{ "posts": [ { "title": "Issue 182", "date": "2024-04-24:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 24, 2024", "slug": "182", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 9.4 available: It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.3 in August 2022, as well some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. Users running 9.3 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/04/22: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.

FreeBSD Foundation Delivers V1 of FreeBSD SSDF Attestation to Support Cybersecurity Compliance: The SSDF is a key resource for entities working with the US Government, facilitating compliance with NIST SP 800-218 Section 4e as recommended by the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in consultation with the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This initiative aligns with the goals of Executive Order 14028, issued by the Biden Administration in May of 2021, and Memorandum M-22-18, issued in September of 2022, aimed at enhancing national cybersecurity.

BSD Now 555: Poudriereing Apple Silicon: Kubernetes and back - Why I don’t run distributed systems, NetApp’s strategic contributions to FreeBSD: a deep dive into upstreaming efforts, Make your own E-Mail server - Part 2 - Adding Webmail and More with Nextcloud, Poudriere on Apple Silicon, One less Un*xy option for 32-bit PowerPC, and more.

In OpenBSD -current, default write format for tar(1) has changed: A series of commits by Jeremie Courreges-Anglas (jca@) has modified tar(1) such that its default write format (for archives) is that of pax(1).

iXsystems: No one is being ‘marooned’ by Debian focus: Continuation of news regarding iX focusing more on Linux and less on BSD, addressing some of the concerns of BSD users.

Valuable News – 2024/04/15: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.

Tutorials

FreeBSD: installing and using Haskell: Youtube video tutorial showing how to install Haskell, setup VIM to use the Haskell Language Server and finally, write a simple program, compile it and run.

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

", "excerpt": "

NetBSD release and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 181", "date": "2024-04-17:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 17, 2024", "slug": "181", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

BSDCan 2024 Travel Grant Application Now Open: The Travel Grant Application for BSDCan 2024 is now open. The FreeBSD Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development.

BSD Now 554: NetBSD Double Digit: The XZ Backdoor, NetBSD 10.0, iX announces that they will put out a release of TrueNAS 13.3, State of the Terminal, LibreSSL 3.8.4 and 3.9.1 released and more.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

Little issue number 181.

" }, { "title": "Issue 180", "date": "2024-04-10:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 10, 2024", "slug": "180", "html": "

Releases

OpenBSD 7.5 released: The OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 7.5, the project’s 56th release, with numerous improvements and support for 14 hardware platforms. See the OpenBSD 7.5 release page for a more detailed list.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: April 8, 2024 (xserver): Errata patches for X11 server have been released for OpenBSD 7.5, 7.4 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

GhostBSD review: Youtube video review of their latest release.

BSD Now 553: Terminal Latency: Using Git offline, Make your own E-mail server, quiz: a tool for rapid OpenZFS development, Configuring openzfs for nvme databases, Mirroring OmniOS: The Complete Guide part 1, Installing OpenBSD 7.4 on a VisionFive 2 rev, and more.

NetApp’s strategic contributions to FreeBSD: a deep dive into upstreaming efforts: Open source software leads the way in technology innovation, and corporate contributions to these community-driven projects significantly shape these resources. NetApp is a great example of this, as it has made strategic and multifaceted efforts to contribute to FreeBSD.

pfSense® Software Embraces Change: A Strategic Migration to the Linux Kernel: Following in-depth evaluation and collaborative discussions, Netgate announced a significant strategic shift in the technological foundation of the pfSense project. They plan the migration of the pfSense platform from the FreeBSD operating system to a Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland. This was on April 1st, but haven’t seen any confirmation this (not) being a joke.

Valuable News – 2024/04/01: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD’s 56th release and maybe some April Fools?

" }, { "title": "Issue 179", "date": "2024-03-27:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 27, 2024", "slug": "179", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed available.

News

BSD Now 551: The Story of Port 22: This week on the show, The story of SSH getting port 22, GGC using Clang, AuxRunner, Stabweek, Using a Kensington SlimBladePro on OpenBSD, and more…

March 2024 Partnerships Update: Two sponsored development projects that began at the end of Q4 ‘23 and in January are proceeding well. One, sponsored by RG Nets, is porting VPP to FreeBSD. The other is adding the IOMMU driver to support AMD chips with 512+ cores.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

Rather small issue, as I’ve been busy, but hey!

" }, { "title": "Issue 178", "date": "2024-03-20:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 20, 2024", "slug": "178", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 10.0 RC6 available: RC6 fixes a few issues with the new named/bind imported for RC5 plus several minor issues.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 18, 2024 (expat): Errata patches for libexpat XML library have been released for OpenBSD 7.3 and 7.4. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

FreeBSD 2023 fundraising recap: They’ve closed the books on their 2023 accounting, and can share that the FreeBSD Foundation raised $1,263,772.05 towards their goal last year. In article, you can learn what are they planning to use it for.

A FreeBSD user Tries NetBSD 10-RC5: In this video we’ll have a look at NetBSD 10 RC5, and get a feel on how things are going from the FreeBSD user perspective.

The FreeBSD Project Participating in Google Summer of Code 2024: FreeBSD Project has again been selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2024. This year marks the 20th year of GSoC, and also marks the 20th year that the FreeBSD Project will be participating as a mentoring organization. Contributor applications will open on Monday, March 18, 2024, and close on Tuesday, April 2, 2024.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Another NetBSD RC and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 177", "date": "2024-02-28:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 28, 2024", "slug": "177", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/02/26: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.

New code for SIGILL faults help identify misbranches: If you run recent OpenBSD on certain amd64 or aarch64 platforms, indirect branching to an “unexpected” location will crash your program, in order to prevent ROP attacks and similar ways to have your program execute code where it shouldn’t. The OpenBSD compiler will insert an extra instruction in all the places where a branch is supposed to land, and if it lands anywhere else, a CPU fault is raised and your program gets an “Illegal Instruction”. Previously, crashes of this kind have looked more or less like any other kind of fault where code is executing random data or from random locations, but since the kernel knows when this has happened, we can make it explicit that the fault is due to missing branch target instructions, which will help a lot when debugging.

BSD Now 547: IT Impostor Syndrome: Overcoming imposter syndrome in IT, A Practical Guide to GNU sed With Examples, Early computer art by Barbara Nessim, Don’t prefill config files, Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only, You cannot cURL under pressure, and more.

Tutorials

Some OpenBSD features that aren’t widely known: In this blog post, you will learn about some OpenBSD features that can be useful, but not widespread. They often have a niche usage, but it’s important to know they exist to prevent you from reinventing the wheel.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD features that aren’t widely known and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 176", "date": "2024-02-14:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 14, 2024", "slug": "176", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available: RC4 became necessary as a few very important DRM/KMS issues especially for Intel GPUs have been resolved. And as an (unexpected) bonus support for the Nintendo Wii has been added to the evbppc port.

BSDSec

Future of 32-bit platform support in FreeBSD: FreeBSD is deprecating 32-bit platforms over the next couple of major releases. They anticipate FreeBSD 15.0 will not include the armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms, and FreeBSD 16.0 will not include armv7. Support for executing 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels will be retained through at least the lifetime of the stable/16 branch if not longer. (There is currently no plan to remove support for 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels.)

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/02/12: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

FreeBSD Foundation Statement on the European Union Cyber Resiliency Act: Open source communities, including the FreeBSD Foundation, initially expressed concerns that the CRA could subject open source projects, communities, and developers to the same security procedures and potential fines as commercial entities. The FreeBSD Foundation gratefully acknowledges the efforts made during the legislative process to raise and address these concerns and welcomes the revisions made in the final version of the CRA. The final version improves important exclusions of open source projects, communities, foundations, and their development and package distribution platforms.

BSD Now 545: BSD Audio Enhancements: ZFS High Availability with Asynchronous Replication and zrep, Stop Blogging and start documenting, 2023 in Review: Infrastructure, NovaCustom NV41 laptop review, OpenBSD Video Audio Screen Recording, HDMI Audio sound patches into GhostBSD source code, DSA removal from OpenSSH, NetBSD/evbppc 0.99.10 on the Nintendo Wii, NetBSD/amd64 current performance patch

Tutorials

Migrate a FreeBSD bhyve virtual machine to OmniOS: Author has a home lab running FreeBSD bhyve hypervisor and a collo server running OmniOS. From time to time, they migrate some VMs from one to the other. It is very simple when using ZFS and sharing a compatible bhyve implementation.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week is all about RC4 for NetBSD and 32-bit platform on FreeBSD.

" }, { "title": "Issue 175", "date": "2024-02-07:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 07, 2024", "slug": "175", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/02/05: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Soft updates (softdep) support removed from OpenBSD-current: Softdep has been a no-op for some time now, this removes it to get it out of the way.

BD Now 544: Geeky weather check: GPL 3: The Controversial Licensing Model and Potential Solutions, The Geeks way of checking what the outside weather is like, Alpine on a FreeBSD Jail, DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s, Dealing with USB Storage devices on OmniOS, Creating a Time Capsule instance using Samba, FreeBSD, and ZFS.

Tutorials

Debunking Common Myths About FreeBSD: Dive into the reality behind FreeBSD with this article debunking widespread myths. Understand how it’s not just for experts, but also accessible for beginners, thanks to its extensive documentation and supportive community. Learn about FreeBSD’s significant role in major companies like Juniper, Sony, and Cisco, and how organizations like Klara Inc. are enhancing its presence and debunking misconceptions about this versatile operating system.

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

", "excerpt": "

Let’s debunk some FreeBSD myths!

" }, { "title": "Issue 174", "date": "2024-01-31:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 31, 2024", "slug": "174", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/01/29: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 543: OpenBSD Workstation Hardening: OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases Part 3: Databases and VMs, 2023 in Review: Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement, Running OpenBSD on OmniOS using bhyve, FreeBSD jailed ZFS datasets – how do I find the .zfs/snapshot directory?, OpenBSD workstation hardening, KDE Plasma now linked to packages build on -current, MidnightBSD 3.1.3 release.

KMS for Apple silicon machines: Mark Kettenis committed support for Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) on Apple silicon (arm64) machines.

GPL 3: The Controversial Licensing Model and Potential Solutions: Discover the controversies surrounding GPL 3 and the growing trend of GPL to BSD migration in the open-source world. Article provides in-depth insights into the differences between GPL and BSD licenses, and why more businesses and developers are opting for BSD’s flexibility in their open-source strategies.

Valuable News – 2024/01/22: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 542: 8 Open Source Trends to Keep an Eye Out for in 2024, System Design for Advanced Beginners, 2024 plans and 2023 retrospective, Upgrading from NetBSD 5.1 to 10*RC1, FreeBSD has a new C compiler: Oracle Developer Studio 12.6, Ctrl+Alt Museum.

pinsyscalls(2) working in anger: Theo de Raadt has committed (to -current) the remaining parts required to get pinsyscalls(2) working in anger.

Tutorials

What’s a Permissive License – and Why Should I Care?: Within the world of open source technology, there are multiple varieties of open source licensing agreements that dictate how a program may be used or modified. While software licensing is the subject of never-ending debate, in this blog, they’ll explain the more common examples of software licensing while pointing out their differences.

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

", "excerpt": "

Catching up with BSD reading? You’re in right place.

" }, { "title": "Issue 173", "date": "2024-01-24:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 24, 2024", "slug": "173", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 10.0 RC3 available: For RC3 only few (relatively) minor changes were made, including https certificate verification in libfetch (which is used by pkg_ad(1)), and also improvements to the EFI bootloader to better deal with booting from CD (or in virtual machines ISO images), plus lots of various bug fixes.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: January 16, 2024 (xserver): Errata patches for X server have been released for OpenBSD 7.4 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/01/15: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Tutorials

ZFS High Availability with Asynchronous Replication and zrep: Explore how the ‘zfs send’ and ‘receive’ commands enable efficient data synchronization for high-availability storage services, ensuring quick, reliable failovers between replica systems with up-to-date incremental changes.

Effortless OpenBSD Audio and Desktop Screen Recording Guide: Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) has added a new post to his Shut up and hack series, titled Effortless OpenBSD Audio and Desktop Screen Recording Guide, where he takes the reader through the steps needed to configure your OpenBSD system for audio and video recording. The post even includes a youtube video where he demonstrates recording while he is putting final touches on the blog post.

FreeBSD Desktop – Part 29 – Configuration – Audio Improvements : Recently updated with improvements to the audio configs and settings on FreeBSD desktop.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

New RC for NetBSD and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 172", "date": "2024-01-03:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 03, 2024", "slug": "172", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 3.1.3 release: Updated OpenSSH to 9.2p1, Added quirk for WD MyPassport Ultra External HDD, Fix read/write past buffer end: perl-security 140, nvi 2.2.1, Update pci_vendors to 2023.09.22 version, OpenZFS: Ensure that zfs_getattr() initializes the va_rdev field , nfscl: Fix processing of a rare Rename reply case.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2024/01/01: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement for FreeBSD in 2023: As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, they have a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and the test infrastructure. In 2023, they added more testing jobs for ARM64 architectures like testing with Kernel Address Sanitizer and building test for non-standard compilers like GCC 12 and 13.

BSD Now 539: In this special holiday episode the BSDNow hosts get together to answer questions that listeners have sent over time. They give you updates on their gear, books they read, favorite places, and a whole lot more.

KDE Plasma on OpenBSD: KDE Plasma is now fully functional on OpenBSD and available via the package system. To install, a simple: $ pkg_add kde-plasma.

FreeBSD 2023 in Review: Infrastructure: Among the myriad of ways the FreeBSD Foundation supports FreeBSD, helping to maintain the Project’s infrastructure is one of the most important. They work in conjunction with the cluster administration team to ensure they have the hardware they need to keep everything running smoothly.

Tutorials

Running OpenBSD on OmniOS using bhyve: The bhyve hypervisor has been ported to Illumos and provides an altervative to KVM. SmartOS created an OpenBSD image but it’s quite old. Author of this managed to run OpenBSD 7.4 on OmniOS.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Ever wanted to run OpenBSD on OmniOS using bhyve?

" }, { "title": "Issue 171", "date": "2023-12-20:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 20, 2023", "slug": "171", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 3.1.2: MidnightBSD 3.1.2 includes a security update for pf and a new version of mport package manager. Note: There is a bug in mport package manager in this release and mport upgrade is not working properly. You can still update packages with mport update individually. They are working on a fix that will be included in a future release.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: December 14, 2023 (xserver): Errata patches for X server have been released for OpenBSD 7.4 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:18.nfsclient: When a program running on an affected system appends data to a file via an NFS client mount, the bug can cause the NFS client to fail to copy in the data to be written but proceed as though the copy operation had succeeded. This means that the data to be written is instead replaced with whatever data had been in the packet buffer previously. Thus, an unprivileged user with access to an affected system may abuse the bug to trigger disclosure of sensitive information. In particular, the leak is limited to data previously stored in mbufs, which are used for network transmission and reception, and for certain types of inter-process communication. The bug can also be triggered unintentionally by system applications, in which case the data written by the application to an NFS mount may be corrupted. Corrupted data is written over the network to the NFS server, and thus also susceptible to being snooped by other hosts on the network. Note that the bug exists only in the NFS client; the version and implementation of the server has no effect on whether a given system is affected by the problem.

OpenBSD Errata: December 10, 2023 (vmm, pf): Errata patches for vmm have been released for OpenBSD 7.4 and 7.3. Errata patch for pf has been released for OpenBSD 7.4. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/12/18: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

2024 FreeBSD Community Survey is Here: The FreeBSD Core Team and the FreeBSD Foundation invite you to complete the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey. The purpose of this survey is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the Project’s priorities and efforts.

Security, Performance, and Interoperability; Introducing FreeBSD 14: The FreeBSD community is proud to herald the release of FreeBSD 14. FreeBSD 14 represents the 82nd release in the history of one of the world’s first open source projects, and contains over two and a half years of development work since the launch of the previous release. In this blog, we’ll take a look at these key themes to outline what’s new in FreeBSD 14, and more importantly, why it matters.

BSD Now 537: OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases pt 2, MNT Reform – almost a year on, Why do I know shell, and how can you, Authenticate the SSH servers you are connecting to, dsynth in DragonFly, Navigating around in shell, and more.

Tutorials

OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases – Part 3: Databases and VMs: In the conclusion of our ZFS Best Practices series they’re covering two of the trickiest use cases, databases and virtual machine hosting.

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

", "excerpt": "

Minor MidnightBSD release and more. Have a good one!

" }, { "title": "Issue 170", "date": "2023-12-12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 12, 2023", "slug": "170", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD 12.4 and stable/12 branch end-of-life: As of December 31, 2023, FreeBSD 12.4 and the stable/12 branch will reach end of life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 12.4 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible. Note that FreeBSD 12 is the last release series built from the Subversion repository. The git2svn service will be discontinued after December 31, 2023, and the Subversion repository will stop being updated. If there are any commits to stable/12 or other branches after the EOL date they will only be accessible in the Git repository.

FreeBSD security updates: Multiple FreeBSD Errata Notices and Security Advisories has arrived

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

News

BSD Now 536: Pot-flavored Jails: OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases, EuroBSDcon trip report, Disks from the Perspective of a File System, Creating Jails using flavours in pot, OpenIKED 7.3 released, OpenSMTPD 7.4.0p1 Released, FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds, and more.

Tutorials

Personal FreeBSD PKGBASE Update Server: FreeBSD UNIX system can be updated in many ways. You can use freebsd-update(8) command to fetch and install the official binary patches. You can download the FreeBSD sources and compile your new version. You can download and install base.txz and kernel.txz sets in a new ZFS Boot Environment along with copying over your config files there. While for most users these three options will be more then enough – there is a small group or people that need something else. Companies. People that like to use custom FreeBSD version or enterprise corporate world that needs to fulfill many compliance regulations. For their multiple reasons – including but not limited to – security – they want to have their own trusted FreeBSD update infra under their control.

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

", "excerpt": "

Some more FreeBSD erratas this week and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 169", "date": "2023-12-06:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 06, 2023", "slug": "169", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:16.openzfs: FreeBSD has included a version of the powerful and feature-rich ZFS file system beginning with FreeBSD 7.0 released in 2008. The ZFS implementation in FreeBSD 12 and earlier is based on the Illumos ZFS codebase. In FreeBSD 13 and later OpenZFS is used as the ZFS implementation. Sparse files in a file system refer to a technique that optimizes storage space by allowing the creation of files with unallocated or unwritten gaps, known as holes. When reading a file, holes appear as zero or NUL bytes. Certain system calls can access hole location metadata, including lseek(2) with SEEK_HOLE and copy_file_range(2). In OpenZFS a dnode is a data structure used to represent and manage metadata about files and directories. In file systems, “dirty” refers to data or metadata that has been modified in memory but not yet written to the storage device. Thus, a dirty dnode is one which has uncommitted data or metadata. In FreeBSD 13.2 and FreeBSD 14.0 cp(1) uses copy_file_range(2) to perform the data copying in the kernel. copy_file_range attempts to find file holes in the source file and preserve them in the copy. In FreeBSD 12.4 cp does not use copy_file_range. A check did not test both the dnode itself and its data for dirtiness. This provides a very small window of time while a file is being modified where the dirtiness check can falsely report that the dnode is clean. If this happens a hole may incorrectly be reported where data was written. If an access occurs while a file is being modified and a hole is incorrectly reported, the data may instead be interpreted as zero bytes. Any application which checks for holes may be affected by this issue; if this occurs during a file copy it will result in a corrupt copy that retains the incorrect data. Note that the source file remains intact (a subsequent read will return the correct data).

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:15.sanitizer: Compiler-RT is an implementation of various compiler runtime support routines, provided by the LLVM project. This library also provides a number of so-called Sanitizers, which help to catch buffer overruns, thread data races, and so on: AddressSanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, and more. Some of the Sanitizers cannot work correctly when ASLR is enabled. Therefore, at the initialization of such Sanitizers, ASLR is detected via procctl(2). If ASLR is enabled, it is first disabled, and then the main executable containing the Sanitizer is re-executed, after printing an appropriate message. However, the Sanitizers work by intercepting various function calls, and by mistake the already-intercepted procctl(2) function was used. This causes an internal error, which usually results in a segfault. Binaries linked to AddressSanitizer (using -fsanitizedress), MemorySanitizer (using -fsanitize=memory) or ThreadSanitizer (using -fsanitize=thread) can crash at startup with a segfault, if ASLR is enabled. Other binaries are not affected.

OpenBSD Errata: November 29, 2023 (perl): Errata patches for Perl have been released for OpenBSD 7.4 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/12/04: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 535: Untitled Episode: FreeBSD 14 has been released, Reading your RSS feed on FreeBSD, Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk, clang(1)/llvm updated to version 16 in OpenBSD, NetBSD Security Advisory: multiple vulnerabilities in ftpd(8), and more.

Tutorials

OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases – Part 2: File Serving and SANs: In our continuing series of ZFS best practices, they examine several of the most common use cases around file serving, and provide configuration tips and best practices to get the most out of your storage.

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

", "excerpt": "

Some FreeBSD and OpenBSD erratas and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 168", "date": "2023-11-29:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 29, 2023", "slug": "168", "html": "

Releases

Bastille 0.10.20231125 Release - Thanksgiving 2023 Edition: 📦 The Bastille team spent the American holiday weekend putting the final touches on Bastille 0.10.20231125! Major features and fixes include:

bootstrap #FreeBSD BETA and RC releases
bootstrap EOL #FreeBSD releases (>=9.0) * improved jail startup dependency using rcorder(8)
combine create options, eg: -CV, -TB, etc
fixes to bastille setup

pfSense CE Software Version 2.7.1: This is a maintenance software release including new features and bug fixes.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 21, 2023 (patch ospfd tmux httpd): Errata patches for patch, ospfd, tmux, and httpd have been released for OpenBSD 7.4. Errata patch for httpd has also been released for OpenBSD 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

BSD Now 543: Migrating from an Old Linux Server to a New FreeBSD Machine, The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist, The Worst New Guys In History, FreeBSD Jails vs. Docker: A Comparison, Oracle Developer Studio 12.6 on Illumos.

Tutorials

OpenBSD and Pi Zero 2w: Could you use a Pi as a DNS et DHCP server? It turns out to be really simple, with the proper hardware. Here are the notes.

FreeBSD 13.2 upgrade to 14.0 - properly detailed and correct way: In this article, Özgür Konstantin Kazanççı talks about how to upgrade FreeBSD 13.2 systems to 14.0 in deep and detailed way.

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

", "excerpt": "

New releases and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 167", "date": "2023-11-22:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 22, 2023", "slug": "167", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE Available: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the stable/14 branch. Some of the highlights: OpenSSH has been updated to version 9.5p1. OpenSSL has been updated to version 3.0.12, a major upgrade from OpenSSL 1.1.1t in FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE. The bhyve hypervisor now supports TPM and GPU passthrough. FreeBSD supports up to 1024 cores on the amd64 and arm64 platforms. ZFS has been upgraded to OpenZFS release 2.2, providing significant performance improvements. It is now possible to perform background filesystem checks on UFS file systems running with journaled soft updates. Experimental ZFS images are now available for AWS and Azure. The default congestion control mechanism for TCP is now CUBIC. And much more…

BSDSec

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-007: multiple vulnerabilities in ftpd(8): A vulnerability in the NetBSD FTP server allows unauthenticated users to execute MLST and MLSD commands without authentication. This can lead to information leakage - unauthorized party may be able to download the listing of the current ftpd(8) directory. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2023-45198. Additionally, potential buffer overflow in count_users() and reading outside of allocated memory issues due to wrong struct type used in the pam_set_item() call have been identified.

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

News

BSD Now 533: FreeBSD on the RISC-V Architecture, A bit of XENIX history, pkgbase: Official packages, recover lost text by coredumping firefox, FuguIta 7.4 has been released, LibreSSL 3.8.2 Released, OpenSMTPD 7.4.0p0 Released.

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

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 14 is here.

" }, { "title": "Issue 166", "date": "2023-11-15:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 15, 2023", "slug": "166", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 3.1.1: Includes several security fixes plus updates to the mport package manager.

NetBSD 10.0 RC1 available: The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is high time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This matches the long time it took for the developement branch to get ready for branching, a lot of development went into this new release.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:16.cap_net: Casper services allow limiting operations that a process can perform. Each service maintains a specific list of permitted operations. Certain operations can be further restricted, such as specifying which domain names can be resolved. During the verification of limits, the service must ensure that the new set of constraints is a subset of the previous one. In the case of the cap_net service, the currently limited set of domain names was fetched incorrectly. In certain scenarios, if only a list of resolvable domain names was specified without setting any other limitations, the application could submit a new list of domains including include entries not previously in the list.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:13.freebsd-update: Some systems use non-default configurations referred to as “deep” boot environments. Deep boot environments place datasets belonging to the boot environment subordinate to the boot environment dataset itself, rather than elsewhere in the pool structure. This kind of boot environment requires the -r flag to bectl(8) for most operations in order to recurse on these subordinate datasets, but freebsd-update(8) was not recursing when creating a backup boot environment. Without recursing in bectl(8), backups taken of a deep boot environment are not complete snapshots of the system state before the upgrade takes place. This means that it’s potentially painful to try and rollback to the pre-upgrade state after the upgrade has completed.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:14.regcomp: In some instances, the regcomp() implementation would inadvertently sign-extend a character in the regular expression. Additionally, alphabetic wide-characters were not properly being considered as such. Regular expressions supplied to grep(1) or sed(1) that contained an alphabetic wide-character would incorrectly error out as if a bogus trailing backslash had been supplied.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:15.stdio: For line-buffered streams the __sflush() function did not correctly update the FILE object’s write space member when the write(2) system call returns an error. Depending on the nature of an application that calls libc’s stdio functions and the presence of errors returned from the write(2) system call (or an overridden stdio write routine) a heap buffer overfly may occur. Such overflows may lead to data corruption or the execution of arbitrary code at the privilege level of the calling program.

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

News

clang(1) / llvm updated to version 16: Naturally, this has involved supporting work elsewhere in base, and in ports.

Valuable News – 2023/11/13: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 532: 2^18 dollars sponsorship: 218 dollars to open source, EuroBSDCon 2023 Trip Report, FreeBSD vs Linux (Debian), Introduction to sysclean8, Run your own Syncthing discovery server on OpenBSD, FreeBSD years: 2000-2005, Using OpenBSD relayd(8) as an Application Layer Gateway, and more.

September/October 2023 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal is Here: The most recent issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available. It focuses on Ports and Packages and contains articles on “Custom Poudriere Packages in Your Own Repository,” “Wazuh and MITRE Caldera Using FreeBSD Jails,” and more.

Tutorials

GPU passthrough on Proxmox VE - Deploying a cloud image of OpenBSD 7.3: This is the fourth in a series of five articles covering the installation and configuration of VMs (Linux, Windows, macOS and BSD) in PCI Passthrough on Proxmox VE 8. In this article, we’ll explore together how to easily create and deploy a VM with a full desktop (under Mate), using an unofficial OpenBSD image adapted to Cloud-init, while benefiting from good graphics acceleration thank of GPU Passthrough.

OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases – Part 1: Snapshots and Backups: In a new series of articles on OpenZFS, they’ll go over some universal best practices for OpenZFS storage, and then dig into several common use cases along with configuration tips and best practices specific to those use cases.

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

", "excerpt": "

Seems like we’re in a release part of the year. New Midnight 3.1.1 and NetBSD 10 RC1 are here.

" }, { "title": "Issue 165", "date": "2023-11-08:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 08, 2023", "slug": "165", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 Available: The fourth RC build for the FreeBSD 14.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

HardenedBSD October 2023 Status Report: Changes in ports and more from HBSD developer.

Valuable News – 2023/11/06: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 531: Everlasting Software: OpenBSD 7.4, Making Software Last Forever, DragonFlyBSD Per-process capability-based restrictions, HardenedBSD September 2023 Status Report, NetBSD as a Kubernetes Pod, Firefox hardening with Arkenfox, and more.

July-September 2023 Status Report: The July to September 2023 Status Report is now available with 32 entries.

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

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 14 getting closer with RC4 and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 164", "date": "2023-10-25:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 25, 2023", "slug": "164", "html": "

Releases

FuguIta 7.4 Pre-Releases: Following test versions are in the “test” directory of every mirror: FuguIta-7.4-i386 and FuguIta-7.4-amd64.

FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 Available: The second RC build for the FreeBSD 14.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

Bastille 0.10.20231013 Released: The Bastille team has finally published the long awaited 0.10.20231013 release, titled “Worth The Wait”. They’re confident this is the best release they’ve had so far–you’re going to like it! This release includes a new setup command to handle one-time configuration of Bastille hosts, a new tags command to manage tags on containers, improved support for dual-stack ip4/ip6 containers and much more! Find Bastille 0.10.20231013 in FreeBSD latest repository or visit Bastille GitHub for source installation.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

OpenBSD’s built-in memory leak detection: As announced on the misc@ mailing list, Otto Moerbeek, the author of OpenBSD’s malloc(3) implementation a.k.a. “otto malloc”, has written a tutorial on the new malloc(3) leak detection available in OpenBSD 7.4.

Valuable News – 2023/10/23: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

EuroBSDCon 2023 Trip Report – Bojan Novković: Trip report from Bojan, who received the FreeBSD Foundation travel grant to attend EuroBSDcon in Coimbra, Portugal.

BSD Now 529: Adopting FreeBSD as Your Open Source Operating System, How Hard is it to Adapt a Memory Allocator to CHERI, Running Stable Diffusion on FreeBSD, Self-hosting Pixelfed on OpenBSD, Time Capsule instance using Samba, FreeBSD, and ZFS, and more.

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

", "excerpt": "

Some interesting pre/releases and more. Read on!

" }, { "title": "Issue 163", "date": "2023-10-18:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 18, 2023", "slug": "163", "html": "

Releases

OpenBSD 7.4 released: The OpenBSD project has announced the release of OpenBSD 7.4, the 55th release of the OpenBSD operating system. The new release contains a number of innovations and improvements across a number of areas as well as the general churn of optimizations and fixes across the system.

FreeBSD 14.0-RC1 Available: The first RC build for the FreeBSD 14.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/10/16: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 528: Pledge the Program: If you can use Open Source you can build hardware, Good performance is not just big O, Proof You Should Not Run MWL Code, How to add pledge to a program in OpenBSD, 3D printing on OpenBSD, Getting the right type of certificate, Jenny’s Daily Drivers, and more.

HardenedBSD September 2023 Status Report: Changes in src, ports and project in general.

Tutorials

Using OpenBSD relayd(8) as an Application Layer Gateway: Author of this post has attend EuroBSDCon 2023 and had a talk about relayd(8). The talk was recorded and made available on the EuroBSDCon YouTube channel. This post attempts a reboot of the slides content in a more browser-friendly format.

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

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD 7.4, FreeBSD 14.0-RC1 and more. Nice!

" }, { "title": "Issue 162", "date": "2023-10-11:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 11, 2023", "slug": "162", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:14.smccc: To mitigate speculative execution side channel attacks on some AArch64 hardware the kernel can call into the boot firmware using the Secure Monitor Call Calling Convention (SMCCC) mechanism. To decide if the kernel needs to use the SMCCC mitigation on a given CPU it can query the firmware if the SMCCC workaround is present. On CPU 0 the check for the SMCCC workaround is called before SMCCC support has been initialized.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:13.capsicum: A sandboxed process with only read or write but no seek capability on a file descriptor may be able to read data from or write data to an arbitrary location within the file corresponding to that file descriptor.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:12.msdosfs: In certain cases using the truncate or ftruncate system call to extend a file size populates the additional space in the file with unallocated data from the underlying disk device, rather than zero bytes. A user with write access to files on a msdosfs file system may be able to read unintended data (for example, from a previously deleted file).

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:12.freebsd-update: freebsd-update was unable to handle the case where a file in the “old” version changed to a directory in the “new” version. This case occurs with upgrades to FreeBSD 14.0, as /usr/include/c++/v1/__string exists as a file in 12.4 and 13.2, and as a directory in FreeBSD 14.0.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:09.freebsd-update [REVISED]: freebsd-update incorrectly deleted files in /etc/ in the event the file to be updated matched the new release and was different than the old release. This has not been an issue previously because the $FreeBSD$ tag expansion from subversion virtually guaranteed the existing file was going to be different from the new release. With the conversion to git in the 13.x releases, $FreeBSD$ is no longer expanded, making it much more likely that a file would find this issue.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/10/09: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 527: Reports are in: Unlocking Infrastructure Sovereignty, first meeting of the FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group, HardenedBSD August 2023 Status Report, GhostBSD August 2023 donation report, MidnightBSD 3.1 Released, OpenBSD Webzine ISSUE 14, and more.

Introducing Students to FreeBSD: One of the Foundation’s goals for 2023-2024 is to increase the adoption and visibility of FreeBSD. This is a pretty broad and lofty goal, so they’ve broken this down into a few key markets/audiences they plan to target. One group they’ve identified is college students. Introducing FreeBSD to people early on in their education paths will help prepare them for jobs in systems programming, and provide marketable skills for many opportunities going forward. Plus, the Project benefits by having more people contributing to FreeBSD.

New to FreeBSD? Here’s Where to Connect with the Community: The FreeBSD Project is always excited for new users and contributors! The easiest way to get involved is through the community itself: mailing lists, social media, and local meetups. These spaces are filled with FreeBSD users, developers, and enthusiasts who are excited to help new users. They’re great places to discuss FreeBSD, meet community members, and ask questions about the operating system.

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

", "excerpt": "

Bunch of FreeBSD Security advisories and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 161", "date": "2023-10-04:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 04, 2023", "slug": "161", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Announcing the pkgsrc-2023Q3 branch: The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 80th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc contains over 27,000 packages, with varying support across 23 distinct operating systems. Since the pkgsrc-2023Q2 release, 199 packages were added, 174 removed, and 2199 updates (to 1503 distinct packages) were processed. These included 27 Go, 101 Perl, 558 Python, and 263 Ruby package updates.

BSD Now 526: ZFS Replication Tools: Why DNS is still hard to learn, Unix support 50 years ago, ZFS Replication tools, Between ISA and PCI, PCs had EISA and VLB, Old Computer Challenge v3, and more.

Valuable News – 2023/10/02: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

OpenBSD-current has moved to 7.4: For those unfamiliar with the process: this is not the 7.4 release, but is part of the standard build-up to the release.

Tutorials

Introduction to sysclean(8): sysclean(8) is a system tool designed for help system administrator to keep their OpenBSD clean after upgrade.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

After a short break, new issue is out with the new pkgsrc branch and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 160", "date": "2023-09-13:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 13, 2023", "slug": "160", "html": "

Releases

HardenedBSD 14-STABLE Now Available: HardenedBSD 14-STABLE is now officially a thing. Haven’t seen any changelog, yet. Installers are at https://installers.hardenedbsd.org/pub/14-stable/ and package builder at https://hbsd-pkg-14-stable-01.hardenedbsd.org/index.html.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:10.pf: IPv6 fragments may bypass firewall rules written on the assumption all fragments have been reassembled and, as a result, be forwarded or processed by the host.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:11.caroot: Several certificates were added to the bundle after the latest release of FreeBSD 13.2. TLS connections using the missing root certificates as a trust anchor would not be trusted causing an error.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:10.pci: The code which allocated the hot-plug interrupt did not allocate MSI-X vectors properly. When attaching to devices which support only MSI-X messages, the interrupt would not be allocated. PCIe hot-plug would fail to work for certain devices. In particular, this affects certain Amazon EC2 instance types which require functional hot-plug support in order to attach network devices.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:09.freebsd-update: freebsd-update incorrectly deleted files in /etc/ in the event the file to be updated matched the new release and was different than the old release. This has not been an issue previously because the $FreeBSD$ tag expansion from subversion virtually guaranteed the existing file was going to be different from the new release. With the conversion to git in the 13.x releases, $FreeBSD$ is no longer expanded, making it much more likely that a file would find this issue.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/09/11: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 523: The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature, The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace, Theo de Raadt on Zenbleed, OPNsense 23.7 released, illumos gets a new C compiler, fixing Thinkpad X1 WIFI on FreeBSD, and more.

Valuable News – 2023/09/04: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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

", "excerpt": "

HardenedBSD 14-STABLE, many FreeBSD security advisiories and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 159", "date": "2023-08-14:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 14, 2023", "slug": "159", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed available.

News

FreeBSD for Research: CHERI/Morello: University of Cambridge Computing Security Case Study for the FreeBSD foundation.

BSD Now 519: Telegram from BSDNow: 3 Advantages to Running FreeBSD as Your Server OS, FreeBSD 14 Release Schedule, Stream your OpenBSD desktop audio, DOD KSOS Secure UNIX Operating System Manual, How to limit bandwidth usage with SCP transfers, and more.

Tutorials

Self-hosting Pixelfed on OpenBSD: In case you don’t already know, Pixelfed is a media sharing oriented solution that federates with Fediverse using the ActivityPub . And I like it also because it is based on PHP. This makes it quite simple to be hosted on OpenBSD. And here’s how to do this.

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

", "excerpt": "

This one’s short. Well.

" }, { "title": "Issue 158", "date": "2023-08-09:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 09, 2023", "slug": "158", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD 13.1 end-of-life: As of August 2nd, 2023, FreeBSD 13.1 reached end-of-life and is no longer supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 13.1 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:06.ipv6: IPv6 packets may be fragmented in order to accommodate the maximum transmission unit (MTU) of the network path between the source and destination hosts. The FreeBSD kernel keeps track of received packet fragments and will reassemble the original packet once all fragments have been received, at which point the packet is processed normally. Each fragment of an IPv6 packet contains a fragment header which specifies the offset of the fragment relative to the original packet, and each fragment specifies its length in the IPv6 header. When reassembling the packet, the kernel calculates the complete IPv6 payload length. The payload length must fit into a 16-bit field in the IPv6 header. Due to a bug in the kernel, a set of carefully crafted packets can trigger an integer overflow in the calculation of the reassembled packet’s payload length field. Once an IPv6 packet has been reassembled, the kernel continues processing its contents. It does so assuming that the fragmentation layer has validated all fields of the constructed IPv6 header. This bug violates such assumptions and can be exploited to trigger a remote kernel panic, resulting in a denial of service.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:08.vnet: VNET is the name of a technique to virtualize the network stack. It changes global resources, most notably variables, into per network stack resources and handles them in the context of the correct instance. VNET is enabled by default in GENERIC kernels on all architectures except 32-bit ARM. DPCPU is a dynamic per-CPU memory allocator which can instantiate one instance of a global variable with each CPU in the system. Dynamically allocated per-CPU variables can be defined with custom names and types. DPCPU is always enabled. After FreeBSD 13.1 was released, the contributed LLVM components (LLVM, clang, compiler-rt, libc++, libunwind, lld, lldb and openmp) were upgraded to upstream version 14.0.5. The new version of lld, the llvm linker, got additional optimizations for arm64 in the form of so-called relocation relaxations. These relaxations are fine for regular userland applications, as the dynamic linker can handle the optimized relocations. However, due to the way the VNET and DPCPU features are implemented, the optimized relocations can cause panics if they are used in kernel modules. On arm64 systems, loading kernel modules that use VNET or DPCPU features can cause panics. A known example is the WireGuard kernel module, if_wg(4).

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:09.pam_krb5: Kerberos 5 (krb5) is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. The PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) library provides a flexible framework for user authentication and session setup / teardown. pam_krb5 is a PAM module that allows using a Kerberos password to authenticate the user. pam_krb5 is disabled in the default FreeBSD installation. pam_krb5 uses passwords for authentication, which is distinct from Kerberos native protocols like GSSAPI, which allows for login without the exchange of passwords. GSSAPI is not affected by this issue.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:08.ssh: ssh-agent is a program to hold private keys used for OpenSSH public key authentication. Connections to ssh-agent may be forwarded from further remote hosts using the -A option to ssh. The server to which the ssh-agent connection is forwarded may cause the ssh-agent process to load (and unload) operating system-provided shared libraries to support the addition and deletion of PKCS#11 keys.The server may cause ssh-agent to load shared libraries other than those required for PKCS#11 support. These shared libraries may have side effects that occur on load and unload (dlopen and dlclose). An attacker with access to a server that accepts a forwarded ssh-agent connection may be able to execute code on the machine running ssh-agent. Note that the attack relies on properties of operating system-provided libraries. This has been demonstrated on other operating systems; it is unknown whether this attack is possible using the libraries provided by a FreeBSD installation.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:07.bhyve: bhyve(8)‘s fwctl interface provides a mechanism through which guest firmware can query the hypervisor for information about the virtual machine. The fwctl interface is available to guests when bhyve is run with the “-l bootrom” option, used for example when booting guests in UEFI mode. bhyve is currently only supported on the amd64 platform. The fwctl driver implements a state machine which is executed when the guest accesses certain x86 I/O ports. The interface lets the guest copy a string into a buffer resident in the bhyve process’ memory. A bug in the state machine implementation can result in a buffer overflowing when copying this string. A malicious, privileged software running in a guest VM can exploit the buffer overflow to achieve code execution on the host in the bhyve userspace process, which typically runs as root. Note that bhyve runs in a Capsicum sandbox, so malicious code is constrained by the capabilities available to the bhyve process.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/08/07: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

New routed IPsec VPN mode committed to OpenBSD-current: The routed IPSec mode has now been committed to -current by David Gwynne (dlg@), likely to be a prominent item for the upcoming OpenBSD 7.4 release.

