Created by three guys who love BSD, we cover the latest news and have an extensive series of tutorials, as well as interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community. It also serves as a platform for support and questions. We love and advocate FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and TrueOS. Our show aims to be helpful and informative for new users that want to learn about them, but still be entertaining for the people who are already pros. The show airs on Wednesdays at 2:00PM (US Eastern time) and the edited version is usually up the following day.
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130: Store all the Things | BSD Now 130
This week on BSDNow, Allan is back from the Storage Summit in Silicon Valley! We are going to get his thoughts on how the conference went, plus bring you the latest ZFS info discussed. That plus the usual BSD news is This episode was brought to you by Headlines OpenBSD website operators urged to fix mind-alteringly bad bug (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/21/openbsd_website_operator_patch_now_for_the_sake_of_your_sanity/?mt=1456206806399) We start off a bit light-hearted this week, with the important, breaking news that finally a long-standing OpenBSD bug has been addressed for the HTTP daemon. Specifically? It changes the default 404 page fonts away from Comic Sans, to a bit more crowd-pleasing alternative: “For some reason the httpd status pages (e.g. 404) use the Comic Sans typeface. This patch removes comic sans and sets the typeface to the default sans-serif typeface of the client. “This lowers the number of people contacting website maintainers with typeface complaints bordering on harassment”. Operators running HTTPD are highly encouraged to update their systems to the latest code, right now……... No seriously, we are waiting for you. Get it done now and then we’ll continue with the show. Registration for AsiaBSDCon 2016 is now open + Talk Schedule (https://2016.asiabsdcon.org/registration/?lang=en) After a few delays, the registration for AsiaBSDCon has now opened! The conference starts in less than two weeks! now, so be sure to get signed up ASAP. In addition the schedule has been posted, and here’s some of the highlights of this year’s conference. In addition to FreeBSD and NetBSD dev summits on the first two days, we have some excellent tutorials being given this year by Kirk, Gnn, Dru and more! (https://2016.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en) The regular paper talks also have lots of good ones this year, including this crazy encrypted boot loader one given by our very own Allan Jude! *** OPENBSD ON AWS : AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (http://blog.d2-si.fr/2016/02/15/openbsd-on-aws/?hn) We have a blog post from Antoine Jacoutot, talking about the process of getting OpenBSD up and running in AWS It starts with his process of creating an AMI from scratch, which ended up not being that bad: create and loopback-mount a raw image containing a UFS filesystem extract the OpenBSD base sets (which are just regular tarballs) and kernel enable console output (so that one could “aws ec2 get-console-output”) install the boot loader on the image then use the ec2 tools to import the RAW image to S3, convert it into a volume (ec2-import-volume) which we can snapshot (ec2-create-snapshot) and create an AMI from (ec2-register) The blog post also has a link to a script which automates this process, so don’t be daunted if you didn’t quite follow all of that. Thanks to the recently landed DomU support, the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place, allowing OpenBSD to function as a proper guest (with networking!) Next it details the process of injecting a public SSH key into the instances for instant remote access. An ec2-init.sh script was created (also on github) which does the following: setting the hostname installing the provided SSH public key to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys executing user-data (if it starts with a shebang) displaying the host SSH fingerprints on the console (to match cloud-init) With that done, OpenBSD is pretty much AWS ready! He then gives a brief walkthrough of setting up nginx for new users, but if you’ve already done this before then the instance is ready for you to hacking on. Start thinking of ideas for things with FreeBSD for Google's 2016 Summer of Code (https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas) Students and Developers, listen up! It’s time to start thinking about GSoC again, and FreeBSD is looking to update its project ideas page. There’s some good ones on the list, plus ones that should be pruned (such as GELI boot), but now is the time to start adding new ones before we get too deep into the process. This goes for the other BSD’s as well, start thinking about your proposals, or if you are developer, which projects would be a good fit for mentoring. (Improving the Linux Compat layer is one I think should be done!) Guide to getting started with kernel hacking (https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Getting%20started%20with%20kernel%20projects) One of the things that’s been asked frequently is how to contribute towards the efforts to bring updated DRM / X drivers to the FreeBSD kernel. Jean-Sébastien Pédron has started a great guide on the Wiki which details how to get started with the porting effort, and that developers need not be afraid of helping. *** Storage Summit Roundup Earlier this week a number of developers from FreeBSD, as well as various vendors that use FreeBSD, or provide products used with FreeBSD met for a Storage Summit (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201602StorageSummit), to discuss the future of these technologies The summit was co-located with the USENIX FAST (Filesystems And Storage Technologies) conference The summit was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation and FlightAware After a short introduction, the event opened with a Networking Synergy panel The focus of this panel was to see if there were techniques and lessons learned in improving the networking stack over the last 10 years that could be applied to improving the storage stack A lot of time was spent discussing issues like multi-queue support, CPU scheduling, and ways to modernize the stack CAM Scheduling & Locking Revamp (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201602StorageSummit/CAM) No notes posted User Space Storage Stack (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201602StorageSummit/UserSpace) One of the user space storage stacks discussed was Diskmap Like netmap, but for disks (diskmap) Kernel bypass for accessing disks Ilias Marinos, who is working on diskmap at Cambridge University, described diskmap to the group A design discussion then followed in which the memory management was covered as that's an issue for any sort of "IO" map system Action Items: Discuss with Luigi the idea of code merges Need a reset path API Kernel buffer mapping for reliability Support for other interfaces (SATA/SCSI) GEOM layer adaptation Adapting to New Storage Technologies (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201602StorageSummit/NewStorageTechnologies) This working group was led by Adrian Palmer, from Seagate SMR Persistent Memory Session 1: Device Identification and the structural requirements Agenda: We'll look over the Identification nuances and what needs to change to support the structure. Support for IO order guarantees, forward-write only requirements, new commands and topology. Dig into CAM and GEOM layers. Solutions should be fast and have as few code paths as possible Results: Small audience. We talked about zoned characteristics, and how it can be used in various workloads, projected to be implemented in years Session 2: Information dissemination and consumption Agenda: Where and how will information from the report_zones command be gathered, stored, combined and used. This will include userspace storage and multi-volume management. Will CAM store this data, or will GEOM? How frequently will this need to be queried/updated/verified from the drive? Results: Merged with ZFS working group to discuss SMR. Came up with idea that could be implemented as circular buffer zone type. Began to discuss solutions among developers ZFS (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201602StorageSummit/ZFS) During the first session we discussed how to improve dedup support + A dedup throttle or cap was discussed. When the size of the DDT grows beyond this size, new entries would not be deduped. An alternative to this was also discussed, where when the DDT reached the cap size, it would remove a random entry with only a single reference from the DDT to make room for the new entry. When a block is going to be freed, if it is not found in the DDT, it is assumed to have only 1 reference, and removed. There was also discussion of replacing the DDT with an in-memory hash table and a “log” of increment/decrement operations, that is periodically compacted. The hash table is recreated from the log at pool import time. This would reduce the in-memory footprint of the DDT, as well as speed up all write operations as adding an entry to the dedup log will be less expensive than updating the DDT. There was also discussion of using dedicated device(s) for the DDT, either using the DDT on SSD work by Nexenta, or the Metadata Classes work by Intel The first session also discussed Secure Delete and related things The desire for an implementation of TRIM that uses the “secure erase” functionality provided by some disks was expressed Overwriting sectors with patterns of garbage may be insufficient because SSDs may internally remap where a specific LBA physically resides The possibility of using something like the “eager zero” feature to periodically write zeros over all free blocks in the pool to erase any lingering data fragments Problems with the FreeBSD TRIM implementation were discussed, as well as looking at ways to implement the new ZFS TRIM implementation on FreeBSD ABD (ARC Buf Data) was discussed, a new design that lessens the requirement for contiguous memory. Only a small area of contiguous blocks is reserved at boot, and compressed ARC blocks are constructed of scatter-gather lists of individual pages The second session combined with the SMR group and talked about SMR support in ZFS Later in the second session ZFS Encryption was also discussed, mostly with a focus on what the use cases are The third session combined all of the groups for an overview of upcoming ZFS features including device removal and channel programs There was also a request for code review, for mostly finished projects like Persistent L2ARC, Writeback cache, and Large dnode support Hallway Track ZFS / VFS Interaction Adrian Palmer has been a FreeBSD hobbyist since FreeBSD 7, and I think I managed to convince him to start contributing *** News Roundup One Week with NetBSD 7.0: Back to Unix basics (http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2016/02/one-week-with-netbsd-70-back-to-unix.html) The author of this blog series is sending a week using NetBSD 7.0, following a previous series on Solaris 10 “This is actually familiar territory, as I've been using BSD variants almost exclusively since 2006. My recent SunOS explorations were triggered last summer by OpenBSD having choked on my current laptop's NVIDIA card, and from what I could see at the time, FreeBSD had the same problem, although I now know NVIDIA drivers exist for that system. The thing that keeps me from going all-in with FreeBSD 10.x, however, is the fact that Firefox crashes and leaves "core dump" messages in its wake, and I'm just not a Chrome kinda guy.” “For those with a catholic taste in Unix, NetBSD is a keg party at the Vatican. If you're an absolute Unix beginner, or have been living on Ubuntu-based Linux distros for too long, then you may feel stranded at first by NetBSD's sparseness. You'll find yourself staring into the abyss and seeing only a blinking cursor staring back. If you have the presence of mind to type startx, you'll be greeted by twm, a window manager offering little more than an xterm window with the same blinking cursor until you learn how to configure the .twmrc file to include whatever applications you want or need in the right-click menu.” “As for NetBSD itself, I can't think of any major productivity applications that can't be installed, and most multimedia stuff works fine.” Issues the author hopes to sort out in later posts: Audio playback (youtube videos in Firefox) Wireless Flash Digital Camera SD Card readability, video playback Audacity A “fancy” desktop like Gnome 2, KDE, or xfce In a follow-up post (http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2016/02/one-week-with-netbsd-70-libreoffice.html), the author got LibreOffice installed and sorted out the audio issues they were having In a later follow-up (http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2016/02/one-week-with-netbsd-70-mixed-review-of.html) XFCE is up and running as well *** ZFS is for Containers in Ubuntu 16.04 (http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-is-fs-for-containers-in-ubuntu-1604.html) As you may have heard, Ubuntu 16.04 will include ZFS -- baked directly into Ubuntu -- supported by Canonical “ZFS one of the most beloved features of Solaris, universally coveted by every Linux sysadmin with a Solaris background. To our delight, we're happy to make to OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system.” What does “supported by Canonical” mean? “You'll find zfs.ko automatically built and installed on your Ubuntu systems. No more DKMS-built modules” “The user space zfsutils-linux package will be included in Ubuntu Main, with security updates provided by Canonical” The article then provides a quick tutorial for setting up Linux Containers (LXC) backed by ZFS In the example, ZFS is backed by a file on the existing disk, not by a real disk, and with no redundancy However, the setup script seems to support using real block devices The Software Freedom Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) is expected to issue a statement detailing their opinion on the legalities and licensing issues of bundling ZFS with Linux. *** Polling is a Hack: Server Sent Events (EventSource) with gevent, Flask, nginx, and FreeBSD (http://hypatia.software/2016/01/29/polling-is-a-hack-server-sent-events-eventsource-with-gevent-flask-nginx-and-freebsd/) A tutorial on setting up ‘Server-Sent Events’, also know as EventSource in javascript, to notify website clients of new data, rather than having the javascript constantly poll for new data. The setup uses FreeBSD, nginx, gevent, Python, and the Flask framework The tutorial walks through setting a basic Python application using the Flask framework Then setting up the client side in Javascript Then for the server side setup, it covers installing and configuring nginx, and py-supervisor on FreeBSD The tutorial also includes links to additional resources and examples, including how to rate limit the Flash application *** Why FreeBSD? (http://www.aikchar.me/blog/why-freebsd.html) An excellent article written by Hamza Sheikh, discussing why FreeBSD is now his clear choice for learning UNIX. The article is pretty well written and lengthy, but has some great parts which we wanted to share with you: There were many rough edges in the Linux world and some of them exist even today. Choosing the right distribution (distro) for the task at hand is always the first and most difficult decision to make. While this is a strength of the Linux community it is also its weakness. This is exacerbated with the toxic infighting within the community in the last few years. A herd of voices believes it is their right to bring down a distro community because it is not like their distro of choice. Forking upstream projects has somehow become taboo. Hurling abuse in mailing lists is acceptable. Helping new users is limited to lambasting their distro of choice. Creating conspiracy theories over software decisions is the way to go. Copyleft zealots roam social media declaring non-copyleft free software heretic abominations. It all boils down to an ecosystem soured by the presence of maniacs who have the loudest voices and they seem to be everywhere you turn. Where is the engineering among all this noise? Btrfs - baking for a long time - is still nowhere near ZFS in stability or feature parity. systemd is an insatiable entity that feeds on every idea in sight and just devours indiscriminately. Wayland was promised years ago and its time has yet to arrive. Containers are represented by Docker that neither securely contains applications nor makes them easy to manage in production. Firewalling is dithering between firewalld, nftables, etc. SystemTap cannot match DTrace. In the same time span what do various BSDs offer? pf, CARP, ZFS, Hammer, OpenSSH, jails, pkgsrc, (software) ports, DTrace, hardware portability; just to name a few. Few would deny that BSDs have delivered great engineering with free software licenses to the entire world. To me they appear to be better flag bearers of free software with engineering to back it. He then goes through some of the various BSD’s and the specifics on why FreeBSD was the logical choice for his situation. But at the end has a great summary on the community as a whole: Finally - and maybe repeating myself here - I have nothing but praise for the community. Be it BSD Now, mailing lists, Reddit, Twitter, LFNW, or SeaGL, people have encouraged me, answered my questions, and filed bugs for me. I have been welcomed and made a part of the community with open arms. These reasons are (good) enough for me to use FreeBSD and contribute to it. BeastieBits OPNsense 16.1.3 released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-16-1-3-released/) Copies of "FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems" seen in the wild (https://twitter.com/Savagedlight/status/700001944547491842) pfsense training available in Europe (http://www.netgate.com/training/) LiteBSD now has 50 ports in its ports tree (https://github.com/ibara/LiteBSD-Ports) Ports tree locked for OpenBSD 5.9 (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=145615281431064&w=2) “FreeBSD Filesystem Fun” at March semibug (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2556) Event #46 — Embedded Platforms (BSD, OpenWRT, Plan 9 & Inferno) (http://oshug.org/event/46) Feedback/Questions Frank - ZFS RAM? (http://slexy.org/view/s21lcCKrSB) David - ARM Porting (http://slexy.org/view/s204lxjvlq) Johnny - Lumina Default? (http://slexy.org/view/s2xMiSNLYn) Adam - PC-BSD Install and Q’s (http://slexy.org/view/s214gJbLwD) Jeremy - Video Card Q (http://slexy.org/view/s20UNyzEeh) ***
129: Synthesize all the Things!
