Bsd Now

The Open Source midlife crisis, Donald Knuth The Yoda of Silicon Valley, Certbot For OpenBSD's httpd, how to upgrade FreeBSD from 11 to 12, level up your nmap game, NetBSD desktop, and more. ##Headlines Open Source Confronts its midlife crisis Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown. Making things more challenging, while you are navigating the turbulence of teenagers, your own parents are likely entering life’s twilight, needing help in new ways from their adult children. By midlife, in addition to the singular joys of life, you have also likely experienced its terrible sorrows: death, heartbreak, betrayal. Taken together, the fading of youth, the growth in responsibility and the endurance of misfortune can lead to cynicism or (worse) drastic and poorly thought-out choices. Add in a little fear of mortality and some existential dread, and you have the stuff of which midlife crises are ma

FreeBSD 12.0 is finally here, partly-cloudy IPsec VPN, KLEAK with NetBSD, How to create synth repos, GhostBSD author interview, and more. ##Headlines FreeBSD 12.0 is available After a long release cycle, the wait is over: FreeBSD 12.0 is now officially available. We’ve picked a few interesting things to cover in the show, make sure to read the full Release Notes Userland: Group permissions on /dev/acpi have been changed to allow users in the operator GID to invoke acpiconf(8) to suspend the system. The default devfs.rules(5) configuration has been updated to allow mount_fusefs(8) with jail(8). The default PAGER now defaults to less(1) for most commands. The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to reject configuration entries that specify setuid(2) or executable log files. The WITH_REPRODUCIBLE_BUILD src.conf(5) knob has been enabled by default. A new src.conf(5) knob, WITH_RETPOLINE, has been added to enable the retpoline mitigation for userland builds. Userland applications: The dtrace(1) utility has bee

DragonflyBSD 5.4 has been released, down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, OpenBSD in stereo with VFIO, BSD/OS the best candidate for legally tested open source Unix, OpenBGPD adds diversity to the routing server landscape, and more. Headlines DragonflyBSD 5.4 released DragonFly version 5.4 brings a new system compiler in GCC 8, improved NUMA support, a large of number network and virtual machine driver updates, and updates to video support. This release is 64-bit only, as with previous releases. The details of all commits between the 5.2 and 5.4 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.4.0rc and 5.4.0. Big-ticket items Much better support for asymmetric NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) configurations. In particular, both the memory subsystem and the scheduler now understand the Threadripper 2990WX’s architecture. The scheduler will prioritize CPU nodes with direct-attached memory and the memory subsystem will normalize memory queues for CPU nodes without direct-attached memory (whi

Assembly language on OpenBSD, using bhyve for FreeBSD development, FreeBSD Gaming, FreeBSD for Thanksgiving, no space left on Dragonfly’s hammer2, and more. ##Headlines Assembly language on OpenBSD amd64+arm64 This is a short introduction to assembly language programming on OpenBSD/amd64+arm64. Because of security features in the kernel, I have had to rethink a series of tutorials covering Aarch64 assembly language on OpenBSD, and therefore this will serve as a placeholder-cum-reminder. OpenBSD, like many UNIX and unix-like operating systems, now uses the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) for its binary libraries and executables. Although the structure of this format is beyond the scope of this short introduction, it is necessary for me to explain part of one of the headers. Within the program header there are sections known as PT_NOTE that OpenBSD and other systems use to distinguish their ELF executables - OpenBSD looks for this section to check if it should attempt to execute the program or not.

Thoughts on NetBSD 8.0, Monitoring love for a GigaBit OpenBSD firewall, cat’s source history, X.org root permission bug, thoughts on OpenBSD as a desktop, and NomadBSD review. ##Headlines Some thoughts on NetBSD 8.0 NetBSD is a highly portable operating system which can be run on dozens of different hardware architectures. The operating system’s clean and minimal design allow it to be run in all sorts of environments, ranging from embedded devices, to servers, to workstations. While the base operating system is minimal, NetBSD users have access to a large repository of binary packages and a ports tree which I will touch upon later. I last tried NetBSD 7.0 about three years ago and decided it was time to test drive the operating system again. In the past three years NetBSD has introduced a few new features, many of them security enhancements. For example, NetBSD now supports write exclusive-or execute (W^X) protection and address space layout randomization (ASLR) to protect programs against common attacks. Ne

