BSD Now

Interview with Warner Losh about Unix history, the 2.11-BSD restoration project, the Unix heritage society, proper booting, and what devmatch is. Interview - Warner Losh - [email protected] / @bsdimp BSD 2.11 restoration project Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Special Guest: Warner Losh.

Emulex: The Cheapest 10gbe for Your Homelab, In Search of 2.11BSD, as released, Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM, First powerpc64 snapshots available for OpenBSD, OPNsense 20.1.8 released, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines Emulex: The Cheapest 10gbe for Your Homelab Years ago, the hunt for the cheapest 10gbe NICs resulted in buying Mellanox ConnectX-2 single-port 10gbe network cards from eBay for around $10. Nowadays those cards have increased in cost to around $20-30. While still cheap, not quite the cheapest. There are now alternatives! Before diving into details, let’s get something very clear. If you want the absolute simplest plug-and-play 10gbe LAN for your homelab, pay the extra for Mellanox. If you’re willing to go hands-on, do some simple manual configuration and installation, read on for my experiences with Emulex 10gbe NICs. Emulex NICs can often be had for around $15 on eBay, sometimes even cheaper. I recently picked up a set of 4 of these cards, which came bundled with 6 SFP+ 10g-SR modules for a grand total of $47.48. Considering I can usually find SFP+ modules for about $5/ea, these alone were worth $30. I have also tried some Solarflare cards that I found cheap, they work ok, but are pickier about optics, and tend to be focused on low-latency, so often don’t manage to saturate the full 10 gbps, topping out around 8 gbps. I have been using fs.com for optics, patch cables, and DACs. I find DACs are usually cheaper if you are just going between a server and a switch in the same rack, or direct between 2 servers. *** In Search of 2.11BSD, as released Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BSD you can find them online with little fuss. However, if you search for 2.11BSD, you'll find it easily enough, but it won't be the original. You'll find either the latest patched version (2.11BSD pl 469), or one of the earlier popular version (pl 430 is popular). You can even find the RetroBSD project which used 2.11BSD as a starting point to create systems for tiny mips-based PIC controllers. You'll find every single patch that's been issued for the system. News Roundup Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker, mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM, a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu. What baffled me was the speed at which the virtual machine would fire up and run the service. The whole process is to be compared to a container, but safer, as it does not share the kernel nor any resource, it is a separate and dedicated virtual machine. If you want to learn more on Firecracker‘s internals, here’s a very well put article. First powerpc64 snapshots available for OpenBSD Since we reported the first bits of powerpc64 support going into the tree on 16 May, work has progressed at a steady pace, resulting in snapshots now being available for this platform. So, if you have a POWER9 system idling around, go to your nearest mirror and fetch this snapshot. Keep in mind that as this is still very early days, very little handholding is available - you are basically on your own. OPNsense 20.1.8 released Sorry about the delay while we chased a race condition in the updates back to an issue with the latest FreeBSD package manager updates. For now we reverted to our current version but all relevant third party packages have been updated as updates became available over the last weeks, e.g. cURL and Python, and hostapd / wpa_supplicant amongst others. Beastie Bits Old School Disk Partitioning Nomad BSD 1.3.2 Released Chai-Fi Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Poojan - ZFS Question graceon - supermicro zenbum - groff Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] *** Special Guest: Warner Losh.

Chasing a bad commit, New FreeBSD Core Team elected, Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro, FreeBSD on the Intel 10th Gen i3 NUC, pf table size check and change, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines Chasing a bad commit While working on a big project where multiple teams merge their feature branches frequently into a release Git branch, developers often run into situations where they find that some of their work have been either removed, modified or affected by someone else's work accidentally. It can happen in smaller teams as well. Two features could have been working perfectly fine until they got merged together and broke something. That's a highly possible case. There are many other cases which could cause such hard to understand and subtle bugs which even continuous integration (CI) systems running the entire test suite of our projects couldn't catch. We are not going to discuss how such subtle bugs can get into our release branch because that's just a wild territory out there. Instead, we can definitely discuss about how to find a commit that deviated from an expected outcome of a certain feature. The deviation could be any behaviour of our code that we can measure distinctively — either good or bad in general. New FreeBSD Core Team Elected The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the completion of the 2020 Core Team election. Active committers to the project have elected your Eleventh FreeBSD Core Team.! Baptiste Daroussin (bapt) Ed Maste (emaste) George V. Neville-Neil (gnn) Hiroki Sato (hrs) Kyle Evans (kevans) Mark Johnston (markj) Scott Long (scottl) Sean Chittenden (seanc) Warner Losh (imp) *** News Roundup Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro If you buy a Pinebook Pro now, it comes with Manjaro Linux on the internal eMMC storage. Let’s install NetBSD instead! The easiest way to get started is to buy a decent micro-SD card (what sort of markings it should have is a science of its own, by the way) and install NetBSD on that. On a warm boot (i.e. when rebooting a running system), the micro-SD card has priority compared to the eMMC, so the system will boot from there. A FreeBSD developer has borrowed some of the NetBSD code to get audio working on RockPro64 and Pinebook Pro: https://twitter.com/kernelnomicon/status/1282790609778905088 *** FreeBSD on the Intel 10th Gen i3 NUC I have ended up with some 10th Gen i3 NUC's (NUC10i3FNH to be specific) to put to work in my testbed. These are quite new devices, the build date on the boxes is 13APR2020. Before I figure out what their true role is (one of them might have to run linux) I need to install FreeBSD -CURRENT and see how performance and hardware support is. pf table size check and change Did you know there’s a default size limit to pf’s state table? I did not, but it makes sense that there is one. If for some reason you bump into this limit (difficult for home use, I’d think), here’s how you change it There is a table-entries limit specified, you can see current settings with 'pfctl -s all'. You can adjust the limits in the /etc/pf.conf file containing the rules with a line like this near the top: set limit table-entries 100000 In the original mail thread, there is mention of the FreeBSD sysctl net.pf.request_maxcount, which controls the maximum number of entries that can be sent as a single ioctl(). This allows the user to adjust the memory limit for how big of a list the kernel is willing to allocate memory for. *** Beastie Bits tmux and bhyve Azure and FreeBSD Groff Tutorial *** ###Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Tarsnap Mastery Feedback/Questions Chris - ZFS Question Patrick - Tarsnap Pin - pkgsrc *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] ***

Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With "pot" within 5 minutes, OmniOS as OpenBSD guest with bhyve, BSD vs Linux distro development, My FreeBSD Laptop Build, FreeBSD CURRENT Binary Upgrades, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With "pot" Within 5 Minutes pot is a great and relatively new jail management tool. It offers DevOps style provisioning and can even be used to provide Docker-like, scalable cloud services together with nomad and consul (more about this in Orchestrating jails with nomad and pot). OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS Today I will be creating a OpenBSD guest via bhyve on OmniOS. I will also be adding a Pass Through Ethernet Controller so I can have a multi-homed guest that will serve as a firewall/router. This post will cover setting up bhyve on OmniOS, so it will also be a good introduction to bhyve. As well, I look into OpenBSD’s uEFI boot loader so if you have had trouble with this, then you are in the right place. News Roundup BSD versus Linux distribution development Q: Comparing-apples-to-BSDs asks: I was reading one of the old articles from the archive. One of the things mentioned was how the BSDs have a distinct approach in terms of packaging the base system relative to userland apps, and that the Linux distros at the time were not following the same practice. Are there Linux distros that have adopted the same approach in modern times? If not, are there technical limitations that are preventing them from doing so, such as some distros supporting multiple kernel versions maybe? DistroWatch answers: In the article mentioned above, I made the observation that Linux distributions tend to take one of two approaches when it comes to packaging software. Generally a Linux distribution will either offer a rolling release, where virtually all packages are regularly upgraded to their latest stable releases, or a fixed release where almost all packages are kept at a set version number and only receive bug fixes for the life cycle of the distribution. Projects like Arch Linux and Void are popular examples of rolling, always-up-to-date distributions while Fedora and Ubuntu offer fixed platforms. My FreeBSD Laptop Build I have always liked Thinkpad hardware and when I started to do more commuting I decided I needed something that had a decent sized screen but fit well on a bus. Luckily about this time Lenovo gave me a nice gift in the Thinkpad X390. Its basically the famous X2xx series but with a 13” screen and smaller bezel. So with this laptop I figured it was time to actually put the docs together on how I got my FreeBSD workstation working on it. I will here in the near future have another post that will cover this for HardenedBSD as well since the steps are similar but have a few extra gotchas due to the extra hardening. FreeBSD CURRENT Binary Upgrades Disclaimer This proof-of-concept is not a publication of FreeBSD. Description up.bsd.lv is a proof-of-concept of binary updates for FreeBSD/amd64 CURRENT/HEAD to facilitate the exhaustive testing of FreeBSD and the bhyve hypervisor and OpenZFS 2.0 specifically. Updates are based on the SVN revisions of official FreeBSD Release Engineering bi-monthly snapshots. Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Karl - pfsense Val - esxi question lars - openbsd router hardware Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

Yubikey-agent on FreeBSD, Managing Kubernetes clusters from OpenBSD, History of FreeBSD part 1, Running Jitsi-Meet in a FreeBSD Jail, Command Line Bug Hunting in FreeBSD, Game of Github, Wireguard official merged into OpenBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines yubikey-agent on FreeBSD Some time ago Filippo Valsorda wrote yubikey-agent, seamless SSH agent for YubiKeys. I really like YubiKeys and worked on the FreeBSD support for U2F in Chromium and pyu2f, getting yubikey-agent ported looked like an interesting project. It took some hacking to make it work but overall it wasn’t hard. Following is the roadmap on how to get it set up on FreeBSD. The actual details depend on your system (as you will see) Manage Kubernetes clusters from OpenBSD This should work with OpenBSD 6.7. I write this while the source tree is locked for release, so even if I use -current this is as close as -current gets to -release Update 2020-06-05: we now have a port for kubectl. So, at least in -current things get a bit easier. News Roundup History of FreeBSD Part 1: Unix and BSD FreeBSD, a free and open-source Unix-like operating system has been around since 1993. However, its origins are directly linked to that of BSD, and further back, those of Unix. During this History of FreeBSD series, we will talk about how Unix came to be, and how Berkeley’s Unix developed at Bell Labs. Running Jitsi-Meet in a FreeBSD Jail Due to the situation with COVID-19 that also lead to people being confined to their homes in South Africa as well, we decided to provide a (freely usable of course) Jitsi Meet instance to the community being hosted in South Africa on our FreeBSD environment. That way, communities in South Africa and beyond have a free alternative to the commercial conferencing solutions with sometimes dubious security and privacy histories and at the same time improved user experience due to the lower latency of local hosting. Grafana for Jitsi-Meet *** Command Line Bug Hunting in FreeBSD FreeBSD uses bugzilla for tracking bugs, taking feature requests, regressions and issues in the Operating System. The web interface for bugzilla is okay, but if you want to do a lot of batch operations it is slow to deal with. We are planning to run a bugsquash on July 11th and that really needs some tooling to help any hackers that show up process the giant bug list we have. Beastie Bits Game of Github + Wireguard official merged into OpenBSD *** Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Florian : Lua for $HOME Kevin : FreeBSD Source Question Tom : HomeLabs Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines, NetBSD code study, DRM Update on OpenBSD, Booting FreeBSD on HPE Microserver SATA port, 3 ways to multiboot, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines APU4D4 I just got myself a PC Engines APU4D4. I miss an OpenBSD box providing home services. It’s quite simple to install and run OpenBSD on this machine. And you can even update the BIOS from OpenBSD. NetBSD code study News Roundup Booting FreeBSD off the HPE MicroServer Gen8 ODD SATA port My small homelab post generated a ton of questions and comments, most of them specific to running FreeBSD on the HP MicroServer. I’ll try and answer these over the coming week. Josh Paxton emailed to ask how I got FreeBSD booting on it, given the unconventional booting limitations of the hardware. I thought I wrote about it a few years ago, but maybe it’s on my proverbial draft heap. If you’re impatient, the script is in my lunchbox. 3 ways to multiboot multiboot installation of a BSD system with other operating systems (OSs) on UEFI hardware is not officially supported by any of the popular Beastie Bits pfSense2.4.5-Release-p1 now available BSDCan 2020 TomSmyth - OpenBSD And OpenBGPD As ISP Controlplane OpenBSD DRM Update *** ###Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions James - Apple T2 Michael - Jordyns ZFS Question Note from JT Rob - FreeBSD Freindly Registrar Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] ***

TrueNAS is Multi-OS, Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD, FreeBSD’s new Code of Conduct, Gaming on OpenBSD, dig a little deeper, Hammer2 and periodic snapshots, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines TrueNAS is Multi-OS There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used. Once software applications became prominent, your hardware’s OS determined the applications you could run. Application vendors were forced to juggle the burden of “portability” between OS platforms, choosing carefully the operating systems they’d develop their software to. Then, there were the great OS Wars of the 1990s, replete with the rampant competition, licensing battles, and nasty lawsuits, which more or less gave birth to the “open source OS” era. The advent of the hypervisor simultaneously gave way to the “virtual era” which set us on a path of agnosticism toward the OS. Instead of choosing from the applications available for your chosen OS, you could simply install another OS on the same hardware for your chosen application. The OS became nothing but a necessary cog in the stack. TrueNAS open storage enables this “post-OS era” with support for storage clients of all UNIX flavors, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, VMware, Citrix, and many others. Containerization has carried that mentality even further. An operating system, like the hardware that runs it, is now just thought of as part of the “infrastructure”. Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD 9.0, for a FreeBSD guy I had one of my other HP Microservers brought back from the office last week to help with this working-from-home world we’re in right now. I was going to wipe an old version of Debian Wheezy/Xen and install FreeBSD to mirror my other machines before thinking: why not NetBSD? News Roundup FreeBSD's New Code of Conduct FreeBSD Announcement Email Gaming on OpenBSD While no one would expect this, there are huge efforts from a small team to bring more games into OpenBSD. In fact, now some commercial games works natively now, thanks to Mono or Java. There are no wine or linux emulation layer in OpenBSD. Here is a small list of most well known games that run on OpenBSD: 'dig' a little deeper I knew the existence of the dig command but didn't exactly know when and how to use it. Then, just recently I encountered an issue that allowed me to learn and make use of it. HAMMER2 and periodic snapshots The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system. git: Implement periodic hammer2 snapshots *** Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Cy - OpenSSL relicensing Christian - lagg vlans and iocage Brad - SMR *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] ***

Upgrading OpenBSD, Where do Unix man pages come from?, Help for NetBSD’s VAX port, FreeBSD on Dell Latitude 7390, PFS Tool changes in DragonflyBSD, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines How to Upgrade OpenBSD and Build a Kernel Let's see how to upgrade your OpenBSD system. Maybe you are doing this because the latest release just came out. If so, this is pretty simple: back up your data, boot from install media, and select "Upgrade" instead of "Install". But maybe the latest release has been out for a few months. Why would we go through the trouble of building and installing a new kernel or other core system components? Maybe some patches have been released to improve system security or stability. It is pretty easy to build and install a kernel on OpenBSD, easier and simpler in many ways than it is on Linux. The History of man pages Where do UNIX manpages come from? Who introduced the section-based layout of NAME, SYNOPSIS, and so on? And for manpage authors: where were those economical two- and three-letter instructions developed? VAX port needs help The VAX is the oldest machine architecture still supported by NetBSD. Unfortunately there is another challenge, totally outside of NetBSD, but affecting the VAX port big time: the compiler support for VAX is ... let's say sub-optimal. It is also risking to be dropped completely by gcc upstream. Now here is where people can help: there is a bounty campaign to finance a gcc hacker to fix the hardest and most immediate issue with gcc for VAX. Without this being resolved, gcc will drop support for VAX in a near future version. My new FreeBSD Laptop: Dell Latitude 7390 As a FreeBSD developer, I make a point of using FreeBSD whenever I can — including on the desktop. I've been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004; this hasn't always been easy, but over the years I've found that the situation has generally been improving. One of the things we still lack is adequate documentation, however — so I'm writing this to provide an example for users and also Google bait in case anyone runs into some of the problems I had to address. PFS tool changes in DragonFly HAMMER2 just became a little more DWIM: the pfs-list and pfs-delete directives will now look across all mounted filesystems, not just the current directory’s mount path. pfs-delete won’t delete any filesystem name that appears in more than one place, though git: hammer2 - Enhance pfs-list and pfs-delete Enhance pfs-list to list PFSs available across all mounted hammer2 filesystems instead of just the current directory's mount. A specific mount may be specified via -s mountpt. Enhance pfs-delete to look for the PFS name across all mounted hammer2 filesystems instead of just the current directory's mount. As a safety, pfs-delete will refuse to delete PFS names which are duplicated across multiple mounts. A specific mount may be specified via -s mountpt. Beastie Bits BastilleBSD Templates Tianocore update Reminder: FreeBSD Office Hours on June 24, 2020 *** ###Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Niclas - Regarding the Lenovo E595 user from Episode 340 Erik - What happened with the video Igor - Boot Environments *** Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] ***

FreeBSD 11.4-RC 2 available, OpenBSD 6.7 on a PineBook Pro 64, How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe, Bringing FreeBSD to EC2, FreeBSD 2020 Community Survey, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines FreeBSD 11.4-RC2 Now Available The second RC build of the 11.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available. 11.4-RELEASE notes (still in progress at the time of recording) *** Install OpenBSD 6.7-current on a PineBook Pro 64 This document is work in progress and I'll update the date above once I change something. If you have something to add, remarks, etc please contact me. Preferably via Mastodon but other means of communication are also fine. News Roundup Understanding How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe Veteran technology writer Jim Salter wrote an excellent guide on the ZFS file system’s features and performance that we absolutely had to share. There’s plenty of information in the article for ZFS newbies and advanced users alike. Be sure to check out the article over at Ars Technica to learn more about ZFS concepts including pools, vdevs, datasets, snapshots, and replication, just to name a few. Bringing FreeBSD to ec2 Colin is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service which combines the flexibility and scriptability of the standard UNIX "tar" utility with strong encryption, deduplication, and the reliability of Amazon S3 storage. Having started work on Tarsnap in 2006, Colin is among the first generation of users of Amazon Web Services, and has written dozens of articles about his experiences with AWS on his blog. FreeBSD 2020 Community Survey The FreeBSD Core Team invites you to complete the 2020 FreeBSD Community Survey. The purpose of this survey is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the project’s priorities and efforts. This is only the second time a survey has been conducted by the FreeBSD Project and your input is valued. The survey will remain open for 14 days and will close on June 16th at 17:00 UTC (Tuesday 10am PDT). Beastie Bits FreeBSD Project Proposals TJ Hacking Scotland Open Source podcast Next FreeBSD Office Hours on June 24, 2020 *** Feedback/Questions Tom - Writing for LPIrstudio Luke - rstudio Matt - Vlans and Jails Morgan - Can I get some commentary on this issue Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