Coming up this week, we will be talking to John Marino about his work on the ports-mgmt utility “Synth” and the cross-pollination between DragonFly and FreeBSD. That plus the latest news and your email here on This episode was brought to you by Headlines glibc and the BSDs (https://blog.des.no/2016/02/freebsd-and-cve-2015-7547/) You have likely already heard about CVE-2015-7547 (https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2015-7547) “A stack-based buffer overflow was found in the way the libresolv library performed dual A/AAAA DNS queries. A remote attacker could create a specially crafted DNS response which could cause libresolv to crash or, potentially, execute code with the permissions of the user running the library.” “Note: this issue is only exposed when libresolv is called from the nss_dns NSS service module.” More details from Google’s Online Security team blog (https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.ca/2016/02/cve-2015-7547-glibc-getaddrinfo-stack.html) “Naturally, people have started asking whether FreeBSD is affected. The FreeBSD Security Officer has not yet released an official statement, but in the meantime, here is a brief look at the issue as far as FreeBSD is concerned.” “First of all: neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected. While the resolver in FreeBSD’s libc and GNU libc share a common parentage, the bug was introduced when the latter was rewritten to send A and AAAA queries in parallel rather than sequentially when the application requests both.” The same most likely applies to the other BSDs “However, Linux applications running under emulation on a FreeBSD system use the GNU libc and are therefore vulnerable unless patched.” A patch to update emulation/linux_base-c6 has been prepared and should be committed soon Running ‘pkg audit’ will list any known vulnerable packages installed on your system “The issue can be mitigated by only using resolvers you trust, and configuring them to avoid sending responses which can trigger the bug.” “If you already have your own resolvers, you can configure them to avoid sending UDP responses larger than 2048 bytes. If the response does not fit in 2048 bytes, the server will send a truncated response, and the client should retry using TCP. While a similar bug exists in the code path for TCP requests, I believe that it can only be exploited by a malicious resolver, and interposing your own resolver will protect affected Linux systems and applications.” Dag-Erling’s blog post also includes instructions and configuration examples for locking down your resolver, or setting up your own resolver if you don’t have one already *** OpenBSD Foundation - 2016 Fundraising Campaign (http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2016.html) The OpenBSD foundation has announced their 2016 fundraising campaign, and set the goal of raising $250k for the year. While they mention that fundraising for 2015 didn’t hit 2014’s blockbuster numbers, it still exceeded the goal set, with an almost equal mix of corporate and community donors. ‘Our goal for 2016 is to increase the amount of support we offer for development, without compromising our regular support for the projects. We would like to: Plan and support more developer events (hackathons), and allow for more developers to attend these events. Continue to improve the project infrastructure. Fund more dedicated developer time for targeted development of specific projects.‘ To give you an idea of how much OpenBSD technology is used around the world, they broke it down this way: If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal. Getting Started with ION-DTN 3.4.0 on FreeBSD (https://sgeos.github.io/freebsd/ion/dtn/2016/02/07/getting-started-with-ion-dtn-3-4-0-on-freebsd.html) “The Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) software distribution is an implementation of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture as described in Internet RFC 4838, suitable for use in spacecraft” This tutorial covers setting up ION 3.4.0 on FreeBSD The tutorial starts by downloading the ION software, and installing the relevant build tools The instructions allow ION to be installed system-wide, or for a specific user The each host is configured Then pings are traded between the hosts to ensure everything works Then a web page is served over the interplanetary network Sadly I don’t have any hosts on other planets to test with. The tutorial also includes a troubleshooting guide *** Open Storage Issue – New BSD Mag is Out! (https://bsdmag.org/download/open_storage/) The next issue of BSDMag (The Open Storage Issue) just landed which features an interview with Matt Olander of iXsystems. During the interview, Matt talks about the culture of support for open-source down at iX, not only FreeNAS and PC-BSD, but the FreeBSD foundation, Slackware and more. He also gets to extol the virtues of the open-source development model itself, why it tends to lead to better code overall. In addition to the lead interview with Matt, this issue also features some other great interviews with Open Source storage vendors, and even some ZFS howto’s about setting up your ZIL devive *** Interview - John Marino - marino@freebsd.org (mailto:marino@freebsd.org) FreeNAS with FreeBSD as its base helped save taxpayers $36,000 for a small public school district (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/2016/02/11/january-missioncomplete-best-story/) News Roundup Getting Started With Tor Hidden Services on FreeBSD (https://sgeos.github.io/tor/freebsd/nc/curl/2016/02/06/getting-started-with-tor-hidden-services-on-freebsd.html) Ever wondered how to setup and use a Tor hidden service? We have a walkthrough posted over on github.io which details how to do that on a FreeBSD -CURRENT system. The basics are pretty simple, installing security/tor is the first step (although, he is using portmaster, you may wish to just ‘pkg install security/tor’) The walkthrough provides an example server hosting just the date/time on port 8080, which you can use as an example and to verify it works, before serving anything real. Once a local server is ready to serve something, the Tor setup is pretty quick, basically just two lines of config in torrc: HiddenServiceDir /usr/home/tor/hidden_service/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080 After starting the service, the walkthrough will show you how to get the new hostname for this hidden service and verify its functionality. ZFS Remote Mirrors for Home Use (https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror) A recently updated tutorial on remotely mirroring your ZFS files Using a spare old computer, or a SBC like a Raspberry Pi, and an (external) hard drive It covers installing and configuring FreeBSD for both sides of the remote replication The new appendix covers the creation of a Raspberry Pi image, although a prebuilt one is also provided The setup uses GELI to ensure the data is encrypted at-rest Updating and maintaining both systems is covered in detail The article is very detailed, and covers pretty much every aspect of the setup, including suggestions on where to physically locate the remote system, and configuration tips to reduce the chance that local intervention will be required Most importantly, it covers the disaster recovery steps. How to get your files back when bad things happen *** Lumina Desktop 0.8.8 Released (http://lumina-desktop.org/lumina-desktop-0-8-8-released/) PC-BSD’s very own Lumina desktop has issued a new release, 0.8.8 Notable in this release is support for NetBSD out of box, improvements to the start menu, and ability to change monitor resolutions in the X configuration tool. (Also the desktop font colors look better!) 0.8.8 is now available in PC-BSD via pkg, and FreeBSD ports/pkg system as well. Lumina Desktop aims for v1.0 in July 2016 (http://fossforce.com/2016/02/lumina-desktop-getting-ready-freebsd-11-0/) We also have a blog post from Larry over at FossForce, highlighting that 1.0 of Lumina is still targeted for July(ish) *** NetBSD on Google's Compute Engine (http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/nb_20160213_1951.html) A NetBSD developer has gotten NetBSD running on Google Compute Engine, a service somewhat similar to Amazon’s EC2, and Microsoft’s Azure Support is still being worked on, but I imagine it will land in NetBSD before too long NetBSD on GCE dmesg (http://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi?action=dmesgd&do=view&id=2900) OpenBSD on GCE (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138610199311393&w=2) FreeBSD on GCE (https://github.com/swills/FreeBSD-gcloud) *** BeastieBits htop 2.0 released - an interactive process viewer for Unix (including FreeBSD and OpenBSD) (http://hisham.hm/htop/) Full set of binary packages for 7.0 released for ARM v6 and v7 (hf) (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm/2016/01/31/msg003648.html) DragonFly 4.4.2 released (https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release44/) LibertyBSD 5.8 has been released (http://libertybsd.net/) Broadwell systems may want to take advantage of the patch by Imre Vadasz (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-January/459239.html) Finding the hard-to-spot bugs in FreeBSD (http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0377/) Feedback/Questions Johnny - The Daily Show (http://slexy.org/view/s21dwzoXRn) Randy - Let it BSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Hmmu5pUr) Miguel - NullFS (http://slexy.org/view/s20tOLsHHj) Jaek - PC-BSD Hardware (http://slexy.org/view/s2N9wQ1n5X) ***
128: The State of BSD
This week on BSDNow, we interview Nick Wolff about how FreeBSD is used across the State of Ohio and some of the specific technology used. That, plus the latest news is coming your way right now on BSDNow, the place to This episode was brought to you by Headlines Doc like an Egyptian: Managing project documentation with Sphinx (https://opensource.com/business/16/1/scale-14x-interview-dru-lavigne) In case you didn’t make it out to SCALE a few weeks back, we have a great interview with Dru Lavigne over at OpenSource.com which goes over her talk on “Doc like an Egyptian”. In particular she discusses the challenges of running a wiki for documentation for PC-BSD and FreeNAS which prompted the shift to using Sphinx instead. “While the main purpose of a wiki is to invite user contributions and to provide a low barrier to entry, very few people come to write documentation (however, every spambot on the planet will quickly find your wiki, which creates its own set of maintenance issues). Wikis are designed for separate, one-ish page infobytes, such as how-tos. They really aren't designed to provide navigation in a Table of Contents or to provide a flow of Chapters, though you can hack your pages to provide navigational elements to match the document's flow. This gets more difficult as the document increases in size—our guides tend to be 300+ pages. It becomes a nightmare as you try to provide versioned copies of each of those pages so that the user is finding and reading the right page for their version of software. While wiki translation extensions are available, how to configure them is not well documented, their use is slow and clunky, and translated pages only increase the number of available pages, getting you back to the problems in the previous bullet. This is a big deal for projects that have a global audience. While output-generation wiki extensions are available (for example, to convert your wiki pages to HTML or PDF), how to configure them is not well documented, and they provide very little control for the layout of the generated format. This is a big deal for projects that need to make their documentation available in multiple formats.“ She then discusses some of the hurdles of migration from the Wiki to Sphinx, and follows up with some of the differences using Sphinx you should be aware of for any documentation project. “While Sphinx is easy to learn, it does have its quirks. For example, it does not support stacked tags. This means, for example, you can not bold italic a phrase using tags—to achieve that requires a CSS workaround. And, while Sphinx does have extensive documentation, a lot of it assumes you already know what you are doing. When you don't, it can be difficult to find an example that does what you are trying to achieve. Sphinx is well suited for projects with an existing repository—say, on github—a build infrastructure, and contributors who are comfortable with using text editors and committing to the repo (or creating, say, git pull requests).“ Initial FreeBSD RISC-V Architecture Port Committed. (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2016/02/initial-freebsd-risc-v-architecture.html) Touching on a story we mentioned a few weeks back, we have a blog post from from Annie over at the FreeBSD foundation talking about the details behind the initial support for RISC-V. To start us off, you may be wondering what is RISC-V and what makes it special?RISC-V is an exciting new open-source Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA) developed at the University of California at Berkeley, which is seeing increasing interest in the embedded systems and hardware-software research communities. Currently the improvements allows booting FreeBSD in the Spike simulator, from the university of Berkeley, with enough reliability to do various things, such as SSH, shell, mail, etc. The next steps include getting multi-core support working, and getting it working in simulations of Cambridge’s open-source LowRISC System-on-Chip functioning, and ready for early hardware. Both ports and packages are expected to land in the coming days, so if you love hacking on branch new architectures, this may be your time to jump in. *** FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor supporting Windows UEFI guests (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=295124) If you have not been following bhyve lately, you’re in for a treat when FreeBSD 10.3 ships in the coming weeks bhyve now supports UEFI and CSM booting, in addition to its existing FreeBSD userboot loader, and grub-bhyve port The EFI support allows Windows guests to be run on FreeBSD Due to the lack of graphics, this requires making a custom .iso to do an ‘Unattended Install’ of Windows, but this is easily done just editing and including a .xml file The bootrom can now allocate memory Added some SATA command emulations (no-op) Increased the number of virtio-blk indirect descriptors Added a Firmware guest query interface Add -l option to specify userboot path FreeBSD Bhyve Hypervisor Running Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard (https://jameslodge.com/freebsd-bhyve-hypervisor-running-windows-server-2012-r2-standard/) In related news, TidalScale officially released their product today (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tidalscale-releases-its-system-scaling-hyperkernel-300216105.html) TidalScale is a commercial product based on bhyve that allows multiple physical machines to be combined into a single massive virtual machine, with the combined processor power, memory, disk I/O, and network capacity of all of the machines *** FreeBSD TACACS+ GNS3 and Cisco 3700 Router (http://www.unixmen.com/freebsd-tacacs-gns3-and-cisco-3700-router/) “TACACS+ – (Terminal Access Controller Access Control System plus) — is a session protocol developed by Cisco.” This tutorial covers configuring FreeBSD and the tac_plus4 port to act as an authentication, authorization, and accounting server for Cisco routers The configuration of FreeBSD, the software, and the router are covered It also includes how to set the FreeBSD server up as a VM on windows, and bridge it to the network I am sure there are some network administrators out there that would appreciate this *** Interview - Nick Wolff - darkfiberiru@gmail.com (mailto:darkfiberiru@gmail.com) / @darkfiberiru (https://twitter.com/darkfiberiru) News Roundup Papers We Love Presents : Bryan Cantrill on Jails & Solaris Zones (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2016-February/016495.html) The folks over at NYCBug point us to “Papers We Love”, a New York based meetup group where past papers are presented. They have a talk scheduled for tomorrow (Feb 11th) with Bryan Cantrill discussing Jails and Solaris Zones The talk starts at 7PM at the Tumblr building, located between 5th and Park Ave South on 21st street “We're crazy excited to have Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent, formerly of Sun Microsystems, presenting on Jails: Confining the omnipotent root (https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/bcantrill/public/ppwl-cantrill-jails.pdf). by Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson and Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads (https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/bcantrill/public/ppwl-cantrill-zones.pdf) by Dan Price and Andy Tucker!” The abstract posted gives us a sneak peak of what to expect, first covering jails as a method to “partition” the operating system environment, but maintaining the UNIX “root” model. Next it looks like he will compare and contrast with the Solaris Zones functionality, which creates virtualized application execution environments, within the single OS instance. Sounds like a fantastic talk, hopefully somebody remembers to record and post it for us to enjoy later! There will not be a live stream, but a video of the event should appear online after it has been edited *** FreeBSD Storage Summit (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201602StorageSummit) The FreeBSD Foundation will be hosting a Storage Summit, co-located at the USENIX FAST (Filesystems And Storage Technology) conference Developers and Vendors are invited to work on storage related issues This summit will be a hackathon focused event, rather than a discussion focused devsummit After setup and introductions, the summit will start with a “Networking Synergies Panel”, to discuss networking as it relates to storage After a short break, the attendees will break up into a number of working groups focused on solving actual problems The current working groups include: CAM Scheduling & Locking, led by Justin Gibbs: “Updating CAM queuing/scheduling and locking models to minimize cross-cpu contention and support multi-queue controllers” ZFS, led by Matt Ahrens: topics will include enabling the new cryptographic hashes supported by OpenZFS on FreeBSD, Interaction with the kernel memory subsystem, and other upcoming features. User Space Storage Stack, led by George Neville-Neil This event offers a unique opportunity for developers and vendors from the storage industry to meet at an event they will likely already be attending *** Tor Browser 5.5 for OpenBSD/amd64 -current is completed (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2016-February/016514.html) “The Tor BSD Diversity Project (TDP) is proud to announce the release of Tor Browser (TB) version 5.5 for OpenBSD. Please note that this version of TB remains in development mode, and is not meant to ensure strong privacy, anonymity or security.” “TDP (https://torbsd.github.io) is an effort to extend the use of the BSD Unixes into the Tor ecosystem, from the desktop to the network. TDP is focused on diversifying the Tor network, with TB being the flagship project. Additional efforts are made to increase the number of *BSD relays on the Tor network among other sub-projects” Help test the new browser bundle, or help diversify the Tor network *** “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” Table of Contents (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2548) We brought you the news about sponsoring the Advanced ZFS book that MWL is working on, now Michael has given us the tentative chapter layout of the (sure to be a classic) tome coming from him and Allan. 0: Introduction 1: Boot Environments 2: Delegation and Jails 3: Sharing 4: Replication 5: zvols 6: Advanced Hardware 7: Caches 8: Performance 9: Tuning 10: ZFS Potpourri In addition to the tease about the upcoming book, michael has asked the community for assistance in coming up with the cover art for it as well. In particular it should probably be in-line with his previous works, with a parody of some other classic art-work. If you have something, go tweet out to him at @mwlauthor Beastie Bits Online registration for AsiaBSDCon 2016 now open SOON (https://2016.asiabsdcon.org/index.html.en) BhyveCon 2016 (http://bhyvecon.org/) NYC*BUG shell-fu talk slides (http://www.nycbug.org/index.cgi?action=view&id=10640) Possible regression in DragonFly i915 graphics on older Core2Duos (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-February/228597.html) Videos from FOSDEM 2016. BSD dev room was k4601 (http://video.fosdem.org/2016/) Feedback/Questions Andrew - SMART Tests (http://slexy.org/view/s2F39XEu9w) JT - Secure File Delete (http://slexy.org/view/s20kk6lzc9) Jordan - Migrate (http://slexy.org/view/s21zjZ0ci8) Lars - Pros and Cons of VM (http://slexy.org/view/s2Hqbt0Uq8) Alex - IPSEC (http://slexy.org/view/s2HnO1hxSO) ***
127: DNS, Black Holes & Willem
