This week we catch up with OpenBSD, upgrade GhostBSD and then look at all the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

OpenBSD catch up

While many of us have been busy social distancing, OpenBSD development work has continued. Noteworthy things not previously reported here include:

• The OpenBSD version has moved to 6.7-beta
• Some 11 syscalls have been unlocked since the 6.6 release.
• FFS2 has been made the default filesystem for new installs on most platforms.
• The rpki-client web site has been launched.
• Supported hardware on the arm64 platform has widened further, including support for Pine64 Pinebook Pro and Rasperry Pi 4.
• The default compiler on the macppc platform has been switched to clang(1).
• Ports work has entered slowdown in the move towards release.

Releases

GhostBSD 20.04 Now Available. This new build comes with some minor system update and numerous software applications updates. It was followed by GhostBSD 20.04.1 to fix the setup of NVIDIA driver on the installed system.

BSDSec

No SAs this week, but as always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feeds and Twitter account available.

News

dhcpcd in DragonFly is updated to 9.0.2. This is a bugfix release, so no new features.

NetBSD heads up: Entropy overhaul. This week, NetBSD had an overhaul of the kernel entropy system. For the technical background, see the thread on tech-kern a few months ago.

The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 2). The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
• One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. They set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.

Tutorials

How to fix “no carrier” for DragonFly’s iwm. If you have an iwm(4) wireless Intel device, here’s how you get it to stop saying “no carrier”.

How to implement gdnsd on FreeBSD: gdnsd is an authoritative-only name server. The initial ‘g’ stands for geographic, as gdnsd offers a plugin system for geographic (or other sorts of) balancing, redirection, and service-state-concious failover. This post explains how gdnsd is implemented at SoCruel.NU to achieve the availability goals, which are:

• have a failover possibility in place for the public SoCruel.NU web sites in case the web sites become unavailable on the primary location in cases of i.e. internet connection down or server hardware failure
• a failover must take place in a couple of minutes (2 to 3 minutes - so this amount of down time is accepted)

To make these goals happen the simplefo gdnsd plugin is used. This is one of the more simple plugins of gdnsd. More complex setups with geographic balacing, redirection and service-state-concious failover scenario’s are possible!

Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD: hort article to summarize authors current understanding of how to configure VLANs on FreeBSD as they think the word VLAN is being used in at least two different senses.

Installation of NetBSD on a Mac Mini. There are a few obstacles to overcome when trying to install NetBSD/macppc on a Mac Mini, which made the author learn a lot of new details about that hardware and about the boot process. Therefore they decided to write a little bit about their experiences in case someone else ever tries to install this combination again.

More

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available, Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux, Ars technica reviews GhostBSD, “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open, BSD community show their various collections, a tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals, learn to stop worrying and love SSDs, and more.

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 2020-05-04.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/02 is out, too.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!