BSD Now 518: Unix Edition Zero: A Guide to Problem-Solving for Software Developers with Examples, making 20% time work, Long Live Netbooks, OpenBSD Router on Sg105w, Set Up a Simple and Actually Working Wireguard Server, Unix Edition Zero, how to be a -10x engineer, and more.

Tutorials

Self-Hosted SearXNG instance on OpenBSD: Some time ago, author of this post discovered and used searx on OpenBSD . This worked quite well but there were a few annoying bugs that they couldn’t solve. Mainly using OpenSearch with Firefox and timeouts with some Big Tech search engines. After struggling enough, they decided to switch to SearXNG .

Multiboot Microsoft Windows, OpenBSD and Slackware Linux: This is how an author configured a multiboot environnement on the ThinkPad with Microsoft Windows 11, OpenBSD 7.3 and Slackware Linux 15.0. Note that they will encrypt as much storage as possible using the various available OS technologies.

Fixing ThinkPad X1 WiFi on Freebsd: Blog post about replacing AX200 WiFi adapter with an AC9260 for FreeBSD

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

", "excerpt": "

Among other BSD news, this week we see bunch of FreeBSD security advisories plus how to host SearXNG instance on OpenBSD.

" }, { "title": "Issue 157", "date": "2023-08-02:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 02, 2023", "slug": "157", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 23.7 “Restless Roadrunner” Released: This version enables API support for a broad spectrum of features, achieved through the diligent work on the MVC framework. Legacy migrated features include: Interface diagnostics (Ping / Traceroute and Portprobe) LAGG interfaces System Services (Diagnostics) DHCP Leases, both IPV4 and IPV6 Advanced Unbound DNS capabilities Additionally, floating rules and groups benefit from improved visibility, thus simplifying network management.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 25, 2023 (hv amd cpu): Errata patches for guests running on hypervisors on AMD cpus have been released for OpenBSD 7.2 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/07/31: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

FreeBSD Status Report - Second Quarter 2023: FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2023 Here is the second 2023 status report, with 37 entries. As you might notice, we have several more reports than last quarter. This is a great news and shows how much the FreeBSD community is active and always working on providing high quality software. In particular, please note that Summer has started and do not miss the amazing projects shared by our Google Summer of Code students.

BSD Now 517: Huge pfsync rewrite: Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls Comparison Part 2, 27 Years with the Perfect OS, Top 20 OpenSSH Server Best Security Practices, Huge pfsync rewrite, OpenSMTPD 7.3.0p1 release, Running OpenBSD 7.3 on your laptop is really hard (not), and more.

2023 Recommended Summer Reads – FreeBSD and Linux: Embrace the power of FreeBSD! 🌞📚 Unleash its potential with this captivating summer collection. Optimize performance, boost security, and expand your tech horizons. Level up your skills as you sip on your summer cocktail or simply take a break from a heavy year.

Theo de Raadt on Zenbleed: The buzzword bug of the week is Zenbleed, which affects various AMD processors. On OpenBSD, the latest -current snapshots already have the fixes..

Tutorials

Launch OpenBSD vmd Guests on Demand from SSH: Or how to run Signal on OpenBSD?

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

", "excerpt": "

OPNsense release is here, and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 156", "date": "2023-07-26:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 26, 2023", "slug": "156", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 19, 2023 (ssh-agent): Errata patches for ssh-agent have been released for OpenBSD 7.2 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/07/24: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade to FreeBSD 13.2: The FreeBSD 13.2 release came out in April and for those of you who have not yet upgraded, FreeBSD Foundation created a top ten list of reasons to upgrade today.

BSD Now 516: Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls Part 1, Why Netflix Chose NGINX as the Heart of Its CDN, Protect your web servers against PHP shells and malwares, Installing and running Gitlab howto, and more.

In Memoriam: Hans Petter William Sirevåg Selasky: The FreeBSD community was saddened this month by the tragic death of one of its most prolific contributors. We learned that Hans Petter Selasky passed away in a traffic accident in Lillesand, Norway on June 23, 2023 at the age of 41. Hans was an incredibly brilliant and kind person, and made many valuable contributions to FreeBSD.

Tutorials

Live from OpenBSD in Amsterdam: An article about moving to OpenBSD in OpenBSD Amsterdam. Author writes about basic configuration of httpd, relayd and acme client for a static webpage. Some parts read as a love letter to Michael W. Lucas.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Top 10 reasons to upgrade to FreeBSD 13.2 and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 155", "date": "2023-07-19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 19, 2023", "slug": "155", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 12, 2023 (bgpd, httpd, elf, bgpd): Errata patches for bgpd(8), httpd(8) and the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 7.2 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/07/17: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 515: ChatGPT writing pf.conf: FreeBSD or Linux – A Choice Without OS Wars, The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories, ChatGPT was asked to write a pf.conf to spec, GhostBSD 23.06.1 is now available, OPNsense 23.1.9 released, Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD, and more.

FreeBSD – 3 Advantages to Running FreeBSD as Your Server Operating System: As the motto “The Power To Serve” indicates, FreeBSD is specifically designed to excel as a server operating system. Article is going to go over three of its most compelling advantages in that role: thorough OpenZFS integration, easy-to-leverage infrastructure for custom packaging, and advanced fleet management capabilities.

Tutorials

FreeBSD – How to install LXQt as a Desktop environment: LXQt is known for being a lightweight GUI and has been gaining popularity. Under FreeBSD, LXQt is installed with version 1.3.0 and is the result of the merger of LXDE-Qt and Razor-qt projects.

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

", "excerpt": "

Yet another teeny tiny edition, but hey, it’s summer time!

" }, { "title": "Issue 154", "date": "2023-07-12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 12, 2023", "slug": "154", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/07/10: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Major pfsync(4) Rewrite Has Been Committed: The major pfsync(4) rewrite on which we recently reported has been committed to -current by David Gwynne. Testers wanted.

BSD Now 514: OpenZFS, Your Data and the Challenge of Ransomware, I Didn’t Learn Unix By Reading All The Manpages, I try to answer “how to become a systems engineer”, Writing shell scripts in Nushell, Sudo and signal propagation, infecting SSH Public Keys with backdoors, OpenBSD Thinkpad, and more.

[CFT] sec(4) for Route Based IPSec VPNs: A new tool for creating flexible, route based site to site virtual private networks (site-to-site VPNs) is entering its call for testing phase on OpenBSD-current.

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

", "excerpt": "

Teeny tiny edition, but hey, it’s summer time!

" }, { "title": "Issue 153", "date": "2023-07-05:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 05, 2023", "slug": "153", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-006: KDC-spoofing in pam_krb5: Workarounds are described in the article.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-005: su(1) bypass via pam_ksu(8): Workaround is to disable pam_ksu(8) or installed fixed versions.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-004: procfs environ exposure: This can expose secrets, since the process environment is often used to hold things like secret access keys. Workaround: Avoid mounting procfs. If you need to mount procfs, update the kernel to a fixed version and reboot.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-003: Structure padding memory disclosures: Many system calls can disclose kernel memory due to structure padding. There are pre-built binaries for all architectures and NetBSD versions.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-002: Various compatibility syscall memory access issues: Update the kernel to a fixed version and reboot to fix those issues.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-001: Multiple buffer overflows in USB drivers: To fix this issue, update the kernel to a fixed version and reboot.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/07/03: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

HardenedBSD June 2023 Status Report: The main message is that the development and build infrastructure is back online.

BSD Now 513: New Host Interview: New show host, Understanding ZFS vdev Types, Don’t abuse su for dropping user privileges, Dynamic Tracing on OpenBSD 7.3, new Libressl, Manual Jails on FreeBSD 12, and more.

Announcing the pkgsrc-2023Q2 branch: The pkgsrc developers have announced the 79th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc contains over 27,000 packages, with varying support across 23 distinct operating systems. Since the pkgsrc-2023Q1 release, 287 packages were added, 55 removed, and 2763 updates (to 1918 distinct packages) were processed. These included 11 Go, 128 Perl, 610 Python, 226 Ruby, and 414 TeX package updates.

Tutorials

NFSv4 Server Inside FreeBSD VNET Jail: Article provides a step-by-step guide on how to create a VNET jail, install the necessary packages, configure the NFS server, and test the setup.

Ad Blocking with pfSense Software: The article explains how to use pfSense, a free and open source firewall and router, to block ads on your network. It also compares different methods of ad blocking and their advantages and disadvantages.

FreeBSD – Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls – Part 2: In the first article of this series, they covered the major differences between two types of firewalls platforms - either Linux or FreeBSD based and what the options are. In the second part, they go a bit deeper and discuss how egress filtering is done, and how tables and sets are built.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Bunch of NetBSD advisories, so get ready, plus more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 152", "date": "2023-06-28:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 28, 2023", "slug": "152", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/06/26: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Celebrating 30 Years of FreeBSD: Performance: FreeBSD is known for a lot of things, but high performance seems to come up over and over again.Thanks to the efficient kernel design, broad scalability and of course, integrated filesystems like ZFS, FreeBSD is designed with performance in mind.

Celebrating 30 Years of FreeBSD: Licensing: Many choices are available when it comes to deciding on what license to use for your latest project. Today, we are going to focus on the 2 clause variant of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, also known as the FreeBSD license. For many folks, the business-friendly FreeBSD license offers the flexibility they are looking for. Why? Well first let’s take a look at the license itself.

512: BSDNow Live! 9 bits of BSDNow - Just speak into the goat: Recorded at BSDCan 2023.

Celebrating 30 Years of FreeBSD: Security: Whether it’s using FreeBSD to create security focused products or strengthening security for the FreeBSD Operating System, we all know that the effort to keep any type of technology secure is extensive and never-ending. So how do folks within FreeBSD handle the gigantic task?

4 Months of BSD: Over the past 4 months the post author have been running various BSDs on his daily machine.This will be mostly a discussion comparing BSD to Linux and what they like about and dislike about the various BSDs by itself.

shutdown reboot now require membership of group _shutdown: Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) committed changes which result in the shutdown(8) and reboot(8) commands (in -current) requiring membership of the the (new) group “_shutdown”. The xfce port has already been modified to accommodate this.

Valuable News – 2023/06/19: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Celebrating 30 Years of FreeBSD – FreeBSD Journal Special Edition: Inside you’ll find stories from long-time FreeBSD community members such as Poul-Henning Kamp, Greg Lehey, and Doug Rabson. Kirk McKusick discusses the secrets to FreeBSD’s success and Hiroki Sato takes a look back at the history of FreeBSD in Japan. Those are just a few of the intriguing stories you’ll find inside. Plus, a PDF of the timeline poster is included. It’s perfect for printing out and hanging on your wall.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Bunch of articles about 30th FreeBSD anniversary plus more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 151", "date": "2023-06-21:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 21, 2023", "slug": "151", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 15, 2023 (libx11): Errata patches for libX11 CVE-2023-3138 have been released for OpenBSD 7.2 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Celebrating 30 years of FreeBSD – FreeBSD Timeline: The Foundation took a look back through the Project’s history and, with the collaboration of the FreeBSD Journal team, created a new FreeBSD timeline. Spanning from the first timeshare operating systems, all the way to today, the timeline highlights some of the important breakthroughs and developments that have helped FreeBSD endure for 3 decades.

FreeBSD Day – Celebrating 30 Years of FreeBSD: June 19, 2023 marks 30 years since the FreeBSD operating system got its name. As you may know, the anniversary of FreeBSD has been named FreeBSD Day. If you love FreeBSD as much as we do, join us on July 19 and throughout the week to help us celebrate this exciting milestone.

BSD Now 511: Against Innovation: Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them, OpenZFS for HPC Clusters, Self-Hosted Bookmarks using DAV and httpd on OpenBSD, Terraform + Proxmox + OpenBSD = Love, WOL Plex Server, Against innovation, and more.

Registration for EuroBSDCon 2023 is open: Program at https://2023.eurobsdcon.org/program/. Early bird rate before July 15th.

Valuable News – 2023/06/12: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Tutorials

FreeBSD – Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls – Part 1: When it comes to choosing a firewall technology for your operating system, the options can be overwhelming. This is particularly true for Linux and FreeBSD, which offer multiple choices. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at four of the most popular firewall options for both systems: iptables, nftables, ipfw, and pf, to help you make an informed decision.

Catfish - A FreeBSD GUI search tool for the Desktop: Catfish is a GUI file searching tool for the FreeBSD/GhostBSD desktop. The interface is lightweight and simple and the tool allows you to refine your search with criteria like time, file type, etc.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Celebrating 30 years of FreeBSD, let’s go!

" }, { "title": "Issue 150", "date": "2023-06-07:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 07, 2023", "slug": "150", "html": "

Releases

GhostBSD 23.06.01 ISO is now available: This release contains a new tool called Backup Station to manage ZFS boot environment. Now the default time is set to local instead of UTC, which fixes an issue with LightDM time. Software Station search got improved to be less laggy.

OPNsense 23.1.9 released: A small update to improve stability with multiple delegated prefixes from DHCPv6 connectivity as well as proper “no binding” handling in the DHCPv6 client itself. Internally, the backend service has been refactored to allow for future additions, but no visible functionality changes have been done.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/06/05: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

EuroBSDCon 2023 Travel Grant Application Now Open: The Travel Grant Application for EuroBSDCon 2023 is now open. The Foundation can help you attend EuroBSDCon through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development. Applications are due August 2, 2023.

BSD Now 509: Dot File Naming: Leveraging OpenZFS to Build Your Own Storage Appliance, Install OpenBSD as a VM, Set up your own CalDAV and CardDAV servers on OpenBSD, display basic computer information using DMI table decoder, Gpart CheatSheet, Rob Pike on the Origin of Unix Dot File Names, and more.

Valuable News – 2023-05-29: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSDCan report: BSDCan trip report from Jake Freeland.

Tutorials

OpenZFS – OpenZFS, Your Data and the Challenge of Ransomware: As commercial storage becomes increasingly expensive, more and more of the Education vertical is looking at Open Source solutions for storage. In this article, we discuss the value of OpenZFS for Universities and how system administrators can best leverage it to their benefit.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

New GhostBSD and OPNsense versions are out, what a week!

" }, { "title": "Issue 149", "date": "2023-05-10:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 10, 2023", "slug": "149", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2023/05/09: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

cron(8) now supports random ranges with steps in OpenBSD: Thanks to the commit by Todd Miller (millert@), cron(8) now supports random values in a range with a step value (i.e. ”~/” in crontab(5) entries).

NetBSD AGM2023: Annual General Meeting, May 13, 21:00 UTC: In 2023, The NetBSD Foundation will hold its Annual General Meeting in public, on Saturday, May 13th, at 21:00 UTC, in the netbsd-agm channel on irc.libera.chat - You can use your favorite Internet Relay Chat program or: https://web.libera.chat/#netbsd-agm There will be various presentations about NetBSD, and a moderated Q&A session.

AsiaBSDCon 2023 Trip Report: Report about recent attendance at the DevSummit and AsiaBSDCon 2023.

BSD Now 505: BSD Desktop Setup: OpenBSD 7.3 released, Accelerating Datacenter Energy Efficiency by Leveraging FreeBSD as Your Server OS, install Cinnamon as a Desktop environment, xmonad FreeBSD set up from scratch, Burgr books in your terminal, and more.

FreeBSD Foundation Welcomes New Team Members: The Foundation is pleased to welcome two new members to the FreeBSD Foundation team: Greg Wallace joins the Foundation as the new Director of Partnerships and Research and Pierre Pronchery joins the FreeBSD Foundation as a Userland Software Developer.

Spring 2023 Foundation Software Development Projects Update: In this post, Foundation gives an update on the work that has gone on over the past few months towards meeting the objectives set out in the FreeBSD Foundation Technology Roadmap.

Tutorials

Self-Hosted Bookmarks using DAV and httpd on OpenBSD: How to Install the PHP environment, Setup the DAV web-space, Ofuscated URLs and users, Authenticated access, Users data separation, How to Keep the code simple and add more DAV spaces.

OpenZFS – What Makes OpenZFS the Ideal Storage Solution for University Environments: OpenZFS is a cost-effective open source storage solution for Educational institutions. Learn how universities & system administrators can maximize its benefits.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

As it’s time of conferences again, let’s read some reports and more news from BSD.

" }, { "title": "Issue 148", "date": "2023-05-03:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 03, 2023", "slug": "148", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: Mai 3, 2023 (bgpd): An errata patch for bgpd and rpki-client has been released for OpenBSD 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

VM owners can now override the boot kernel: Dave Voutila (dv@) has added another feature to virtualisation on OpenBSD. Thanks to the following commit, it is now possible for the owners of virtual machines to override the boot kernel.

vmd(8) moves to a multi-process model: Dave Voutila (dv@) committed a change which brings a multi-process model to vmd(8), enhancing both security and performance.

BSD Now 504: Release the BSD: FreeBSD 13.2 Release, Using DTrace to find block sizes of ZFS, NFS, and iSCSI, Midnight BSD 3.0.1, Closing a stale SSH connection, How to automatically add identity to the SSH authentication agent, Pros and Cons of FreeBSD for virtual Servers, and more.

SCaLE20X Conference Report: Conference report from by Drew Gurkowski from FreeBSD Foundation.

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

", "excerpt": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

viogpu(4), a VirtIO GPU driver, added to -current : Joshua Stein has committed viogpu(4), which provides support for the virtio(4) GPU interface (provided by QEMU and other virtual machines) to create a wscons(4) console.

BSD Now 503: Fast Unix Commands: ZFS Optimization Success Stories, Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man’s Plan 9 Namespaces, better support for SSH host certificates, Fast Unix Commands, Fascination with AWK, and more.

malloc leak detection available in OpenBSD -current: OpenBSD -current just grew a new tool for developers working on OpenBSD to detect unsafe behaviors in their code. OpenBSD lets you more easily track memory allocations and whether allocations are properly freed after use.

FreeBSD Status Report - First Quarter 2023 : Here is the first status report of 2023, including 25 reports: we have usual team reports, some news about cloud projects, progress in the src, ports and doc trees and more.

Trying to create OpenBSD images using Linux supporting arm and riscv: This is a work in progress, where author is trying to create OpenBSD images from Linux, specially using arm64 and riscv64 for AWS since OpenBSD has no vmm support for arm64 nor riscv64 yet.

Tutorials

OpenBSD: Managing an inverter/converter with NUT: In this article, Stéphane HUC explains how to install, configure and use one inverter with the NUT project on OpenBSD

Celebrating Earth Day: Tips for Running a Greener FreeBSD: Every year since 1970, Earth Day has focused the world’s attention on the need to act to protect our home. It’s a vital call to action for every person and organization. The FreeBSD Foundation is committed to making FreeBSD the OS of choice for users seeking to reduce the environmental impact of computing. Read to learn more.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

New FreeBSD report status is here plus more from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 146", "date": "2023-04-19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 19, 2023", "slug": "146", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

BSD Now 502: Ping from Hell: 5 Key reasons for a OpenZFS Performance Audit, The Ping from Hell, OpenBGPD 7.9 released, Setting the clock ahead to see what breaks, and more.

Tutorials

OpenZFS – Comparing Modern Open-Source Storage Solutions: Discover how OpenZFS provides scalable storage architecture for petabytes of data with flexible storage configurations, RAID levels & disk addition/removal.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

Smaller issue and a bit later, but still all BSD.

" }, { "title": "Issue 145", "date": "2023-04-12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 12, 2023", "slug": "145", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE Now Available: This is the third release of the stable/13 branch. Some of the highlights: - OpenSSH has been updated to version 9.2p1. - OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1t. - The bhyve hypervisor now supports more than 16 vCPUs in a guest. - Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is now enabled for 64-bit executables by default. - ZFS has been upgraded to OpenZFS release 2.1.9. - It is now possible to take snapshots on UFS filesystems when running with journaled soft updates. - The kernel wg(4) WireGuard driver is now available. - The kernel netlink(4) network configuration protocol is now available. - And much more…

OpenBSD 7.3: This release contains a number of improvements over earlier versions, including but not limited to Improved hardware support, including new arm64 variants and numerous network and graphics driver updates Improved general and network performance due to steadily improving multi-core support More flexible network configuration, now supporting lladdr-based config retguard for amd64 system calls Enhanced memory and process security Relinking of network exposed daemons at boot time execute-only (xonly) pinsyscall(2) Improved versions of OpenSSH (9.3), LibreSSL (3.7.2), OpenBGPD (7.9) … Support for disk encryption in the installer X11 Mesa shader cache enabled. More aggressive randomisation of the stack location for all 64-bit architectures except alpha

MidnightBSD 2.2.8 Release: This includes an updated mport with bug fixes for a segmentation fault in mport search, a CVE fix for APR used by svnlite, and some tweaks to the perl config. At this point, it’s recommend to use 3.0.1 for new users.

BSDSec

LibreSSL 3.7.2 Released: This is the first stable release for the 3.7.x branch, also available with OpenBSD 7.3.

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

News

BSD Now 501: Boot that Snapshot : Nextcloud + OpenBSD = Love, Understanding the Origins of DTrace, Bastille Templates for FreeBSD Jails, Initial support for guided disk encryption in the OpenBSD installer, Dynamic host configuration please, OpenBSD Storage Management tutorial at BSDCan 2023, Jan/Feb 2023 Column Out in the FreeBSD Journal, and more.

Tutorials

Managing Disk Arrays on FreeBSD or TrueNAS Core: Discover strategies to manage disk arrays on FreeBSD and related platforms/operating systems. Ensure device health & easy replacements with these valuable tips.

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

", "excerpt": "

It’s been a week of releases: get ready for new FreeBSD, OpenBSD and minor release for MidnightBSD.

" }, { "title": "Issue 144", "date": "2023-04-05:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 05, 2023", "slug": "144", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 3.0.1: MidnightBSD 3.0.1 release includes the following changes: - OpenSSL 1.1.1t - mport 2.2.9 - Fix CVE-2020-10188 in telnetd - doas 6.3p9 - tzdata 2023c - readelf - gnu compatibility on output

FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 Available: The sixth RC build for the FreeBSD 13.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 29, 2023 (xserver): Errata patches for X11 server have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Announcing the pkgsrc-2023Q1 branch: Pkgsrc has announced its 78th quarterly release, which includes over 27,000 packages and supports 23 platforms, with 10 currently working. The latest release includes updates and additions to many packages, including Ruby, Python, Haskell, and PHP.

BSD Now 500: Guarding the Wire : Wireguard VPN Server with Unbound on OpenBSD, Auditing for OpenZFS Storage Performance, OpenBSD 7.2 on a Thinkpad X201, Practical Guides to fzf, Replacing postfix with dma, and more.

Desktop FreeBSD won’t improve unless people are using it: The author doubts that BSD people actually run BSD as a desktop os.

Comments on “Desktop FreeBSD won’t improve unless people are using it”: Author’s response to comments about his previous post about the state of FreeBSD on desktop.

Tutorials

Using DTrace to find block sizes of ZFS, NFS, and iSCSI: Author shows how to go from a general question to a specific answer, using awesome dtrace powers.

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

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD desktop controversy? I guess so … Plus pkgsrc-2023Q1 and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 143", "date": "2023-03-29:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 29, 2023", "slug": "143", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 3.0 release: A few key updates include import of many FreeBSD 12.x features, OpenSSL 1.1.1s and many third party software updates. Anyone using MidnightBSD for internet facing services that’s not using openssl from mports already should update as soon as possible. Warning: the current packages available for both amd64 and i386 include an outdated version of mesa that is not playing nice with various web browsers that make use of EGL. They’ve updated mesa in mports but haven’t been able to rebuild packages yet. This could be a blocker for desktop users until packages are refreshed. Most GUI browsers aren’t working with the packages, although text browsers are available. They plan to update the packages this week. You can update mesa from mports and downstream ports that use it if you don’t want to wait for packages.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Available: The fifth RC build for the FreeBSD 13.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 23, 2023 (bgpd): Errata patches for bgpd have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

BSD Now 499 - Dan Langille Interview: BSD Now is interviewing Dan Langille about his new server project. He’ll talk to us about the things he’s building, some of which are a bit out of the ordinary. They’re also talking about BSDCan 2023 and what to expect after returning to an in-presence conference format.

Tutorials

FreeBSD or Linux – A Choice Without OS Wars: Pinning FreeBSD against Linux is a tale as old as time. But it removes from the necessary conversation about which technology is most suitable for its users. Both Linux and FreeBSD are mature operating systems with a myriad of resources and features to offer. At times, one will be more suitable than the other depending on the use case and aim. In this article, we take time to discuss where does it fit, and provide the audience with more reading material before making a decision.

Self-Hosted Calendar and Addressbook services on OpenBSD: Once you have self-hosted email up and running, you may want to add the Calendar and Addressbook features to your service bag. Nowadays, the standard protocols regarding those subjects are CalDAV and CardDAV. Author decided to go with Baikal , the dedicated CalDAV+CardDAV server based on the sabre/dav framework ; the same framework used in Nextcloud DAV services AFAIK. It relies on PHP and is available as a package on OpenBSD.

Accelerating Datacenter Energy Efficiency by Leveraging FreeBSD as Your Server OS: Datacenters are large facilities that house computer systems and other electronic equipment that are used to store, process, and transmit data. These facilities are critical components of the modern digital economy, but they also consume vast amounts of energy. In fact, datacenters are estimated to account for around 1% of global electricity consumption, and that figure is projected to grow as digital technologies continue to expand.

Proxmox to FreeBSD: In this article, the author describes all the steps to migrate VMs and LXC containers from Proxmox to FreeBSD (bhyve VMs and jails)

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

", "excerpt": "

Yet another RC for FreeBSD 13.2 plus MidnightBSD 3.0. What a week!

" }, { "title": "Issue 142", "date": "2023-03-22:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 22, 2023", "slug": "142", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.2-RC3 Available: The third RC build for the FreeBSD 13.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are available on most of FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 16, 2023 (resolv): Errata patches for libc resolver have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

(Even more) Aggressive randomisation of stack location: In a late-stage addition prior to the release of OpenBSD 7.3, Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) has committed more aggressive randomisation of the stack location for all 64-bit architectures except alpha.

BSD Now 498: Dropping Privileges: OpenZFS auditing for storage Performance, Privilege drop; privilege separation; and restricted-service operating mode in OpenBSD, OPNsense 23.1.1 release, Cloning a System with Ansible, FOSDEM 2023, BSDCan 2023 Travel Grants.

FreeBSD History – Understanding the Origins of DTrace: DTrace is a powerful tool for system administrators to diagnosis system issues without unduly impacting performance. DTrace became part of FreeBSD with the release of FreeBSD 7.1 in 2009—two years before Oracle began porting DTrace, and nine years before Oracle eventually solved the inherent CDDL vs GPL license conflict.

BSD Now 497: Random Relinking SSHD: How to Catch a Bitcoin Miner, A Call For More Collaboration, zstd updates, hating hackathons, How to monitor multiple log files at once, KeePassXC, sshd random relinking at boot, and more.

Tutorials

FreeBSD on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme G2: In this short blog post, author summarizes their attempts to make FreeBSD work on this laptop.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

We’re getting closer to new FreeBSD and OpenBSD releases. Hang tide!

" }, { "title": "Issue 141", "date": "2023-02-22:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 22, 2023", "slug": "141", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 23.1.1 released: Apart from security updates for operating system and third party software this mainly fixes issues with the initial 23.1 release. IPsec and Unbound components in particular receive a number of improvements being the more prominent areas of work for this series. Unbound also gained a SafeSearch option and the new reporting database CPU usage should be much lower and easier to use.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:03.openssl: Multiple vulnerabilities in OpenSSL: CVE-2023-0286, CVE-2023-0215, CVE-2022-4450, CVE-2022-4304.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-23:02.openssh: A flaw in the backwards-compatibility key exchange route allows a pointer to be freed twice. A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to cause a denial of service, or possibly remote code execution. Note that FreeBSD 12.3 and FreeBSD 13.1 include older versions of OpenSSH, and are not affected. FreeBSD 13.2-BETA1 and later include the fix.

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

News

Low-latency game streaming on NetBSD (Video): Moonlight has been ported to NetBSD, which means NetBSD machines can now connect to Sunshine servers for low-latency gaming and remote desktop applications.

BSD Now 494: Unix workstation extinction : Mass extinction of UNIX workstations, Determine Who Can Log In to an SSH Server, Factors When Considering FreeBSD vs. Linux Packages, A Visual Guide to SSH Tunnels, Harvesting the Noise While it’s Fresh, Bastille - The Jail Manager on FreeBSD, and more.

BSDCan 2023 Travel Grant Application Now Open: The FreeBSD Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development. BSDCan 2023 applications are due April 5, 2023.

Tutorials

Privilege drop, privilege separation, and restricted-service operating mode in OpenBSD: Detailed article about privilege drop, privilege separation, and restricted-service operating mode in OpenBSD.

Nextcloud + OpenBSD = Love: The author maintain the nextcloud port since ever, and using since then, to be honest it’s pretty cool and handy, despite all the php slowness and other flavors the system has and the OpenBSD’s issues as client and server, it works really really well in every way he use it…

Cloning a System With Ansible: A small Python script for FreeBSD and OpenBSD to generate an Ansible playbook out of an existing system, so that setup can be duplicated elsewhere.

Did we miss anything?

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

", "excerpt": "

OPNsense security update is here, you can apply for BSDCan travel grant, and more as always.

" }, { "title": "Issue 140", "date": "2023-02-15:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 15, 2023", "slug": "140", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD errata notices and security advisory: FreeBSD errata from last week:

OpenBSD Errata: February 7, 2023 (x509 xserver smtpd): Errata patches for LibreSSL libcrypto, X11 server, and smtpd have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

BSD Now 493: Write Admin tools from Day One, Differentiating between Data Security and Data Integrity, 45 year-old Unix tool is finally getting an upgrade, OpenBSD 7.2 on an ODROID-HC4, Dotfiles Management, and more.

Fosdem 2023 report: FOSDEM took place last week-end, as an offline-first event again for the first time since 2020. It was located as usual at the university campus of the ULB in Brussels. It was packed with developers, users, passionate and professionals of Open Source software.

5 Key Reasons Why You Need an OpenZFS Performance Audit: To expand your OpenZFS storage infrastructure to meet constantly evolving infrastructure demands, you must understand where the limits of your current system lie. Only then can you plan to expand to provide the capacity, durability, and performance that modern applications demand.

Tutorials

VXLAN over WireGuard: Tunnelling VXLAN over WireGuard (on OpenBSD)

Using /bin/eject with USB flash drives: Implementing the MTRETEN ioctl on sd devices.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Hey, another round of BSDSec messages and BSD-related news is here.

" }, { "title": "Issue 139", "date": "2023-02-08:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 08, 2023", "slug": "139", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: February 2, 2023 (sshd): Errata patch for sshd(8) has been released for OpenBSD 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

BSD Now 492: Feeling for NetBSD : Writing your own operating system, Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance Update, feeling for the NetBSD community, Testing wanted: execute-only on amd64, GCC uses Modula-2 and Rust, do they work on OpenBSD, Unix is dead; long live Unix, and more.

HardenedBSD January 2023 Status Report: Updates for the projects (mainly src and infra) + goals for the next month.

Tutorials

OpenZFS – Auditing for Storage Performance: OpenZFS and storage in general is a complex and important part of any project’s architecture. It should be planned thoughtfully and ideally, ahead of time! In this article, they talk about how to understand, measure, and plan for storage performance needs.

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

", "excerpt": "

Seems like not much happened last week, but not really: new errata for sshd on OpenBSD + HardenedBSD report and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 138", "date": "2023-02-01:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 01, 2023", "slug": "138", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 23.1: 23.1, nicknamed “Quintessential Quail”, features Unbound DNS statistics with a blocklist rewrite in Python, improved WAN SLAAC operability, firewall alias BGP ASN type support, PHP 8.1, assorted FreeBSD networking updates, MVC/API pages for packet capture/virtual IPs/IPsec connection management, IPsec configuration file migration to swanctl.conf, new sslh plugin, ddclient custom backend support (including Azure), WireGuard kernel module plugin variant as the new default plus much more.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

DiscoBSD - 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like Operating System for STM32 and PIC32 Microcontrollers: DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices. Source code to the system is freely available under a BSD-like license.

Hiring: FreeBSD OS Developer: Klara Inc. is looking for a FreeBSD Operating System Developer to join their growing team of Open Source Specialists. In this role you will be working as part of a FreeBSD team to design and build new features and fix bugs in FreeBSD. Their team is building new key features for FreeBSD and contributing bug fixes and improvements that make life easier for all users of the operating system. The ideal candidate will have experience working with Open Source Operating Systems projects in either the kernel, user space or ports areas. The ideal candidate also has an interest in team work, and specifically being able to involve and engage with other developers to make changes which lead to the best result for the users. As a FreeBSD OS Developer, you will work directly with their customers to design and implement improvements and enhancements to FreeBSD. In this role you will have the opportunity to build the future of FreeBSD.

New Open Position: FreeBSD Userland Software Developer: Are you a versatile problem-solver with a knack for operating system development? Do you thrive working in an open source development environment with a diverse team? If so, the FreeBSD Foundation is searching for a software developer with varied interests and skills and a passion to perfect the user experience on FreeBSD.

BSD Now 491: Catch the Spammers : Dragonfly BSD 6.4 is out, Running OpenZFS – Choosing Between FreeBSD and Linux, OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems ebook leaks, catching 71% spam, crazy unix shell prompts, Linux Binary Compatibility: Ubuntu on FreeBSD, Reproducible Builds Summit Venice 2022, and more.

FreeBSD Status Report - Fourth Quarter 2022: The New Year has started and here is the last status report of 2022, including 34 reports. You will also notice that for the first time a new category has been introduced: the Cloud category. Here’s an extensive list of topics covered: FreeBSD Team Reports, FreeBSD Core Team, FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, Cluster Administration Team, Continuous Integration, Ports Collection, Status reports: New workflow â€¢ Projects, Console screen reader infrastructure, Vessel - Integrated Application Containers for FreeBSD, Enable the NFS server to run in a vnet prison, Pytest support for the FreeBSD testing framework â€¢ Userland, Base System OpenSSH Update â€¢ Kernel, Enabling Snapshots on Filesystems Using Journaled Soft Updates, Wireless updates, Netlink on FreeBSD, Adding basic CTF support to ddb â€¢ Architectures, CheriBSD 22.12 release, FreeBSD/riscv64 Improvements, go on FreeBSD riscv64, FreeBSD/ARM64 on Xen â€¢ Cloud, FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure, FreeBSD as a Tier 1 cloud-init Platform, OpenStack on FreeBSD â€¢ Documentation, Documentation Engineering Team, FreeBSD Presentations and Papers â€¢ Ports, FreshPorts - help wanted, PortsDB: Program that imports the ports tree into an SQLite database, KDE on FreeBSD, Xfce on FreeBSD, Pantheon desktop on FreeBSD, Budgie desktop on FreeBSD, GCC on FreeBSD, Another milestone for biology ports â€¢ Third Party Projects, Containers and FreeBSD: Pot, Potluck and Potman.

Modern Web Browser Recommendations For OpenBSD?: OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X230, what browsers would you recommend? This post links to Reddit discussion when OP says: > installed Firefox via ‘pkg_add’. I noticed though that it gets a little hot at times, and YouTube kind of spazzes out with codec errors from time to time for some reason without any additional Firefox plugins installed. What modern browser options exist for OpenBSD that run well? Is there Chromium, or Librewolf etc?

Tutorials

Coding new ioctls to produce screendumps from the console: Screenshots are easy if you’re running the X Window system or perhaps working within a virtual machine, but what about those times when you need to capture some console output straight from real hardware?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Looking for a FreeBSD job? There’re some in + all the latest news from the BSD commmunity.

" }, { "title": "Issue 137", "date": "2023-01-25:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 25, 2023", "slug": "137", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: January 21, 2023 (vmm vmd): Errata patches for vmm(4) and vmd(8) have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: January 17, 2023 (libxpm): Errata patches for X11 libXpm library have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

490: New Year’s Plan9’ing: FreeBSD Foundation’s Software Development review of 2022, what can we learn from Vintage Computing, OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022, a Decade of HardenedBSD, In Praise of Plan9, and more.

Tutorials

Automation and Hacking Your FreeBSD CLI: The more we automate, the more we can save time and boost our productivity to higher levels. In this article we plan on looking at how to build more human-readable outputs in FreeBSD by leveraging tools like libxo to drive better output for automation APIs.

OpenZFS – Data Security vs. Integrity: Data security is about preventing data from being disclosed, ensuring that only the correct people can access it. Data integrity ensures the data is correct, that it has not become corrupt due to hardware failure or other issues. With ZFS, you can get both.

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

", "excerpt": "

Rather small issue as I’ve been busy and not too many people contributed, but hey!

" }, { "title": "Issue 136", "date": "2023-01-18:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 18, 2023", "slug": "136", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: January 13, 2022 (tcp): Errata patches for TCP have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Testing wanted: execute-only on amd64: On the tech@ mailing list, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has issued a request for testing of patch(es) for execute-only (xonly) binaries on amd64.

What kind of jobs are available with FreeBSD/OpenBSD?: Networking student wanting to know whether FreeBSD/OpenBSD knowledge is a thing that could bring them job offers.

NetBSD HAMMER2: Based on the FreeBSD version, with notes: - Initial target is read-only support, but write support is also planned once read-only support is accomplished. - Tags are merely for packaging, nothing directly to do with file system version. - -CURRENT aka upstream NetBSD is the only tier 1 support branch at the moment.

BSD Now 489: Refreshing Perspective : FreeBSD vs. Linux – Networking, HDMI sound output through TV speakers on FreeBSD 13, Getting started with tmux, Samba Active Directory, OpenIKED 7.2 released, FreeBSD Plasma 5 GUI Install, DHCP server howto in German, and more.

Tutorials

FreeBSD vs. Linux – 5 Factors When Considering FreeBSD vs Linux – Package Management: The popularity of package managers permeates all Unix distributions. Yet there are subtle differences in the approach that Linux vs. FreeBSD take in handling packages. How does Linux compare to FreeBSD’s way of managing packages? We have identified key points to consider in the software lifecycle management of both in the article.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Execute-only on amd64? You can help testing it on OpenBSD! Plus some more news and tutorials for the rest.

" }, { "title": "Issue 135", "date": "2023-01-04:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 04, 2023", "slug": "135", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

FreeBSD 2022 in Review: Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance Update: The year 2022 was a busy and productive one for the FreeBSD Foundation. Continuous Integration (CI) and Quality Assurance (QA) is but one of many successful efforts the Foundation continues to support as a dedicated resource. In this article, you can see interview with Li-Wen Hsu, one of the Foundation’s Software Engineers, to discuss his work on this project over the past year, and the plans he has for it this coming year.

OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022: A lot has happened since the last OpenBSD KDE Status Report in 2021. As it goes, this new report is split to four areas: the good, the bad, the plasma and libinput.

BSD Now 487: EuroBSDcon Interviews Pt. 2: This year’s end episode of BSDNow features a trip report to EuroBSDcon by Mr. BSD.tv, as well as an interview with FreeBSD committer John Baldwin.

Tutorials

Suricata vs. Snort: Similarities and Differences: Snort and Suricata are two of the most popular intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) in the world. Both systems use signatures, rules, and protocol analysis to detect malicious traffic on networks. This blog post will talk about the similarities and differences of Snort and Suricata software.

Installing OpenBSD 7.2 on an ODROID-HC4: Let’s see some notes about installing OpenBSD 7.2 on the ODROID-HC4: an arm64 board that provides SATA slots. It is quite straightforward to install, once you get the ordered steps.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Happy New Year! BSD community keeps going and so here are some news and tutorials from last few days.

" }, { "title": "Issue 134", "date": "2022-12-28:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 28, 2022", "slug": "134", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 22.7.10 released: Another small reliability update with additional RADIUS user creation support included.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

AsiaBSDCon CFP extended: The AsiaBSDCon Call for Papers deadline has been extended to December 28th. See the conference web site https://www.asiabsdcon.org for details.