Today on the show, we welcome Allan back from FOSSDEM, and enjoy an interview with Willem about DNS and MTU Black Holes. That plus all the weeks news, keep it turned here to BSD This episode was brought to you by Headlines FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report (https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.html) It is that time of year again, reviewing the progress of the FreeBSD project over the last quarter of 2015 There are a huge number of projects that have recently been completed or that are planned to finish in time for FreeBSD 10.3 or 11.0 This is just a sample of the of the items that stood out most to us: A number of new teams have been created, and existing teams report in. The Issue Triage, bugmeister, jenkins, IPv6 advocacy, and wiki-admin teams are all mentioned in the status report Progress is reported on the i915 project to update the Intel graphics drivers In the storage subsystem: RCTL I/O rate limiting, Warner Losh’s CAM I/O Scheduler is progressing, Mellanox iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) was added, Chelsio iSCSI offload drivers, Mellanox 100 gbit/s drivers In Security: Encrypted crash dumps, OpenBSM updates, and a status report on HardenedBSD For embedded: Support for Ralink/Mediatek MIPS devices, Raspberry Pi Video Code packages, touch screen support for RPI and BBB, new port to the Marvell Armada38x, and the work on arm64 and RISC-V kib@ rewrote the out-of-memory handler, specifically to perform better in situations where a system does not have swap. Was tested on systems ranging from 32 MB of memory, to 512 GB Various improvements to the tool chain, build system, and nanobsd It was nice to see a bunch of reports from ports committers An overview of the different proposed init replacements, with a report on each *** First timer’s guide to FOSS conferences (http://sarah.thesharps.us/2016/02/02/first-timers-guide-to-foss-conferences/) This post provides a lot of good information for those considering going to their first conference The very first item says the most: “Conference talks are great because they teach you new skills or give you ideas. However, what conference talks are really for is giving you additional topics of conversation to chat with your fellow conference goers with. Hanging out after a talk ends to chat with the speaker is a great way to connect with speakers or fellow attendees that are passionate about a particular subject.” The hallway track is the best part of the conference. I’ve ended up missing as much as 2/3rds of a conference, and still found it to be a very valuable conference, sometimes more so than if I attend a talk in every slot It is important to remember that missing a talk is not the end of the world, that discussion in the hallway may be much more valuable. Most of the talks end up on youtube anyway. The point of the conference is being in the same place as the other people at the conference, the talks are just a means to get us all there. There is even a lot of good advice for people with social anxiety, and those like Allan who do not partake in alcohol Know the conference perks and the resources available to you. The author of the post commented on twitter about originally being unaware of the resources that some conferences provide for speakers, but also of discounts for students, and travel grants from Google and others like the FreeBSD Foundation There are also tips about swag, including watching out for booth wranglers (not common at BSD events, but many larger conferences have booths where your personal information can be exchanged for swag), as well as advice for following up with the people you meet at conferences. Lastly, it provides thoughts on avoiding “Project Passion Explosion“, or what I call “overcharging your BSD battery”, where after hearing about the interesting stuff other people are doing, or about the things other need, you try to do everything at once, and burn yourself out I know for myself, there are at least 10 projects I would love to work on, but I need to balance my free time, my work schedule, the FreeBSD release schedule, and which items might be better for someone else to work on. *** FreeBSD 10.1 based WiFi Captive Portal (http://www.unixmen.com/freebsd-10-1-x64-wifi-captive-portal/) Captive portals, the bane of many a traveler’s existence, however a necessary evil in the era of war-driving and other potentially nefarious uses of “free-wifi”. This week we have an article from the folks at “unixmen”, showing (in great detail) how they setup a FreeBSD 10.1 based captive portal, and yes those are manual MySQL commands. First up is a diagram showing the layout of their new portal system, using multiple APs for different floors of the apartment / hotel? The walkthrough assumes you have Apache/MySQL and PHP already installed, so you’ll need to prep those bits beforehand. Some Apache configuration is up next, which re-directs all port 80 requests over to 443/SSL and the captive portal web-login At this point we have to install “pear” from ports or packages and begin to do the database setup which is fairly typical if you done any SQL before, such as create user / database / table, etc. With the database finished, the article provides a nice and clean rc.conf which enables all the necessary services. Next up is the firewall configuration, which is using IPFW, specifically DUMMYNET/IPALIAS/IPDIVERT and friends. The article does mention to compile a new minimal kernel with these features, if you plan on doing so they I would recommend starting off with that. The article then continues, with setting up DHCP server, SUDO and the PHP file creation that will act as the interface between the client and mysql/firewall rules. When it’s all said and done, you end up with a nice web-interface for clients, plus a bonus Admin interface to manage creating and removing users. For convenience at the very end is a link to all the files / configurations used, so grab that and avoid some of the copy-n-paste *** Sailor, a 'wannabe' portable container system {their own words!} (https://github.com/NetBSDfr/sailor) In the world of docker / jails / VMs, containers are all the rage right now, and now we can introduce “Sailor” to this mix A unique thing about this new solution, is that its based upon chroot/pkgin, and available on NetBSD / OSX and CentOS Since it is not using “jail” or other security mechanism, they to give us this cavet “Note that sailor's goal is not to provide bullet-proof security, chroot is definitely not a trustable isolator; instead, sailor is a really convenient way of trying / testing an environment without compromising your workstation filesystem.” Creating a new “ship” is relatively straight-forward, a simple shell define file can supply most of the relevant information. Nginx for example is only a few lines: https://github.com/NetBSDfr/sailor/blob/master/examples/nginx.conf In addition to the basic pkg configuration, it also provides methods to do rw/ro mounts into the chroot, as well as IP aliases and copying of specific host binaries into the container *** Interview - Willem Toorop - willem@nlnetlabs.nl (mailto:willem@nlnetlabs.nl) / @WillemToorop (https://twitter.com/WillemToorop) GetDNS vBSDCon 2015 Talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73M7h56Dsas) *** News Roundup A Quarter Century of Unix (http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=publications:quarter_century_of_unix) An oldie, but goodie, the book “A Quarter Century of UNIX” is now available for free download via PDF format. This provides an invaluable look into the history of UNIX, which of course we wouldn’t have BSD without. There is also a print version still available via Amazon (link at the above URL also). If you find the book useful, consider buying a copy, since a % still goes to the original author *** Bjoern Zeeb has been awarded grant to finalize VIMAGE fixes (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2016janupdate.pdf) “Bjoern Zeeb has been awarded a project grant to finalize and integrate the work done to make the VIMAGE network stack virtualization infrastructure production ready.” VIMAGE is the network virtualization kernel component that can be used to give jails their own network interfaces, so they can have their own firewalls, be assign addresses via DHCP, etc. Currently, a number of bugs prevent this feature from being enabled by default, or used in production The main areas of focus for the work are: network stack teardown, interface ordering, locking, and addressing the remaining memory leaks at teardown The work is expected to be completed by the end of March and to be included in FreeBSD 11.0 *** Building a smtpd Mail Server on OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/opensmtpd/faq/example1.html) The OpenSMTPd FAQ has been updated with a new walkthrough of a complete installation Following this guide, the resulting installation will: Accepting mails for multiple domains and virtual users Allowing virtual users to authenticate and send mails Applying anti-spam and anti-virus filters on mails Providing IMAP access for the virtual users Providing log statistics It covers setting up the new filter system, configuring TLS, creating the domain and user tables, configuring spamassassin and clamav, and setting up dovecot There is even a crontab to send you weekly stats on what your email server is doing *** Introduction to the FreeBSD Open Source Operating System LiveLessons (http://www.informit.com/store/introduction-to-the-freebsd-open-source-operating-system-9780134305868) Dr. Kirk McKusick has been one of the foremost authorities on FreeBSD for some time now, as co-author of the D&I of FreeBSD (along with George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson) and teaching numerous classes on the same. (Another good reason to come to a *BSD conference) As part of the Addison-Wesley Professional / LiveLessons series, he has made a 10+ hour video lecture you can now purchase to take his class from the comfort of your own home/couch/office/etc Aspiring FreeBSD developers, kernel developers, Application Developers and other interested individuals should really consider this invaluable resource in their learning. The video starts with an introduction to the FreeBSD community and explains how it differs from the Linux ecosystem. The video then goes on to provide a firm background in the FreeBSD kernel. The POSIX kernel interfaces are used as examples where they are defined. Where they are not defined, the FreeBSD interfaces are described. The video covers basic kernel services, locking, process structure, scheduling, signal handling, jails, and virtual and physical memory management. The kernel I/O structure is described showing how I/O is multiplexed and the virtual filesystem interface is used to support multiple filesystems. Devices are described showing disk management and their auto-configuration. The organization and implementation of the fast filesystem is described concluding with a discussion of how to maintain consistency in the face of hardware or software failures. The video includes an overview of the ZFS filesystem and covers the socket-based network architecture, layering and routing issues. The presentations emphasize code organization, data structure navigation, and algorithms. Normally the video will set you back $299, but right now you can pick it up for $239 (USD). We can’t recommend this enough, but also don’t forget to try and make it out to BSDCan or MeetBSD, where you can usually talk to Dr. McKusick in person. *** BeastieBits Faces of FreeBSD: Sean Bruno (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.ca/2016/01/faces-of-freebsd-2016-sean-bruno.html) Support Michael W. Lucas writing BSD books, and get your name in the credits (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2539) bhyve windows support merged to stable/10 branch, will be included in FreeBSD 10.3 (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=295124) FreeBSD Outsells Windows by almost 2-1 (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/ea-lets-slip-lifetime-xbox-one-and-ps4-consoles-sales/) A rant about the whois protocol (http://fanf.livejournal.com/140505.html) Kris Moore talks about Jails and system management on BSDTalk (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2016/01/bsdtalk261-jails-and-system-management.html) FOSDEM 2016: Slides from the 5 years of IllumOS talk (https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/illumos_overview/attachments/audio/873/export/events/attachments/illumos_overview/audio/873/FOSDEM_2016.pdf) A tweet from the first day of FOSDEM showed only 1 FreeBSD machine. Many of the FreeBSD developers were at a devsummit offsite that day, and more users arrived for the BSD dev room which was on the Sunday (https://twitter.com/pvaneynd/status/693813132649697281) Feedback/Questions Antonio - ZFS Book Formatting (http://pastebin.com/ZWNHgqHQ) Simon - ZFS Corruption? (http://pastebin.com/XW97YSQK) Christian - rm -r^^^OOOPSSS (http://pastebin.com/W7TwWwtE) Phillipp - ZFS Send/Recv (http://pastebin.com/zA2ewPuF) ***
126: Illuminating the future on PC-BSD
This week on BSDNow, we are going to be talking to Ken Moore about the Lumina desktop environment, where it stands now & looking ahead. Then Allan turns the tables & interviews both Kris & Ken about new ongoings in PC-BSD land. Stay tuned, lots of exciting show is coming your way right now on BSDNow, the place to B...SD! This episode was brought to you by Headlines Linuxvoice reviews six NAS designed OSes and states that FreeNAS has the largest amount of features (https://www.linuxvoice.com/group-test-nas-distros/) The review compares the features of: FreeNAS, NAS4Free, Open Media Vault, Openfiler Community Edition, EasyNAS, and Turnkey Linux File Server “Many NAS solutions can do a lot more than just back up and restore files – you can extend them with plugins to do a variety of tasks. Some enable you to stream media to computers and others devices. Others can hook up with apps and services and allow them to use the NAS for storing and retrieving data” Open Media Vault: 4/5, “A feature-rich NAS distro that’s easy to deploy and manage”. Many plugins, good UI Turnkey Linux File Server: 2/5, “A no-fuss distro that’ll set up a fully functional file sharing server in no time”. No RAID, LVM must be down manually Openfiler Community Edition: 1/5, “There is a target segment for Openfiler, but we can’t spot it”. In the middle of rebasing on CentOS, lacking documentation, confusing UI EasyNAS: 3/5, “A simple NAS distro that balances the availability of features with reasonable assumptions”. Major updates require reinstall, lacks advanced features and advanced protocols FreeNAS: 3/5, “FreeNAS The most feature-rich NAS distribution requires some getting used to”. Best documentation, best snapshot management, most plugins, jailed plugins, most enterprise features NAS4Free: 3/5, “NAS4Free An advanced NAS distro that’s designed for advanced users”, additional flexibility with disk layout (partition the first disk to install the OS there, use remaining space for data storage) “If we had to award this group test to the distro with the biggest number of features then the top two challengers would have been FreeNAS and its protegée NAS4Free. While both of these solutions pitch themselves to users outside the corporate environment, they’d simply be overkill for most home users. Furthermore, their FreeBSD base and the ZFS filesystem, while a boon to enterprise users, virtually makes them alien technology to the average Linux household.” It is not clear why they gave NAS4Free and FreeNAS the same score when they wrote a list of reasons why FreeNAS was better. It seems the goal of their rundown was to find the best Linux NAS, not the best NAS. *** FreeBSD based Snort IPS (http://www.unixmen.com/freebsd-snort-ips/) UnixMen.com provides a new tutorial on setting up Snort, the IPS (Intrusion Prevention system) on FreeBSD Install Apache, PHP, and MySQL, then Snort Download the latest Snort rules from the official website Disable the Packet Filter on the USB interfaces to avoid issues with Snort Install oinkmaster and barnyard2, and configure them Then install the Snorby WEB interface, which will give you a nice overview of the data generated by the IPS Then install SnortSAM, and connect it to ipfw Now when Snort detects a potential intrusion, it will be displayed in Snorby, and automatically blocked with IPFW *** Opensource.com features two BSD developers as examples of how open source can help your career (https://opensource.com/life/16/1/3-new-open-source-contributors-share-their-experiences) “When contributing to open source projects and communities, one of the many benefits is that you can improve your tech skills. In this article, hear from three contributors on how their open source helped them get a job or improved their career.” Alexander Yurchenko, an OpenBSD developer who now works at Yandex says: “Participating in such a project yields colossal experience. A good, large open source project has everything that is typically required from a developer at job interviews: good planning, good coding, use of versioning systems and bug trackers, peer reviews, teamwork, and such. So, after stewing in such an environment for a year or two, you have a good opportunity to grow to a senior developer level.” “That is, in fact, what happened to me. I was hired as a senior developer without having any formal work experience on my service record. After the first week, my probation period was reduced from three months to zero.” While you may not have “formal work experience”, you do have a body of work, a (code/documentation/etc) portfolio, you can point to Having spent a year working somewhere may say something about you, but showing some code you wrote that other people use every day, is usually more valuable Alexander Polyakov, a DragonFly contributor, worked on updating support for other languages and on ACPI. “I even made some money in the process—a customer found me via git log. He wanted to use DragonFlyBSD in production and needed better ACPI support and some RAID driver or something.” “In a nutshell, contributing to various open source projects is how you gain great experience. Don't be afraid to send in bad code (happens to the best of us), keep calm (while being scolded for sending in that bad code), and choose projects you are really interested in. Then you'll both gain experience and have fun while you doing it.” Kirill Gorkunov talks about his experience with turning open source into a career: “For a few years, I've been fixing the code, sending patches, getting scolded for bad code and complimented for good code. That experience was priceless. And you can be sure that as soon as you get good at it, job offers will follow. This is, in fact, how I met the kernel developers working on OpenVZ. Together, we decided to continue working on the OpenVZ kernel and related stuff as well” When you contribute to open source, you end up being the person who wrote “Foo”, and this can often turn into work, when someone wants to build something with “Foo”, or like “Foo” This same point was focus of a panel the FreeBSD Foundation organized at the womENcourage conference in Sweden last year: Open Source as a Career Path (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7PW1E3IJvY) *** FreeBSD, LibreSSL and LetsEncrypt oh my! (https://wiki.freebsd.org/BernardSpil/LetsEncrypt) Over on the FreeBSD Wiki, Bernard Spil (whom we’ve interviewed before) has started a walkthrough talking about how he uses LibreSSL and LetsEncrypt, without using the heavy python client The article provides detailed instructions on prepping the system and automating the process of updating the SSL certificates If you’ve used the “official” letsencrypt client in the past, you’ll note some differences in his method, which keeps all the ‘acme-challenge’ files in a single-directory, which is aliased into domains. Using this method also drops the requirement to run the letsencrypt auth as root, and allows you to run it as the unprivileged “letsencrypt” user instead. He mentions that the bash/zsh scripts used may be added to ports at some point as well *** Interview - Ken Moore & Kris Moore - ken@pcbsd.org (mailto:ken@pcbsd.org) / @pcbsdkris (https://twitter.com/pcbsdkris) PC-BSD’s new SysAdm Project and Lumina Update *** News Roundup DragonFly Intel i915 support to match what’s in the Linux 4.1 kernel (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-January/459241.html) In DragonFly’s ongoing quest for DRM awesomeness, they have now merged changes to bring them up to Linux 4.1 kernel features. Some of the notables include that “Valleyview” support is greatly improved, and not considered preliminary anymore Skylake got some support improvements as well, including runtime power management, and that turbo and sleep states should be functional. Some great improvements to power usage have been added, such as setting GPU frequencies to hardware minimum and enabling of DRRS (Dynamic Refresh Rate Switching) being enabled by default They’ve even begun importing some of the prelim work for Broxton, the upcoming Atom SOC *** FreeNAS Home Server Build (https://ramsdenj.github.io/server/2016/01/01/FreeNAS-Server-Build.html) We have a nice article to share with you this week by John Ramsden, which walks us through his home-brew FreeNAS server setup. As is typical with most home users, he will be using the system to both serve media, and as a backup target for other systems. His hardware setup is pretty impressive for a home-brew, made up of the following: Fractal Design Node 804 Chassis Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard Xeon E3-1231 v3 CPU 4x Samsung DDR3 1.35v-1600 M391B1G73QH0 RAM 2x 32GB SATA III SMC DOM Boot Drive SeaSonic G-550 Power Supply Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD 1500VA 900W PFC UPS 6x Western Digital 6TB Red HDD 2 x ENERMAX T.B. Silence UCTB12P Case Fan 3x Noctua NF-P14s redux-1200 Case Fan The SATA DOM was neat to see in use, in his case in a mirror He then walks us through his burn-in process, which involved memory testing for 46 hours, and then disk testing with the smartctl long tests. There is even details on how the fan thresholds were set up, which may be of use to other DiY’ers out there. The SATA DOM was neat to see in use, in his case in a mirror He then walks us through his burn-in process, which involved memory testing for 46 hours, and then disk testing with the smartctl long tests. There is even details on how the fan thresholds were set up, which may be of use to other DiY’ers out there. claviger manages your SSH authorized_keys files for you (https://github.com/bwesterb/claviger) An application to manage your SSH authorized_keys files for you Make a list of your keys (laptop, desktop, work) Then a list of your ssh accounts List which keys should be present, and which should be absent Optional setting to keep all “other” keys, such as those added by other users Optional list of specific “other” keys to allow (does not add them, but does not remove them if they are present) You say say ‘server2 like server1’, and it will inherit all of the settings from that server There is a “default” server, that all others inherit *** FreeBSD 9.2 x64 OpenVPN AD authentication with crypt (http://www.unixmen.com/openvpn-ad-authentication-with-crypt/) A few days back unixmen.com posted a nice tutorial walkthrough of a OpenVPN setup on FreeBSD 9.2 using Active Directory for auth In this particular setup, FreeBSD is running the gateway / OpenVPN server, the client desktops are running Windows 7 and domain controller on Windows 2008 The setup on FreeBSD pretty straightforward, thanks to the openvpn-auth-ldap port. (Unknown why they didn’t use the package) In addition to showing the details on how configuration was done on BSD, what makes this walkthrough nice is the addition of so many screenshots of how the windows configuration was done. Part of the walkthrough will also detail how they created their .ovpn files for importing on the OpenVPN clients. *** Beastie Bits dtrace included by default in NetBSD (http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/share/mk/bsd.own.mk.diff?r1=1.883&r2=1.884&only_with_tag=MAIN&f=h) FOSDEM16 is approaching, get ready to follow the BSD devroom (https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/track/bsd/) Call for testing: Concurrent: malloc(3) calls (to speed up Firefox) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160123165549) "With the PV drivers in -CURRENT, it is now possible to run OpenBSD within AWS." (http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?p=57767) PC-BSD Handbook in Spanish (http://www.pcbsd.org/doc-archive/10.2/html-es/pcbsd.html) Feedback/Questions Clint - ZIL on Partition (http://pastebin.com/WLpHzz3F) Federico - LibreSSL and DMA (http://pastebin.com/1QFZU2Bz) Ghislain - FreeBSD vs Linux vs Illumos (http://pastebin.com/aesVaKG4) Cary - ZFS - Caching - Replication (http://pastebin.com/x4DRHP0i) ***
