BSD Now

OpenBSD 6.5 has been released, mount ZFS datasets anywhere, help test upcoming NetBSD 9 branch, LibreSSL 2.9.1 is available, Bail Bond Denied Edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, and one reason ed(1) was a good editor back in the days in this week’s episode. Headlines OpenBSD 6.5 Released Changelog Mirrors 6.5 Includes OpenSMTPD 6.5.0 LibreSSL 2.9.1 OpenSSH 8.0 Mandoc 1.14.5 Xenocara LLVM/Clang 7.0....

Introducing funlinkat(), an OpenBSD Router with AT&T U-Verse, using NetBSD on a raspberry pi, ZFS encryption is still under development, Rump kernel servers and clients tutorial, Snort on OpenBSD 6.4, and more. Headlines Introducing funlinkat It turns out, every file you have ever deleted on a unix machine was probably susceptible to a race condition One of the first syscalls which was created...

A PI-powered Plan 9 cluster, an SSH tarpit, rdist for when Ansible is too much, falling in love with OpenBSD again, how I created my first FreeBSD port, the Tilde Institute of OpenBSD education and more. Headlines A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes from the same stable as the UNIX operating system, which of course Linux was designed after, and Apple’s OS X runs on top of a cer...

This week we have a special episode with a Michael W. Lucas interview about his latest jail book that’s been released. We’re talking all things jails, writing, book sponsoring, the upcoming BSDCan 2019 conference, and more. ###Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwl@mwl.io / @mwlauthor FreeBSD Mastery: Jails BR: Welcome back to the show and congratulations on your latest book. How many books did you ha...

FreeBSD Q4 2018 status report, the GhostBSD alternative, the coolest 90s laptop, OpenSSH 8.0 with quantum computing resistant keys exchange, project trident: 18.12-U8 is here, and more. ##Headlines ### AsiaBSDcon 2019 recap Both Allan and I attended AsiaBSDcon 2019 in Tokyo in mid march. After a couple of days of Tokyo sightseeing and tasting the local food, the conference started with tutorials....

Storage changing software, what makes Unix special, what you need may be “pipeline +Unix commands”, running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL, the ultimate guide to memorable tech talks, light-weight contexts, and more. ##Headlines ### Tracking a storage issue led to software change Early last year we completed a massive migration that moved our customers’ hosting data off of a legacy datacenter (t...

FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX, looking at NetBSD as an OpenBSD user, taking time-stamped notes in vim, OpenBSD 6.5 has been tagged, FreeBSD and NetBSD in GSoC 2019, SecBSD: an UNIX-like OS for Hackers, and more. ##Headlines ### ARM’d and dangerous: FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (aarch64) While I don’t remember for how many years I’ve had an interest in CPU architectures that could be an alternative to A...

A kernel of failure, IPv6 fragmentation vulnerability in OpenBSD’s pf, a guide to the terminal, using a Yubikey for SSH public key authentication, FreeBSD desktop series, and more. ##Headlines ### A Kernel Of Failure - How IBM bet big on the microkernel being the next big thing in operating systems back in the ’90s—and spent billions with little to show for it. Today in Tedium: In the early 1990s,...

Software will never fix Spectre-type bugs, a proof that sed is Turing complete, managed jails using Bastille, new version of netdata, using grep with /dev/null, using GMail with mutt, and more. ##Headlines ### Google: Software is never going to be able to fix Spectre-type bugs Spectre is here to stay: An analysis of side-channels and speculative execution Researchers from Google investigating the...

Design and Implementation of NetBSD’s rc.d system, first impressions of Project Trident 18.12, PXE booting a FreeBSD disk image, middle mouse button pasting, NetBSD gains hardware accelerated virtualization, and more. ##Headlines ### The Design and Implementation of the NetBSD rc.d system Abstract In this paper I cover the design and implementation of the rc.d system start-up mechanism in NetBSD 1...

Adding glue to a desktop environment, flashing the BIOS on a PC Engine, revive a Cisco IDS into a capable OpenBSD computer, An OpenBSD WindowMaker desktop, RealTime data compression, the love for pipes, and more. ##Headlines ### Adding Glue To a Desktop Environment In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly reg...

Strategic thinking to keep FreeBSD relevant, reflecting on the soul of a new machine, 10GbE Benchmarks On Nine Linux Distros and FreeBSD, NetBSD integrating LLVM sanitizers in base, FreeNAS 11.2 distrowatch review, and more. ##Headlines ### Strategic thinking, or what I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant Since I participate in the FreeBSD project there are from time to time some voi...

