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SSH keys and making your life easier

A tip for anyone using public keys in SSH: you can start up your xorg session using ssh-agent and then have all subsequent connections be authorized by the agent, saving you some hassle of password typing, etc.  Put this in your ~/.xinitrc :

eval `/usr/bin/ssh-agent -c`
(insert line to start up your window manager here)
/bin/kill $SSH_AGENT_PID

(Yoinked from Matthew Dillon on IRC)  Realistically, you should also lock your terminal or otherwise prevent physical access to any workstation where you do this, since it means immediate SSH access to other systems using your identity, for anyone touching that keyboard.

If you’re using Windows, there’s always Pageant.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/06/30

Some of this is overflow from last week.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/06/23

Lots of announcements, lots of reading.  Note the first item listed is happening today.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/06/16

Lots of different items, probably because of BSDCan.

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mkinitrd out, initrd in

There was an optional ‘make initrd’ step in the DragonFly build process, where you can create a small binary to use for mounting encrypted root drives.

Aaron LI has removed mkinitrd in favor of ‘make initrd’, which builds a separate binary to use in exactly those situations.  See the commit message for more detail.  It incidentally creates a ‘/rescue’ directory and works as a rescue ramdisk, similar to other BSDs, if you should ever need it.  (See updated MOTD for details)

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In Other BSDs for 2018/06/09

BSDCan is running this weekend.  There is, depending on what time you are reading this, a livestream.

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BSDNow 249: Router On A Stick

BSDNow 249 is covering a really wide range of topics including an uncommon amount of NetBSD, so I’m going to do the easy thing and repeat the summary: “OpenZFS and DTrace updates in NetBSD, NetBSD network security stack audit, Performance of MySQL on ZFS, OpenSMTP results from p2k18, legacy Windows backup to FreeNAS, ZFS block size importance, and NetBSD as router on a stick.”

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In Other BSDs for 2017/06/02

One of these links will be very useful to someone.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/05/26

I have the normal list of links, but here’s a feature.  At first glance, this looks like Netgate, the commercial entity behind pfsense, is not using FreeBSD for their new product.  However, Jim Thompson of Netgate steps up and give a full-on explanation, and points out there’s already code out there to do this – it needs contributors.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/05/19

Note the eleventy-jillion hackathon reports.

Your thinkpiece for the week: The cultural shift from not selling out to blowing up.  There’s a BSD analogy possible there.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/05/12

This came together very nicely.