FreeBSD 2022 in Review: Software Development : From ZFS support in makefs to experimental 16k page support on arm64 to lldb and wireguard improvements, the Foundation development staff and contractors had another busy year working to improve FreeBSD. From January 1, 2022 until mid-December 2022, 1114 of the 7575 commits to the src repository (about 15%) identify the FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor. The raw commit data give a broad indication that the Foundation is dedicated to directly improving FreeBSD, however commit data only tell part of the story. Let’s review the Foundation’s role in FreeBSD development over the past year.

BSD Now 486: EuroBSDcon interviews: This special episode features two interviews they did at EuroBSDcon in Vienna this year. They talk with FreeBSD developers about how they got started, their current projects and more.

2022 in Review: Fundraising Update: When discussing goals for the FreeBSD Foundation, one might argue that one of our most important goals revolves around fundraising. Let’s talk about where they are with their fundraising efforts for 2022.

FreeBSD and ZFS Holiday Reads – 2022 Edition: If you’re getting ready to close the year, here is some FreeBSD content.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Can you feel the end of year coming? Let’s finish up with the latest BSD-news roundup of this year! We shall see OPNsense release, some FreeBSD end of year reviews and more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 133", "date": "2022-12-21:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 21, 2022", "slug": "133", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 10.0 BETA available: After nearly 3 whole years of development (work started on NetBSD 10 in late 2019), BETA snapshots have finally been published for interested users to test. More changes will be backported from the development branch over the next few months before we tag a final release, so the BETA images will keep getting updated. Among the features you can expect to find in NetBSD 10 are reworked cryptography, including compatibility with WireGuardⓇ, automatic swap encryption, new disk encryption methods, and CPU acceleration in the kernel. In hardware support, there are updated GPU drivers from Linux 5.6, support for more ARM hardware (including Rockchip RK356X, NXP i.MX 8M, Amlogic G12¸ Apple M1, and Raspberry Pi 4), support for new security features found in the latest ARM CPUs, and support for Realtek 2.5 gigabit and new Intel 10/25/40 gigabit ethernet adapters. compat_linux has been ported to AArch64 and DTrace has been ported to MIPS. For retrocomputing enthusiasts, there’s improved multiprocessor support on Alpha, and more iMac G5 support. The Xen hypervisor support has received a major rework. There are various new userspace programs, including blkdiscard(8) to manually TRIM a disk, aiomixer(1) to control audio volume, realpath(1), and fsck_udf(8). And loads more…

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: December 16, 2022 (acme): Errata patches for acme-client(8) have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: December 14, 2022 (xserver vmd gpuinv): Errata patches for Xorg(1), vmd(8), and inteldrm(4) have been released for OpenBSD 7.2. Errata patches for Xorg(1) and inteldrm(4) have been released for OpenBSD 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

FreeBSD Foundation Sponsors Update to WireGuard Kernel Port for FreeBSD : WireGuard’s simplicity makes it an elegant VPN solution. This general-purpose VPN tunnel is fast and lean, and provides a good alternative to existing tools like IPsec and OpenVPN. An updated version for FreeBSD ships out-of-the-box in the next release, thanks to the Foundation’s support.

FreeBSD 2022 in Review: Advocacy : Yet another year is coming to an end and we’re taking a look back at how we advocated for FreeBSD over the past year. 2022 started with a bit of uncertainty, but thankfully has ended with a bit of a return to “normal” whatever that means. Through it all, the Foundation staff continued to work together to expand the ways to spread the word about FreeBSD. Take a look at what they’ve been doing for the past year.

BSD Now 485: FreeBSD Home Assistant: Tails of the M1 GPU, Getting Home Assistant running in a FreeBSD 13.1 jail, interview with AWK creator Dr. Brian Kernighan, Next steps toward mimmutable, Unix’s (technical) history is mostly old now, and more.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

NetBSD beta and the rest of the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 132", "date": "2022-12-14:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 14, 2022", "slug": "132", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Fuzzing ping(8) … and finding a 24 year old bug.: FreeBSD had a security fluctuation in their implementation of ping(8) the other day. As someone who has done a lot of work on ping(8) in OpenBSD this tickled interests of author.

EuroBSDCon 2022 Trip Report: Patrick McEvoy: Report from EuroBSDcon 2022 that took place in Vienna.

Tutorials

How To Set Up a Minio Cluster From Potluck, Complete With Nextcloud, Monitoring And Alerting: Let’s build a two-server Minio storage system, complete with alerting and monitoring via Grafana and Prometheus. To illustrate application, we’ll include a Nextcloud pot image using Minio S3 as file storage. This blog post should show that it is quite straight forward to set up production quality cluster solutions with FreeBSD, Pot and Potluck.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Small batch of news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 131", "date": "2022-12-07:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 07, 2022", "slug": "131", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 22.7.9 released: A quick update to address the new FreeBSD security advisory for ping utility as well as Suricata. The DNS block list was rewritten in Python and there will be a couple of cool additions for it in the foreseeable future.

FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE Now Available: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/12 branch. Some of the highlights: The ena(4) kernel driver has been updated to 2.6.1. The if_epair(4) driver now allows multiple cores to be used to process traffic to improve performance. The unbound(8) utility has been updated to version 1.16.3. The telnetd(8) daemon has been deprecated. The tcpdump(1) utility now allow users to set a number on rules which will be exposed as part of the pflog header. OpenSSL has been updated to 1.1.1q. OpenSSH has been updated to 9.1p1. The LLVM toolchain suite has been updated to version 13.0.0. The dma(8) utility has been updated to snapshot 2022-01-27. The file(1) utility has been updated to version 5.43. The libarchive(3) library has been updated to version 3.6.0. And much more…

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:14.heimdal REVISED: Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Heimdal implementation of the Kerberos 5 network authentication protocols and KDC. - - CVE-2022-42898 PAC parse integer overflows - - CVE-2022-3437 Overflows and non-constant time leaks in DES{,3} and arcfour - - CVE-2021-44758 NULL dereference DoS in SPNEGO acceptors - - CVE-2022-44640 Heimdal KDC: invalid free in ASN.1 codec - - CVE-2019-14870 Validate client attributes in protocol-transition - - CVE-2019-14870 Apply forwardable policy in protocol-transition - - CVE-2019-14870 Always lookup impersonate client in DB

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:28.heimdal: The patch released with FreeBSD-SA-22:14.heimdal included an inadvertently merged block of code which prevents the KDC from issuing valid tickets.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:15.ping: ping reads raw IP packets from the network to process responses in the pr_pack() function. As part of processing a response ping has to reconstruct the IP header, the ICMP header and if present a “quoted packet,” which represents the packet that generated an ICMP error. The quoted packet again has an IP header and an ICMP header. The pr_pack() copies received IP and ICMP headers into stack buffers for further processing. In so doing, it fails to take into account the possible presence of IP option headers following the IP header in either the response or the quoted packet. When IP options are present, pr_pack() overflows the destination buffer by up to 40 bytes.

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

News

Help the OpenBSD Foundation Reach Its 2022 Funding Goal: The OpenBSD Foundation, which is central to funding the OpenBSD project, needs your help to reach its 2022 Fundraising Goal of $300,000. At the time of writing, the amount raised in 2022 stands at a little over 50% of the stated goal.

BSD Now 483: ZFS Time Machine : Research Unix Version 6 in the Open SIMH PDP-11 Emulator, The Hot Tub Time Machine is Your ZFS Turn-Back-Time Method, NFS on NetBSD: server and client side, HardenedBSD October 2022 Status Report, Nushell : Introduction, and more.

Help the OpenBSD Foundation Reach Its 2022 Funding Goal: The OpenBSD Foundation, which is central to funding the OpenBSD project, needs your help to reach its 2022 Fundraising Goal of $300,000.

Tutorials

Authentication gateway with SSH on OpenBSD: A neat feature in OpenBSD is the program authpf, an authenticating gateway using SSH. Basically, it allows to dynamically configure the local firewall PF by connecting/disconnecting into a user account over SSH, either to toggle an IP into a table or rules through a PF anchor.

Running OpenZFS – Choosing Between FreeBSD and Linux: Age-old discussion: ZFS running on Linux or FreeBSD? We’re not going to set out to tell you which operating system you should use. Both choices are excellent — but we’ll lay out how different (or alike) it is to run OpenZFS on either to help anyone on the fence decide which OS to use beneath our favorite filesystem.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news, releases and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 130", "date": "2022-11-30:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 30, 2022", "slug": "130", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 26, 2022 (vmm unwind pfsync): Errata patches for vmm(4), unwind(8), and pfsync(4) have been released for OpenBSD 7.2. Errata patch for unwind(8) has been released for OpenBSD 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

OpenBSD Webzine ISSUE #12: TL;DR OpenBSD 7.2 is out! Webzine is late! 😅 More SMP improvements Lot of new programs packaged!

BSD Now 482: BSD XFCE Desktop: 5 Key Reasons to Consider Open Source Storage, OpenBSD Minimalist Desktop, BSD XFCE, Alpine Linux VM on bhyve - with root on ZFS, FreeBSD Jail Quick Setup with Networking, and more.

Tutorials

PostgreSQL 14.5 On OpenBSD 7.2: Install: This post shows how to install PostgreSQL on the latest OpenBSD.

snmp & snmpd (on OpenBSD): Article explains how to install and configure snmp, snmpd on OpenBSD

Installing OpenBSD on Oracle Cloud: This post shows how to install PostgreSQL on the latest OpenBSD.

Dendrite (on OpenBSD): Article explains how to install Dendrite (Matrix-like) on OpenBSD

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 129", "date": "2022-11-16:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 16, 2022", "slug": "129", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 12.4-RC2 Available: The second RC build for the FreeBSD 12.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 15, 2022 (pixman): Errata patches for X11 pixman library have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:12.lib9p: The implementation of lib9p’s handling of RWALK messages was missing a bounds check needed when unpacking the message contents. The missing check means that the receipt of a specially crafted message will cause lib9p to overwrite unrelated memory. The bug can be triggered by a malicious bhyve guest kernel to overwrite memory in the bhyve(8) process. This could potentially lead to user-mode code execution on the host, subject to bhyve’s Capsicum sandbox.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:26.cam: A backwards-incompatible change to the CAM ioctl interface was made. Partial compatibility support for the old version of the interface was provided, but it was incomplete. In particular, CAM periph drivers did not handle the old version of the CAMGETPASSTHRU ioctl. Software applications which make use of the CAM ioctl(2) interface may fail to work following an upgrade to FreeBSD 13.1.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:10.aio: FreeBSD’s aio(4) subsystem implements asynchronous I/O. II. Problem Description The aio_aqueue function, used by the lio_listio system call, fails to release a reference to a credential in an error case. An attacker may cause the reference count to overflow, leading to a use after free (UAF).

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:24.zfs: A kernel regression caused all dataset snapshot directories to become inaccessible over NFS. Any attempt to access individual snapshots would return an error message mentioning a stale file handle. Workflows which rely on ZFS snapshots being accessible over NFS are broken.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:11.vm: A particular case of memory sharing is mishandled in the virtual memory system. This is very similar to SA-21:08.vm, but with a different root cause. An unprivileged local user process can maintain a mapping of a page after it is freed, allowing that process to read private data belonging to other processes or the kernel.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:19.pam_exec: When pam_exec(8) is used for authentication with the ‘expose_authtok’ option and an application calls pam_setcred(3), it attempts to expose an already stored authentication token. It is incorrectly assumed that there always is such a token stored, which leads to dereferencing a NULL pointer if this isn’t the case. It is impossible to reliably use pam_exec(8) for authentication with the ‘expose_authtok’ option, that is necessary to have the external program check credentials. In most scenarios, authentication will fail because of a crash caused by the NULL pointer dereference.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:27.loader: As of FreeBSD 13.1, the UEFI loader on amd64 systems will detect if the kernel it loaded is capable of being relocated to a different physical address than the historical load address. This detection relied on an ELF symbol lookup that was not correctly filtering symbols based on their type, which caused a false positive result for older amd64 kernels. The UEFI loader would relocate the kernel to a different physical address than expected, and the resulting kernel would fail to boot.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:25.tcp: A change made to make TCP more resilient and effective when handling loss recovery by SACK, could lead to connection interruption when incoming ACKs suddenly no longer contain SACK blocks. This can lead to correct data being placed at the wrong offset in the stream in a non-deterministic manner. This can result in termination of the TCP connection by the application or in the worst case silent data corruption.

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

News

EuroBSDCon 2022 Trip Report: Muhammad Moinur Rahman: This trip was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

BSD Now 480: OpenBSD 7.2: OpenBSD 7.2 and FuguIta have been released, Learn the Whys and Hows with the FreeBSD Sec Team, how to get notified about FreeBSD updates, using unbound for ad blocking on OpenBSD, further memory protections on OpenBSD current, and more.

mmap(2), munmap(2), and mprotect(2) unlocked: Martin Pieuchot (mpi@) has committed a change unlocking the mmap(2), munmap(2), and mprotect(2) system calls. Accesses to data structures used by these syscalls are serialized by the VM map lock with the exception of file mappings which are still protected by the KERNEL_LOCK(). Unlocking this set of syscalls improves most of userland workloads.

Tutorials

Virtualization showdown – FreeBSD’s bhyve vs. Linux’s KVM Virtualization: The bhyve hypervisor makes it easy to run reliable, high-performance virtual machines on a FreeBSD host system. In this article, we test the performance of virtual machines running Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD itself under bhyve—and we compare and contrast with performance of the same virtual machines running under Linux’s well-known KVM hypervisor. Understanding the pros and cons of each hypervisor helps you make confident, informed decisions when deciding how to set up your virtualization hosts.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD RC plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 128", "date": "2022-11-02:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 02, 2022", "slug": "128", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 1, 2022 (expat): Errata patches for libexpat have been released for OpenBSD 7.1 and 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: October 27, 2022 (ukbd): Errata patch for USB keyboard has been released for OpenBSD 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

HardenedBSD October 2022 Status Report: Monthly report of changes in src and ports.

Videos from EuroBSDcon 2022 now available: EuroBSDcon YouTube channel has been updated with a variety of talk recordings from this year’s con.

BSDNow 478: Debunking sudo myths: Open Source in Enterprise Environments, Your Comprehensive Guide to rc(8): FreeBSD Services and Automation, How Rob Pike got hired by Dennis Richie, what FreeBSD machines rubenerd uses, new debugbreak command, 7 sudo myths debunked.

Tutorials

Nushell: Introduction to a new kind of shell: Solène Rapenne: nushell is non-POSIX shell, so most of your regular shells knowledge (zsh, bash, ksh, etc…) can’t be applied on it, and using it feels like doing functional programming. I packaged it for OpenBSD, so it’s available on -current (and will be in releases after 7.3 is out), the port could be used on 7.2 with no effort. With Nix, it’s packaged under the name nushell, the binary name is nu.

httm – The Hot Tub Time Machine is Your ZFS Turn-Back-Time Method: You may already know how powerful ZFS snapshots are at enabling simple recovery from accidentally or maliciously deletion or corruption of files, but with a tool like Hot Tub Time Machine (HTTM) you can manage this on a per file basis even more easily. Enabling self-service restoration can reduce the load on your IT team, and HTTM even works on machines that do not use ZFS, as long as they are backed up to ZFS.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 127", "date": "2022-10-26:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 26, 2022", "slug": "127", "html": "

Releases

FuguIta 7.2: This is a first test release.

FreeBSD 12.4-BETA1 Available: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 12.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

OpenBSD 7.2: This is the 53rd release, as they remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 7.2 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system, for example adding Apple M2 as supported platform.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: October 24, 2022 (libcrypto): Errata patches for libcrypto have been released for OpenBSD 7.2. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2022: Here is the third quarterly report for year 2022, with 24 reports included, which is slightly fewer than last quarter. Report includes: FreeBSD Team Reports, FreeBSD Core Team, FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, Cluster Administration Team, Continuous Integration, Ports Collection, Projects, OpenStack on FreeBSD, FreeBSD as a Tier 1 cloud-init Platform, Userland, bhyve debug server enhancements, Rewrite of pjdfstest, Ongoing work on LLDB multiprocess debugging support, DTrace: Instruction-level dynamic tracing, Kernel, ENA FreeBSD Driver Update, wtap(4) enhancement, Intel wireless towards 11ac, More wireless updates, Enabling Snapshots on Filesystems Using Journaled Soft Updates, Architectures, FreeBSD/Firecracker, Documentation, Documentation Engineering Team, Ports, Calendar-data: License added, KDE on FreeBSD, GCC: New maintainer, GCC 12.2 and more, sysutils/lsof major upgrade, Third Party Projects, Containers and FreeBSD: Pot, Potluck and Potman .

Keeping FreeBSD Secure: Learn the Whys and Hows with the FreeBSD Sec Team: Interview with Gordon Tetlow, a volunteer FreeBSD Security Officer, and Ed Maste, Deputy Security Officer, and Mark Johnston, a FreeBSD security team member. The latter two are sponsored by FreeBSD Foundation and support the security team in both ongoing operational aspects of the team’s work, and proactive development.

BSD Now 477: Uninitialized Memory Disclosures: Analyzing BSD Kernels for Uninitialized Memory Disclosures Using Binary Ninja, Sharing Dual-Licensed Drivers between Linux and FreeBSD, favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools, How to trigger services restart after OpenBSD update, Gems from the Man Page Trenches, and more.

FreeBSD comes to Amazon’s lightweight hypervisor: The FreeBSD developer who brought FreeBSD to Amazon EC² has now got it working on the company’s lightweight Firecracker hypervisor. AWS Community Hero” Colin Percival is the developer of the Tarsnap online backup service and the portsnap tool for updating FreeBSD. It’s thanks to his efforts that FreeBSD is supported on Amazon EC². Now, he has announced that FreeBSD supports another new platform: Amazon’s Firecracker hypervisor.

Tutorials

New How-to Guide: Binary Package Management on FreeBSD: If you haven’t used packages for software management in a while, it might be time to give them a try again! Since the introduction of the pkg management tool, binary package management has become incredibly simple and fast on FreeBSD. Binary packages are pre-compiled and require no in-depth understanding of compiling software on FreeBSD, making them the ideal method to install software for new users.

Avoid Vendor Lock-In with MinIO and OpenZFS: Modern web and mobile applications are increasingly dependent on software defined storage. Most commonly, this means Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage buckets. What you may not realize is that you don’t actually need Amazon for Amazon-compatible cloud storage! In this article, we’ll discuss how and why to avoid vendor lock-in by providing your apps fully S3-compatible storage using free and open source software.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 126", "date": "2022-10-12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 12, 2022", "slug": "126", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 22.7.5 released: This release is fixing a security issue involving the “installer” user and kernel-based TCP panics that some have been fighting with since FreeBSD 13. Some ports and plugins have also been updated now that the holiday season is coming to its inevitable end.

BSDSec

NetBSD Security Advisory 2022-004: procfs(5) missing permission checks: Due to missing permission checks it was possible to reuse open descriptors which are exposed in the procfs(5) pid /fd/ directory. It might allow malicious user to bypass permission checks and read data from opened descriptor under some circumstances.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2022-003: Race condition in mail.local(8): A race condition exists in the mail.local(8) (/usr/libexec/mail.local) program which is setuid root. That may be exploited in order to change the ownership of or append arbitrary data to an arbitrary file. A malicious local user may exploit the race condition to acquire write permissions to a critical system file, and leverage the situation to acquire escalated privileges. This was originally addressed in NetBSD-SA2016-006 and has been assigned CVE-2016-6253. The fix proved inefficient and had to be fixed again, which is the reason for this new advisory.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2022-002: Coredump credential reference count leak: The coredump handling code always leaks a reference to the dumped processes cred structure. An attacker may cause the reference count to overflow, leading to a use after free (UAF).

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

News

Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Koichi Imai: The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

BSDNow 475: Prompt Injection Attacks : Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3, the History of Package Management on FreeBSD, A fresh look at FreeBSD, File Management Tools for Your Favorite Shell, Quick Guide about Video Playback on FreeBSD, and more.

LibreSSL 3.6.0 released: This is a development release for the 3.6.x branch, and they appreciate additional testing and feedback before the final release coming soon with OpenBSD 7.2.

Tutorials

Automatic mounting of volumes on FreeBSD: There are several solutions for automatically mounting volumes. This article will introduce you to 2 solutions, automount and DSBMD.

Basic settings for FuguIta (OpenBSD-based Live System): This video shows the steps involved in automatically saving files on FuguIta until it can be reloaded on subsequent automatic boot. FuguIta in this video is demonstrated on OpenBSD’s virtualization monitor vmm/vmd.

Ads blocking with OpenBSD unbound(8): The Internet is full of Ads and Trackers. And a way to avoid those is to simply not reach the stinky servers. This can be partially done using a local DNS resolver.

Part 3: Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS : This part concentrates on exposing the data on your NAS to the network using NFS, Samba, and iSCSI shares. Network File System (NFS) is a commonly used protocol for accessing NAS systems, especially with Linux or FreeBSD clients. Article provides an overview of each type of share to help guide you in deciding which is most suited to the clients that will be accessing the NAS.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 125", "date": "2022-10-05:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 05, 2022", "slug": "125", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

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

News

HardenedBSD September 2022 Status Report: HardenedBSD changes in src, ports + upcoming plans.

SCALE19X Conference Report: On July 28th, FreeBSD community and headed to Los Angeles, California for SCALE19X. Being the first in-person conference that the Foundation had attended since the pandemic, all were excited to advocate for FreeBSD face-to-face.

Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Christos Margiolis: The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

OpenBSD.app - search packages: Default search queries OpenBSD 7.2 package sets.

Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Jake Freeland: The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

BSD Now 474: EuroBSDcon 2022 : Deploying FreeBSD on Oracle Cloud, A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends, EuroBSDcon 2022 recap, OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” Status Report, OpenBGPD 7.6 Released, immutable userland mappings, Portable OpenSSH commits now SSH-signed, and more.

Announcing the pkgsrc 2022Q3 branch: pkgsrc is available with more than 26,500 packages, and supports 24 platforms, of which 10 are currently known to be working. In total, 167 packages were added, 80 packages were removed, and 1931 package updates (to 1390 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2022Q2 release.

FreeBSD: Jstats – a resource monitor for Jails: Jstats is a resource monitoring script for Jails. It simply lists RAM, CPU and disk space usage of the jails running in the host system.

Tutorials

OpenBSD: Manage DNS, DNSSEC (to automate TLSA records): How to manage DNSSEC, TLSA records, to validate TLS certificates on OpenBSD with nsd, ldns and others…

Red Hat’s OpenShift vs FreeBSD Jails: Kubernetes has become a hot technology for managing clusters of applications, but it is famously difficult technology to use and understand. RedShift is an Enterprise cloud platform for running and managing Kubes without tying you into a single platform. How does RedShift relate to the technologies that FreeBSD provides and can we create similar environments on top of FreeBSD?

Writing FreeBSD Kernel Modules in Rust: At present all major operating system kernels are written in C/C++, languages which provide no or minimal assistance in avoiding common security problems. Modern languages such as Rust provide better security guarantees by default and prevent many of the common classes of memory safety security bugs. In this post we will take a brief look at existing community efforts towards this goal and build a basic “Hello World” proof-of-concept kernel module for FreeBSD.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 124", "date": "2022-09-29:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 29, 2022", "slug": "124", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: September 23, 2022 (expat): Errata patches for libexpat have been released for OpenBSD 7.0 and 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

EuroBSDCon 2022 (NetBSD): Trip report from Nia Alarie from NetBSD Blog.

Tutorials

How to trigger services restart after OpenBSD update: Solène Rapenne: Keeping an OpenBSD system up-to-date requires two daily operation. However, OpenBSD isn’t very friendly with regard to what to do after upgrading: modified binaries should be restarted to use the new code, and a new kernel requires an upgrade.

A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools : Peter N. M. Hansteen: The OpenBSD packet filter PF was introduced a little more than 20 years ago as part of OpenBSD 3.0. We’ll take a short tour of PF features and tools that I have enjoyed using.

Running a Docker Host under OpenBSD using vmd(8): The OpenBSD virtual machine daemon works pretty well with Linux VMs nowadays. This time author tried to replace the Synology Docker service with some Docker host provided by vmd(8).

Your Comprehensive Guide to rc(8): FreeBSD Services and Automation: The FreeBSD rc(8) subsystem is a sensible & elastic services management framework which enables extension automation as well as customizable start/stop scripts for your services. It’s also deterministic - which means services always start in the same order every boot, a critically important feature in service critical environments. Take a deep dive into FreeBSD services and automation with this new article.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 123", "date": "2022-09-21:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 21, 2022", "slug": "123", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

pfSense Software is Moving Ahead: They are moving the version of PHP used by pfSense® software to PHP 8.1. They have also taken a decision to move the base operating system version of FreeBSD used by pfSense software from 12-STABLE to the current development “top of tree” version also known as “main”, or “HEAD”, and, at the time of writing, “14-CURRENT”. In order to minimize potential disruption to the community and customer base, public development snapshots and repository synchronization have been temporarily paused while they work on these major shifts, including internal testing of builds.

OpenBGPD 7.6 released: This release includes the following changes to the previous release: Include OpenBSD 7.1 errata 008: bgpd(8) could fail to invalidate nexthops and incorrectly leave them in the FIB or Adj-RIB-Out. Speedup bgpctl show rib 10/8 or-longer and show rib 10/8 or-shorter Switch various static hash tables to RB trees improving performance on large systems Export per neighbor pending update and withdraw statistics Fix race between a neighbor session reset and its update message backlog Improve handling of nexthop reachability state changes * Further improve portability of the FIB handling code

BSD Now 472: Consistent Exit Code : FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux, why OpenBSD’s documentation is so good, configure dma for mail delivery in jails on internet hosts, introducing muxfs, RAID1C boot support, and more.

A Quick Look at the History of Package Management on FreeBSD: Pkgng became FreeBSD’s official package manager in FreeBSD 10 in 2014. Applications can be easily installed from either pkg—a system managing precompiled binary packages—or the ports tree, which automates building and installation of packages directly from their source code.

Allan Jude in conversation with Level1Techs: Tech YouTuber Wendell Wilson from Level1Techs talks to Allan Jude from Klara Systems (and host of BSD Now podcast) about ZFS and the recovery of Linus Media Group’s data.

AsiaBSDCon 2023 announced: AsiaBSDCon will be held in the next March/April as an in-person conference again! The details will be published later at https://2023.asiabsdcon.org

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 122", "date": "2022-09-15:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 15, 2022", "slug": "122", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

OpenBSD-current has moved to 7.2: Theo de Raadt has moved -current to version 7.2. For those unfamiliar with the process: this is not the 7.2 release, but is part of the standard build-up to the release.

Sharing Dual-Licensed Drivers between Linux and FreeBSD: Linux and FreeBSD are both Open Source UNIX-like operating systems. Both have a long development history and are maintained by sizable development teams consisting of professional, volunteer, academic and hobbyist contributors. Both are capable of high performance in demanding production applications. However, one area where they differ is in the license: Linux is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) while FreeBSD uses the permissive Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.

FreeBSD Twitter community: New FreeBSD-themed Twitter community.

BSD Now 471: De-Penguinization : Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD, BSD for Linux users, r2k22 Hackathon Report on rpki-client, Configuring OpenIKED, De-Penguin Me, and more.

Tutorials

Desktop-installer: Use your Cleverness for Creativity: How would you like to spend minimal time setting up your workstation or laptop, and most of it doing creative work? This is the design goal of desktop-installer, and FreeBSD helps make it possible. The core purpose of desktop-installer is to help you quickly and easily create the most reliable and secure desktop system available, so you can spend your time on productive work rather than tedious systems management.

Deploying FreeBSD on Oracle Cloud: FreeBSD is the OS of choice for leveraging the most out of your Oracle Cloud deployment. Take advantage of the raw processing power the Ampere Altra has to offer and take the next step in evolving your infrastructure.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 121", "date": "2022-09-07:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 07, 2022", "slug": "121", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:13.zlib: Applications that call inflateGetHeader may be vulnerable to a buffer overflow. Note that inflateGetHeader is not used by anything in the FreeBSD base system, but may be used by third party software.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:20.tzdata: Several changes to future and past timestamps have been recorded in the IANA Time Zone Database after previous FreeBSD releases were released. This affects many users in different parts of the world. Because of these changes, the data in the zoneinfo files need to be updated. If the local timezone on the running system is affected, tzsetup(8) needs to be run to update /etc/localtime.

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

News

g2k22 Hackathon Report snmpd(8): Report on the recently-concluded g2k22 hackathon from Martijn van Duren (martijn@).

OpenBSD may soon gain further memory protections: immutable userland mappings: In a September 1st post to tech@ titled immutable userland mappings, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) gave the a preview of code that may soon land in -current. This is about work that is upcoming, still not committed.

August Foundation Fundraising Update : The goal this year is to raise at a minimum $1,400,000 towards a spending budget of around $2,000,000. As of writing this report, they’ve brought in under $200,000 towards that goal.

HardenedBSD August 2022 Status Report: Report of activities in src, ports and hbsdfw.

Tutorials

New FreeBSD Quick Guide: Video Playback on FreeBSD: Setting up basic video playback on FreeBSD is quick and simple! In this guide, we’ll download and set up the xine video player on a fresh FreeBSD install. The xine multimedia player relies on the XWindow system and the XVideo extension to provide a graphical video playback interface.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 120", "date": "2022-08-31:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 31, 2022", "slug": "120", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Several /sbin daemons are now dynamically-linked: In a pair of commits, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) changed many daemons in /sbin to be dynamically linked.

BSD Now 469: Ctrl-C Reset : FreeBSD Q2 2022 Status Report, FreeBSD in Science, fastest yes(1) in the west, Why Programmers Can’t “Reset” Programs With Ctrl-C, Run Slack in FreeBSD’s Linuxulator, and more.

BSDCan 2022 videos are available: Video recordings from BSDCan 2022 are now available.

Tutorials

FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop: Read to learn what works and what does not + few workarounds. Currently On: FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE (stable/13-n252072-1243360b1a0/GENERIC) and Framework Laptop (Batch 6).

Docker on FreeBSD using bhyve and sshfs (2020): This is step-by-step instruction how you can run your docker and docker-compose projects/code in FreeBSD. Solution is based on bhyve and vm-bhyve, and great Alpine Linux distribution.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 119", "date": "2022-08-17:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 17, 2022", "slug": "119", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:09.elf: When dumping core and saving process information, proc_getargv() might return an sbuf which have a sbuf_len() of 0 or -1, which is not properly handled. An out-of-bound read can happen when user constructs a specially crafted ps_string, which in turn can cause the kernel to crash.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:17.cam: CAM (Common Access Method) is a FreeBSD kernel subsystem which handles various aspects of storage device management. Among other responsibilities, it handles device error recovery and can automatically retransmit commands to peripheral devices when a transient error is encountered. When a CAM-managed device responds to a command with an error condition, CAM may automatically retry the command following some error recovery protocol. For instance, it may send a SCSI START UNIT command to the device before retrying the failed command. In this case, an in-memory copy of the original command is preserved for a later retry. However, a specific portion of the command state was not saved correctly, and upon a retry this could lead to memory corruption. The bug can cause kernel panics or other system-level misbehaviour.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:16.kqueue: kevent(2) is a system call which provides a generic method of notifying the caller when a caller-specified event happens or a condition holds. One use for kevent(2) is to wait for a specified timeout to elapse. This is implemented by the EVFILT_TIMER filter type. In FreeBSD 13.1, periodic events of type EVFILT_TIMER will return at only half of the requested frequency, following the first event. The bug may cause misbehaviour in software that makes use of periodic kevent(2)-based timers.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:18.wifi: FreeBSD’s net80211 kernel subsystem provides infrastructure and drivers for IEEE 802.11 wireless (Wi-Fi) communications. FreeBSD-SA-22:02.wifi included a number of improvements to net80211 data validation. Some of these changes were not included in the patch provided for FreeBSD 13.0 and via freebsd-update. The changes were included in the git repository. The interface affected by the missing change is only available to the superuser. The superuser may be able to cause kernel crash.

OpenBSD Errata: August 12, 2022 (zlib): Errata patches for zlib have been released for OpenBSD 7.0 and 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

BSD Now 467: Minecraft on NetBSD: Installing BSDs on Cubieboard1, Self-hosting a static site with OpenBSD, httpd, and relayd, NetBSD can also run a Minecraft server, A Little Story About the yes Unix Command, Shell History: Unix, OpenBGPD 7.5 released, and more

/usr/games removed from the default $PATH : In -current, /usr/games has been removed from the default $PATH. So when you next sit down on a fresh snapshot install and want to do a quick rot13 or do a round of tetris, you may need to specify the full path.

FreeBSD 13.0 end-of-life: On August 31, 2022, FreeBSD 13.0 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 13.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

Tutorials

Emulating the Amstrad CPC on NetBSD: A small HOWTO which explains how to emulate the Amstrad CPC 464 and/or 6128 guest on a NetBSD host.

Jstats - a resource monitor script for FreeBSD Jails: Jstats is a tiny resource monitor for FreeBSD jails, created by Özgür Kazanççı, a small tool that lists RAM, CPU and disk space usage of the jails running in the host system.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 118", "date": "2022-08-10:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 10, 2022", "slug": "118", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 9.3 released: The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.3, the third release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.2 in May 2021, as well some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. Users running 9.2 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade. Aside from many bug fixes, 9.3 includes backported improvements to suspend and resume support, various minor additions of new hardware to existing device drivers, compatibility with UDF file systems created on Windows 10, enhanced support for newer Intel Gigabit Ethernet chipsets, better support for new Intel and AMD Zen 3 chipsets, support for configuring connections to Wi-Fi networks using sysinst(8), support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga, and minor performance improvements for the Xen hypervisor.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2022: Here is the second quarterly report of 2022, with 26 reports included, from FreeBSD Team Reports, Projects, Userland, Kernel, Architectures, Documentation and Ports.

Valuable News – 2022/08/08: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

BSD Now 466: cat(1)’s efficiency : Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development, bringing TLS 1.3 to the Internet of Old Things, How efficient can cat(1) be, boost the speed of Unix shell programs, Running FreeBSD VNET Jails on AWS EC2 with Bastille, and more.

Tutorials

Ada development on FreeBSD 13.1: The Ada support has been removed from FreeBSD 13.1 ports because it was deprecated. Indeed, the gcc6-aux port was deprecated and expired on 2022-02-28. There is no indication about a replacement solution and using Ada for FreeBSD is a challenge but this is still possible. This article records a number of steps and commands that helped me setup a new Ada compiler based on GCC 12 on a fresh FreeBSD 13.1 installation.

Running FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE for ARM64: Learn how to run FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE for ARM64 in QEMU on Apple Silicon Mac (MacBook Pro M1, etc) with HVF acceleration (Hypervisor.framework).

Meta-programming in Shell: In this article, they talk about how to use FreeBSD’s shell for meta-programming, where the program’s execution changes based on other programs using hooks (function names) and data (environment variables)

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

NetBSD 9.3 plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 117", "date": "2022-08-03:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 03, 2022", "slug": "117", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: August 2, 2022 (bgpd): Errata patch for BGP daemon has been released for OpenBSD 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development: In this article, they talk about why open source projects needs non-developer contributions. Let’s learn how these non-developer contributions have transformed the open source ecosystem and tips on how to building welcoming communities in order to attract these contributions.

HardenedBSD July 2022 Status Report: Monthly summary of changes in src, ports and For hbsdfw (the HardenedBSD 13-STABLE fork of OPNsense).

OPNsense 22.7 released: 22.7, nicknamed “Powerful Panther”, features the upgrade to FreeBSD 13.1, PHP 8.0, Phalcon 5, stacked VLAN and Intel QuickAssist (QAT) support, DDoS protection using SYN cookies, MVC/API pages for IPsec status and Unbound overrides, new APCUPSD and CrowdSec plugins plus much more.

CHERI-based computer runs KDE for the first time: And Ruslan Bukin, a researcher at Cambridge’s computer science department and also a FreeBSD contributor, has now ported the Wayland display server and KDE desktop to CheriBSD.

BSD Now 465: Deep Space Debugging: Debugging Lisp in Deep Space, 0 Dependency Websites with OpenBSD & AsciiDoc, Deleting old snapshots on FreeBSD, Full multiprocess support in lldb-server, Basic fix between pf tables and macros, and more.

Advocating for FreeBSD in 2022 and Beyond : Article by Anne Dickison from FreeBSD Foundation discussing the FreeBSD advocacy and work of FreeBSD Foundation.

Tutorials

FreeBSD on Hetzner dedicated servers: The European cloud and dedicated server provider Hetzner has silently dropped support for FreeBSD. A FreeBSD rescue system is not offered anymore so users running dedicated servers with FreeBSD may run into difficulties if anything goes wrong. But luckily it is still possible to install FreeBSD using a mfsBSD image and to manage the installation from the Linux rescue system to some degree if using a root-on-ZFS installation.

Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD: Article from BastilleBSD on the top ten things to configure on a new FreeBSD installation.

Install FreeBSD-13.1 on your dedicated server from within a Linux rescue environment: Hetzner dropped support for FreeBSD installs in July 2022. Therefore, this installer script for mfsBSD image to install FreeBSD 13.1 with zfs-on-root using a statically compiled qemu binary has been created.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 116", "date": "2022-07-28:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 28, 2022", "slug": "116", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 24, 2022 (xserver cron): Errata patches for X11 server and cron daemon have been released for OpenBSD 7.0 and 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

FreeBSD in Science: FreeBSD has always been an exceptional platform for scientific computing, thanks in large part to its unrivaled reliability.

OpenBSD-current has moved to 7.2-beta : Snapshots are already available for several platforms.

BSD Now 464: Compiling with kefir: From 0 to bhyve on FreeBSD, Analyze OpenBSD’s Kernel with Domain-Specific Knowledge, OpenBSD Webzine: ISSUE #10, HardenedBSD June 2022 Status Report, two new C compilers: chibicc and kefir in OpenBSD, SSD TRIM in NetBSD HEAD, and more.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

OpenBSD Webzine: ISSUE #10: TL;DR: - pkg_add -u speedup in -current, now you can upgrade at ludicrous speed - IP forwarding is now parallelized - Many new packages landed in -current - Many links to read - Don’t forget to update your 7.1 system with syspatch and packages with pkg_add -u

Announcing the pkgsrc-2022Q2 branch: In total, 268 packages were added, 81 packages were removed, and 2289 package updates (to 1743 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2021Q4 release.

BSD Now 461: Persistent Memory Allocation: BSD news round in podcast form.

OpenBSD has two new C compilers: chibicc and kefir: Brian Robert Callahan: In my never ending quest to have oksh support every C compiler in existence, I have ported two more C compilers to OpenBSD. They are chibicc and kefir. As always, let’s review them and at the end I’ll have links to unofficial ports so that you can play around with these C compilers.

HardenedBSD June 2022 Status Report: List of the changes and enhancements in src, ports and other of their projects.

Tutorials

Analyze OpenBSD’s Kernel with Domain-Specific Knowledge: In this article you can learn how you can analyze the OpenBSD kernel with domain-specific knowledge of spl(9) locking primitives, to find programming errors.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 114", "date": "2022-06-29:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 29, 2022", "slug": "114", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Ghost BSD 22.06.18 : Another leap forward for desktop BSD: A look at the latest release of Ghost BSD which is now based on FreeBSD 13.1 offering greater stability and a faster desktop experience.

In Other BSDs for 2022/06/25: Weekly BSD digest from Dragonfly BSD.

BSD Now 460: OpenBSD airport folklore: Containerd gains support for launching Linux containers on FreeBSD, OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64, true minimalistic window manager does not exist, OpenBSD folklore, HardenedBSD May 2022 Status Report, DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 out, and more.

How I would sell OpenBSD as a salesperson: Solène Rapenne: Let’s have fun today. I always wondered how I would sell OpenBSD licences to customers if I was a salesperson.

GhostBSD Online Meetup: This meetup is for open discussions related to GhostBSD, OpenZFS, and FreeBSD with a period of questions and answers. Everyone can suggest a subject of discussion.

Tutorials

Plex Media Server on FreeBSD: In this video you’ll see how to install & configure Plex Media Server on FreeBSD.

Fear and loathing in FreeBSD, or qorg’s experiences with FreeBSD: Linux user trying out FreeBSD. Post describes Installation, Networking, Making the fresh installed system a desktop, Package management, Linux emulation and some more FreeBSD features.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 113", "date": "2022-06-22:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 22, 2022", "slug": "113", "html": "

Releases

Hotfix GhostBSD 22.06.18 ISO is now available: This new ISO contains a critical fix and software updates. The last change to automount was untested, and the live iso was automating all internal drives and caused serious partitioning issues and installation problems.