Byproducts of reading OpenBSD’s netcat code, learnings from porting your own projects to FreeBSD, OpenBSD’s unveil(), NetBSD’s Virtual Machine Monitor, what 'dependency' means in Unix init systems, jailing bhyve, and more. ##Headlines ###The byproducts of reading OpenBSD netcat code When I took part in a training last year, I heard about netcat for the first time. During that class, the tutor showed some hacks and tricks of using netcat which appealed to me and motivated me to learn the guts of it. Fortunately, in the past 2 months, I was not so busy that I can spend my spare time to dive into OpenBSD‘s netcat source code, and got abundant byproducts during this process. (1) Brush up socket programming. I wrote my first network application more than 10 years ago, and always think the socket APIs are marvelous. Just ~10 functions (socket, bind, listen, accept…) with some IO multiplexing buddies (select, poll, epoll…) connect the whole world, wonderful! From that time, I developed a habit that is when touching

MidnightBSD 1.0 released, MeetBSD review, EuroBSDcon trip reports, DNS over TLS in FreeBSD 12, Upgrading OpenBSD with Ansible, how to use smartd to run tests on your drives automatically, and more. ##Headlines MidnightBSD 1.0 now available I’m happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 1.0 for amd64 and i386. Over the years, many ambitious goals were set for our 1.0 release. As it approached, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to accomplish all of them. This release is more of a natural progression rather than a groundbreaking event. It includes many updates to the base system, improvements to the package manager, an updated compiler, and tools. Of particular note, you can now boot off of ZFS and use NVME SSDs and some AMD Radeon graphics cards support acceleration. AMD Ryzen support has greatly improved in this release. We also have added bhyve from FreeBSD. The 1.0 release is finally available. Still building packages for i386 and plan to do an amd64 package build later in the week. The single largest

OpenBSD 6.4 released, GhostBSD RC2 released, MeetBSD - the ultimate hallway track, DragonflyBSD desktop on a Thinkpad, Porting keybase to NetBSD, OpenSSH 7.9, and draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag in FreeBSD. ##Headlines OpenBSD 6.4 released See a detailed log of changes between the 6.3 and 6.4 releases. See the information on the FTP page for a list of mirror machines. Have a look at the 6.4 errata page for a list of bugs and workarounds. signify(1) pubkeys for this release: base: RWQq6XmS4eDAcQW4KsT5Ka0KwTQp2JMOP9V/DR4HTVOL5Bc0D7LeuPwA fw: RWRoBbjnosJ/39llpve1XaNIrrQND4knG+jSBeIUYU8x4WNkxz6a2K97 pkg: RWRF5TTY+LoN/51QD5kM2hKDtMTzycQBBPmPYhyQEb1+4pff/H6fh/kA ###GhostBSD 18.10 RC2 Announced This second release candidate of GhostBSD 18.10 is the second official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood. The official desktop of GhostBSD is MATE. However, in the future, there might be an XFCE community release, but for now, there is no community release yet. What has changed since RC1 Removed drm-sta

FreeBSD Foundation September Update, tiny C lib for programming Unix daemons, EuroBSDcon trip reports, GhostBSD tested on real hardware, and a BSD auth module for duress. ##Headlines FreeBSD Foundation Update, September 2018 MESSAGE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Dear FreeBSD Community Member, It is hard to believe that September is over. The Foundation team had a busy month promoting FreeBSD all over the globe, bug fixing in preparation for 12.0, and setting plans in motion to kick off our 4th quarter fundraising and advocacy efforts. Take a minute to see what we’ve been up to and please consider making a donation to help us continue our efforts supporting FreeBSD! September 2018 Development Projects Update In preparation for the release of FreeBSD 12.0, I have been working on investigating and fixing a backlog of kernel bug reports. Of course, this kind of work is never finished, and we will continue to make progress after the release. In the past couple of months I have fixed a combination of long-st

