BSDTalk, which is hitting its 8th year, has 20 minutes of conversation with Ike Levy and Brian Callahan about NYCBSDCon. (which is coming up on February 8th; will you sponsor?)
Odds and ends for the quieter holidays.
- Hubert Feyrer spotted this video interview of Amitai ‘schmonz’ Schlair about NetBSD.
- OpenBSD has tmpfs.
- PC-BSD has made it through a pkg upgrade.
- pkgsrc is frozen until at least the end of the month, for pkgsrc-2013Q4.
- OpenBSD wants to shift electrical costs. (via)
- The DiscoverBSD weekly roundup.
- Managing custom ports. (can apply to dports too)
- Building tcsh on 4.3BSD-Quasijarus. This led me to…
- 4.5BSD. An ambitious project.
- A pfSense video review.
- Steryana Shopova is this past week’s Faces of FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD had a head start on not trusting RNGs.
- OpenBSD has a new vioscsi(4) driver.
- Michael W. Lucas’s books are available through OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD Kitten. (via NYCBUG)
As you can kinda sorta guess from the show title, BSDNow 16 is about encryption.
One of the things noted there that I hadn’t heard of is that FreeBSD ports is getting a ‘stable’ branch for the first time – I suppose I need to read even more mailing lists.
Things are very quiet this week; I’ve had nothing to post for some days – DragonFly or even for other BSDs. The end of the year has most people distracted, I think. This makes it a good time to bring up something that’s been bothering me: the state of software firewalls in BSD. The pf utility is a BSD advantage; I’ve heard people say “I used iptables on Linux and pf is a much better alternative.” I know that’s anecdotal, but there it is. Here’s the question, and the reason I’m writing this: which pf?
DragonFly has a version of pf equivalent to what was shipped in OpenBSD 4.4. FreeBSD has a version equivalent, I think, to OpenBSD 3.8 4.5’s pf, and it has been further modified. NetBSD has a similar, older pf, but there’s people working on a NetBSD-specific version called npf, which isn’t yet ready. And of course, OpenBSD has its version of pf. If you feel good about these different alternatives, you call it divergence. If you don’t feel good about it, you call it fragmentation.
Compare this to OpenSSH – it works the same on each platform. There’s no confusion on how to configure it, or interoperability problems. It would be wonderful to have the equivalent for pf, where other BSD platforms would import a portable version. This software firewall is a strength, and it’s much easier to tout it when there’s only one.
I doubt there’s a way to bring it all back to one source tree. There’s a lot vested in the different forks out there. You know what would take a lot less effort: a compatibility test suite. Agreeing on a common syntax and set of functions would make life easier for every end user. It would incidentally make vendors a lot happier, too. Even if a user or vendor wasn’t hoping to move between BSD flavors, a test suite would still guarantee a certain known level of functionality for any BSD release.
How likely is this? I don’t know. But I want to bring up the notion before it gets missed. Now is a good time, with each pf version still being relatively close to one another.
Update/note: Henning Brauer is willing to help.
Another week where I could get away without any commit links, just cause there’s so much BSD stuff out there.
- Randomness changes in FreeBSD. Saw commits before, but this is a good summary. (via)
- Cipher changes summary for OpenBSD.
- The DiscoverBSD summary.
- Faces of FreeBSD for this week: Brooks Davis.
- PC-BSD’s weekly summary.
- FuguIta, an OpenBSD liveCD.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s Semi-Annual Newsletter. There’s details on the FreeBSD Journal.
- Also, that newsletter links this first of 4 BSD whitepapers.
- The FreeBSD Challenge on linuxcauldron.com – a 30-day challenge.
- BSDCan 2014 has issued a call for papers.
- So has NYCBSDCon 2014. Here’s the announcement of NYCBSDCon 2014 itself, and flyer.
- Note to self: investigate cheap bus trips to New York City.
- The IP-Plug, a NetBSD-powered wall wart. The article goes into terrific detail.
- Ruby in pkgsrc will be (apparently?) defaulting to version 2.0.
- robotpkg, a specialized fork of pkgsrc that I didn’t know about.
- PC-BSD is going through lots of changes to support pkg. (that’s one of many commits.)
- FreeBSD has added newcons.
BSDNow episode 15 keeps the pun titles going. Josh Paetzel is apparently replaced by Santa Claus in the interview? There’s also FreeNAS coverage, and lots else.