GhostBSD 22.06.15 ISO is now available: It contains many bug fixes, security fixes, feature improvements, software updates, and OS updates. For details, see the changelog on the link.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

New FreeBSD Core Team Elected: Active committers to the project have elected Twelfth FreeBSD Core Team. Baptiste Daroussin (bapt) Benedict Reuschling (bcr) Ed Maste (emaste) Greg Lehey (grog) John Baldwin (jhb) Li-Wen Hsu (lwhsu) Emmanuel Vadot (manu) Tobias C. Berner (tcberner) Mateusz Piotrowski (0mp) To read about the responsibilities of the Core Team, refer to https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-core

BSD Now 459 - NetBSD Kernel benchmark: Evaluating FreeBSD CURRENT for Production Use, Time Machine-like Backups on OpenBSD, FreeBSD on the Graviton 3, Compiling the NetBSD kernel as a benchmark, Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset from BSDCan 2022, Hardware Detection & Diagnostics for New FreeBSD Users, and more.

Tutorials

Differences between base and ports LLVM in OpenBSD: Frederic Cambus: Base vs ports LLVM in OpenBSD, and why we still need both

Using Netgraph for FreeBSD’s Bhyve Networking: FreeBSD 13 adds new support for a netgraph backend for virtual network devices under bhyve. Netgraph is a modular networking framework that allows for arbitrary stacking of protocols and transports, along with filtering, tunneling, redirection, inspection, injection and more—fast and feature-rich, netgraph is to networking what the geom layer is to disks and storage. This article provides a basic recipe to demonstrate some common netgraph syntax and use-cases.Why might you want to run CURRENT? If you have a large modified code base, or are building a product based on FreeBSD, CURRENT gives you a look into the future of FreeBSD. Running CURRENT will help you understand changes that are happening in the FreeBSD Operating System and it gives you an opportunity to see how your stack performs with new features. In this article we will show how to build a CURRENT system with the debugging features disabled, and perform some benchmarks to test the impact debugging features have on performance.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 112", "date": "2022-06-08:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 08, 2022", "slug": "112", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

BSD Now 457: The NetBSD Wheelbarrow: Journey to ZFS RAIDZ1 on NetBSD, FreeBSD networking basics: WiFi and Bluetooth, smuggling code into the playstation via NetBSD driver hole, KDE FreeBSD CI, remembering buildtool, and more.

HardenedBSD May 2022 Status Report: In May 2022, HardenedBSD saw a few changes in src, ports and other projects.

Tutorials

How to Install cgit With Gitolite and Nginx on FreeBSD 13: Recently, I dove into creating a very simple Git server setup, gradually moving away from the big Git providers. First I used Gitea for some time but (unsurprisingly) realized that I like editing text files in the terminal a lot more than clicking around web sites. So I did embark on the mission of setting up a robust but simple Git server solution. Along the way I encountered a couple of not particularly well-documented trip wires, so this document attempts to do that, in a small way.

The True Minimalistic Window Manager Does Not Exist: Window managers; many people use them to increase the efficiency of their workflows or to show how “cool” they are to their colleagues or friends. Window managers are among bachelor’s and even master’s thesis topics these days. Serhan Ekici explains why true minimalistic window manager that follows UNIX philosophy doesn’t exist yet by discussing dwm, bspwm, and how the design of the true minimalistic window manager should be.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 111", "date": "2022-06-01:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 01, 2022", "slug": "111", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

FreeBSD Foundation Work in the 13.1 Release: FreeBSD 13.1, which was released on Monday May 16, is the culmination of 13 months of development since 13.0. The work involved 56781 new commits and of those, 8312 or about 15% identified sponsorship by the FreeBSD Foundation. Part of the FreeBSD Foundation’s mission is to support the development of the FreeBSD operating system. In this post they highlight some of the Foundation-sponsored work that went into 13.1.

BSD Now 456: FreeBSD 13.1 : FreeBSD 13.1 is released, Unix command line conventions over time, Branching for NetBSD 10, Microbhyve, Own your Calendar and Contacts with OpenBSD, the PSARC case for ZFS, and more.

NetBSD Google Summer of Code 2022 projects: The NetBSD Foundation has finalized the list of projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code. The community bonding period has already started (from May 20) and it will last until June 12. During this time, the contributors are expected to coordinate with their mentors and community. This will be immediately followed by the coding period from June 13 to September 4. After which, the contributors are expected to submit their final work, evaluate their mentors, and get evaluated by their mentors as well. Results will be announced on September 20.

Welcome FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Participants: The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announced we’ll be working with 7 projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Tutorials

Time Machine like Backups on OpenBSD: Matthias Schmidt: Since Time Machine is Apple only and I use OpenBSD on all my personal machines, I decided to write my own Time Machine like solution.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 110", "date": "2022-05-04:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 04, 2022", "slug": "110", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.1-RC5 Available : The fifth RC build for the FreeBSD 13.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, arm64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, and riscv architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Part 2: Tuning Your FreeBSD Configuration for Your NAS: Building your own NAS isn’t just about having the right storage configuration. It starts with the right hardware, the right OS setup, and finally going through the right choice for your storage – OpenZFS. In this edition of our 4-part article series on how to build your own NAS we discuss about fine tuning your FreeBSD OS for excellent NAS performance.

BSD Now 452: The unknown hackers: The unknown hackers, Papers we love to read, Dual Boot Homelab in The Bedroom by the bed testbed, OpenSSH 9.0 released, OS battle: OpenBSD vs. NixOS, and more.

Writing my first OpenBSD game using Godot: Solène Rapenne: a few days ago I discovered the open source game engine Godot. This game engine is a full-featured tool allowing to easily write 2D or 3D games portables on operating systems where the Godot engine is available, like OpenBSD.

Playing the game Bottomless on OpenBSD: Solène Rapenne: Today I’m play the free (not open source) game Bottomless from itch.io https://picster.itch.io/bottomless

I ported the new Hare compiler to OpenBSD: Brian Robert Callahan: Hare comes in two repositories: a compiler and a runtime. This blog post will only deal with porting the compiler; we’ll port the runtime in a follow-up post.

Tutorials

compiling an openbsd kernel 50% faster: Ted Unangst: My theory is that compiling less code will be faster than compiling more code, but first we must find the code so we know not to compile it. The OpenBSD kernel source tree has a total of 6.93M lines and 383.41M bytes of code…

https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/probing-my-ssds-latency: Ted Unangst: My SSD is probably pretty fast, but maybe a faster one would let me compile a kernel even quicker by reducing the time spent waiting for I/O to complete. First though, I need to determine its latency, and the benchmark tool available to me, dd, measures throughput not latency.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 13.1 RC plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 109", "date": "2022-04-27:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 27, 2022", "slug": "109", "html": "

Releases

OpenBSD 7.1 Released: This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 7.1.

FreeBSD 13.1-RC4 Available: The fourth RC build for the FreeBSD 13.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, arm64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, and riscv architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

Syspatch retracted (OpenBSD Errata: April 22, 2022 (wifi)): Syspatch syspatch71-001_wifi has been retracted. A mistake was made in generating the syspatch(8) binary update syspatch71-001_wifi for this errata. This causes problems installing future binary updates and reverting the syspatch. Because of this, the syspatch has been retracted until the issue is resolved. The actual source patch is not affected from this (and can be applied as described in the patch instructions) and the syspatch itself works fine as well. If you already have installed the syspatch71-001_wifi update, you can continue running with it until we publish instructions on how to recover on http://www.openbsd.org/errata71.html.

OpenBSD Errata: April 22, 2022 (wifi): Errata patch for wireless drivers in the kernel has been released for OpenBSD 7.1. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Let’s try V on OpenBSD: Brian Robert Callahan: Let’s see if V language still works on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD is the Perfect OS post Nuclear Apocalypse: If you’re lucky enough to survive a nuclear apocalypse, you will inevitably start looking for things to do.

LibreSSL 3.5.2 Released: This is the first stable release for the 3.5.x branch, also available with OpenBSD 7.1.

Tuning ZFS recordsize: Full system backups with FFS snapshots, ZFS and dump(8), tuning recordsize in OpenZFS, Optimizing FreeBSD Power Consumption on Modern Intel Laptops, remember to check for ZFS filesystems being mounted, Use tcpdump to save wireless bridge, and more.

OpenBSD Webzine ISSUE #9: TL;DR - OpenBSD 7.1 released! - No more packages updates for 7.0, syspatch will still be published - No more syspatches for 6.9, it is now end of life and shouldn’t be used any longer - OpenBSD 7.0 to 7.1 upgrade guide is available

Tutorials

Interacting with FreeBSD – Learning the Fundamentals of the FreeBSD Shell: The time of the CLI might seem over given the plethora of UIs these days, however, any experienced sysadmin knows just how necessary a powerful CLI like the FreeBSD shell can be. In FreeBSD 14, the default root shell is changing, and in this article we talk about the background and motivations for this change and what implications and advantages this change brings.

Reduce httpd web server bandwidth usage by serving compressed files: Solène Rapenne: When reaching a website, most web browsers will send a header (some metadata about the requestion) informing the web server that you supported compressed content. In OpenBSD 7.1, the httpd web server received a new feature allowing it to serves a pre-compressed file of a requested file if the web browser supports compression.

OpenBSD 7.1: fan noise and high temperature solution: Solène Rapenne: OpenBSD 7.1 has been released with a change that will set the CPU to max speed when plugged to the wall. This brings better performance and entirely let the CPU and mainboard do the frequency throttling.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD 7.1, FreeBSD 13.1 RC plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 108", "date": "2022-04-20:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 20, 2022", "slug": "108", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 2.1.7 RELEASE: MidnightBSD 2.1.7 is now available via git and ISOs via FTP/HTTPS. zlib 1.2.12 is included.

FreeBSD 13.1-RC3 Available: The third RC build for the FreeBSD 13.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, arm64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, and riscv architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: April 5, 2022 (syszlib): Errata patches for zlib in the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:15.pf: pf rulesets that set a limit on the number of table entries and include one or more address tables may occasionally fail to load. An initial load of the rules will succeed, but an attempt to re-load can fail. In this case, the problem persists until the system is rebooted.

OpenBSD Errata: April 11, 2022 (rpki): Errata patches for rpki-client have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Operating systems battle: OpenBSD vs NixOS: Solène Rapenne: While I’m an OpenBSD contributor, I also enjoy using Linux especially the NixOS distribution which I consider a system apart from the other Linux distributions because of how different it is.

Q1 2022 Software Development Projects Update: The FreeBSD Foundation Technology Team and grant recipients have been busy over the first 3 months of 2022. Take a look at the status of the latest development projects and see what’s coming later in the year.

BSD Now 450: The ideas that made Unix, hints for writing Unix tools, cron best practices, three different sorts of filesystem errors, LibreSSL 3.5.1 released, taskwarrior to manage tasks, and more.

FreeBSD Fundraising Update Q1 2022 : 2021 fundraising goal of $1,250,000 have increased to $1,400,000. Article updates on areas that this money should support.

Tutorials

iblock: block scanner TCP connections under OpenBSD: iblock is a software whose purpose is to detect TCP connections, on specific ports, in order to block the corresponding IP adresses, through Packet Filter.

How to talk to a local IPMI under OpenBSD: Chris Siebenmann: OpenBSD can talk to a machine’s BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) that implements the IPMI specification using one of a number of standard interfaces, as covered in the “System Interfaces” section of ipmi(4). However, OpenBSD throws us a curve ball in that the ipmi(4) driver is normally present in the default OpenBSD kernel but not enabled.

Let’s install OpenBSD/riscv64 on QEMU: Brian Robert Callahan: Let’s figure out how to install OpenBSD/riscv64 on QEMU running Windows 11.

Improving Replication Security With OpenZFS Delegation: OpenZFS privilege delegation is an extremely powerful tool that enables system administrators to carefully provide unprivileged users the ability to manage ZFS datasets and zvols at an extremely precise level —with much finer control than would be possible with generic security tools like sudo or doas.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

MidnightBSD 2.1.7, FreeBSD 13.1 RC plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 107", "date": "2022-04-13:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 13, 2022", "slug": "107", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.1-RC2 Available: The second RC build for the FreeBSD 13.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, arm64, powerpc64, and powerpcspe architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:04.netmap: On systems configured to include netmap in their devfs_ruleset, a privileged process running in a jail can affect the host environment.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:06.ioctl: Users with access to the mpr, mps or mpt device node may overwrite heap data, potentially resulting in privilege escalation. Note that the device node is only accessible to root and members of the operator group.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:05.bhyve: A misbehaving bhyve guest could overwrite memory in the bhyve process on the host, possibly leading to code execution in the host context. The bhyve process runs in a Capsicum sandbox, which (depending on the FreeBSD version and bhyve configuration) limits the impact of exploiting this issue.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:08.zlib: Certain inputs can cause zlib’s compression routine to overwrite an internal buffer with compressed data. This issue may require the use of uncommon or non-default compression parameters.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:07.wifi_meshid: While a FreeBSD Wi-Fi client is in scanning mode (i.e., not associated with a SSID) a malicious beacon frame may overwrite kernel memory, leading to remote code execution.

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

News

BSD Now 449: FreeBSD Status Report 4th Quarter 2021, Reproducible clean $HOME in OpenBSD using impermanence, Making RockPro64 a NetBSD Server, helloSystem 0.7.0 is out, lazy approach to FreeBSD dual-booting, going to jail, and more.

Tutorials

Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS: Let’s talk about building your own NAS on FreeBSD. The first step – researching hardware. When it comes to researching NAS hardware, it’s easy to get lost in the dizzying array of technologies, vendor datasheets touting performance and reliability stats. While we can’t tell you what hardware to buy in an article, we can discuss some of the factors to consider as you research which hardware best meets your storage requirements.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 13.1 RC plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 106", "date": "2022-03-30:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 30, 2022", "slug": "106", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.1-BETA3 Available: The third BETA build for the FreeBSD 13.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, arm64, powerpc64, powerpcspei, and riscv architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 22, 2022 (slaacd): Errata patches for slaacd have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:13.zfs: Erratum FreeBSD-EN-22:11.zfs was addressed by a patch which modified a ZFS kernel function that determines whether the in-memory copy of a filesystem object is dirty with respect to its representation on stable storage. The modification contained a bug which could cause the function to return false negatives.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:14.tzdata: Several changes to future and past timestamps have been recorded in the IANA Time Zone Database after previous FreeBSD releases were released. This affects many users in different parts of the world. Because of these changes, the data in the zoneinfo files need to be updated. If the local timezone on the running system is affected, tzsetup(8) needs to be run to update /etc/localtime.

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

News

The NetBSD Foundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022: We are pleased to announce that The NetBSD Foundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022. Would you like to contribute to NetBSD or pkgsrc during the summer? Please give a look to the project list: and join #NetBSD-code IRC channel on Libera.chat and mailing lists to propose possible further ideas! Please note that unlike past years if you are 18 years or older you can be a Google Summer of Code contributor (previously the program was opened only to university students).

Should I Upgrade to OpenZFS 2.1?: Beginning with version 13.0, FreeBSD supports the long-anticipated OpenZFS native encryption. If you’ve used FreeBSD’s GELI encryption in the past, you may wonder if switching to OpenZFS native encryption makes sense. Check out the differences between GELI encryption and OpenZFS native encryption, and the main benefits of native encryption, let’s take a look at how to create an encrypted database and reroot to an encrypted database.

BSD Now 447: Path to BSD : FreeBSD Foundation Proposals, UNIX: On the Path to BSD, Fujitsu ends its mainframe and Unix services, Install burpsuite on FreeBSD using Linuxulator, new OpenBSD Webzine is out, and more.

Heap Overflow in OpenBSD’s slaacd via Router Advertisement : In this blog post we analyze a heap overflow vulnerability we discovered in the IPv6 stack of OpenBSD, more specifically in its slaacd daemon. This issue, whose root cause can be found in the mishandling of Router Advertisement messages containing a DNSSL option with a malformed domain label, was patched by OpenBSD on March 21, 2022. A proof-of-concept to reproduce the vulnerability is provided.

OpenBSD Webzine Issue #8: TL;DR: - OpenBSD on Apple M1 is more accessible - httpd supports static gzip compression - Many wifi performance improvements - Webzine new Questions and Answers section - Webzine is being translated into German and French

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 13.1 betas plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 105", "date": "2022-03-16:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 16, 2022", "slug": "105", "html": "

Releases

Unofficial HardenedBSD liveCD: The system requirements for using is 4 GiB RAM and VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution. The liveCD contains the common softwares as well as paxtest and hbsd-checksec. They also contain a second kernel (FreeBSD) for debugging purposes. This is not an official project.

FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1 Available: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 13.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, arm64, powerpc64, powerpcspe, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

iwx(4) gains 11ac 80MHz channel support: Following a request-for-testing thread on tech@, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) has committed some IEEE 802.11ac support to iwx(4). This makes it possible to use 80MHz channels and VHT-specific MCS. Other 11ac features remain disabled for now.

BSD Now 445: Journey to BSD : Idiot’s guide to OpenBSD on the Pinebook Pro, FreeBSD Periodic Scripts, history of service management in Unix, journey from macOS to FreeBSD, Unix processes “infecting” each other, navidrom music server on FreeBSD, and more.

mtw(4), a driver for MediaTek MT7601U Wi-Fi devices: James Hastings (hastings@) has committed mtw(4), a driver for MediaTek MT7601U USB Wi-Fi devices. Ported from run(4) with legacy chipsets removed. Not yet enabled in the build.

Tutorials

Optimizing FreeBSD Power Consumption on Modern Intel Laptops: One thing with FreeBSD is that unlike Windows or desktop Linux, the default configuration is poorly optimized for laptops that are newer than your ancient ThinkPad T420, or maybe a T460s. Therefore there are a few things to keep in mind.

Making RockPro64 a NetBSD Server: There are some minor issues with the RockPro64. It has no ability to use ECC memory. It only comes with 1 PCIe 4x slot, and Rockchip errata limited this to PCIe 1.x. It is possible to use a PCIe bridge to enable more devices for booting, or to enable both a network and storage device.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

New Unofficial HardenedBSD liveCD plus all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 104", "date": "2022-02-23:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 23, 2022", "slug": "104", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: February 21, 2022 (slaacd): Errata patches for slaacd have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

OpenBSD-current has moved to 7.1-beta : Snapshots are (already) available for some platforms. This serves as an excellent reminder to upgrade snapshots frequently, test both base and ports, and report problems.

librespeed-template: A BastilleBSD Template for librespeed. Librespeed is a very lightweight Speedtest implemented in Javascript, using XMLHttpRequest and Web Workers.

BSD Now 422: The Birth of Unix, Help request for three big Lumina items, FreeBSD 13 on Thinkpad T460s, HardenedBSD January 2022 Status Report, OPNsense 22.1 “Observant Owl” released, and more.

What’s Ahead for FreeBSD and the Foundation in 2022: As part of the FreeBSD Stand at FOSDEM 2022, the FreeBSD Foundation put together a few videos that discuss what’s ahead for the Project and Foundation in 2022. Check out the Project’s YouTube channel to see where they’re headed.

Tutorials

Debugging an ioctl Problem on OpenBSD: Joshua Stein explains how he tracks ‘n debugs ioctl problem into one V4L2 program, on OpenBSD.

The FreeBSD Boot Process : Let’s talk about the FreeBSD boot process. It is very robust and complex, as it is well-thought. Find out what are the differences when you boot from UEFI or legacy BIOS, or from GPT and MBR partitioning schemes. Learn what happens when you use ZFS or UFS filesystem.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 103", "date": "2022-02-16:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 16, 2022", "slug": "103", "html": "

Releases

pfSense Plus version 22.01 and pfSense CE version 2.6.0 Software are Now Available: This is a regularly scheduled release of pfSense® Plus and pfSense CE software including new features, additional hardware support, and bug fixes.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

HardenedBSD 12-STABLE support will be dropped: On 01 May 2022, HardenedBSD will delegate support of the 12-STABLE branch to the wider HardenedBSD community. They will stop providing binary updates, nightly builds, and routine package builds at that time.Everyone is encouraged to enjoy 13-STABLE going forward.

BSD Now 411: Migrating our servers from Linux to FreeBSD, Cluster provisioning with Nomad and Pot on FreeBSD, LibBSDDialog, FreeBSD 13.0 Base Jails with ZFS and VNET, and more.

GhostBSD meetup: This meetup is for open discussions related to GhostBSD, OpenZFS, FreeBSD with a period of questions and answers. Everyone can suggest a subject of discussion. When: Friday, Mar 18, 2021, 19:00 EST. Where: https://meet.jit.si/GhostBSD_Meet.

How we are migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD - Part 1 - System and jails setup: After my post on why we’re migrating (many of) our servers to FreeBSD, I’ve received a lot of feedback. Many questions, many comments. Many e-mails from Linux users asking how we’re migrating, how jails can replace lxc or (in part) Docker, and how we’re monitoring and performing backups/restores.

Tutorials

Building your ports from source using DPB.: Jay Eptinxa shows us how to set up the Distributed Ports Builder, or dpb. After covering the basics, and a few common pitfalls to avoid, we then see how to download a set of distfiles for use on off-line machines, as well as how to carry your distfiles directory neatly from one release to the next, avoiding excessive and unwanted downloads.

UNIX: On the Path to BSD: Continuation of series of articles on the history of Unix with the events led to the creation of BSD. Find out about the first Unix editions, how C evolved, and how Unix was first licensed.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

New pfSense release, HardenedBSD dropping support for 12 and all the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 102", "date": "2022-02-09:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 09, 2022", "slug": "102", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:07.la57: Recent Intel x86-64 CPUs support 5-level paging, extending the size of the virtual address space to 57 bits. The extension is enabled by setting a bit known as LA57 in a control register, and switching to 5-level paging during boot. LA57 support was tested on and is functional within QEMU, but fails on physical hardware.The kernel fails to boot on Intel CPUs that support LA57.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:08.i386 : The FreeBSD/i386 port supports running FreeBSD on 32-bit Intel and AMD CPUs. On the i386 platform, the operating system kernel is responsible for invalidating per-CPU TLBs (translation lookaside buffer) when virtual memory mappings are updated. The patch which was released as EN-22:04.pcid introduced a regression affecting FreeBSD 12.2 and 12.3. This regression introduced a bug in the i386 platform’s TLB invalidation logic. The regression causes kernel panics under multi-core CPU load.

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

News

RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS Goes Live: The Foundation sponsored feature reflows existing data to rewrite it onto a new arrangement of disks thereby freeing space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group. The feature reflows existing data, essentially rewriting it onto a new arrangement of disks – meaning the original group plus a newly added disk. In so doing, a new adjacent chunk of free space is created at the end of the logical RAID-Z group and thus at the end of each physical disk.

FreeBSD 13.1 Release Process: The release schedule for FreeBSD 13.1 has been released.

BSD Now 440: BSD Inside Zone: GhostBSD 22.01 is available, Packet Scheduling with Dummynet and FreeBSD, Inside zone installation, Why the FreeBSD Desktop and my Linux Rant, How to install Gnome on OpenBSD, The important Unix idea of the “virtual filesystem switch”, and more.

Tutorials

Poudriere on FreeBSD: A tutorial on how to setup and use Poudriere package build system on FreeBSD.

Modern inetd in FreeBSD: The inetd ‘super-server’ is a special application that ties incoming network connections to locally-run commands. While it is not a common part of deployments today, it still has potential to be useful in production environments, and definitely has a place in the future of FreeBSD.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD erratas plus the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 101", "date": "2022-01-26:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 26, 2022", "slug": "101", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: January 24, 2022 (ppctrap): Errata patches for macppc kernel trap handler have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0.

OpenBSD Errata: January 19, 2022 (libexpat vmm): Errata patches for expat XML library have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0. Errata patch for kernel vmm has been released for OpenBSD 7.0. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

Note: two files changed and hashes/signatures updated for NetBSD 8.1: The NetBSD release engineering team recently received a notification that for the (very old) NetBSD 8.1 release there was a checksum mismatch on our ftp server. This was not the effect of some hack, but incomplete manual fixes to a manual mistake made during the initial release of NetBSD 8.1. To make sure nothing bad happened, they recreated the two affected images from scratch in internal trusted build environment and replaced the files on the ftp server.

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

News

Why we’re migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD: Some time ago they started a complex, continuous and not always linear operation, that is to migrate, where possible, most of the servers (theirs and of their customers) from Linux to FreeBSD. The reasons are many, and this article lists some of them with corresponding explanations.

Tutorials

Cluster provisioning with Nomad and Pot on FreeBSD: Many modern production environments are built on top of Docker and Kubernetes. It is common to see READMEs for open source tools offering build options for the docker crowd and sometimes tools only support docker based workflows. This is a natural product of the reality that many developer workflows are built on top of Docker – when you already know a tool, it makes sense to also use it in your other projects.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD erratas, NetBSD hashes changes for 8.1 plus more.

" }, { "title": "Issue 100", "date": "2022-01-19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 19, 2022", "slug": "100", "html": "

2021 Top DiscoverBSD and BSDSec articles

That time of year again :) I took articles based on the number of visits, so there are also older articles.

DiscoverBSD

BSD Sec

Releases

GhostBSD 22.01.12 ISO is now available: This new ISO contains fixes, improvements, and software updates. Finally, the installer hanging at the cleaning stage for ZFS installation got fixed, and OpenRC and dhcpcd were removed from the base code. Furthermore, automation configuration for HD 7000 series and older GPUs has been added. Also added was the support for os-release to show GhostBSD name and GhostBSD version in applications like mate-system-monitor, python distros, pfetch, and neofetch and added a new set of wallpapers for 2022 and removed p7zip from the default selection since it is vulnerable and unmaintained.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-22:01.vt: FreeBSD’s system console is provided by the vt(4) virtual terminal console driver. Under certain conditions involving use of the highlight buffer while text is scrolling on the console, console data may overwrite data structures associated with the system console or other kernel memory. Users with access to the system console may be able to cause system misbehaviour.

FreeBSD Errata Notices:

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

News

“The early days of Unix at Bell Labs” - Brian Kernighan (LCA 2022 Online): In barely 50 years, the Unix operating system has gone from a tiny two-⁠person experiment in a New Jersey attic to a multi-⁠billion dollar industry whose products and services are an integral part of the world’s computing infrastructure. Along the way, there have been many changes, but a surprisingly large amount is much the same as when it started. How did this come about? What are the good ideas in Unix that have been preserved and even spread? What are the good ideas that have fallen by the wayside? What are the not so good ideas that have prospered? And what might the future hold?

GhostBSD 22.01.12 Full Tour: The GhostBSD project has published an update to their FreeBSD-based, rolling release desktop system. The project’s new snapshot fixes a number of issues and removes an unmaintained package from the default install.

Suyimazu - Wine-based Game Launcher for FreeBSD: Suyimazu is a launcher that makes it easy to run Windows games/launcher easily on FreeBSD by providing/applying the required fixes and workarounds. - The Windows emulation is provided by Wine. - The launcher menus are provided by Zenity - The most fixes that gets applied are provided by Winetricks

Tutorials

Local authoritative DNS on OpenBSD using dhcpd(8) and unbound(8): One meaningful addition to home networks is the ability to refer to devices using domain names instead of IP addresses. Domain names are more memorable and human readable. Local authoritative DNS allows things like this to work

Bastille Template Examples: AdGuard Home Prometheus Exporter: Add a Prometheus exporter to the AdGuard Home DNS container created in the previous example. This exports full metrics on AdGuard service status, average processing time, number of queries made, number of blocked domains, top clients, top queries and more.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Best articles of the last year plus all the latest from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 99", "date": "2022-01-12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 12, 2022", "slug": "99", "html": "

Releases

DragonFly 6.2.1 released: DragonFly version 6.2 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

BastilleBSD User Survey: Bastille wouldn’t exist without our community. This survey helps the project to understand who that community is and how the project is being used. The results of this survey will help prioritize platform compatibility and gather feedback regarding what they’re doing well and where they can improve. Feedback from this survey is anonymous.

In Other BSDs for 2022/01/08: Mostly end-of-year articles from BSD world.

FLOSS Weekly 662 - FreeBSD: Deb Goodkin, Executive Director of the FreeBSD Foundation joins Doc Searls and Shawn Powers on this episode of FLOSS Weekly. There are lots of ways FreeBSD is not Linux or vice versa. Or ways they’re actually better for some purposes. Just ask Netflix. In a lively hour of conversation, Goodkin visits many operating systems and related topics regarding the open source world as well as FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Foundation Soliciting Project Proposals: The FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of project proposals for funded development. Successful completion of many of the contributed ideas such as Raspberry Pi hardware improvements, support for the exFat filesystem, and adding Capsicum use in more applications would be beneficial for the Project and have clear deliverables. However, please do not feel limited to these topics. We welcome proposals with other ideas for improving the base system, the ports tree, documentation, or other areas. If you think your proposal will benefit the Project, we will consider it.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Dragonfly release plus all the latest from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 98", "date": "2022-01-05:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 05, 2022", "slug": "98", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Electron port for FreeBSD: Electron is officially available in the FreeBSD ports tree. This repository will continue to serve as a pre-official development repository. It contains an experimental port of electron for FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Journal new issue: Check out the Nov/Dec 2021 issue of the #FreeBSD Journal. The issue features articles on Open Channel SSD, Building FreeBSD Communities and more.

Year End Interview: In this last episode of 2021, BSDNow interviews Solene from OpenBSD. She’s blogging about her experiences with OpenBSD on dataswamp.org, the webzine she created, how she got involved and other topics.

Tutorials

Signal Desktop on OpenBSD via vmm(4): How to using Signal on OpenBSD via virtualisation (with Ubuntu on guest).

OpenBSD setup notes: Personal notes on installing, setting up, and using OpenBSD on two Thinkpads (an X220 and a T400). They’re applicable to OpenBSD-current as at 2020-09-05 (somewhere between OpenBSD versions 6.7 and 6.8).

OpenBSD BASED Challenge Day 2: Root BSD explains why they like cwm(1) on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD BASED Challenge Day 3: Root BSD explains things about tmux(1),xterm(1) on OpenBSD.

Bastille Template: AdGuard Home: Bastille is more than just lightweight containers for FreeBSD. The template command allows you to automatically deploy a wide range of software. This post begins a series highlighting examples of deploying popular applications using Bastille on FreeBSD. AdGuard Home is network-wide software for blocking ads & tracking.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

All the latest from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 97", "date": "2021-12-16:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 16, 2021", "slug": "97", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE Now Available: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch. Some of the highlights:

Updates to various networking drivers.
Several updates to upstream contributed software.
Several userland application improvements and kernel bug fixes.
And much more…

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Wayland 1.20 Released With Proper FreeBSD Support, Protocol Additions: While work on the core Wayland code itself has slowed down in recent years, Wayland 1.20 is a fairly notable update. In particular, this first Wayland release in nearly one year is bringing fully upstreamed FreeBSD support. All of the FreeBSD support patches have worked their way upstream into Wayland 1.20 and it’s ready to be supported with this release. There is also now FreeBSD continuous integration (CI) test coverage to ensure the FreeBSD support remains in good shape and hopefully won’t regress.

BSDCan 2022 CFP: The BSDCan 2022 Call For Papers has gone out. Submissions will close Jan 19, 2022. The conference will be held in-person this upcoming year.

FreeBSD documentation site redesign: The FreeBSD documentation site got a new face, containing pages such as Getting started, Downloads, Handbook, Porter’s Handbook, FAQs, Documentation Project Primer, Manual pages, Books and Articles.

What are the VPN available on OpenBSD: A list of VPNs with encryption that can be used on OpenBSD.

Benchmarks: FreeBSD 13 vs. NetBSD 9.2 vs. OpenBSD 7 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6 vs. Linux: It’s been a while since last having a hearty BSD benchmark comparison on Phoronix in part due to the latest hardware platforms generally lagging behind with how well supported they are by the various BSDs. But stemming from a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requesting some fresh BSD benchmarks, here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1, FreeBSD 13.0, NetBSD 9.2, and OpenBSD 7.0 are competing against various Linux distributions like CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu.

LLDB FreeBSD kernel core dump support: Moritz Systems have been contracted by the FreeBSD Foundation to continue our work on modernizing the LLDB debugger’s support for FreeBSD. The primary goal of the contract is to bring kernel debugging into LLDB.

BSDDialog: BSDDialog is an utility to write a script with a Text User Interface. It can build widgets/dialogs: to show messages, to get input and to inform about a computation status.

Tutorials

Adding Logitech Unifying Receiver support to OpenBSD, part 1: The Logitech Unifying Receiver is a small USB device that essentially acts as a wireless dongle, using a special protocol to communicate with Logitech wireless devices like mice and keyboards. Many Logitech products, including my mouse (the MX Master 2S) come with one of these devices. Thanks to the nature of the USB protocol, the Unifying Receiver is supported out-of-the-box on OpenBSD.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 12.3 and all the rest from last week.

" }, { "title": "Issue 96", "date": "2021-12-08:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 08, 2021", "slug": "96", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: December 7, 2021 (rpki-client): Errata patch for rpki-client has been released for OpenBSD 6.9. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

The state of Steam on OpenBSD: There is a very common question within the OpenBSD community, mostly from newcomers: “How can I install Steam on OpenBSD?“. The short answer is: You can’t.

UNIX Wars – The Battle for Standards: UNIX’s history was marred by power struggles and fights over its direction and core. This meant that at some point in time, different factions went to war to control the future of UNIX. As part of our recent write-up, we’re taking a look at the wars that shaped UNIX’s future and the events that followed.

Valuable News – 2021/11/29: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Tutorials

BSD, C, httpd, SQLite: BCHS is an open source software stack for web applications. To prepare a BCHS environment, install OpenBSD, start your editor of choice, and get to work.

Using awk to pretty-display OpenBSD packages update changes: You use OpenBSD and when you upgrade your packages you often wonder which one is a rebuild and which one is a real version update? The packages updates are logged in /var/log/messages and using awk it’s easy to achieve some kind of report.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Rather small issue with OpenBSD Errata and all the rest from last week.

" }, { "title": "Issue 95", "date": "2021-12-01:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 01, 2021", "slug": "95", "html": "

Releases

GhostBSD 21.11.24 ISO is now available: This new ISO contains kernel, OS, and software updates.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 26, 2021 (kernel, libcrypto): Errata patches for kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and 7.0. Errata patch for libcrypto has been released for OpenBSD 7.0. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

In Other BSDs for 2021/11/27: BSD-related news from last week.

OpenZFS 3.0 Introduced at Developer Summit: The ninth annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place November 8th and 9th online with iXsystems proudly returning as a Gold sponsor. This blog summarizes some of the more interesting talks.

NetBSD Project Report: Add support for chdir(2) support in posix_spawn(3) : The primary goal of the project was to extend posix_spawn(3) to include chdir(2) for the newly created child process. Two functions were supposed to be implemented, namely posix_spawn_file_actions_addchdir() and posix_spawn_file_actions_addfchdir(), to support both chdir(2) and fchdir(2) respectively. posix_spawn() is a POSIX standard method responsible for creating and executing new child processes.

Tutorials

OpenBSD on the VIA Eden X2 powered HP t510 Thin Client: Running OpenBSD on the t510 Thin Client VIA Eden X2 CPU.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Rather small issue with GhostBSD release, OpenBSD Errata and all the rest from last week.

" }, { "title": "Issue 94", "date": "2021-11-24:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 24, 2021", "slug": "94", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

Tutorials

OctoPkg: A Great GUI Package Manager In FreeBSD: If you are looking for a GUI package manager in FreeBSD, what options do you have if managing packages using a terminal is not your thing? And this question makes even more sense if you are coming from Linux as the Tux world is abundant with package managers, graphical or otherwise. Though most FreeBSD users prefer the good old terminal to manage packages in FreeBSD (you’ll probably end there sooner or later), having a graphical package manager in FreeBSD does make life easier especially for new users. In this article, we will learn how to install, configure and use the OctoPkg GUI package manager in FreeBSD as well as the complete list of package classification and shortcuts in OctoPkg.

SSH Server Security Audit&Hardening - Maximum score through Online Test (SSHAudit): In this article, Özgür Kazanççı talks about step-by-step securing&optimization (auditing and hardening) of the SSH server installed on FreeBSD, and he introduces an online SSH security testing tool called SSHAudit.

How to Access Your Modem’s Web Interface with OPNsense: Modems have a web-based interface which allows you to view information about the status of your modem including signal strength and quality as well as logs about the connectivity to your ISP. The information can be a useful diagnostic tool when troubleshooting various issues. You may also view the firmware version to see if you are using the latest version. The IP address to access the modem’s web interface is often 192.

Demystifying OpenZFS 2.0: OpenZFS 2.0 has been released for a while now and, needless to say, FreeBSD 13 was shipped with OpenZFS 2.0. However, there are still questions about how the change from feature flags happened and why version 2.0 of OpenZFS was decided. With this article, we’re hoping to clear the air around the release of OpenZFS 2.0.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Rather small issue with some tutorials from last week.

" }, { "title": "Issue 93", "date": "2021-11-17:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 17, 2021", "slug": "93", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.7.5 released: FreeBSD security advisories and an issue with Intel-based ixgbe driver with “ifconfig -v” stalls keep this release rolling. Also note that OpenSSH was updated to version 8.8 which deprecates ssh-rsa usage which is mainly an issue for client access from the OPNsense system to the outside and can be amended as per the suggestions in the respective release notes.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2021: This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between July and September, and is the third of four planned reports for 2021, and contains 42 entries. The third quarter of 2021 was quite active in lots of different areas, so the report covers a bunch of interesting work including but not limited to boot performance, compile-time analysis, hole-punching support, various drivers, ZFS raidz expansion, an update to the sound mixer, and many more.

Valuable News – 2021/11/15: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

GhotBSD 0nline Meetup: GhotBSD online meetups consist of open discussions on GhostBSD, OpenZFS, FreeBSD, and questions and answers. Everyone can suggest a subject of discussion. There will be no official presentations until the group is more established. When: Saturday, Dec 11, 2021, 8:30 EST Where: https://meet.jit.si/GhostBSD_Meet

BSD Now 428: OpenBSD Part 1: How it all started, Explaining top(1) on FreeBSD, Measuring power efficiency of a CPU frequency scheduler on OpenBSD, CultBSD, a whole lot of BSD bits, and more.

OpenBSD Webzine ISSUE #4: TL;DR - xterm mouse support disabled - four errata for 7.0-stable - wayland makes its way into the ports tree - lots of hardware setup news

Chimera Linux: a Linux distribution based on FreeBSD userland and LLVM: This project is still very early in its development, but it’s an interesting premise. It’s developed by Daniel Kolesa, who also contributes a lot to Void Linux, most notably the excellent POWER/PowerPC port of that excellent distribution.

FreeBSD Documentation: Papers We Love To Read: A lot of great papers have been written throughout the history of FreeBSD. For most of the features you see today in a modern FreeBSD Operating System there is a corresponding paper that was written during its development or after its inclusion to document its addition. Today, we’re looking at two of our favourite papers, trying to highlight their contribution to the FreeBSD Operating System.

Tutorials

What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 3: That packet filter: This series aims to highlight the project’s signature security features and development practices — razor-sharp focus on correct and secure code coupled with continuing code audit — as well as the project’s role as a source of innovation in security practices and an ‘upstream’ source for numerous widely-used components such as OpenSSH, PF, LibreSSL and others. Part 1 focused on the history, Part 2 focused on usage and user experience, and this final part will looks at that packet filter (PF).

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Latest roundup of news from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 92", "date": "2021-11-10:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 10, 2021", "slug": "92", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 9, 2021 (rpki-client): An errata patch for rpki-client has been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and OpenBSD 7.0. rpki-client(8) should handle CA misbehaviours as soft-errors. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:29.tzdata: Several changes in Daylight Saving Time transition dates happened after previous FreeBSD releases were released affecting many users in different parts of the world. Because of these changes, the data in the zoneinfo files need to be updated, and if the local timezone on the running system is affected, tzsetup(8) needs to be run so the /etc/localtime is updated.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:28.vmci: An error during driver initialization results in a kernel panic due to unallocated resources being freed up.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:26.libevent: libevent1 maintains a local copy of some structure definitions from system headers to simplify consumers of the library. One of these structures no longer matched the corresponding system definition, causing inconsistent views of the struct event and struct bufferevent layouts.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:27.caroot: Several certificates were removed from the bundle after the latest release of FreeBSD 12.2 and FreeBSD 13.0. Additionally, an oversight in the root bundle processor included some roots that were not intended to be trusted for these purposes (SERVER_AUTH).

