NetBSD – Page 15 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/04/262014/05/01

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/26

Another active week.

RetroBSD recently moved to Git and GitHub, and is now buildable on Mac OS X.
ALTQ is gone, at least for the OpenBSD version of pf.
So I’ll bring up this point again: pf is fragmenting, and we should do something about it.
The EdgeBSD presentation from FOSDEM 2014. (via)
OpenBSD could use some VLAN testing.
FreeBSDNews is running an swag contest.
netbsd.fi replaces onetbsd.org.
Here’s a GSoC project that could help everyone. (thanks, Tomáš Bodžár)
I’ve linked to some parts of this work, but Undeadly has a summary of the man page search improvements in OpenBSD.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/04/14 summary.
LibreSSL started because of a leaky water heater.
I always like threads about small hardware.
FreeNAS hardware unboxing.
Man, everybody likes pfSense.
Lua in pkgsrc is getting versioned.
Why would you do this?

2014/04/192014/04/18

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/19

I’ve got “coverage” of most every BSD this week.

OpenBSD has brought in OpenSSL – and is modifying it severely. Instead of linking to the many commits as they tear it into little bits, I’ll just link to this Lobste.rs post. Will it be OpenOpenSSL? It looks like it’s for internal consumption only. Undeadly has a similar summation. Apparently there’s a running blog of the changes, or at least the snarky comments.
Have you never been to BSDCan? Dan Langille asks the question. As he points out, BSD conventions are awesome, where you get to meet some smart people and put names to faces.
“I have been given the option of Linux or BSD at work…” A discussion of BSD as a Java development platform.
FreeBSD has added the if_nf10bmac(4) driver, for the “NetFPGA-10G Embedded CPU Ethernet Core”, which appears to be a programmable network card? I’m not sure how it all works together.
Goodbye EISA on FreeBSD. (Gone long ago on DragonFly.)
NetBSD src and pkgsrc changes are being twittered. (NetBSD link does not work just now when I tried it.)
PC-BSD Digest 26 mentions the addition of a new desktop environment called Lumina, built just for PC-BSD.

2014/04/08

Heartbleed and BSD

If you didn’t know what the Heartbleed bug is, here’s your explanation, plus details. (via). You should probably update your systems.

2014/04/052014/04/05

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/05

Another week.

BSDCan 2014 will have the BSD Professional Certification exam available (as beta)
“The Design And Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” second edition, is up for pre-order. (comments are rude/funny.)
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/31.
The PC-BSD Digest 24.
reop, an follow-up from OpenBSD’s signify
The FreeBSDNews link roundup.
Michael W. Lucas follows up on a prank with a description of how to get a BSD convention going.
Peter N. M. Hansteen wants feedback on his BSDCan tutorials.
Joystick support always sounds like a good idea.
The Playstation 2 is back as a NetBSD platform.
Turn partitions into disk images on FreeBSD.
You can possibly create x86 USB images with NetBSD. (you couldn’t before?)
NetBSD imported starsign, for signing data. Since it’s an external program, I tried searching for its origin… Google failed spectacularly, with astrology links galore.
NetBSD also added dust, which appears to be a sensible utility. (Update: both this and starsign apparently written by Alistair Crooks.)
I didn’t know serial ports could go this fast.
pkgsrc-2014Q1 is out.
Pkgsrc is looking at signing packages, too.
Some conversation about building machines with a bunch of network ports. From openbsd-misc, but probably applies across the board.
Video of the April 1 NYCBUG presentation on random number generation is available.

2014/03/292014/03/29

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/29

A quiet week this week.

BSD author Michael W. Lucas has a project announcement mailing list.
OpenBSD after version 5.5 will no longer support FTP for installation of sets.
OpenBSD 5.5. preorders are available.
NetBSD has imported mDNSResponder-258-14.
OpenSSH 6.6 is out. I haven’t kept track of which BSDs have updated.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/03/24 summary.
Another RetroBSD device.
PC-BSD Weekly Digest 23.

2014/03/152014/03/15

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/15

Another week with lots of links.

DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/03/10.
PC-BSD Digest 21 – 10.0.1 release.
FreeBSDNews needs a new maintainer. (am I the old man of BSD blogs? Yeesh.)
FreeBSDNews also has two FreeNAS videos.
OpenBSD is starting on USB 3 support. I assume this is separate from USB4BSD?
OpenBSD has moved to OpenSMTPD by default.
Hubert Feyrer has a summary of recent ARM developments in NetBSD.
The 2014Q1 freeze for pkgsrc starts effectively today, lasting two weeks.
Eric Radman pointed out that non-linear editing is possible on the BSDs using Blender, and here’s a tutorial.
FreeBSD had an ABI change, so rebuild carefully on master.
Man pages added by Microsoft to FreeBSD. It makes sense, but it still makes me pause.
Apache is out of OpenBSD base.
The window manager cwm has been made portable, meaning it’s not just for OpenBSD now.
IPX and AppleTalk have been removed from FreeBSD.

