. Beastie Bits BSD Beer (https://i.redd.it/hlh8luidzgg51.jpg) Awk for JSON (https://github.com/mohd-akram/jawk) Drawing Pictures The Unix Way - with pic and troff (https://youtu.be/oG2A_1vC6aM) Refactoring the FreeBSD Kernel with Checked C (https://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/jzhou41/papers/freebsd_checkedc.pdf) 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 Jason - German Locales (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/365/jason%20-%20german%20locale.md) pcwizz - Router Style Device (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/365/pcwizz%20-%20router%20style%20device.md) predrag - OpenBSD Router Hardware (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/365/predrag%20-%20openbsd%20router%20hardware.md) *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
364: FreeBSD Wireless Grind
FreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration, the grind of FreeBSD’s wireless stack, thoughts on overlooking Illumos's syseventadm, when Unix learned to reboot, New EXT2/3/4 File-System driver in DragonflyBSD, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines FreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration (https://euroquis.nl/freebsd/2020/07/21/webengine.html) FreeBSD has a handful of Qt WebEngine-based browsers. Falkon, and Otter-Browser, and qutebrowser and probably others, too. All of them can run into issues on FreeBSD with GPU-accelerated rendering not working. Let’s look at some of the workarounds. NetBSD on the Nanopi Neo2 (https://www.cambus.net/netbsd-on-the-nanopi-neo2/) The NanoPi NEO2 from FriendlyARM has been serving me well since 2018, being my test machine for OpenBSD/arm64 related things. As NetBSD/evbarm finally gained support for AArch64 in NetBSD 9.0, released back in February, I decided to give it a try on this device. The board only has 512MB of RAM, and this is where NetBSD really shines. Things have become a lot easier since jmcneill@ now provides bootable ARM images for a variety of devices, including the NanoPi NEO2. I'm back into the grind of FreeBSD's wireless stack and 802.11ac (https://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2020/07/im-back-into-grind-of-freebsds-wireless.html) Yes, it's been a while since I posted here and yes, it's been a while since I was actively working on FreeBSD's wireless stack. Life's been .. well, life. I started the ath10k port in 2015. I wasn't expecting it to take 5 years, but here we are. My life has changed quite a lot since 2015 and a lot of the things I was doing in 2015 just stopped being fun for a while. But the stars have aligned and it's fun again, so here I am. News Roundup Some thoughts on us overlooking Illumos's syseventadm (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/OverlookingSyseventadm) In a comment on my praise of ZFS on Linux's ZFS event daemon, Joshua M. Clulow noted that Illumos (and thus OmniOS) has an equivalent in syseventadm, which dates back to Solaris. I hadn't previously known about syseventadm, despite having run Solaris fileservers and OmniOS fileservers for the better part of a decade, and that gives me some tangled feelings. When Unix learned to reboot (https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/when-unix-learned-to-reboot2.html) Recently, a friend asked me the history of halt, and when did we have to stop with the sync / sync / sync dance before running halt or reboot. The two are related, it turns out. DragonFlyBSD Lands New EXT2/3/4 File-System Driver (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DragonFlyBSD-New-EXT2FS) While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system. DragonFlyBSD has long offered an EXT2 file-system driver (that also handles EXT3 and EXT4) while hitting their Git tree this week is a new version. The new sys/vfs/ext2fs driver, which will ultimately replace their existing sys/gnu/vfs/ext2fs driver is based on a port from FreeBSD code. As such, this driver is BSD licensed rather than GPL. But besides the more liberal license to jive with the BSD world, this new driver has various feature/functionality improvements over the prior version. However, there are some known bugs so for the time being both file-system drivers will co-exist. Beastie Bits LibreOffice 7.0 call for testing (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-office/2020-July/005822.html) More touchpad support (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2020/07/15/24747.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 Casey - openbsd wirewall (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/364/feedback/casey%20-%20openbsd%20wirewall.md) Daryl - zfs (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/364/feedback/daryl%20-%20zfs.md) Raymond - hpe microserver (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/364/feedback/raymond%20-%20hpe%20microserver.md) - Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
363: Traditional Unix toolchains
FreeBSD Q2 Quarterly Status report of 2020, Traditional Unix Toolchains, BastilleBSD 0.7 released, Finding meltdown on DragonflyBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines FreeBSD Quarterly Report (https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2020-04-2020-06.html) This report will be covering FreeBSD related projects between April and June, and covers a diverse set of topics ranging from kernel updates over userland and ports, as well to third-party work. Some highlights picked with the roll of a d100 include, but are not limited to, the ability to forcibly unmounting UFS when the underlying media becomes inaccessible, added preliminary support for Bluetooth Low Energy, a introduction to the FreeBSD Office Hours, and a repository of software collections called potluck to be installed with the pot utility, as well as many many more things. As a little treat, readers can also get a rare report from the quarterly team. Finally, on behalf of the quarterly team, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation and thank you to salvadore@, who decided to take down his shingle. His contributions not just the quarterly reports themselves, but also the surrounding tooling to many-fold ease the work, are immeasurable. Traditional Unix Toolchains (https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2020/07/traditional-unix-toolchains.html?m=1) Older Unix systems tend to be fairly uniform in how they handle the so-called 'toolchain' for creating binaries. This blog will give a quick overview of the toolchain pipeline for Unix systems that follow the V7 tradition (which evolved along with Unix, a topic for a separate blog maybe). Unix is a pipeline based system, either physically or logically. One program takes input, process the data and produces output. The input and output have some interface they obey, usually text-based. The Unix toolchain is no different. News Roundup Bastille Day 2020 : v0.7 released (https://github.com/BastilleBSD/bastille/releases/tag/0.7.20200714) This release matures the project from 0.6.x -> 0.7.x. Continued testing and bug fixes are proving Bastille capable for a range of use-cases. New (experimental) features are examples of innovation from community contribution and feedback. Thank you. Beastie Bits Finding meltdown on DragonFly (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2020/07/28/24787.html) NetBSD Server Outage (https://mobile.twitter.com/netbsd/status/1286898183923277829) *** 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 Vincent - Gnome 3 question (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/363/feedback/vincent%20-%20gnome3.md) Malcolm - ZFS question (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/363/feedback/malcolm%20-%20zfs.md) Hassan - Video question (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/363/feedback/hassan%20-%20video.md) For those that watch on youtube, don’t forget to subscribe to our new YouTube Channel if you want updates when we post them on YT (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/363/feedback/new-bsdnow-youtube-channel.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) ***
362: 2.11-BSD restoration
Interview with Warner Losh about Unix history, the 2.11-BSD restoration project, the Unix heritage society, proper booting, and what devmatch is. Interview - Warner Losh - imp@freebsd.org (mailto:imp@freebsd.org) / @bsdimp (https://twitter.com/bsdimp) BSD 2.11 restoration project 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) Special Guest: Warner Losh.