BSDNow episode 14 is up – and actually has been for a few days; I’ve been on the road. There’s an interview with George Wilson about OpenZFS and a bunch more stuff I haven’t had a chance to watch yet. (see previous note about being on the road.)
I had a sometimes-great, sometimes-difficult trip to New York City over the past few days, and while I was there, I met the ball of energy that is George Rosamond of NYCBUG (which is having a huge party right now.) He and I talked for a bit about various aspects of the BSD ecosystem, and one thing he noted was that people aren’t generally aware of all the licenses in use for the different software packages on the system, or even the individual licenses in the system files.
There is an ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES setting in pkgsrc, where software licensed under terms not in that list won’t install. That’s useful, but frustrating, because it keeps people from getting what they asked for – a software install. Something that would be useful – and it could be cross-BSD very easily – would be a license audit summary.
There’s meta-data on every package in FreeBSD’s ports and DragonFly’s dports and pkgsrc and OpenBSD’s port system. Why not say ‘pkg licenses’ in the same way you can say ‘pkg info’, and get a summary of the licenses you have installed in the system? (or pkg_licenses, etc. You get the idea) This wouldn’t prevent people from installing software, but it would give a very quick view of what you were using.
> pkg licenses
Software package License
---------------- -------
foo-2.2.26 Apache license
bar-7.999999 Donateware
baz_ware-20131209 MIT
quux-silly-6.5 BSD
It could be extended to the base system, but I’d like to see this in all the packaging systems as a common idea, in the same way that ‘info’ in a packaging command always shows what’s installed.
Happy birthday to me!
- Is Your Stack Protector Working? On Undeadly, so it’s OpenBSD.
- ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH. (via)
- The next PC-BSD 10.0 image is available.
- Reid Linnemann is the latest in the Faces of FreeBSD series.
- NetBSD has updated file.
- FreeBSD’s iwn(4) driver has some updates (also in DragonFly).
- FreeBSD now has casperd, for controlling access to out-of-sandbox capabilities.
- FreeBSD’s oce(4) driver now supports 40Gb devices. (yay for manufacturer support)
- FreeBSD has Hyper-V drivers.
- OpenBSD’s ifconfig now shows the NWID, channel, and BSSID for IBSS networks.
- OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.32.4.
- pkgsrc’s 2013Q4 freeze will start on the 16th.
- How old is who? (Don’t tell me 900 years.)
- There’s a broken builds list for pkgsrc-2013Q4 for anyone who wants to help.
- Hacker News had a link to the FreeBSD version of the BSD Family Tree, which is not unique, but the comments led to some interesting links, like this story of an 8-year NetBSD uptime.
- FreeBSDNews’s summary.
- All the AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos. (Last week’s link was just OpenBSD ones.)
- FreeBSD authentication against Samba 4 LDAP. I’m going to need this for the DragonFly machine I’m setting up in the same role at work… in my copious spare time.
A lighter week for commits probably because of the U.S. holiday, but still plenty of things to link.
- Gabor Pali is this week’s ‘Faces of FreeBSD‘.
- The DiscoverBSD weekly BSD summary.
- There will be a FreeBSD Journal, though I see no mention on the Foundation site yet.
- There’s a ruBSD conference on December 14th, in Moscow. Undeadly has a page about it, and there’s the translation, if you feel lucky.
- BSDCan needs volunteers.
- Because FreeBSD is using the pre-GPL3 version of GCC, Google’s patches for Android (since that environment is apparently avoiding GPL3 too) have been brought in.
- FreeBSD has updated to svn 1.8.5.
- OpenBSD has updated NSD to 4.0.
- NetBSD has updated mpc. mpfr, and gmp.
- NetBSD has moved from pppd to ppp.
- FreeBSD is dropping 32-bit binary support, for reasons. But maybe not?
- Is it time to dump Linux and move to BSD? Yes, of course.
BSDNow 13 is out, and it includes an interview with Jordan Hubbard of ports/Apple/iXSystems fame. They also continue the ‘Building an OpenBSD router’ project, and of course, there’s more.
I’m working my way up to more than just links to source for the cross-BSD news. There’s a lot to swim through!
- NYCBSDCon 2014 (on February 8, 2014 – note the recent change) is, in addition to the normal call for papers, having a ‘call for exposés’, meaning they want people to expose BSD projects. I found this out through the undeadly.org description noting that some MIPS machines will be on display. This is an excellent idea; BSD projects need a showcase.