Scheduling in NetBSD, ZFS vs. RAID on Ironwolf disks, OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go 2, FreeBSD for Linux sysadmins, FreeBSD on Lenovo T480, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap Headlines Scheduling in NetBSD – Part 1 In this blog, we will discuss about the 4.4BSD Thread scheduler one of the two schedulers in NetBSD and a few OS APIs that can be used to control the schedulers and get information while executing. ZFS versus RAID: Eight Ironwolf disks, two filesystems, one winner This has been a long while in the making—it's test results time. To truly understand the fundamentals of computer storage, it's important to explore the impact of various conventional RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) topologies on performance. It's also important to understand what ZFS is and how it works. But at some point, people (particularly computer enthusiasts on the Internet) want numbers. If you want to hear more from Jim, he has a new bi-weekly podcast with Allan and Joe Ressington over at 2.5admins.com News Roundup OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go 2 I used OpenBSD on the original Surface Go back in 2018 and many things worked with the big exception of the internal Atheros WiFi. This meant I had to keep it tethered to a USB-C dock for Ethernet or use a small USB-A WiFi dongle plugged into a less-than-small USB-A-to-USB-C adapter. FreeBSD UNIX for Linux sysadmins If you’ve ever installed and explored another Linux distro (what Linux sysadmin hasn’t?!?), then exploring FreeBSD is going be somewhat similar with a few key differences. While there is no graphical installation, the installation process is straightforward and similar to installing a server-based Linux distro. Just make sure you choose the local_unbound package when prompted if you want to cache DNS lookups locally, as FreeBSD doesn’t have a built-in local DNS resolver that does this. Following installation, the directory structure is almost identical to Linux. Of course, you’ll notice some small differences here and there (e.g. regular user home directories are located under /usr/home instead of /home). Standard UNIX commands such as ls, chmod, find, which, ps, nice, ifconfig, netstat, sockstat (the ss command in Linux) are exactly as you’d expect, but with some different options here and there that you’ll see in the man pages. And yes, reboot and poweroff are there too. FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad T480 Recently I replaced my 2014 MacBook Air with a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, on which I've installed FreeBSD, currently 12.1-RELEASE. This page documents my set-up along with various configuration tweaks and fixes. Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Benjamin - ZFS Question Brad - swap_pager_getswapspace errors Brandon - gaming Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

A brief introduction to randomness, logs grinding netatalk to a halt, NetBSD core team changes, Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests, WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD, FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop, and more. Headlines Entropy A brief introduction to randomness Problem: Computers are very predictable. This is by design. But what if we want them to act unpredictably? This is very useful if we want to secure our private communications with randomized keys, or not let people cheat at video games, or if we're doing statistical simulations or similar. Logs grinding Netatalk on FreeBSD to a hault I’ve heard it said the cobbler’s children walk barefoot. While posessing the qualities of a famed financial investment strategy, it speaks to how we generally put more effort into things for others than ourselves; at least in business. The HP Microserver I share with Clara is a modest affair compared to what we run at work. It has six spinning rust drives and two SSDs which are ZFS-mirrored; not even in a RAID 10 equivalent. This is underlaid with GELI for encryption, and served to our Macs with Netatalk over gigabit Ethernet with jumbo frames. News Roundup NetBSD Core Team Changes Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions. Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group, and bringing it up to date with modern functionality. Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests. WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD A while ago I wanted to learn more about OpenBSD development. So I picked a project, in this case WireGuard, to develop a native client for. Over the last two years, with many different iterations, and working closely with the WireGuard's creator (Jason [Jason A. Donenfeld - Ed.], CC'd), it started to become a serious project eventually reaching parity with other official implementations. Finally, we are here and I think it is time for any further development to happen inside the src tree. FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop I’m using FreeBSD again on a laptop for some reasons so expect to read more about FreeBSD here. This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1. Beastie Bits List of useful FreeBSD Commands Master Your Network With Unix Command Line Tools Original Unix containers aka FreeBSD jails Flashback : 2003 Article : Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor FreeBSD Journal March/April 2020 Filesystems: ZFS Encryption, FUSE, and more, plus Network Bridges HAMBug meeting will be online again in June, so those from all over the world are welcome to join, June 9th (2nd Tuesday of each month) at 18:30 Eastern Feedback/Questions + Lyubomir - GELI and ZFS Patrick - powerd and powerd++ Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

Backup and Restore on NetBSD, OpenBSD 6.7 available, Building a WireGuard Jail with FreeBSD's standard tools, who gets to chown things and quotas, influence TrueNAS CORE roadmap, and more. Headlines Backup and Restore on NetBSD Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most Admin Handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing my old Mac Mini's OS by NetBSD, I tried to implement an automated backup, allowing me to handle it similarly to the time machine backups I've been using before. Suggestions on how to improve are always welcome. BSD Release: OpenBSD 6.7 The OpenBSD project produces and operating system which places focus on portability, standardisation, code correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. The project's latest release is OpenBSD 6.7 which introduces several new improvements to the cron scheduling daemon, improvements to the web server daemon, and the top command now offers scrollable output. These and many more changes can be found in the project's release announcement: "This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 6.7. For a comprehensive list, see the changelog leading to 6.7. General improvements and bugfixes: Reduced the minimum allowed number of chunks in a CONCAT volume from 2 to 1, increasing the number of volumes which can be created on a single disk with bioctl(8) from 7 to 15. This can be used to create more partitions than previously. Rewrote the cron(8) flag-parsing code to be getopt-like, allowing tight formations like -ns and flag repetition. Renamed the 'options' field in crontab(5) to 'flags'. Added crontab(5) -s flag to the command field, indicating that only a single instance of the job should run concurrently. Added cron(8) support for random time values using the ~ operator. Allowed cwm(1) configuration of window size based on percentage of the master window during horizontal and vertical tiling actions." Release Announcement Release Notes News Roundup Building a WireGuard Jail with the FreeBSD's Standard Tools Recently, I had an opportunity to build a WireGuard jail on a FreeBSD 12.1 host. As it was really quick and easy to setup and it has been working completely fine for a month, I’d like to share my experience with anyone interested in this topic. The Unix divide over who gets to chown things, and (disk space) quotas One of the famous big splits between the BSD Unix world and the System V world is whether ordinary users can use chown (the command and the system call) to give away their own files. In System V derived Unixes you were generally allowed to; in BSD derived Unixes you weren't. Until I looked it up now to make sure, I thought that BSD changed this behavior from V7 and that V7 had an unrestricted chown. However, this turns out to be wrong; in V7 Unix, chown(2) was restricted to root only. You Can Influence the TrueNAS CORE Roadmap! As many of you know, we’ve historically had three ticket types available in our tracker: Bugs, Features, and Improvements, which are all fairly self-explanatory. After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to implement a new type of ticket, a “Suggestion”. These will be replacing Feature and Improvement requests for the TrueNAS Community, simplifying things down to two options: Bugs and Suggestions. This change also introduces a slightly different workflow than before. Beastie Bits FreeNAS Spare Parts Build: Testing ZFS With Imbalanced VDEVs and Mismatched Drives TLSv1.3 server code enabled in LibreSSL in -current Interview with Deb Goodkin *** Feedback/Questions Bostjan - WireGaurd Chad - ZFS Pool Design Pedreo - Scale FreeBSD Jails Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

5x if_bridge Performance Improvement, How Unix Won, Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD, Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS, TrueNAS 11.3-U2 Available, and more. Headlines 5x if_bridge Performance Improvement With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Kristof Provost harnesses new parallel techniques to uncork performance bottleneck Kristof also streamed some of his work, providing an interesting insight into how such development work happens > https://www.twitch.tv/provostk/videos *** How Unix Won +> Unix has won in every conceivable way. And in true mythic style, it contains the seeds of its own eclipse. This is my subjective historical narrative of how that happened. I’m using the name “Unix” to include the entire family of operating systems descended from it, or that have been heavily influenced by it. That includes Linux, SunOS, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and many, many others. Both major mobile OSs, Android and iOS, have Unix roots. Their billions of users dwarf those using clunky things like laptops and desktops, but even there, Windows is only the non-Unix viable OS. Almost everything running server-side in giant datacenters is Linux. How did Unix win? News Roundup Check logs of central syslog-ng log host on FreeBSD This blog post continues where the blog post A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD left off. Open source solutions to check syslog log messages exist, such as Logcheck or Logwatch. Although these are not to difficult to implement and maintain, I still found these to much. So I went for my own home grown solution to check the syslog messages of the SoCruel.NU central log host. And the solution presented in this blog post works pretty well for me! Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD Until recently, I’ve never had a chance to use VLANs on FreeBSD hosts, though I sometimes configure them on ethernet switches. But when I was playing with vnet jails, I suddenly got interested in VLAN configuration on FreeBSD and experimented with it for some time. I wrote this short article to summarize my current understanding of how to configure VLANs on FreeBSD. Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS Some hardware is not supported in illumos yet, but luckily there is bhyve which supports pci passthrough to any guest operating system. To continue with my OmniOS desktop on "modern" hardware I would love wifi support, so why not using a bhyve guest as router zone which provide the required drivers? TrueNAS 11.3-U2 is Generally Available TrueNAS 11.3-U2.1 is generally available as of 4/22/2020. This update is based on FreeNAS 11.3-U2 which has had over 50k deployments and received excellent community and third party reviews. The Release Notes are available on the iXsystems.com website. Beastie Bits HardenedBSD April 2020 Status Report NYC Bug’s Mailing List - Listing of open Dev Jobs Feedback/Questions Greg - Lenovo Matt - BSD Packaging Morgan - Performance Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected]

Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD, Time on Unix, Improve ZVOL sync write performance with a taskq, central log host with syslog-ng, NetBSD Entropy overhaul, Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment, and more. Headlines EKCD - Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD Some time ago, I was describing how to configure networking crash dumps. In that post, I mentioned that there is also the possibility to encrypt crash dumps. Today we will look into this functionality. Initially, it was implemented during Google Summer of Code 2013 by my friend Konrad Witaszczyk, who made it available in FreeBSD 12. If you can understand Polish, you can also look into his presentation on BSD-PL on which he gave a comprehensive review of all kernel crash dumps features. The main issue with crash dumps is that they may include sensitive information available in memory during a crash. They will contain all the data from the kernel and the userland, like passwords, private keys, etc. While dumping them, they are written to unencrypted storage, so if somebody took out the hard drive, they could access sensitive data. If you are sending a crash dump through the network, it may be captured by third parties. Locally the data are written directly to a dump device, skipping the GEOM subsystem. The purpose of that is to allow a kernel to write a crash dump even in case a panic occurs in the GEOM subsystem. It means that a crash dump cannot be automatically encrypted with GELI. Time on Unix Time, a word that is entangled in everything in our lives, something we’re intimately familiar with. Keeping track of it is important for many activities we do. Over millennia we’ve developed different ways to calculate it. Most prominently, we’ve relied on the position the sun appears to be at in the sky, what is called apparent solar time. We’ve decided to split it as seasons pass, counting one full cycle of the 4 seasons as a year, a full rotation around the sun. We’ve also divided the passing of light to the lack thereof as days, a rotation of the earth on itself. Moving on to more precise clock divisions such as seconds, minutes, and hours, units that meant different things at different points in history. Ultimately, as travel got faster, the different ways of counting time that evolved in multiple places had to converge. People had to agree on what it all meant. See the article for more News Roundup Improve ZVOL sync write performance by using a taskq A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD - Part 1 syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure. HEADS UP: NetBSD Entropy Overhaul This week I committed an overhaul of the kernel entropy system. Please let me know if you observe any snags! For the technical background, see the thread on tech-kern a few months ago: https://mail-index.NetBSD.org/tech-kern/2019/12/21/msg025876.html. Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment I used T_PAGEFLT’s blog post as a reference for setting my NetBSD kernel development environment since his website is down I’m putting down the steps here so it would be helpful for starters. Beastie Bits You can now use ccache to speed up dsynth even more. Improving libossaudio, and the future of OSS in NetBSD DragonFlyBSD DHCPCD Import dhcpcd-9.0.2 with the following changes Reminder: watch this space for upcoming FreeBSD Office Hours, next is May 13th at 2pm Eastern, 18:00 UTC Feedback/Questions Ghislain - ZFS Question Jake - Paypal Donations Oswin - Hammer tutorial Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available, Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux, Ars technica reviews GhostBSD, “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open, BSD community show their various collections, a tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals, learn to stop worrying and love SSDs, and more. Headlines FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available for XFCE and KDE The Q2 2020 images are not a visible leap forward but a functional leap forward. Most effort was spent creating a better out of box experience for automatic Ethernet configuration, working WiFi, webcam, and improved hypervisor support. Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux Since I wrote my article "Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD" I have been wanting to write something about the technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux and while I cannot possibly cover every single reason, I can write about some of the things that I consider worth noting. News Roundup + Not actually Linux distro review deux: GhostBSD When I began work on the FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE review last week, it didn't take long to figure out that the desktop portion wasn't going very smoothly. I think it's important for BSD-curious users to know of easier, gentler alternatives, so I did a little looking around and settled on GhostBSD for a follow-up review. GhostBSD is based on TrueOS, which itself derives from FreeBSD Stable. It was originally a Canadian distro, but—like most successful distributions—it has transcended its country of origin and can now be considered worldwide. Significant GhostBSD development takes place now in Canada, Italy, Germany, and the United States. “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on. This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books. JT (our producer) shared his Open Source Retail Box Collection on twitter this past weekend and there was a nice response from a few in the BSD Community showing their collections: JT's post: https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1251194823589138432 High Resolution Image to see the bottom shelf better: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-9QTs2RR/0/f1742096/O/i-9QTs2RR.jpg Closeup of the BSD Section: https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1251294290782928897 Others jumped in with their collections: Deb Goodkin's collection: https://twitter.com/dgoodkin/status/1251294016139743232 & https://twitter.com/dgoodkin/status/1251298125672660992 FreeBSD Frau's FreeBSD Collection: https://twitter.com/freebsdfrau/status/1251290430475350018 Jason Tubnor's OpenBSD Collection: https://twitter.com/Tubsta/status/1251265902214918144 Do you have a nice collection, take a picture and send it in! Tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals - malloc(3) Hi there, It's been a very long time I haven't written anything after my last OpenBSD blogs, that is, OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space. OpenBSD: Introduction to execpromises in the pledge(2) pledge(2): OpenBSD's defensive approach to OS Security So, again I started reading OpenBSD source codes with debugger after reducing my sleep timings and managing to get some time after professional life. This time I have picked one of my favourite item from my wishlist to learn and share, that is, OpenBSD malloc(3), secure allocator How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs my home FreeNAS runs two pools for data. One RAIDZ2 with four spinning disk drives and one mirror with two SSDs. Toying with InfluxDB and Grafana in the last couple of days I found that I seem to have a constant write load of 1 Megabyte (!) per second on the SSDs. What the ...? So I run three VMs on the SSDs in total. One with Windows 10, two with Ubuntu running Confluence, A wiki essentially, with files for attachments and MySQL as the backend database. Clearly the writes had to stop when the wikis were not used at all, just sitting idle, right? Well even with a full query log and quite some experience in the operation of web applications I could not figure out what Confluence is doing (productively, no doubt) but trust me, it writes a couple of hundred kbytes to the database each second just sitting idle. My infrastructure as of 2019 I've wanted to write about my infrastructure for a while, but I kept thinking, "I'll wait until after I've done $next_thing_on_my_todo." Of course this cycle never ends, so I decided to write about its state at the end of 2019. Maybe I'll write an update on it in a couple of moons; who knows? For something different than our usual Beastie Bits… we bring you… We're all quarantined so lets install BSD on things! Install BSD on something this week, write it up and let us know about it, and maybe we'll feature you! Installation of NetBSD

Rethinking OpenBSD security, FreeBSD 2020 Q1 status report, the notion of progress and user interfaces, Comments about Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses, making Unix a little more Plan9-like, Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD, and more. Headlines Rethinking OpenBSD Security OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure. I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative. FreeBSD 2020 Q1 Quarterly report Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020. News Roundup The Notion of Progress and User Interfaces One trait of modern Western culture is the notion of progress. A view claiming, at large, everything is getting better and better. How should we think about progress? Both in general and regarding technology? Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses I was recently pointed at a web page on Thomas E. Dickeys site talking about NetBSD curses. It seems initially that the page was intended to be a pointer to some differences between ncurses and NetBSD curses and does appear to start off in this vein but it seems that the author has lost the plot as the document evolved and the tail end of it seems to be devolving into some sort of slanging match. I don't want to go through Mr. Dickey's document point by point, that would be tedious but I would like to pick out some of the things that I believe to be the most egregious. Please note that even though I am a NetBSD developer, the opinions below are my own and not the NetBSD projects. Making Unix a little more Plan9-like I’m not really interested in defending anything. I tried out plan9port and liked it, but I have to live in Unix land. Here’s how I set that up. A Warning The suckless community, and some of the plan9 communities, are dominated by jackasses. I hope that’s strong enough wording to impress the severity. Don’t go into IRC for help. Stay off the suckless email list. The software is great, the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned, but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone. Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE This month's Linux distro review isn't of a Linux distribution at all—instead, we're taking a look at FreeBSD, the original gangster of free Unix-like operating systems. The first FreeBSD release was in 1993, but the operating system's roots go further back—considerably further back. FreeBSD started out in 1992 as a patch-release of Bill and Lynne Jolitz's 386BSD—but 386BSD itself came from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD itself goes back to 1977—for reference, Linus Torvalds was only seven years old then. Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge something up front—our distro reviews include the desktop experience, and that is very much not FreeBSD's strength. FreeBSD is far, far better suited to running as a headless server than as a desktop! We're going to get a full desktop running on it anyway, because according to Lee Hutchinson, I hate myself—and also because we can't imagine readers wouldn't care about it. FreeBSD does not provide a good desktop experience, to say the least. But if you're hankering for a BSD-based desktop, don't worry—we're already planning a followup review of GhostBSD, a desktop-focused BSD distribution. Beastie Bits Wifi renewal restarted HAMMER2 and a quick start for DragonFly Engineering NetBSD 9.0 Antivirus Protection using OPNsense Plugins BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC BSDNow is going Independent After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. LinuxAcademy is now under new leadership, and we understand that cutbacks needed to be made, and that BSD is not their core product. That does not mean your favourite BSD podcast is going away, we will continue and we expect things will not look much different. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you wi

Tales from a core file, Lenovo X260 BIOS Update with OpenBSD, the problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines, Hugo workflow using FreeBSD Jails, Caddy, Restic; extending NetBSD-7 branch support, a tale of two hypervisor bugs, and more. Headlines Tales From a Core File - Lessons from the Unix stdio ABI: 40 Years Later On the side, I’ve been wrapping up some improvements to the classic Unix stdio libraries in illumos. stdio contains the classic functions like fopen(), printf(), and the security nightmare gets(). While working on support for fmemopen() and friends I got to reacquaint myself with some of the joys of the stdio ABI and its history from 7th Edition Unix. With that in mind, let’s dive into this, history, and some mistakes not to repeat. While this is written from the perspective of the C programming language, aspects of it apply to many other languages. Update Lenovo X260 BIOS with OpenBSD My X260 only runs OpenBSD and has no CD driver. But I still need to upgrade its BIOS from time to time. And this is possible using the ISO BIOS image. First off all, you need to download the “BIOS Update (Bootable CD)” from the Lenovo Support Website. News Roundup The problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines Various Unixes have had a 'iowait' statistic for a long time now (although I can't find a source for where it originated; it's not in 4.x BSD, so it may have come through System V and sar). The traditional and standard definition of iowait is that it's the amount of time the system was idle but had at least one process waiting on disk IO. Rather than count this time as 'idle' (as you would if you had a three-way division of CPU time between user, system, and idle), some Unixes evolved to count this as a new category, 'iowait'. My Latest Self Hosted Hugo Workflow using FreeBSD Jails, Caddy, Restic and More After hosting with Netlify for a few years, I decided to head back to self hosting. Theres a few reasons for that but the main reasoning was that I had more control over how things worked. In this post, i’ll show you my workflow for deploying my Hugo generated site (www.jaredwolff.com). Instead of using what most people would go for, i’ll be doing all of this using a FreeBSD Jails based server. Plus i’ll show you some tricks i’ve learned over the years on bulk image resizing and more. Let’s get to it. Extending support for the NetBSD-7 branch Typically, some time after releasing a new NetBSD major version (such as NetBSD 9.0), we will announce the end-of-life of the N-2 branch, in this case NetBSD-7. We've decided to hold off on doing that to ensure our users don't feel rushed to perform a major version update on any remote machines, possibly needing to reach the machine if anything goes wrong. Security fixes will still be made to the NetBSD-7 branch. We hope you're all safe. Stay home. Tale of two hypervisor bugs - Escaping from FreeBSD bhyve VM escape has become a popular topic of discussion over the last few years. A good amount of research on this topic has been published for various hypervisors like VMware, QEMU, VirtualBox, Xen and Hyper-V. Bhyve is a hypervisor for FreeBSD supporting hardware-assisted virtualization. This paper details the exploitation of two bugs in bhyve - FreeBSD-SA-16:32.bhyve (VGA emulation heap overflow) and CVE-2018-17160 (Firmware Configuration device bss buffer overflow) and some generic techniques which could be used for exploiting other bhyve bugs. Further, the paper also discusses sandbox escapes using PCI device passthrough, and Control-Flow Integrity bypasses in HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT Beastie Bits GhostBSD 20.02 Overview FuryBSD 12.1 Overview > Joe Maloney got in touch to say that the issues in the video and other ones found have since been fixed. Now that's community feedback in action, and an example of a developer who does his best to help the community. A great guy indeed. OS108-9.0 amd64 MATE released FreeBSD hacking: carp panics & test Inaugural FreeBSD Office Hours Feedback/Questions Shody - systemd question Ben - GELI and GPT Stig - DIY NAS Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

