The summary for BSDNow episode 252: “FreeBSD 11.2 has been released, setting up an MTA behind Tor, running pfsense on DigitalOcean, one year of C, using OpenBGPD to announce VM networks, the power to serve, and a BSDCan trip report.”
Lots of announcements, lots of reading. Note the first item listed is happening today.
- Book Fair, 23 June 2018. Michael W. Lucas is at the Scriptorium Book Fest today, in Michigan. Go if you are near and get a signed BSD book.
- Escape from System D, Episode V. Interesting cause it mentions BSD and interesting for spot-on characterization of Twitter/Hacker News feedback. (via)
- 25 years of FreeBSD. (via)
- NetBSD Summer of Code reports: libfuzzer, kernel address sanitizer, and kernel undefined behavior sanitizer.
- Valuable News 2018/06/17.
- FreeBSD Desktop, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I linked to a few of the early ones before, but I want to present a complete (so far) list.
- FreeBSD 11.2-RC3 Available.
- OPNsense 18.1.10 released.
- httpd(8) Gains Simple Request Rewrites.
- SMT Disabled by Default in -current.
- More Mitigations for (potential) CPU Vulnerabilities.
- LDAP client added to -current. This, or a similar LDAP client, should be present in all BSDs.
- KDE on FreeBSD – June 2018. 5 is almost working in DragonFly, too, by the way. (via)
- itch.io Summer Sale + General itch.io Feature.
- “what’s good in openbsd superior than freebsd?“
- HardenedBSD 11-STABLE v1100055.4 Released. (via)
- “Today I stumbled upon a BSD Wikipedia page. Why should I choose BSD over a Linux based distro?“
BSDNow 251 has one of the more fun titles ever, and goes into HAMMER encryption, BSDCan details, and a number of other things that make for good BSD news.
SemiBUG meets tonight at 7 PM, and James Turner is presenting about BHCS. I rarely say this, but: I wish I was closer to Michigan. Go, if you are near.
Update: the files referenced during the talk.
Lots of different items, probably because of BSDCan.
- EuroBSDCon 2018 is happening September 20-23 at University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania – Call for papers ends tomorrow.
- June HardenedBSD Foundation Update. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.2-RC2 Available.
- Valuable News – 2018/06/09.
- Pledge and Unveil in OpenBSD [pdf]. Knew about pledge, not about unveil. (via)
- OpenBSD at BSDCan 2018. A summary post.
- TBW60: #OpenBSD @BSDCAN 2017 Interview. Video. “TBW” == The Brothers WISP; a series I did not know about. Stumbled into this by accident.
- Project Trident, the GUI version of TrueOS.
- BSDCan 2018 Recap and SELF 2018 Recap from iXSystems.
- Apple Airport Extreme == NetBSD, which I did not know.
- OpenBSD adds “-n” to crontab(5): “no mail when everything went OK” A good idea. (via)
- pNFS server in FreeBSD. (via)
- (Open)BSD equivalent of nmtui (curses Wi-Fi network chooser)
- syspatch(8) for OpenBSD. Included in other convention coverage, I’m sure, but I found this tool interesting. (PDF, via).
I am typing BSDXXX phrases a lot, it seems. BSDNow 250 goes over the just-finished BSDCan. There’s a ton of events, so get reading/listening.
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)
BSDCan is running this weekend. There is, depending on what time you are reading this, a livestream.
- Retguard: An improved stack protector for OpenBSD. (via)
- Mailing lists vs Github. Relevant to most every BSD project. (via)
- need help determining the best HA solution for 3 pfSense VM guests.
- OpenBSD’s ksh(1) does not export PWD, causing unexpected problems. (via)
- GOG.com summer sale – OpenBSD highlights.
- libcsi – Crypto Simplified Interface.
- Author Discoverability.
- Your own VPN with OpenIKED & OpenBSD. (via)
- zedenv, a ZFS Boot Environment Manager for FreeBSD and Linux. (via)
- TrueOS to Focus On Core Operating System. Not a name change; it’s work on becoming a base like Debian. (via)
- Isotop: French desktop-oriented OpenBSD distro. (via)
- May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
- Silent Fanless FreeBSD Desktop/Server.
- Valuable News – 2018/06/05.
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.”