125: DevSummits, Core and the Baldwin
This week on the show, we will be talking to FreeBSD developer and former core-team member John Baldwin about a variety of topics, including running a DevSummit, everything you needed or wanted to know. Coming up right now on BSDNow, the place to B...SD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines FreeBSD server retired after almost 19 years (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/14/server_retired_after_18_years_and_ten_months_beat_that_readers/) We’ve heard stories about this kind of thing before, that box that often sits under-appreciated, but refuses to die. Well the UK register has picked up on a story of a FreeBSD server finally being retired after almost 19 years of dedicated service. “In its day, it was a reasonable machine - 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive's a Seagate, for those of you looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations. This system in particular had been running FreeBSD 2.2.1 over the years. Why not upgrade you ask? Ross has an answer for that: “It was heavily firewalled and only very specific services were visible to anyone, and most only visible to our directly connected customers,” Ross told Vulture South. “By the time it was probably due for a review, things had moved so far that all the original code was so tightly bound to the operating system itself, that later versions of the OS would have (and ultimately, did) require substantial rework. While it was running and not showing any signs of stress, it was simply expedient to leave sleeping dogs lie.” All in all, an amazing story of the longevity of a system and its operating system. Do you have a server with a similar or even greater uptime? Let us know so we can try and top this story. *** Roundup of all the BSDs (https://www.linuxvoice.com/group-test-bsd-distros/) The magazine LinuxVoice recently did a group test of a variety of “BSD Distros”. Included in their review were Free/Open/Net/Dragon/Ghost/PC It starts with a pretty good overview of BSD in general, its starts and the various projects / forks that spawned from it, such as FreeNAS / Junos / Playstation / PFSense / etc The review starts with a look at OpenBSD, and the consensus reached is that it is good, but does require a bit more manual work to run as a desktop. (Most of the review focuses on desktop usage). It ends up with a solid ⅘ stars though. Next it moves into GhostBSD, discusses it being a “Live” distro, which can optionally be installed to disk. It loses a few points for lacking a graphical package management utility, and some bugs during the installation, but still earns a respectable ⅗ stars. Dragonfly gets the next spin and gets praise for its very-up to date video driver support and availability of the HAMMER filesystem. It also lands at ⅗ stars, partly due to the reviewer having to use the command-line for management. (Notice a trend here?) NetBSD is up next, and gets special mention for being one of the only “distros” that doesn’t do frequent releases. However that doesn’t mean you can’t have updated packages, since the review mentions pkgsrc and pkg as both available to customize your desktop. The reviewer was slightly haunted by having to edit files in /etc by hand to do wireless, but still gives NetBSD a ⅗ overall. Last up are FreeBSD and PC-BSD, which get a different sort of head-to-head review. FreeBSD goes first, with mention that the text-install is fairly straight-forward and most configuration will require being done by hand. However the reviewer must be getting use to the command-line at this point, because he mentions: “This might sound cumbersome, but is actually pretty straightforward and at the end produces a finely tuned aerodynamic system that does exactly what you want it to do and nothing else.” He does mention that FreeBSD is the ultimate DIY system, even to the point of not having the package management tools provided out of box. PC-BSD ultimately gets a lot of love in this review, again with it being focused on desktop usage this follows. Particularly popular are all the various tools written to make PC-BSD easier to use, such as Life-Preserver, Warden, the graphical installer and more. (slight mistake though, Life-Preserver does not use rsync to backup to FreeNAS, it does ZFS replication) In the end he rates FreeBSD ⅘ and PC-BSD a whopping 5/5 for this roundup. While reviews may be subjective to the particular use-case being evaluated for, it is still nice to see BSD getting some press and more interest from the Linux community in general. *** OpenBSD Laptops (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/openbsd-laptops) Our buddy Ted Unangst has posted a nice “planning ahead” guide for those thinking of new laptops for 2016 and the upcoming OpenBSD 5.9 He starts by giving us a status update on several of the key driver components that will be in 5.9 release“5.9 will be the first release to support the graphics on Broadwell CPUs. This is anything that looks like i5-5xxx. There are a few minor quirks, but generally it works well. There’s no support for the new Skylake models, however. They’ll probably work with the VESA driver but minus suspend/resume/acceleration (just as 5.8 did with Broadwell).” He then goes on to mention that the IWM driver works well with most of the revisions (7260, 7265, and 3160) that ship with broadwell based laptops, however the newer skylake series ships with the 8260, which is NOT yet supported. He then goes on to list some of the more common makes and models to look for, starting with the broadwell based X1 carbons which work really well (Kris gives +++), but make sure its not the newer skylake model just yet. The macbook gets a mention, but probably should be avoided due to broadcom wifi The Dell XPS he mentions as a good choice for a powerful (portable) desktops *** Significant changes from NetBSD 7.0 to 8.0 (https://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-8.0.html) Updated to GCC 4.8.5 Imported dhcpcd and replaced rtsol and rtsold gpt(8) utility gained the ability to resize partitions and disks, as well as change the type of a partition OpenSSH 7.1 and OpenSSL 1.0.1q FTP client got support for SNI for https Imported dtrace from FreeBSD Add syscall support Add lockstat support *** Interview - John Baldwin - jhb@freebsd.org (mailto:jhb@freebsd.org) / @BSDHokie (https://twitter.com/BSDHokie) FreeBSD Kernel Debugging News Roundup Dragonfly Mail Agent spreads to FreeBSD and NetBSD (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2016/01/18/17508.html) DMA, the Dragonfly Mail Agent is now available not only in Dragonfly’s dports, but also FreeBSD ports, and NetBSD pkgsrc “dma is a small Mail Transport Agent (MTA), designed for home and office use. It accepts mails from locally installed Mail User Agents (MUA) and delivers the mails either locally or to a remote destination. Remote delivery includes several features like TLS/SSL support and SMTP authentication. dma is not intended as a replacement for real, big MTAs like sendmail(8) or postfix(1). Consequently, dma does not listen on port 25 for incoming connections.” There was a project looking at importing DMA into the FreeBSD base system to replace sendmail, I wonder of the port signals that some of the blockers have been fixed *** ZFS UEFI Support has landed! (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=294068) Originally started by Eric McCorkle Picked up by Steven Hartland Including modularizing the existing UFS boot code, and adding ZFS boot code General improvements to the EFI loader including using more of libstand instead of containing its own implementations of many common functions Thanks to work by Toomas Soome, there is now a Beastie Menu as part of the EFI loader, similar to the regular loader As soon as this was committed, I added a few lines to it to connect the ZFS BE Menu to it, thanks to all of the above, without whom my work wouldn’t be usable It should be relatively easy to hook my GELI boot stuff in as a module, and possibly just stack the UFS and ZFS modules on top of it I might try to redesign the non-EFI boot code to use a similar design instead of what I have now *** How three BSD OSes compare to ten Linux Distros (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3bsd-10linux) After benchmarking 10 of the latest Linux distros, Phoronix took to benchmarking 3 of the big BSDs DragonFlyBSD 4.4.1 - The latest DragonFly release with GCC 5.2.1 and the HAMMER file-system. OpenBSD 5.8 - OpenBSD 5.8 with GCC 4.2.1 as the default compiler and FFS file-system. PC-BSD 10.2 - Derived off FreeBSD 10.2, the defaults were the Clang 3.4.1 compiler and ZFS file-system. In the SQLite test, PCBSD+ZFS won out over all of the Linux distros, including those that were also using ZFS In the first compile benchmark, PCBSD came second only to Intel’s Linux distro, Clear Linux. OpenBSD can last, although it is not clear if the benchmark was just comparing the system compiler, which would be unfair to OpenBSD In Disk transaction performance, against ZFS won the day, with PCBSD edging out the Linux distros. OpenBSD’s older ffs was hurt by the lack of soft updates, and DragonFly’s Hammer did not perform well. Although in an fsync() heavy test, safety is more important that speed As with all benchmarks, these obviously need to be taken with a grain of salt In some of them you can clearly see that the ‘winner’ has a much higher standard error, suggesting that the numbers are quite variable *** OPNSense 15.7.24 Released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-15-7-24-released/) We are just barely into the new year and OPNSense has dropped a new release on us to play with. This new version, 15.7.24 brings a bunch of notable changes, which includes improvements to the firewall UI and a plugin management section of the firmware page. Additionally better signature verification using PKG’s internal verification mechanisms was added for kernel and world updates. The announcement contains the full rundown of changes, including the suricata, openvpn and ntp got package bumps as well. *** Beastie Bits A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to (https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/) (A bit old, but still one of the most complete walkthroughs of a desktop FreeBSD setup from scratch) BSD and Scale 14 (http://fossforce.com/2016/01/bsd-ready-scale-14x/) Xen support enabled in OpenBSD -current (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160114113445&mode=expanded) Feedback/Questions Matt - Zil Sizes (http://slexy.org/view/s20a0mLaAv) Drin - IPSEC (http://slexy.org/view/s21qpiTF8h) John - ZFS + UEFI (http://slexy.org/view/s2HCq0r0aD) Jake - ZFS Cluster SAN (http://slexy.org/view/s2VORfyqlS) Phillip - Media Server (http://slexy.org/view/s20ycRhUkM) ***
124: Get your engine(x) started!
This week on the show, we have a very full news roster to rundown, plus an oldie, but goodie with Igor of the nginx project. That plus all your questions and feedback, iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSDJournal! *** FreeNAS Logo Design Contest (https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-logo-contest/) Rules and Requirements (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/) For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using. Softbox Light Diffuser (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OTG6474?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00&pldnSite=1) Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00198U6U6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00) *** This episode was brought to you by Headlines Clearing the air (http://blog.randi.io/2015/12/31/the-developer-formerly-known-as-freebsdgirl/) A number of you have written in the past few weeks asking why Allan and I didn’t talk about one of the biggest stories to make headlines last week. Both of us are quite aware of the details surrounding the incidents between former FreeBSD developers “freebsdgirl” and “xmj”, however the news was still ongoing and we didn’t feel it right to discuss until some of the facts had time to shake out and a more clear (and calm) discussion could be had. However, without getting into all the gory details here’s some of the key points that we want to highlight for our listeners. We each have our own thoughts on this. Kris: The FreeBSD that I know has been VERY open and inclusive to all who want to contribute. The saying “Shut up and code” is there for a reason. We’ve seen developers of all types, different race / gender / creed, and the one thing we all have in common is the love for BSD. This particular incident has been linked to FreeBSD, which isn’t exactly a fair association, since the project and other members of community were not directly involved. What started out as a disagreement (over something non-BSD related) turned into an ugly slugfest all across social media and (briefly) on a BSD chatroom. In this case after reviewing lots of the facts, I think both sides were WAY out of line, and hope they recognize that. There has been slamming of the core team and foundation in social media, as somehow the delay / silence is an admission of wrong-doing. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are serious people doing a serious job, and much like BSD they would rather take the time to do it right instead of just going off on social media and making things worse. (Plus they all are volunteers who are spread across many different time-zones) Also, if you hear rumors of incidents of harassment, remember that without details all those will ever be is rumors. Obviously those in the project would take any incident like that seriously, but without coming forward and sharing the details it’s impossible to take any action or make changes for the better. Allan: The FreeBSD community is the best group of people I have ever worked with, but that doesn’t mean that it is immune to the same problems that every other group of people faces. As much as all of us wish it didn’t, harassment and other ill-behavior does happen, and must be dealt with The FreeBSD Core team has previously sanctioned committers and revoked commit bits for things that happened entirely offline and outside of the FreeBSD community. Part of being a committer is representing the project in everything that you do, so anything you do that reflects badly upon the project is grounds for your removal There was something written about this in the project documentation somewhere (that I can not find for the live of me), specifically about the prestige that comes with (or used to) an @freebsd.org account, and how new members of the community need to keep that in mind as they work to earn, and keep, a commit bit In this specific situation, I am not sure what core did exactly, we’ll have to wait for their report to find out, but I am not sure what more they could have done. “Individual members of core have the power to temporarily suspend commit privileges until core as a whole has the chance to review the issue. Only a 2/3 majority of core has the authority to suspend commit privileges for longer than a week or to remove them permanently. Core's “special powers” only kick in when it acts as a group, not on an individual basis. As individuals, the core team members are all committers first and core second” So, an individual member of core can revoke the commit bit of someone who is reported to have acted in a manner not conducive with the rules, but I don’t know how that would have made a difference in this case. The only point from Randi’s list of 10 things the project should change that I do not think is possible is #6. As stated in the “Committers' Big List of Rules” that I quoted earlier, the core team can only take action after they have had time for everyone to review and discuss a matter, and then vote on it. The core team is made up of 9 people with other responsibilities and commitments. Further, they are currently spread across 6 different countries, and 6 different times zones (even the countries and time zones do not line up). We eagerly await Cores report on this matter, and more importantly, Core and the Foundation's work to come up with a better framework and response policy to deal with such situations in the future. The important thing is to ensure that incident reports are properly handled, so that those reporting issues feel safe in doing so While we hope there is never another incident of harassment in the FreeBSD community, the realities of the world we live in mean we need to be ready to deal with it *** Dan Langille discussing his rig (https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/3zv64t/the_home_lab_9_servers_about_98tb_working_url/) Pictures of Dan Langille's Home Lab (http://imgur.com/gallery/nuBBD) Ever read FreeBSD Diary? How about used FreshPorts or FreshSource? Gone to BSDCan? If so you may be interested in seeing exactly where those sites are served from. Dan Langille posts to reddit with information about his home lab, with the obligatory pictures to back it up As most good home racks do, this one starts at Home Depot and ends up with a variety of systems and hardware living on it. All in all an impressive rig and nice job wiring (I wonder what that ASUS RT‑N66U is doing, if it’s running FreeBSD or just an access point??) Reminder: Get your BSDCan talk proposal submitted before the deadline, January 19th *** Pre-5.9 pledge(2) update (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160107174436) Theo gives us a status update on pledge() for pre OpenBSD 5.9“For the next upcoming release, we will disable the 'paths' argument.Reasoning: We have been very busy making as much of the tree set thepromises right in applications, and building a few new promises aswell. We simply don't have enough time to review the kernel code andmake sure it is bug-free. We'll use the next 6 months developmentcycle to decide on paths, and then re-audit the tree to use theinterface where it is suitable. The base tree (/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/libexec /usr/games)contains 652 ELF binaries. 451 use pledge. 201 do not. Approximately47 do not need or cannot use pledge. Leaving 154 we could potentiallypledge in the future. Most of those are not very important. Thereare a few hot spots, but most of what people use has been handled wellby the team.“ Chromium: now with OpenBSD pledge(2) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160107075227) In addition to the pledge news, we also have a story about the Chromium browser being converted to use pledge on OpenBSD.“The renderer, gpu, plugin and utility processes are now using pledge(2)Unfortunately the GPU process only requires an rpath pledge because ofMesa trying to parse two configuration files, /etc/drirc and ${HOME}/.drircSo currently the GPU process will use an rpath pledge in the nextweek or so so that people can test, but this situation has to beresolved because it is not acceptable that a mostly unused configurationfile is being parsed from a library and that stops us from using lesspledges and thus disallowing the GPU process to have read accessto the filesystem ... like your ssh keys.” UPDATE: the rpath pledge has been removed. *** iXsystems https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/ Interview - Igor Sysoev - igor@sysoev.ru (mailto:igor@sysoev.ru) / @isysoev (https://twitter.com/isysoev) NGINX and FreeBSD News Roundup FreeBSD on EdgeRouter Lite - no serial port required (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2016-01-10-FreeBSD-EdgeRouter-Lite.html) A few years back there was a neat story on how to setup FreeBSD on the EdgeRouter-Lite This last week we get to revisit this, as Colin Percival posts a script, and a very detailed walkthrough of using it to generate your own custom image which does NOT require hooking up a serial cable. Currently the script only works on -CURRENT, but may work later for 10.3 The script is pretty complete, does the buildworld and creation of a USB image for you. It also does a basic firewall configuration and even growfs for expanding to the full-size of your USB media. Using the ‘firstboot’ keyword, an rc.d script does all the initial configuration allowing you access to the system If you have one, or are looking at switching to a FreeBSD based router, do yourself a favor and take a look at this article. *** John Marino reaches out to the community for testing of Synth, a new custom package repo builder (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-January/228540.html) A hybrid of poudriere and portmaster/portupgrade Uses your regular ports tree and your running system, but built builds packages faster, the poudriere way Requires no setup, no downloading or building reference versions of the OS, no checking out yet another copy of the ports tree In the future may have support for using binary packages for dependencies, build only the apps you actually want to customize Looks very promising *** OpenBSD malloc finds use-after-free in Android OS (https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/196090/) Score one for OpenBSD’s rigorous security and attention to detail. We have an interesting commit / comment from Android It looks like this particular mistake was found in the uncrypt routines, in particular the using of a variable memory which had already gone out of scope. Through the usage of OpenBSD’s malloc junk filling feature, the developers were able to identify and correct the issue. Maybe there is a case to be made that this be used more widely, especially during testing? *** Netflix's async sendfile now in FreeBSD-current (http://www.slideshare.net/facepalmtarbz2/new-sendfile-in-english) We have some slides presented by Gleb Smirnoff at last years FreeBSD storage summit, talking about changes to sendfile made by Netflix. It starts off with a bit of history, showing the misery of life without sendfile(2) back in FreeBSD 1.0, specifically the ftpd daemon. Then in 1997 that all changed, HP-UX 11.00 grew the sendfile function, and FreeBSD 3.0 / Linux 2.2 added it in ‘98 The slides then go into other details, on how the first implementations would map the userland cycle into the kernel. Then in 2004 the SF_NODISKIO flag was added, followed by changes in 2006 and 2013 to using sbspace() bytes and sending shared memory descriptor data respectively. The idea is that instead of the web server waiting for the send to complete, it calls sendfile then goes about its other work, then it gets a notification when the work is done, and finishes up any of the request handling, like logging how many bytes were sent The new sendfile implementation took the maximum load of an older netflix box from 25 gigabits/sec to 35 gigabits/sec Separately, Netflix has also done work on implementing a TLS version of sendfile(), to streamline the process of sending encrypted data There is still a todo list, including making sendfile() play nice with ZFS. Currently files sent via sendfile from ZFS are stored in memory twice, once in the ARC, and once in the buffer cache that sendfile uses *** Beastie Bits Unix Timeline of how Unix versions have evolved (http://www.levenez.com/unix/) netmap support now in bhyve in FreeBSD -Current (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293459) McCabe complexity and Dragonfly BSD (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2016/01/12/17478.html) Bourne Basic - a BASIC interpreter implemented (painfully) in pure Bourne shell (https://gist.github.com/cander/2785819) NixOS on FreeBSD (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/10816#issuecomment-169298385) Turning an ordinary OpenBSD system into a router (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html) nvidia releases beta 361.16 driver for FreeBSD (https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/908423/unix-graphics-announcements-and-news/linux-solaris-and-freebsd-driver-361-16-beta-/) Feedback/Questions Bryson - SmartOS / KVM / ZFS (http://slexy.org/view/s2BLZeBrSK) Samba 1969 (http://slexy.org/view/s2OQIxkZst) DO / VPN / PF (http://slexy.org/view/s206j2ekTZ) Unstable VM / Update (http://slexy.org/view/s20kyrKSH9) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