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

News

Valuable News – 2021/11/08: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

amdgpu support in DragonFly: The amdgpu driver, equivalent to Linux 4.19, has been committed along with supporting changes in ttm. Credit goes to Sergey Zigachev, Francois Tigeot, and Matthew Dillon for the work. The module is now built by default in bleeding edge DragonFly.

BSD Now 427: Build Your FreeBSD Developer Workstation, logging is important, how BSD authentication works, pfSense turns 15 years old, OPNsense Business Edition 21.10 released, getting started with pot, and more.

What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 2: Why use OpenBSD?: This series aims to highlight the project’s signature security features and development practices — razor-sharp focus on correct and secure code coupled with continuing code audit — as well as the project’s role as a source of innovation in security practices and an ‘upstream’ source for numerous widely-used components such as OpenSSH, PF, LibreSSL and others. Part 1 focused on the history, this post will focus on usage and user experience, and Part 3 will look at that packet filter.

OpenBSD on Raspberry Pi 4 with Full-Disk Encryption: Raspberry Pi 4 running with OpenBSD 6.9 and full-disk encryption on a USB3 memory stick

Looking Towards the Future: FreeBSD on the RISC-V Architecture: Since its first release for the i386 processor in 1993, FreeBSD has been ported to run on a wide array of different CPU architectures and platforms. In this article, we will look at the youngest of these architectures on which FreeBSD currently runs: the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

OpenBSD Catchup 2021-11-03 : List of interesting developments (in -current) since OpenBSD 7.0.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Latest roundup of news from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 91", "date": "2021-11-03:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 03, 2021", "slug": "91", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.7.4 released: This update features three new major things: optional receive side scaling (RSS) support in the kernel, asynchronous DNS resolving for aliases and configuration support for advanced LAGG settings.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: October 31, 2021 (bpf): An errata patch for the kernel has been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and OpenBSD 7.0. Opening /dev/bpf too quickly too often could lead to a kernel crash. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: October 31, 2021 (uipc): An errata patch for the kernel has been released for OpenBSD 6.9 and OpenBSD 7.0. The kernel could leak memory when closing unix sockets. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: October 31, 2021 (nsd): An errata patch for nsd(8) has been released for OpenBSD 7.0. In certain configurations, nsd can be crashed remotely. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

BSD Now 426: OpenBSD 7.0 Hero: A Good Time to Use OpenZFS Slog, OpenBSD 7.0 is out, OpenBSD and Wayland, UVM faults yield significant performance boost, and more.

FAT on DragonFly: You can now create FAT volumes on DragonFly. Not exactly high-tech, but a filesystem that most anything can read and write.

FreeBSD advocacy update: Advocacy remains an important part of the Foundation mission. Their advocacy efforts include highlighting important and interesting FreeBSD work, producing informative literature, promoting FreeBSD at events, and giving talks on FreeBSD. They are continually working on new training initiatives and updating their selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD.

OpenBSD Webzine #3: - Loongson architecture support dropped - Many commits during the h2k21 hackathon - We have mastodon and Twitter bots relaying news

What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 1: How it all started: ‘Functional, free and secure by default’, OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field. This series aims to highlight the project’s signature security features and development practices — razor-sharp focus on correct and secure code coupled with continuing code audit — as well as the project’s role as a source of innovation in security practices and an ‘upstream’ source for numerous widely-used components such as OpenSSH, PF, LibreSSL and others. This post will focus on the history,

Tutorials

OpenBSD VPS Installation: Some virtual private server providers support OpenBSD as an install target. This is a wonderful start, but only a start because the image applied and resided will probably not a useful partition scheme and mount options that makes sense for your security and operational strategy.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OPNsense release, OpenBSD erratas plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 90", "date": "2021-10-27:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 27, 2021", "slug": "90", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

GCC 10 with Ada language support added to NetBSD: Fernando Oleo Blanco’s efforts to port GNAT Ada compiler to NetBSD resulted in GCC 10 with Ada support (x86 and x86_64) being added to NetBSD’s pkgsrc-wip repository.

Valuable News – 2021/10/25: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

OpenBSD on the HiFive Unmatched: A post reviewing OpenBSD 7.0 riscv64 on the HiFive Unmatched as a desktop.

FreeBSD Foundation October 2021 Fundraising Update: As of this writing, they’ve raised $180,000 towards $1,250,000 goal for 2021.

Valuable News – 2021/10/19: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Tutorials

Running the Searx metasearch engine on OpenBSD : Searx is a free metasearch engine. This means that it will aggregate search results from several search engines, like Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google or Qwant. But it will also interface with services like DailyMotion, DeviantArt, FramaLibre, GitHub, Reddit or Wikipedia to extract search results. For more information, have a look at the searx online documentation . It also removes Cookies and generate a random profile for each request you do. This is a step forward to privacy.

An LDC bootstrap compiler and LDC package for OpenBSD: How building an LDC bootstrap works (at least on OpenBSD)

How BSD Authentication Works: OpenBSD uses a mechanism called BSD Authentication. BSD Auth is comparatively much simpler than PAM. Modules or, authentication “styles”, are instead stand alone applications or scripts that communicate over IPC. The module has no ability to interfere with the parent and can very easily revoke permissions using pledge(2) or unveil(2). The BSD Authentication system of configured through login.conf(5).

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

All the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 89", "date": "2021-10-20:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 20, 2021", "slug": "89", "html": "

Releases

GhostBSD 21.10.16 ISO is now available: GhostBSD 21.10.16 ISO comes with MATE 1.26.0, VirtualBox boot setup fixed, and two vulnerability security fix updates.

OpenBSD 7.0 released: 7.0 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system. If you already have an OpenBSD 6.9 system, and do not want to reinstall, upgrade instructions and advice can be found in the Upgrade Guide.

DragonFly 6.0.1 released: 6.0.1 is tagged and available. The major reason for this update is an expired Let’s Encrypt certificate that would cause problems when downloading dpkg binaries.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Register Today for the November 2021 FreeBSD Vendor Summit: Join members of the FreeBSD vendor and developer communities for the online November 2021 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. The event will consist of virtual, half day sessions, taking place November 18-19, 2021. It’s free to attend but we ask that you register via eventbrite to gain access to the meeting room. In addition to vendor talks, we will also have a work in progress session and a separate hallway track. The event will also be live streamed and recorded.

MATE 1.26.0 upgrade ready for GhostBSD: It is recommend to use the Update Station to upgrade to MATE 1.26.0.

OpenBSD webzine issue #2: - OpenBSD 7.0 released! (Announcement) - No more packages updates for 6.9, syspatch will still be published - No more syspatches for 6.8, it is now end of life and shouldn’t be used any longer - OpenBSD 7.0 song released as well!

Valuable News – 2021/10/11: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Packaging the DMD D compiler for OpenBSD: Yesterday concluded a very fun journey that began back in March when Brian R. Callahan announced that he had gotten a working D compiler, GDC, the GNU D Compiler, working on OpenBSD. Yesterday, he committed a port of DMD, the Digital Mars D Compiler, to the OpenBSD ports tree.

Tutorials

How to setup goaccess to get nice stats with OpenBSD httpd: How to setup goaccess to get nice stats with OpenBSD httpd

Explaining top(1) on FreeBSD: We all know and have at least once used the top(1) command on FreeBSD to track information about our cpu and processes, but how many of you know what each field means? By default, top(1) displays the ‘top’ processes on each system and periodically updates this information every 2.0 seconds using the raw cpu use percentage to rank the processes in the list. This article will give you some insight on how to better understand top (1).

Deploy Nginx Proxy Manager in a DMZ with OPNsense: Are you interested in deploying a reverse proxy in your network? The topic of reverse proxies can be difficult or confusing to understand when you are new to the concept. Understanding when you might want to use a reverse proxy may be more difficult than understanding how it functions as you build out a more advanced home network.

Jitter-free audio on FreeBSD: Author provides another great update on the state of FreeBSD audio, touching on everything from drivers to ports and community too.

Did we miss anything?

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Last week BSD releases with all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 88", "date": "2021-10-13:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 13, 2021", "slug": "88", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Benchmarking the oksh shell, or, let’s look at a lot of C compilers: Late last night, Brian Robert Callahan released version 7.0 of the oksh shell, a portable version of the public domain KornShell distributed with OpenBSD.

BSD Now 423: RACK the Stack : FreeBSD serves Netflix Video at 400Gb/s, Using the RACK TCP stack, an OpenBSD script to update packages fast, Plasma System Monitor and FreeBSD, TrueNAS vs FreeNAS (and why you should upgrade!), auto lock screen on OpenBSD using xidle and xlock, and more.

Tutorials

How to play audio from youtube in console at FreeBSD: There are two options: start also X11 on FreebSD and run web browser with youtube to play some music, or to download audio first using youtube-dl and then add it to cmus playlist. Article talks about the script that allows to play instantly any youtube audio without startxing X11.

Full WireGuard setup with OpenBSD: We want all our network traffic to through a WireGuard VPN tunnel automatically, both WireGuard client and server are running OpenBSD, how to do that?

FreeBSD Developer Workstation Setup: If you are eager to start FreeBSD development, but don’t know where to begin, this short guide is for you. This article will provide some pointers into how some FreeBSD committers work on the Operating System and ports collection. We will discuss the hardware configurations that are used day to day to implement, build and test the operating system.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Tiny issue with all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 87", "date": "2021-10-06:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 06, 2021", "slug": "87", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 2.1.1 release now available: This fixes a bug on the installation media with respect to /usr/lib/libperl.so. Additionally, the following changes are present: root user now uses tcsh as the default shell and less for paging. New PCI IDs list with updated hardware detection. Slow down the loader twiddle.

helloSystem 0.6.0 released: helloSystem is a FreeBSD based desktop system with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac. Release 0.6.0 brings KWin as the new window manager and many refinements. An installable Live ISO is available.

GhostBSD 21.09.29 ISO Now Available: This new ISO contains installer fixes, GPU auto-configuration improvement, software updates.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: September 30, 2021 (libressl): An errata patch for LibreSSL has been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and OpenBSD 6.9. Compensate for the expiry of the DST Root X3 certificate. The use of an unnecessary expired certificate in certificate chains can cause validation errors. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

OpenBSD: Release song 7.0: “The Style Hymn”: There we see developers, busy as bees. Each carefully tending to their trees.

Realtek wireless firmwares imported to OpenBSD: As a result of a licence change by Realtek, that company’s wireless firmware images are now included in the tree.

LibreSSL 3.3.5 / 3.2.7 Released: It includes the following fixes: A stack overread could occur when checking X.509 name constraints. Enable X509_V_FLAG_TRUSTED_FIRST by default in the legacy verifier. This compensates for the expiry of the DST Root X3 certificate.

Story of making the OpenBSD Webzine: Solene Rapenne just started a Webzine dedicated to the OpenBSD project and community. She’d like to tell you the process of its creation.

OpenBSD Webzine: OpenBSD Webzine is done by volunteers who are passionated about the OpenBSD project development. The goal is to allow people to stay informed about OpenBSD in a cool, fun and instructive way, like reading a regularly issued magazine of one’s favorite hobby.

Calamares and Hacktoberfest 2021: Calamares is an independent Linux-distro-installer. It was recently added to FreeBSD ports as well, although you won’t be able to use it as an installer yet. The Calamares project is KDE-adjacent – but independent – so it participates ins some things that KDE projects do not. One of those things is Hacktoberfest.

BSD Now 422: The Brian Callahan Interview : They interview Dr. Brian Callahan about his language porting work for OpenBSD, teaching with BSDs and recruiting students into projects, research, and his work at NYC*BUG in this week’s episode of BSDnow.

Tutorials

Nextcloud on OpenBSD: Wanna run your own Nextcloud Server on OpenBSD? This Setup is done on the current Version, 6.9.

Did we miss anything?

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

MidnightBSD, helloSystem and GhostBSD releases plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 86", "date": "2021-09-29:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 29, 2021", "slug": "86", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.7.3 released: This release finally brings in Suricata version 6 as well as OpenVPN tls-crypt support, automatic user creation on LDAP-based logins and more. As a general note the Realtek vendor driver currently bundled with the base system will be moved to a plugin-based kernel module in version 22.1 and the original re(4) driver inside FreeBSD 13 will be restored. To ease migration and because the version maintained in FreeBSD ports actually offers additional fixes we have inlcuded the new plugin into this build.

MidnightBSD 2.1.0 is now available for amd64 and i386: This is an incremental release focusing on bug fixes, improvements to the package manager and a new system compiler.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: September 27, 2021 (libressl): An errata patch for LibreSSL has been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and OpenBSD 6.9. A stack overread could occur when checking X.509 name constraints. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: September 27, 2021 (sshd): An errata patch for sshd(8) has been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and OpenBSD 6.9. sshd(8) from OpenSSH 6.2 (OpenBSD 5.3) through 8.7 (OpenBSD 6.9) failed to correctly initialise supplemental groups when executing an AuthorizedKeysCommand or AuthorizedPrincipalsCommand, where a AuthorizedKeysCommandUser or AuthorizedPrincipalsCommandUser directive has been set to run the command as a different user. Instead these commands would inherit the groups that sshd(8) was started with. Depending on system configuration, inherited groups may allow AuthorizedKeysCommand/AuthorizedPrincipalsCommand helper programs to gain unintended privilege. Neither AuthorizedKeysCommand nor AuthorizedPrincipalsCommand are enabled by default in sshd_config(5). Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Measuring power efficiency of a CPU frequency scheduler on OpenBSD: Solenne started to work on the OpenBSD code dealing with the CPU frequency scaling. The current automatic logic is a trade-off between okay performance and okay battery. She’d like the auto policy to be different when on battery and when on current (for laptops) to improve battery life for nomad users and performance for people connected to the grid.

OpenBGPD 7.2 released: We have released OpenBGPD 7.2, which will be arriving in the OpenBGPD directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.

OpenBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU: This is the OpenBSD counterpart of Frederic Cambus’s article about running NetBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU, and its purpose is mostly to archive a dmesg entry and various benchmarks for this machine

OpenBSD and Wayland: Experience and thoughts about trying to port Wayland to OpenBSD.

In Other BSDs for 2021/09/25: BSD-related news from last week.

BSD Now 421: ZFS eats CPU : Useless use of GNU, Meet the 2021 FreeBSD GSoC Students, historical note on Unix portability, vm86-based venix emulator, ZFS Mysteriously Eating CPU, traceroute gets speed boost, and more.

Tutorials

How to Configure OPNsense for a Directly Connected PC or Server: One of the most common ways to set up a home network with OPNsense is to use the following configuration: Internet > modem > OPNsense > network switch(es) > end devices/wireless access points. Many network appliances will have more than 2 ports/interfaces. You may use the extra ports to attach network switches or other devices you may have on your network including PCs, laptops, game consoles, media servers/players, and wireless access points. This may be a convenient option for you based on the location of your OPNsense box.

What Makes a Good Time to Use OpenZFS Slog and When Should You Avoid It : In this article, they’re talking about the OpenZFS SLOG. Find out, among others, about synchronous vs asynchronous writes and the ZIL, why you should use a SLOG and on what type of devices.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

MidnightBSD and OPNsense releases plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 85", "date": "2021-09-22:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 22, 2021", "slug": "85", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD 11.4 end-of-life: As of September 30, 2021, FreeBSD 11.4 and stable/11 branch will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 11.4 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

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

News

Valuable News – 2021/09/20: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

FreeBSD Technology Roadmap : Much like any other organization navigating the future during very uncertain times, the FreeBSD Foundation team spent the last year increasingly focused on how best to support its mission and goal – how best to support the FreeBSD Project. They held strategy sessions with the Foundation Board and FreeBSD Core team, reviewed the results of the FreeBSD core team’s user and developer surveys, and held conversations with developers, users and other members of the FreeBSD community to determine where to focus our efforts. The overall goal is to expand and enhance the efforts of the technology team.

The cgroup filesystem ported to the BSD: People who are interested in porting software between open source platforms such as Linux and the members of the BSD family just gained a new tool: a cgroup filesystem for the BSDs. “CGrpFS is a tiny implementation of the GNU/Linux CGroup filesystem for BSD platforms. It takes the form of a FUSE filesystem and implements robust tracking of processes. Resource control, however, is not present; the different BSD platforms each provide different mechanisms for this, none of which are easily adapted to CGroups semantics. The process tracking alone is sufficient for the main user of CGrpFS, InitWare, a service manager derived from systemd.” This effort should make it easier to port software from Linux to the members of the BSD family, especially packages which usually rely on systemd.

OpenZFS 2.1.1 Arrives As A Big Point Release: Following the big OpenZFS 2.1 release from July that brought Distributed SPARE RAID, a compatibility property for pools, and other new features, OpenZFS 2.1.1 is available as a follow-up release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.1.1 has around ninety fixes in this point release making it a rather hearty update from the big v2.1 feature release.

LibreSSL 3.4.0 Released: Important new features have been enabled in this release: Add support for OpenSSL 1.1.1 TLSv1.3 APIs. Enable the new x509 validator.

BSD Now 420: OpenBSD makes life better : Choosing The Right ZFS Pool Layout, changes in OpenBSD that make life better, GhostBSD 21.09.06 ISO’s now available, Fair Internet bandwidth management with OpenBSD, NetBSD wifi router project update, NetBSD on the Apple M1, HardenedBSD August Status Report, FreeBSD Journal on Wireless and Desktop, and more.

Experimenting with a new OpenBSD development lab: This article is not an how to or explaining anything. Post author just wanted to share how they spend their current free time. It’s obviously OpenBSD related.

EuroBSDCon 2021 Program: This weekend the all-online eurobsdcon 2021 is on. It’s free, but you need to register in order to join.

Plasma System Monitor and FreeBSD: There’s lots of new code: CPU usage information is all there, CPU monitor widget which can run in the panel or as a separate widget. Networking, processes, memory use – are not there yet.

Tutorials

Reuse of OpenBSD packages for trying runtime: There are always tricks to make bandwidth and storage more efficient, it’s not complicated and it’s always a good opportunity to understand simple mechanisms available in our daily tools.

Benchmarking compilation time with ccache/mfs on OpenBSD: How to make packages building faster. There are at least two easy tricks available: storing temporary data into RAM and caching build objects.

Using the FreeBSD RACK TCP Stack: Did you know that FreeBSD has more than one TCP stack and that TCP stacks are pluggable at run time? Since FreeBSD 12, FreeBSD has support pluggable TCP stacks, and today we will look at the RACK TCP Stack. The FreeBSD RACK stack takes this pluggable TCP feature to an extreme: rather than just swapping the congestion control algorithm, FreeBSD now supports dynamically loading and an entirely separate TCP stack. With the RACK stack loaded, TCP flows can be handled either by the default FreeBSD TCP stack or by the RACK stack.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD 11.4 end-of-life plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 84", "date": "2021-09-15:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 15, 2021", "slug": "84", "html": "

Releases

Quick fix GhostBSD 21.09.08 ISO now available: This new ISO contains a vital fix for lightdm after installation. For an unknown reason, sysrc does not work in the iso_to_hd.sh script. Team had to replace it with sed and they also fixed automount on the ISO boot and fixed .xinitrc group permission.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Unlocking UVM faults in OpenBSD yields significant performance boost: Unlocking UVM [virtual memory - Ed.] faults makes build time decrease a lot and improve the overall latency of mixed userland workload. In other words it gives a smoother feeling for “desktop usage”: it is now possible to do ‘make -j17’ and watch a HD video at the same time.

OpenBSD’s scp(1) now uses SFTP protocol by default: The original scp/rcp protocol remains available via the -O flag. Note that ~user/ prefixed paths in SFTP mode require a protocol extension that was first shipped in OpenSSH 8.7.

BSD Now 419: Reviewing a first OpenBSD port, NetBSD 9.2 on a DEC Alpha CPU in QEMU with X11, FreeBSD Experiment Rethinks the OS Install, GhostBSD switching to FreeBSD rc.d, Irix gets LLVM, and more.

Tutorials

I got the J language working on OpenBSD: post author got the J language system running on OpenBSD. They find it important to write these up, because it helps them preserve their own knowledge of what they did and hopefully it will help others porting languages to their favorite *BSD.

How to Create a VLAN Only Interface in OPNsense: Author was recently assigned a laptop to use for work so they wanted to create a new VLAN only for their work laptop to keep it segregated from their own network. On their OPNsense box, they have extra unused interfaces. They decided to take the opportunity to utilize one of those extra interfaces instead of adding yet another VLAN to their main LAN interface. There are two ways they could utilize the unused interface: use the physical interface with no VLAN tagging or assign a VLAN to the physical interface.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

GhostBSD fix-release plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 83", "date": "2021-09-08:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 08, 2021", "slug": "83", "html": "

Releases

GhostBSD 2021.09.06 ISO images are available now.: GhostBSD 2021.09.06 ISO images are available now, replacing OpenRC with FreeBSD rc.d. It also includes other critical bug fixes and package updates.

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE Now Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace: The FreeBSD Azure Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE on Microsoft Azure Marketplace: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.co/marketplace/apps/thefreebsdfoundation.freebsd-13_0

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

A project to collect tested hardware configurations for upcoming and released versions of BSD variants: Currently the project includes daily reports for FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT/13.0, helloSystem 0.5.0/0.4.0, NomadBSD 1.4/1.3.2 and OpenBSD 6.9/6.8/6.7.

Valuable news : The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

traceroute(8) gets speed boost: traceroute(8) is now faster by sending probes and doing DNS async.

iked(8) gains client-side support for DNS configuration: Automatic name server configuration is enabled by default for policies using the ‘iface’ option.

timeout(1) utility imported to OpenBSD: Job Snijders (job@) imported the timeout(1) utility from NetBSD, to run commands with time limit.

BSD Now 418: The greatest time in history to be a creator : In this episode, they interview Michael W. Lucas about his latest book projects including Git sync murder, TLS Mastery, getting paid for creative work, writing tools and techniques, and more.

OpenBSD’s Hibernate time reduced : Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) committed a change which significantly reduces hibernate time on machines with larger amounts of RAM.

Valuable News 2021-08-30: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

RSA/SHA1 signature type disabled by default in OpenSSH: The “ssh-rsa” signature type is now disabled by default but “ssh-rsa” signatures can be selectively re-enabled if necessary. RSA (“ssh-rsa”) keys are not affected by this change and remain valid.

Tutorials

FreeBSD&PHP: How to activate php mail() function and set it working correctly for WordPress (and any other CMSs): How to enable websites hosted on your server to successfully send emails with the php mail() function, without having an SMTP server setup on your FreeBSD server.

Understanding ZFS Channel Programs: One of the newer OpenZFS features that became available with FreeBSD 12.0 is ZFS Channel Programs. This article addresses questions to clarify what a ZFS channel program is, why you should use it, what are the operations supported by channel programs, or what a channel program looks like. Follow our guide and resources to learn how to create your own Channel Programs.

FreeBSD Desktop – Part 27 – Configuration – Netflix Signal Telegram: In this article you will learn how to use Netflix (also other streaming services that require Widevine DRM) and Signal/Telegram on FreeBSD desktop.

Choosing the right ZFS pool layout: Setting up a ZFS pool involves a number of permanent decisions that will affect the performance, cost, and reliability of your data storage systems, so you really want to understand all the options at your disposal for making the right choices from the beginning. Let’s talk about mirror vdevs, RAID-Z or dRAID to better understand real redundant data storage.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

GhostBSD release, FreeBSD on Azure plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 82", "date": "2021-08-18:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 18, 2021", "slug": "82", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: August 11, 2021 (perl): An errata patch for perl has been released for OpenBSD 6.9. perl(1) Encode (3p) loads a module from an incorrect relative path. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: August 11, 2021 (kernel): An errata patch for the kernel has been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and OpenBSD 6.9. In a specific configuration, wg(4) leaked mbufs. Binary updates for the amd64, i386 and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2021/08/16: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Meet the 2021 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. As the 2021 session nears its completion, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

pkgupdate, an OpenBSD script to update packages fast: pkgupdate is a simple shell script meant for OpenBSD users of the stable branchs (people following releases) to easily keep their packages up to date.

BSD Now 415: Wrong Way to Switch Server OS, Net/1 and Net/2 – A Path to Freedom, Permissions Two Mistakes, OpenBSD progress in supporting riscv64 platform, I2P intro, git sync murder is out, GhostBSD init system poll, and more

Tutorials

How to convert from ports-jail to /jails/freshports: This post is the latest in a series of posts documenting the process of converting from using a chroot to using a full proper jail.

The Power To Serve: Custom Kernel Goodness on FreeBSD: Like Linux, FreeBSD (and Windows and MacOS) all have an underlying Kernel. This is basically a loose term that describes all the underlying components that the user doesn’t see day-to-day when utilizing an Operating System, such as firmware and drivers being loaded, support for multithreading, filesystem support, and so on. Because BSD has so much support for strange devices- like VAX machines of old- it’s expected of users who wish to optimize their systems to purge unneeded support from their system.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD erratas plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 81", "date": "2021-08-11:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 11, 2021", "slug": "81", "html": "

Releases

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 Released, FreeNAS Transitions to “Legacy” Status: The migration of FreeNAS to TrueNAS started in October 2020. The transition has been deliberately slow and methodical, while the efficiency gains have been every bit the windfall we anticipated. Over this period, many exabytes of data were carefully managed while the ZFS file system and NAS software were updated with new technologies, features, and performance.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: August 4, 2021 (kernel, sparc64): An errata patch for the kernel on the sparc64 architecture has been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and OpenBSD 6.9. On sparc64, a missaligned address could trigger a kernel assert and panic the kernel.

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

News

OpenBSD on the Framework Laptop: Framework is a new company offering a laptop that is designed to be repairable and upgradeable, both in terms of internal components like the screen and motherboard, and in pluggable expansion cards. Status is relative to OpenBSD-current as of 2021-08-08.

Low space and HAMMER2 snapshots: It used to be that if you had a HAMMER2 volume and ran low on space, snapshotting would stop so that you didn’t completely fill the disk. Now snapshots continue to roll forward and discard older ones to keep disk usage constant. It’s in 6.0 too.

Tutorials

Goaccess / OpenBSD: Install to use Goaccess on OpenBSD (with configuration snippets for both webserver, httpd and nginx)

Bringing NetBSD to Zig’s Continuous Integration: This blogpost outlines the things CI company had to do to bring NetBSD to Zig CI.

pfstat on OpenBSD: analyze stream on IPv4 and IPv6 through PF: Install pfstat to analyze stream on IPv4, IPv6 through the firewall PF (Packet Filter), on OpenBSD!

Did we miss anything?

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

TrueNAS release plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 80", "date": "2021-08-04:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 04, 2021", "slug": "80", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.1.8 released: The code moves to PHP 7.4. Shipped alongside are a few updates and fixes that still make sense for the 21.1 series. Also community contributions regarding the Norwegian translation and Fetchmail plugin.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

passwdqc added to DragonFly: libpasswdqc(8) does quality checks on passwords via PAM, and now it’s in DragonFly.

Open Source Voices: Episode 17: Tom Jones - FreeBSD Developer : Tom Jones is an Internet Researcher and FreeBSD developer that works on improving the core protocols that drive the Internet. He is a contributor to open standards in the IETF and is enthusiastic about using FreeBSD as a platform to experiment with new networking ideas as they progress towards standardization.

Tutorials

OpenZFS Snapshots: Understanding which data benefits from being in a snapshot and how long it makes sense to keep snapshots will help you get the most out of OpenZFS snapshots. Pruning snapshots to just the ones you need will make it easier to find the data you want to restore, save disk capacity, and prevent performance bottlenecks on your OpenZFS system.

Brian Robert Callahan: Reviewing my first OpenBSD port, and what I’d do differently 10 years later: This article will review and discuss what the author would do differently after ten years of working on ports.

Automatically lock screen on OpenBSD using xidle and xlock: If you use native window manager, how to use xidle and xlock to simulate lock account or screen during inactive session.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OPNsense release plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 79", "date": "2021-07-28:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 28, 2021", "slug": "79", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 25, 2021 (relayd): An errata patch for the relayd application layer gateway daemon has been released for OpenBSD 6.9. relayd(8), when using the the http protocol strip filter directive or http protocol macro expansion, processes format strings. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: July 25, 2021 (libc, mips64): An errata patch for the libc library on the mips64 architecture has been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and OpenBSD 6.9. On mips64, the strchr/index/strrchr/rindex functions in libc handled signed characters incorrectly.

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

News

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2021: This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between April and June, and is the second of four planned reports for 2021. Some of this reports highlights include but are not limited to work on an experimental installer, changes to pf, additional work on the Linuxulator, updates on the state of kernel sanitizers, coverage of the raidz expansion feature for ZFS, and some news about resource accounting.

Introducing dhcpleased(8): Now enabled by default on OpenBSD -current is dhcpleased(8), a dynamic host configuration protocol daemon. To begin using dhcpleased, upgrade to a current snapshot. You can edit hostname.if(5) to replace “dhcp” with “inet autoconf”.

BSD Now 412: FreeBSD Performance Observability, Advance!BSD thoughts 1/2, Lumina Desktop Maintainership Change, How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line, Like NetBSD DragonFlyBSD Now Has “COVID”, and more.

NVMM lands in DragonFly: DragonFly added NVMM, hardware acceleration for virtual machines. The version of qemu in dports is not set up to support this, yet. Until then, you can download a prebuilt version.

Tutorials

OpenBSD Virtualization - Host and guests on the same network: Tips to virtualize serenely under OpenBSD with vmd, where host and guest(s) are part of the same network!

OpenBSD full Tor setup: If for some reasons you want to block all your traffic except traffic going through Tor, here is how to proceed on OpenBSD.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD Security Erratas plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 78", "date": "2021-07-21:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 21, 2021", "slug": "78", "html": "

Releases

BastilleBSD celebrates Bastille Day by releasing 0.9.20210714: This release includes six months of development and bug-fixing. New features include support for Ubuntu based containers, improved import/export options, support for MidnightBSD and a much improved “bastille list -a” output format.

BSDSec

NetBSD Security Advisory 2021-002: Incorrect permissions in kernfs: The /kern file system contains references to the device the root volume was mounted from. It was discovered that the permissions were incorrect and allow any local user to read the device, thus allowing any local user to read any file on the root volume.

NetBSD Security Advisory 2021-001: Predictable ID disclosures in IPv4 and IPv6: IP ID randomization was not enabled by default and the randomization algorithms were not strong enough. For all NetBSD versions, you need to obtain fixed kernel sources, rebuild and install the new kernel, and reboot the system.

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

News

FreeBSD KGDB support in LLDB: The Moritz Systems team has started a new contract on FreeBSD KGDB support in LLDB. It is expected that once the work is complete, the new features in LLDB will become part of the FreeBSD base system after the next update.

dhcpleased(8) and resolvd(8) enabled in OpenBSD base, replacing dhclient(8) : OpenBSD is moving from a model where dhclient on 1 interface believes it is MASTER of /etc/resolv.conf and a bunch of system aspects, and the userbase is familiar with dhclient.conf towards a model where multiple interfaces + unwind can advertise their DNS resolution abilities to resolvd, which then sorts the offers and maintains a configuration. dhclient will remain available for people who want that old model, but they will likely encounter increasing difficulty sticking to it because the default configuration is changing.

What init system would you prefer to use under GhostBSD?: As much as GhostBSD devs like OpenRC, it comes at a price. All FreeBSD OS services and ports/packages services must be maintained and new ones to be added. So on that note, they would like your vote on which one you prefer before making a drastic decision.

A Look at Profiling: FreeBSD Sort: The FreeBSD sort program reads lines from input or from a file and produces the same lines in sorted order. NetBSD has an equivalent program, as does the GNU Project. Recently, FreeBSD received a bug report that described how FreeBSD sort was much slower than NetBSD sort and GNU sort.

How DragonFly BSD handles filesystem errors: Modern operating systems include a lot of components and a lot of variables. We tend not to notice when the thousands of pieces are working together in harmony, but if something goes wrong it’s possible for the whole house of cards to fall. Matthew Dillon recently shared opinions on how systems fail and how they can attempt to fail in more positive ways, using DragonFly BSD’s HAMMER2 filesystem as an example.

ndis removed from DragonFly: ndis(4) is removed from DragonFly; it’s probably been years since it was applicable to any hardware: for a while it was possible to use Windows XP drivers to create a BSD network driver, effectively.

Tutorials

FreeBSD TCP Performance System Controls : While new protocols are constantly being developed, the venerable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) still accounts for most global traffic. The FreeBSD kernel TCP stack offers a lot of opportunities to tweak different performance features. The options it includes allow a lot of flexibility in the configuration of machines without having to do custom kernel builds. Find out how to make use of the Initial Window, what the TCP Segment OffLoad is, and how to use TCP Buffer Tuning to your advantage.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Bastille Day, NetBSD Security Advisories plus all the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 77", "date": "2021-07-14:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 14, 2021", "slug": "77", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

BSD Now 410: OpenBSD Consumer Gateway : Open Source and Blogging Bubbles, Building Customized FreeBSD Images, Updating Minecraft in FreeBSD, Upgrading FreeBSD jails using mkjail, Dragonfly 6.0 Performance benchmark, OpenBSD Consumer Gateway Launch, and more.

Following NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD Now Has COVID: COVID as in COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 but this is actually an open-source package containing the SARS-CoV-2 genome and a manual (man page) encouraging vaccination and other steps to help prevent the spread of COVID.

Tutorials

OpenBSD: pkg_add performance analysis: OpenBSD package manager pkg_add is known to be quite slow and using much bandwidth, can we figure out easy ways to improve it?

Working Wireguard on DragonFly: This note describes how to get Wireguard functioning on DragonFly; his linked patch is not necessary at this point since it’s been committed to dports – though not in the latest binaries.

Status of Online Conference Software on FreeBSD: Conferencing and online video meeting software has become an increasingly popular choice for remote working and video calling, especially since the pandemic at the beginning of 2020. There are a number of popular platforms floating around, such as Google Hangouts and Skype. However, there are not many online resources available showing how well the different platforms work on FreeBSD desktop environments. This article is a investigation of how different web-based online conferencing applications are working on FreeBSD.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 76", "date": "2021-07-07:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 07, 2021", "slug": "76", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Errata Notices:

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

News

Porting OpenBSD security features to Linux: Are there any efforts to bring OpenBSD security features like pledge and unveil over from OpenBSD to Linux?

Chimera Linux - A Linux distribution based on FreeBSD userland and LLVM: The project is currently heavily WIP. It does not yet include a kernel or an init system, and the packaging is rough (both the build system and the templates themselves are in the state of flux). Chimera uses LLVM and Clang as its system toolchain. This is used to build all core components of the system.

OpenZFS 2.1 Released With dRAID, Compatibility Property, Better Performance: OpenZFS 2.1 introduces Distributed Spare RAID (dRAID) to allow creating pools using a distributed variant of RAIDZ for faster resilver times using integrated hot spares. The dRAID implementation allows for full redundancy to be restored in a “fraction of the time” normally required when carrying out a full disk replacement.

pkgsrc-2021Q2 branch announcement: The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 71st quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 26,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/ In total, 210 packages were added, 103 packages were removed, and 2458 package updates (to 1900 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2021Q1 release.

Tutorials

History of FreeBSD – Net/1 and Net/2 – A Path to Freedom: Let’s talk some more FreeBSD history. From the release of 4.3BSD to how networking for all became available and Net/1 and Net/2 came to be. This article is going to cover the time period from the release of 4.3BSD with TCP/IP to the BSD lawsuits. This period set the stage for BSD as we know it today.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD Errata Notices plus all the latest from BSD-world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 75", "date": "2021-06-30:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 30, 2021", "slug": "75", "html": "

The Evolution of the Unix System Architecture

Unix has evolved for more than five decades, shaping modern operating systems, key software technologies, and development practices. Studying the evolution of this remarkable system from an architectural perspective can provide insights on how to manage the growth of large, complex, and long-lived software systems. In 2016 Paris Avgeriou and Diomidis Spinellis embarked on this study aiming to combine software architecture insights and software analytics skills. Here is a brief summary of the study, which was published this month in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 25, 2021 (bgpd): An errata patch for the bgpd routing daemon has been released for OpenBSD 6.9. During bgpd(8) config reloads prefixes of the wrong address family could leak to peers resulting in session resets. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Valuable News – 2021/06/29: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

KDE on FreeBSD 2021o4: Here’s some KDE-on-FreeBSD news. It includes some desktop@ and x11@ items as well, because the things we do together are tangled up closely. Also, the KDE-FreeBSD team has moved its primary communications channel (on IRC) in with the rest of the FreeBSD world. You can now find them on Libera.Chat, in the #freebsd-desktop channel.

In Other BSDs for 2021/06/26: BSD related news from last week.

BSD Now 408: FreeBSD DevSummit 2021 : Report from virtual FreeBSD DevSummit 2021, another promising release by FreeBSD Based helloSystem, GearBSD, OpenBGPD release, Let’s Encrypt on OpenBSD, FreeBSD 13 on the Panasonic Let’s Note, and more.

FreeBSD 13.0 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6.0 vs. Linux On AMD EPYC 7003 Series “Milan”: For those wondering how well the likes of FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD’s EPYC 7003 “Milan” processors launched earlier this year, here are some initial benchmarks of those BSDs alongside a few Linux distributions.

Tutorials

Akonadi+MySQL 5.7.34 on FreeBSD: Users of Akonadi (databases/akonadi) on FreeBSD are advised of an incompatibility between .. something .. and the current version of MySQL client 5.7. The Akonadi server crashes on startup, and no KDE PIM applications that need Akonadi will work. Users are advised to downgrade the MySQL client libraries for the time being.

High Availability With OpenBGPD on OpenBSD 6.9: Building a simple, highly available web server cluster with OpenBGPD on OpenBSD

FreeBSD Performance Observability: Performance observability is a powerful feature that highly supports FreeBSD. In this article, author is showing how to take advantage of tools that are specifically built for and with an operating system: tools which understand and are built into the operating system’s kernel structures. Learn about how to gather the information you need in order to get the most out of your system, determine your operational baselines, and find and resolve performance bottlenecks.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

The Evolution of the Unix System Architecture, OpenBSD Errata plus all the latest from BSD-world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 74", "date": "2021-06-23:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 23, 2021", "slug": "74", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.1.7 released: OPNsesne moves to Phalcon version 4 along with new FreeBSD security advisories and fixes for firewall live log as well as new features such as shell timeout and TLS remote syslog.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

TrueNAS Core 12.0 review: TrueNAS Core, formerly called FreeNAS, is a FreeBSD-based operating system which provides Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services. TrueNAS Core is the community branch of the TrueNAS project, sponsored by iXsystems. It also has a commercial branch called TrueNAS Enterprise. TrueNAS provides a minimal operating system base with a friendly, web-based front end for administration. Using TrueNAS we can set up ZFS storage pools, filesystem snapshots, network shares, user accounts, and background services through the web-based administration portal.

In Other BSDs for 2021/06/19: BSD related articles from last week.

OpenBSD progress in support for the riscv64 platform: There has been significant progress on support for riscv64: - There’s now a web page for the platform, with details of (broadened) hardware support - Following some commits from Dale Rahn (drahn@), install sets now include xenocara

FreeBSD Day is Almost Here: June 19th has been declared FreeBSD Day, and the Foundation hopes you’ll join them in honoring the Project’s pioneering legacy and continuing impact on technology.

BSD Now 407: Confining the omnipotent root, Jails with ZFS and PF on DigitalOcean, NomadBSD 130R is out, KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD, Firefox under FreeBSD with Privacy, Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere, and more.

Screenshots & preview video of helloSystem 0.5: Screenshots and preview video of helloSystem 0.5, the latest development release from the BSD desktop project inspired the mac design principles.

Tutorials

Modern Unix: A collection of modern/faster/saner alternatives to common unix commands.

Using the I2P network with OpenBSD and NixOS: In this text you will learn what is the I2P network and how to provide a service over I2P on OpenBSD and how to use to connect to an I2P service from NixOS.

