I bet you are familiar with Unix philosophy. Get ready to be surprised and reasoned with anyway. Then read on because as always we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.
Unix philosophy
Unix philosophy says a program should do only one thing and do it well. Solve problems by sewing together a sequence of small, specialized programs. In practice, programs gain overlapping features over time.
The hard part isn’t writing little programs that do one thing well. The hard part is combining little programs to solve bigger problems, to write programs to work together.
But still, once in a while a new program can really surprise you. Reminiscing a while ago, one Unix user came up with a list of eye-opening Unix gems. Only a couple of these programs are indispensable or much used. What singles them out is their originality.
What are the reasons for the enduring utility and popularity of the Unix command line tools, anyway? Here’s one take.
Releases
DragonFly 5.6.3 has been tagged and images has been built. You should run 5.8, cause it’s the most recent, but this means there’s an image that captures all the last bugfixes in the 5.6 series.
BSDSec
NetBSD Security Advisory 2020-002: Specific ICMPv6 error message packet can crash the system: Due to a mistake in IP-IP tunnel packet processing, a malicious ICMPv6 error message packet whose payload is an IP-IP tunnel packet can cause incorrect resource freeing leading to a system crash. This is a remote DoS, that affects all systems that have IPv6 enabled.
OpenBSD Errata: March 10th, 2020 (sysctl): Missing input validation in sysctl(2) can be used to crash the kernel. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.
OpenBSD Errata: March 13th, 2020 (sosplice). Local outbound UDP broadcast or multicast packets sent by a spliced socket can crash the kernel. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.
As always, it’s always worth following BSDSec.
News
FreeBSD To Sponsor Work For 802.11ac Support. While Windows and Linux have seen good 802.11ac “WiFi 5” support and these days are focused on 802.11ax “WiFi 6” with the latest wireless chipsets, FreeBSD is still tackling 802.11ac. But the FreeBSD Foundation is prepared to soon begin sponsoring development work on ironing out their 802.11ac support.
MidnightBSD now have an experimental copy of midnightbsd src code in github. They might be switching to using Github, but are doing some testing first.
Tutorials
In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to set up an SMB share on your FreeNAS machine. To share data with Windows clients, FreeNAS uses CIFS, also known as SMB or Samba. SMB shares are also compatible with macOS offering great flexibility for client operating systems.
Seeking a faster, lighter weight, and potentially more secure VPN server to access your home network? Check out this tutorial to learn How to configure the WireGuard VPN server in OPNsense.
NomadBSD persistent live USB setup and demo: This FreeBSD-based OS is designed to run from a live USB drive which is persistent, so that user files, applications and operating system changes can be saved to it. NomadBSD is hence a portable alternative OS that you can move between computers and carry around in your pocket.
More
As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD on Power, DragonflyBSD 5.8 is here, Unifying FreeNAS/TrueNAS, OpenBSD vs. Prometheus and Go, gcc 4.2.1 removed from FreeBSD base, and more.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to providing summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. The latest is from 2020-03-16.
In Other BSDs for 2020/03/14 is out, too.
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