This Turkey Day (for U.S. readers) episode of BSD Now talks about the perennial idea of BSD admin certification, along with the usual roundup of recent news.
Read that last link, if only to make your convention-going safer in the future.
- Maintaining port modifications in FreeBSD. (via)
- The fading out of multi-‘architecture’ Unix environments.
- Followup: In the old days, we didn’t use multiple Unixes by choice (mostly).
- Valuable News – 2019/11/18.
- OpenBSD on SPARC64 (6.0 to 6.5).
- And the followup Running OpenBSD on SPARC64 (HTTPd, packages, patching, X11, …)
- GEOM NOP.
- p2k19 reports: Martin Pieuchot: The Unknown Plan,
Landry Breuil on unveil(2)-ing Mozilla, sqlite3 testing, Jeremy Evans on PostgreSQL and Ruby, krw@ adventures. - Creating new users dedicated to processes. Could work on any BSD except for doas.
- Board of Directors and Officers elected. For NetBSD.
- Support for Realtek RTL8125 2.5Gb Ethernet controller. For OpenBSD. 2.5Gb seems so arbitrary. (via)
- Why is BSD>Linux?
- Lessons Learned from Sendmail. Video. There’s lots of EuroBSDCon videos out there, but this is a good one cause this is one of the prototypical packages. (via)
- BSD Link Roundup 11.18.
- The Six Prequels to “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails”.
- Proof I Am a Monster.
It hasn’t been updated or used for some time, but libc_r was 20+ years old. Now it’s gone. You know someone younger than this code, or maybe even younger than the last time I talked about it.
BSD New 325 has a bunch of release news this week, including FreeBSD 12.1, and as you can guess from the title, rainbow tables.
Michael W. Lucas is presenting on sudo, to match his recent book, at SeMiBUG, tomorrow night. I think it may be getting held at a different location than usual. Go, if you are near.
Some commercial stuff this week, even.
- A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984. PreBSD. (via)
- HardenedBSD November 2019 Status Report. (via)
- This probably applies to all BSDs on certain Intel CPUs. (FreeBSD-SA-19:26.mcu)
- FreeNAS/TrueNAS 11.3 beta available. Also, the Mini E product.
- rpki-client recycles some uid/gids on OpenBSD.
- Any games that can be recommended that requires virtually no configuration/setup on OpenBSD? Again, possibly valid for every BSD.
- OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support in base. I mentioned this before, sorta, but it’s important.
- p2k19 Hackathon Report: Good vibes from Bucharest.
- HEADS UP: ntpd changing. On OpenBSD.
- DNSSEC enabled in default
unbound(8)configuration. - OpenZFS Developer Summit 2019.
- HardenedBSD Status Report. (via)
- Valuable News – 2019/11/12.
- LLDB Threading support now ready for mainline.
- Modern BSD Computing for Fun on a VAX! NetBSD on VAX hardware at BSDCan 2019, in video. I feel like I was destined to type a sentence like that sooner or later.
BSD Now 324 is up, with the normal mix of content. It includes a heck of a awk statement for renaming files, and mention of a deployment management system for BSD I hadn’t heard about – Bastille.
ChiBUG meets tomorrow, at the usual place. Go, if you are near.
Aaaand back to normal.
- FreeBSD 12.1 is released.
- ChiBUG is meeting November 12th. I’ll post a reminder.
- U2F support in OpenSSH HEAD. Excellent news. (via)
- What can software authors do to help Linux distributions and BSDs package their software?
- Linux VS open source UNIX. (via)
- Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads continued.
- Valuable News – 2019/11/04.
- EuroBSDCon 2019 videos available. OpenBSD oriented, but there’s a full playlist for the conference.
- OPNsense 19.7.6 released.
- New openbsdstore available with 6.6 T-shirts. More wearable than CDs.
- Will the Real UNIX Please Stand Up? An abbreviated but decent history.
- FuryBSD 12.0-XFCE-11-06-2019-01 released.
- asr has been renamed to stub in unwind.conf(5).
- Linux Professional Institute Releases BSD Specialist Certification – re BSD Certification Group.
- My peertube OpenBSD gaming channel. Peertube is getting popular.
- Dead Cells running on OpenBSD.
- MidnightBSD 1.2 now available.
This week’s BSD Now has a good mix of historical articles and how-tos, but of course I would think that’s a good mix.