Introduction to ZFS Replication: Replication is an OpenZFS feature that really ups the data management game, providing a mechanism for handling a hardware failure with minimal data loss and downtime. Fortunately, replication itself is easy to configure and understand. In this article we’ll keep things simple, and practice replicating small amounts of data to a virtual machine.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

OPNsense patch release plus all the latest from BSD-world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 73", "date": "2021-06-16T19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 16, 2021", "slug": "73", "html": "

Releases

helloSystem 0.5 Released For macOS-Inspired FreeBSD Desktop: The helloSystem 0.5 release is powered by FreeBSD 12.2 - they have not yet moved over to the recently launched FreeBSD 13.0. The helloSystem 0.5 release features changes to yield a smaller ISO system, their macOS-inspired desktop has seen various improvements, adding of the MTP Android File Transfer utility, and a lot of other desktop-related enhancements. There are also many fixes like “sudo su” now working. The helloDesktop stack also supports making use of KWin rather than Openbox but the latter remains the default.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 9, 2021 (vmd): Errata patches for vmd have been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and 6.9. vmd guests could cause stack overflows by crafting malicious dhcp requests when using local interfaces. Binary updates for the amd64 platform are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

helloSystem video review: HelloSystem is an interesting operating system from the person behind AppImage. It’s a desktop OS that’s designed to be elegant and simple to use. At the heart of helloSystem is FreeBSD which it’s based on. It’s intended to be a system for “mere mortals” and it’s look and feel should feel welcoming to traditional mac users. However helloSystem insists that this is more than just a theme or a clone of something that came before it. HelloSystem is a desktop operating system using the latest technologies and puts the user first giving them full control over their system.

Support for chdir(2) in posix_spawn(3) : What really happens when you double click an icon on your desktop?

BSD Now 406: Jailed Gemini Capsule : Gemini Capsule in a FreeBSD Jail, FreeBSD Quarterly status report 2021Q1, NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS), Interview with Michael Lucas, WireGuard Returns as Experimental Package in pfSense, CGI with Awk on OpenBSD httpd, and more.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

helloSystem 0.5 plus all the latest from BSD-world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 72", "date": "2021-06-09T19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 09, 2021", "slug": "72", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 8, 2021 (cpuswitch inteldrm): Errata patches for cpuswitch and inteldrm have been released for OpenBSD 6.8 and 6.9. Recent Intel or any AMD machines could crash as the kernel did not flush all TLBs that multi threaded processes require. Disable PPGTT on Intel machines with cherryview/braswell graphics to avoid memory corruption. Binary updates for the amd64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.

OpenBGPD 7.0 released: This release includes the following changes to the previous release:

Stop processing queued UPDATES when the max-prefix limit was reached.
Improve negotiation for route refresh, graceful restart and multi-protocol capabilities
Correctly track ‘rde evaluate all’ and ‘export’ settings during reload.
Properly withdraw prefixes when ‘rde evaluate all’ is used.
Fix MRT handling on initial startup for message dump types.
Fix and use non-blocking connect for RTR sessions.
Fully implement RFC 6286 by checking for BGP ID collisions.
Adjust the 4-byte AS number handling to RFC 6793 by changing error behaviour from prefix witdraw to attribute discard.
In bgpctl print out both the sent “Neighbor capabilities” and the “Negotiated capabilities” for a session.
Print timestamps both as a formatted and a pure time in seconds filed in various JSON objects.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:17.libradius: The patch for FreeBSD-SA-21:12.libradius modified rad_get_attr(3) to verify that an attribute length smaller than the minimum required for the attribute type and length fields is disallowed. This check may fail incorrectly for the final attribute in a RADIUS message.

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

News

In Other BSDs for 2021/06/05: Roundup of BSD-related links.

Don’t miss the June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit: The online event will consist of three, half day sessions, taking place June 9-11, 2021. It’s free to attend, but we ask that you register with the eventbrite system to gain access to the meeting room. The full schedule is available on the wiki and includes sessions on Boot Code, Raid-Z Expansion, Icelandic DNS Registry, IFLIB, an update from the FreeBSD Core Team, and much more.

FreeBSD 13 on the Panasonic Let’s Note CF-RZ6: Few links about the Panasonic Let’s Note CF-RZ6: the laptops page and dmesg to the NYC*BUG.

GearBSD: a project to help automating your OpenBSD: Author of this post loves NixOS and Guix for their easy system configuration and easy jumping from one machine to another by using your configuration file. To some extent, they want to make it possible to do so on OpenBSD with a collection of parametrized Rex modules, allowing to configure your system piece by piece from templates that you feed with variables.

Tutorials

DTrace Network Probes: DTrace landed in FreeBSD 7.1 in 2009. DTrace is an observability framework that enables dynamic tracing of programs, and the FreeBSD Kernel. It offers an incredible view into the operation of programs, and is an excellent tool for debugging and performing analysis of complex software. Using the full power of FDT probes requires familiar knowledge with how things are implemented. SDT probes and specific providers like ip, tcp and udp offer insights into the internal behavior of the kernel without requiring a high level of knowledge of the underlying code.

FreeBSD from a NetBSD user’s perspective: Topics include: - Packages - Init system - Hardware and drivers - Webcams and webcamd - GPU drivers and modules - Jails, VMs, and chroots - Multicast DNS - Storage

NetBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU: EBOX 3300A-H, with a 1GHz CPU and 256MB of RAM: author used a 1GB CompactFlash card and selected a minimal installation in sysinst.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! Take a vaccine and stay safe!

", "excerpt": "

Bunch of SAs plus all the latest from BSD-world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 71", "date": "2021-06-02T19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 02, 2021", "slug": "71", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.1.6 released: With a bit of delay it bring to you the usual mix of security and reliablilty updates. It is of note that the OpenVPN advisory tracked as CVE-2020-15078 does not affect the provided version 2.4.11, but the security audit will falsely flag it as vulnerable because the source of the audit is FreeBSD where OpenVPN was migrated to 2.5 series already.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Errata and Announcements:

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

News

Public NetBSD IRC chat channels moved to Libera: Due to the unfortunate situation regarding changes in administration on freenode.net, and the resulting chaos, NetBSD team has decided to move the public NetBSD IRC chat channels from freenode to irc.libera.chat.

Write Better Firewall Rules in OPNsense using Aliases: When you first learned to write firewall rules in OPNsense, you may have simply used the pre-defined aliases for the network interfaces/ports and IP addresses such as “LAN net”, “LAN interface”, “HTTP”, “HTTPS”, etc. You may not have even realized you were using aliases since they do not appear in the list on the “Aliases” page. Using the predefined aliases is not only convenient but helps make your rules easier to understand (imagine having a large number of rules and seeing only IP/network addresses).

Updating GCC GNAT (Ada) in pkgsrc/NetBSD: This page is meant to document the findings about getting a modern version of GCC, in this case GCC 10, running on NetBSD with Ada support. It contains Current state of the art, Getting it to compile, Findings and Further work, aka, TODO.

FreeBSD IRC Channels on Libera Chat: Libera Chat is now FreeBSD’s primary and official IRC network and presence. You can find the official home at libera.chat: freebsd IRC channel. If you need help or support, please reach out on freebsd-irc or .

DragonFlyBSD 6.0 Is Performing Very Well Against Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD 13.0: Earlier this month in our initial benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0 we found DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performing much better than DragonFlyBSD 5.8, but how does that put its performance up against FreeBSD 13.0 and Ubuntu Linux for reference? Here are such benchmarks in our latest benchmarking of DragonFlyBSD 6.0, FreeBSD 13.0 (with both GCC and Clang), and Ubuntu Linux.

Tutorials

History of ZFS – Part 2: Exploding in Popularity: From its birth at Sun, ZFS grew exponentially in popularity. Many were impressed by its revolutionary features, and ported it to run on their systems. Find out how more about its journey and the rise of OpenZFS in the second part of our series.

Using dpb on OpenBSD for package compilation cluster: This article will explain how to easily setup your own OpenBSD dpb infra. dpb is a tool to manage port building and can use chroot to use a sane environment for building packages. This is particularly useful when you want to test packages or build your own, it can parallelize package compilation in two way: multiples packages at once and multiples processes for one package.

How to Configure WAN and NAT Port Forward Rules in OPNsense: Understanding how to forward ports and create firewall rules for the WAN interface of your router is important if you wish to access services hosted on your router or a server in your internal network. Knowing when to use a WAN rule versus a NAT Port Forward rule may be confusing to new users. WAN vs. NAT Port Forward Rule: Which one to use? Generally speaking, WAN rules should be used for any service running directly on your router and NAT port forward rules for any service host on a server in your internal network (either virtualized or physical).

Opening a Garage Door Using OpenBSD on a Raspberry Pi: Sven G is back with another tale of using a Raspberry Pi in his garage.

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

", "excerpt": "

New OPNsense release, FreeBSD Errata and Notices plus all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 70", "date": "2021-05-26T19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 26, 2021", "slug": "70", "html": "

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2021/05/24: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

DragonFlyBSD 6.0 Performance Is Looking Great - Initial Benchmarks : DragonFlyBSD 6.0 was released recently and while benchmarks of this new DragonFlyBSD release has just begun, the numbers so far are quite compelling for this BSD compared to its prior release.

BSD Now 403: Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product, Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator, OPNsense 21.1.5 released, FreeBSD meetings on the Desktop, Running FreeBSD jails with containerd 1.5, Markdown, DocBook, and the quest for semantic documentation on NetBSD.org, and more.

The state of toolchains in OpenBSD: For most of the 2010s, the OpenBSD base system has been stuck with GCC 4.2.1. It was released in July 2007, imported into the OpenBSD source tree in October 2009, and became the default compiler on the amd64, i386, hppa, sparc64, socppc and macppc platforms in OpenBSD 4.8, released in November 2010. As specified in the commit message during import, this is the last version released under the GPLv2 license. OpenBSD was not the only operating system sticking to GCC 4.2.1 for licensing reasons, FreeBSD did the same, and Mac OS X as well. Read the article to see what happened next.

Tutorials

Getting Started with OpenZFS 2.0: FreeBSD 13.0 imported OpenZFS 2.0 replacing the bespoke port that had served since 2007. The FreeBSD installer has an interface allowing ZFS as the root file system, allowing a bootable FreeBSD system on ZFS. Selecting the guided root on ZFS, install will permit graphical selection of disks to include in a pool. This is an easy way to explore ZFS features without an extensive hardware investment. This article will introduce new users to ZFS, and cover some of the new features in the upgrade.

How to Run OPNsense in a Proxmox Virtual Machine: Have you wanted to take a look at OPNsense without installing it to a dedicated machine and/or deploying it as your primary home router/firewall? The easiest way to evaluate OPNsense without installing it on separate hardware is to virtualize it.

Building Customized FreeBSD Images: Did you know that Poudriere is not only a package building tool for FreeBSD, but it can also generate FreeBSD images? You can also use NanoBSD or, perhaps, assemble a bootable FreeBSD image by hand. This article will explore some of the ideas and tools required to start down the path of building customized FreeBSD images, and by the end you should have the knowledge required to continue on your own.

Potluck & containerd: Since containerd 1.5 has arrived in ports a few days ago, we show how you can use runj to easily convert images from the Potluck image library into OCI containers and then run them with containerd.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

DragonFlyBSD 6.0 Performance Is Looking Great plus all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 69", "date": "2021-05-12T19:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 12, 2021", "slug": "69", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 9.2 released: As well as the usual bug, stability, and security fixes, this release includes: support for exporting ZFS filesystems over NFS, various updates to the bozotic HTTP daemon, improvements to ARM 32-bit and Linux compatibility, fread() performance improvements, support for the TP-Link TL-WN821N V6 wireless adapter, support for the Allwinner H5 cryptographic accelerator, Pinebook Pro display brightness fixes, new defaults for kern.maxfiles, and accessibility improvements for the default window manager configuration.

GhostBSD 21.05.11 ISO now available : This new ISO contains some vital fixes, like dhcpcd not starting properly, Software Station random crashes, a fix to start VirtualBox properly on the live session, and some software updates.

NomadBSD 130R-20210508 released : - The base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. - The partition alignment has been changed to 1M to improve the write speed on flash drives. - A bug where GLX is disabled has been fixed. - Drivers for VMware have been added.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

KDE on FreeBSD 2021o3: Updates about FreeBSD and KDE, including KDE Big Picture, KDE Software Tweaks, Software Stack, Ports Framework and Where there is no progress.

BSD Now 402: It’s time to say goodbye to the GPL, a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails, A bit of Xenix history, On Updating QEMU’s bsd-user fork, FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop, and more.

aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other NetBSD news : Sumup of some of the developement activities in NetBSD land.

Tutorials

NomadBSD - An Amazing OS For USB Drives: NomadBSD is a FreeBSD based operating system which is intended to run from USB drives. They recently released their newest version, NomadBSD 130R-20210508. This version is is based on the FreeBSD 13.0 release. In this video we have a run through the desktop and the included applications. Towards the end we use NomadBSD’s installer to copy installed system to another hard drive.

FreeBSD on the Pine H6: Pine makes a bunch of different bits of hardware. The Pine64 was a bit of a breakthrough in single-board-computing (SBC) – very different from the Raspberry Pi, and a lot more open-source. We could argue about just how open it is, but it did spawn the Pinebook and the Pinebook Pro. We hear the latter is really nice, and runs OpenBSD and FreeBSD too. Somewhat forgotten amongst all these is the Pine H6.

DragonFly pkg 5.8 to 6 quickfix: If you are upgrading an older 5.8.x system to DragonFly 6, and get a lua error when updating pkg: manually copy over a config file, and you’ll be set.

NomadBSD 130R-20210508 Visual Tour - Video: A visual tour of NomadBSD 130R-20210505, with special focus on UI elements & important applications included.

Running Potluck Images with runj: The Potluck container image library wants to provide complex services out of the box, like e.g. a complete postfix secondary mailserver. Many of the images are prepared to be orchestrated via nomad and nomad-pot-driver. This small how-to shows that these jails can also very easily be started via the new runj utility, which is the first step to prepare a tasty OCI and containerd Potluck.

Basics of ZFS Snapshot Management: One of the many powerful features of OpenZFS are snapshots. OpenZFS stands out in its snapshot design, providing powerful and easy-to-use tools for managing snapshots. Snapshots complement a backup strategy, as they are instantaneous and don’t require a backup window. Since snapshots are atomic, they are not affected by other processes and you don’t have to stop any running applications before taking a snapshot. In this article we’ll start with the basics: creating, using, and deleting file system snapshots.

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

", "excerpt": "

Releases for NetBSD, GhostBSD and NomadBSD plus all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 68", "date": "2021-05-12T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 12, 2021", "slug": "68", "html": "

Releases

DragonFly BSD 6.0 released: The DragonFly BSD team has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 6.0, a successor of version 5.8

FuguIta 6.9 released: FuguIta is the Live System which is based on OpenBSD operating system. After recent RC, now we have full 6.9 release of this live system.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

KDE Plasma Wayland - a week in FreeBSD: Summary article about the some of the issues when running KDE with Wayland on FreeBSD.

BSD Now 401: OpenBSD Dog Garage : Dog’s Garage Runs OpenBSD, EuroBSDcon 2021 Call for Papers, FreeBSD’s iostat, The state of toolchains in NetBSD, Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8, FreeBSD’s ports migration to git and its impact on HardenedBSD, TrueNAS 12.0-U3 has been released, and more.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - First Quarter 2021: This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between January and March, and is the first of four planned reports for 2021. The first quarter of 2021 has been very active in both FreeBSD-CURRENT and -STABLE, with 13.0-RELEASE work starting in January and finishing up mid-April. It provides lots of new features, and there’s even a good chance that some workloads will experience performance improvements. This report in particular includes a number of interesting entries, covering everything from the linuxulator, various mitigation work, long-awaited work on OpenBSM, work on kernel sanitizers, and many more things.

pfSense: WireGuard returns as an Experimental Package: Christian McDonald to bring WireGuard back to pfSense® Plus and pfSense CE software in an experimental form. Starting May 5, 2021, Netgate® will build and distribute this new code as part of the library of extensions that exist for both development and future versions of pfSense Plus and pfSense CE.

Tutorials

How to install Gnome on OpenBSD: This article explains how to install the Gnome desktop on OpenBSD. You need access to the root user to proceed.

How to upgrade ZFS storage pools version on FreeBSD: When we update FreeBSD from 12 to 13, we get an updated version of ZFS. FreeBSD 13 released with OpenZFS support with various performance boosts. Sometimes OS patching and minor FreeBSD upgrade can also offer an updated zpool version. In any case, we need to upgrade the ZFS storage pools version to get newer functionality and bug fixes. This page explains how to update the ZFS storage pools version on FreeBSD.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

DragonFlyBSD 6.0, OpenBSD-based FuguIta 6.9 plus all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 67", "date": "2021-05-05T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 05, 2021", "slug": "67", "html": "

Releases

OpenBSD 6.9 released: This is the 50th release. As in the previous releases, 6.9 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system:

New/extended platforms
Various kernel improvements
SMP Improvements
Direct Rendering Manager
VMM/VMD improvements
Various new userland features
Various bugfixes and tweaks in userland
Improved hardware support and driver bugfixes
New or improved network hardware support
Installer and upgrade improvements
Security improvements
Routing daemons and other userland network improvements

GhostBSD 21.04.27 ISO’s are now available: New release is out. Here are some of the changes:

GhostBSD is now based on FreeBSD 13.0-STABLE
Devmatch and Devd are now fully functional
Touch screen support
Network configuration is done by devd
Network service supports starting unique devices
OpenZFS 2.0

Hotfix GhostBSD 21.05.01 ISO’s are now available: It was reported that when using the partition editor to install GhostBSD was resulting in errors. ISO with fixes is out.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: May 4, 2021 (vmd) : Errata patch for vmd has been released for OpenBSD 6.9. vmd guests can trigger excessive log messages on the host by sending certain network packets. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

On Updating QEMU’s bsd-user fork: bsd-user is a ‘user mode’ emulation tool. It emulates FreeBSD’s system calls on FreeBSD well, and $OTHER-BSD system calls elsewhere to varying degrees of success. It’s primary mission has been to build FreeBSD packages using user-mode emulation to speed the process over using system mode. It speeds things up because the compilers and other huge CPU hogs can be built natively.

In Other BSDs for 2021/05/01: BSD-related news from last week.

KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD: What works, what not and where do we move?

Registration Open for the June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit : The event will consist of virtual, half day sessions, taking place June 9-11, 2021. It’s free to attend, but they ask that you register with the eventbrite system to gain access to the meeting room. In addition to developer discussion sessions, they will also have vendor talks.

Tutorials

Deep Diving Into the Strengths of FreeBSD: Still doubting whether to use FreeBSD for your next project? Let’s talk about the wonders of the BSD route.

Wayland on FreeBSD with AMDGPU : Steps of one user explaining how they switched their main workstation – FreeBSD 13, nVidia GT730, KDE Plasma – over to KDE Plasma Wayland.

OpenBSD 6.9 packages using IPFS: OpenBSD 6.9 has been released so let’s try fetching packages and base sets for 6.9 amd64 over IPFS.

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS): TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI. But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with a caveat.

FreeBSD arm64 Performance – Getting more out of your FreeBSD Deployment : With the release of FreeBSD 13, arm64 has been elevated to Tier 1 status. FreeBSD support for arm64 has grown steadily since the architecture was incorporated in 2015 based on work supported by the community, ARM and Marvell (then Cavium). Learn about processor performance, hardware factors, and Big.Little in this article.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we have new GhostBSD (+ hotfix) and 6.9 OpenBSD. We also have a look at all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 66", "date": "2021-04-28T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 28, 2021", "slug": "66", "html": "

Releases

Dragonfly 6.0RC1 images available: The image should be at your nearest mirrors now.

OPNsense 21.1.5 released : This is mainly a security and reliablility update. There are several FreeBSD security advisories and updates for third party tools such as curl. The historic bsdinstaller has been replaced by a scriptable alternative based on the readily available bsdinstall bundled with the base system.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

OPNsense and HardenedBSD are parting ways: With FreeBSD 13 released and the gaining interest for security, they think it is now time to change their strategy a bit and focus their efforts further on FreeBSD to help improve security as much as they can. In time there is a risk that HardenedBSD additions are less compatible with new FreeBSD security features. For this reason they are aiming to incorporate FreeBSD 13.x into OPNsense 22.1 in January 2022. Since Shawn (from HardenedBSD) has been a core team member due to the involvement into their operating system, they decided to remove him from their core team as well. Obviously they wish HardenedBSD and Shawn a bright future, maybe in time more of the original concepts and ideas will land in FreeBSD.

Valuable News – 2021/04/26 : The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

New BSD Games: Terminal games that natively run on Linux, BSD, MacOS and are known to work on Windows as well (using PDCurses).

OpenZFS 2.1-rc4: OpenZFS 2.1-rc4 brings several ZFS fixes, a few libzfs bug fixes, and other mostly small changes at this point. OpenZFS 2.1 is designed for use on FreeBSD 12.2 and later while on the Linux front currently supports from the vintage 3.10 kernel up through Linux 5.11 stable.

Initial Support for the riscv64 Architecture for OpenBSD: Dale Rahn (drahn@) imported initial support for the 64-bit RISC-V architecture.

Tutorials

Gemini Capsule in a FreeBSD Jail: How to setup jail in FreeBSD to run Gemini capsule. FreeBSD runs on a RaspberryPi.

Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product: Open source licensing is an integral part of any open source project. Understanding what the limitations of each type of licensing is is as much legal work as it is an art. In our most recent article we talk about the ease of the BSD licensing model and why you should consider it going forward.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we have first RC for DragonFly 6, new OPNsense minor release. We also have a look at all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 65", "date": "2021-04-21T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 21, 2021", "slug": "65", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE Now Available: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/13 branch. Some of the highlights:

The clang, lld, and lldb utilities and compiler-rt, llvm, libunwind, and libc++ libraries have been updated to version 11.0.1.
Removed the obsolete version of the GNU debugger that was installed to /usr/libexec for use by crashinfo(8). Detailed kernel crash information can be obtained by installing modern GDB from ports or packages.
Removed the obsolete binutils 2.17 and gcc(1) 4.2.1 from the tree. All supported architectures now use the LLVM/clang toolchain.
The BSD version of grep(1) is now installed by default. The obsolete GNU version that was the previous default has been removed.
Removed CU-SeeMe support from libalias(3).
The qat(4) driver has been added, supporting some of the cryptographic acceleration functions of the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) device. The qat(4) driver supports the QAT devices integrated with Atom C2000 and C3000 and Xeon C620 and D-1500 platforms, and the Intel QAT Adapter 8950.
Several deprecated drivers have been removed.
Several drivers have been ported to the PowerPC64 architecture.
The kernel now supports in-kernel framing and encryption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) data on TCP sockets for TLS versions 1.0 through 1.3. Transmit offload via in-kernel crypto drivers is supported for MtE cipher suites using AES-CBC as well as AEAD cipher suites using AES-GCM. Receive offload via in-kernel crypto drivers is supported for AES-GCM cipher suites for TLS 1.2. Using KTLS requires the use of a KTLS-aware userland SSL library. The OpenSSL library included in the base system does not enable KTLS support by default, but support can be enabled by building with the WITH_OPENSSL_KTLS option
The 64-bit ARM architecture known as arm64 or AArch64 is promoted to Tier-1 status for FreeBSD 13.
And much more…

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: April 13th, 2021 (xi): Errata patches for the X server have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. Input validation failures in X server XInput extension can lead to privileges elevations for authorized clients. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

HyperBK (Hyper Berkeley Kernel): HyperBK (Hyper Berkeley Kernel), a BSD descendant kernel with GPL-compatible licenses preserved, non-compatible ones removed, and new code written under GPLv3.

Valuable News – 2021/04/19 : The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Distrowacth reviews helloSystem 0.5.0 : Unfortunately the operating system’s live media failed to boot on their test systems, systems which can run FreeBSD, and so they put it aside to try another project.

LibreSSL 3.3.2 Released : This is the last development release for the 3.3.x branch before it is declared stable.

Tutorials

FreeBSD Desktop – Part 23 – Configuration – Herbe Notifications: Very small and compact solution for notifications on X11 desktop – herbe – as its author describes it – its daemon-less notifications without D-Bus. Minimal and lightweight.

How to Configure DNS over TLS (DoT) Using Unbound DNS in OPNsense: Since Unbound DNS in OPNsense does not support DNS over HTTPS (DoH) directly, it was necessary to use the DNSCrypt-Proxy plugin. The plugin also supports DNS over TLS (DoT). However, Unbound gained native support for DoT at some point in time, which is very nice. Because of built-in support for DoT, the configuration of DNS over TLS becomes pretty trivial.

FreeBSD iostat – A Quick Glance: iostat provides a window into the i/o effort of the storage subsystem. You can use it to determine usage patterns, bottlenecks and poor behavior at a glance. It can produce data to support conclusions and suggest further avenues of investigation when used judiciously. In this article, we will dissect its output and introduce disk subsystem troubleshooting using statistical output from iostat.

FreeBSD 13 released: Here is how to upgrade FreeBSD 12 to 13: The FreeBSD project released FreeBSD version 13. The new version comes with updated software and features for a wild variety of architectures. The latest release provides performance improvements and better support for FreeBSD. One can benefit greatly using an upgraded version of FreeBSD. Let us see what’s new and quickly update FreeBSD 12 to 13 using the CLI.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look at the new release from FreeBSD, OpenBSD Errata and latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 64", "date": "2021-04-14T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 14, 2021", "slug": "64", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 2.0.7: A security update for MidnightBSD is now available in git, version 2.0.7. This update includes two security updates and a new version of our package manager, mport. The new version of the package manager no longer uses libdispatch / blocks and has a fix for a double free issue. You can also install the mport update from mports individually. The security fixes are around jails file/directory access and shared memory mappings which fail to get invalidated.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisories and Errata Noticies:

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:09.pf - pf(4) may fail to load filtering rules if they cause the default request_maxcount bound to be exceeded. Users that relied on loader.conf to increase the request_maxcount value could see their rules fail to load.
FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:10.lldb - Attempts to use lldb’s print command (p alias) resulted in lldb aborting. Some common debugger functionality cannot be used.
FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:08.vm - A particular case of memory sharing is mishandled in the virtual memory system. It is possible and legal to establish a relationship where multiple descendant processes share a mapping which shadows memory of an ancestor process. In this scenario, when one process modifies memory through such a mapping, the copy-on-write logic fails to invalidate other mappings of the source page. These stale mappings may remain even after the mapped pages have been reused for another purpose.
FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:09.accept_filter - An unprivileged process can configure an accept filter on a listening socket.
FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:10.jail_mount - Due to a race condition between lookup of ”..” and remounting a filesystem, a process running inside a jail might access filesystem hierarchy outside of jail.

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

News

The state of toolchains in NetBSD: While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn’t mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license. Realistically, NetBSD is more or less tied to GCC, as it supports more architectures than the other BSDs, some of which will likely never be supported in LLVM.

FreeBSD/arm64 becoming Tier 1 in FreeBSD 13 : FreeBSD will promote arm64 to a Tier 1 architecture in FreeBSD 13. This means they will provide release images, binary packages, and security and errata updates. While they anticipate there will be minor issues with this first release, they believe the port is mature enough that they can be resolved during the life of FreeBSD 13.

Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator : Recognizing its importance, the FreeBSD Foundation eagerly approved two separate Grant applications from longtime FreeBSD contributor and community member Edward Tomasz Napierała in 2019 and 2020 to update and improve Linuxulator. They caught up with Edward working from his home in Cambridge, UK to learn more about his work.

BSD Now 397: Fresh BSD 2021 : Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel, OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong, how ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd, LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed, FreshBSD 2021, gmid, Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide in english, and more

OpenZFS 2.1.0-rc2 Released With Bug Fixes: Headlining OpenZFS 2.1 is distributed spare RAID (dRAID) functionality. OpenZFS 2.1 is also introducing a new “compatibility” property for Zpool feature sets, a zpool_influxdb command was added, and a variety of other changes. With this release of OpenZFS 2.1.0-rc2 there are various bug fixes that landed. A random assortment of fixes made it into this second release candidate, some FreeBSD specific items, and some extra OpenZFS compatibility file sets.

Tutorials

Steam on FreeBSD: Steam is a gaming platform that sells and manages games on Windows and Linux. Since FreeBSD has some pretty good Linux emulation, it is possible – with some footnotes – to run Linux Steam Games on FreeBSD. This was already possible in 2016 but the tooling keeps being updated, so let’s take a look at how things work.

Did we miss anything?

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Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look at the new release from MidnightBSD, FreeBSD advisories and latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 63", "date": "2021-04-07T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 07, 2021", "slug": "63", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.1.4 released : The development version includes an update of Suricata to version 6.0.2 in case any of you want to try it out. Also, improvements in the DHCP static mapping can now deal with IPv6 prefix merge for such deployments using Unbound and Dnsmasq host registration.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

Valuable News – 2021/04/05 : The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

Manjaro migrates to FreeBSD as new base: One of the biggest announcements yet for Manjaro as a project. They say goodbye to Archlinux and move on to a better base.

BSD NOw 396: License to thrill : FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting, The State of FreeBSD, dhcpleased, bhyve for Calamares Development, EFS automount and ebsnvme-id, Old Usenix pictures, and more.

em/emx(4) updates in DragonFly: If you’re running an em(4)/emx(4) network card on DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau’s updated to the 7.7.8 release of the driver from Intel, and added a few more chipsets too.

HardenedBSD March 2021 Status Report: The HardenedBSD March 2021 status report is out: they’re actively looking for kernel hackers to help with the in-kernel Wireguard implementation.

Tutorials

Customizing FreeBSD Ports and Packages : Without a doubt, one of the most convenient tools of modern open-source operating systems is the package manager. The ability to search, download, and install a wide range of pre-compiled software with only a single command is unparalleled. FreeBSD is no exception here, providing access to binary packages via the pkg(8) utility. However, these packages must all be compiled somewhere, and package consumers are at the mercy of the package producer when it comes to the contents and compile-time options used.

GNU Modula-2 compiler working on OpenBSD: How one person decieded to make this work and as always, there are lessons to be learned.

A Linux Users Experience Switching To OpenBSD: Breakdown of why the video author is interested in OpenBSD and how the transition from Arch to OpenBSD is going for them as well as what challenges they have ran into using it.

Upgrading to the new GhostBSD base on 13-STABLE: Warning: It is safer to backup and reinstalls GhostBSD with an iso. If you follow these steps properly, everything should be fine, but I would backup all the important data in another drive or in a NAS.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look at the new release from OPNsense and latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 62", "date": "2021-03-31T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 31, 2021", "slug": "62", "html": "

NetBSD donations and financial report for 2020

NetBSD nearly hit their 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000. These donations have enabled them to fund significant work on NetBSD in 2020 such as:

an aarch64 package build server, victory.netbsd.org. Thanks to Western Washington University for hosting this machine.
Modernizing wi-fi network stack and release engineering work by Martin Husemann
LLDB support by Michał Górny
ptrace and GDB improvements by Kamil Rytarowski

If you are interested in seeing more work like this, please consider donating via PayPal or GitHub sponsors. The financial report for 2020 is also available.

Releases

FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 Released With POWER Fixes, Other Bugs Addressed: Last week saw FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 released as an “extra” build due to the fallout from the last minute WireGuard situation. Due to other bugs, FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 was issued today rather than going for the final release. FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 is now the second unplanned/as-needed release candidate ahead of the big FreeBSD 13.0 debut. FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 fixes an issue with scripted installations and also has several PowerPC fixes. FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 is also rounded out by a NETMAP memory leak fix, an issue with lock-unbound and some IPv6 deployments, updated to OpenSSL 1.1.1k over its recent security issues, and other various bug fixes.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:07.openssl : This advisory covers two distinct OpenSSL issues: The X509_V_FLAG_X509_STRICT flag enables additional security checks of the certificates present in a certificate chain. It is not set by default. Starting from OpenSSL version 1.1.1h a check to disallow certificates in the chain that have explicitly encoded elliptic curve parameters was added as an additional strict check. An error in the mplementation of this check meant that the result of a previous check to confirm that certificates in the chain are valid CA certificates was overwritten. This effectively bypasses the check that non-CA certificates must not be able to issue other certificates. A TLSv1.2 renegotiation ClientHello message sent to a TLS server that omits the signature_algorithms extension (where it was present in the initial ClientHello), but includes a signature_algorithms_cert extension results in a NULL pointer dereference in the server.

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

News

GSoC Reports: Make system(3), popen(3) and popenve(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally: This final report was prepared by Nikita Gillmann as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

pkgsrc-2021Q1 branch announcement: In total, 381 packages were added, 61 packages were removed, and 2,349 package updates (to 2,064 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2020Q4 release. Updates include 29 R packages, 499 Python, and 332 Ruby packages. The default Go version in pkgsrc is now 1.16. As always, many packages have been brought up to date relative to upstream.

Valuable News – 2021/03/29: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

FreeBSD Core Team Statement on FreeBSD Development Processes: In light of the recent commentary on FreeBSD’s development practices, members of the Core team would like to issue the following statement. Also, over the next month the FreeBSD Core Team will lead a discussion on appropriate pre-commit testing, static analysis, code review, and integration policies to avoid a repeat of this situation and to continue improving FreeBSD’s code quality.

In Other BSDs for 2021/03/27 : BSD-related news from last week.

KDE on FreeBSD 2021o2 : Let’s take a look at the big things that happened in KDE-on-FreeBSD in last six-and-a-half weeks.

BSD Now 395: Tracing ARM’s history : Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD, Make ‘less’ more friendly, NomadBSD 1.4 Release, Create an Ubuntu Linux jail on FreeBSD 12.2, OPNsense 21.1.2 released, Midnight BSD and BastilleBSD, and more.

Buffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call: 40,000 lines of flawed code almost made it into FreeBSD’s kernel—this article examines how.

kmalloc_obj added to DragonFly: Matthew Dillon has implemented per-zone memory management in DragonFly with the kmalloc_obj subsystem.

mport package manager updates: Several bug fixes have been made on the mport package manager. - it’s now using a sha256 hash for verification of files rather than md5. - it gracefully ignores missing files on a mport update. - mport install can now update dependencies it needs to install a package.

Tutorials

FreeBSD on arm64 In The Cloud : FreeBSD/arm64 is the FreeBSD port to the 64-bit ARM architecture, also known as AArch64 or ARMv8. All supported FreeBSD releases include support for ARMv8 and there are many packages and ports (3rd party applications) available to support the software you normally deploy with FreeBSD.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look at the NetBSD’s donations, new FreeBSD release, security announcements, news and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 61", "date": "2021-03-24T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 24, 2021", "slug": "61", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 Released With The WireGuard Driver Removed: A third and final release candidate of FreeBSD 13.0 was warranted ahead of its formal 13.0-RELEASE later this month. FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 is out this weekend as what was an “as-needed” milestone ahead of the FreeBSD 13.0 release set to take place around 30 March. Notable with this weeks FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 is the removal of the WireGuard kernel driver “if_wg” due to the change in WireGuard implementations amid concerns over code quality for this original WireGuard driver that was set to be introduced in FreeBSD 13.0. Now the existing WireGuard kernel code was removed but this new implementation won’t land until at least FreeBSD 13.1 due to the timing of this significant change. FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 also takes care of a virtual memory list locking issue, a fix for systems running under VirtualBox, a fix in the service utility, and other small fixes.

News

bnx updates in DragonFly: If you have a Broadcom BCM57785/BCM5718 series network card, supported by the bnx(4) driver, there’s some new models supported. There’s some fixes for other models, too.

Valuable News – 2021/03/22 : The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.

FreeBSD: Sway Compositor Can Run While KDE Plasma On Wayland Is Still A Work-In-Progress: It’s been a while since hearing much about Wayland efforts on FreeBSD, but it turns out the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor can run on this BSD after a number of setup steps. However, the likes of KDE Plasma on Wayland still aren’t working well outside of Linux.

In Other BSDs for 2021/03/20 : BSD related news from last week.

EuroBSDCon 2021 Call for Papers open : Hoping to be able to make a conference in Vienna in September (and doing it digitally if not), the EuroBSDCon is now accepting submissions for presentations and tutorials. Read more at 2021.EuroBSDCon.org

BSD Now 394: FreeBSD on Mars : Onboard Scheduler for the Mars 2020 Rover, Practical Guide to Storage of Large Amounts of Microscopy Data, OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS, NextCloud on OpenBSD, MySQL Transactions - the physical side, TrueNAS 12.0-U2.1 is released, HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union, and more.

LibreSSL 3.2.5 Released: It includes the following bug fix: A TLS client using session resumption may cause a use-after-free.

History of ZFS – Part 1: The Birth of ZFS : ZFS (or the Zettabyte File System) is approaching its 15th birthday, and over a decade since integration into FreeBSD. Originally created by Sun Microsystems, ZFS grew in popularity because of its advanced features. Today we will take a look at its history.

In-kernel WireGuard is on its way to FreeBSD and the pfSense router : This morning, WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld announced a working, in-kernel implementation of his WireGuard VPN protocol for the FreeBSD 13 kernel. This is great news for BSD folks—and users of BSD-based routing appliances and distros such as pfSense and opnSense.

runj - experimental runtime for FreeBSD jails: runj is an experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. Important: runj is a proof-of-concept and the implementation has not been evaluated for its security. Do not use runj on a production system. Do not run workloads inside runj that rely on a secure configuration.

A new way to find compatible parts for a computer based on BSD telemetry: A new method of searching for compatible parts for upgrading a computer has become available based on the data from the BSD-Hardware.info portal using the hw-probe telemetry client (available in most BSD variants). No need to learn specifications anymore to perform successful upgrade — just create a probe of the computer and follow new “Find compatible parts for upgrade” link on the probe page to find out what parts are installed by other users of the same computer model or motherboard.

Tutorials

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience: With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, post’s author wanted to see how it shapes up on their Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right. This post is about how they went from a fresh install of FreeBSD 13.0RC1 to a working environment that is based on using the XFCE4 desktop experience.

A working D compiler on OpenBSD: Here’s the story of how we got here and where we need to go next.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look once again at the releases, security announcements and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 60", "date": "2021-03-17T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 17, 2021", "slug": "60", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 21.1.3 released: OPNsense movse ahead with the firmware UI and API rework. You will also notice the new plugin conflict dialog which will report that plugins have been installed previously but not registered in the configuration. This can be easily amended by reseting the local conflicts, which essentially accepts the current plugin configuration as the new default.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 15, 2021 (libssl): Errata patches for LibreSSL have been released for OpenBSD 6.8. A TLS client using session resumption may cause a use-after-free. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

What is New in FreeBSD 13.0.: FreeBSD 13.0 comes out at the end of March. Take a look at what’s new in the upcoming release.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BSDSec.

Tutorials

Easy spamAssassin with OpenSMTPD: How to setup very easily the anti-spam SpamAssassin and make it work with the OpenSMTPD mail server (OpenBSD default mail server).

Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel: In this article, we will be looking at the various ways to customize the build of the FreeBSD kernel and its loadable modules. Understanding this process is invaluable for making custom additions or tuning the kernel build for a specific piece of hardware.

Implement a Command not found handler in OpenBSD: On many Linux systems, there is a special program run by the shell (configured by default) that will tell you which package provide a command you tried to run but is not available in $PATH. Let’s do the same for OpenBSD!

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Lessons learned from a 27 years old UNIX book, Finally dRAID, Setting up a Signal Proxy using FreeBSD, Annotate your PDF files on OpenBSD, Things You Should Do Now, Just: More unixy than Make, 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 2021/03/15.

In Other BSDs for 2021/03/13 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look once again at the releases, security announcements and tutorials from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 59", "date": "2021-03-10T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 10, 2021", "slug": "59", "html": "

Releases

NomadBSD 1.4 released: NomadBSD team has announced the release of NomadBSD 1.4, latest stable release of FreeBSD based, persistent, live distribution:

The base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.2-p4.
Automatic graphics driver detection has been improved
Touchpad support has been improved
and more

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: March 9th, 2021 (npppd): Errata patches for npppd have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. npppd PPTP protocol handler can cause heap over-read leading to a crash. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: March 4th, 2021 (sshagent): Errata patches for SSH have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. Double free in ssh-agent(1) Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

New games on DragonFly: New to DragonFly, but not new to games. Aarom LI has added several old–school BSD games back to DragonFly mostly via NetBSD. It’s ching(6), gomoku(6), monop(6), and cgram(6).

helloSystem got first statistical report on BSD-Hardware.info: The system has found the required number of users to get its first statistical report on BSD-Hardware.info portal as it was done earlier by FreeBSD, OpenBSD and OPNsense. You can see in the report which hardware/software components are preferred by users of this OS. The report is available to clone from the GitHub repository.

Top 12 best opensource games available on OpenBSD: This article features the 12 best games (in authors opinion) in term of quality and fun available in OpenBSD packages. The list only contains open source games that you can install out of the box. This means that game engines requiring proprietary (or paid) game assets are not part of this list.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BSDSec.

Tutorials

Manage containers on Raspberry Pi with this open source tool: In-depth article on opensource.com describing container use on the Raspberry Pi using Bastille. Covers installation of FreeBSD 13.0 (beta), installing and configuring Bastille, creating jails and working with templates.

FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting: Understanding Network Performance: FreeBSD has a full set of debugging features, and the network stack is able to report a ton of information. So much that it can be hard to figure out what is relevant and what is not.

Quick-publishing of poudriere packages: An essential tool in the FreeBSD porter’s arsenal (“porters” are the people who package third-party software, software like KDE Plasma, Haskell, ..) is poudriere, which is an evolution of the old tinderbox. It leverages ZFS and FreeBSD jails to do clean, consistent builds even on an otherwise occupied workstation, and can build for OS versions and architectures you’re not even running. Using the packages you’ve built can be slightly harder, so here’s some notes.

Side-loading FreeBSD versions using Boot Environments: Sometimes using boot environments is not sufficient to upgrade a FreeBSD ZFS installation. Side-loading is creating an empty boot environment, and then moving in the bits you need. Some breakage may occur along the way.

Using Restic for fast backups and restores: Set up your own BSD backups using restic, with zfs and tar for good measure. Restic also allows multiple backends, so you can store these on your own infrastructure, or almost anywhere else in the world.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD 13 BETA Benchmarks, FreeBSD Jails Deep Dive by Klara Systems, FreeBSD Foundation looking for a Senior Arm Kernel Engineer & OSS Project Coordinator, macOS-Inspired BSD Desktop OS by helloSystem, A Trip into FreeBSD and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/03/06 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

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Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look once again at the releases, security announcements, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 58", "date": "2021-03-03T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 03, 2021", "slug": "58", "html": "

Releases

MidnightBSD 2.0.5: New release tagged in git. Fixes: pam security issue. Updates: mport 2.0.5 tzdata 2021a Now uses sysrc for firstboot script.

Development Release: FreeBSD 13.0-BETA4: The fourth beta snapshot of FreeBSD 13.0 is now available for download and testing. This is an unplanned release which means that the final build of FreeBSD 13.0 has been rescheduled to arrive a week later than originally envisaged, on 30 March. “The fourth BETA build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. A summary of changes since 13.0-BETA3 includes: a possible race between jailremove(2) and fork(2) had been fixed; an issue with the pf(4) osfp configuration had been fixed; an update to the ena(4) driver had been added; a bug fix to flex(1) had been addressed; fixes for FreeBSD-SA-21:06.xen and FreeBSD-SA-21:03.pamlogin_access had been addressed; a fix to ZFS to address a potential system crash if scrubbing after removing a slog device had been addressed; other miscellaneous fixes.”

BSDSec

FreeBSD Errata notices and Security advisories:

OpenBSD Errata: February 24th, 2021 (pffrag): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. A sequence of overlapping IPv4 fragments could crash the kernel in pf due to an assertion. 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD: FreeBSD developers started working on support for 32-bit ARM chips during FreeBSD 6.0. (For reference, this was 4 years before the Raspberry Pi was introduced.) The support for 32-bit ARM was officially added to the kernel in FreeBSD 7.0 in February of 2008. Support for 64-bit ARM processors was added a few years later in FreeBSD 11 in October 2016.

A comparison between mports and FreeBSD ports: MidnightBSD mports started as a refactor of the FreeBSD ports with some influence from OpenBSD many years ago. Read the post to learn more about what’s still similar and what has changed over years.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BSDSec.

resolvd(8) - daemon to handle nameserver configuration: Florian Obser (florian@) imported resolvd(8), a daemon for handling nameserver configuration.

Tutorials

BastilleBSD on MidnightBSD: MidnightBSD has recently added a new port, mports/sysutils/bastille that allows you to manage containers. This is a port of a project that originally targetted FreeBSD, but also works on HardenedBSD.

Side-loading FreeBSD versions using Boot Environments: Or upgrading a FreeBSD box the dirty way. This is very much a “works on my machine” approach but it should get you 90% of the way to dealing with your own. Expect annoying breakages and minor fixes along the way.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Follow-up about FreeBSD jail advantages, Install Prometheus, Node Exporter and Grafana, Calibrate your touch-screen on OpenBSD, OPNsense 21.1 Marvelous Meerkat Released, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1, Lets all shed a Tear for 386, find mostly doesn’t need xargs today on modern Unixes, OpenBSD KDE Status Report, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/02/27 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This is a week of MidnightBSD: new release, mports history and BastilleBSD port. Plus other releases, security announcements, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 57", "date": "2021-02-24T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 24, 2021", "slug": "57", "html": "

Releases

pfSense® Plus software version 21.02 and pfSense Community Edition (CE) software version 2.5.0, now available for new installations and upgrades.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

FreeBSD CORE Team Office Hours on the 17th of March: Following on from the effort in 2019, The FreeBSD team is arranging another Community Survey to help shape the future of The FreeBSD Project. The purpose of this survey is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the project’s priorities and efforts. Similar surveys have been conducted twice by the FreeBSD Project and we are preparing for our third. Before publishing the next survey the Core Team welcomes you to attend for a Virtual Town Hall meeting to share some of the insights of the 2020 Community Survey, and seek advice on how the next survey should be conducted.

MidnightBSD Project Status, happy 15th anniversary: MidnightBSD recently added a default .xinitrc file for user profiles to help with the desktop integration on a fresh install. The default desktop environment has recently changed to Xfce. They still need to build packages to get the default on midnightbsd-desktop updated. A number of package bugs are being worked on and they’ve placed the mport package manager in it’s own repository now to help with contributions and allow us to easily package it in mports. February is the 15th anniversary for the project!

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BSDSec.

Introducing veb(4) - a new Virtual Ethernet Bridge: David Gwynne (dlg@) adds a new veb(4) driver to the tree. David’s goal is to replace the old bridge(4) driver.

Tutorials

OpenBSD booting multi-user on Apple M1: Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) is teasing OpenBSD booting multi-user on Apple M1 hardware.

What security does a default OpenBSD installation offer?: In this text author will explain what makes OpenBSD secure by default when you install it. Do not take this for a security analysis, but more like a guide to help you understand what is done by OpenBSD to have a secure environment. The purpose of this text is not to compare OpenBSD to others OS but to say what you can honestly expects from OpenBSD.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Did Linux kill Commercial Unix, three node GlusterFS setup on FreeBSD, OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano (1st Gen), NetBSD on EdgeRouter Lite, TLS Mastery first draft done.

In Other BSDs for 2021/02/20 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Quiet week with pfSense release plus the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 56", "date": "2021-02-17T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 17, 2021", "slug": "56", "html": "

2020 Top DiscoverBSD and BSDSec articles

DiscoverBSD

BSDSec

Releases

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 resolves many bug fixes and introduces some new minor features. It is an easy web update for CORE users while Enterprise users can automatically update via the web UI on February 23rd. There will soon be a migration path from TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

FreeBSD Jails – The Beginning of FreeBSD Containers: In recent years, containers and virtualization have become a buzzword in the Linux community, especially with the rise of Docker and Kubernetes. What many people probably don’t realize is that these ideas have been around for a very long time. Today, we will be looking at Jails and how they became part of FreeBSD.

GhostBSD 2020 financial report: In 2020 the project’s goal was 10,000 CAD. The goal was met and they accumulated 11,276.2 CAD from sponsors, patrons and donors. The list of donors is at https://www.ghostbsd.org/donors, the list of sponsors is at https://www.ghostbsd.org/sponsor, and the list of Patrons is at https://www.ghostbsd.org/patrons.

helloSystem Wants To Be The “macOS of BSDs” With A Polished Desktop Experience: While it was a sad blow when PC-BSD/TrueOS stopped pursuing its desktop ambitions as what was arguably the leading BSD desktop operating system out there with a nice end-user experience, since then we have seen efforts like MidnightBSD, GhostBSD, and others fill the avoid with continuing to enhance the out-of-the-box BSD desktop system. A new entrant that is quite interesting is helloSystem that aims to be a “macOS of BSDs” for a polished desktop experience.

FreeBSD 13 BETA Benchmarks - Performance Is Much Better: The official release of FreeBSD 13.0 is coming up in March, while already from our preliminary tests of the newly minted FreeBSD 13.0 BETA1, the benchmark results are extremely tantalizing compared to FreeBSD 12.2… Ultimately the performance should be much more competitive now compared to Linux (at least on Intel x86_64) and other operating systems with the big FreeBSD 13 release.

LibreSSL 3.2.4 Released It includes the following bug and interoperability fixes:

Switch back to certificate verification code from LibreSSL 3.1.x. The new verifier is not bug compatible with the old verifier causing issues with applications expecting behavior of the old verifier.
Unbreak DTLS retransmissions for flights that include a CCS
Only check BIOshouldread() on read and BIOshouldwrite() on write
Implement autochain for the TLSv1.3 server
Use the legacy verifier for autochain
Implement exporter for TLSv1.3
Free alertdata and phhdata in tls13recordlayer_free()
Plug leak in x509verifychain_dup()
Free the policy tree in x509vfycheck_policy()

KDE on FreeBSD 2021O1: Here’s the first six weeks of KDE-on-FreeBSD-in-2021 in a daemon-approved nutshell.

OpenBSD Catchup 2021-02-13: Recent noteworthy things commited to -current and not previously reported.

OccamBSD: occambsd.sh is a script that builds a minimum FreeBSD u serland and kernel using build options, for use with bhyve(8) and jail(8). The result takes minutes t o build and seconds to boot, but achieving this simple objective required fifteen+ years of experimen tation, error reporting, and gentle persuasion.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by MidnightBSD.

Tutorials

Filtering TCP connections by operating system on OpenBSD: In this text you’ll learn how to filter TCP connections by operating system using OpenBSD Packet filter.

Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8: This is a February 2021 update of a text originally published in April 2017 and it explains how to limit bandwidth on OpenBSD using its firewall PF (Packet Filter) queuing capability.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about A week with Plan 9, Exploring Swap on FreeBSD, how to create a FreeBSD pkg mirror using bastille and poudriere, How to set up FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS, Creating Comfy FreeBSD Jails Using Standard Tools, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/02/13 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

After a pause last week we are back with top BSD articles of 2020. We also take a look at the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 55", "date": "2021-02-03T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 03, 2021", "slug": "55", "html": "

Releases

The first release candidate of NomadBSD 1.4 is now available. Changes since 1.3.2:

The base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.2-p2.
The installer has been improved.
Automatic graphics driver detection has been improved
Touchpad support has been improved and more…

OPNsense 21.1 Released: New and improved are the firewall rules and NAT categories, the traffic graphs supporting IPv6 along with a visual refresh, intrusion detection rule management by policies, an alias for MAC addresses and NAT over IPsec with all phase 2 you could ever want. Last but not least, the serial image now supports UEFI as well.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisories:

FreeBSD Errata Notices

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

News

BREAKING pf(4) change: change route-to so it sends packets to IPs instead of interfaces: Does your pf configuration have route-to rules? If so, you need to consider the implications of this commit by David Gwynne (dlg@) carefully: change route-to so it sends packets to IPs instead of interfaces. The intention is to make it as easy as nat/rdr to use, and more robust when it’s operating.

FreeBSD/i386 demoted to Tier 2 for FreeBSD 13.x: FreeBSD is designating i386 as a Tier 2 architecture starting with FreeBSD 13.0. The Project will continue to provide release images, binary updates, and pre-built packages for the 13.x branch. However, i386-specific issues (including SAs) may not be addressed in 13.x.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by FreeBSD handbook

OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano (1st Gen): New smaller device from Lenovo. Status is relative to OpenBSD-current as of 2021-01-27.

Tutorials

Simple and Secure VPN in FreeBSD – Introducing WireGuard: Wireguard is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology that aims to enable the easy deployment and configuration of servers and clients. Wireguard is intended to replace the use of IPSec or OpenVPN for many VPN applications.

Setup a Three Node Replicated GlusterFS Cluster on FreeBSD A technology demonstration and tutorial for running a three node replicated GlusterFS volume on FreeBSD. It uses Bhyve virtual machines as the hosts and ZFS as the underlying filesystem for the brick. The following topics are covered: 1) Initializing the host machine for Bhyve, 2) Creating and starting Bhyve VM’s, 3) Deploying and configuring GlusterFS, 4) Setting up clients.

Annotate your PDF files on OpenBSD: Annotating (or signing) PDF files is a really simple task using Preview on macOS. You can’t do it on OpenBSD using Zathura, Xpdf etc. But there is a software in the ports that can achieve this: Xournal.

NetBSD on the EdgeRouter Lite: Running the NetBSD/evbmips port on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about GNN’s tips for surviving Cabin Fever and Coding from Home, Self-host a password manager on OpenBSD, Preliminary OpenBSD Support added to OBS, Dan’s CURL tip of the Day, List of some Shell goodies for OpenBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/30 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week has brought new releases for NomadBSD, OPNsense plus SAs from FreeBSD. We also take a look at the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 54", "date": "2021-01-27T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 27, 2021", "slug": "54", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 20.7.8 released: The particular volume of this stable update foreshadows the end of the 20.7 series in less than two weeks. One longstanding issue with radvd on FreeBSD 12.1 has been resolved according to multiple user feedback. Also, the mailing lists have been archived and will no longer be used. Consumers of the development version are now able to upgrade to 21.1-RC1.

GhostBSD 21.01.20 release note: This new release is to fix a bug found in the installer related to the hostname not behind set up properly on the new system installation.

XigmaNAS 12.2.0.4 Michael Zoon has announced the release of XigmaNAS 12.2.0.4, a new stable snapshot of the project’s embedded, open-source NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD. This is major update and the first released built on top of FreeBSD 12.2

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by FreeBSD handbook

OpenBSD KDE Status Report: OpenBSD has managed to drop KDE3 and KDE4 in the 6.8 -> 6.9 release cycle. This of course brings questions: Kde Plasma 5 package missing. After half a year of work,Qt5 stack has been now updated to the last LTS version 5.15.2.

WireGuard Is Now Available For pfSense: The domination of the open-source WireGuard secure VPN tunnel not only on Linux systems but BSDs too… WireGuard is now available on pfSense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform. Those that transition to the pfSense 2.5 development snapshots this week can begin enjoying the WireGuard support, which like all of the other features can be controlled via the pfSense web interface with setting up new WG interfaces. The updated pfSense sources are also available.

ujoy(4) added to OpenBSD -current: Thomas Frohwein (thfr@) added a joystick/gamecontroller driver to -current. This includes ujoyhidiscollection() to work around limitations of hidis_collection() until this can be combined without fallout.

Tutorials

Calibrate your touch-screen on OpenBSD: T460s comes with a touch-screen. It is recognized by default on OpenBSD and not well calibrated as-is. But that’s really simple to solve.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Routing and Firewalling VLANS with FreeBSD, FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS howto, pkgsrc-2020Q4 released, FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 4 With 4GB of RAM, HardenedBSD December 2020 Status Report, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/23 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week has brought new releases for OPNsense, GhostBSD and XigmaNAS. We also take a look at the latest news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 53", "date": "2021-01-20T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 20, 2021", "slug": "53", "html": "

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Fourth Quarter 2020

This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.

This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things.

Releases

GhostBSD 21.01.15: This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button’s restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: January 13th, 2021 (carp): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.8. Use of bpf(4) on a carp interface could result in a use after free error. 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by CBSD - a management layer written for the FreeBSD jail(8) subsystem, bhyve and Xen.

Preliminary OpenBSD Support Added to OBS Studio: OpenBSD developer Vadim Zhukov (zhukov@) has added preliminary OpenBSD support to Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio release 26.1.0 and later. The changes come as part of an ongoing collaboration between the upstream OBS project and OpenBSD developers. Note that this is still a WIP and it hasn’t been submitted to the ports mailing list or committed to the ports tree.

Tutorials

Exploring Swap on FreeBSD: On modern Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, “swapping” refers to the activity of paging out the contents of memory to a disk and then paging it back in on demand. The page-out activity occurs in response to a lack of free memory in the system: the kernel tries to identify pages of memory that probably will not be accessed in the near future, and copies their contents to a disk for safekeeping until they are needed again. When an application attempts to access memory that has been swapped out, it blocks while the kernel fetches that saved memory from the swap disk, and then resumes execution as if nothing had happened.

Bastille port redirection and persistence: Redirecting ports from the host system to individual containers is simple with the “rdr” sub-command. This redirection can also be accomplished with the use of templates to automate the process.

Accented characters using a US keyboard layout on OpenBSD: Does your laptop ship with an International US layout keyboarda and you can’t accents with the default Xenocara configuration? Let’s see how to fix this.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about History of FreeBSD: Early Days of FreeBSD, mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard, FreeBSD Foundation Sponsors LLDB Improvements, Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/16 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD Project released it’s last report for 2020, GhostBSD has a new release + OpenBSD Errata, news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 52", "date": "2021-01-13T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 13, 2021", "slug": "52", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD Desktop for PineBook Pro: Unofficial user-built images for PineBook Pro based on 12.2-STABLE and 13.0.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: January 11th, 2021 (nd6): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. When an NDP entry is invalidated the associated layer 2 address is not invalidated. 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by Homura, Wine-based Game Launcher for FreeBSD.

XFCE 4.16 in FreeBSD ports: This XFCE release dropped support for GTK2 plugins and also dropped GTK2 from all components.

pkgsrc-2020Q4 released: The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 69th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 24,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms. Special note for users of pkgsrc on NetBSD: The default package database location has changed from /var/db/pkg to /usr/pkg/pkgdb. While there is compatibility code that will quietly use the old location, users are advised to explicitly set the database path whether or not they migrate the database, especially if they have taken intermediate or partial migration steps.

vkernels broken for now in Dragonfly: MAP_VPAGETABLE has been removed in DragonFly because of conflicts with recent pmap work. This has the unfortunate effect of breaking vkernel(7), but vkernels can be resurrected with changes to use hardware virtualization support. Note that running DragonFly as a VM is unaffected; that’ll still work just fine. This breakage is DragonFly-vkernel-on-DragonFly specific.

Tutorials

Self-host a password manager on OpenBSD: One of possible solutions for following requirements:

Access and manage passwords from iOS devices
Filling credentials in iOS apps
Accessible and manageable from an OpenBSD and MacOS workstation

Routing and Firewalling VLANS with FreeBSD: In this article we are going to look at and integrate two network isolation technologies, VLANs and VNET. VLANs are common place, and if you have done some network management or design then you are likely to have interacted with them. The second are FreeBSDs VNET virtual network stacks, a powerful network stack isolation technology that gives FreeBSD jails super powers.

Setup and configure Offshore 100% Logless VPN server on FreeBSD 12.2: Installation of a Japanese VPN: SoftEther VPN server on FreeBSD 12.2, explaining how to configure it being completely offshore, 100% logless with every aspect of details.

If you ever have to recover root password, here’s a small how-to.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship, Toward an automated tracking of OpenBSD ports contributions, Trying OpenZFS 2 on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE, OpenBSD on TECLAST F7 Plus, Multi-volume support in HAMMER2, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/09 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we have regural issue with BSDSec, releases, news and tutorials from BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 51", "date": "2021-01-06T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 06, 2021", "slug": "51", "html": "

helloSystem: The “Less is More” FreeBSD Desktop

helloSystem is a FreeBSD desktop OS that focuses on simplicity, elegance, and usability. It boots quickly and provides a responsive desktop experience with a mere 20 running processes. helloSystem draws on the Lumina and FuryBSD desktop projects for its archive and WiFi utilities, plus its LiveCD infrastructure.

A video tour is available of a helloSystem preview build.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BastilleBSD, the system for automating deployment and management of containerized applications on FreeBSD.

2020 in Review: FreeBSD Software Development Projects: Despite the challenges of the global pandemic, the Foundation’s software development efforts proceeded apace, and we’ve made significant contributions across a number of functional areas in FreeBSD.

sysctl parameter kern.video.record added to OpenBSD -current Analog to the the kern.audio.record sysctl parameter for audio(4) devices, introduce kern.video.record for video(4) devices. By default kern.video.record will be set to zero, blanking all data delivered by device drivers which attach to video(4).

Running BSDs On The AMD Ryzen 5000 Series - FreeBSD vs. Linux Benchmarks: Trying out a few of the BSDs on a Ryzen 9 5900X desktop as well as running some FreeBSD 12.2 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks, including with Linux on OpenZFS and Clang.

FreeBSD Completes Its Transition From Subversion To Git For Development: The past several days FreeBSD has been working to complete its migration from their development being done with Subversion to instead using the Git distributed revision control system as used by most other open-source projects.

Tutorials

Setup ssh-chat, an interesting SSHd-based chat server on OpenBSD: In this article, Özgür Kazanççı talks about ssh-chat (by Andrey Petrov) and installs it step-by-step on OpenBSD. ssh-chat is a very interesting instant messaging chat daemon/SSH server, written in Go. Connecting to the port it listens, instead of a shell, you get a fancy, retro, IRC-like chat prompt.

BastilleBSD Native Container Management for FreeBSD: BastilleBSD is very promising. Practically negligible performance differences, active development, smart features (templates), and excellent documentation and guides are worth a recommendation.

Run bhyve hypervisor inside a BastilleBSD Jail on FreeBSD: This post outlines installation, setup and configuration of jailed bhyve hypervisor (using VNET!) within Bastille on FreeBSD.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin Final Milestone achieved, Tailscale for OpenBSD, macOS to FreeBSD migration, monitoring of our OpenBSD machines, OPNsense 20.7.6 released, and more

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/02 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we take a look at helloSystem, new FreeBSD based desktop OS and the rest of the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 50", "date": "2020-12-30T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 30, 2020", "slug": "50", "html": "

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: December 24th, 2020 (smtpd): Errata patches for smtpd have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. smtpd’s filter state machine can prematurely release resources leading to a crash. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by bhyve, the “BSD hypervisor”.

FreeBSD 2020 in Review: Advocacy: It’s that time again. We’re looking back at how Foundation advocated for FreeBSD over the past year. They began the year like any other with many in-person events on the horizon, celebrations planned for our upcoming 20th anniversary and energy that comes with introducing new people and companies to FreeBSD. Then March rolled around, and well, you know rest. Thankfully, the Foundation team has been able to work together on new and expanded ways to spread the word about FreeBSD.

Multi-volume support in HAMMER2 If you remember HAMMER1’s ability to create a volume that spanned multiple local disks, that capability’s been introduced to HAMMER2. Look at the commit message to see how it works so far. Note that this is not multi-master replication.

Tutorials

Virtualize Your Network on FreeBSD with VNET: FreeBSD Jails are a well-known feature and have become core to many excellent tools on FreeBSD such as the Poudriere package builder. Jails offer process and file system isolation, but for a long time they did not offer very satisfying network isolation. VIMAGE provides isolation for networking through virtual network stacks or VNET.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now features you interviewing us with questions that you sent in. JT, Allan, and Benedict answer everything that you ever wanted to know in this week’s special episode of BSDNow.

In Other BSDs for 2020/12/26 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you have an OSS BSD-related project that you would like to showcase in BSD Weekly? Reply to sender and we can showcase you as a sponsor of an issue (for free).

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

In this mini holiday issue, we look at OpenBSD’s errata for smtp, FreeBSD Advocacy 2020 review and the rest of news from the BSD world.

" }, { "title": "Issue 49", "date": "2020-12-23T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 23, 2020", "slug": "49", "html": "

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.

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.

In Other BSDs for 2020/12/19 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we learn about Memorial Scholarship of NetBSD’s Allen Briggs. Then we look at latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 48", "date": "2020-12-09T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 09, 2020", "slug": "48", "html": "

Releases

No releases last week.

BSDSec

There have been new FreeBSD Errata Notices and Security Advisory from 1st December:

OpenBSD Errata: December 1st, 2020 (xmaplen) Errata patches for the X server have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. Multiple input validation failures in the X server XKB extension can lead to out of bounds memory accesses for authorized clients. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by intro(1).

History of FreeBSD – Part 3: Early Days of FreeBSD: In this third part of our series on the history of FreeBSD, we start tracing the early days of FreeBSD and the events that would eventually shape the project and the future of open source software.

Tutorials

A mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard: WireGuard is a new coming to OpenBSD 6.8 and it looks like a simple and efficient way to connect computers. Author has a few VPS that tend to be connected through filtered public services and/or SSH tunnels. And that’s neither efficient nor easy to manage.

Wireguard Puffy to OPNsense: How to Setup an WG Tunnel between OpenBSD and OPNSense?

Webinar: Best Practices For Optimizing ZFS: ZFS was introduced in 2001 to make storage administration easier by combining the filesystem with the volume manager, introducing new levels of redundancy, and a much simpler user interface, ZFS works for most common use cases out-of-the-box, but to get the most out of it requires understanding what it is doing, and how each of the tuning knobs impacts it. During the first webinar in the “Best Practices for ZFS” series, Allan has touched on the following topics:

Building Your Storage Array – Everything from picking the best hardware to RAID-Z and using mirrors.
Keeping up with Data Growth – Expanding and growing your pool, and of course, shrinking with device evacuation.
Datasets and Properties – Controlling settings with properties and many other tricks!

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Adventures in Freebernetes, tracing kernel functions, The better way of building FreeBSD networks, New beginnings: CDBUG virtual meetings, LibreSSL update in DragonFly, Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/12/05 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week we had some FreeBSD and OpenBSD Erratas and Advisories. Then we look at latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 47", "date": "2020-12-02T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "December 02, 2020", "slug": "47", "html": "

FreeBSD Foundation Q3 2020 Status Update

Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 3rd Quarter 2020 Status Report, check out the highlights of what they did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

COVID-19 Impact to the Foundation
Partnerships and Commercial User Support
Fundraising Efforts
OS Improvements
University of Waterloo Co-op
Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
Legal/FreeBSD IP

Releases

GhostBSD 20.11.28 Release Announcement: This release comes with a new live system that leverages ZFS, compression, and replication first introduced in FuryBSD by Joe Maloney. The 20.11.28 release contains numerous improvements, including OS fixes for linuxulator to improve Linux Steam performance, an updated kernel, and GhostBSD userland updates. Userland updates include a MATE desktop upgrade to version 1.24.1, Software Station performance improvements, and numerous application updates.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 is Scheduled for early December: In just four weeks, more than 20,000 systems have been upgraded to TrueNAS 12.0. TrueNAS 12.0-U1 has entered development code-freeze and is now entering its final QA cycle for availability in early December.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

FreeBSD Merges WireGuard Support: The momentum of WireGuard continues with FreeBSD now having mainlined their port of this open-source secure VPN tunnel. For FreeBSD 13 there is now the import of the WireGuard kernel module. This follows OpenBSD adding WireGuard earlier in the year.

macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a why I left macOS: This is not a technical documentation for how to migrate from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why to migrate from macOS to FreeBSD.

re(4) testers needed for DragonFly: If you have a Realtek network card supported by the re(4) driver, Sepherosa Ziehau has a new driver for you to test.

OpenZFS 2.0 Released With Unified FreeBSD/Linux Support, Many New Features: OpenZFS 2.0 marks a major step forward for open-source ZFS file-system support for what started out as ZFSOnLinux but is now OpenZFS with unified FreeBSD and Linux support (macOS support is still being pursued as well) and this release also bringing many new features.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by ebrowse(1).

Tutorials

Testing CS:GO on GhostBSD with Linux Steam: This video is all done under GhostBSD with the use of OBS to record video and audio with virtual_oss, pacat to loop the audio of the game and Pitivi was use to sync the audio with the video.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now has interview with Michael W. Lucas: SNMP and TLS book, cashflow for creators, book sale and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/11/28 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This weeks we look what’s inside FreeBSD Foundation Q3 2020 Status Update plus latest news, tutorials and releases.

" }, { "title": "Issue 46", "date": "2020-11-25T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 25, 2020", "slug": "46", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense 20.7.5 released This is a small patch set and plan to pin the 20.1 upgrade path to this particular version to avoid unnecessary stepping stones.

MidnightBSD 2.0.1 for amd64: Updated ISOs for MidnightBSD 2 have been released on amd64. There are two changes: 1. UEFI support for booting the ISO as well as installing with ZFS root on GPT 2. mkimg was updated to facilitate 1. Aside from these changes, the release is identical to 2.0 for i386.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

LibreSSL 3.3.0 Released: This is the first development release from the 3.3.x series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.9. Follow the link for list of all changes.

ArisbluBSD: Why a new BSD?: This article is to explain some decisions and plans made by the ArisbluBSD team, why they are making their own thing, and what the plan is for the OS. They talk about five things: desktop, package management, software availability, custom software, and the future of the OS. They also explain what the goal of the OS is, and how they plan to expand in the near future.

The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan: In the late 1960s and 1970s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building was UNIX. They were building more than just an operating system though. They were building a way to work with computers that had never existed before. In this podcast episode they talk to Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix.

*BSD statistics for October 2020: (Facebook link) In October, hw-probe asked to participate in the statistics of users of BSD variants and here are the processed results.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by apropos(1).

Tutorials

Unbound DNS Blacklist: This tutorial is about how to configure unbound(8) to block spam/malicious/malware domains at DNS level. It will use FreeBSD for that purpose but you can use any system that unbound(8) runs on.

How to Set Up and Install TrueNAS CORE: In this tutorial, we’re going to walk you through the basic requirements to run the TrueNAS storage operating system, from creating the installation media and installing it onto your system.

FuguITA: OpenBSD live-cd: This article will explain how to download and run the FuguITA OpenBSD live-cd, which is not official (not endorsed by the OpenBSD project) but is available since a long time and is carefully updated at every release and errata published.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD 12.2 is available, ZFS Webinar, Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, how the OpenBSD -stable packages are built, OPNsense 20.7.4 released, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/11/21 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This weeks we learn why ArisbluBSD got started plus latest news, tutorials and releases.

" }, { "title": "Issue 45", "date": "2020-11-18T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 18, 2020", "slug": "45", "html": "

Releases

Lucas Holt has announced the release of MidnightBSD 2.0, a major new version of the project’s FreeBSD-derived operating system developed with desktop users in mind. Besides providing package upgrades, security updates and bug fixes, this release also imports features from FreeBSD 11.

OS108-9.1 XFCE amd64 released: OS108 is a fast, open and Secure Desktop Operating System built on top of NetBSD.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

rpki-client 6.8p1 released: This is the second release based on OpenBSD 6.8. It includes the following changes to the previous release:

incorporate OpenBSD 6.8 errata 006 of November 10, 2020: rpki-client incorrectly checks the manifest validity interval. In the portable version,
Add compat code for the LibreSSL ASN1timeparse() and ASN1timetm_cmp() functions. Those are needed to properly check the validity of MFT files.
Add openssl/asn1.h to the noinst_HEADERS else make distcheck fails

hello: Let’s make a FreeBSD for “mere mortals”: Can we make an open source system that is welcoming to swtichers from the Mac? Something that “just works” as intended, without the need to fiddle around much to get to a working desktop that does its job and otherwise gets out of your way? Say hello to hello, a desktop system for creators with focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability.

There’s one more OS based on FreeBSD we found this week: Arisblu BSD. It attempts to build a powerful and user friendly live-CD with the best tools possible.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by man(1).

Tutorials

Hosting multiple web servers behind a single IP address: Virtual hosts for a website are a thing. One webserver can host multiple websites. They can all be on the same IP address, different IP addresses, different ports, etc. This post is about using a proxy service. In this post, author explains their setup with FreeBSD 12.1, Nginx 1.18.0, Bind 9.16.6 and optional split dns.

Blog spotlight - A little Daemon on my Desktop

This week we let tigersharke introduce their blog:

A journey with FreeBSD as my desktop OS. Insights, tips, and the occasional rant, all relating to the ‘Beastie’ or activities while using it. Here I am writing about FreeBSD, my experiences and troubles, solutions and tips, and the occasional rant. If I have discovered something cool, or new, even if it is not directly related to FreeBSD but is usable from it, I’ll post about it here. This is going to be technical at times but I hope to offer as clear and precise directions as I can when appropriate. My intent had been to publish blog posts only when finalized but in some instances I may make works in progress available. Frequency of updates, revisions, or writing schedule are likely to remain sporadic but I hope you all enjoy.

In Other BSDs for 2020/11/14 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This weeks issue is short and sweet. We see some new BSDs being introduced plus latest news, tutorials, releases and a blog spotlight.

" }, { "title": "Issue 44", "date": "2020-11-11T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "November 11, 2020", "slug": "44", "html": "

Releases

The FreeBSD Azure Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE on Microsoft Azure Marketplace: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/marketplace/apps/thefreebsdfoundation.freebsd-12_2.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: November 5th, 2020 (wg): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.8. wg(4) could panic the kernel by releasing the wrong lock. 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: November 10th, 2020 (unwind): Errata patches for unwind have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. unwind fails to process large DNS replies. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: November 10th, 2020 (rpki): Errata patches for rpki-client have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. rpki-client incorrectly checks the manifest validity interval. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Firefox is not paxctl safe for NetBSD: This has been tested on amd64. Hopefully other architectures don’t have additional ways to be not-mprotect-safe, but there is always the possibility. No obvious performance difference in an older (non-wasm) javascript benchmark.

OpenBGPD 6.8p1 released: This is the second stable release for the 6.8 version. It includes the following change: Include OpenBSD 6.8 errata 001: In bgpd, the roa-set parser could leak memory. OpenBGPD-portable is known to compile and run on FreeBSD, and the Linux distributions Debian, Ubuntu and Alpine Linux.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by pfqueue.

Tutorials

VirtualBox disk I/O on FreeBSD: In the best example of “have your tried turning if off and on again”, related to the ext4 VirtualBox woes, post author was informed of the existence of a checkbox called Use Host I/O Cache; toggling the value of that checkbox solved all their problems.

Join the peer to peer social network Scuttlebutt using OpenBSD and Oasis: In this article, author will tell you about the Scuttlebutt social network, what makes it special and how to join it using OpenBSD.

Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD: Looks like Signal people are not interested in supporting the *BSDs and their app, but there are other ways.

How to build an amazing router and firewall with OpenBSD: This is the third part of the OpenBSD router and firewall tutorial. In this part we get to setup PF, the OpenBSD packet filter firewall.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about bhyve - The FreeBSD Hypervisor, udf information leak, being a vim user instead of classic vi, FreeBSD on ESXi ARM Fling: Fixing Virtual Hardware, new FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin in LLDB, OpenBSD Laptop, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/11/07 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

FreeBSD on Azure, OpenBSD erratas plus latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 43", "date": "2020-10-28T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 28, 2020", "slug": "43", "html": "

Releases

NetBSD 9.1 available:The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.1, the first feature and stability update for the netbsd-9 release branch. Over the last months many changes have been made to the NetBSD 9 stable branch. As a stable branch the release engineering team and the NetBSD developers are conservative with changes to this branch and many users rely on the binaries from our regular auto-builds for production use. The new release features (among various other changes) many bug fixes, a few performance enhancements, stability improvements for ZFS and LFS and support for USB security keys in a mode easily usable in Firefox and other applications. For more details and instructions see the 9.1 announcement at https://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.1.html

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available, and with it, TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise are now ready for production deployments. The merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image is now officially complete and has become a production-ready platform right on schedule.

OPNsense 20.7.4 released: This release finally wraps up the recent Netmap kernel changes and tests. The Realtek vendor driver was updated as well as third party software cURL, libxml2, OpenSSL, PHP, Suricata, Syslog-ng and Unbound just to name a couple of them.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by top(1).

BSDSec

No SAs last few days.

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

News

DragonFly and clang10: You can now use compilers.conf(5) to switch to clang10/llvm10 for building Dragonfly.

openbsd_snmp3_check: This script checks memory and swap usage, file system space usage, traffic for specific network interface and CPU load average on OpenBSD systems and can be used as a plugin with such monitoring systems like Nagios/Icinga/Centreon and others. It also shows detailed information about all avaliable file systems, configured NICs, system information about OS and list of running processes.

History of FreeBSD – Part 2: BSDi and USL Lawsuits: In this second part of our series on the history of FreeBSD, we continue to trace the pre-history of FreeBSD and the events that would eventually shape the project and the future of open source software.

OpenBGPD 6.8p0 released: This is the first stable release for the 6.8 version. It includes the following changes:

In bgpctl(8), the “reload” command now takes a ‘reason’ argument to use as Administrative Shutdown Communication to its neighbors.
Added bgpctl(8) support for VPNv6 in the family option of the “show rib” command.
Added bgpctl(8) support for JSON formatted output in various “show” commands.
Support to build OpenBGPD on Alpine Linux added OpenBGPD-portable is known to compile and run on FreeBSD, and the Linux distributions Debian, Ubuntu and Alpine Linux.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2020: This quarter brings a good mix of additions and changes to the FreeBSD Project and community, from a diverse number of teams and people covering everything from architectures, continuous integration, wireless networking and drivers, over drm, desktop and third-party project work, as well as several team reports, along with many other interesting subjects too numerous to mention.

Tutorials

ext4 (and FUSE) on FreeBSD: FreeBSD has a FUSE kernel module, which allows it to use other filesystems – in user space – than it would normally do.

Running 9front on OpenBSD vmd: OpenBSD 6.8 was just released, and it included a few fixes to vmd that allows us to run 9front without crashing.

Setup OpenBSD at thinkpad x240: This post will show how to configure the OpenBSD at Lenovo ThinkPad x240. I will not describe the install process of the base OpenBSD as it is basically quite simple process. Users need to just follow the install wizard ans ask questions. Focus on a specific way of using OpenBSD and the configuration of this system for the laptop.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now has an interview with Kyle Evans for you this week. They talk about his grep project, lua and flua in base, as well as bectl, being on the core team and a whole lot of other stuff.

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/24 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week we’ve seen releases for NetBSD, TrueNAS and OPNsense. Plus latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 42", "date": "2020-10-20T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 20, 2020", "slug": "42", "html": "

Celebrating OpenBSD project’s 25th anniversary with OpenBSD 6.8

On its 25th birthday, the OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 6.8, the 49th release.

The new release comes with a large number of improvements and debuts a new architecture, OpenBSD/powerpc64, running on the POWER9 family of processors. The full list of changes can be found in the announcement and on the release page. Some highlights:

this release debuts the OpenBSD/powerpc64 architecture, supporting the POWER9 [and POWER8] family of processors
Numerous kernel improvements such as better time measurements across several architectures, updated graphics support, and of course numerous improvements in hardware support with updated drivers across several platforms
Numerous network stack improvements.
wg(4), an in-kernel driver for WireGuard VPN
login_ldap added to base
FFS2 improvements
LibreSSL 3.2.2 with TLSv1.3 enabled for both client and server, and a new-and-improved X509 certificate chain validator

Releases

FreeBSD 12.2-RC3 Available: The third RC build for the FreeBSD 12.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

NomadBSD 1.3.2 Errata notes are now available:

sysutils/e2fsprogs breaks pkg upgrade
Qt5 applications do not start after upgrade

NetBSD Security Advisory 2020-003: USB network interface jumbo packets: Some USB network interface drivers are missing a bounds check, without which data from the network may be copied past the end of an array allocated in a kernel mbuf cluster. This enables a network device on the same LAN to corrupt kernel memory. The affected USB network interfaces are: atu(4), axe(4), axen(4), otus(4), run(4), ure(4).

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

News

Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD: This report was written by Ayushu Sharma as part of Google Summer of Code 2020 and summarizes the work done during the third and final coding period of project.

Tutorials

Oldschool Gaming on FreeBSD: When was the last time you played a computer game? Let’s learn about some oldschool gaming on FreeBSD system.

OpenBSD Laptop: How to get OpenBSD with Gnome up and running.

Cryptographic Signing using ssh-keygen(1) with a FIDO Authenticator: signify(1) does not support the use of FIDO authenticators. However, recent versions of OpenSSH do support signing using the -Y sign option of ssh-keygen(1), and with the recent addition of FIDO authenticator support to OpenSSH, we have a means (using tools in base OpenBSD) of using a hardware factor when signing files.

Switching Xorg keyboard layout on OpenBSD: Here’s a few minimalistic options to switch keyboard layout on OpenBSD. Of course, if you run a complex DE, like Gnome, KDE or even XFCE, there is a graphical tool that allows switching keyboard layout. But when using cwm(1), you have to dig elsewhere.

open-vm-tools on FreeBSD under VMware ESXi ARM Fling: open-vm-tools is a set of services and modules that enable several features in VMware products for better management of, and seamless user interactions with, guests. There are two different options to get open-vm-tools on FreeBSD for ARM right now. Author provided pre-compiled packages for a few key FreeBSD versions. Alternatively, you can compile them yourself from the custom ports that author provided.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Wayland on BSD, My BSD sucks less than yours, Even on SSDs, ongoing activity can slow down ZFS scrubs drastically, OpenBSD on the Desktop, simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/17 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD celebrating their 25th anniversary with 6.8 release, NetBSD SA, NomadBSD errate plus latest news and tutorials

" }, { "title": "Issue 41", "date": "2020-10-14T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 14, 2020", "slug": "41", "html": "

OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020

The eighth annual OpenZFS Developer Summit was an online conference which took place Oct 6-7 (Tue-Wed) over Zoom.