123: ZFS in the trenches
This week on BSDNow, we will be talking shop with Josh Paetzel of FreeNAS fame, hearing about his best do’s and do-nots of using ZFS in production. Also, a quick iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** FreeNAS Logo Design Contest (https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-logo-contest/) Rules and Requirements (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/) For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using. Softbox Light Diffuser (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OTG6474?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00&pldnSite=1) Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00198U6U6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00) *** This episode was brought to you by Headlines A Brief look back at 2015 (http://fossforce.com/2015/12/bsd-brief-look-back-2015/) As we start the show this week, we begin with a brief look back at BSD in 2015, brought to us by Larry at FOSS force. Aside from his issue with tap-to-click on the touchpad, his PC-BSD experience has been pretty good. (Larry, if you hear this, jump on #pcbsd on FreeNode and we will lend a hand) He mentions that this really isn’t his first time running BSD, apparently back in ye-olden days he got NetBSD up and running on a PowerBook G3, until an update brought that experience to abrupt ending. He gives a shout-out to the FreeBSD Foundation as being a great go-to source for wrapup on the previous year in FreeBSD land, while also mentioning the great 4.4 release of DragonFly, and some of the variants, such as RetroBSD and LiteBSD He leaves us with a tease for 2016 that work is ongoing on Twitter to port over Mopidy, a python based extensible music server *** A look forward at BSD events throughout 2016 (http://www.bsdevents.org/scheduler/) After a quick look back at 2015, now its time to start planning your 2016 schedule. The BSDEvents site has a calendar of all the upcoming conferences / shows where BSD will have a presence this year. There are quite a few items on the agenda, including non BSD specific conferences, such as SCALE / Fosdem and more. Take a look and see, you may be able to find something close your location where you can come hang out with other BSD developers. (or better yet), if a linux conference is coming to your town, think about submitting a BSD talk! Additionally, if getting BSD Certification is something on your 2016 resolutions, you can often take the test at one of these shows, avoiding the need to travel to a testing center. *** The 'Hidden' Cost of Using ZFS for Your Home NAS (http://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-your-home-nas.html) An article was recently posted that seems to be trying to dissuade people from using ZFS for their home NAS It points out what experienced users already know, but many newcomers are not strictly aware of: Expanding a ZFS pool is not always as straightforward as you think it should be ZFS was designed to be expanded, and it handled this very well However, a ZFS pool is made up of VDEVs, and it is these VDEVs that provide the redundancy. RAID-Z VDEVs cannot be changed once they are created. You can replace each disk individually, and the VDEV will grow to its new larger size, but you cannot add additional disks to a RAID-Z VDEV At this point, your option is to add an additional VDEV, although best practises dictate that the new VDEV should use an equal number of disks, to avoid uneven performance So, if you started with a 6 disk RAID-Z2, having to add 6 more disks to grow the pool does seem excessive For the best flexibility, use mirrors. If you had used 6 disks as 3 mirrors of 2 disks each, you could then just add 2 more disks at a time. The downside is that using 2TB disks, you’d only have 6TB of usable space, versus the 8TB you would get from those disks in a RAID-Z2 This is the trade-off, mirrors give you better performance and flexibility, but less space efficiency It is important to note that the diagrams in this article make it appear as if all parity information is stored on specific drives. In ZFS parity is spread across all drives. Often times, the data written to the drive is not of a size that can evenly be split across all drives, so the data actually ends up looking like this (http://blog.delphix.com/matt/files/2014/06/RAIDZ.png) The errors as I see it in the original article are: It notes that the hidden cost of ZFS is that if you add a second RAID-Z VDEV, you will have a whole second set of parity drives. While this is a cost, it is the cost of making sure your data is safe. If you had an array with more than 12 drives, it is likely that you would to be able to withstand the failure of the larger number of drives The article does not consider the resilver time. If you did create a configuration with a very wide RAID-Z stripe, the failure of a disk would leave the pool degraded for a much longer time, leaving your pool at risk for that longer period. The article does not consider performance. Two RAID-Z2 VDEVs of 6 disks each will give much better performance than a single VDEV of 10 or 12 disks, especially when it comes to IOPS. *** ZFS Boot Enviroments now availble in the FreeBSD bootloader (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293001) It’s been in phabricator for a while (and PC-BSD), but the support for Boot-Environments has now landed upstream in -CURRENT This work was helped by cross-project collaboration when an IllumOS Developer, Toomas Soome, started porting the FreeBSD loader to IllumOS to replace GRUB there This gives Beastie menu the ability to look at the ZFS disk, and dynamically list boot-environments that it finds. (Much nicer than GRUB, which required a pre-written configuration file) This work was extended further, when Toomas Soome also ported the Beastie Menu to the UEFI loader (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293233) which is now enabled by default for UEFI (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293234) All of these changes are scheduled to be merged back in time for FreeBSD 10.3 as well. There is also a patch being worked on to support booting from ZFS in UEFI (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4515) This is exciting times for doing neat things with ZFS on root, these plus Allans forthcoming GELI support (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4593) will negate the necessity for GRUB on PC-BSD for example (Kris is very happy) *** Interview - Josh Paetzel - email@email (mailto:email@email) / @bsdunix4ever (https://twitter.com/bsdunix4ever) ZFS Support *** News Roundup RetroBSD being tested on ESP32 (http://retrobsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37470) More hardware news for RetroBSD and LiteBSD I don’t know much about this hardware, but there is a lot of discussion in the forum threads about it Not sure what you are supposed to accomplish with only 400kb of ram LITEBSD Brings 4.4BSD to PIC32 (https://hackaday.com/2016/01/04/litebsd-brings-4-4bsd-to-pic32/) It is interesting to see these super-small boards with only 512kb of memory, but will crypto offload support It is also interesting to see talk of 140mbps WiFi, can the processor actually handle that much traffic? BSD Unix-like OS is Resurrected for Embedded IoT Market (http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/bsd-unix-os-resurrected-embedded-iot-market) Related to the above stories, we also have an article about BSD making a resurgence on various Internet of things devices, which mentions both RetroBSD and LiteBSD The article mentions that this is an exciting development for embedded vars who now have an alternative licensed open-source OS to potentially use *** HardenedBSD’s new Binary Updater (https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2015-12-31/introducing-hardenedbsds-new-binary-updater) It looks like there is now another way to update your FreeBSD(hardened) system The post by Shawn Web, details how the new updater will work in future releases of HBSD Right now it looks fairly straight-forward, creating both the base.txz and kernel.txz, along with some data for etcupdate It includes a nice option for the kernel name in the update, allowing different kernels to be installed / updated at will Everything is cryptographically signed and verified using the base system openssl The build system is fairly simple, only requiring “sh/git/openssl” to create the binary updates Planned features also include updating of jails, and ZFS boot-environments *** Sometimes, processors need (BSD) love too (http://functionallyparanoid.com/2016/01/02/sometimes-processors-need-love-too/) We have a blog post from Brian Everly, talking about his long journey into legacy processors and the plans for the future to work on better supporting them on OpenBSD ports He begins with the story of his UNIX journey to today, and why this fostered his love for many of these old (and not so old) architectures, such as Sparc64, PPC32, i386. This journey ended up with the purchase of some legacy hardware (ebay is your friend), and the creation of a database listing the major port blockers on each platform This is the great kind of thing folks can do to step up and help a project, even as a weekend hobby it’s great to run some hardware and help test / fix up issues that other developers maybe don’t interact with as much anymore. *** Beastie Bits The standard MWL disclaimer (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2510) PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTJAN2016 Available (http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testing/2016-January/010350.html) NetBSD pkgsrc-2015Q3 statistics (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2015/12/28/msg016193.html) NetBSD pkgsrc-2015Q4 released (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2016/01/01/msg016213.html) First Reproducible builds conference in Athens (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/reproducible_builds_conference_in_athens) The creator of the original ThinkPad design passes away (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/06/thinkpad_designer_obituary) Feedback/Questions Andrew - High Contrast (http://slexy.org/view/s213iCKLwn) John - FreeNAS followup (http://slexy.org/view/s21ClGePLP) Giorgio - Custom Install (http://slexy.org/view/s21527pkO1) Don - ZFS Slowdowns (http://slexy.org/view/s2jOlCsjkU) Fred - Dual Boot PC-BSD/Linux (http://slexy.org/view/s21uaB0FDU) ***
122: The BSD Black Box
This week on the show, we will be interviewing Alex Rosenberg, to This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Life with an OpenBSD Laptop: A UNIX-lover's tale of migrating away from the Mac. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly (http://www.nycbug.org/event/10356/openbsd_laptop_nycbug_2015.pdf) OpenBSD user Isaac (.ike) Levy details his switch from a Mac to an OpenBSD laptop He covers a bit about selecting hardware and dealing with wifi Talks about binary packages and system upgrades Talks about power management, suspend/resume, battery life Show screenshots of some of his favourite window managers Browsers and email clients are also discussed Things he found missing in OpenBSD: A journaling file system, every unclean shutdown means a full fsck(1) UTF-8/unicode was not everywhere Syncing pictures and contacts to his phone Drawing tools *** DragonFlyBSD matches its Intel kernel graphics driver against Linux 4.0 (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-December/459067.html) The DragonFlyBSD DRM stack continues to rapidly advance, now bringing in support from Linux 4.0! Some of the notable features: Basic Skylake support Panel Self-Refresh (PSR) now supported on Valleyview and Cherryview Preparations for atomic display updates Performance improvements on various GPU families, including Cherryview, Broadwell and Haswell GPU frequencies are now kept at a minimum of 450MHz when possible on Haswell and Broadwell, ensuring a minimum experience level for various types of workloads Improved reset support for gen3/4 GPUs, which should fix some OpenGL crashes on Core 2 and pre-2012 Atom machine Better sound/graphics driver synchronization for audio over hdmi support As usual, small bugfixes and stability improvements here and there *** A BSD Wish List for 2016 (http://fossforce.com/2015/12/bsd-wish-list-2016/) Larry over at Foss Force brings us his wish list for BSD support in 2016. Since he has converted most of his daily desktop usage to PC-BSD, he is specifically wanting support for some desktop applications. Namely Google hangouts and Spotify. This is something which has come up periodically among the PC-BSD community. At the moment most users are dual-booting or using alternatives, like WebRTC. However the Google Hangouts plugin is available for Linux, and perhaps this will encourage some developers to see if we can get it running with the newer Linux stack on -CURRENT. Spotify also has a native Linux version, which may need testing on FreeBSD - CURRENT. It may be closer now, and should be updated on the Wanted Ports Page https://wiki.freebsd.org/WantedPorts *** Hard Float API coming soon by default to armv6 (http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2015/12/hard-float-api-coming-soon-by-default.html) Warner Losh talks about upcoming changes to armv6 on FreeBSD “All the CPUs that FreeBSD supports have hard floating point in them. We've supported hard float for quite some time in the FreeBSD kernel. However, by default, we still use a soft-float ABI.” First, “A new armv6hf (architecture) was created, but that caused some issues with some ports, and the meaning of 'soft float' sadly was ambiguous between the soft-float ABI, and the soft-float libraries that implement floating point when there's no hardware FPU” “Over the spring and summer, I fixed ld.so so that it can load both soft ABI and hard ABI libraries on the same system, depending on markings in the binaries themselves. Soft float ABI and hard float ABI binaries have different flags in the ELF headers, so it is relatively straightforward to know which is which.” “So, in the coming days, I'll commit the first set of changes to move to armv6 as a hard float ABI by default. The kernel doesn't care: it can execute both. The new ld.so will allow you to transition through this change by allowing old, compat soft ABI libraries to co-exist on the system with new hard ABI libraries. This change alone isn't enough, but it will be good to get it out into circulation.” “armv6hf will be removed before FreeBSD 11” A LIBSOFT will be created, similar in concept to the LIB32 available on AMD64 *** Interview - Alex Rosenberg - alexr@leftfield.org (mailto:alexr@leftfield.org) / @alexr (https://twitter.com/alexr) Former Manager of Platform Architecture at Sony *** Beastie Bits Tuesday, Dec 20, 2005 was the release date of the very first bsdtalkpodcast (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2005/12/bsdtalk001-intro-to-bsd.html) Patch: Server side support for TCP FastOpen (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4350) Learn to tame OpenBSD quickly (http://www.openbsdjumpstart.org/) Hardware Accerated iSCSI lands in FreeBSD (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=292740) Settings for full HD resolution on DragonFlyBSD under QEMU/KVM, thanks to reddit user Chapo_Rouge (https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonflybsd/comments/3x4n7u/psa_1920x1080_on_dragonflybsd_44_under_qemukvm/) Patch: An IllumOS developer has been porting the FreeBSD boot loader to replace their old version of GRUB. In doing so, he has also made improvements to the block caching in the boot loader (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4713) A FreeBSD user working at Microsoft talks about Microsoft’s shift to Open Source (http://blog.teleri.net/open-microsoft/) BSDCG Exam Session at FOSDEM'16 (https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/cert_bsdcg/) Schedule for the BSD devroom at FOSDEM'16 (https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/track/bsd/) OpenBSD snapshots are now 5.9 (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=145055446007162&w=2) Notes on making BSD grep faster (http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/12/some-notes-on-fast-grep.html#.VoQKD1JSRhx) Intel’s Platform Application Engineering (PAE) group within the Networking Division (ND) is looking for a Network Software Engineer (https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/jobs/job-search/js2.html?job=782165&src=ML-12080) Did you watch Die Hard at Christmas? Get the Die Hard FreeBSD boot screen: install this file in /boot and set loader_logo="tribute" in /boot/loader.conf (http://locheil.shxd.cx/logo-tribute.4th) Feedback/Questions Jeremy - ZFS without root (http://slexy.org/view/s20CTqtEan) Dan - Getting PC-BSD Media (http://slexy.org/view/s20sNPoDm5) Chris - VMs and FreeBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2hjsVgGBK) Ben - Haswell and IRC (http://slexy.org/view/s21pwYOTHi) Instructions for trying the Haswell patch (https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Update%20i915%20GPU%20driver%20to%20Linux%203.8) Matt - Donation to foundation (http://slexy.org/view/s20vifHCyc) ***
121: All your hyves are belong to us