6 metrics for zpool performance, 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD, ZFS maintaining file type information in dirs, everything old is new again, netcat demystified, and more. ##Headlines Six Metrics for Measuring ZFS Pool Performance Part 1 The layout of a ZFS storage pool has a significant impact on system performance under various workloads. Given the importance of picking the right configuration for your workload and the fact that making changes to an in-use ZFS pool is far from trivial, it is important for an administrator to understand the mechanics of pool performance when designing a storage system. To quantify pool performance, we will consider six primary metrics: Read I/O operations per second (IOPS) Write IOPS Streaming read speed Streaming write speed Storage space efficiency (usable capacity after parity versus total raw capacity) Fault tolerance (maximum number of drives that can fail before data loss) For the sake of comparison, we’ll use an example system with 12 drives, each one sized at 6TB, and say

We have a long interview with fiction and non-fiction author Michael W. Lucas for you this week as well as questions from the audience. ##Headlines Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwlucas@michaelwlucas.com / @mwlauthor BR: [Welcome Back] AJ: What have you been doing since last we talked to you [ed, ssh, and af3e] BR: Tell us more about AF3e AJ: How did the first Absolute FreeBSD come about? BR: Do you have anything special planned for MeetBSD? AJ: What are you working on now? [FM:Jails, Git sync Murder] BR: What are your plans for next year? AJ: How has SEMIBug been going? Auction at https://mwl.io Patreon Link: ##Feedback/Questions Paul - Recent bhyve related videos (daemon) Michael - freebsd-update question Sigflup - pkg file search Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Running OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve, vermaden’s FreeBSD story, thoughts on OpenBSD on the desktop, history of file type info in Unix dirs, Multiboot a Pinebook KDE neon image, and more. ##Headlines OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve When I was writing a blog post about the process title, I needed a couple of virtual machines with OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Ubuntu. Before that day I mainly used FreeBSD and Windows with bhyve. I spent some time trying to set up an OpenBSD using bhyve and UEFI as described here. I had numerous problems trying to use it, and this was the day I discovered the grub2-bhyve tool, and I love it! The grub2-bhyve allows you to load a kernel using GRUB bootloader. GRUB supports most of the operating systems with a standard configuration, so exactly the same method can be used to install NetBSD or Ubuntu. First, let’s install grub2-bhyve on our FreeBSD box: # pkg install grub2-bhyve To run grub2-bhyve we need to provide at least the name of the VM. In bhyve, if the m

We report from our experiences at EuroBSDcon, disenchant software, LLVM 7.0.0 has been released, Thinkpad BIOS update options, HardenedBSD Foundation announced, and ZFS send vs. rsync. ##Headlines ###[FreeBSD DevSummit & EuroBSDcon 2018 in Romania] Your hosts are back from EuroBSDcon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania this year. The first two days of the conference are used for tutorials and devsummits (FreeBSD and NetBSD), while the last two are for talks. Although Benedict organized the devsummit in large parts, he did not attend it this year. He held his Ansible tutorial in the morning of the first day, followed by Niclas Zeising’s new ports and poudriere tutorial (which had a record attendance). It was intended for beginners that had never used poudriere before and those who wanted to create their first port. The tutorial was well received and Niclas already has ideas for extending it for future conferences. On the second day, Benedict took Kirk McKusick’s “An Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Ope

FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD benchmarks on AMD’s Threadripper, NetBSD 7.2 has been released, optimized out DTrace kernel symbols, stuck UEFI bootloaders, why ed is not a good editor today, tell your BSD story, and more. ##Headlines FreeBSD & DragonFlyBSD Put Up A Strong Fight On AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX, Benchmarks Against Linux The past two weeks I have been delivering a great deal of AMD Threadripper 2990WX benchmarks on Linux as well as some against Windows and Windows Server. But recently I got around to trying out some of the BSD operating systems on this 32-core / 64-thread processor to see how they would run and to see whether they would have similar scaling issues or not like we’ve seen on the Windows side against Linux. In this article are FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD benchmarks with the X399 + 2990WX compared to a few Linux distributions. The BSDs I focused my testing on were FreeBSD 11.2-STABLE and 12.0-CURRENT/ALPHA1 (the version in development) as well as iX System’s TrueOS that is tracking FreeBSD

Mitigating Spectre/Meltdown on HP Proliant servers, omniOS installation setup, debugging a memory corruption issue on OpenBSD, CfT for OpenZFS native encryption, Asigra TrueNAS backup appliance shown at VMworld, NetBSD 6 EoL, and more. ##Headlines How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server with FreeBSD As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing you’re carrying on for ages) you may take the necessary extra steps to protect your environment. I never planned to do any article on patching anything. Nowadays it’s a no brainer and operating systems have provided the necessary tools for this to be easy and as smooth as possible. So why this article? Spectre and Meltdown are both hardware vulnerabilities. Major ones. They are mea

OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go, FreeBSD Foundation August Update, What’s taking so long with Project Trident, pkgsrc config file versioning, and MacOS remnants in ZFS code. ##Headlines OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go For some reason I like small laptops and the constraints they place on me (as long as they’re still usable). I used a Dell Mini 9 for a long time back in the netbook days and was recently using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary development machine for many years. Recently Microsoft announced a smaller, cheaper version of its Surface tablets called Surface Go which piqued my interest. Hardware The Surface Go is available in two hardware configurations: one with 4Gb of RAM and a 64Gb eMMC, and another with 8Gb of RAM with a 128Gb NVMe SSD. (I went with the latter.) Both ship with an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor which is not very fast, but it’s certainly usable. The tablet measures 9.65" across, 6.9" tall, and 0.3" thick. Its 10" diagonal 3:2 touchscreen is co

Insight into TrueOS and Trident, stop evildoers with pf-badhost, Flashback to FreeBSDcon ‘99, OpenBSD’s measures against TLBleed, play Morrowind on OpenBSD in 5 steps, DragonflyBSD developers shocked at Threadripper performance, and more. ##Headlines An Insight into the Future of TrueOS BSD and Project Trident Last month, TrueOS announced that they would be spinning off their desktop offering. The team behind the new project, named Project Trident, have been working furiously towards their first release. They did take a few minutes to answer some of our question about Project Trident and TrueOS. I would like to thank JT and Ken for taking the time to compile these answers. It’s FOSS: What is Project Trident? Project Trident: Project Trident is the continuation of the TrueOS Desktop. Essentially, it is the continuation of the primary “TrueOS software” that people have been using for the past 2 years. The continuing evolution of the entire TrueOS project has reached a stage where it became necessary to reo

Trip reports from the Essen Hackathon and BSDCam, CfT: ZFS native encryption and UFS trim consolidation, ZFS performance benchmarks on a FreeBSD server, how to port your OS to EC2, Vint Cerf about traceability, Remote Access console to an RPi3 running FreeBSD, and more. ##Headlines Essen Hackathon & BSDCam 2018 trip report Allan and Benedict met at FRA airport and then headed to the Air Rail terminal for our train to Essen where the Hackathon would happen over the weekend of Aug 10 - 12, 2018. Once there, we did not have to wait long until other early-arrivals would show up and soon we had about 10 people gathered for lunch. After buying some take-out pizzas and bringing it back to the Linuxhotel (there was a training still going on there so we could not get into our rooms yet), we sat in the sunny park and talked. More and more people arrived and soon, people started hacking on their laptops. Some people would not arrive until a few hours before midnight, but we already had a record appearance of 20 peo

The strange birth and long life of Unix, FreeBSD jail with a single public IP, EuroBSDcon 2018 talks and schedule, OpenBSD on G4 iBook, PAM template user, ZFS file server, and reflections on one year of OpenBSD use. Picking the contest winner Vincent Bostjan Andrew Klaus-Hendrik Will Toby Johnny David manfrom Niclas Gary Eddy Bruce Lizz Jim Random number generator ##Headlines ###The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it’s actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written. A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative pr

FreeBSD Foundation July Newsletter, a bunch of BSDCan trip reports, HardenedBSD Foundation status, FreeBSD and OSPFd, ZFS disk structure overview, and more Spectre mitigations in OpenBSD. ##Headlines FreeBSD Foundation Update, July 2018 MESSAGE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR We’re in the middle of summer here, in Boulder, CO. While the days are typically hot, they can also be quite unpredictable. Thanks to the Rocky Mountains, waking up to 50-degree (~10 C) foggy weather is not surprising. In spite of the unpredictable weather, many of us took some vacation this month. Whether it was extending the Fourth of July celebration, spending time with family, or relaxing and enjoying the summer weather, we appreciated our time off, while still managing to accomplish a lot! In this newsletter, Glen Barber enlightens us about the upcoming 12.0 release. I gave a recap of OSCON, that Ed Maste and I attended, and Mark Johnston explains the work on his improved microcode loading project, that we are funding. Finally, Anne