One of these links will be very useful to someone.
- Join us, building a full OpenBSD mailserver. (via)
- Valuable News 2018/05/25.
- May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
- BSDJobs.com. (via)
- Research Positions – Aberdeen Scotland.
- NetBSD: a new version of the CDDL dtrace and ZFS code. (via)
- OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space. (via)
- iXsystems Newsletter: The April 2018 Edition.
- OPNsense 18.1.9 released.
- OpenBSD’s httpd gets URL rewrite Not the final patch. (via)
- BSD: Networking Included. Some extremely useful tips in here for network troubleshooting. (via)
- Boot All the Things! (via)
BSDNow 248 has an interview with Patrick Mooney, talking about bhyve, along with the usual news summaries.
Bug reports are usually unexciting, but it’s always fun to see someone working through a new idea, especially when it’s something enabled by doing it on DragonFly.
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.
- Where did devio.us go?
- Do Not Use sha256crypt / sha512crypt – They’re Dangerous. As the source link comments point out, FreeBSD’s implementation may be similar. I haven’t looked at other BSDs, and I’m not qualified to evaluate how dangerous this is or is not. (via)
- Simple Desktop for OpenBSD 6.3. (via)
- New Grammar for smtpd.conf.
- An annotated look at a NetBSD Pinebook’s startup.
- Valuable News – 2018/05/21.
- Draining the manual-page swamp. (via)
- WireGuard is available for OpenBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 3 – X11 Window System.
BSDNow 247 leads with a report on Mitchell Horne working for the FreeBSD Foundation (actually in the office) as an intern. It’s an interesting contrast to the all-online model for most committers. There’s plenty more links.
Note the eleventy-jillion hackathon reports.
- OpenBSD 6.3 : why and how. (via)
- Helpful OpenBSD Tutorials. A request for input, not a link to existing.
- A pile of p2k18 hackathon reports. And more.
- “We didn’t chase the fad of using every Intel cpu feature.” (via)
- Getting CUPS working under NetBSD?
- What I Learned During My FreeBSD Internship.
- Valuable News – 2018/05/14. Catching links that I didn’t.
- OPNSense 18.1.7 released. No, I mean 18.1.8.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” Sponsorships, and writing schedule changes.
- FreeBSD 11.2 beta is out.
- Calamares “some day, a FreeBSD system installer”. (via)
Your thinkpiece for the week: The cultural shift from not selling out to blowing up. There’s a BSD analogy possible there.
BSDNow 246’s title is talking about CVE-2018-8897, which was (unlike the original Spectre/Meltdown) responsibly disclosed to many different operating system vendors, including the BSDs. As a result, fixes arrived a lot faster… seems like a good idea. No interview in this episode, but as always there’s other topics explored.
SemiBUG‘s having a hands-on server workshop tonight. Go, if you are near, and bring something networked to type on.
This came together very nicely.
- Addendum – MongoDB Cluster Replica Set on FreeBSD. (via)
- OpenPGP Web Key Service and Web Key Directory Implemented on OpenBSD. (via)
- mksh bugfix?—?thank you for the music.
- Valuable News for 2018/04/30 and 2018/05/07. BSD links, which make me happy to see.
- BSD routing table -> ASCIIgraph. (via)
- LibreSSL 2.7.3 is out. (via)
- Overview of TrueOS 18.03. (via)
- HowTo Modern (2018) KDE on FreeBSD. (via)
- Recent BSD-runnable game sales. Summarizing this is a decent public service to provide.
- “Do One Thing“, the UNIX idea. (via)
Hey, another terse title, and I didn’t even write it! This BSDNow episode talks about the recent ZFS conference. It’s interesting to think there can be a meetup about a file system that isn’t really held to a vendor at this point. There ‘s a number of other articles, too – I’m just a bit late noting it.
A recent and new CPU bug, CVE-2018-8897, is fixed in DragonFly. THis applies to both Intel and AMD processors. I’m happy to see that the CERT page lists equal notification timing for a whole lot of operating systems, rather than the few that heard about Spectre/Meltdown early.
Following that topic, Matthew Dillon has “fleshed out” Spectre mitigations, and his commit message details the current state. The sysctl ‘machdep.spectre_mitigation’ will tell you what’s set at any given point.
Update: update.