This week on the show, we are going to be talking to Trent Thompson, This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Review: Guarding the gates with OpenBSD 5.8 (http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20151207#openbsd) Jesse Smith over at DistroWatch treats us this week to a nice review of OpenBSD 5.8, which may be a good introduction for the uninitiated to learn more+ He first walks through some of the various highlights of 5.8, and spends time introducing the reader to a number of the projects that originate from OpenBSD, such as LibreSSL, OpenSSH, doas, the new “file” implementation and W^X support on i386. The article then walks through his impressions of performing a fresh install of 5.8, and then getting up and running in X. He mentions that you may want to check the installation defaults, since on his 8GB VM disk, it didn’t leave enough room for packages on the /usr partition. It also includes a nice heads-up for new users about using the pkg_add command, and where / how you can set the initial repository mirror address. The “doas” command was also praised:“I found I very much appreciated the doas command, its documentation and configuration file. The doas configuration file is much easier to read than sudo's and the available options are well explained. The doas command allowed me to assign root access to a user given the proper password and doas worked as advertised.” A glowing summary as well:“OpenBSD may be very secure, but I think what sets the operating system apart are its documentation and clean system design. It is so easy to find things and understand the configuration of an OpenBSD system. The file system is organized in a clean and orderly manner. It always takes me a while to get accustomed to using OpenBSD, as for me it is a rare occurrence, but once I get settled in I like how straight forward everything is. I can usually find and configure anything on the system without referring to external documents or searching for answers on-line and that is quite an accomplishment for an operating system where virtually everything is done from the command line. “ *** OpenBSD Hackathon Reports Alexander Bluhm: multiprocessor networking (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151212192918) “The next step, we are currently working on, is to remove the big kernel lock from forwarding and routing. mpi@ has been doing this for a long time, but some corner cases were still left. I have written a regression test for handling ARP packets to show that all cases including proxy ARP are still working. Another thing that may happen with lock-free routing is that the interface is destroyed on one CPU while another CPU is working with a route to that interface. We finally got this resolved. The code that destroys the interface has to wait until all routes don't use this interface anymore. I moved the sleep before the destruction of the interface is started, so that the routes can always operate on a completely valid interface structure.” Vincent Gross: ifa_ifwithaddr() (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151215150708) Vincent worked on the function that finds the interface with the specified address, which is used to tell if the machine is the intended recipient of an incoming packet. A number of corner cases existed with broadcast addresses, especially if two interfaces were in the same subnet. This code was moved to the new in_broadcast() Ken Westerback: fdisk, installbot, and dhclient (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151216192843) Reyk Floeter: Hosting a hackathon, vmd, vmctl (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151217134417) “When I heard that Martin Pieuchot (mpi@) was looking for a place to hold another mini-hackathon for three to four people to work on multiprocessor (MP) enhancements of the network stack, I offered to come to our work place in Hannover, Northern Germany. We have space, gear, fast Internet and it is easy to reach for the involved people. Little did I know that it would quickly turn into n2k15, a network hackathon with 20 attendees from all over the world” “If you ever hosted such an event or a party for many guests, you will know the dilemma of the host: you’re constantly concerned about your guests enjoying it, you have to take care about many trivial things, other things will break, and you get little to no time to attend or even enjoy it yourself. Fortunately, I had very experienced and welcomed guests: only one vintage table and a vase broke – the table can be fixed – and I even found some time for hacking myself.” Martin Pieuchot: MP networking (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151218175010) “ We found two kind of MP bugs! There are MP bugs that you fix without even understanding them, and there are MP bugs that you understand but can't fix” Stefan Sperling: initial 802.11n support (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151219160501) *** Hacking the PS4 (https://cturt.github.io/ps4.html) As a followup to the story last week about the PS4 being “jailbroken”, we have a link to further information about how far this project has come along This article also provides some great background information about whats running under the hood of your PS4, including FreeBSD 9, Mono VM and WebKit, with WebKit being the primary point of entry to jailbreak the box. One particular point of interest, was the revelation that early firmware versions did not include ASLR, but it appears ASLR was added sometime around firmware 1.70. (Wonder if they used HardenedBSD’s implementation), and how they can bypass it entirely. “Luckily for us, we aren't limited to just writing static ROP chains. We can use JavaScript to read the modules table, which will tell us the base addresses of all loaded modules. Using these bases, we can then calculate the addresses of all our gadgets before we trigger ROP execution, bypassing ASLR.“ The article also mentions that they can prove that jails are used in some fashion, and provides examples of how they can browse the file system and dump a module list. The kernel exploit in question is SA-15:21 (https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-15:21.amd64.asc) from August of this year. The jailbreaking appears to be against an older version of PS4 firmware that did not include this patch *** Nokia and ARM leading the charge to implement better TCP/IP as part of the 5G standard (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/14/nokia_and_arm_bid_reinvent_tcpip_stack_5g/?page=1) “Many believe that a critical success factor for 5G will be a fully revamped TCP/IP stack, optimized for the massively varied use cases of the next mobile generation, for cloud services, and for virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN). This is the goal of the new OpenFastPath (OFP) Foundation, founded by Nokia Networks, ARM and industrial IT services player Enea. This aims to create an open source TCP/IP stack which can accelerate the move towards SDN in carrier and enterprise networks. Other sign-ups include AMD, Cavium, Freescale, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the ARM-associated open source initiative, Linaro.” “The new fast-path TCP/IP stack will be based on the open source FreeBSD operating system” The general idea is to have a fast, open source, user space networking stack, based on the FreeBSD stack with an “optimised callback-based zero-copy socket API” to keep packet processing in user-space as far as possible It will be interesting to see a little bit more FreeBSD getting into every mobile and cloud based device. *** Interview - Trent Thompson - trentnthompson@gmail.com (trentnthompson@gmail.com) / @pr1ntf (https://twitter.com/pr1ntf) iohyve (https://github.com/pr1ntf/iohyve) *** News Roundup First cut of the FreeBSD modularized TCP stack (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=292309) FreeBSD now has more than one TCP stack, and better yet, you can use more than one at once Each socket pcb is associated with a stack, and it is possible to select a non-default stack with a socket option, so you can make a specific application use an experimental stack, while still defaulting to the known-good stack This should lead to a lot of interesting development and testing, without the level of risk usually associated with modifying the TCP stack The first new module available is ‘fastpath’, which may relate to the Nokia story earlier in the show There are also plans to support changing TCP stacks after establish a session, which might land as early as January *** Faces of FreeBSD : Erin Clark (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2015/12/faces-of-freebsd-2015-erin-clark.html) In this edition of “Faces of FreeBSD” the FreeBSD foundation gives us an introduction to Erin Clark, of our very own iXsystems! Her journey to the BSD family may sound similar to a lot of ours. She first began using Linux / Slackware in the early 2000’s, but in 2009 a friend introduced her to FreeBSD and the rest, as they say, is history. “I use FreeBSD because it is very solid and secure and has a great selection of open source software that can be used with it from the ports collection. I have always appreciated FreeBSD’s networking stack because it makes a great router or network appliance. FreeBSD’s use of the ZFS file system is also very nice - ZFS snapshots definitely saved me a few times. I also like that FreeBSD is very well documented; almost everything you need to know about working with FreeBSD can be found in the FreeBSD Handbook.” Originally a sys admin at iXsystems, where she helped managed PC-BSD desktops among others, now she works on the FreeNAS project as a developer for the CLI interface functionality. *** New Olimex board runs Unix (https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/new-product-in-stock-pic32-retrobsd-open-source-hardware-board-running-unix-like-retrobsd-os/) Looking for some small / embedded gear to mess around with? The Olimex folks have a new Pic32 system now available which runs “RetroBSD” “The current target is Microchip PIC32 microcontroller with 128 kbytes of RAM and 512 kbytes of Flash. PIC32 processor has MIPS M4K architecture, executable data memory and flexible RAM partitioning between user and kernel modes.” RetroBSD isn’t something we’ve covered extensively here on BSDNow, so to bring you up to speed, it is a port of 2.11 BSD Their website lists the following features of this 2.11 refresh:“ Small resource requirements. RetroBSD needs only 128 kbytes of RAM to be up and running user applications. Memory protection. Kernel memory is fully protected from user application using hardware mechanisms. Open functionality. Usually, user application is fixed in Flash memory - but in case of RetroBSD, any number of applications could be placed into SD card, and run as required. Real multitasking. Standard POSIX API is implemented (fork, exec, wait4 etc). Development system on-board. It is possible to have C compiler in the system, and to recompile the user application (or the whole operating system) when needed.“ For those looking into BSD history, or wanting something small and exotic to play with this may fit the bill nicely. *** OpenSource.com reviews PCBSD (https://opensource.com/life/15/12/bsd-desktop-user-review-pc-bsd) Joshua over at opensource.com writes up a review of PC-BSD (10.2 we assume) Some of the highlights mentioned, include the easy to use graphical installer, but he does mention we should update the sorting of languages. (Good idea!) Along with including nice screenshots, it also covers the availability of various DE’s / WM’s, and talks a fair amount about the AppCafe and Control Panel utilities. “Thanks to being featured on PC-BSD's desktop, the PC-BSD Handbook is easily located by even the most novice user. There is no need to search through the system's installed applications for a manual, or relying solely on the help documentation for individual components. While not comprehensive, PC-BSD's handbook does a good job as striking a balance between concise and thorough. It contains enough information to help and provides detailed instructions for the topics it covers, but it avoids providing so much information that it overwhelms” *** BeastieBits Gandi introduces support for FreeBSD on their IaaS platform, with both ZFS and UFS based images available (https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2015-12-23/6473-introducing_freebsd_and_trimming_down_the_official_image_list/) Funny commit message from the Linux kernel (http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f076ef44a44d02ed91543f820c14c2c7dff53716) FreeBSD Journal, Nov/Dec 2015 (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/journal/vol2_no6) Feedback/Questions Zafer - NetBSD on DO (http://slexy.org/view/s2MPhvSFja) Richard - FreeNAS Replication (http://slexy.org/view/s2hhJktjRu) Winston - Android ADP (http://slexy.org/view/s2VK83ILlK) Alex - Multiple Domains (http://slexy.org/view/s20UVY8Bs5) Randy - Getting Involved (http://slexy.org/view/s20Cb076tu) Craig - zprezto (http://slexy.org/view/s2HNQ2aB42) ***
120: I’m talking about the man in the middle
This week on BSDNow, we are going to be talking to Pawel about how his This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Note the recent passing of 2 members of the BSD community Juergen Lock / Nox (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib-develinmemoriam.html) Benjamin Perrault / creepingfur (https://twitter.com/michaeldexter/status/676290499389485057) Memories from Michael Dexter (http://pastebin.com/4BQ5uVsT) Additional Memories (http://www.filis.org/rip_ben.txt) Benjamin and Allan at Ben’s local bar (http://www.allanjude.com/bsd/bp/IMG_20151101_161727-auto.jpg) Benjamin treated Allan and Michael Dexter to their first ever Bermese food (http://www.allanjude.com/bsd/bp/IMG_20151101_191344-auto.jpg) Benjamin enjoying the hallway track at EuroBSDCon 2015 (http://www.allanjude.com/bsd/bp/IMG_20151003_105457-auto.jpg) *** NGINX as Reverse Proxy for Apache on FreeBSD 10.2 (http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/install-nginx-reverse-proxy-apache-freebsd-10-2/) A tutorial on setting up NGINX as a reverse proxy for Apache Sometimes your users or application require some feature of Apache, that cannot be easily replicated in NGINX, like .htaccess files or a custom apache module In addition, because the default worker model in Apache does not accept new work until it is finished sending the request, a user with a slow connection can tie down that worker for a long time With NGINX as a reverse proxy, it will receive the data from the Apache worker over localhost, freeing that worker to answer the next request, while NGINX takes care of sending the data to the user The tutorial walks through the setup, which is very easy on modern FreeBSD One could also add mod_rpaf2 to the Apache, to securely pass through the users’ real IP address for use by Apache’s logging and the PHP scripts *** FreeBSD and FreeNAS in Business by Randy Westlund (http://bsdmag.org/freebsd_freenas/) The story of how a Tent & Awning company switched from managing orders with paper, to a computerized system backed by a FreeNAS “At first, I looked at off-the-shelf solutions. I found a number of cloud services that were like Dropbox, but with some generic management stuff layered on top. Not only did these all feel like a poor solution, they were very expensive. If the provider were to go out of business, what would happen to my dad’s company?” “Fortunately, sourcing the hardware and setting up the OS was the easiest part; I talked to iXsystems. I ordered a FreeNAS Mini and a nice workstation tower” “I have r2d2 (the tower, which hosts the database) replicating ZFS snapshots to c3po (the FreeNAS mini), and the data is backed up off-site regularly. This data is absolutely mission-critical, so I can’t take any risks. I’m glad I have ZFS on my side.” “I replaced Dropbox with Samba on c3po, and the Windows machines in the office now store important data on the NAS, rather than their local drives.” “I also replaced their router with an APU board running pfSense and replaced their PPTP VPN with OpenVPN and certificate authorization.” “FreeBSD (in three different incarnations) helped me focus on improving the company’s workflow without spending much time on the OS. And now there’s an awning company that is, in a very real sense, powered by FreeBSD.” *** Tutorial, Windows running under bhyve (http://pr1ntf.xyz/windowsunderbhyve.html) With the recent passing of the world’s foremost expert on running Windows under bhyve on FreeBSD, this tutorial will help you get up to speed “The secret sauce to getting Windows running under bhyve is the new UEFI support. This is pretty great news, because when you utilize UEFI in bhyve, you don't have to load the operating system in bhyveload or grub-bhyve first.” The author works on iohyve, and wanted to migrate away from VirtualBox, the only thing stopping that was support for Windows Guests iohyve now has support for managing Windows VMs The tutorial uses a script to extract the Windows Server 2008 ISO and set up AutoUnattend.xml to handle the installation of Windows, including setting the default administrator password, this is required because there is no graphical console yet The AutoUnattended setup also includes setting the IP address, laying out the partitions, and configuring the serial console A second script is then used to make a new ISO with the modifications The user is directed to fetch the UEFI firmware and some other bits Then iohyve is used to create the Windows VM The first boot uses the newly created ISO to install Windows Server 2008 Subsequent boots start Windows directly from the virtual disk Remote Desktop is enabled, so the user can manage the Windows Server graphically, using FreeRDP or a Windows client iohyve can then be used to take snapshots of the machine, and clone it *** BSD Router Project has released 1.58 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsdrp/files/BSD_Router_Project/1.58/) The BSD Router project has announced the release of version 1.58 with some notable new features Update to FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE-p8 Disabled some Chelsio Nic features not used by a router Added new easy installation helper option, use with “system install ” Added the debugging symbols for userland Includes the iperf package, and flashrom package, which allows updating system BIOS on supported boxes IMPORTANT: Corrects an important UFS label bug introduced on 1.57. If you are running 1.57, you will need to fetch their fixlabel.sh script before upgrading to 1.58 *** OPNsense 15.7.22 Released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-15-7-22-released/) An update to OPNsense has landed this week which includes the important updates to OpenSSL 1.0.2e and LibreSSL 2.2.5 A long-standing annoying bug with filter reload timeouts has finally been identified and sorted out as well, allowing the functionality to run quickly and “glitch free” again. Some newer ports for curl (7.46), squid (3.5.12) and lighttpd (1.4.38) have also been thrown in for good measure Some other minor UI fixes have also been included as well With the holidays coming up, if you are still running a consumer router, this may be a good time to convert over to a OPNsense or PFsense box and get yourself ready for the new year. *** iXsystems iXSystems releases vCenter Web Client Plug-in for TrueNAS (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/2015/12/vcenter-web-client-plug-in-for-truenas-now-available/) Interview - Pawel Jakub Dawidek - pjd@FreeBSD.org (mailto:pjd@FreeBSD.org) News Roundup Developer claims the PS4 has been jail-broken (http://www.networkworld.com/article/3014714/security/developer-claims-ps4-officially-jailbroken.html) While not exactly a well-kept secret, the PS4’s proprietary “OrbOS” is FreeBSD based. Using this knowledge and a Kernel exploit, developer CTurt (https://twitter.com/CTurtE/) claims he was able jailbreak a WebKit process and gain access to the system. He has posted a small tease to GitHub, detailing some of the information gleaned from the exploit, such as PID list and root FS dump As such with these kinds of jailbreaks, he already requested that users stop sending him requests about game piracy, but the ability to hack on / run homebrew apps on the PS4 seems intriguing *** Sepherosa Ziehau is looking for testers if you have a em(4), emx(4), or igb(4) Intel device (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2015-December/228461.html) DragonFly Testers wanted! Sephe has posted a request for users of the em(4), emx(4) and igb(4) intel drivers to test his latest branch and report back results He mentions that he has tested the models 82571, 82574 and 82573 (em/emx); 82575, 82576, 82580 and i350 specifically, so if you have something different, I’m sure he would be much appreciative of the help. It looks like the em(4) driver has been updated to 7.5.2, and igb(4) 2.4.3, and adds support for the I219-LM and I219-V NICS. *** OpenBSD Xen Support (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144933933119525&w=2) Filed under the “Ohh, look what’s coming soon” section, it appears that patches are starting to surface for OpenBSD Xen DOMU support. For those who aren’t up on their Xen terminology, DomU is the unprivileged domain (I.E. Guest mode) Right now the patch exists at the link above, and adds a new (commented out) device to the GENERIC kernel, but this gives Xen users something new to watch for updates to. *** Thinkpad Backlit Keyboard support being worked on (http://freshbsd.org/commit/openbsd/b355449caa22e7bb6c460f7a647874836ef604f0) Another reason why Lenovo / ThinkPads are some of the best laptops currently to use with BSD, the kettenis over at the OpenBSD project has committed a patch to enable support for the “ThinkLight” For those who don’t know, this is the little light that helps illuminate the laptop’s keyboard under low-light situations. While the initial patch only supports the “real-deal” ThinkLight, he does mention that support will be added soon for the others on ThinkPads No sysctl’s to fiddle with, this works directly with the ACPI / keyboard function keys directly, nice! *** Deadline is approaching for Submissions of Tutorial Proposals for AsiaBSDCon 2016 (https://2016.asiabsdcon.org/cfp.html) Call for Papers for BSDCAN 2016 now open (http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/papers.php) + The next two major BSD conferences both have their CFP up right now. First up is AsiaBSDCon in Tokyo from March 10th-13th, followed by BSDCan in Ottawa, June 8th-11th. + If you are working on anything interesting in the BSD community, this is a good way to get the word out about your project, plus the conference pays for Hotel / Travel. + If you can make it to both, DO SO, you won’t regret it. Both Allan and Kris will be attending and we would look forward to meeting you. iohyve lands in ports (https://github.com/pr1ntf/iohyve) (http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/iohyve/) + Something we’ve mentioned in passing has taken its first steps in becoming reality for users! “iohyve” has now landed in the FreeBSD ports tree + While it shares a similar name to “iocage” its not directly related, different developers and such. However it does share a very similar syntax and some principles of ZFS usage + The current version is 0.7, but it already has a rather large feature set + Among the current features are ISO Management, resource management, snapshot support (via ZFS), and support for OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux (Using grub-bhyve port) BeastieBits hammer mount is forced noatime by default (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2015-November/228445.html) Show your support for FreeBSD (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2015/12/show-your-support-for-freebsd.html) OpenBSD running in an Amazon EC2 t2.micro (https://gist.github.com/reyk/e23fde95354d4bc35a40) NetBSD's 2015Q4 Package freeze is coming (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2015/12/05/msg016059.html) ‘Screenshots from Developers’ that we covered previously from 2002, updated for 2015 (https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/) Feedback/Questions (slexy was down when I made these, I only did 3, since the last is really long, save rest for next week) Mark - BSD laptops (http://pastebin.com/g0DnFG95) Jamie - zxfer (http://pastebin.com/BNCmDgTe) Anonymous - Long Story (http://pastebin.com/iw0dXZ9P) ***
119: There be Dragons, BSD Dragons anyway