NYCBUG is having an installfest tonight, at the usual meeting place. Go, if you are near.
I still haven’t caught up, natch, but not going to miss this week!
- Humble Book Bundle: Linux & BSD Bookshelf by No Starch Press. Includes books I’ve linked before; you get a lot of material for only $15.
- NYCBUG is having an installfest this Wednesday, 11/6. Go just to see what oddball hardware someone drags out.
- The Call for Participation for the FOSDEM 2020 BSD devroom is up. You’ve got about 3 weeks to get your proposal in.
- FreeBSD 2019Q2 status report.
- FreeBSD 11.2 EOL as of a few days ago.
- RPI/Pinebook and BSD compatibility, a current status.
- Semibug topics for next year. Keep going through the thread; A HAMMER2 talk would be nice.
- Speaking of Semibug, the November 19th meeting may be moved. I’ll post when I hear of the final spot, too.
- bzflag, runs on any BSD, still active.
- Anyone use FreeNAS for file server?
- Arm to Deliver CHERI-based Prototype to Tackle Security Threats. Related to CHERIBSD. (via)
- Valuable News – 2019/10/28.
- How to fuck up software releases. Linked cause the DragonFly release document is essentially a list of ways to keep me from repeating the mistakes I made on the last release.
- Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads.
- EuroBSDCon 2019, Norway – video. (via)
- Unix: A History and a Memoir. (via)
This week’s BSD Now covers some releases, some history, and the very useful tool sshuttle, a VPN alternative.
BSD Now 321 returns to the interview format, talking with Trenton Schulz about things I know about (FreeBSD) and things I did not (Robot OS).
I’m leading with the most complex but perhaps also most unfulfilling link.
- 2020 OS MIGRATION. Or, how to make your project just one Linux distro among many.
- Bell Labs: Celebrating 50 Years of Unix. (via multiple places)
- Related: The UNIX Game. (via)
- FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS. Video from vBSDCon. (via)
- Replacing an Oracle Server with FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and PostgreSQL. More convention video. (via)
- The Ubuntu package roulette. For contrast with BSD packages; people usually assume, wrongly, that Linux packaging systems are more complete.
- Valuable News – 2019/10/07, Valuable News – 2019/10/14, and Valuable News – 2019/10/18. Yeah, I’m running behind on my RSS.
- Threading support in LLDB continued
- OPNsense 19.7.5 released.
- OpenBSD 6.6 Released.
- OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits.
- FreeBSD 12.1-RC2 Available.
- A Ghidra loader for the Linear eXecutable format.
This week’s BSD Now is double-coloned. Colonned? I don’t know the plural possessive of colon, but there’s a nice selection of links to follow there.
SeMiBUG meets tonight, 7 PM, Altair Engineering. Go, if you are near.
(not sure about capitalization on semibug…)
Thanks to Erik Blomberg and the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, I now know the Digest has reached a whole new operating system: CP/M. This entertains me.

(It’s the Digest being browsed in text mode on a TeleVideo TS-803, if you can’t see the screen well enough.)
I’m sure there’s some recent stuff I missed; I will catch it in next week’s roundup.
- SeMiBUG meets Tuesday the 15th.
- FreeNAS datasets and snapshots.
- Defense at Scale. There’s a BSD system in there. (via)
- History of UNIX Design and Interfaces. BSD history mixed in. (via)
- 1 day / 1 game: solene@ playing Unexplored on OpenBSD. Links to FLV.
- OpenSSH 8.1 released. (via)
- Care and Feeding of OpenBSD Porters. (via)
- By the numbers: ZFS Performance Results from Six Operating Systems and Their Derivatives. This and following are vBSDCon 2019 videos. (via)
- Transitioning from FreeNAS to FreeBSD. (via)
- In-Kernel TLS Framing and Encryption for FreeBSD. (via)
- 20 Years of FreeBSD Jails. Last video. (via)
- Ken Thompson’s Unix password. He doesn’t need it. (via)
- OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits. (via)
- Porting NetBSD to the AMD x86-64: a case study in OS portability. Old news but why not. (via)
- Resurrecting Ancient Operating Systems on Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Docker. Very early BSD. (via)
- FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook. (via)
- Causing ZFS corruption for fun, profit, and quality assurance. Can’t tell if they are doing this on FreeBSD or not. (via)