NetBSD 8.2 is available, NextCloud on OpenBSD, X11 screen locking, NetBSD and RISC OS running parallel, community feedback about switching to BSD, and more. Headlines NetBSD 8.2 is available! The third release in the NetBSD-8 is now available. This release includes all the security fixes in NetBSD-8 up until this point, and other fixes deemed important for stability. Some highlights include: x86: fixed regression in booting old CPUs x86: Hyper-V Gen.2 VM framebuffer support httpd(8): fixed various security issues ixg(4): various fixes / improvements x86 efiboot: add tftp support, fix issues on machines with many memory segments, improve graphics mode logic to work on more machines. Various kernel memory info leaks fixes Update expat to 2.2.8 Fix ryzen USB issues and support xHCI version 3.10. Accept root device specification as NAME=label. Add multiboot 2 support to x86 bootloaders. Fix for CVE-2019-9506: 'Key Negotiation of Bluetooth' attack. nouveau: limit the supported devices and fix firmware loading. radeon: fix loading of the TAHITI VCE firmware. named(8): stop using obsolete dnssec-lookaside. NextCloud on OpenBSD NextCloud and OpenBSD are complementary to one another. NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for proprietary platforms, whereas OpenBSD forms the most secure and solid foundation to serve it on. Setting it up in the best way isn’t hard, especially using this step by step tutorial. Preface Back when this tutorial was initially written, things were different. The OpenBSD port relied on PHP 5.6 and there were no package updates. But the port improved (hats off, Gonzalo!) and package updates were introduced to the -stable branch (hats off, Solene!). A rewrite of this tutorial was long overdue. Right now, it is written for 6.6 -stable and will be updated once 6.7 is released. If you have any questions or desire some help, feel free to reach out. News Roundup X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach For years I’ve been using XScreenSaver as a default, but I recently learned about xsecurelock and re-evaluated my screen-saving requirements NetBSD and RISC OS running parallel I have been experimenting with running two systems at the same time on the RK3399 SoC. It all begun when I figured out how to switch to the A72 cpu for RISC OS. When the switch was done, the A53 cpu just continued to execute code. OK I thought why not give it something to do! My first step was to run some small programs. It worked! Thanks to Tom Jones for the pointer to this article Several weeks ago we covered a story about switching from Linux to BSD. Benedict and JT asked for community feedback as to their thoughts on the matter. Allan was out that week, so this will give him an opportunity to chime in with his thoughts as well. Jamie - Dumping Linux for BSD Matt - BSD Packaging Brad - Linux vs BS MJ - Linux vs BSD Feedback Ben - Feedback for JT Henrik - Why you should migrate everything to BSD Beastie Bits ssh-copy-id now included OPNsense 20.1.3 released A Collection of prebuilt BSD Cloud Images Instant terminal sharing Feedback/Questions Ales - Manually verify signature files for pkg package Shody - Yubikey Mike - Site for hashes from old disks Answer: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19FmLs0jXxLkxAr0zwgdrXQd1qhbwvNHH6NvolvXKWTM/edit?usp=sharing Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

Shell text processing, data rebalancing on ZFS mirrors, Add Security Headers with OpenBSD relayd, ZFS filesystem hierarchy in ZFS pools, speeding up ZSH, How Unix pipes work, grow ZFS pools over time, the real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated, clear your terminal in style, and more. Headlines Text processing in the shell This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers. We currently are hard at work on it! One of the things that makes the shell an invaluable tool is the amount of available text processing commands, and the ability to easily pipe them into each other to build complex text processing workflows. These commands can make it trivial to perform text and data analysis, convert data between different formats, filter lines, etc. When working with text data, the philosophy is to break any complex problem you have into a set of smaller ones, and to solve each of them with a specialized tool. Rebalancing data on ZFS mirrors One of the questions that comes up time and time again about ZFS is “how can I migrate my data to a pool on a few of my disks, then add the rest of the disks afterward?” If you just want to get the data moved and don’t care about balance, you can just copy the data over, then add the new disks and be done with it. But, it won’t be distributed evenly over the vdevs in your pool. Don’t fret, though, it’s actually pretty easy to rebalance mirrors. In the following example, we’ll assume you’ve got four disks in a RAID array on an old machine, and two disks available to copy the data to in the short term. News Roundup Using OpenBSD relayd to Add Security Headers I am a huge fan of OpenBSD’s built-in httpd server as it is simple, secure, and quite performant. With the modern push of the large search providers pushing secure websites, it is now important to add security headers to your website or risk having the search results for your website downgraded. Fortunately, it is very easy to do this when you combine httpd with relayd. While relayd is principally designed for layer 3 redirections and layer 7 relays, it just so happens that it makes a handy tool for adding the recommended security headers. My website automatically redirects users from http to https and this gets achieved using a simple redirection in /etc/httpd.conf So if you have a configuration similar to mine, then you will still want to have httpd listen on the egress interface on port 80. The key thing to change here is to have httpd listen on 127.0.0.1 on port 443. How we set up our ZFS filesystem hierarchy in our ZFS pools Our long standing practice here, predating even the first generation of our ZFS fileservers, is that we have two main sorts of filesystems, home directories (homedir filesystems) and what we call 'work directory' (workdir) filesystems. Homedir filesystems are called /h/NNN (for some NNN) and workdir filesystems are called /w/NNN; the NNN is unique across all of the different sorts of filesystems. Users are encouraged to put as much stuff as possible in workdirs and can have as many of them as they want, which mattered a lot more in the days when we used Solaris DiskSuite and had fixed-sized filesystems. Speeding up ZSH https://web.archive.org/web/20200315184849/https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/speeding-up-zsh I was opening multiple shells for an unrelated project today and noticed how abysmal my shell load speed was. After the initial load it was relatively fast, but the actual shell start up was noticeably slow. I timed it with time and these were the results. In the future I hope to actually recompile zsh with additional profiling techniques and debug information - keeping an internal timer and having a flag output current time for each command in a tree fashion would make building heat maps really easy. How do Unix Pipes work Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post. Let’s look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let’s download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel. What we do to enable us to grow our ZFS pools over time In my entry on why ZFS isn't good at growing and reshaping pools, I mentioned that we go to quite some lengths in our ZFS environment to be able to incrementally expand our pools. Today I want to put together all of the pieces of that in one place to discuss what those lengths are. Our big constraint is that not only do we need to add space to pools over time, but we have a fairly large number of pools and which pools will have space added to them is unpredictable. We need a solution to pool expansion that leaves us with as much flexibility as possible for as long as possible. This pretty much requires being able to expand pools in relatively small increments of space. Linux maintains bugs: The r

Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD, Wireguard VPN Howto in OPNsense, NomadBSD 1.3.1 available, fresh GhostBSD 20.02, New FuryBSD XFCE and KDE images, pf-badhost 0.3 released, and more. Headlines Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD Here is a quick HOWTO for those who want to provide some FreeBSD based compute resources to help finding vaccines. UPDATE 2020-03-22: 0mp@ made a port out of this, it is in “biology/linux-foldingathome”. Per default it will now pick up some SARS-CoV‑2 (COVID-19) related folding tasks. There are some more config options (e.g. how much of the system resources are used). Please refer to the official Folding@Home site for more information about that. Be also aware that there is a big rise in compute resources donated to Folding@Home, so the pool of available work units may be empty from time to time, but they are working on adding more work units. Be patient. How to configure the Wireguard VPN in OPNsense WireGuard is a modern designed VPN that uses the latest cryptography for stronger security, is very lightweight, and is relatively easy to set up (mostly). I say ‘mostly’ because I found setting up WireGuard in OPNsense to be more difficult than I anticipated. The basic setup of the WireGuard VPN itself was as easy as the authors claim on their website, but I came across a few gotcha's. The gotcha's occur with functionality that is beyond the scope of the WireGuard protocol so I cannot fault them for that. My greatest struggle was configuring WireGuard to function similarly to my OpenVPN server. I want the ability to connect remotely to my home network from my iPhone or iPad, tunnel all traffic through the VPN, have access to certain devices and services on my network, and have the VPN devices use my home's Internet connection. WireGuard behaves more like a SSH server than a typical VPN server. With WireGuard, devices which have shared their cryptographic keys with each other are able to connect via an encrypted tunnel (like a SSH server configured to use keys instead of passwords). The devices that are connecting to one another are referred to as “peer” devices. When the peer device is an OPNsense router with WireGuard installed, for instance, it can be configured to allow access to various resources on your network. It becomes a tunnel into your network similar to OpenVPN (with the appropriate firewall rules enabled). I will refer to the WireGuard installation on OPNsense as the server rather than a “peer” to make it more clear which device I am configuring unless I am describing the user interface because that is the terminology used interchangeably by WireGuard. The documentation I found on WireGuard in OPNsense is straightforward and relatively easy to understand, but I had to wrestle with it for a little while to gain a better understanding on how it should be configured. I believe it was partially due to differing end goals – I was trying to achieve something a little different than the authors of other wiki/blog/forum posts. Piecing together various sources of information, I finally ended up with a configuration that met the goals stated above. News Roundup NomadBSD 1.3.1 NomadBSD 1.3.1 has recently been made available. NomadBSD is a lightweight and portable FreeBSD distribution, designed to run on live on a USB flash drive, allowing you to plug, test, and play on different hardware. They have also started a forum as of yesterday, where you can ask questions and mingle with the NomadBSD community. Notable changes in 1.3.1 are base system upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-p2. automatic network interface setup improved, image size increased to over 4GB, Thunderbird, Zeroconf, and some more listed below. GhostBSD 20.02 Eric Turgeon, main developer of GhostBSD, has announced version 20.02 of the FreeBSD based operating system. Notable changes are ZFS partition into the custom partition editor installer, allowing you to install alongside with Windows, Linux, or macOS. Other changes are force upgrade all packages on system upgrade, improved update station, and powerd by default for laptop battery performance. New FuryBSD XFCE and KDE images This new release is now based on FreeBSD 12.1 with the latest FreeBSD quarterly packages. This brings XFCE up to 4.14, and KDE up to 5.17. In addition to updates this new ISO mostly addresses community bugs, community enhancement requests, and community pull requests. Due to the overwhelming amount of reports with GitHub hosting all new releases are now being pushed to SourceForge only for the time being. Previous releases will still be kept for archive purposes. pf-badhost 0.3 Released pf-badhost is a simple, easy to use badhost blocker that uses the power of the pf firewall to block many of the internet's biggest irritants. Annoyances such as SSH and SMTP bruteforcers are largely eliminated. Shodan scans and bots looking for webservers to abuse are stopped dead in their tracks. When used to filter outbound traffic, pf-badhost block

OpenBSD Full disk encryption with coreboot and tianocore, FreeBSD 12.0 EOL, ZFS DVA layout, OpenBSD’s Go situation, AD updates requires changes in TrueNAS and FreeNAS, full name of FreeBSD’s root account, and more. Headlines OpenBSD Full Disk Encryption with CoreBoot and Tianocore Payload It has been a while since I have posted here so I wanted to share something that was surprisingly difficult for me to figure out. I have a Thinkpad T440p that I have flashed with Coreboot 4.11 with some special patches that allow the newer machine to work. When I got the laptop, the default BIOS was UEFI and I installed two operating systems. Windows 10 with bitlocker full disk encryption on the “normal” drive (I replaced the spinning 2.5″ disk with an SSD) Ubuntu 19.10 on the m.2 SATA drive that I installed using LUKS full disk encryption I purchased one of those carriers for the optical bay that allows you to install a third SSD and so I did that with the intent of putting OpenBSD on it. Since my other two operating systems were running full disk encryption, I wanted to do the same on OpenBSD. See article for rest of story FreeBSD 12.0 EOL Dear FreeBSD community, As of February 29, 2020, FreeBSD 12.0 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 12.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible. 12.1 Active release 12.2 Release Schedule News Roundup Some effects of the ZFS DVA format on data layout and growing ZFS pools One piece of ZFS terminology is DVA and DVAs, which is short for Data Virtual Address. For ZFS, a DVA is the equivalent of a block number in other filesystems; it tells ZFS where to find whatever data we're talking about. The short summary of what fields DVAs have and what they mean is that DVAs tell us how to find blocks by giving us their vdev (by number) and their byte offset into that particular vdev (and then their size). A typical DVA might say that you find what it's talking about on vdev 0 at byte offset 0x53a40ed000. There are some consequences of this that I hadn't really thought about until the other day. Right away we can see why ZFS has a problem removing a vdev; the vdev's number is burned into every DVA that refers to data on it. If there's no vdev 0 in the pool, ZFS has no idea where to even start looking for data because all addressing is relative to the vdev. ZFS pool shrinking gets around this by adding a translation layer that says where to find the portions of vdev 0 that you care about after it's been removed. Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates. Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet. FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March. Full name of the FreeBSD Root Account NetBSD now has a users(7) and groups(7) manual. Looking into what entries existed in the passwd and group files I wondered about root’s full name who we now know as Charlie Root in the BSDs.... OpenBSD Go Situation Over in the fediverse, Pete Zaitcev had a reaction to my entry on OpenBSD versus Prometheus for us: I don't think the situation is usually that bad. Our situation with Prometheus is basically a worst case scenario for Go on OpenBSD, and most people will have much better results, especially if you stick to supported OpenBSD versions. If you stick to supported OpenBSD versions, upgrading your machines as older OpenBSD releases fall out of support (as the OpenBSD people want you to do), you should not have any problems with your own Go programs. The latest Go release will support the currently supported OpenBSD versions (as long as OpenBSD remains a supported platform for Go), and the Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee means that you can always rebuild your current Go programs with newer versions of Go. You might have problems with compiled binaries that you don't want to rebuild, but my understanding is that this is the case for OpenBSD in general; it doesn't guarantee a stable ABI even for C programs (cf). If you use OpenBSD, you have to be prepared to rebuild your code after OpenBSD upgrades regardless of what language it's written in. Beastie Bits Test your TOR OPNsense 20.1.1 released pkg for FreeBSD 1.13 Feedback/Questions Bostjan writes in about Wireguard Charlie has a followup to wpa_supplicant as lower class citizen L

FreeBSD on Power, DragonflyBSD 5.8 is here, Unifying FreeNAS/TrueNAS, OpenBSD vs. Prometheus and Go, gcc 4.2.1 removed from FreeBSD base, and more. Headlines FreeBSD on Power The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc. The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs. This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users. Dragonfly 5.8 DragonFly version 5.8 brings a new dsynth utility for building your own binary dports packages, plus significant support work to speed up that build - up to and including the entire collection. Additional progress has been made on GPU and signal support. The details of all commits between the 5.6 and 5.8 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.8.0rc1 and 5.8.0. Also see /usr/src/UPDATING for specific file changes in PAM. See article for rest of information 2nd HamBUG meeting recap The second meeting of the Hamilton BSD Users Group took place last night The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd Tuesday of the month, April 14th 2020 News Roundup FreeNAS/TrueNAS Brand Unification FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been separate-but-related members of the #1 Open Source storage software family since 2012. FreeNAS is the free Open Source version with an expert community and has led the pursuit of innovations like Plugins and VMs. TrueNAS is the enterprise version for organizations of all sizes that need additional uptime and performance, as well as the enterprise-grade support necessary for critical data and applications. From the beginning at iXsystems, we’ve developed, tested, documented, and released both as separate products, even though the vast majority of code is shared. This was a deliberate technical decision in the beginning but over time became less of a necessity and more of “just how we’ve always done it”. Furthermore, to change it was going to require a serious overhaul to how we build and package both products, among other things, so we continued to kick the can down the road. As we made systematic improvements to development and QA efficiency over the past few years, the redundant release process became almost impossible to ignore as our next major efficiency roadblock to overcome. So, we’ve finally rolled up our sleeves. With the recent 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained parity with FreeNAS on features like VMs and Plugins, further homogenizing the code. Today, we announce the next phase of evolution for FreeNAS and TrueNAS. OpenBSD versus Prometheus (and Go). We have a decent number of OpenBSD machines that do important things (and that have sometimes experienced problems like running out of disk space), and we have a Prometheus based metrics and monitoring system. The Prometheus host agent has enough support for OpenBSD to be able to report on critical metrics, including things like local disk space. Despite all of this, after some investigation I've determined that it's not really sensible to even try to deploy the host agent on our OpenBSD machines. This is due to a combination of factors that have at their root OpenBSD's lack of ABI stability FreeBSD removed gcc from base As described in Warner's email message[1] to the FreeBSD-arch mailing list we have reached GCC 4.2.1's retirement date. At this time all supported architectures either use in-tree Clang, or rely on external toolchain (i.e., a contemporary GCC version from ports). GCC 4.2.1 was released July 18, 2007 and was imported into FreeBSD later that year, in r171825. GCC has served us well, but version 4.2.1 is obsolete and not used by default on any architecture in FreeBSD. It does not support modern C and does not support arm64 or RISC-V. Beastie Bits New Archive location for Dragonfly 4.x A dead simple git cheat sheet Xorg 1.20.7 on HardenedBSD Comes with IE/RELRO+BIND_NOW/CFI/SafeStack Protections Feedback/Questions Niclas writes in Regarding the Lenovo E595 user (episode 340) Lyubomir writes about GELI and ZFS Peter writes in about scaling FreeBSD jails Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

