This week we learn about Memorial Scholarship of NetBSD’s Allen Briggs. Then we look at latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.
In memory of Allen Briggs
Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.
He was a revered member of the NetBSD core team, and keenly involved in many aspects of its application; from working on ARM chips to helping architect many projects, Allen was renowned for his expertise. He was a distinguished engineer at Apple, and used his NetBSD expertise there to bring products to market.
If you can, we would ask you to consider contributing to his Memorial Scholarship.
The Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship is an endowment to provide scholarships in perpetuity for summer programs at the North Carolina School of Science & Math, which Allen considered to be a place that fundamentally shaped him as a person. We would love to invite Allen’s friends and colleagues from the BSD community to donate to this cause so that we can provide more scholarships to students with financial need each year. We are approximately halfway to our goal of $50K with aspirations to exceed that target and fund additional scholarships.
Releases
OPNsense 20.7.7 released: This release is a security update.
BSDSec
FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:33.openssl [REVISED]: The OpenSSL project has published publicly available patches for versions included in FreeBSD 12.x. FreeBSD 11.x includes an older OpenSSL version, and patches for that version from from the OpenSSL project are only available to premium support contract holders. This advisory includes an independently-developed backport of the patch for FreeBSD 11.4.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.
News
This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by
cgd(4).
Foundation Sponsors FreeBSD LLDB Improvements: The LLDB project builds on libraries provided by LLVM and Clang to provide a great modern debugger. It uses the Clang ASTs and the expression parser, LLVM JIT, LLVM disassembler, etc so that it provides an experience that “just works”. It is also blazing fast and more permissively licensed than GDB, the GNU Debugger.
OpenBSD on TECLAST F7 Plus: This is a thin 14 inch laptop that mostly looks like a MacBook Air. It comes preinstalled with Windows 10. Most of the hardware works but there are two main issues: touchpad doesn’t work and Sleep & Suspend half work.
Tutorials
Block millions of spammers/abusive IP addresses with “pf-badhost” in OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD: In this article, a very useful security script, by Jordan Geoghegan, for *BSD operating systems called “pf-badhost” is explained. A small - yet very efficient tool to prevent millions of spammer/abusive/bad IP addresses, from reaching your servers, filling your network bandwidth/system logs.
Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD: Learn how to deploy your own Cryptpad instance with OpenBSD. Cryptpad is a web office suite featuring easy realtime collaboration on documents. Cryptpad is written in javascript and the daemon acts as a webserver.
This tutorial shows how to set up a secure, fast WireGuard VPN server on OpenBSD and configuring Windows 10 clients to connect through it.
Trying OpenZFS 2 on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE: OpenZFS 2 is a huge achievement, and it gives good prospects about the long term for the world’s most trustworthy and nicest to use storage system. You can even use try it today on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE, though it’s recommend tracking -CURRENT for these sorts of features. Also, refer to the OpenZFS website and FreeBSD Handbook for more information about the process, and for the canonical documentation.
More
As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about the Origin of the Shell, Return to Plan 9, ArisbluBSD: Why a new BSD?, OPNsense 20.7.5 released, Midnight BSD 2.0 Release Status, HardenedBSD November 2020 Status Report, 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 2020-12-21.
In Other BSDs for 2020/12/19 is out, too.
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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!