This week on BSDNow - It’s getting close to christmas and the This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines n2k15 hackathon reports (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151208172029) tedu@ worked on rebound, malloc hardening, removing legacy code “I don't usually get too involved with the network stack, but sometimes you find yourself at a network hackathon and have to go with the flow. With many developers working in the same area, it can be hard to find an appropriate project, but fortunately there are a few dusty corners in networking land that can be swept up without too much disturbance to others.” “IPv6 is the future of networking. IPv6 has also been the future of networking for 20 years. As a result, a number of features have been proposed, implemented, then obsoleted, but the corresponding code never quite gets deleted. The IPsec stack has followed a somewhat similar trajectory” “I read through various networking headers in search of features that would normally be exposed to userland, but were instead guarded by ifdef _KERNEL. This identified a number of options for setsockopt() that had been officially retired from the API, but the kernel code retained to provide ABI compatibility during a transition period. That transition occurred more than a decade ago. Binary programs from that era no longer run for many other reasons, and so we can delete support. It's only a small improvement, but it gradually reduces the amount of code that needs to be reviewed when making larger more important changes” Ifconfig txpower got similar treatment, as no modern WiFi driver supports it Support for Ethernet Trailers, RFC 893 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc893), enabled zero copy networking on a VAX with 512 byte hardware pages, the feature was removed even before OpenBSD was founded, but the ifconfig option was still in place Alexandr Nedvedicky (sashan@) worked on MP-Safe PF (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151207143819) “I'd like to thank Reyk for hackroom and showing us a Christmas market. It was also my pleasure to meet Mr. Henning in person. Speaking of Henning, let's switch to PF hacking.” “mpi@ came with patch (sent to priv. list only currently), which adds a new lock for PF. It's called PF big lock. The big PF lock essentially establishes a safe playground for PF hackers. The lock currently covers all pftest() function. The pftest() function parts will be gradually unlocked as the work will progress. To make PF big lock safe few more details must be sorted out. The first of them is to avoid recursive calls to pftest(). The pftest() could get entered recursively, when packet hits block rule with return-* action. This is no longer the case as ipsend() functions got introduced (committed change has been discussed privately). Packets sent on behalf of kernel are dispatched using softnet task queue now. We still have to sort out pfroute() functions. The other thing we need to sort out with respect to PF big lock is reference counting for statekey, which gets attached to mbuf. Patch has been sent to hackers, waiting for OK too. The plan is to commit reference counting sometimes next year after CVS will be unlocked. There is one more patch at tech@ waiting for OK. It brings OpenBSD and Solaris PF closer to each other by one tiny little step.” *** ACM Queue: Challenges of Memory Management on Modern NUMA System (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2852078) “Modern server-class systems are typically built as several multicore chips put together in a single system. Each chip has a local DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) module; together they are referred to as a node. Nodes are connected via a high-speed interconnect, and the system is fully coherent. This means that, transparently to the programmer, a core can issue requests to its node's local memory as well as to the memories of other nodes. The key distinction is that remote requests will take longer, because they are subject to longer wire delays and may have to jump several hops as they traverse the interconnect. The latency of memory-access times is hence non-uniform, because it depends on where the request originates and where it is destined to go. Such systems are referred to as NUMA (non-uniform memory access).” So, depending what core a program is running on, it will have different throughput and latency to specific banks of memory. Therefore, it is usually optimal to try to allocate memory from the bank of ram connected to the CPU that the program is running on, and to keep that program running on that same CPU, rather than moving it around There are a number of different NUMA strategies, including: Fixed, memory is always allocated from a specific bank of memory First Touch, which means that memory is allocated from the bank connected to the CPU that the application is running on when it requests the memory, which can increase performance if the application remains on that same CPU, and the load is balanced optimally Round Robin or Interleave, where memory is allocated evenly, each allocation coming from the next bank of memory so that all banks are used. This method can provide more uniform performance, because it ensures that all memory accesses have the same change to be local vs remote. If even performance is required, this method can be better than something more focused on locality, but that might fail and result in remote access AutoNUMA, A kernel task routinely iterates through the allocated memory of each process and tallies the number of memory pages on each node for that process. It also clears the present bit on the pages, which will force the CPU to stop and enter the page-fault handler when the page is next accessed. In the page-fault handler it records which node and thread is trying to access the page before setting the present bit and allowing execution to continue. Pages that are accessed from remote nodes are put into a queue to be migrated to that node. After a page has already been migrated once, though, future migrations require two recorded accesses from a remote node, which is designed to prevent excessive migrations (known as page bouncing). The paper also introduces a new strategy: Carrefour is a memory-placement algorithm for NUMA systems that focuses on traffic management: placing memory so as to minimize congestion on interconnect links or memory controllers. Trying to strike a balance between locality, and ensuring that the interconnect between a specific pair of CPUs does not become congested, which can make remote accesses even slower Carrefour uses three primary techniques: Memory collocation, Moving memory to a different node so that accesses will likely be local. Replication, Copying memory to several nodes so that threads from each node can access it locally (useful for read-only and read-mostly data). Interleaving, Moving memory such that it is distributed evenly among all nodes. FreeBSD is slowly gaining NUMA capabilities, and currently supports: fixed, round-robin, first-touch. Additionally, it also supports fixed-rr, and first-touch-rr, where if the memory allocation fails, because the fixed domain or first-touch domain is full, it falls back to round-robin. For more information, see numa(4) and numa_setaffinity(2) on 11-CURRENT *** Is that Linux? No it is PC-BSD (http://fossforce.com/2015/12/linux-no-pc-bsd/) Larry Cafiero continues to make some news about his switch to PC-BSD from Linux. This time in an blog post titled “Is that Linux? No, its PC-BSD” he describes an experience out and about where he was asked what is running on his laptop, and was unable for the first time in 9 years to answer, it’s Linux. The blog then goes on to mention his experience up to now running PC-BSD, how the learning curve was fairly easy coming from a Linux background. He mentions that he has noticed an uptick in performance on the system, no specific benchmarks but this “Linux was fast enough on this machine. But in street racing parlance, with PC-BSD I’m burning rubber in all four gears.” The only major nits he mentions is having trouble getting a font to switch in FireFox, and not knowing how to enable GRUB quiet mode. (I’ll have to add a knob back for that) *** Dual booting OS X and OpenBSD with full disk encryption (https://gist.github.com/jcs/5573685) New GPT and UEFI support allow OpenBSD to co-exist with Mac OS X without the need for Boot Camp Assistant or Hybrid MBRs This tutorial walks the read through the steps of installing OpenBSD side-by-side with Mac OS X First the HFS+ partition is shrunk to make room for a new OpenBSD partition Then the OpenBSD installer is run, and the available free space is setup as an encrypted softraid The OpenBSD installer will add itself to the EFI partition Rename the boot loader installed by OpenBSD and replace it with rEFInd, so you will get a boot menu allowing you to select between OpenBSD and OS X *** Interview - Paul Goyette - pgoyette@netbsd.org (mailto:pgoyette@netbsd.org) NetBSD Testing and Modularity *** iXsystems iXsystems Wins Press and Industry Analyst Accolades in Best in Biz Awards 2015 (http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2015/12/08/ixsystems-wins-press-and-industry-analyst-accolades-best-biz-awards-2015) *** News Roundup HOWTO: L2TP/IPSec with OpenBSD (https://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=2019) *BSD contributor Sevan Janiyan provides an update on setting up a road-warrior VPN This first article walks through setting up the OpenBSD server side, and followup articles will cover configuring various client systems to connect to it The previous tutorial on this configuration is from 2012, and things have improved greatly since then, and is much easier to set up now The tutorial includes PF rules, npppd configuration, and how to enable isakmpd and ipsec L2TP/IPSec is chosen because most operating systems, including Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android, include a native L2TP client, rather than requiring some additional software to be installed *** DragonFly 4.4 Released (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release44/) DragonFly BSD has made its 4.4 release official this week! A lot of big changes, but some of the highlights Radeon / i915 DRM support for up to Linux Kernel 3.18 Proper collation support for named locales, shared back to FreeBSD 11-CURRENT Regex Support using TRE “As a consequence of the locale upgrades, the original regex library had to be forced into POSIX (single-byte) mode always. The support for multi-byte characters just wasn't there. ” …. “TRE is faster, more capable, and supports multibyte characters, so it's a nice addition to this release.” Other noteworthy, iwm(4) driver, CPU power-saving improvements, import ipfw from FreeBSD (named ipfw3) An interesting tidbit is switching to the Gold linker (http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/15/12/04/2351241/dragonflybsd-44-switches-to-the-gold-linker-by-default) *** Guide to install Ajenti on Nginx with SSL on FreeBSD 10.2 (http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/install-ajenti-nginx-ssl-freebsd-10-2/) Looking for a webmin-like interface to control your FreeBSD box? Enter Ajenti, and today we have a walkthrough posted on how to get it setup on a FreeBSD 10.2 system. The walkthrough is mostly straightforward, you’ll need a FreeBSD box with root, and will need to install several packages / ports initially. Because there is no native package (yet), it guides you through using python’s PIP installer to fetch and get Ajenti running. The author links to some pre-built rc.d scripts and other helpful config files on GitHub, which will further assist in the process of making it run on FreeBSD. Ajenti by itself may not be the best to serve publically, so it also provides instructions on how to protect the connection by serving it through nginx / SSL, a must-have if you plan on using this over unsecure networks. *** BSDCan 2016 CFP is up! (http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/papers.php) BSDCan is the biggest North American BSD conference, and my personal favourite The call for papers is now out, and I would like to see more first-time submitters this year If you do anything interesting with or on a BSD, please write a proposal Are the machines you run BSD on bigger or smaller than what most people have? Tell us about it Are you running a big farm that does something interesting? Is your university research using BSD? Do you have an idea for a great new subsystem or utility? Have you suffered through some horrible ordeal? Make sure the rest of us know the best way out when it happens to us. Did you build a radar that runs NetBSD? A telescope controlled by FreeBSD? Have you run an ISP at the north pole using Jails? Do you run a usergroup and have tips to share? Have you combined the features and tools of a BSD in a new and interesting way? Don’t have a talk to give? Teach a tutorial! The conference will arrange your air travel and hotel, and you’ll get to spend a few great days with the best community on earth Michael W. Lucas’s post about the 2015 proposals and rejections (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2325) *** Beastie Bits OpenBSD's lightweight web server now in FreeBSD's ports tree (http://www.freshports.org/www/obhttpd/) Stephen Bourne's NYCBUG talk is online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI_bZhV7wpI) Looking for owner to FreeBSDWiki (http://freebsdwiki.net/index.php/Main_Page) HOWTO: OpenBSD Mail Server (http://frozen-geek.net/openbsd-email-server-1/) A new magic getopt library (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-12-06-magic-getopt.html) PXE boot OpenBSD from OpenWRT (http://uggedal.com/journal/pxe-boot-openbsd-from-openwrt/) Supporting the OpenBSD project (http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/227054) Feedback/Questions Zachary - FreeBSD Jails (http://slexy.org/view/s20pbRLRRz) Robert - Iocage help! (http://slexy.org/view/s2jGy34fy2) Kjell - Server Management (http://slexy.org/view/s20Ht8JfpL) Brian - NAS Setup (http://slexy.org/view/s2GYtvd7hU) Mike - Radius Followup (http://slexy.org/view/s21EVs6aUg) Laszlo - Best Stocking Ever (http://slexy.org/view/s205zZiJCv) ***
118: BSD is go for Launch
Coming up on BSDNow - We know init systems have been all the rage This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Interview with Renato Westphal (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151123113224&mode=expanded) An interview with Brazilian OpenBSD developer Renato Westphal He describes how he first got into OpenBSD, working on a University-Industry partnership program and looking to deploy LDP (Label Distribution Protocol) for MPLS. He ported OpenBSDs ldpd(8) to Linux, but then contributed his bug fixes and improvements back to OpenBSD When asked if he was motivated to replace closed-source router implementations with OpenBSD: “Well, I don't administer any network, I work full time as a programmer. I have some friends however that succeeded replacing closed vendor solutions with OpenBSD boxes and that for sure motivates me to keep doing what I'm doing. My biggest motivation, however, is the challenge of resolving complex problems writing trivially simple code that is both secure and efficient.” They also go on to discuss some of the interesting features of EIGRP, and developing eigrpd(8) What do you think is missing from routing in OpenBSD: “Implementing new features and protocols while they are in their draft stage in IETF. I'd like to see OpenBSD as the reference platform for the development of new routing and networking technologies in general” *** Let’s Encrypt on a FreeBSD NGINX reverse proxy (http://savagedlight.me/2015/11/24/lets-encrypt-on-a-freebsd-nginx-reverse-proxy/) We have a neat guide/story today on how to setup the “Let’s Encrypt” certificates on a FreeBSD / nginx reverse proxy Backstory: For those who don’t know, “Let’s Encrypt” (https://letsencrypt.org) is a new Certificate Authority, which will allow you to create free and automated certificates. They have been in closed beta for several months now, and will be opening to a public beta Dec 3rd (tomorrow) This guide is particularly timely, since by the time most of you are watching this episode, the public beta will be up and running. Most of the instructions are fairly straight-forward. She starts by installing the lets-encrypt package from ports/pkg and modifying her nginx with a ‘catch-all’ vhost that re-directs traffic to the https versions of a site. With that done, the certificate creation is just a few commands to get started, in which she shows creating a cert for multiple domains As a bonus! She includes a nice renewal script which can be run from cron. It will monitor the certs daily, and renew it when it’s 14 days from expiring, or throw an error for somebody to look at. *** Mike Larkins OpenBSD vmm subsystem now in tree (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144822644214614&w=2) An openBSD native hypervisor has taken another step closer to reality, with Mike Larkin pushing the initial bits of “vmm” into the base kernel/world He mentions in the commit message that it still needs a lot of work, and as such is disabled by default. However for the adventurous among you, it can be turned on and tested Right now there is no BIOS, and as such it can only be used to boot other OpenBSD instances, although he mentions other BSD’s could be supported fairly quickly (He did a 1 hour port to bootstrap NetBSD) No big documentation expected for this release, since there is so much ongoing churn. Take a look at the man page for details on getting started. *** The story of how Yahoo switched to FreeBSD (http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html) Yahoo originally started running on SunOS, but quickly found it not able to cope with the high frequency of HTTP requests “Having spend many frustrating hours trying to install other PC OS's, I was a bit skeptical. I had no intention of spending three days trying to install yet another one. To my surprise I went to the FreeBSD Web site, downloaded the floppy boot image, booted a PC with the created floppy, answered a few install questions, and a few minutes later FreeBSD was installing over the Net. The real surprise was when I came back later to a fully configured system that actually worked.” “If anything had gone wrong with that install it would likely been the end of that trial. Luckily for us that it was the easiest and most painless OS installs I had ever experienced.” Just that easily, Yahoo might never have ended up on FreeBSD “A couple of days later we added a FreeBSD box to our cluster of Web servers. Not only did it out-perform the rest of our machines, but it was more stable.” From my understanding of stories told over dinner, Yahoo had a few very important perl scripts, and they tended to crash on Linux, but kept running without issue on FreeBSD Related hackernews thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288) *** iXsystems iXsystem's recap of LISA 2015 (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/lisa-2015/) *** Interview - Mark Heily - mark@heily.com (mailto:mark@heily.com) / @MarkHeily (https://twitter.com/MarkHeily) relaunchd (https://github.com/mheily/relaunchd) *** News Roundup Inline Intrusion Prevision System is an upcoming OPNSense Feature (https://opnsense.org/inline-intrusion-prevention/) The next OPNSense release, 16.1 is around the corner and today we have a sneak peek at their new Inline Intrusion Prevention system Suricata working with Netmap 2.1 enabled version, which allows Deep Packet Inspection of traffic. Such as looking at each packet individually and only blocking specific ones. They use the example of blocking Warcraft (oh noes!) Enabling this feature is just a simple mouse-click away, and various default rules are included as part of the Emerging Threats Community rules. *** Matthew Dillion working on Hardlinks in Hammer2 (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-November/458763.html) We have an interesting commit from Matthew Dillon for Hammer2, specifically targeted at hard-links The backstory he gives us: “The H2 design has had a long-standing problem of losing track of hardlinks when intermediate directories are renamed, breaking the common-parent-directory design for the inode target.” The implemented fix was one which instead places the hardlink target in the first common parent directory, which is marked with “xlink” via chflag If no parent directory is marked “xlink”, it will fall-through instead to the root of the mount They also modified their installworld to set “/” /usr/,/var/,/home/ as “xlink” flagged This prevents moving hard-links across these directories, but is similar to dealing with multiple partitions / datasets already. *** Japan's NetBSD User Group showed off some NetBSD machines at the 2015 Tokushima Open Source Conference (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-November/016403.html) It’s been a little while since we’ve shown off a bunch of odd devices running NetBSD, but we have an update from the 2015 Tokushima Open Source Conference. This time around, we have pictures of the booth, as well as a variety of oddities such as: ODroid-C1 / Sharp X68030 Sharp NetWalker Sharp WZero3 (Cell phone) Give them a look, this time around they have nice cards pictured which details the hardware being used (in english none the less!) *** One of the three OpenBSD users Blog Post by Adam Wolk (http://blog.tintagel.pl/2015/11/22/one-of-the-three-openbsd-users.html) An OpenBSD user comments on a recent interaction with the syncthing project (a dropbox like alternative) The application has an auto-update feature (which doesn’t mix well with package systems in the first place), but it doesn’t work on OpenBSD because there is no /proc/curproc/file to determine the filename of the executable. This is a trivially easy task, but when the bug was reported, syncthings response was “Maybe one of the three (https://data.syncthing.net/#metrics) OpenBSD users feel strongly enough about this to propose a patch. :D” Part of the issue is that many users (especially the type that would run OpenBSD) opt out of reporting metrics, so OpenBSD is under-represented in the metrics the project developers are basing their decisions on Maybe someone can post a patch to solve the problem. While FreeBSD can provide a linux procfs, it would be better to use a more portable way to get the location of the process binary *** BeastieBits DragonFly BSD 4.4 RC branch created (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-November/458818.html) HOWTO: NFS booting bhyve (http://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/39/) DragonFly BSD is looking for a 4.4 RC image by the end of November (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/kernel/2015-November/175040.html) Support for Atheros QCA953x "Honeybee" has been added to FreeBSD (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=290910) Top updated in DragonflyBSD to allow the 'c' command (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-November/458692.html) FreeBSD textbook makes appearance on the 6pm news in the Netherlands 12:49 (http://www.npo.nl/nos-journaal/30-11-2015/POW_00941854) SemiBug gives a recap of its Inaugural meeting and its plans for future meetups (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2495) *** Feedback/Questions Adam - GELI on USB (http://slexy.org/view/s204HRCPdR) Noble - Radius on FreeBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s21q2WWisr) Jim - Backporting Wifi Code (http://slexy.org/view/s21L59OGyF) Mohammad - Zombies! (http://slexy.org/view/s20nWwzTGS) Miguel - ScaleEngine BTS (http://slexy.org/view/s201Kpd4GX) ***
117: The Cantrill Strikes Back: ...