Why ZFS is doing filesystem checksumming right, better TMPFS throughput performance on DragonFlyBSD, reshaping pools with ZFS, PKGSRC on Manjaro aarch64 Pinebook-pro, central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD, and more. Headlines Checksumming in filesystems, and why ZFS is doing it right One of the best aspects of ZFS is its reliability. This can be accomplished using a few features like copy-on-write approach and checksumming. Today we will look at how ZFS does checksumming and why it does it the proper way. Most of the file systems don’t provide any integrity checking and fail in several scenarios: Data bit flips - when the data that we wanted to store are bit flipped by the hard drives, or cables, and the wrong data is stored on the hard drive. Misdirected writes - when the CPU/cable/hard drive will bit flip a block to which the data should be written. Misdirected read - when we miss reading the block when a bit flip occurred. Phantom writes - when the write operation never made it to the disk. For example, a disk or kernel may have some bug that it will return success even if the hard drive never made the write. This problem can also occur when data is kept only in the hard drive cache. Checksumming may help us detect errors in a few of those situations. DragonFlyBSD Improves Its TMPFS Implementation For Better Throughput Performance It's been a while since last having any new magical optimizations to talk about by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, but on Wednesday he landed some significant temporary file-system "TMPFS" optimizations for better throughput including with swap. Of several interesting commits merged tonight, the improved write clustering is a big one. In particular, "Reduces low-memory tmpfs paging I/O overheads by 4x and generally increases paging throughput to SSD-based swap by 2x-4x. Tmpfs is now able to issue a lot more 64KB I/Os when under memory pressure." https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/4eb0bb82efc8ef32c4357cf812891c08d38d8860 There's also a new tunable in the VM space as well as part of his commits on Wednesday night. This follows a lot of recent work on dsynth, improved page-out daemon pipelining, and other routine work. https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commit/bc47dbc18bf832e4badb41f2fd79159479a7d351 This work is building up towards the eventual DragonFlyBSD 5.8 while those wanting to try the latest improvements right away can find their daily snapshots. News Roundup Why ZFS is not good at growing and reshaping pools (or shrinking them) recently read Mark McBride's Five Years of Btrfs (via), which has a significant discussion of why McBride chose Btrfs over ZFS that boils down to ZFS not being very good at evolving your pool structure. You might doubt this judgment from a Btrfs user, so let me say as both a fan of ZFS and a long term user of it that this is unfortunately quite true; ZFS is not a good choice if you want to modify your pool disk layout significantly over time. ZFS works best if the only change in your pools that you do is replacing drives with bigger drives. In our ZFS environment we go to quite some lengths to be able to expand pools incrementally over time, and while this works it both leaves us with unbalanced pools and means that we're basically forced to use mirroring instead of RAIDZ. (An unbalanced pool is one where some vdevs and disks have much more data than others. This is less of an issue for us now that we're using SSDs instead of HDs.) Using PKGSRC on Manjaro Linux aarch64 Pinebook-pro I wanted to see how pkgsrc works on aarch64 Linux Manjaro since it is a very mature framework that is very portable and supported by many architectures – pkgsrc (package source) is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. One might question why use pkgsrc on Arch based Manjaro, since the pacman package repository is very good on its own. I see alternative pkgsrc as a good automated build framework that offers a way to produce independent build environment /usr/pkg that does not interfere with the current Linux distribution in any way (all libraries are statically built) I have used the latest Manjaro for Pinebookpro and standard recommended tools as mentioned here https://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/how_to_use_pkgsrc_on_linux/ A Central Log Host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD Part 1 syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure. Part 2 This blog post continues where the blog post A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD le

Meet FuryBSD, NetBSD 9.0 has been released, OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup, a retrospective on OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers, NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal, OpenSSH 8.2 released, and more.## Headlines Meet FuryBSD: A New Desktop BSD Distribution At its heart, FuryBSD is a very simple beast. According to the site, “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer. You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like a couple of other BSDs that are available, such as NomadBSD and GhostBSD. The major difference between those BSDs and FuryBSD is that FuryBSD is much closer to stock FreeBSD. For example, FuryBSD uses the FreeBSD installer, while others have created their own installers and utilities. As it states on the site, “Although FuryBSD may resemble past graphical BSD projects like PC-BSD and TrueOS, FuryBSD is created by a different team and takes a different approach focusing on tight integration with FreeBSD. This keeps overhead low and maintains compatibility with upstream.” The lead dev also told me that “One key focus for FuryBSD is for it to be a small live media with a few assistive tools to test drivers for hardware.” Currently, you can go to the FuryBSD homepage and download either an XFCE or KDE LiveCD. A GNOME version is in the works. NetBSD 9.0 The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes. Here are some highlights of this new release. News Roundup OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup Our target for 2019 was CDN$300K. Our community's continued generosity combined with our corporate donors exceeded that nicely. In addition we received the largest single donation in our history, CDN$380K from Smartisan. The return of Google was another welcome event. Altogether 2019 was our most successful campaign to date, yielding CDN$692K in total. We thank all our donors, Iridium (Smartisan), Platinum (Yandex, Google), Gold (Microsoft, Facebook) Silver (2Keys) and Bronze (genua, Thinkst Canary). But especially our community of smaller donors whose contributions are the bedrock of our support. Thank you all! OpenBSD Foundation 2019 Fundraising Goal Exceeded A retrospective on our OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers Our OmniOS fileservers have now been out of service for about six months, which makes it somewhat past time for a retrospective on them. Our OmniOS fileservers followed on our Solaris fileservers, which I wrote a two part retrospective on (part 1, part 2), and have now been replaced by our Linux fileservers. To be honest, I have been sitting on my hands about writing this retrospective because we have mixed feelings about our OmniOS fileservers. I will put the summary up front. OmniOS worked reasonably well for us over its lifespan here and looking back I think it was almost certainly the right choice for us at the time we made that choice (which was 2013 and 2014). However it was not without issues that marred our experience with it in practice, although not enough to make me regret that we ran it (and ran it for as long as we did). Part of our issues are likely due to a design mistake in making our fileservers too big, although this design mistake was probably magnified when we were unable to use Intel 10G-T networking in OmniOS. On the one hand, our OmniOS fileservers worked, almost always reliably. Like our Solaris fileservers before them, they ran quietly for years without needing much attention, delivering NFS fileservice to our Ubuntu servers; specifically, we ran them for about five years (2014 through 2019, although we started migrating away at the end of 2018). Over this time we had only minor hardware issues and not all that many disk failures, and we suffered no data loss (with ZFS checksums likely saving us several times, and certainly providing good reassurances). Our overall environment was easy to manage and was pretty much problem free in the face of things like failed disks. I'm pretty sure that our users saw a NFS environment that was solid, reliable, and performed well pretty much all of the time, which is the important thing. So OmniOS basically delivered the fileserver environment we wanted. NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal Is it really more than 10 years since we last had an official fundraising drive? Looking at old TNF financial reports I noticed that we have been doing quite well financially over the last years, with a steady stream of small and medium donations, and most of the time only moderate expenditures. The last fundraising drive back in 2009 was a giant success, and we have lived off it until now. OpenSSH 8.2 released February

Distrowatch reviews FuryBSD, LLDB on i386 for NetBSD, wpa_supplicant as lower-class citizen, KDE on FreeBSD updates, Travel Grant for BSDCan open, ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail, and more. Headlines Distrowatch Fury BSD Review FuryBSD is the most recent addition to the DistroWatch database and provides a live desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. FuryBSD is not entirely different in its goals from NomadBSD, which we discussed recently. I wanted to take this FreeBSD-based project for a test drive and see how it compares to NomadBSD and other desktop-oriented projects in the FreeBSD family. FuryBSD supplies hybrid ISO/USB images which can be used to run a live desktop. There are two desktop editions currently, both for 64-bit (x86_64) machines: Xfce and KDE Plasma. The Xfce edition is 1.4GB in size and is the flavour I downloaded. The KDE Plasma edition is about 3.0GB in size. My fresh install of FuryBSD booted to a graphical login screen. From there I could sign into my account, which brings up the Xfce desktop. The installed version of Xfce is the same as the live version, with a few minor changes. Most of the desktop icons have been removed with just the file manager launchers remaining. The Getting Started and System Information icons have been removed. Otherwise the experience is virtually identical to the live media. FuryBSD uses a theme that is mostly grey and white with creamy yellow folder icons. The application menu launchers tend to have neutral icons, neither particularly bright and detailed or minimal. LLDB now works on i386 Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February 2019, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues, fixing watchpoint and threading support. The original NetBSD port of LLDB was focused on amd64 only. In January, I have extended it to support i386 executables. This includes both 32-bit builds of LLDB (running natively on i386 kernel or via compat32) and debugging 32-bit programs from 64-bit LLDB. News Roundup wpa_supplicant is definitely a lower-class citizen, sorry wpa_supplicant is definitely a lower-class citizen, sorry. I increasingly wonder why this stuff matters; transit costs are so much lower than the period when eduroam was setup, and their reliance on 802.11x is super weird in a world where, for the most part + entire cities have open wifi in their downtown core + edu vs edu+transit split horizon problems have to be solved anyways + many universities have parallel open wifi + rate limiting / fare-share approaches for the open-net, on unmetered + flat-rate solves the problem + LTE hotspot off a phone isn't a rip off anymore + other open networks exist essentially no one else feels compelled to do use 802.11x for a so called "semi-open access network", so I think they've lost the plot on friction vs benefit. (we've held hackathons at EDU campus that are locked down like that, and in every case we've said no way, gotten a wire with open net, and built our own wifi. we will not subject our developers to that extra complexity). KDE FreeBSD Updates Feb 2020 Some bits and bobs from the KDE FreeBSD team in february 2020. We met at the FreeBSD devsummit before FOSDEM, along with other FreeBSD people. Plans were made, schemes were forged, and Groff the Goat was introduced to some new people. The big ticket things: Frameworks are at 5.66 Plasma is at 5.17.5 (the beta 5.18 hasn’t been tried) KDE release service has landed 19.12.2 (same day it was released) Developer-centric: KDevelop is at 5.5.0 KUserfeedback landed its 1.0.0 release CMake is 3.16.3 Applications: Musescore is at 3.4.2 Elisa now part of the KDE release service updates Fuure work: KIO-Fuse probably needs extra real-world testing on FreeBSD. I don’t have that kind of mounts (just NFS in /etc/fstab) so I’m not the target audience. KTextEditor is missing .editorconfig support. That can come in with the next frameworks update, when consumers update anyway. Chasing it in an intermediate release is a bit problematic because it does require some rebuilds of consumers. Travel Grant Application for BSDCan is now open Hi everyone, The Travel Grant Application for BSDCan 2020 is now open. The Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development. BSDCan 2020 applications are due April 9, 2020. Find out more and apply at: https

Happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work, building a FreeBSD fileserver, Kubernetes on FreeBSD bhyve, NetBSD 9 RC1 available, OPNSense 20.1 is here, HardenedBSD’s idealistic future, and more. Headlines The happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work In the past few days, several free software maintainers have come out to discuss the stresses of their work. Though the timing was suggestive, my article last week on the philosophy of project governance was, at best, only tangentially related to this topic - I had been working on that article for a while. I do have some thoughts that I’d like to share about what kind of stresses I’ve dealt with as a FOSS maintainer, and how I’ve managed (or often mismanaged) it. February will mark one year that I’ve been working on self-directed free software projects full-time. I was planning on writing an optimistic retrospective article around this time, but given the current mood of the ecosystem I think it would be better to be realistic. In this stage of my career, I now feel at once happier, busier, more fulfilled, more engaged, more stressed, and more depressed than I have at any other point in my life. The good parts are numerous. I’m able to work on my life’s passions, and my projects are in the best shape they’ve ever been thanks to the attention I’m able to pour into them. I’ve also been able to do more thoughtful, careful work; with the extra time I’ve been able to make my software more robust and reliable than it’s ever been. The variety of projects I can invest my time into has also increased substantially, with what was once relegated to minor curiosities now receiving a similar amount of attention as my larger projects were receiving in my spare time before. I can work from anywhere in the world, at any time, not worrying about when to take time off and when to put my head down and crank out a lot of code. The frustrations are numerous, as well. I often feel like I’ve bit off more than I can chew. This has been the default state of affairs for me for a long time; I’m often neglecting half of my projects in order to obtain progress by leaps and bounds in just a few. Working on FOSS full-time has cast this model’s disadvantages into greater relief, as I focus on a greater breadth of projects and spend more time on them. Building a FreeBSD File Server Recently at my job, I was faced with a task to develop a file server explicitly suited for the requirements of the company. Needless to say, any configuration of a kind depends on what the infrastructure needs. So, drawing from my personal experience and numerous materials on the web, I came up with the combination FreeBSD+SAMBA+AD as the most appropriate. It appears to be a perfect choice for this environment, and harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since FreeBSD + SAMBA + AD enables admins with the broad range of possibilities for access control. However, as nothing is perfect, this configuration isn’t the best choice if your priority is data protection because it won’t be able to reach the necessary levels of reliability and fault tolerance without outside improvements. Now, since we’ve established that, let’s move on to the next point. This article’s describing the process of building a test environment while concentrating primarily on the details of the configuration. As the author, though, I must say I’m in no way suggesting that this is the only way! The following configuration will be presented in its initial stage, with the minimum requirements necessary to get the job done, and its purpose in one specific situation only. Here, look at this as a useful strategy to solve similar tasks. Well, let’s get started! Report from the first Hamilton BSD Users Group Meeting February 11th was the first meeting of this new user group, founded by John Young and myself 11 people attended, and a lot of good discussions were had One of the attendees already owns a domain that fits well for the group, so we will be getting that setup over the next few weeks, as well as the twitter account, and other organization stuff. Special thanks to the illumos users who drove in from Buffalo to attend, although they may have actually had a shorter drive than a few of the other attendees. The next meeting is scheduled again for the 2nd Tuesday of the month, March 10th. We are still discussing if we should meet at a restaurant again, or try to get a space at the local college or innovation hub where we can have a projector etc. News Roundup Kubernetes on FreeBSD Bhyve There are quite a few solutions for container orchestration, but the most popular (or the most famous and highly advertised, is probably, a Kubernetes) Since I plan to conduct many experiments with installing and configuring k8s, I need a laboratory in which I can quickly and easily deploy a cluster in any quantities for myself. In my work and everyday life I use two OS very tightly - Linux and FreeBSD OS. Kubernetes and docker are Linux-centric

Linux couldn’t duplicate OpenBSD, FreeBSD Q4 status report, OPNsense 19.7.9 released, archives retain and pass on knowledge, HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes, and more. Headlines OpenBSD has to be a BSD Unix and you couldn't duplicate it with Linux OpenBSD has a well deserved reputation for putting security and a clean system (for code, documentation, and so on) first, and everything else second. OpenBSD is of course based on BSD (it's right there in the name) and descends from FreeBSD NetBSD (you can read the history here). But one of the questions you could ask about it is whether it had to be that way, and in particular if you could build something like OpenBSD on top of Linux. I believe that the answer is no. Linux and the *BSDs have a significantly different model of what they are. BSDs have a 'base system' that provides an integrated and fully operational core Unix, covering the kernel, C library and compiler, and the normal Unix user level programs, all maintained and distributed by the particular BSD. Linux is not a single unit this way, and instead all of the component parts are maintained separately and assembled in various ways by various Linux distributions. Both approaches have their advantages, but one big one for the BSD approach is that it enables global changes. Making global changes is an important part of what makes OpenBSD's approach to improving security, code maintenance, and so on work. Because it directly maintains everything as a unit, OpenBSD is in a position to introduce new C library or kernel APIs (or change them) and then immediately update all sorts of things in user level programs to use the new API. This takes a certain amount of work, of course, but it's possible to do it at all. And because OpenBSD can do this sort of ambitious global change, it does. This goes further than just the ability to make global changes, because in theory you can patch in global changes on top of a bunch of separate upstream projects. Because OpenBSD is in control of its entire base system, it's not forced to try to reconcile different development priorities or integrate clashing changes. OpenBSD can decide (and has) that only certain sorts of changes will be accepted into its system at all, no matter what people want. If there are features or entire programs that don't fit into what OpenBSD will accept, they just lose out. FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report 2019Q4 Here is the last quarterly status report for 2019. As you might remember from last report, we changed our timeline: now we collect reports the last month of each quarter and we edit and publish the full document the next month. Thus, we cover here the period October 2019 - December 2019. If you thought that the FreeBSD community was less active in the Christmas' quarter you will be glad to be proven wrong: a quick glance at the summary will be sufficient to see that much work has been done in the last months. Have a nice read! News Roundup OPNsense 19.7.9 released As 20.1 nears we will be making adjustments to the scope of the release with an announcement following shortly. For now, this update brings you a GeoIP database configuration page for aliases which is now required due to upstream database policy changes and a number of prominent third-party software updates we are happy to see included. Archives are important to retain and pass on knowledge Archives are important. When they are public and available for searching, it retains and passes on knowledge. It saves vast amounts of time. HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes I've been working today on deploying Tor Onion Service v3 nodes across our build infrastructure. I'm happy to announce that the public portion of this is now completed. Below you will find various onion service hostnames and their match to our infrastructure. hardenedbsd.org: lkiw4tmbudbr43hbyhm636sarn73vuow77czzohdbqdpjuq3vdzvenyd.onion ci-01.nyi.hardenedbsd.org: qspcqclhifj3tcpojsbwoxgwanlo2wakti2ia4wozxjcldkxmw2yj3yd.onion ci-03.md.hardenedbsd.org: eqvnohly4tjrkpwatdhgptftabpesofirnhz5kq7jzn4zd6ernpvnpqd.onion ci-04.md.hardenedbsd.org: rfqabq2w65nhdkukeqwf27r7h5xfh53h3uns6n74feeyl7s5fbjxczqd.onion git-01.md.hardenedbsd.org: dacxzjk3kq5mmepbdd3ai2ifynlzxsnpl2cnkfhridqfywihrfftapid.onion Beastie Bits The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (MIT Course) An old Unix Ad OpenBSD syscall call-from verification OpenBSD/arm64 on Pinebook Reminder: First Southern Ontario BSD user group meeting, February 11th (this coming Tuesday!) 18:30 at Boston Pizza on Upper James st, Hamilton. NYCBUG: March meeting will feature Dr. Paul Vixie and his new talk “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes” 8th Meetup of the Stockholm BUG: March 3 at 18:00 Polish BSD User Group meets on Feb 11, 2020 at 18:15 Feedback/Questions Sean - ZFS and Creation Dates Christopher - Help on ZFS Disaster Recovery Mike - Encrypted ZFS Send Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned

Hyperbola Developer interview, why you should migrate from Linux to BSD, FreeBSD is an amazing OS, improving the ptrace(2) API in LLVM 10, First FreeBSD conference in Australia, and a guide to containers on FreeNAS. Headlines FreeBSD is an amazing operating System Update 2020-01-21: Since I wrote this article it got posted on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobster, and a few people have emailed me with comments. I have updated the article with comments where I have found it needed. As an important side note I would like to point out that I am not a FreeBSD developer, there may be things going on in the FreeBSD world that I know absolutely nothing about. I am also not glued to the FreeBSD developer mailing lists. I am not a FreeBSD "fanboy". I have been using GNU/Linux a ton more for the past two decades than FreeBSD, mainly due to hardware incompatibility (lacking or buggy drivers), and I love both Debian GNU/Linux and Arch Linux just as much as FreeBSD. However, I am concerned about the development of GNU/Linux as of late. Also this article is not about me trying to make anyone switch from something else to FreeBSD. It's about why I like FreeBSD and that I recommend you try it out if you're into messing with operating systems. I think the year was late 1999 or mid 2000 when I one day was browsing computer books at my favorite bookshop and I discovered the book The Complete FreeBSD third edition from 1999 by Greg Lehey. With the book came 4 CD Roms with FreeBSD 3.3. I had already familiarized myself with GNU/Linux in 1998, and I was in the process of migrating every server and desktop operating system away from Microsoft Windows, both at home and at my company, to GNU/Linux, initially Red Hat Linux and then later Debian GNU/Linux, which eventually became my favorite GNU/Linux distribution for many years. When I first saw The Complete FreeBSD book by Greg Lehey I remember noticing the text on the front page that said, "The Free Version of Berkeley UNIX" and "Rock Solid Stability", and I was immediately intrigued! What was that all about? A free UNIX operating system! And rock solid stability? That sounded amazing. Hyperbola Dev Interview In late December 2019, Hyperbola announced that they would be making major changes to their project. They have decided to drop the Linux kernel in favor of forking the OpenBSD kernel. This announcement only came months after Project Trident announced that they were going in the opposite direction (from BSD to Linux). Hyperbola also plans to replace all software that is not GPL v3 compliant with new versions that are. To get more insight into the future of their new project, I interviewed Andre, co-founder of Hyperbola. News Roundup Improving the ptrace(2) API and preparing for LLVM-10.0 This month I have improved the NetBSD ptrace(2) API, removing one legacy interface with a few flaws and replacing it with two new calls with new features, and removing technical debt. As LLVM 10.0 is branching now soon (Jan 15th 2020), I worked on proper support of the LLVM features for NetBSD 9.0 (today RC1) and NetBSD HEAD (future 10.0). The first FreeBSD conference in Australia FreeBSD has existed as an operating system, project, and foundation for more than twenty years, and its earlier incantations have exited for far longer. The old guard have been developing code, porting software, and writing documentation for longer than I’ve existed. I’ve been using it for more than a decade for personal projects, and professionally for half that time. While there are many prominent Australian FreeBSD contributors, sysadmins, and users, we’ve always had to venture overseas for conferences. We’re always told Australians are among the most ardent travellers, but I always wondered if we could do a domestic event as well. And on Tuesday, we did! Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand. A practical guide to containers on FreeNAS for a depraved psychopath This is a simple write-up to setup Docker on FreeNAS 11 or FreeBSD 11. But muh jails? You know that jails are dope and you know that jails are dope, yet no one else knows it. So here we are stuck with docker. Two years ago I would be the last person to recommend using docker, but a whole lot of things has changes past years… So jails are dead then? No, jails are still dope, but jails lack tools to manage them. Yes, there are a few tools, but they meant for hard-core FreeBSD users who used to suffering. Docker allows you to run applications without deep knowledge of application you’re running. It will also allow you to run applications that are not ported to FreeBSD. Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD As an operating system GNU/Linux has become a real mess because of the fragmented nature of the project, the bloatware in the kernel, and because o

Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1, Distrowatch switching to FreeBSD, Torvalds says don’t run ZFS, iked(8) removed automatic IPv6 blocking, working towards LLDB on i386, and memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme in NetBSD. Headlines Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1 Now here’s something more like what I was originally expecting the content on this blog to look like. I’m in the process of moving all of our FreeBSD servers (about 30 in total) from 11.3 to 12.1. We have our own local build of the OS, and until “packaged base” gets to a state where it’s reliably usable, we’re stuck doing upgrades the old-fashioned way. I created a set of notes for myself while cranking through these upgrades and I wanted to share them since they are not really work-specific and this process isn’t very well documented for people who haven’t been doing this sort of upgrade process for 25 years. Our source and object trees are read-only exported from the build server over NFS, which causes things to be slow. /etc/make.conf and /etc/src.conf are symbolic links on all of our servers to the master copies in /usr/src so that make installworld can find the configuration parameters the system was built with. Switching Distrowatch over to BSD This may be a little off-topic for this board (forgive me if it is, please). However, I wanted to say that I'm one of the people who works on DistroWatch (distrowatch.com) and this past week we had to deal with a server facing hardware failure. We had a discussion about whether to continue running Debian or switch to something else. The primary "something else" option turned out to be FreeBSD and it is what we eventually went with. It took a while to convert everything over from working with Debian GNU/Linux to FreeBSD 12 (some script incompatibilities, different paths, some changes to web server configuration, networking IPv6 troubles). But in the end we ended up with a good, FreeBSD-based experience. Since the transition was successful, though certainly not seamless, I thought people might want to do a Q&A on the migration process. Especially for those thinking of making the same switch. News Roundup iked(8) automatic IPv6 blocking removed iked(8) no longer automatically blocks unencrypted outbound IPv6 packets. This feature was intended to avoid accidental leakage, but in practice was found to mostly be a cause of misconfiguration. If you previously used iked(8)'s -6 flag to disable this feature, it is no longer needed and should be removed from /etc/rc.conf.local if used. Linus says dont run ZFS “Don’t use ZFS. It’s that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me.” This is what Linus Torvalds said in a mailing list to once again express his disliking for ZFS filesystem specially over its licensing. To avoid unnecessary confusion, this is more intended for Linux distributions, kernel developers and maintainers rather than individual Linux users. GSoC 2019 Final Report: Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD We successfully incorporated the Argon2 reference implementation into NetBSD/amd64 for our 2019 Google Summer of Coding project. We introduced our project here and provided some hints on how to select parameters here. For our final report, we will provide an overview of what changes were made to complete the project. The Argon2 reference implementation, available here, is available under both the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 and the Apache Public License 2.0. To import the reference implementation into src/external, we chose to use the Apache 2.0 license for this project. Working towards LLDB on i386 NetBSD Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February 2019, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues, fixing watchpoint and threading support. Throughout December I've continued working on our build bot maintenance, in particular enabling compiler-rt tests. I've revived and finished my old patch for extended register state (XState) in core dumps. I've started working on bringing proper i386 support to LLDB. Beastie Bits An open source Civilization V BSD Groups in Italy Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for OpenVMS? Benchmarking shell pipelines and the Unix “tools” philosophy LPI and BSD working together Feedback/Questions Pat - March Meeting Madhukar - Overheating Laptop Warren - R vs S Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on

Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2019, Wireguard on OpenBSD Router, Amazon now has FreeBSD/ARM 12, pkgsrc-2019Q4, The Joys of UNIX Keyboards, OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, and more. Headlines Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2019 It’s hard to believe that 2019 is nearly over. It has been an amazing year for supporting the FreeBSD Project and community! Why do I say that? Because as I reflect over the past 12 months, I realize how many events we’ve attended all over the world, and how many lives we’ve touched in so many ways. From advocating for FreeBSD to implementing FreeBSD features, my team has been there to help make FreeBSD the best open source project and operating system out there. In 2019, we focused on supporting a few key areas where the Project needed the most help. The first area was software development. Whether it was contracting FreeBSD developers to work on projects like wifi support, to providing internal staff to quickly implement hardware workarounds, we’ve stepped in to help keep FreeBSD innovative, secure, and reliable. Software development includes supporting the tools and infrastructure that make the development process go smoothly, and we’re on it with team members heading up the Continuous Integration efforts, and actively involved in the clusteradmin and security teams. Our advocacy efforts focused on recruiting new users and contributors to the Project. We attended and participated in 38 conferences and events in 21 countries. From giving FreeBSD presentations and workshops to staffing tables, we were able to have 1:1 conversations with thousands of attendees. Our travels also provided opportunities to talk directly with FreeBSD commercial and individual users, contributors, and future FreeBSD user/contributors. We’ve seen an increase in use and interest in FreeBSD from all of these organizations and individuals. These meetings give us a chance to learn more about what organizations need and what they and other individuals are working on. The information helps inform the work we should fund. Wireguard on OpenBSD Router wireguard (wg) is a modern vpn protocol, using the latest class of encryption algorithms while at the same time promising speed and a small code base. modern crypto and lean code are also tenants of openbsd, thus it was a no brainer to migrate my router from openvpn over to wireguard. my setup : a collection of devices, both wired and wireless, that are nat’d through my router (openbsd 6.6) out via my vpn provider azire* and out to the internet using wg-quick to start wg. running : doubtless this could be improved on, but currently i start wg manually when my router boots. this, and the nat'ing on the vpn interface mean its impossible for clients to connect to the internet without the vpn being up. as my router is on a ups and only reboots when a kernel patch requires it, it’s a compromise i can live with. run wg-quick (please replace vpn with whatever you named your wg .conf file.) and reload pf rules. News Roundup Amazon now has FreeBSD/ARM 12 AWS, the cloud division of Amazon, announced in December the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2. This is a custom chip design with a 7nm architecture. It is based on 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores. Compared to first-generation Graviton processors (A1), today’s new chips should deliver up to 7x the performance of A1 instances in some cases. Floating point performance is now twice as fast. There are additional memory channels and cache speed memory access should be much faster. The company is working on three types of Graviton2 EC2 instances that should be available soon. Instances with a “g” suffix are powered by Graviton2 chips. If they have a “d” suffix, it also means that they have NVMe local storage. General-purpose instances (M6g and M6gd) Compute-optimized instances (C6g and C6gd) Memory-optimized instances (R6g and R6gd) You can choose instances with up to 64 vCPUs, 512 GiB of memory and 25 Gbps networking. And you can see that ARM-powered servers are not just a fad. AWS already promises a 40% better price/performance ratio with ARM-based instances when you compare them with x86-based instances. AWS has been working with operating system vendors and independent software vendors to help them release software that runs on ARM. ARM-based EC2 instances support Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. It also works with multiple container services (Docker, Amazon ECS, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service). Coverage of AWS Announcement Announcing the pkgsrc-2019Q4 release The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 65th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 20,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/ In total, 190 packages were added, 96 packages were removed, and 1,868 package updates (to 1388 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2019Q3 rele

Announcing HyperbolaBSD, IPFW In-Kernel NAT setup on FreeBSD, Wayland and WebRTC enabled for NetBSD 9/Linux, LLDB Threading support ready for mainline, OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support in base, Dragonfly drm/i915: Update, and more. Headlines HyperbolaBSD Announcement Due to the Linux kernel rapidly proceeding down an unstable path, we are planning on implementing a completely new OS derived from several BSD implementations. This was not an easy decision to make, but we wish to use our time and resources to create a viable alternative to the current operating system trends which are actively seeking to undermine user choice and freedom. This will not be a "distro", but a hard fork of the OpenBSD kernel and userspace including new code written under GPLv3 and LGPLv3 to replace GPL-incompatible parts and non-free ones. Reasons for this include: Linux kernel forcing adaption of DRM, including HDCP. Linux kernel proposed usage of Rust (which contains freedom flaws and a centralized code repository that is more prone to cyber attack and generally requires internet access to use.) Linux kernel being written without security and in mind. (KSPP is basically a dead project and Grsec is no longer free software) Many GNU userspace and core utils are all forcing adaption of features without build time options to disable them. E.g. (PulseAudio / SystemD / Rust / Java as forced dependencies) As such, we will continue to support the Milky Way branch until 2022 when our legacy Linux-libre kernel reaches End of Life. Future versions of Hyperbola will be using HyperbolaBSD which will have the new kernel, userspace and not be ABI compatible with previous versions. HyperbolaBSD is intended to be modular and minimalist so other projects will be able to re-use the code under free license. Forum Post A simple IPFW In-Kernel NAT setup on FreeBSD After graduating college, I am moving from Brooklyn, NY to Redmond, WA (guess where I got a job). I always wanted to re-do my OPNsense firewall (currently a HP T730) with stock FreeBSD and IPFW’s in-kernel NAT. Why IPFW? Benchmarks have shown IPFW to be faster which is especially good for my Tor relay, and because I can! However, one downside of IPFW is less documentation vs PF, even less without natd (which we’re not using), and this took me time to figure this out. But since my T730 is already packed, I am testing this on a old PC with two NICs, and my laptop [1] as a client with an USB-to-Ethernet adapter. News Roundup HEADS UP: Wayland and WebRTC enabled for NetBSD 9/Linux This is just a heads up that the Wayland option is now turned on by default for NetBSD 9 and Linux in cases where it peacefully coexists with X11. Right now, this effects the following packages: graphics/MesaLib devel/SDL2 www/webkit-gtk x11/gtk3 The WebRTC option has also been enabled by default on NetBSD 9 for two Firefox versions: www/firefox, www/firefox68 Please keep me informed of any fallout. Hopefully, there will be none. If you want to try out Wayland-related things on NetBSD 9, wm/velox/MESSAGE may be interesting for you. LLDB Threading support now ready for mainline Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report. So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report. OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support in base Hardware backed keys can be generated using "ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk" (or "ed25519-sk" if your token supports it). Many tokens require to be touched/tapped to confirm this step. You'll get a public/private keypair back as usual, except in this case, the private key file does not contain a highly-sensitive private key but instead holds a "key handle" that is used by the security key to derive the real private key at signing time. So, stealing a copy of the private key file without also stealing your security key (or access to it) should not give the attacker anything. drm/i915: Update to Linux 4.8.17 drm/i915: Update to Linux 4.8.17 Broxton, Valleyview and C

How learning OpenBSD makes computers suck a little less, How Unix works, FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Well on Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, BSDCan CFP, HardenedBSD Infrastructure Goals, and more. Headlines Why computers suck and how learning from OpenBSD can make them marginally less horrible How much better could things actually be if we abandoned the enterprise development model? Next I will compare this enterprise development approach with non-enterprise development - projects such as OpenBSD, which do not hesitate to introduce ABI breaking changes to improve the codebase. One of the most commonly referred to pillars of the project's philosophy has long been its emphasis on clean functional code. Any code which makes it into OpenBSD is subject to ongoing aggressive audits for deprecated, or otherwise unmaintained code in order to reduce cruft and attack surface. Additionally the project creator, Theo de Raadt, and his team of core developers engage in ongoing development for proactive mitigations for various attack classes many of which are directly adopted by various multi-platform userland applications as well as the operating systems themselves (Windows, Linux, and the other BSDs). Frequently it is the case that introducing new features (not just deprecating old ones) introduces new incompatibilities against previously functional binaries compiled for OpenBSD. To prevent the sort of kernel memory bloat that has plagued so many other operating systems for years, the project enforces a hard ceiling on the number of lines of code that can ever be in ring 0 at a given time. Current estimates guess the number of bugs per line of code in the Linux kernel are around 1 bug per every 10,000 lines of code. Think of this in the context of the scope creep seen in the Linux kernel (which if I recall correctly is currently at around 100,000,000 lines of code), as well as the Windows NT kernel (500,000,000 lines of code) and you quickly begin to understand how adding more and more functionality into the most privileged components of the operating system without first removing old components begins to add up in terms of the drastic difference seen between these systems in the number of zero day exploits caught in the wild respectively. How Unix Works: Become a Better Software Engineer Unix is beautiful. Allow me to paint some happy little trees for you. I’m not going to explain a bunch of commands – that’s boring, and there’s a million tutorials on the web doing that already. I’m going to leave you with the ability to reason about the system. Every fancy thing you want done is one google search away. But understanding why the solution does what you want is not the same. That’s what gives you real power, the power to not be afraid. And since it rhymes, it must be true. News Roundup FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Refreshingly Well With AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform. It was refreshing to see FreeBSD 12.1 booting and running just fine with the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-core/64-thread processor from the ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME motherboard and all core functionality working including the PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage, onboard networking, etc. The system was running with 4 x 16GB DDR4-3600 memory, 1TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 580 graphics. It was refreshing to see FreeBSD 12.1 running well with this high-end AMD Threadripper system considering Linux even needed a boot workaround. While the FreeBSD 12.1 experience was trouble-free with the ASUS TRX40 motherboard (ROG Zenith II Extreme) and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, DragonFlyBSD unfortunately was not. Both DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 stable and the DragonFlyBSD daily development snapshot from last week were yielding a panic on boot. So with that, DragonFlyBSD wasn't tested for this Threadripper 3970X comparison but just FreeBSD 12.1. FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X was benchmarked both with its default LLVM Clang 8.0.1 compiler and again with GCC 9.2 from ports for ruling out compiler differences. The FreeBSD 12.1 performance was compared to last week's Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks with the same system. BSDCan 2020 CFP BSDCan 2020 will be held 5-6 (Fri-Sat) June, 2020 in Ottawa, at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 3-4 June (Wed-Thu). NOTE the change of month in 2020 back to June Also: do not miss out on the Goat BOF on Tuesday 2 June. We are now accepting proposals for talks. The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business d

Authentication Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD, NetBSD 9.0 RC1 is available, Running FreeNAS on a DigitalOcean droplet, NomadBSD 1.3 is here, at e2k19 nobody can hear you scream, and more. Headlines Authentication vulnerabilities in OpenBSD We discovered an authentication-bypass vulnerability in OpenBSD's authentication system: this vulnerability is remotely exploitable in smtpd, ldapd, and radiusd, but its real-world impact should be studied on a case-by-case basis. For example, sshd is not exploitable thanks to its defense-in-depth mechanisms. From the manual page of login.conf: OpenBSD uses BSD Authentication, which is made up of a variety of authentication styles. The authentication styles currently provided are: passwd Request a password and check it against the password in the master.passwd file. See login_passwd(8). skey Send a challenge and request a response, checking it with S/Key (tm) authentication. See login_skey(8). yubikey Authenticate using a Yubico YubiKey token. See login_yubikey(8). For any given style, the program /usr/libexec/auth/login_style is used to perform the authentication. The synopsis of this program is: /usr/libexec/auth/login_style [-v name=value] [-s service] username class This is the first piece of the puzzle: if an attacker specifies a username of the form "-option", they can influence the behavior of the authentication program in unexpected ways. login_passwd [-s service] [-v wheel=yes|no] [-v lastchance=yes|no] user [class] The service argument specifies which protocol to use with the invoking program. The allowed protocols are login, challenge, and response. (The challenge protocol is silently ignored but will report success as passwd-style authentication is not challenge-response based). This is the second piece of the puzzle: if an attacker specifies the username "-schallenge" (or "-schallenge:passwd" to force a passwd-style authentication), then the authentication is automatically successful and therefore bypassed. Case study: smtpd Case study: ldapd Case study: radiusd Case study: sshd Acknowledgments: We thank Theo de Raadt and the OpenBSD developers for their incredibly quick response: they published patches for these vulnerabilities less than 40 hours after our initial contact. We also thank MITRE's CVE Assignment Team. First release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 available! Since the start of the release process four months ago a lot of improvements went into the branch - more than 500 pullups were processed! This includes usbnet (a common framework for usb ethernet drivers), aarch64 stability enhancements and lots of new hardware support, installer/sysinst fixes and changes to the NVMM (hardware virtualization) interface. We hope this will lead to the best NetBSD release ever (only to be topped by NetBSD 10 next year). Here are a few highlights of the new release: Support for Arm AArch64 (64-bit Armv8-A) machines, including "Arm ServerReady" compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA) Enhanced hardware support for Armv7-A Updated GPU drivers (e.g. support for Intel Kabylake) Enhanced virtualization support Support for hardware-accelerated virtualization (NVMM) Support for Performance Monitoring Counters Support for Kernel ASLR Support several kernel sanitizers (KLEAK, KASAN, KUBSAN) Support for userland sanitizers Audit of the network stack Many improvements in NPF Updated ZFS Reworked error handling and NCQ support in the SATA subsystem Support a common framework for USB Ethernet drivers (usbnet) More information on the RC can be found on the NetBSD 9 release page News Roundup Running FreeNAS on a Digitalocean droplet ZFS is awesome. FreeBSD even more so. FreeNAS is the battle-tested, enterprise-ready-yet-home-user-friendly software defined storage solution which is cooler then deep space, based on FreeBSD and makes heavy use of ZFS. This is what I (and soooooo many others) use for just about any storage-related task. I can go on and on and on about what makes it great, but if you're here, reading this, you probably know all that already and we can skip ahead. I've needed an offsite FreeNAS setup to replicate things to, to run some things, to do some stuff, basically, my privately-owned, tightly-controlled NAS appliance in the cloud, one I control from top to bottom and with support for whatever crazy thing I'm trying to do. Since I'm using DigitalOcean as my main VPS provider, it seemed logical to run FreeNAS there, however, you can't. While DO supports many many distos and pre-setup applications (e.g OpenVPN), FreeNAS isn't a supported feature, at least not in the traditional way :) Before we begin, here's the gist of what we're going to do: Base of a FreeBSD droplet, we'll re-image our boot block device with FreeNAS iso. We'll then install FreeNAS on the second block device. Once done we're going to do the ol' switcheroo: we're going to re-image our original boot block device using

In this episode, we interview Michael W. Lucas about his latest book projects, including the upcoming SNMP Mastery book. Interview - Michael Lucas Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag. Special Guest: Michael W Lucas.