2014/03/082014/03/08

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/08

Links everywhere this week!

ZFS 101. This might be the same material presented at NYCBSDCon; I’m not sure.
Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script.
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/03.
PC-BSD Weekly Digest 20.
Theo De Raadt questions for a Slashdot interview.
OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 is released.
Introduction to FreeNAS development.
GhostBSD activity. (via)
FreeNAS is now 64-bit only. (via)
OpenBSD package building on larger machines.
pkgsrcCon 2014 is happening June 21-22 in London, UK.
The schedule for BSDCan 2014 is out.
Merkletrees. Don’t know what it’s for; just like the name.
NetBSD has a versioning system called ‘bikeshed’. It appears to mostly be plans at this point.
OpenBSD has added qlw(4), a driver for QLogic ISP SCSI HBAs.
Apparently some quirks from decades ago still survive.
Random is more random on BSD than on Linux. (see last paragraph) (via)
If you keep an emergency towel, you may get this joke.

2014/03/012014/02/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/01

Another week where I barely need to look up source code commits.

PC-BSD Weekly Digest 18 and Digest 19.
OpenBSD’s signify tool has been backported to OpenBSD versions < 5.5.
Video of an OpenBSD install.
xorg, unprivileged on OpenBSD. (via)
This is a good idea: FreeBSD 10’s release.sh mapped out.
bcrypt() updates in OpenBSD and what it means for you. (also)
iXSystem’s NYCBSDCon 2014 recap. (via nycbug-talk)
A description of those expensive/busy WhatsApp FreeBSD servers. (via)
FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis. (via #nycbug)
NetBSD is bringing in BIND 9.10.0b1. (a beta?)
NetBSD is also in the process of moving from gcc 4.5 to 4.8.
Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord. I still haven’t set up the Netflow system that I want to set up, dangit.
pkg will require libucl. This affects FreeBSD and will affect DragonFly too.
OpenBSD has an experimental USB installer. This may be new to the upcoming release – I don’t know.

2014/02/222014/02/21

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/22

Read the first item, if nothing else.

You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
Power failure resistance.
LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.

2014/02/082014/02/06

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/08

As you read this, I’m at NYCBSDCon – or at least should be.

FOSDEM 2014 videos are up. The second item listed is about the new version of ports, which includes dports. (via)
Crochet-FreeBSD, a system for building bootable FreeBSD images for a variety of platforms including x86, ARM, and VM. (via Markus Pfieffer on IRC, indirectly)
Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures. Seen previously at BSDCan. ‘Greytrapping’, mentioned in the article, is new to me.
Email delivery headaches. Mailing many people is somehow almost always a low-level irritation.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/03 roundup.
Another n2k14 hackathon report. DragonFly uses that DHCP client he’s talking about.
PC-BSD on eWeek.
bsd-cloudinit – FreeBSD on OpenStack. (via)
OpenBSD gained some VAX hardware. The only VAX hardware I ever saw was 6 feet tall; I can’t imagine these are easy to ship.
OpenBSD updated to ldns 1.6.17.
Seen via a pkgsrc list: Berlios.de is closing down its hosting, so this may affect you if you usually grab your pkgsrc packages from there.
The proper way to break the FreeBSD ABI.
Robert Watson’s privilege ideas.
How to switch between mfi(4) and mrsas(4) on FreeBSD. mrsas(4) sounds like MRSA to me, which is a bit more worrisome
FreeBSD supports MegaRAID Fury cards.
The plan for ATF removal in NetBSD.
DragonFly takes the FreeBSD patch(1) updates, and that’s fine, because FreeBSD made those changes to an import of DragonFly’s patch(1). Hooray for cross-pollination!

2014/02/012014/01/31

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/01

For once, I got this mostly done before late Friday night!

OpenBSD on the Beaglebone Black.
DiscoverBSD’s January 28th roundup.
Automated FreeBSD Panic Reporting. More people need to do this.
A report from the n2k14 OpenBSD hackathon.
New to me: CHERIBSD. Capsicum, implemented in hardware, is a rough summary.
Python is going to 3.x by default in pkgsrc.
OpenSSH 6.5 is out.
PC-BSD 10 is out. (release announcement)
FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Final.
Sendmail is moved to 8.14.8, and bmake to 20140101 in FreeBSD.
NetBSD has announced several 5.x and 6.x patch level changes.
Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower, 2014 Edition.

2014/01/042014/01/04

In Other BSDs for 2014/01/04

Things are picking up again after the break.