This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System by Siju George (http://bsdmag.org/siju_george/) We have a new article this week by Siju George posted over at BSDMag, talking about his reasons for using DragonFlyBSD in production. He ran through periods of using both Free/OpenBSD, but different reasons led him away from each. Specifically problems doing port upgrades on FreeBSD, and the time required to do fsck / raid parity checks on OpenBSD. During his research, he had heard about the HAMMER file-system, but didn’t know of anybody running it in production. After some mailing list conversions, and pointers from Matthew Dillon, he took the plunge and switched. Now he has fallen in love with the operating system, some of the key strengths he notes at: Rolling-Release model, which can be upgraded every few weeks or whenever he has the time No time-consuming fsck after a unclean shutdown No RAID parity checks while still having redundancy Able to add volumes to HAMMER on the fly He also mentions looking forward to HAMMER2, and its potential for easy clustering support, along with eventual CARP implementation so he can run two systems on the same IP. *** The Devil & BSD - Larry Cafiero (http://fossforce.com/2015/11/devil-bsd-leaving-linux-behind/) A story that has been making the rounds on social media is by Larry Cafiero, on his reasons for deciding to switch from Linux over to the BSD side of things. While most of the reasons are over the conflicts surrounding behavior by Linux leaders towards those in the community, he does mention that he has converted his main workstation over to PC-BSD. According to Larry, “With a couple of hours of adding backup files and tweaking (augmented by a variety of “oh, look” moments which could easily make me the ADHD Foundation Poster Boy), it looks exactly like my personally modified Korora 22 Xfce which graced the machine earlier. “ He also gave a great compliment to the quality of the docs / applications in PC-BSD: “In addition, you have to like a operating system which gives you a book — in this case, the PC-BSD Handbook — which should be the gold standard of documentation. It’s enviable, as in, “man, I wish I had written that.” Also programs like AppCafe provide a plethora of FOSS software, so there’s no shortage of programs. Side by side, there’s nothing on the Linux side of things that is lacking on the BSD side of things.” Regardless the initial reason for the switch, we are glad to have him and any other switchers join us on the BSD side of FOSS. *** New resource for BSD-schoolin’ (http://teachbsd.org/) “The initial repository (https://github.com/teachbsd/course) contains all of the material for the practitioner and masters style courses as well as a PDF for the teaching guide. All of the material is licensed under a BSD doc team license, also visible in the repo and on the github site.” “we expect all other work, including the extension of the practitioner course to 5 days, and the adaptation of the graduate course to undergraduates will be in the github repo” “Our goal now is to recruit a small number of universities to partner with us to teach this material. We will keep you posted on our progress.” We are working on getting an interview lined up to talk more about this project If I somehow find the time, I am try to contribute towards a sysadmin course similar to what I used to teach at an Arts&Tech College here in Canada *** A Few thoughts on OpenBSD 5.8 (http://lippard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-few-thoughts-on-openbsd-58.html) A user details their thoughts, reactions, and concerns after upgrading to OpenBSD 5.8 Among the changes: sudo was removed and replaced as doas. The user decided to make the switch, but ran into a bug with line continuation (\ to escape newline to continue a long line) The removal of TCP Wrappers support from ssh - this caused a number of rules in hosts.allow to no longer be respected. The FreeBSD port of openssh-portable has a patch to readd TCP wrappers because many people find it useful, including myself, when the ssh is in a jail and cannot run a firewall The removal of the pfrules= rc.conf variable. “I used to just put the default pf.conf rules file in place with each release and upgrade, and keep my changes in a pf.conf.local file that was specified in the pfrules variable. The effect was that from the period after the upgrade until I noticed the change, my systems were using the default rules and thus more exposed than they were supposed to be” This is what is often called a “POLA Violation”, Policy of Least Astonishment. When deciding what the system should do after some change or new feature is introduced, it should be the thing that will be the least “surprising” to the user. Having your firewall rules suddenly not apply, is surprising. “A minor annoying change that was made in 5.8 was putting the file /var/unbound/db/root.key into /etc/changelist, so that the file gets checked daily by the security script. The issue with this is that if you are actually using unbound with DNSSEC, this file changes daily, though only in the comments” It is very helpful to see a list of feedback like this after a release, so that the next release can be better I would be interested in seeing similar feedback for the other BSDs *** Interview - Bryan Cantrill - @bcantrill (https://twitter.com/bcantrill) Linux Interface Rants News Roundup FreeBSD AMI building AMI - Colin’s Corner (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-11-21-FreeBSD-AMI-builder-AMI.html) Colin Percival (Of TarSnap Fame) has brought us a new article this week on how to create your own custom EC2 AMI builds. This new tool and instructions allows the creation of AMI files, without needing to go through the hassle of doing a fresh FreeBSD release build each time. Essentially it works similar to Colin’s previous “de-penguinator” utility, by running a FreeBSD in a memory instance, allowing the disk to be unmounted and prepped for becoming an AMI. The hope is that this new work allows easier creation of a new variety of “customized” FreeBSD instances, for end users to download and deploy at will. *** Peter Hessler on OpenBSD / OpenBGPd (https://ripe71.ripe.net/archives/video/1200/) Last week a new video landed of Peter Hessler giving us a status update on OpenBSD tech, and OpenBGPd specifically Of interest, he notes that LibreSSL is being used in iOS / OSX, and of course PF is used all over, Apple, BSD, Solaris and even a Windows port! OpenNTPD gets a mention as well, still ZERO CVEs for the lifetime of the project On the OpenBGPd side, it is considered production ready, so no reason to hold back deployment Very “feature-complete”, able to handle Edge Router, Route server, Multi-RIB. Slew of optional features like route reflector, looking glass, mrt dumps, mpls / mpls vpn. Bugs fixed, crashers, memory constraints and performance has been improved Filtering Performance, in example provided, importing 561K rules / 60K prefixes, went from 35 minutes down to 30 seconds. *** Onion Omega Updates (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/wiki/Onion-Omega) I have a newer kernel config that will be committed soon that hooks up the system LED, and the three LEDs on the expansion dock via /dev/led I also have the I2C interface working to talk to the Relay and Servo expansions I have not determined the exact protocol for the Servo expansions, but the relay expansion is fairly simple to operate Instructions have been added to the wiki I have managed to use the GPIO to toggle external LEDs and to read the value from a switch I have also used the Servo PWM controller to dim an LED and control the speed of a PWM computer case fan My plan is to operate a 32x32 multi colour LED matrix from the device for an interactive christmas display *** FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS Book review (http://www.cyberciti.biz/datacenter/book-review-freebsd-mastery-zfs/) Book can be purchased here (http://smile.amazon.com/FreeBSD-Mastery-ZFS-7/dp/0692452354/) or from the list of vendors including directly from the author here (http://www.zfsbook.com/) *** Beastie Bits Computer History Museum is looking for Bell Labs UNIX (http://www.computerhistory.org/artifactdonation/) ACM Queue Portrait: Robert Watson (https://youtu.be/rA_5Cz99z28) Video Collection about BSD History, put together by FreeBSDNews (https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/11/12/bsd-videos/) Minix announces its 2016 conference (http://www.minix3.org/conference/2016/) Chris Henschen from fP Technologies' talk about BSD is now online (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2015/10/bsdtalk258-chris-henschen-from-fp.html) Mike Larkin and Theo de Raadt's talks from Hackfest this year in Quebec are online (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151123161651&mode=expanded) FreeBSD on a BeagleBoneBlack with a Touchscreen Display (http://kernelnomicon.org/?p=534) Dan Langille will be talking at CINLUG (http://www.cinlug.org/meetings/2015/December) Feedback/Questions John - Rpi2 and BSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Gm06eC0Y) Roger - Win10 + FreeBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Kf2FG84H) Anonymous - Sharing Socket (http://slexy.org/view/s21bOG5UhS) Brad - Scrub Repaired (http://slexy.org/view/s20bKjCNXW) Kelly - Automated Provisioning (http://slexy.org/view/s2qb07BC2G) ***
116: Arcing ZFS
This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! Headlines How to create new binary packages in the Ports system on OpenBSD (http://functionallyparanoid.com/2015/11/06/where-do-binary-packages-come-from/) Creating a port is often a great first step you can take to get involved in your favorite BSD of choice, and (often) doesn’t require any actual programming to do so. In this article we have a great walkthrough for users on creating a new ported application, and eventually binary package, on OpenBSD As mentioned in the tutorial, a good starting place is always an existing port, which can you use as a template for your new creation. Tip: Try to pick something similar, I.E. python for a python app, Qt for Qt, etc. This tutorial will first walk you through the process of creating your Makefile and related description about the new port. Once you’ve created the initial Makefile, there are a bunch of new “make” targets you can begin to run to try building your port, everything from “make fetch” to “make makesum” and “make package”. Using these tests you can verify that your port is correct and results in the installable package/app you wanted. *** Status update on pledge(2) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151116152318) OpenBSD has been working very aggressively to convert much of their base system applications to using pledge(2) “Formerly Tame(2)) Theo has provided a great status update on where that stands as of right now and the numbers look like the following: Out of 600 ELF binaries, 368 of them have been updated to utilize pledge(2) in some manner This is quite a few, and includes everything from openssl, ping, sftp, grep, gzip and much more There are still a number of “pledge-able” commands waiting for conversion, such as login, sysctl, nfsd, ssh and others. He also mentions that there does exist some subset of commands which aren’t viable pledge(2) candidates, such as simple things like “true”, or commands like reboot/mount or even perl itself. *** FreeBSD booting on the Onion Omega (https://onion.io/omega/) Tiny $19 MIPS SoC ($25 with dock that provides built in mini-USB Serial interface, power supply, LED lights, GPIO expansion, USB port, etc) A number of pluggable ‘expansions’ are available, including: Arduino Dock (connect the Omega device to your existing Arduino components) Blue Tooth Lower Energy 10/100 Ethernet Port Relay expansion (2 relays each, can stack up to 8 expansions to control 16 relays) Servo expansion (control up to 16 PWM servos, like robotic arms or camera mounts) OLED expansion (1" monochrome 128x64 OLED display) Thermal Printer Kit (includes all wiring and other components) The device is the product of a successful Kick Starter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onion/onion-omega-invention-platform-for-the-internet-of/description) from March of this year Specs: Atheros AR9330 rev1 400MHZ MIPS 24K 64MB DDR2 400MHz 16MB Flash 802.11b/g/n 150Mbps Atheros Wifi + 100mbps Atheros Wired Ethernet 18 GPIO Pins USB Controller Using the freebsd-wifi-build (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/wiki) tool, I was able to build a new firmware for the device based on a profile for a similar device based on the same Atheros chip. I hope to have time to validate some of the settings and get them posted up into the wiki and get the kernel configuration committed to FreeBSD in the next week or two It is an interesting device compared to the TP-Link WDR3600’s we did at BSDCan, as it has twice as much flash, leaving more room for the system image, but only half as much ram, and a slower CPU *** SSH Performance testing (https://wiki.freebsd.org/SSHPerf) There has been a discussion (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058244.html) about the value of upkeeping the HPN (High Performance Networking) patch to OpenSSH in the base system of FreeBSD As part of this, I did some fresh benchmarks on my pair of new high end servers The remaining part to be done is testing different levels of latency By tweaking the socket buffer sizes, I was able to saturate the full 10 gigabit with netcat, iperf, etc From the tests that have been done so far, it doesn’t look like even the NONE cipher can reach that level of performance because of the MAC (Message Authentication Code) It does appear that some of the auto-tuning in HPN is not worked as expected Explicitly setting -oTcpRcvBuf=7168 (KB) is enough to saturate a gigabit with 50ms RTT (round trip time) *** iXsystems iX gives an overview of FreeBSD at SeaGl 2015 (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/seagl-2015/) On the FreeNAS Blog, Michael Dexter explains the ZFS Intent Log and SLOG (http://www.freenas.org/whats-new/2015/11/zfs-zil-and-slog-demystified.html) Interview - George Wilson - wilzun@gmail.com (mailto:wilzun@gmail.com) / @zfsdude (https://twitter.com/zfsdude) OpenZFS and Delphix *** News Roundup Nicholas Marriott has replaced the aging version of less(1) in OpenBSD (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151105223808) Sometimes less isn’t more, it’s just less In this story, we have news that the old version of less(1) in OpenBSD has now been ripped out in favor of the more modern fork from illumos founder Garrett D’Amore. In addition to being a “more” modern version, it also includes far “less” of the portability code, uses terminfo, replacing termcap and is more POSIX compliant. *** FreeBSD gets initial support for advanced SMR drives (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058522.html) Kenneth D. Merry ken@freebsd.org has developed initial support for Host Managed, and Host Aware Shingled Magnetic Recording drives in FreeBSD, available as a patch against both -current and 10-stable “This includes support for Host Managed, Host Aware and Drive Managed SMRdrives that are either SCSI (ZBC) or ATA (ZAC) attached via a SAScontroller. This does not include support for SMR ATA drives attached viaan ATA controller. Also, I have not yet figured out how to properly detecta Host Managed ATA drive, so this code won't do that.” SMR drives have overlapping tracks, because the read head can be much smaller than the write head The drawback to this approach is that writes to the disk must take place in 256 MB “zones” that must be written from the beginning New features in the patch: A new 'camcontrol zone' command that allows displaying and managing drive zones via SCSI/ATA passthrough. A new zonectl(8) utility that uses the new DIOCZONECMD ioctl to display and manage zones via the da(4) (and later ada(4)) driver. Changes to diskinfo -v to display the zone mode of a drive. A new disk zone API, sys/sys/disk_zone.h. A new bio type, BIO_ZONE, and modifications to GEOM to support it. This new bio will allow filesystems to query zone support in a drive and manage zoned drives. Extensive modifications to the da(4) driver to handle probing SCSI and SATA behind SAS SMR drives. Additional CAM CDB building functions for zone commands. “We (Spectra Logic) are working on ZFS changes that will use this CAM and GEOM infrastructure to make ZFS play well with SMR drives. Those changes aren't yet done.” It is good to see active development in this area, especially from experts in archival storage A second patch (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058521.html) is also offered, that improves the pass(4) passthrough interface for disks, and introduces a new camdd(8) command, a version of dd that uses the pass(4) interface, kqueue, and separate reader/writer threads for improved performance He also presents a feature wishlist that includes some interesting benchmarking features, including a ‘sink’ mode, where reads from the device are just thrown away, rather than having to write then to /dev/null *** Initial implemtnation of 802.11n now in iwm(4) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151112212739) OpenBSD laptop users rejoice! 802.11n has landed! Initially only for the iwm(4) driver, support is planned for other devices in the future Includes support for all the required (non-optional) bits to make 802.11N functional Adds a new 11n mode to ifmedia, and MCS (modulation coding scheme) that sits alongside the ieee80211_rateset structure. No support for MIMO / SGI (Short Guard Interval) or 40 MHz wide-channels, but perhaps we will see those in a future update. They are asking users for testing against a wide variety of any/all APs! *** Freebsd adds support for Bluetooth LE Security Management (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=290038) FreeBSD + BlueTooth, not something we discuss a lot about, but it is still under active development. The most recently added features come from Takanori Watanabe, and adds new LE Security Management. Specifically, it enables support for BLE Security Manager Protocol(SMP), and enables a userland tool to wait for the underlying HCI connection to be encrypted. *** Building OpnSense on HardenedBSD (http://0xfeedface.org/2015/11/07/hbsd-opnsense.html) Looking for a way to further Harden your router? We have a tutorial from the HardenedBSD developer, Shawn Webb, about how to build OpnSense on HBSD 10-STABLE. You’ll need to first be running HBSD 10-STABLE somewhere, in this article he is using bhyve for the builder VM. The build process itself is mostly pretty straight-forward, but there are a number of different repos that all have to be checked out, so pay attention to which goes where. +In this example he does a targeted build for a Netgate RCC-VE-4860, but you can pick your particular build. *** Beastie Bits 1 BTC bounty for chromium bug! (https://github.com/gliaskos/freebsd-chromium/issues/40) DesktopBSD 2.0 M1 released (http://www.desktopbsd.net/forums/threads/desktopbsd-2-0-m1-released.806/) By implementing asynchronous pru_attach for UDP, Sepherosa Ziehau has increased connect rate by around 15K connections per second (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-October/458500.html) Stephen Bourne, known for the Bourne Shell, will be giving a talk at NYCBUG this week (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-October/016384.html) Tor Browser 5.0.3 for OpenBSD released (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-October/016390.html) The Tor BSD Diversity Project (https://torbsd.github.io/) aim to Increase the number of Tor relays running BSDs. We envision this happening by increasing the total number of relays, with the addition of more BSD users running relays; Make the Tor Browser available under BSD operating systems using native packaging mechanisms. Our first target is OpenBSD; Engage the broader BSD community about the Tor anonymity network and the place that BSD Unix should occupy in the privacy community at large. Screenshots from Unix People circa 2002 (https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/) Feedback/Questions Dominik - Bhyve Setup (http://slexy.org/view/s21xTyirkO) John - beadm + GELI (http://slexy.org/view/s2YVi7ULlJ) Darrall - ZFS + RAID = Problems (http://slexy.org/view/s20lRTaZSy) Hamza - Which shell? (http://slexy.org/view/s2omNWdTBU) Amenia - FreeBSD routing (http://slexy.org/view/s21Y8bPbnm) ***