LLDB Threading support now ready, Multiple IPSec VPN tunnels with FreeBSD, Netflix Optimized FreeBSD's Network Stack More Than Doubled AMD EPYC Performance, happy eyeballs with unwind(8), AWS got FreeBSD ARM 12, OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support, and more. Headlines LLDB Threading support now ready for mainline Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report. So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report. Multiple IPSec VPN tunnels with FreeBSD The FreeBSD handbook describes an IPSec VPN tunnel between 2 FreeBSD hosts (see https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ipsec.html) But it is also possible to have multiple, 2 or more, IPSec VPN tunnels created and running on a FreeBSD host. How to implement and configure this is described below. The requirements is to have 3 locations (A, B and C) connected with IPSec VPN tunnels using FreeBSD (11.3-RELEASE). Each location has 1 IPSec VPN host running FreeBSD (VPN host A, B and C). VPN host A has 2 IPSec VPN tunnels: 1 to location B (VPN host B) and 1 to location C (VPN host C). News Roundup Netflix Optimized FreeBSD's Network Stack More Than Doubled AMD EPYC Performance Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel. Netflix has long been known to be using FreeBSD in their data centers particularly where network performance is concerned. But in wanting to deliver 200Gb/s throughput from individual servers led them to making NUMA optimizations to the FreeBSD network stack. Allocating NUMA local memory for kernel TLS crypto buffers and for backing files sent via sentfile were among their optimizations. Changes to network connection handling and dealing with incoming connections to Nginx were also made. For those just wanting the end result, Netflix's NUMA optimizations to FreeBSD resulted in their Intel Xeon servers going from 105Gb/s to 191Gb/s while the NUMA fabric utilization dropped from 40% to 13%. unwind(8); "happy eyeballs" In case you are wondering why happy eyeballs: It's a variation on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs unwind has a concept of a best nameserver type. It considers a configured DoT nameserver to be better than doing it's own recursive resolving. Recursive resolving is considered to be better than asking the dhcp provided nameservers. This diff sorts the nameserver types by quality, as above (validation, resolving, dead...), and as a tie breaker it adds the median of the round trip time of previous queries into the mix. One other interesting thing about this is that it gets us past captive portals without a check URL, that's why this diff is so huge, it rips out all the captive portal stuff (please apply with patch -E): 17 files changed, 385 insertions(+), 1683 deletions(-) Please test this. I'm particularly interested in reports from people who move between networks and need to get past captive portals. Amazon now has FreeBSD ARM 12 Product Overview FreeBSD is an operating system used to power servers, desktops, and embedded systems. Derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley, FreeBSD has been continually developed by a large community for more than 30 years. FreeBSD's networking, security, storage, and monitoring features, including the pf firewall, the Capsicum and CloudABI capability frameworks, the ZFS filesystem, and the DTrace dynamic tracing framework, make FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage systems. OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support in base I just

We read FreeBSD’s third quarterly status report, OpenBSD on Sparc64, ZoL repo move to OpenZFS, GEOM NOP, keeping NetBSD up-to-date, and more. Headlines FreeBSD third quarterly status report for 2019 This quarter the reports team has been more active than usual thanks to a better organization: calls for reports and reminders have been sent regularly, reports have been reviewed and merged quickly (I would like to thank debdrup@ in particular for his reviewing work). Efficiency could still be improved with the help of our community. In particular, the quarterly team has found that many reports have arrived in the last days before the deadline or even after. I would like to invite the community to follow the guidelines below that can help us sending out the reports sooner. Starting from next quarter, all quarterly status reports will be prepared the last month of the quarter itself, instead of the first month after the quarter's end. This means that deadlines for submitting reports will be the 1st of January, April, July and October. Next quarter will then be a short one, covering the months of November and December only and the report will probably be out in mid January. OpenBSD on Sparc64 OpenBSD, huh? Yes, I usually write about FreeBSD and that’s in fact what I tried installing on the machine first. But I ran into problems with it very early on (never even reached single user mode) and put it aside for later. Since I powered up the SunFire again last month, I needed an OS now and chose OpenBSD for the simple reason that I have it available. First I wanted to call this article simply “OpenBSD on SPARC” – but that would have been misleading since OpenBSD used to support 32-bit SPARC processors, too. The platform was just put to rest after the 5.9 release. Version 6.0 was the last release of OpenBSD that came on CD-ROM. When I bought it, I thought that I’d never use the SPARC CD. But here was the chance! While it is an obsolete release, it comes with the cryptographic signatures to verify the next release. So the plan is to start at 6.0 as I can trust the original CDs and then update to the latest release. This will also be an opportunity to recap on some of the things that changed over the various versions. News Roundup ZoL repo move to OpenZFS Because it will contain the ZFS source code for both Linux and FreeBSD, we will rename the "ZFSonLinux" code repository to "OpenZFS". Specifically, the repo at http://github.com/ZFSonLinux/zfs will be moved to the OpenZFS organization, at http://github.com/OpenZFS/zfs. The next major release of ZFS for Linux and FreeBSD will be "OpenZFS 2.0", and is expected to ship in 2020. Mcclure111 Sun Thread A long time ago— like 15 years ago— I worked at Sun Microsystems. The company was nearly dead at the time (it died a couple years later) because they didn't make anything that anyone wanted to buy anymore. So they had a lot of strange ideas about how they'd make their comeback. GEOM NOP Sometimes while testing file systems or applications you want to simulate some errors on the disk level. The first time I heard about this need was from Baptiste Daroussin during his presentation at AsiaBSDCon 2016. He mentioned how they had built a test lab with it. The same need was recently discussed during the PGCon 2019, to test a PostgreSQL instance. If you are FreeBSD user, I have great news for you: there is a GEOM provider which allows you to simulate a failing device. GNOP allows us to configure transparent providers from existing ones. The first interesting option of it is that we can slice the device into smaller pieces, thanks to the ‘offset option’ and ‘stripsesize’. This allows us to observe how the data on the disk is changing. Let’s assume that we want to observe the changes in the GPT table when the GPT flags are added or removed (for example the bootme flags which are described here). We can use dd every time and analyze it using absolute values from the disks. Keeping NetBSD up-to-date with pkg_comp 2.0 This is a tutorial to guide you through the shiny new pkg_comp 2.0 on NetBSD. Goals: to use pkg_comp 2.0 to build a binary repository of all the packages you are interested in; to keep the repository fresh on a daily basis; and to use that repository with pkgin to maintain your NetBSD system up-to-date and secure. This tutorial is specifically targeted at NetBSD but should work on other platforms with some small changes. Expect, at the very least, a macOS-specific tutorial as soon as I create a pkg_comp standalone installer for that platform. Beastie Bits DragonFly - Radeon Improvements NomadBSD review Spongebob OpenBSD Security Comic Forth : The Early Years LCM+L PDP-7 booting and running UNIX Version 0 Feedback/Questions Chris - Ctrl-T Improved Ctrl+t that shows kernel backtrace Brian - Migrating NexentaStore to FreeBSD/FreeNAS Avery - How to get involved Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on t

LPI releases BSD Certification, openzfs trip report, Using FreeBSD with ports, LLDB threading support ready, Linux versus Open Source Unix, and more. Headlines Linux Professional Institute Releases BSD Specialist Certification - re BSD Certification Group Linux Professional Institute extends its Open Technology certification track with the BSD Specialist Certification. Starting October 30, 2019, BSD Specialist exams will be globally available. The certification was developed in collaboration with the BSD Certification Group which merged with Linux Professional Institute in 2018. G. Matthew Rice, the Executive Director of Linux Professional Institute says that "the release of the BSD Specialist certification marks a major milestone for Linux Professional Institute. With this new credential, we are reaffirming our belief in the value of, and support for, all open source technologies. As much as possible, future credentials and educational programs will include coverage of BSD.” OpenZFS Trip Report The seventh annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place on November 4th and 5th in San Francisco and brought together a healthy mix of familiar faces and new community participants. Several folks from iXsystems took part in the talks, hacking, and socializing at this amazing annual event. The messages of the event can be summed up as Unification, Refinement, and Ecosystem Tooling. News Roundup Using FreeBSD with Ports (2/2): Tool-assisted updating Part 1 here: https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2019/08/18/using-freebsd-with-ports-1-2-classic-way-with-tools/ In the previous post I explained why sometimes building your software from ports may make sense on FreeBSD. I also introduced the reader to the old-fashioned way of using tools to make working with ports a bit more convenient. In this follow-up post we’re going to take a closer look at portmaster and see how it especially makes updating from ports much, much easier. For people coming here without having read the previous article: What I describe here is not what every FreeBSD admin today should consider good practice (any more)! It can still be useful in special cases, but my main intention is to discuss this for building up the foundation for what you actually should do today. LLDB Threading support now ready for mainline Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report. So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report. Linux VS open source UNIX Beastie Bits Support for Realtek RTL8125 2.5Gb Ethernet controller Computer Files Are Going Extinct FreeBSD kernel hacking Modern BSD Computing for Fun on a VAX! Trying to use a VAX in today's world by Jeff Armstrong MidnightBSD 1.2 Released Feedback/Questions Paulo - Zfs snapshots Phillip - GCP A Listener - Old episodes? Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

FreeBSD 12.1 is here, A history of Unix before Berkeley, FreeBSD development setup, HardenedBSD 2019 Status Report, DNSSEC, compiling RainbowCrack on OpenBSD, and more. Headlines FreeBSD 12.1 Some of the highlights: BearSSL has been imported to the base system. The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, compiler-rt utilities and libc++ have been updated to version 8.0.1. OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1d. Several userland utility updates. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.1R/relnotes.html A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984. Nobody needs to be told that UNIX is popular today. In this article we will show you a little of where it was yesterday and over the past decade. And, without meaning in the least to minimise the incredible contributions of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, we will bring to light many of the others who worked on early versions, and try to show where some of the key ideas came from, and how they got into the UNIX of today. Our title says we are talking about UNIX evolution. Evolution means different things to different people. We use the term loosely, to describe the change over time among the many different UNIX variants in use both inside and outside Bell Labs. Ideas, code, and useful programs seem to have made their way back and forth - like mutant genes - among all the many UNIXes living in the phone company over the decade in question. Part One looks at some of the major components of the current UNIX system - the text formatting tools, the compilers and program development tools, and so on. Most of the work described in Part One took place at Research'', a part of Bell Laboratories (now AT&T Bell Laboratories, then as nowthe Labs''), and the ancestral home of UNIX. In planned (but not written) later parts, we would have looked at some of the myriad versions of UNIX - there are far more than one might suspect. This includes a look at Columbus and USG and at Berkeley Unix. You'll begin to get a glimpse inside the history of the major streams of development of the system during that time. News Roundup My FreeBSD Development Setup I do my FreeBSD development using git, tmux, vim and cscope. I keep a FreeBSD fork on my github, I have forked https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd to https://github.com/adventureloop/freebsd OPNsense 19.7.6 released As we are experiencing the Suricata community first hand in Amsterdam we thought to release this version a bit earlier than planned. Included is the latest Suricata 5.0.0 release in the development version. That means later this November we will releasing version 5 to the production version as we finish up tweaking the integration and maybe pick up 5.0.1 as it becomes available. LDAP TLS connectivity is now integrated into the system trust store, which ensures that all required root and intermediate certificates will be seen by the connection setup when they have been added to the authorities section. The same is true for trusting self-signed certificates. On top of this, IPsec now supports public key authentication as contributed by Pascal Mathis. HardenedBSD November 2019 Status Report. We at HardenedBSD have a lot of news to share. On 05 Nov 2019, Oliver Pinter resigned amicably from the project. All of us at HardenedBSD owe Oliver our gratitude and appreciation. This humble project, named by Oliver, was born out of his thesis work and the collaboration with Shawn Webb. Oliver created the HardenedBSD repo on GitHub in April 2013. The HardenedBSD Foundation was formed five years later to carry on this great work. DNSSEC enabled in default unbound(8) configuration. DNSSEC validation has been enabled in the default unbound.conf(5) in -current. The relevant commits were from Job Snijders (job@) How to Install Shopware with NGINX and Let's Encrypt on FreeBSD 12 Shopware is the next generation of open source e-commerce software. Based on bleeding edge technologies like Symfony 3, Doctrine2 and Zend Framework Shopware comes as the perfect platform for your next e-commerce project. This tutorial will walk you through the Shopware Community Edition (CE) installation on FreeBSD 12 system by using NGINX as a web server. Requirements Make sure your system meets the following minimum requirements: Linux-based operating system with NGINX or Apache 2.x (with mod_rewrite) web server installed. PHP 5.6.4 or higher with ctype, gd, curl, dom, hash, iconv, zip, json, mbstring, openssl, session, simplexml, xml, zlib, fileinfo, and pdo/mysql extensions. PHP 7.1 or above is strongly recommended. MySQL 5.5.0 or higher. Possibility to set up cron jobs. Minimum 4 GB available hard disk space. IonCube Loader version 5.0.0 or higher (optional). How to Compile RainbowCrack on OpenBSD Project RainbowCrack was originally Zhu Shuanglei's implementation, it's not clear to me if the project is still jus

Migrating drives and zpool between hosts, OpenBSD in 2019, Dragonfly’s new zlib and dhcpcd, Batch renaming images and resolution with awk, a rant on the X11 ICCCM selection system, hammer 2 emergency space mode, and more. Headlines Migrating drives and the zpool from one host to another. Today is the day. Today I move a zpool from an R710 into an R720. The goal: all services on that zpool start running on the new host. Fortunately, that zpool is dedicated to jails, more or less. I have done some planning about this, including moving a poudriere on the R710 into a jail. Now it is almost noon on Saturday, I am sitting in the basement (just outside the server room), and I’m typing this up. In this post: FreeBSD 12.0 Dell R710 (r710-01) Dell R720 (r720-01) drive caddies from eBay and now I know the difference between SATA and SATAu PLEASE READ THIS first: Migrating ZFS Storage Pools OpenBSD in 2019 I’ve used OpenBSD on and off since 2.1. More back then than in the last 10 years or so though, so I thought I’d try it again. What triggered this was me finding a silly bug in GNU cpio that has existed with a “FIXME” comment since at least 1994. I checked OpenBSD to see if it had a related bug, but as expected no it was just fine. I don’t quite remember why I stopped using OpenBSD for servers, but I do remember filesystem corruption on “unexpected power disconnections” (even with softdep turned on), which I’ve never really seen on Linux. That and that fewer things “just worked” than with Linux, which matters more when I installed more random things than I do now. I’ve become a lot more minimalist. Probably due to less spare time. Life is better when you don’t run things like PHP (not that OpenBSD doesn’t support PHP, just an example) or your own email server with various antispam tooling, and other things. This is all experience from running OpenBSD on a server. On my next laptop I intend to try running OpenBSD on the dektop, and will see if that more ad-hoc environment works well. E.g. will gnuradio work? Lack of other-OS VM support may be a problem. Verdict Ouch, that’s a long list of bad stuff. Still, I like it. I’ll continue to run it, and will make sure my stuff continues working on OpenBSD. And maybe in a year I’ll have a review of OpenBSD on a laptop. News Roundup New zlib, new dhcpcd zlib and dhcpcd are both updated in DragonFly… but my quick perusal of the commits makes it sound like bugfix only; no usage changes needed. DHCPCD Commit: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-October/719768.html ZLIB Commit: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-October/719772.html Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk The most recent item on my list of “Geeky things I did that made me feel pretty awesome” is an hour’s adventure that culminated in this code: $ file IMG* | awk 'BEGIN{a=0} {print substr($1, 1, length($1)-5),a++"_"substr($8,1, length($8)-1)}' | while read fn fr; do echo $(rename -v "s/$fn/img_$fr/g" *); done IMG_20170808_172653_425.jpg renamed as img_0_4032x3024.jpg IMG_20170808_173020_267.jpg renamed as img_1_3024x3506.jpg IMG_20170808_173130_616.jpg renamed as img_2_3024x3779.jpg IMG_20170808_173221_425.jpg renamed as img_3_3024x3780.jpg IMG_20170808_173417_059.jpg renamed as img_4_2956x2980.jpg IMG_20170808_173450_971.jpg renamed as img_5_3024x3024.jpg IMG_20170808_173536_034.jpg renamed as img_6_4032x3024.jpg IMG_20170808_173602_732.jpg renamed as img_7_1617x1617.jpg IMG_20170808_173645_339.jpg renamed as img_8_3024x3780.jpg IMG_20170909_170146_585.jpg renamed as img_9_3036x3036.jpg IMG_20170911_211522_543.jpg renamed as img_10_3036x3036.jpg IMG_20170913_071608_288.jpg renamed as img_11_2760x2760.jpg IMG_20170913_073205_522.jpg renamed as img_12_2738x2738.jpg // ... etc etc The last item on the aforementioned list is “TODO: come up with a shorter title for this list.” I hate the X11 ICCCM selection system, and you should too - A Rant d00d, that document is devilspawn. I've recently spent my nights in pain implementing the selection mechanism. WHY OH WHY OH WHY? why me? why did I choose to do this? and what sick evil twisted mind wrote this damn spec? I don't know why I'm working with it, I just wanted to make a useful program. I didn't know what I was getting myself in to. Nobody knows until they try it. And once you start, you're unable to stop. You can't stop, if you stop then you haven't completed it to spec. You can't fail on this, it's just a few pages of text, how can that be so hard? So what if they use Atoms for everything. So what if there's no explicit correlation between the target type of a SelectionNotify event and the type of the property it indicates? So what if the distinction is ambiguous? So what if the document is littered with such atrocities? It's not the spec's fault, the spec is authoritative. It's obviously YOUR (the implementor's) fault for misundersta