Faces of FreeBSD: Isabell Long. Note that she came in via Google Code-In. That’s the value of those programs.
OpenBSD: Randomness, sooner.
OpenBSD’s change to PIE for i386 means special upgrade procedures – if you’re on i386. Also, here’s PIE. atexit(3) changes also changes the upgrade method this one time for… all platforms? I’m not sure.
The DiscoverBSD roundup for 12/31/2013.
The FreeBSD Test Suite. It’s similar to what NetBSD has, but see the source link for comments on what’s different. DragonFly has a test setup too, though I’ve never tried it – is there one for OpenBSD?
Pkgsrc-2013Q4 is branched.
FreeBSD has improved NFS performance.
NetBSD has updated libpcap, tcpdump, wpa, bind, and dhcpcd.
OpenBSD has updated xterm, glproto, and some other xenocara parts.

2013/12/282013/12/27

In Other BSDs for 2013/12/28

Again, quiet from the holiday break.

strlcpy/strlcat users, a rundown. The buffer overflow problem is suprisingly widespread. (via)
The PC-BSD Digest for 12/20 and for 12/27.
The DiscoverBSD weekly summary.
Faces of FreeBSD: Kevin Martin.
FreeNAS 9.2.0 is out. (via)
OpenSMTPD, a project I’ve always meant to look at more, has been updated.
BSD Magazine for December 2013 is out. The RSS feed for them/their newsletter is no longer working, cause I had to find out here.
ruBSD talks about OpenBSD are online.
There’s new support in NetBSD for that old Amiga.
You may need to update your OpenBSD packages.
NetBSD’s smbfs is now an import from FreeBSD.
NetBSD has updated ACPICA and OpenPAM.

2013/12/092013/12/09

A BSD plan: license summaries

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.

2013/12/072013/12/04

In Other BSDs for 2013/12/07

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.

2013/11/302013/11/29

In Other BSDs for 2013/11/30

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.

2013/11/222013/11/22

BSDNow 12: Collecting SSHells

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.

2013/11/092013/11/08

In Other BSDs for 2013/11/09

Not sure why, but there wasn’t a lot of things this week to pick out.

A short discussion of Perfect Forward Secrecy on pkgsrc-users.
PC-BSD apparently (used to) play a movie on first boot.
FreeBSD now has a ‘mini-memstick‘ install option. (a later messages says ~200M in size.)
FreeBSD has updated aacraid.
OpenBSD supports the RTS5229 card reader in rtsx(4).
OpenBSD has updated OpenSSH, and NetBSD has updated. (DragonFly has a fix for the underlying problem.)
OpenBSD has FUSE support.

2013/11/022013/11/01

In Other BSDs for 2013/11/02

There’s a surprisingly large list this week.

FreeBSD has updated netmap.
FreeBSD supports VT-d DMAR hardware. Not totally sure what that is.
FreeBSD supports the RealTek RTL8168G, RTL8168GU, RTL8411B, and RTL8168EP.
FreeBSD updated byacc to version 20130925.
FreeBSD has binary packages again.
Managed Services using FreeBSD at NYI, a whitepaper.
NetBSD has imported OpenBSD’s support for ASIX AX88178a and AX88179 USB network interfaces, in the axen(4) driver.
NetBSD supports the Broadcom BCM56340 iProc based switch.
OpenBSD supports unattended installation. See Also on Undeadly.
OpenBSD has softraid booting documentation. Someone will find this useful, I’m sure.
OpenBSD 5.4 is released.
Inspecting Packets with OpenBSD and pf, the presentation from vBSDCon.
Lua in pkgsrc has been modified.
Ocaml in pkgsrc has been updated to 4.0.1.
The BSD Router Project has hit 1.5. (via)
PC-BSD 10 alpha images are available for testing.
PC-BSD is doing weekly updates, an idea I support, unsurprisingly.
No BSD systems in Google Code-In this year, darnit.

2013/10/262013/10/25

In Other BSDs for 2013/10/26

Once again, doing this at the last minute:

FreeBSD supports the FreeScale Fast Ethernet controller on a number of SoC systems.
FreeBSD’s jemalloc has been updated to 3.4.1.
FreeBSD has initial support for the RealTek RTL8106E PCIe Fast Ethernet chipset.
FreeBSD has significant changes to the CAM subsystem.
FreeBSD has initial support for the Rockchip RK3188 SoC.
FreeBSD has an updated oce(4) driver, directly supported by Emulex, the vendor. (always nice to see vendor support.)
FreeBSD now has a /usr/tests.
There’s some NetBSD in your Mercedes.
the safety of the internet is called into doubt
OpenBSD supports the cubieboard and other allwinner devices.
OpenBSD supports the XBox controller.
A few packages are being retired from pkgsrc because of lack of DESTDIR support.