- There’s also a NYC Tech Meta-party, with NYCBUG and many other groups participating.
- FOSDEM 2014 will have a BSD Room.
- FreeBSD developer and FreeBSD-based-business-owner Colin Percival gets a spotlight from the FreeBSD Foundation.
- DiscoverBSD’s BSD summary. We need more of this.
- FreeBSD News miscellaneous links. Hey, there’s more!
- hostileadmin has a slew of wrap-up reports from vBSDCon. Sounds like a good time was had by all.
- Here’s more vBSDCon wrapups, plus slides.
- And a developer (John-Mark Gurney) trip to vBSDCon sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.
- Also, AsiaBSDCon OpenBSD presentations in video form.
- The pfSense blog is called “The pfSense Digest”. Digest… hey, that sounds like a good, descriptive term! They also are looking to hire. I just used some of my paid pfSense support time on a work problem – well worth the money spent.
- OK, back to source commit links.
- FreeBSD has enabled some Texas Instruments hardware.
- FreeBSD has added some example test framework programs.
- FreeBSD has added the axge(4) driver for ASIX AX88178A and AX88179 USB Ethernet
adapters. - OpenBSD has 802.11A support in wpi(4).
- (updated to add) There’s a PC-BSD weekly digest, too. That’s good, because I had trouble spotting things in the massive flood of PBI approvals over the past week.
BSDNow 12, which I haven’t had a chance to watch yet, has the normal roundup of events and an interview with Amitai Schlair of NetBSD. There’s also a tutorial about ssh and tmux.
The November issue of BSD Magazine is out, with a feature on High Availability Storage (that’s HAST) on FreeBSD, plus more. (noticed via freebsdnews, since I somehow missed the email/rss from bsdmag.com)
BSDTalk 235 has 26 minutes of conversation with Allan Jude about various topics, including this BSDNow thing I was just on,
Not as much pulled directly from the source lists this time, which is good.
- It’s no surprise that I would say this, but: it makes me happy to see other BSD projects doing regular summaries, like this one or that one for PC-BSD or this general BSD summary.
- A random PC-BSD review found via Google Search.
- PC-BSD 10 test images are available. I wonder if that’s related to the eleventy-billion commits lately out of the PC-BSD Github account?
- OpenBSD/CARP, Cisco, and schadenfreude.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s annual fundraising is on; they have already made it well along, but there’s still lots of dollars to go.
- OpenBSD now has automatic disk mounting.
- g4u 2.6 has entered beta. It’s “Ghost for Unix”, which gives you an idea of what it does.
- EuroBSDCon 2013 DevSummit video recordings are up. I said there would be video all week, didn’t I?
- Using OpenBSD with Vagrant and Veewee. Those tool names sound somewhat rude.
- pbulk bulk builds for pkgsrc made easy. I was working on a script like this.
- Cross–pollination makes me happy.
- svn in FreeBSD is updated.
- FreeBSD supports the MediaTek/Ralink RT5370/RT5372 chipset.
- nvi still gets updates.
- FreeBSD supports the (takes deep breath) Freescale Vybrid Family VF600 heterogeneous
ARM Cortex-A5/M4 SoC. (exhales) - FreeBSD has an IEEE Organizationally Unique Identifier. Not sure what it means.
- NetBSD has a new game, hals_end. If you saw 2001 the movie, you may guess the contents.
- OpenBSD has a new ugl driver for the Genesys Logic GL620USB-A
USB host-to-host link cable.
BSDNow episode 11 is up, with conversations about OpenSSH, FUSE, building an OpenBSD router, etc… and a whole hour of me talking about the upcoming DragonFly 3.6 release and this very Digest, too!
This appears to be all audiovisual media week, because author Michael W. Lucas gave a talk at the Michigan Users Group about OpenBSD (he’s qualified), and it’s up now in two parts. He describes it as:
“Among other things, I compare OpenBSD to Richard Stallman and physically assault an audience member.”
BSDTalk 234 is 30 minutes of conversation with Henning Brauer, taken at vBSDCon 2013. There’s a correlation between east coast BSD conferences and the number of BSDTalk episodes coming out.
I just finished a whole hour of gabbing on about DragonFly and BSD work in general for BSDNow. Because I am a ninny, I didn’t post something here earlier today so that people would know to watch the livestream. Sorry! However, it should be showing up in the next day or so on the BSDNow site. When it does, I’ll link it.