The earliest Unix code, how to replace fail2ban with blacklistd, OpenBSD crossed 400k commits, how to install Bolt CMS on FreeBSD, optimized hammer2, appeasing the OSI 7-layer burrito guys, and more. Headlines The Earliest Unix Code: An Anniversary Source Code Release What is it that runs the servers that hold our online world, be it the web or the cloud? What enables the mobile apps that are at the center of increasingly on-demand lives in the developed world and of mobile banking and messaging in the developing world? The answer is the operating system Unix and its many descendants: Linux, Android, BSD Unix, MacOS, iOS—the list goes on and on. Want to glimpse the Unix in your Mac? Open a Terminal window and enter “man roff” to view the Unix manual entry for an early text formatting program that lives within your operating system. 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Unix. In the summer of 1969, that same summer that saw humankind’s first steps on the surface of the Moon, computer scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—most centrally Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—began the construction of a new operating system, using a then-aging DEC PDP-7 computer at the labs. This man sent the first online message 50 years ago As many of you have heard in the past, the first online message ever sent between two computers was "lo", just over 50 years ago, on Oct. 29, 1969. It was supposed to say "log," but the computer sending the message — based at UCLA — crashed before the letter "g" was typed. A computer at Stanford 560 kilometres away was supposed to fill in the remaining characters "in," as in "log in." The CBC Radio show, “The Current” has a half-hour interview with the man who sent that message, Leonard Kleinrock, distinguished professor of computer science at UCLA "The idea of the network was you could sit at one computer, log on through the network to a remote computer and use its services there," 50 years later, the internet has become so ubiquitous that it has almost been rendered invisible. There's hardly an aspect in our daily lives that hasn't been touched and transformed by it. Q: Take us back to that day 50 years ago. Did you have the sense that this was going to be something you'd be talking about a half a century later? A: Well, yes and no. Four months before that message was sent, there was a press release that came out of UCLA in which it quotes me as describing what my vision for this network would become. Basically what it said is that this network would be always on, always available. Anybody with any device could get on at anytime from any location, and it would be invisible. Well, what I missed ... was that this is going to become a social network. People talking to people. Not computers talking to computers, but [the] human element. Q: Can you briefly explain what you were working on in that lab? Why were you trying to get computers to actually talk to one another? A: As an MIT graduate student, years before, I recognized I was surrounded by computers and I realized there was no effective [or efficient] way for them to communicate. I did my dissertation, my research, on establishing a mathematical theory of how these networks would work. But there was no such network existing. AT&T said it won't work and, even if it does, we want nothing to do with it. So I had to wait around for years until the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Defence decided they needed a network to connect together the computer scientists they were supervising and supporting. Q: For all the promise of the internet, it has also developed some dark sides that I'm guessing pioneers like yourselves never anticipated. A: We did not. I knew everybody on the internet at that time, and they were all well-behaved and they all believed in an open, shared free network. So we did not put in any security controls. When the first spam email occurred, we began to see the dark side emerge as this network reached nefarious people sitting in basements with a high-speed connection, reaching out to millions of people instantaneously, at no cost in time or money, anonymously until all sorts of unpleasant events occurred, which we called the dark side. But in those early days, I considered the network to be going through its teenage years. Hacking to spam, annoying kinds of effects. I thought that one day this network would mature and grow up. Well, in fact, it took a turn for the worse when nation states, organized crime and extremists came in and began to abuse the network in severe ways. Q: Is there any part of you that regrets giving birth to this? A: Absolutely not. The greater good is much more important. News Roundup How to use blacklistd(8) with NPF as a fail2ban replacement blacklistd(8) provides an API that can be used by network daemons to communicate with a packet filter via a daemon to enforce opening and c

Unix is 50, Hunting down Ken's PDP-7, OpenBSD and OPNSense have new releases, Clarification on what GhostBSD is, sshuttle - VPN over SSH, and more. Headlines Unix is 50 In the summer of 1969 computer scientists Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created the first implementation of Unix with the goal of designing an elegant and economical operating system for a little-used PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs. That modest project, however, would have a far-reaching legacy. Unix made large-scale networking of diverse computing systems — and the Internet — practical. The Unix team went on to develop the C language, which brought an unprecedented combination of efficiency and expressiveness to programming. Both made computing more "portable". Today, Linux, the most popular descendent of Unix, powers the vast majority of servers, and elements of Unix and Linux are found in most mobile devices. Meanwhile C++ remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. Unix may be a half-century old but its influence is only growing. Hunting down Ken's PDP-7: video footage found In my prior blog post, I traced Ken's scrounged PDP-7 to SN 34. In this post I'll show that we have actual video footage of that PDP-7 due to an old film from Bell Labs. this gives us almost a minute of footage of the PDP-7 Ken later used to create Unix. News Roundup OpenBSD 6.6 Released Announce: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=157132024225971&w=2 Upgrade Guide: https://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade66.html Changelog: https://openbsd.org/plus66.html OPNsense 19.7.5 released Hello friends and followers, Lots of plugin and ports updates this time with a few minor improvements in all core areas. Behind the scenes we are starting to migrate the base system to version 12.1 which is supposed to hit the next 20.1 release. Stay tuned for more infos in the next month or so. Here are the full patch notes: system: show all swap partitions in system information widget system: flatten services_get() in preparation for removal system: pin Syslog-ng version to specific package name system: fix LDAP/StartTLS with user import page system: fix a PHP warning on authentication server page system: replace most subprocess.call use interfaces: fix devd handling of carp devices (contributed by stumbaumr) firewall: improve firewall rules inline toggles firewall: only allow TCP flags on TCP protocol firewall: simplify help text for direction setting firewall: make protocol log summary case insensitive reporting: ignore malformed flow records captive portal: fix type mismatch for timeout read dhcp: add note for static lease limitation with lease registration (contributed by Northguy) ipsec: add margintime and rekeyfuzz options ipsec: clear $dpdline correctly if not set ui: fix tokenizer reorder on multiple saves plugins: os-acme-client 1.26[1] plugins: os-bind will reload bind on record change (contributed by blablup) plugins: os-etpro-telemetry minor subprocess.call replacement plugins: os-freeradius 1.9.4[2] plugins: os-frr 1.12[3] plugins: os-haproxy 2.19[4] plugins: os-mailtrail 1.2[5] plugins: os-postfix 1.11[6] plugins: os-rspamd 1.8[7] plugins: os-sunnyvalley LibreSSL support (contributed by Sunny Valley Networks) plugins: os-telegraf 1.7.6[8] plugins: os-theme-cicada 1.21 (contributed by Team Rebellion) plugins: os-theme-tukan 1.21 (contributed by Team Rebellion) plugins: os-tinc minor subprocess.call replacement plugins: os-tor 1.8 adds dormant mode disable option (contributed by Fabian Franz) plugins: os-virtualbox 1.0 (contributed by andrewhotlab) Dealing with the misunderstandings of what is GhostBSD Since the release of 19.09, I have seen a lot of misunderstandings on what is GhostBSD and the future of GhostBSD. GhostBSD is based on TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE with our twist to it. We are still continuing to use TrueOS for OpenRC, and the new package's system for the base system that is built from ports. GhostBSD is becoming a slow-moving rolling release base on the latest TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE. When FreeBSD 13 STABLE gets released, GhostBSD will be upgraded to TrueOS with FreeBSD 13 STABLE. Our official desktop is MATE, which means that the leading developer of GhostBSD does not officially support XFCE. Community releases are maintained by the community and for the community. GhostBSD project will provide help to build and to host the community release. If anyone wants to have a particular desktop supported, it is up to the community. Sure I will help where I can, answer questions and guide new community members that contribute to community release. There is some effort going on for Plasma5 desktop. If anyone is interested in helping with XFCE and Plasma5 or in creating another community release, you are well come to contribute. Also, Contribution to the GhostBSD base system, to ports and new ports, and in house software are welcome. We are mostly active on Telegram https://t.me/ghostbsd, but you can also reach

An interview with Trenton Schulz about his early days with FreeBSD, Robot OS, Qt, and more. Interview - Trenton Schulz - [email protected] Robot OS on FreeBSD BR: Welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with BSD? AJ: You were working for Trolltech (creators of Qt). Was FreeBSD used there and how? BR: Can you tell us more about the work you are doing with Robot OS on FreeBSD? AJ: Was EuroBSDcon your first BSD conference? How did you like it? BR: Do you have some tips or advice on how to get started with the BSDs? AJ: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us before we let you go? Beastie Bits FreeBSD Miniconf at linux.conf.au 2020 Call for Sessions Now Open Portland BSD Pizza Night: Oct 24th, 19:00 @ Rudy’s Gourmet Pizza NYC*BUG Install Fest: Nov 6th 18:45 @ Suspenders FOSDEM 2020 - BSD Devroom Call for Participation University of Cambridge looking for Research Assistants/Associates Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag. Special Guest: Trenton Shulz.

Headlines FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook Back in 2015, I jumped on the ThinkPad bandwagon by getting an X240 to run FreeBSD on. Unlike most people in the ThinkPad crowd, I actually liked the clickpad and didn\u2019t use the trackpoint much. But this summer I\u2019ve decided that it was time for something newer. I wanted something.. lighter and thinner (ha, turns out this is actually important, I got tired of carrying a T H I C C laptop - Apple was right all along); with a 3:2 display (why is Lenovo making these Serious Work\u2122 laptops 16:9 in the first place?? 16:9 is awful in below-13-inch sizes especially); with a HiDPI display (and ideally with a good size for exact 2x scaling instead of fractional); with USB-C ports; without a dGPU, especially without an NVIDIA GPU; assembled with screws and not glue (I don\u2019t necessarily need expansion and stuff in a laptop all that much, but being able to replace the battery without dealing with a glued chassis is good); supported by FreeBSD of course (\u201csome development required\u201d is okay but I\u2019m not going to write big drivers); how about something with open source firmware, that would be fun. I was considering a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from an old generation - the one from the same year as the X230 is corebootable, so that\u2019s fun. But going back in processor generations just doesn\u2019t feel great. I want something more efficient, not less! And then I discovered the Pixelbook. Other than the big huge large bezels around the screen, I liked everything about it. Thin aluminum design, a 3:2 HiDPI screen, rubber palm rests (why isn\u2019t every laptop ever doing that?!), the \u201cconvertibleness\u201d (flip the screen around to turn it into.. something rather big for a tablet, but it is useful actually), a Wacom touchscreen that supports a pen, mostly reasonable hardware (Intel Wi-Fi), and that famous coreboot support (Chromebooks\u2019 stock firmware is coreboot + depthcharge). So here it is, my new laptop, a Google Pixelbook. Conclusion Pixelbook, FreeBSD, coreboot, EDK2 good. Seriously, I have no big words to say, other than just recommending this laptop to FOSS enthusiasts :) Porting NetBSD to the AMD x86-64: a case study in OS portability Abstract NetBSD is known as a very portable operating system, currently running on 44 different architectures (12 different types of CPU). This paper takes a look at what has been done to make it portable, and how this has decreased the amount of effort needed to port NetBSD to a new architecture. The new AMD x86-64 architecture, of which the specifications were published at the end of 2000, with hardware to follow in 2002, is used as an example. Portability Supporting multiple platforms was a primary goal of the NetBSD project from the start. As NetBSD was ported to more and more platforms, the NetBSD kernel code was adapted to become more portable along the way. General Generally, code is shared between ports as much as possible. In NetBSD, it should always be considered if the code can be assumed to be useful on other architectures, present or future. If so, it is machine-independent and put it in an appropriate place in the source tree. When writing code that is intended to be machine-independent, and it contains conditional preprocessor statements depending on the architecture, then the code is likely wrong, or an extra abstraction layer is needed to get rid of these statements. Types Assumptions about the size of any type are not made. Assumptions made about type sizes on 32-bit platforms were a large problem when 64-bit platforms came around. Most of the problems of this kind had to be dealt with when NetBSD was ported to the DEC Alpha in 1994. A variation on this problem had to be dealt with with the UltraSPARC (sparc64) port in 1998, which is 64-bit, but big endian (vs. the little-endianness of the Alpha). When interacting with datastructures of a fixed size, such as on-disk metadata for filesystems, or datastructures directly interpreted by device hardware, explicitly sized types are used, such as uint32_t, int8_t, etc. Conclusions and future work The port of NetBSD to AMD's x86-64 architecture was done in six weeks, which confirms NetBSD's reputation as being a very portable operating system. One week was spent setting up the cross-toolchain and reading the x86-64 specifications, three weeks were spent writing the kernel code, one week was spent writing the userspace code, and one week testing and debugging it all. No problems were observed in any of the machine-independent parts of the kernel during test runs; all (simulated) device drivers, file systems, etc, worked without modification. News Roundup ZFS performance really does degrade as you approach quota limits Every so often (currently monthly), there is an "OpenZFS leadership meeting". What this really means is 'lead developers from the various ZFS

Causing ZFS corruption for fun, NetBSD Assembly Programming Tutorial, The IKEA Lack Rack for Servers, a new OmniOS Community Edition LTS has been published, List Block Devices on FreeBSD lsblk(8) Style, Project Trident 19.10 available, and more. Headlines Causing ZFS corruption for fun and profit Datto backs up data, a lot of it. At the time of writing Datto has over 500 PB of data stored on ZFS. This count includes both backup appliances that are sent to customer sites, as well as cloud storage servers that are used for secondary and tertiary backup of those appliances. At this scale drive swaps are a daily occurrence, and data corruption is inevitable. How we handle this corruption when it happens determines whether we truly lose data, or successfully restore from secondary backup. In this post we'll be showing you how at Datto we intentionally cause corruption in our testing environments, to ensure we're building software that can properly handle these scenarios. Causing Corruption Since this is a mirror setup, a naive solution to cause corruption would be to randomly dd the same sectors of both /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. This works, but is equally likely to just overwrite random unused space, or take down the zpool entirely. What we really want is to corrupt a specific snapshot, or even a specific file in that snapshot, to simulate a more realistic minor corruption event. Luckily we have a tool called zdb that lets us view some low level information about datasets. Conclusion At the 500 PB scale, it's not a matter of if data corruption will happen but when. Intentionally causing corruption is one of the strategies we use to ensure we're building software that can handle these rare (but inevitable) events. To others out there using ZFS: I'm curious to hear how you've solved this problem. We did quite a bit of experimentation with zinject before going with this more brute force method. So I'd be especially interested if you've had luck simply simulating corruption with zinject. NetBSD Assembly Programming Tutorial A sparc64 version is also being prepared and will be added when done This post describes how to write a simple hello world program in pure assembly on NetBSD/amd64. We will not use (nor link against) libc, nor use gcc to compile it. I will be using GNU as (gas), and therefore the AT&T syntax instead of Intel. Why assembly? Why not? Because it's fun to program in assembly directly. Contrary to a popular belief assembly programs aren't always faster than what optimizing compilers produce. Nevertheless it's good to be able to read assembly, especially when debugging C programs Due to the nature of the guide, visit the site for the complete breakdown News Roundup The IKEA Lack Rack for Servers The LackRack First occurrence on eth0:2010 Winterlan, the LackRack is the ultimate, low-cost, high shininess solution for your modular datacenter-in-the-living-room. Featuring the LACK (side table) from Ikea, the LackRack is an easy-to-implement, exact-fit datacenter building block. It's a little known fact that we have seen Google engineers tinker with Lack tables since way back in 2009. The LackRack will certainly make its appearance again this summer at eth0:2010 Summer. Summary When temporarily not in use, multiple LackRacks can be stacked in a space-efficient way without disassembly, unlike competing 19" server racks. The LackRack was first seen on eth0:2010 Winterlan in the no-shoe Lounge area. Its low-cost and perfect fit are great for mounting up to 8 U of 19" hardware, such as switches (see below), or perhaps other 19" gear. It's very easy to assemble, and thanks to the design, they are stable enough to hold (for example) 19" switches and you can put your bottle of Club-Mate on top! Multi-shiny LackRack can also be painted to your specific preferences and the airflow is unprecedented! Howto You can find a howto on buying a LackRack on this page. This includes the proof that a 19" switch can indeed be placed in the LackRack in its natural habitat! OmniOS Community Edition r151030 LTS - Published at May 6, 2019 The OmniOS Community Edition Association is proud to announce the general availability of OmniOS - r151030. OmniOS is published according to a 6-month release cycle, r151030 LTS takes over from r151028, published in November 2018; and since it is a LTS release it also takes over from r151022. The r151030 LTS release will be supported for 3 Years. It is the first LTS release published by the OmniOS CE Association since taking over the reins from OmniTI in 2017. The next LTS release is scheduled for May 2021. The old stable r151026 release is now end-of-life. See the release schedule for further details. This is only a small selection of the new features, and bug fixes in the new release; review the release notes for full details. If you upgrade from r22 and want to see all new features added since then, make sure to also

DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Linux benchmark on Ryzen 7, JFK Presidential Library chooses TrueNAS for digital archives, FreeBSD 12.1-beta is available, cool but obscure X11 tools, vBSDcon trip report, Project Trident 12-U7 is available, a couple new Unix artifacts, and more. Headlines DragonFlyBSD 5.6 vs. FreeBSD 12 vs. Linux - Ryzen 7 3700X For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04. Back in July I looked at FreeBSD 12 on the Ryzen 9 3900X but at that time at least DragonFlyBSD had troubles booting on that system. When trying out the Ryzen 7 3700X + MSI GODLIKE X570 motherboard on the latest BIOS, everything "just worked" without any compatibility issues for either of these BSDs. We've been eager to see how well DragonFlyBSD is performing on these new AMD Zen 2 CPUs with DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon having publicly expressed being impressed by the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. For comparison to those BSDs, Ubuntu 19.04 and openSUSE Tumbleweed were tested on the same hardware in their out-of-the-box configurations. While Clear Linux is normally the fastest, on this system Clear's power management defaults had caused issues in being unable to detect the Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD used for testing and so we left it out this round. All of the hardware was the same throughout testing as were the BIOS settings and running the Ryzen 7 3700X at stock speeds. (Any differences in the reported hardware for the system table just come down to differences in what is exposed by each OS for reporting.) All of the BSD/Linux benchmarks on this eight core / sixteen thread processor were run via the Phoronix Test Suite. In the case of FreeBSD 12.0, we benchmarked both with its default LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler as well as with GCC 9.1 so that it would match the GCC compiler being the default on the other operating systems under test. JFK Presidential Library Chooses iXsystems TrueNAS to Preserve Precious Digital Archives iXsystems is honored to have the TrueNAS® M-Series unified storage selected to store, serve, and protect the entire digital archive for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. This is in support of the collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (JFK Library). Over the next several years, the Foundation hopes to grow the digital collection from hundreds of terabytes today to cover much more of the Archives at the Kennedy Library. Overall there is a total of 25 million documents, audio recordings, photos, and videos once the project is complete. Having first deployed the TrueNAS M50-HA earlier in 2019, the JFK Library has now completed the migration of its existing digital collection and is now in the process of digitizing much of the rest of its vast collection. Not only is the catalog of material vast, it is also diverse, with files being copied to the storage system from a variety of sources in numerous file types. To achieve this ambitious goal, the library required a high-end NAS system capable of sharing with a variety of systems throughout the digitization process. The digital archive will be served from the TrueNAS M50 and made available to both in-person and online visitors. With precious material and information comes robust demands. The highly-available TrueNAS M-Series has multiple layers of protection to help keep data safe, including data scrubs, checksums, unlimited snapshots, replication, and more. TrueNAS is also inherently scalable with data shares only limited by the number of drives connected to the pool. Perfect for archival storage, the deployed TrueNAS M50 will grow with the library’s content, easily expanding its storage capacity over time as needed. Supporting a variety of protocols, multi-petabyte scalability in a single share, and anytime, uninterrupted capacity expansion, the TrueNAS M-Series ticked all the right boxes. Youtube Video News Roundup FreeBSD 12.1-beta available FreeBSD 12.0 is already approaching one year old while FreeBSD 12.1 is now on the way as the next installment with various bug/security fixes and other alterations to this BSD operating system. FreeBSD 12.1 has many security/bug fixes throughout, no longer enables "-Werror" by default as a compiler flag (Update: This change is just for the GCC 4.2 compiler), has imported BearSSL into the FreeBSD base system as a lightweight TLS/SSL implementation, bzip2recover has been added, and a variety of mostly lower-level changes. More details can be found via the in-progress release notes. For those with time to test this weekend, FreeBSD 12.1 Beta 1 is available for all prominent architectures