We recap FOSDEM 2019, FreeBSD Foundation January update, OPNsense 19.1 released, the hardware-assisted virtualization challenge, ZFS and GPL terror, ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE, and more. Headlines FOSDEM 2019 Recap Allan and I were at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium over the weekend. On the Friday before, we held a FreeBSD Devsummit in a hotel conference room, with 25 people attending. We talked about...

We’re at FOSDEM 2019 this week having fun. We’d never leave you in a lurch, so we have recorded an interview with Niclas Zeising of the FreeBSD graphics team for you. Enjoy. ##Interview - Niclas Zeising - zeising@FreeBSD.org / @niclaszeising Interview topic: FreeBSD Graphics Stack BR: Welcome Niclas. Since this is your first time on BSDNow, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you started...

Project Trident 18.12 released, Spotifyd on NetBSD, OPNsense 18.7.10 is available, Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation, OpenRsync, LLD porting to NetBSD, and more. ##Headlines ### AsiaBSDCon 2019 Call for Papers You have until Jan 30th to submit Full paper requirement is relaxed a bit this year (this year ONLY!) due to the short submission window. You don’t need all 10-12 pages, but it...

SCP client vulnerabilities, BSDs vs Linux benchmarks on a Tyan EPYC Server, fame for the Unix inventors, Die IPv4, GhostBSD 18.12 released, Unix in pictures, and more. ##Headlines ### scp client multiple vulnerabilities Overview SCP clients from multiple vendors are susceptible to a malicious scp server performing unauthorized changes to target directory and/or client output manipulation. Descript...

A EULA in FOSS clothing, NetBSD with more LLVM support, Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0, FreeBSD Performance against Windows and Linux on Xeon, Microsoft shipping NetBSD, and more. Headlines A EULA in FOSS clothing? There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source . As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time t...

The future of ZFS in FreeBSD, we pick highlights from the FreeBSD quarterly status report, flying with the raven, modern KDE on FreeBSD, many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2, GOG installers on NetBSD, and more. Headlines The future of ZFS in FreeBSD The sources for FreeBSD’s ZFS support are currently taken directly from Illumos with local ifdefs to support the peculiarities of FreeBSD where the Sola...

We sat down at BSDCan 2018 to interview Kirk McKusick about various topics ranging about the early years of Berkeley Unix, his continuing work on UFS, the governance of FreeBSD, and more. ##Interview - Kirk McKusick - mckusick@mckusick.com 25 years of FreeBSD How Kirk got started in BSD, at the very beginning Predicting the Future How the code and community grew The leadership of the project, and...

The Open Source midlife crisis, Donald Knuth The Yoda of Silicon Valley, Certbot For OpenBSD's httpd, how to upgrade FreeBSD from 11 to 12, level up your nmap game, NetBSD desktop, and more. ##Headlines ### Open Source Confronts its midlife crisis Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood...

FreeBSD 12.0 is finally here, partly-cloudy IPsec VPN, KLEAK with NetBSD, How to create synth repos, GhostBSD author interview, and more. ##Headlines ### FreeBSD 12.0 is available After a long release cycle, the wait is over: FreeBSD 12.0 is now officially available. We’ve picked a few interesting things to cover in the show, make sure to read the full Release Notes Userland: Group permissions on...

DragonflyBSD 5.4 has been released, down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, OpenBSD in stereo with VFIO, BSD/OS the best candidate for legally tested open source Unix, OpenBGPD adds diversity to the routing server landscape, and more. Headlines DragonflyBSD 5.4 released DragonFly version 5.4 brings a new system compiler in GCC 8, improved NUMA support, a large of number network and virtual machine driv...

Assembly language on OpenBSD, using bhyve for FreeBSD development, FreeBSD Gaming, FreeBSD for Thanksgiving, no space left on Dragonfly’s hammer2, and more. ##Headlines ### Assembly language on OpenBSD amd64+arm64 This is a short introduction to assembly language programming on OpenBSD/amd64+arm64. Because of security features in the kernel, I have had to rethink a series of tutorials covering Aar...

Thoughts on NetBSD 8.0, Monitoring love for a GigaBit OpenBSD firewall, cat’s source history, X.org root permission bug, thoughts on OpenBSD as a desktop, and NomadBSD review. ##Headlines ### Some thoughts on NetBSD 8.0 NetBSD is a highly portable operating system which can be run on dozens of different hardware architectures. The operating system’s clean and minimal design allow it to be run in a...

Byproducts of reading OpenBSD’s netcat code, learnings from porting your own projects to FreeBSD, OpenBSD’s unveil(), NetBSD’s Virtual Machine Monitor, what 'dependency' means in Unix init systems, jailing bhyve, and more. ##Headlines ### The byproducts of reading OpenBSD netcat code When I took part in a training last year, I heard about netcat for the first time. During that class, the tutor sho...