BSD Weekly - Issue 15

Published April 15, 2020

Coming up tomorrow, you can join the next “FreeBSD Office Hours”. But make sure to read on because as always we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

FreeBSD Office Hours: April 16, 2020 02:00 UTC

This coming Thursday at 02:00 UTC (So Wednesday evening in North America, 22:00 Eastern, 19:00 Pacific), FreeBSD project will hold the second “FreeBSD Office Hours”, an interactive online event where users, contributors, and developers can ask questions and get advice.

You can join them here

If you wish to join the IRC channel directly: freebsd on irc.geekshed.net

This session will also be recorded and posted to Youtube within a day or two.

Releases

OPNsense 20.1.4 has been released, bringing new fixes and package updates.

BSDSec

LibreSSL 3.1.0 Released: This is the first development release from the 3.1.x series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.7.

Completed initial TLS 1.3 implementation with a completely new state machine and record layer. TLS 1.3 is now enabled by default for the client side, with the server side to be enabled in a future release. Note that the OpenSSL TLS 1.3 API is not yet visible/available.
Many more code cleanups, fixes, and improvements to memory handling and protocol parsing.
Added RSA-PSS and RSA-OAEP methods from OpenSSL 1.1.1.
Ported Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) implementation from OpenSSL 1.1.1 and enabled by default.
Improved compatibility by backporting functionality and documentation from OpenSSL 1.1.1.
Added many new additional crypto test vectors.
Adjusted EVP_chacha20()‘s behavior to match OpenSSL’s semantics.
Default CA bundle location is now configurable in portable builds.
Added cms subcommand to openssl(1).
Added -addext option to openssl(1) req subcommand.

As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feeds and Twitter account available.

News

Even if you run bash, zsh, or maybe fish, tcsh is the default root shell in DragonFly – and it just had an update. (all bugfixes according to the release notes)

NetBSD restarts Wifi renewal. Back in 2018, Phil Nelson started a long needed WiFi-refresh, basically syncing our src/sys/net80211/ with the version from FreeBSD. He got a few things working, but then ran out of time and was unable to spend enough time on this to complete the task. The main idea is to get better SMP (locking) support, support for newer (faster) WiFi standards, and support for virtual access points, while also making future updates (and import of drivers) from FreeBSD easier.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - First Quarter 2020: The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020. As you will see from this report, FreeBSD had quite an active quarter with big changes to both kernel, userland, documentation, ports, and third-party projects in the form of everything from bug and security fixes over new features to speed improvements and optimizations. As this report also covers the start of the epidemic, it’s also interesting to note that a quick glance at the svn logs reveal that there has been no overall drop in number of source commits, that docs commits have also stayed constant, and that ports have seen an upwards trend.

Tutorials

Install NetBSD on a Vintage Computer: Put that cherished computer (Cobalt Qube) to good use, while getting hands-on with an O/S that can trace its history back over more than 40 years and remains actively developed today.

GhostBSD KDE Dailybuild 20-04-06 video: Taking a look at a daily build of the development version of GhostBSD KDE branch. This is just a look - more of a feel of out it is at the moment, but so far things are looking good indeed. Some great work happening in the GhostBSD community.

Running X Applications on a Jail created with Bastille: FreeBSD jails are often talked about from a security or system administration perspective. Although it’s a perfectly valid point of view, jails can also be used for other purposes. In fact, just recently I benefited from a jail in such a situation. It once again convinced me that jails were really awesome and made me write up this short article. Assumptions The host is a graphical desktop workstation running FreeBSD 12.

OPNsense 20.1 Installation & Initial setup: How to Install OPNsense 20.1 Firewall on VMware Workstation 15, step by step.

How to install and configure ClamAv on FreeBSD: ClamAV is an open source anti-virus engine using different virus signature databases and is used in a variety situations including protecting end points. ClamAV is in the FreeBSD ports tree so the installation part is easy!

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about NetBSD 8.2 is available, NextCloud on OpenBSD, X11 screen locking, NetBSD and RISC OS running parallel, community feedback about switching to BSD, and more.

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 2020/04/13.

In Other BSDs for 2020/04/11 is out, too.

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