Setting up buildbot in FreeBSD jails, Set up a mail server with OpenSMTPD, Dovecot and Rspamd, OpenBSD amateur packet radio with HamBSD, DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 gets fsck, return of startx for users. Headlines EuroBSDcon 2019 Recap We’re back from EuroBSDcon in Lillehammer, Norway. It was a great conference with 212 people attending. 2 days of tutorials, parallel to the FreeBSD Devsummit, followed by two days of talks. Some speakers uploaded their slides to papers.freebsd.org already with more to come. The social event was also interesting. We visited an open air museum with building preserved from different time periods. In the older section they had a collection of farm buildings, a church originally built in the 1200s and relocated to the museum, and a school house. In the more modern area, they had houses from 1915, and each decade from 1930 to 1990, plus a “house of the future” as imagined in 2001. Many had open doors to allow you to tour the inside, and some were even “inhabited”. The latter fact gave a much more interactive experience and we could learn additional things about the history of that particular house. The town at the end included a general store, a post office, and more. Then, we all had a nice dinner together in the museum’s restaurant. The opening keynote by Patricia Aas was very good. Her talk on embedded ethics, from her perspective as someone trying to defend the sanctity of Norwegian elections, and a former developer for the Opera web browser, provided a great deal of insight into the issues. Her points about how the tech community has unleashed a very complex digital work upon people with barely any technical literacy were well taken. Her stories of trying to explain the problems with involving computers in the election process to journalists and politicians struck a chord with many of us, who have had to deal with legislation written by those who do not truly understand the issues with technology. Setting up buildbot in FreeBSD jails In this article, I would like to present a tutorial to set up buildbot, a continuous integration (CI) software (like Jenkins, drone, etc.), making use of FreeBSD’s containerization mechanism "jails". We will cover terminology, rationale for using both buildbot and jails together, and installation steps. At the end, you will have a working buildbot instance using its sample build configuration, ready to play around with your own CI plans (or even CD, it’s very flexible!). Some hints for production-grade installations are given, but the tutorial steps are meant for a test environment (namely a virtual machine). Buildbot’s configuration and detailed concepts are not in scope here. Setting up a mail server with OpenSMTPD, Dovecot and Rspamd Self-hosting and encouraging smaller providers is for the greater good First of all, I was not clear enough about the political consequences of centralizing mail services at Big Mailer Corps. It doesn’t make sense for Random Joe, sharing kitten pictures with his family and friends, to build a personal mail infrastructure when multiple Big Mailer Corps offer “for free” an amazing quality of service. They provide him with an e-mail address that is immediately available and which will generally work reliably. It really doesn’t make sense for Random Joe not to go there, and particularly if even techies go there without hesitation, proving it is a sound choice. There is nothing wrong with Random Joes using a service that works. What is terribly wrong though is the centralization of a communication protocol in the hands of a few commercial companies, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM coming from the same country (currently led by a lunatic who abuses power and probably suffers from NPD), EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM having been in the news and/or in a court for random/assorted “unpleasant” behaviors (privacy abuses, eavesdropping, monopoly abuse, sexual or professional harassment, you just name it…), and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM growing user bases that far exceeds the total population of multiple countries combined. News Roundup The HamBSD project aims to bring amateur packet radio to OpenBSD The HamBSD project aims to bring amateur packet radio to OpenBSD, including support for TCP/IP over AX.25 and APRS tracking/digipeating in the base system. HamBSD will not provide a full AX.25 stack but instead only implement support for UI frames. There will be a focus on simplicity, security and readable code. The amateur radio community needs a reliable platform for packet radio for use in both leisure and emergency scenarios. It should be expected that the system is stable and resilient (but as yet it is neither). DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 Gets Basic FSCK Support HAMMER2 is Copy on Write, meaning changes are made to copies of existing data. This means operations are generally atomic and can survive a power outage, etc. (You should read up on it!) However, there’s now a fsck command, useful if you want a report of data validity rat

NetBSD LLVM sanitizers and GDB regression test suite, Ada—The Language of Cost Savings, Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD, FreeBSD core team appoints a WG to explore transition to Git, OpenBSD 6.6 Beta tagged, Project Trident 12-U5 update now available, and more. Headlines LLVM santizers and GDB regression test suite. As NetBSD-9 is branched, I have been asked to finish the LLVM sanitizer integration. This work is now accomplished and with MKLLVM=yes build option (by default off), the distribution will be populated with LLVM files for ASan, TSan, MSan, UBSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack and XRay. I have also transplanted basesystem GDB patched to my GDB repository and managed to run the GDB regression test-suite. NetBSD distribution changes I have enhanced and imported my local MKSANITIZER code that makes whole distribution sanitization possible. Few real bugs were fixed and a number of patches were newly written to reflect the current NetBSD sources state. I have also merged another chunk of the fruits of the GSoC-2018 project with fuzzing the userland (by plusun@). The following changes were committed to the sources: ab7de18d0283 Cherry-pick upstream compiler-rt patches for LLVM sanitizers 966c62a34e30 Add LLVM sanitizers in the MKLLVM=yes build 8367b667adb9 telnetd: Stop defining the same variables concurrently in bss and data fe72740f64bf fsck: Stop defining the same variable concurrently in bss and data 40e89e890d66 Fix build of t_ubsan/t_ubsanxx under MKSANITIZER b71326fd7b67 Avoid symbol clashes in tests/usr.bin/id under MKSANITIZER c581f2e39fa5 Avoid symbol clashes in fs/nfs/nfsservice under MKSANITIZER 030a4686a3c6 Avoid symbol clashes in bin/df under MKSANITIZER fd9679f6e8b1 Avoid symbol clashes in usr.sbin/ypserv/ypserv under MKSANITIZER 5df2d7939ce3 Stop defining _rpcsvcdirty in bss and data 5fafbe8b8f64 Add missing extern declaration of ib_mach_emips in installboot d134584be69a Add SANITIZER_RENAME_CLASSES in bsd.prog.mk 2d00d9b08eae Adapt tests/kernel/t_subr_prf for MKSANITIZER ce54363fe452 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for GCC 7 7bd5ee95e9a0 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for LLVM 7 d8671fba7a78 Set NODEBUG for LLVM sanitizers 242cd44890a2 Add PAXCTL_FLAG rules for MKSANITIZER 5e80ab99d9ce Avoid symbol clashes in test/rump/modautoload/t_modautoload with sanitizers e7ce7ecd9c2a sysctl: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers 231aea846aba traceroute: Add indirection of symbol to remove clash with sanitizers 8d85053f487c sockstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers 81b333ab151a netstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers a472baefefe8 Correct the memset(3)'s third argument in i386 biosdisk.c 7e4e92115bc3 Add ATF c and c++ tests for TSan, MSan, libFuzzer 921ddc9bc97c Set NOSANITIZER in i386 ramdisk image 64361771c78d Enhance MKSANITIZER support 3b5608f80a2b Define target_not_supported_body() in TSan, MSan and libFuzzer tests c27f4619d513 Avoids signedness bit shift in db_get_value() 680c5b3cc24f Fix LLVM sanitizer build by GCC (HAVE_LLVM=no) 4ecfbbba2f2a Rework the LLVM compiler_rt build rules 748813da5547 Correct the build rules of LLVM sanitizers 20e223156dee Enhance the support of LLVM sanitizers 0bb38eb2f20d Register syms.extra in LLVM sanitizer .syms files Almost all of the mentioned commits were backported to NetBSD-9 and will land 9.0. Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD Inspired by lutris (a Linux gaming platform), we would like to provide a game launcher to play windows games on FreeBSD. Makes it easier to run games on FreeBSD, by providing the tweaks and dependencies for you Dependencies curl bash p7zip zenity webfonts alsa-utils (Optional) winetricks vulkan-tools mesa-demos i386-wine-devel on amd64 or wine-devel on i386 News Roundup Ada—The Language of Cost Savings? Many myths surround the Ada programming language, but it continues to be used and evolve at the same time. And while the increased adoption of Ada and SPARK, its provable subset, is slow, it’s noticeable. Ada already addresses more of the features found in found in heavily used embedded languages like C+ and C#. It also tackles problems addressed by upcoming languages like Rust. Chris concludes, “Development technologies have a profound impact on one of the largest and most variable costs associated with embedded-system engineering—labor. At a time when on-time system deployment can not only impact customer satisfaction, but access to services revenue streams, engineering team efficiency is at a premium. Our research showed that programming language choices can have significant influence in this area, leading to shorter projects, better schedules and, ultimately, lower development costs. While a variety of factors can influence and dictate language choice, our research showed that Ada’s evolution has made it an increasingly compelling option for engineering organizations, providing both technically and financially sound solutio

vBSDcon 2019 recap, Unix at 50, OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook, humungus - an hg server, how to configure a network dump in FreeBSD, and more. Headlines vBSDcon Recap Allan and Benedict attended vBSDcon 2019, which ended last week. It was held again at the Hyatt Regency Reston and the main conference was organized by Dan Langille of BSDCan fame.The two day conference was preceded by a one day FreeBSD hackathon, where FreeBSD developers had the chance to work on patches and PRs. In the evening, a reception was held to welcome attendees and give them a chance to chat and get to know each other over food and drinks. The first day of the conference was opened with a Keynote by Paul Vixie about DNS over HTTPS (DoH). He explained how we got to the current state and what challenges (technical and social) this entails. If you missed this talk and are dying to see it, it will also be presented at EuroBSDCon next week John Baldwin followed up by giving an overview of the work on “In-Kernel TLS Framing and Encryption for FreeBSD” abstract and the recent commit we covered in episode 313. Meanwhile, Brian Callahan was giving a separate session in another room about “Learning to (Open)BSD through its porting system: an attendee-driven educational session” where people had the chance to learn about how to create ports for the BSDs. David Fullard’s talk about “Transitioning from FreeNAS to FreeBSD” was his first talk at a BSD conference and described how he built his own home NAS setup trying to replicate FreeNAS’ functionality on FreeBSD, and why he transitioned from using an appliance to using vanilla FreeBSD. Shawn Webb followed with his overview talk about the “State of the Hardened Union”. Benedict’s talk about “Replacing an Oracle Server with FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and PostgreSQL” was well received as people are interested in how we liberated ourselves from the clutches of Oracle without compromising functionality. Entertaining and educational at the same time, Michael W. Lucas talk about “Twenty Years in Jail: FreeBSD Jails, Then and Now” closed the first day. Lucas also had a table in the hallway with his various tech and non-tech books for sale. People formed small groups and went into town for dinner. Some returned later that night to some work in the hacker lounge or talk amongst fellow BSD enthusiasts. Colin Percival was the keynote speaker for the second day and had an in-depth look at “23 years of software side channel attacks”. Allan reprised his “ELI5: ZFS Caching” talk explaining how the ZFS adaptive replacement cache (ARC) work and how it can be tuned for various workloads. “By the numbers: ZFS Performance Results from Six Operating Systems and Their Derivatives” by Michael Dexter followed with his approach to benchmarking OpenZFS on various platforms. Conor Beh was also a new speaker to vBSDcon. His talk was about “FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS”. Two OpenBSD talks closed the talk session: Kurt Mosiejczuk with “Care and Feeding of OpenBSD Porters” and Aaron Poffenberger with “Road Warrior Disaster Recovery: Secure, Synchronized, and Backed-up”. A dinner and reception was enjoyed by the attendees and gave more time to discuss the talks given and other things until late at night. We want to thank the vBSDcon organizers and especially Dan Langille for running such a great conference. We are grateful to Verisign as the main sponsor and The FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the tote bags. Thanks to all the speakers and attendees! humungus - an hg server Features View changes, files, changesets, etc. Some syntax highlighting. Read only. Serves multiple repositories. Allows cloning via the obvious URL. Supports go get. Serves files for downloads. Online documentation via mandoc. Terminal based admin interface. News Roundup OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook 14″ v2. The InfinityBook 14” v2 is a fanless 14” notebook. It is an excellent choice for running OpenBSD - but order it with the supported wireless card (see below.). I’ve set it up in a dual-boot configuration so that I can switch between Linux and OpenBSD - mainly to spot differences in the drivers. TUXEDO allows a variety of configurations through their webshop. The dual boot setup with grub2 and EFI boot will be covered in a separate blogpost. My tests were done with OpenBSD-current - which is as of writing flagged as 6.6-beta. See Article for breakdown of CPU, Wireless, Video, Webcam, Audio, ACPI, Battery, Touchpad, and MicroSD Card Reader Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans like Bell Labs, GE, and MIT. Largely the brainchild of a few programmers at Bell Labs, the unlikely story of Unix begins with a meeting on t

Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space, Dsynth details on Dragonfly, Instant Workstation on FreeBSD, new servers new tech, Experimenting with streaming setups on NetBSD, NetBSD’s progress towards Steam support thanks to GSoC, and more. Headlines What has to happen with Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space Recently, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list about a Linux problem under memory pressure (via, and threaded here). The specific reproduction instructions involved having low RAM, turning off swap space, and then putting the system under load, and when that happened (emphasis mine): Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). [...] I'm afraid I have bad news for the people snickering at Linux here; if you're running without swap space, you can probably get any Unix to behave this way under memory pressure. If you can't on your particular Unix, I'd actually say that your Unix is probably not letting you get full use out of your RAM. To simplify a bit, we can divide pages of user memory up into anonymous pages and file-backed pages. File-backed pages are what they sound like; they come from some specific file on the filesystem that they can be written out to (if they're dirty) or read back in from. Anonymous pages are not backed by a file, so the only place they can be written out to and read back in from is swap space. Anonymous pages mostly come from dynamic memory allocations and from modifying the program's global variables and data; file backed pages come mostly from mapping files into memory with mmap() and also, crucially, from the code and read-only data of the program. See link for the rest of the article Dsynth details on Dragonfly First, history: DragonFly has had binaries of dports available for download for quite some time. These were originally built using poudriere, and then using the synth tool put together by John Marino. Synth worked both to build all software in dports, and as a way to test DragonFly’s SMP capability under extreme load. Matthew Dillon is working on a new version, called dsynth. It is available now but not yet part of the build. He’s been working quickly on it and there’s plenty more commits than what I have linked here. It’s already led to finding more high-load fixes. dsynth DSynth is basically synth written in C, from scratch. It is designed to give us a bulk builder in base and be friendly to porting and jails down the line (for now its uses chroot's). The original synth was written by John R. Marino and its basic flow was used in writing this program, but as it was written in ada no code was directly copied. The intent is to make dsynth compatible with synth's configuration files and directory structure. This is a work in progress and not yet ready for prime-time. Pushing so we can get some more eyeballs. Most of the directives do not yet work (everything, and build works, and 'cleanup' can be used to clean up any dangling mounts). dsynth code News Roundup Instant Workstation Some considerable time ago I wrote up instructions on how to set up a FreeBSD machine with the latest KDE Plasma Desktop. Those instructions, while fairly short (set up X, install the KDE meta-port, .. and that’s it) are a bit fiddly. So – prompted slightly by a Twitter exchange recently – I’ve started a mini-sub-project to script the installation of a desktop environment and the bits needed to support it. To give it at least a modicum of UI, dialog(1) is used to ask for an environment to install and a display manager. The tricky bits – pointed out to me after I started – are hardware support, although a best-effort is better than having nothing, I think. In any case, in a VBox host it’s now down to running a single script and picking Plasma and SDDM to get a usable system for me. Other combinations have not been tested, nor has system-hardware-setup. I’ll probably maintain it for a while and if I have time and energy it’ll be tried with nVidia (those work quite well on FreeBSD) and AMD (not so much, in my experience) graphics cards when I shuffle some machines around. Here is the script in my GitHub repository with notes-for-myself. New Servers, new Tech Following up on an earlier post, the new servers for DragonFly are in place. The old 40-core machine used for bulk build, monster, is being retired. The power efficiency of the new machines is startling. Incidentally, this is where donations go – infrastructure. New servers in the colo, monster is being retired We have three new servers in the colo now that will be taking most/all bulk package building duties from monster and the two blades (muscles and pkgbox64) that previously did the work. Monster will be retired. The new servers are a dual-socket Xeon (sting)

OpenBSD on 7th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon, how to install FreeBSD on a MacBook, Kernel portion of in-kernel TLS (KTLS), Boot Environments on DragonflyBSD, Project Trident Updates, vBSDcon schedule, and more. Headlines OpenBSD on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen Another year, another ThinkPad X1 Carbon, this time with a Dolby Atmos sound system and a smaller battery. The seventh generation X1 Carbon isn't much different than the fifth and sixth generations. I opted for the non-vPro Core i5-8265U, 16Gb of RAM, a 512Gb NVMe SSD, and a matte non-touch WQHD display at ~300 nits. A brighter 500-nit 4k display is available, though early reports indicated it severely impacts battery life. Gone are the microSD card slot on the back and 1mm of overall thickness (from 15.95mm to 14.95mm), but also 6Whr of battery (down to 51Whr) and a little bit of travel in the keyboard and TrackPoint buttons. I still very much like the feel of both of them, so kudos to Lenovo for not going too far down the Apple route of sacrificing performance and usability just for a thinner profile. On my fifth generation X1 Carbon, I used a vinyl plotter to cut out stickers to cover the webcam, "X1 Carbon" branding from the bottom of the display, the power button LED, and the "ThinkPad" branding from the lower part of the keyboard deck. See link for the rest of the article How To Install FreeBSD On A MacBook 1,1 or 2,1 FreeBSD Setup For MacBook 1,1 and 2,1 FreeBSD with some additional setup can be installed on a MacBook 1,1 or 2,1. This article covers how to do so with FreeBSD 10-12. Installing FreeBSD can be installed as the only OS on your MacBook if desired. What you should have is: A Mac OS X 10.4.6-10.7.5 installer. Unofficial versions modified for these MacBooks such as 10.8 also work. A blank CD or DVD to burn the FreeBSD image to. Discs simply work best with these older MacBooks. An ISO file of FreeBSD for x86. The AMD64 ISO does not boot due to the 32 bit EFI of these MacBooks. Burn the ISO file to the blank CD or DVD. Once done, make sure it's in your MacBook and then power off the MacBook. Turn it on, and hold down the c key until the FreeBSD disc boots. See link for the rest of the guide News Roundup Patch for review: Kernel portion of in-kernel TLS (KTLS) One of the projects I have been working on for the past several months in conjunction with several other folks is upstreaming work from Netflix to handle some aspects of Transport Layer Security (TLS) in the kernel. In particular, this lets a web server use sendfile() to send static content on HTTPS connections. There is a lot more detail in the review itself, so I will spare pasting a big wall of text here. However, I have posted the patch to add the kernel-side of KTLS for review at the URL below. KTLS also requires other patches to OpenSSL and nginx, but this review is only for the kernel bits. Patches and reviews for the other bits will follow later. https://reviews.freebsd.org/D21277 DragonFly Boot Enviroments This is a tool inspired by the beadm utility for FreeBSD/Illumos systems that creates and manages ZFS boot environments. This utility in contrast is written from the ground up in C, this should provide better performance, integration, and extensibility than the POSIX sh and awk script it was inspired by. During the time this project has been worked on, beadm has been superseded by bectl on FreeBSD. After hammering out some of the outstanding internal logic issues, I might look at providing a similar interface to the command as bectl. See link for the rest of the details Project Trident Updates 19.08 Available This is a general package update to the CURRENT release repository based upon TrueOS 19.08. Legacy boot ISO functional again This update includes the FreeBSD fixes for the “vesa” graphics driver for legacy-boot systems. The system can once again be installed on legacy-boot systems. PACKAGE CHANGES FROM 19.07-U1 New Packages: 154 Deleted Packages: 394 Updated Packages: 4926 12-U3 Available This is the third general package update to the STABLE release repository based upon TrueOS 12-Stable. PACKAGE CHANGES FROM STABLE 12-U2 New Packages: 105 Deleted Packages: 386 Updated Packages: 1046 vBSDcon vBSDcon 2019 will return to the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA on September 5-7 2019. *** Beastie Bits The next NYCBUG meeting will be Sept 4 @ 18:45 Feedback/Questions Tom - Questions Michael - dfbeadm Bostjan - Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to [email protected] Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.