As with previous years: The goal of the event is to foster cross-community discussions of OpenZFS work and to make progress on some of the projects we have proposed. This 2-day event consists of a day of presentation and a 1-day hackathon.

Presentation’s slides and videos are now available.

Releases

FreeBSD 12.2-RC2 Available: The second RC build for the FreeBSD 12.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

pkgsrc-2020Q3 released: The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 68th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 22,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/ In total, 241 packages were added, 115 packages were removed, and 1,713 package updates (to 1,273 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2020Q2 release. As always, many packages have been brought up to date relative to upstream.

FreeBSD Core Team Office Hours 4: Based on the continuity of the last CORE Office Hours The FreeBSD CORE Team would like to invite you all to a virtual town hall meeting. As mentioned earlier this session is timed at 0200 UTC on 14th October, 2020 geared towards the other part of the World but everyone is welcome to join. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/OfficeHours for details on how to join either a live stream to watch, or an interactive meeting to participate. A link to this agenda (and any updates) will be there as well.

New dports binaries available: A complete set of new dports binaries have been built, for DragonFly 5.8 and for -current, so now is a good time to upgrade.

Introduction of a new FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin in LLDB: Moritz Systems have been contracted by the FreeBSD Foundation to modernize the LLDB debugger’s support for FreeBSD. They are writing a new plugin utilizing the more modern client-server layout that is already used by Darwin, Linux, NetBSD and (unofficially) OpenBSD. The new plugin is going to gradually replace the legacy one.

Bye-bye, Apple: Author has been developing on a Macbook for over twelve years, but now, they’ve switched to an ever trending setup: OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. Read more to find what they like and what they miss.

Tutorials

FreeBSD under VMware ESXi on Arm Fling: Earlier this week, VMware released ESXi on Arm Fling, their hypervisor for the ARM platform. Here are instructions to get a FreeBSD virtual machine up and running under VMWare ESXi on Arm Fling. These instruction assume you’ve followed VMware’s documentation on setting up the hypervisor on your ARM platform, and are familiar with the basics of how ESXi/vSphere functions.

FreeBSD on ESXi ARM Fling: Fixing Virtual Hardware: With the current state of FreeBSD on ARM in general, a number of hardware drivers are either set to not auto-load on boot, or are entirely missing altogether. This page is to document my findings with various bits of hardware, and if possible, list fixes.

Creating a 4 drive ZFS zpool: stripe over mirrors: In this post, they are creating a 4 drive ZFS pool consisting of two mirror.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about New Project: zedfs.com, TrueNAS CORE Ready for Deployment, IPC in FreeBSD 11: Performance Analysis, Unix Wildcards Gone Wild, Unix Wars, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/10 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 was happening. There’s also new RC for FreeBSD 12.2 plus latest news an tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 40", "date": "2020-10-07T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "October 07, 2020", "slug": "40", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 12.2-RC1 Available: The first RC build for the FreeBSD 12.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: October 6th, 2020 (mmap): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.7. mmap can exhaust kernel memory. 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

Wayland on NetBSD - trials and tribulations: When is NetBSD switching from X11 to Wayland?”, Wayland being X11’s “new” rival. In this blog post, let’s see why NetBSD aren’t there yet.

F-PROT antivirus on MidnightBSD: MidnightBSD just added the F-PROT antivirus comamnd line scanner for BSD systems to mports under security/f-prot.

OpenZFS 2.0-RC3 Released With Bug Fixes: The third release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms. OpenZFS 2.0-RC3 release it primarily is delivering bug fixes as the official 2.0 release nears later this year. The fixes range from avoiding different kernel problems to FreeBSD specific fixes to other general fixes.

FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration: Pt 2 Primer for Users: This blog post is a preview of a git primer being written for the FreeBSD project. It covers what a typical user will need, including those relatively rare users that may have some changes to the base.

The “..KARL Aware Rootkit..” for OpenBSD 6.7: An experimental proof of concept rootkit for OpenBSD 6.7. leveraging the ‘KARL’ system. KARL is a feature that relinks the OpenBSD Kernel each time the system is restarted with the aim of giving a different layout each time which complicates some forms of exploitation.

There a case study from the FreeBSD Foundation about Netflix.

Tutorials

TrueNAS Core 12 Install and Basic Setup: In this video we are looking at how to install TrueNAS Core 12 on a new system, as well as setting up storage and configuring a Samba/Cifs share to access your TrueNAS or FreeNAS system from any device on your network. We also take a very quick look through some of the features and where to access them within the TrueNAS interface, installing plugins such as Plex, setting up scrubs, S.M.A.R.T tests and configuring permissions and ACLs.

ESET file server antivirus scanner on MidnightBSD: Steps to run ESET on MidnightBSD. Although this has been done technically on a MidnightBSD 1.2 amd64 system, it should also work on FreeBSD 10.x or 11.x.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about The world’s first OpenZFS based live image, FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration video, FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020, testing the shutdown mechanism, login_ldap added to OpenBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/03 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

There’s a RC1 for 12.2-series of FreeBSD plus latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 39", "date": "2020-09-30T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 30, 2020", "slug": "39", "html": "

Releases

DragonFly 5.8.2 released: New bugfix releases for 5.8 DragonFly series has been released.

DragonFly 5.8.3: DragonFly 5.8.2 was missing two CVE fixes – CVE-2019-1547 and CVE-2019-18408. They are fixed and the new 5.8.3 release has them.

OPNsense 20.7.3 released: Release brings a number of FreeBSD security advisories and a few reliability fixes.

FreeBSD 12.2-BETA3 Available: The third BETA build for the FreeBSD 12.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and powerpcspe architectures are available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

MidnightBSD 1.2.10: New security update for MidnightBSD. Description: udf: Validate the full file entry length Otherwise a corrupted file entry containing invalid extended attribute lengths or allocation descriptor lengths can trigger an overflow when the file entry is loaded.

BSDSec

None last week.

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

News

Podcast: Security Headlines with Mischa Peters. In this episode, we interview Mischa Peters which is a long time BSD user with a background in the world of data centers and ISP’s. One of his latest projects is OpenBSD Amsterdam which is a pure-hearted OpenBSD virtual machine hosting provider. That is running 100% OpenBSD, it’s even using OpenBSD’s own hypervisor. We deep dive into OpenBSD Amsterdam, scripting with ssh, awk, and the basic tools, BSD, Hack-tic and a lot more.

Unified pfSense® Documentation: To improve the documentation for pfSense® software and make it easier to use, Netgate are merging the content from the book and the former wiki into a single unified set of documentation available now at https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/.

Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current: For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the “classic” default window manager of twm. However, it’s been showing its age for a long time now.

Nix package manager in FreeBSD: Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell – they are built by functions that don’t have side-effects, and they never change after they have been built. FreeBSD support in Nix is not fully complete yet. This commit only brings the Nix package manager to the ports. Hopefully, this port will streamline the work of bootstrapping of Nix packages on FreeBSD.

There is new FreeBSD channel on Discord. Looks like it is not the official one.

k2k20 hackathon reports

OpenBSD had another hackathon and some reports are in:

NetBSD Google Summer of Code

Final reports from GSoC are in as well:

Tutorials

A simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm(1): This article is about using cwm and termbar together. The idea behind termbar is to launch an terminal that will loop printing the information you want; via a shell script.

How to configure a small mail server: This post is about setting up a mail server on an Internet facing host. It will accept and send mails for a domain, store the accepted mails locally and deliver them using POP3. This is a rather lengthy post because there are quite some pieces to put together. OpenSMTPD will handle incoming and outgoing mail using SMTP. rspamd will support it in fighting incoming spam and malware (using ClamAV), and signing outgoing mail using DKIM. Dovecot stores received mail for users and deliver it using POP3. Finally acme-client(8) is used to manage the certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

Relayd in OpenBSD: One of the components of OpenBSD is relayd. It’s an integrated Loadbalancer & Proxy Service, like F5, Nginx and Others. But just like other BSD Services, straight, simple and easy to use.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about High Availability Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD, CARP, pfsync, and ifstated, Building the Development Version of Emacs on NetBSD, rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc, FreeBSD 11.3 EOL, OPNsense 20.7.1 Released, MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/09/26 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

OpenBSD hackathon reports, NetBSD GSoC final reports plus latest releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 38", "date": "2020-09-23T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 23, 2020", "slug": "38", "html": "

FreeBSD Core Team Office Hours

Based on the continuity of the last CORE Office Hours The FreeBSD CORE Team would like to invite you all to a virtual town hall meeting. The session is timed at 1800 UTC on 23rd September, 2020. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/OfficeHours for details on how to join either a live stream to watch, or an interactive meeting to participate. A link to this agenda (and any updates) will be there as well. Topics:

Git Transition
Recruiting for project teams
Core TODO List publishing
Discuss proposed terminology changes
General Questions

Releases

MidnightBSD 1.2.9 RELEASE is now available in git in the stable/1.2 branch. It addresses two security vulnerabilities in bhyve and one in ftpd. Additionally, 2.0-CURRENT includes a fix for an issue with ure(4).

There is the first release candidate TrueNAS 12.0-RC1 for the first unified FreeNAS and TrueNAS release, renamed to TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise, respectively. More than 180 bugs have been fixed since 12.0-BETA2 as final polishing continues toward the launch of 12.0-RELEASE in October.

The second BETA build for the FreeBSD 12.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

4 new Security Advisories has been released for FreeBSD: FreeBSD-SA-20:30.ftpd, FreeBSD-SA-20:29.bhyvesvm, FreeBSD-SA-20:28.bhyvevmcs and FreeBSD-SA-20:27.ure.

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

News

OpenZFS 2.0-RC2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes: OpenZFS 2.0 is a huge update for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation in that it mainlines FreeBSD support alongside Linux, there is Zstd compression support, many performance optimizations, fast clone deletion, sequential resilvering, and a lot of other improvements and new features.

New version of FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020 is out. The script is slightly longer and more involved now, comparing to year ago when it was published first.

Support for more operating environments has landed
Support for application installations has landed
VMWare support was submitted
SDDM / polkit configuration has been introduced so you can shutdown / reboot from inside the KDE Plasma environment via the Leave menu

Why FreeBSD is moving to git: Warner talks about the reasons behind the planned move to git from subversion. This article focuses on the technical reasons that the previous core team decided to migrate the project from Subversion to git. Future articles will cover the nuts and bolts of what changes to people’s work flows can be expected.

There is also a video talking about the same topic.

DragonFly BSD offers first-boot tool: People who wish to customize the DragonFly BSD operating system have a new tool on their workbench. The project has introduced a first-boot flag which allows a program or script to be run once, and only once, the first time the operating system is booted following installation. “You can now add something to run on first boot after install, only, on DragonFly. This is probably of most use to you if you are building a custom image.”

k2k20 hackathon reports

OpenBSD had another hackathon and first reports are in:

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Modernizing the OpenBSD Console, OS roles have changed, FreeBSD Cluster with Pacemaker and Corosync, Wine in a 32-bit sandbox on 64-bit NetBSD, Find package which provides a file in OpenBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/09/19 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

New MidnightBSD, TrueNAS and FreeBSD releases; FreeBSD Core Team Office Hours; OpenBSD hackathon reports; plus latest news and SAs.

" }, { "title": "Issue 37", "date": "2020-09-16T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 16, 2020", "slug": "37", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 12.2 Beta: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 12.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

XIGMANAS 12.1.0.4 Release available, based on FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE-P9.

FuryBSD 2020-Q3 The world’s first OpenZFS based live image : FuryBSD is a tool to test stock FreeBSD in read write mode to see if it will work for you before installing. In order to provide the most reliable experience possible while preserving integrity of the system the LiveCD now leverages ZFS, compression, replication, memory file systems, and reroot.

BSDSec

Seems to be none SAs.

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

News

GhostBSD on Distrowatch: Distrowatch tried to review MATE edition of GhostBSD - operating system based on FreeBSD and with focus on desktop use. However, this time they could not get GhostBSD up and running.

GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report: This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

FreeBSD Core Team Office Hours: Based on the continuity of our last CORE Office Hours The FreeBSD CORE Team would like to invite you all to a virtual town hall meeting. The session is timed at 1800 UTC on 16th September, 2020. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/OfficeHours for details on how to join either a live stream to watch, or an interactive meeting to participate. A link to this agenda (and any updates) will be there as well.

Tutorials

FuryBSD: The “Ubuntu of BSD” has arrived, finally. Try it today! FuryBSD is a brand new, open source FreeBSD desktop. FuryBSD pays homage to desktop BSD projects of the past like PC-BSD and TrueOS with its graphical interface and adds additional tools like a live, hybrid USB / DVD image. FuryBSD is completely free to use and distributed under the BSD license.

FreeBSD Fridays: Introduction to Hardware Hacking on FreeBSD with Raspberry Pi: Join Tom Jones as he provides an introduction to FreeBSD running on the Raspberry Pi. The one-hour session covers interfacing with hardware like LEDs and switches.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch, Sandbox for FreeBSD, Changing from one dataset to another within a jail, You don’t need tmux or screen for ZFS, HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/09/12 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Join us this week again, as we take a look at the world of BSD world with latest releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 36", "date": "2020-09-09T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 09, 2020", "slug": "36", "html": "

FreeBSD 11.3 end-of-life

As of September 30, 2020, FreeBSD 11.3 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 11.3 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

The currently supported branches and releases and their expected end-of-life\ndates are:

Branch	Release	Release Date	Estimated EoL
stable/12	N/A	N/A	June 30, 2024
releng/12.1	12.1-RELEASE	November 4, 2019	12.2-RELEASE + 3 months
stable/11	N/A	N/A	September 30, 2021
releng/11.4	11.4-RELEASE	June 16, 2020	stable/11 end-of-life

Releases

OPNsense 20.7.2 Released: While team is still looking closer at netmap/iflib performance on 12.1, they are rolling out a kernel with Intel em/igb updates that should avoid bad packet counts in the default installation. Syslog-ng received a workaround for the diagnosed startup issue and alias now supports MAC address content similar to how host content works.

MidnightBSD 1.2.8: There was a security issue in dhclient. They’ve created new ISOs for 1.2.8 for those installing from scratch. If you are on 1.2.7, you can simply update the source from git for stable/1.2 branch and rebuild dhclient.

BSDSec

5 new FreeBSD Security Announcements and Errata notices: There have been 5 new Security Announcements and Errata notices for FreeBSD. They concern linuxthread, ipv6, sctp, getfsstat and dhclient.

Following FreeBSD, there are multiple advisories affecting MidnightBSD 1.2.x and current.

OpenBSD Errata: September 5th, 2020 (amdgpu): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. A buffer overflow was discovered in an amdgpu ioctl. Binary updates for the amd64 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

CVE-2020-7460: FreeBSD Kernel Privilege Escalation: In August, an update to FreeBSD was released to address a time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) bug that could be exploited by an unprivileged malicious userspace program for privilege escalation. This vulnerability was reported to the ZDI program by a researcher who goes by the name m00nbsd. He has graciously provided this write-up and proof-of-concept code detailing ZDI-20-949/CVE-2020-7460.

If you’ve got a newer i219 ethernet chipset – it’s now supported in DragonFly.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Kevin Bowling and Andrew Wafaa have joined the Board of Directors.

bhyve: The FreeBSD Hypervisor: bhyve was originally designed and implemented by Neel Natu, and a small team at NetApp grew the functionality over time. This project was eventually shelved, but the code was open sourced and contributed to FreeBSD in May of 2011. After that, it has seen continuous development ever since.

Tutorials

What FreeBSD can offer you that other operating systems does not? This post is not here to convince you to use or try FreeBSD – this you will have to do by yourself. This article will show you why FreeBSD is valuable or better alternative to other operating systems and is definitely not dying.

Find which package provides a given file in OpenBSD: There is one very hand package on OpenBSD and it’s pkglocatedb which provides the command pkglocate. If you need to find a file or binary/program and you don’t know which package contains it, use pkglocate.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about OpenZFS with ZSTD lands in FreeBSD 13, LibreSSL doc status update, FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead), Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/09/05 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Still running FreeBSD 11.3? Time to upgrade as it reaches EOL. We also take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 35", "date": "2020-09-02T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "September 02, 2020", "slug": "35", "html": "

What’s the oldest BSD

There are many actively developed BSD-based OSes, but can you guess which one is the oldest one?

This YouTube video tries to answer.

Releases

OpenBSD 6.8-beta tagged in CVS: Theo (deraadt@) has just committed the crank to 6.8-beta to CVS. You are welcome to test snapshots and report any issues you find, both in the base systems as in the supplied packages, so that the upcoming 6.8 release does not have surprise issues.

BSDSec

Seems to be none last week.

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

News

GhostBSD has published their financial reports from January to June 2020. The total amount donated was $5,341.75. Keep donations going!

Modernizing the OpenBSD console: What console framework does OpenBSD use, what were the improvements in last few years and what could be next?

GSoC 2020: Report-2: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment: This report was written by Nisarg S. Joshi as part of Google Summer of Code 2020. The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel.

Tutorials

How to build a name server with DNS over TLS (DoT): This post is about configuring nsd(8) as a public name server for your own domain, providing DNS over TLS (DoT). Everything needed for this task is already there in OpenBSD base installation. You don’t need to install a single additional package for this.

FreeBSD Fridays: An Introduction to FreeBSD Security: FreeBSD is known for its stability and security. Join Antranig Vartanian as he walks you through an introduction to FreeBSD Security including the IPFW firewall for workstations and server, Security Event Auditing and more.

FreeBSD configure AWS SES with Postfix MTA: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a hosted email service for you to send and receive email using your email addresses and domains. Typically SES used for sending bulk email or routing emails without hosting MTA with help of cloud servers provided by AWS. We can use Perl/Python/PHP APIs to send an email via SES. In this tutorial we are going to configure FreeBSD server or jail running Postfix to route all outgoing emails via AWS SES.

Minimal OpenBSD Virtual Machine: OpenBSD has its own hypervisor (vmm) for few years. It’s primary goal is to run OpenBSD guests. Recently I played around vmm to create a minimal virtual machine without a virtual disk! It is useful when you need to create lots of similar virtual machines without worrying about accidental data corruption by them.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD USB Audio, Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users, Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around, CLI Tools 235x Faster than Hadoop, FreeBSD Laptop Battery Life Status Command, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/29 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we ask: What’s the oldest active BSD? We also take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 34", "date": "2020-08-26T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 26, 2020", "slug": "34", "html": "

Is telemetry good?

What are the benefits of anonymous telemetry, and how can it help solve the problem of imperfect hardware support?

On the other hand, isn’t the same telemetry why we don’t want to use OSes like Windows?

Releases

MidnightBSD 1.2 out: This is a security and bug fix release.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: August 25th, 2020 (xserverlen): Errata patches for Xorg have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Various X server extensions had deficient input validation. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: August 25th, 2020 (xinitom): Errata patches for libX11 have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. An integer overflow in libX11 could lead to a double free. Additionally, fix a regression in ximcp. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

If you have an AMD processor, support for the System Management Network and CPU temperature readings are now available in DragonFly as amdsmn(4) and amdtemp(4).

LibreSSL 3.2.1 Released: This is the second development release from the 3.2.x series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.8.

FreeBSD merges OpenZFS support in to HEAD: The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base with the community allowing FreeBSD to receive new features sooner and with less effort. It is advised to not do ‘zpool upgrade’ or creating indispensable pools using new features until this change has had a month+ to soak.

Tutorials

FreeBSD Sound: ALSA & Qt: Sound in FreeBSD is somewhat complicated because of the various portability and compatibility shims. One might happen if you plug in a USB sound card: while the kernel and some applications might detect it just fine, other applications might not. There’s a way to fix this, though.

Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader: Almost two years ago this blog author wrote a blog post about checkpoints in ZFS. They didn’t hide that they were a big fan of them. That said, after those two years, they still feel that there are underappreciated features in the ZFS world, so they decided to do something about that.

Wifi USB’s - OpenSUSE vs GhostBSD, FreeBSD & NomadBSD: Youtuber found some random USB Wifi devices, so they thought they would test them on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to show them working then test them on GhostBSD, FreeBSD and NomadBSD. How many worked, and how many didn’t?

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks aboutFreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration, the grind of FreeBSD’s wireless stack, thoughts on overlooking Illumos’s syseventadm, when Unix learned to reboot, New EXT2/3/4 File-System driver in DragonflyBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/22 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we ask: Could telemetry be good for BSD? We also take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 33", "date": "2020-08-19T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 19, 2020", "slug": "33", "html": "

How it fits BSD?

Warning: both links are to Facebook.

Last week talked about how BSD hardware support does not seems that bad.

Need to check desired computer model for BSD compatibility? Try the new approach described in this article.

Releases

OPNsense 20.7.1 released: This small update brings security advisories, multicast fixes and logging reliability patches among others.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: August 18th, 2020 (libssl): Errata patches for LibreSSL have been released for OpenBSD 6.7. The previous errata patch 019 broke bidirectional SSL_shutdown. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

LibreSSL 3.1.4 Released: It includes the following interoperability and bug fixes for the TLSv1.3 client:

Improve client certificate selection to allow EC certificates instead of only RSA certificates.
Do not error out if a TLSv1.3 server requests an OCSP response as part of a certificate request.
Fix SSL_shutdown behavior to match the legacy stack. The previous behaviour could cause a hang.
Fix a memory leak and add a missing error check in the handling of the key update message.
Fix a memory leak in tls13recordlayersettraffic_key.
Avoid calling freezero with a negative size if a server sends a malformed plaintext of all zeroes.
Ensure that only PSS may be used with RSA in TLSv1.3 in order to avoid using PKCS1-based signatures.
Add the P-521 curve to the list of curves supported by default in the client.

The BSDCan 2020 videos now available. Well, that’s really it.

GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report: This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

DragonFly’s direct rendering has been updated to match Linux 4.12.15, which means improved support for a number of Intel processors.

HardenedBSD has released new Status Report (August 2020) which also includes Call for Donations.

Tutorials

Videoconferencing on FreeBSD: This page describes different approaches for videoconferencing on FreeBSD, what I’ve found along the way and what’s worked for me. tl;dr: Virtualization and the Linux compatibility layer may work for you, but web clients are currently the easiest way to do a video call on FreeBSD.

Changing from one dataset to another within a FreeBSD [iocage] jail: The purpose of this post is to document the existing configuration of the production FreshPorts webserver and outline the plan on how to modify it for more zfs-snapshot-based cache clearing.

A 35-year-old bug in patch found in edforts to restore 29 year old system: Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It’s quite interesting to use 27 year old patches to find this bug while restoring a 29 year old OS.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD Q2 Quarterly Status report of 2020, Traditional Unix Toolchains, BastilleBSD 0.7 released, Finding meltdown on DragonflyBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/15 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we learn how to check hardware support for BSDs. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 32", "date": "2020-08-12T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 12, 2020", "slug": "32", "html": "

Hardware support in BSD is not so bad

In this article the author has estimated the status of PCI hardware support in the latest versions of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD systems with the help of lists of supported device IDs extracted from kernel sources taking into account popularity of devices.

It still might be a bit misleading, as we don’t know when they started to be supported, as we still have a lot of modern hardware unsupported.

Releases

BSD Router Project 1.97: Based on a FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE (r363822), it fixes some missing Ethernet NIC modules (Chelsio Ethernet VF driver and Ethernet QLogic 3200 series). This version adds some new packages - Mellanox Firmware tools (lite version), WireGuard, vim-tiny, mrtparse (MRT format data parser), nrpe3 (Nagios client including nagios-plugins), frr7-pythontools (helper script to help reload frr). New features: load of Intel microcodes by default; update to 12.1-STABLE. Bug fixes: add Chelsio Ethernet VF driver (ifcxgbev); add missing ifqlxgb.ko for Ethernet QLogic 3200 series; correctly disabling ICMP redirect by default. New packages: Mellanox firmware tools (lite version); WireGuard; vim-tiny and more.

GhostBSD 20.08.04 Now Available: This release comes with kernel, OS and software application updates. We updated the MATE desktop to 1.24.0. A new interesting feature is the boot environment backup before updates.

BSDSec

New FreeBSD Security Advisories and Errata noticies

OpenBSD also got some errata:

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

News

LLVM 10.0.0 imported into OpenBSD -current: Patrick Wildt (patrick@) upgraded -current to version 10.0.0 of LLVM including clang, lld and lldb..

FreeBSD Foundation Q2 2020 Status Update: Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 2nd Quarter 2020 Status Report, check out the highlights of what have been done to help FreeBSD last quarter, including: COVID-19 Impact on the Foundation, Partnerships and Commercial User Support, Partnerships and Commercial User Support, OS Improvements, University of Waterloo Co-op, Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance, Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure, FreeBSD Advocacy and Education, Foundation Board Meeting and Legal/FreeBSD IP.

There are some new reports from NetBSD and GSoC:

Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, Part 2 (prepared by Ayushi Sharma)
Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls, Part 2 (prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala)
Curses Library Automated Testing (prepared by Naman Jain)

Tutorials

How to install a Wireguard VPN client in a FreeBSD jail: WireGuard is an open-source software application and communication protocol that implements VPN to create secure point-to-point connections in routed or bridged mode. It was initially developed for Linux but now ported to FreeBSD and other operating systems. This page explains how to install and set up WireGuard clients on the FreeBSD system, including jail.

NetBSD on the NanoPi NEO2: The NanoPi NEO2 from FriendlyARM has been serving the post author well since 2018, being their test machine for OpenBSD/arm64 related things. As NetBSD/evbarm finally gained support for AArch64 in NetBSD 9.0, released back in February, they decided to give it a try on this device. The board only has 512MB of RAM, and this is where NetBSD really shines.

Scripted Configuration (Screencast): This is a demonstration of using rset(1) for basic configuration management, as well as more complex data-driven systems orchestration.

How to try FuguIta: FuguIta is OpenBSD based live CD. Learn how to create FuguIta LiveDVD, LiveUSB and how to boot it.

USB audio devices on FreeBSD: Hardware support and configuration for USB audio devices, such as the Behringer UMC22 sound card, on FreeBSD.

Installing a jitsi server: A very detailed explanation of how to set up Jitsi on FreeBSD and how the various packages interact.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now has interview with Warner Losh about Unix history, the 2.11-BSD restoration project, the Unix heritage society, proper booting, and what devmatch is.

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/08 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we look at how hardware is supported across BSDs. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 31", "date": "2020-08-05T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "August 05, 2020", "slug": "31", "html": "

Releases

OPNsense® 20.7 “Legendary Lion” released: For five and a half years, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing. 20.7, nicknamed “Legendary Lion”, is a major operating system jump forward on a sustainable firewall experience. This release adds DHCPv6 multi-WAN, custom error pages for the web proxy, Suricata 5, HardenedBSD 12.1, netstat tree view, basic firewall API support (via plugin) and extended live log filtering amongst others.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 31st, 2020 (ximcp): Errata patches for libX11 have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Malformed messages can cause heap corruption in the X Input Method client implementation in libX11. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: July 31st, 2020 (dix): Errata patches for Xorg have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Pixmaps inside the xserver were an info leak. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

FreeBSD Foundation got a new look: The Foundation team is excited to announce a new look for heir website. They hope you’ll find the new site easier to read and navigate. They’ve also added a FreeBSD Resources section that includes links to how-to guides and other community training resources.They’re also unveiling a 20th Anniversary logo.

libressl updated in DragonFly: In Daniel Fojt’s ongoing series of third-party software upgrades, he’s moved libreSSL in DragonFly up a major version, from 2.9.1 to 3.1.3. This includes TLS 1.3, among other features.

DragonFlyBSD Pulls In AMD Temperature Driver, SMN Support From FreeBSD: DragonFlyBSD has been generally working out well for AMD Zen systems sans a few motherboard specific woes, but now is getting even better thanks to importing some new drivers from FreeBSD. Most exciting is the amdtemp driver now being imported from FreeBSD to DragonFlyBSD. This driver allows for temperature monitoring on AMD Family 0Fh, 10h, 11h, 12h, 14h, 15h, 16h, and 17h processors. The AMD Family 17h support covers Zen 1 as well as Zen 2, including the likes of Threadripper and EPYC. Also imported from FreeBSD is the amdsmn driver. This driver is for the AMD System Management Network (SMN) support on AMD Zen systems.

Tutorials

Testing Linux Steam Proton on GhostBSD (FreeBSD) with BSD linuxulator: BSD user tries running windows games with linux steam. There’s audio but obs cannot record it. 64 bit games are running nicely with performance similar to linux. Due to obs, there’s fps drop.

FreeBSD Virtual Data Centre with Potluck: DevOps & Infrastructure as Code: One of the main complaints about FreeBSD is the lack of Docker and Kubernetes, which in turn is seen as inability to use FreeBSD as a platform for bleeding edge concepts like micro services and scale-out container orchestration. This article series shows that FreeBSD also contains (more than) a complete selection of tools required to run a Virtual Datacenter (vDC). Beside showcasing the power of FreeBSD as a platform, this article series should give an idea of the concept of Potluck. While admittedly it is still in very early stages, it has the potential to be to complex container images and sets of different interdependent container images (like nomad, consul and traefik) what the FreeBSD package collection is to individual applications: Depending on your network speed, setting up the core configuration of consul, nomad and traefik in step 3 with the Potluck images will only take a few minutes.

Updating pkg when pkg is broken: Have you ever broke a pkg on DragonFly machine? Well, if you do, you can use pkg-static to fix it.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Emulex: The Cheapest 10gbe for Your Homelab, In Search of 2.11BSD, as released, Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM, First powerpc64 snapshots available for OpenBSD, OPNsense 20.1.8 released, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/01 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

There have been new Erratas (ximcp and dix) for OpenBSD last week and OPNsense release. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 30", "date": "2020-07-29T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 29, 2020", "slug": "30", "html": "

Releases

Seems to be none.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 22nd, 2020 (tty): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Only pty devices need reprint delays. 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: July 27th, 2020 (rpki): Errata patches for rpki-client have been released for OpenBSD 6.7. In rpki-client, incorrect use of EVPPKEYcmp allows an authentication bypass. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

OpenBSD Errata: July 27th, 2020 (iked): Errata patches for OpenIKED have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. In iked, incorrect use of EVPPKEYcmp allows an authentication bypass. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

New ext2fs support for DragonFly: Tomohiro Kusumi has imported a new version of ext2 filesystem support into DragonFly.

FreeBSD Core Team 10 in Review: As Core Team 11 readies to take over management of the FreeBSD Project, FreeBSD Foundation interviewed members of Core Team 10 for their observations on a productive two years.

NetBSD Is Making Progress On Benchmarking For Performance/Regression Testing: One of many interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 projects is working on automated benchmarking for NetBSD in order to allow for performance/regression testing of this BSD operating system known for its portability across CPU architectures.

DragonFlyBSD Updates Its Intel + Radeon Linux-Ported Graphics Driver Code: As of this weekend the code is now up to a state matching Linux 4.12.14. Yes, still quite old with Linux 5.8 around the corner, but at least progress is being made and it’s better than in the past or where there was no driver support previously.

nvi2 in FreeBSD ports: Craig Leres on the FreeBSD ports team has deprecated nvi-devel in lieu of nvi2, with the former expiring this time in October.

Tutorials

Adding Networking to the 2.11BSD pl 195 system: These instructions are for FreeBSD, alas, and other system may differ. However, the first section is the only part that’s FreeBSD specific. In the same series, there’s also another article: First screen shot of 2.11BSD as released.

ZFS High Availability Filesystem With minio on FreeBSD: minio on FreeBSD can easily be used as storage platform to add High Availability and Scale Out features to ZFS or FFS.

When Unix learned to reboot(2): Recently, a friend of this author asked about the history of halt, and when did we have to stop with the sync / sync / sync dance before running halt or reboot. The two are related, it turns out.

FreeBSD 64bit Assembler (amd64): For FreeBSD, there are not many 64bit assembler (amd64) examples available on the web and virtually none that are a little bit more complex. To change this, author ported a DOS Tetris game to 64bit FreeBSD, using SVGALIB to max VGA out with 320x200 and 256 colours - it is 2020 after all!

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Chasing a bad commit, New FreeBSD Core Team elected, Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro, FreeBSD on the Intel 10th Gen i3 NUC, pf table size check and change, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/07/25 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

There have been new Erratas for OpenBSD last week. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 29", "date": "2020-07-22T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 22, 2020", "slug": "29", "html": "

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2020

This report is covering FreeBSD related projects between April and June, and covers a diverse set of topics ranging from kernel updates over userland and ports, as well to third-party work.

Some hilights picked with the roll of a d100 include, but are not limited to, the ability to forcibly unmounting UFS when the underlying media becomes inaccessible, added preliminary support for Bluetooth Low Energy, a introduction to the FreeBSD Office Hours, and a repository of software collections called potluck to be installed with the pot utility, as well as many many more things.

Releases

TrueNAS Core will soon replace FreeNAS: Network-storage vendor iXsystems announced the release of TrueNAS 12.0-BETA1, which will replace FreeNAS later in 2020. The major offering of the new TrueNAS Core—like FreeNAS before it—is a simplified, graphically managed way to expose the features and benefits of the ZFS filesystem to end users. In the most basic environments, this might amount to little more than a Web front-end to ZFS itself, along with the Samba open-source implementation of Microsoft’s SMB network file-sharing protocol. TrueNAS Core will be what FreeNAS is now—the free, community version of iXsystems’ NAS (Network Attached Storage) distribution. End users—and system administrators who aren’t looking for paid support—can download FreeNAS or TrueNAS Core ISOs directly from iX.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: July 16th, 2020 (tty): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. tty subsystem abuse can impact performance badly. 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

Bastille 0.7.20200714 Released: Bastille Day 2020 brings us another release! This release matures the project from 0.6.x to 0.7.x and includes a number of features. Improvements include evolution of the template automation system, new mount/umount sub-commands, improved documentation and more.

More touchpad support for Dragonfly: DragonFly now has the wsp(4) device, for Wellspring touchpads on Apple laptops.

GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report: This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

Wireguard on (current|6.8): OpenBSD added wg to the Kernel a while ago. Why not have a look into and do some speedtests?

FreeBSD Back To Seeing Progress On 802.11ac WiFi Support, Ath10k Driver: Longtime FreeBSD/Linux network stack developer and former Qualcomm Atheros engineer Adrian Chadd is back to working on FreeBSD wireless networking improvements. Adrian has announced his return to working on FreeBSD’s wireless networking stack with a particular focus on the 802.11ac support (or there the largely lack of at the moment) and the porting of the Ath10k driver from Linux to FreeBSD.

DragonFlyBSD Lands New EXT2/3/4 File-System Driver: While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new “ext2fs” driver implementation for this BSD operating system.

Next FreeBSDFridays: Join the FreeBSD Foundation July 24 at 17:00 UTC (10:00am PDT) for the next FreeBSDFridays. For Part 1 of the FreeBSD InstallFest, Roller Angel will take you through the process of downloading, installing and configuring your FreeBSD instance on a VM.

Tutorials

2.11BSD Original Tapes Recreation: Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BSD you can find them online with little fuss. However, if you search for 2.11BSD, you’ll find it easily enough, but it won’t be the original. You’ll find either the latest patched version (2.11BSD pl 469), or one of the earlier popular version (pl 430 is popular). You can even find the RetroBSD project which used 2.11BSD as a starting point to create systems for tiny mips-based PIC controllers. You’ll find every single patch that’s been issued for the system. The goal of the project is to create two main artifacts. First, it would be cool to have a git repo that has all the 2.11BSD patch points in it. Second, it would be really cool to have a near copy of the 2.11BSD release tapes. This project aims to create these artifacts in a reproducible way. There’s next part now as well, SIMH Setup for 2.11BSD restoration project.

Traditional Unix Toolchains: Older Unix systems tend to be fairly uniform in how they handle the so-called ‘toolchain’ for creating binaries. This blog will give a quick overview of the toolchain pipeline for Unix systems that follow the V7 tradition (which evolved along with Unix, a topic for a separate blog maybe).

FreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration: FreeBSD has a handful of Qt WebEngine-based browsers. Falkon, and Otter-Browser, and qutebrowser and probably others, too. All of them can run into issues on FreeBSD with GPU-accelerated rendering not working. Let’s look at some of the workarounds.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With “pot” within 5 minutes, OmniOS as OpenBSD guest with bhyve, BSD vs Linux distro development, My FreeBSD Laptop Build, FreeBSD CURRENT Binary Upgrades, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/07/18 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we take a look at April-June FreeBSD report. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 28", "date": "2020-07-15T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 15, 2020", "slug": "28", "html": "

NetBSD Summer of Code first reports

NetBSD is taking part in Google Summer of Code this year again. First reports are in:

Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls Part 1 - prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala
Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally Part 1 - prepared by Nikita Gillmann
Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment Part 1 - prepared by Nisarg Joshi
Curses Library Automated Testing Part 1 - prepared by Naman Jain
Extending the functionality of NetPGP Part 1 - prepared by Jason High
Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, Part 1 - prepared by Ayushi Sharma

Releases

Seems to be none.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:19.unbound - Malformed answers from upstream name servers can send Unbound into an infinite loop, resulting in denial of service. A malicious query can cause a traffic amplification attack against third party authoritative nameservers.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:20.ipv6 - The IPV6_2292PKTOPTIONS set handler was missing synchronization, so racing accesses could modify freed memory.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:18.posix_spawnp - posix_spawnp spawns a new thread with a limited stack allocated on the heap before delegating to execvp for the final execution within that thread. execvp would previously make unbounded allocations on the stack, directly proportional to the length of the user-controlled PATH environment variable.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:14.linuxkpi - A bug in one of the LinuxKPI subroutines could cause a kernel panic.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:15.mps - mps(4) implements a pass-through interface which allows privileged user processes to submit commands directly to disks behind the controller. A bug in the code which copies command results out to the requesting process could cause a kernel panic.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:13.bhyve - When an attempt is made to pass through a PCI device to a bhyve(8) VM (causing initialization of IOMMU) on certain Intel chipsets using VT-d the PCI bus stops working entirely resulting in a host crash. This issue occurs at least on the Intel Skylake series processors and those released later. A device passed through to a guest VM running OpenBSD at least since version 6.4 on both AMD and Intel processors may not fully work in the guest. OpenBSD issues 4-byte PCI configuration-space register reads and writes to consecutive 2-byte fields, which were not handled correctly by bhyve(8).

OpenBSD Errata: July 9th, 2020 (shmget): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. shmget IPC_STAT leaked some kernel data. 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 worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

Sponsor NetBSD project on Github You can now sponsor The NetBSD Foundation on Github Sponsors. Tiers range from 5 to 500 $ and can get you different rewards, such as link on their website or dedicate resources to either pkgsrc bulk builds or source builds on two platforms of your choice. Donations to The NetBSD Foundation allow the project to purchase build hardware and fund development. GitHub does not charge fees for GitHub Sponsors. They cover payment processing costs, so one-hundred percent of your sponsorship goes to the developers and organizations.

Tutorial sites treating FreeBSD like a Linux distro: It is true that FreeBSD often gets treated as a Linux distro. Is this good? Is this bad? Should we do something about it?

Timecounters available to userland in -current: Paul Irofti (pirofti@) added support for reading timecounters in userland without making a syscall.

Jailing GUI Applications: This is a short tutorial on how to run GUI applications jailed. This is done primarily for Firefox but the same principle can be applied for any other application.

Tutorials

minio Distributed Mode on FreeBSD: minio is a well-known S3 compatible object storage platform that supports high availability features. This document described how to set it up on FreeBSD as a high availability platform. The certificate setup described might be interesting even if you plan to run minio on another platform and not FreeBSD.

Dummynet: The Better Way to Build FreeBSD Networks: Dummynet is the FreeBSD traffic shaper, packet scheduler, and network emulator. Dummynet allows you to emulate a whole set of network environments in a straight-forward way. It has the ability to model delay, packet loss, and can act as a traffic shaper and policer. Dummynet is roughly equivalent to netem in Linux, but we have found that dummynet is easier to integrate and provides much more consistent results.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Yubikey-agent on FreeBSD, Managing Kubernetes clusters from OpenBSD, History of FreeBSD part 1, Running Jitsi-Meet in a FreeBSD Jail, Command Line Bug Hunting in FreeBSD, Game of Github, Wireguard official merged into OpenBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/07/11 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week are first reports from GSoC. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 27", "date": "2020-07-08T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 08, 2020", "slug": "27", "html": "

Core Team Office Hours

FreeBSD recently held an election for its governing body called the Core Team (results in News section).

The newly elected Core Team would like to invite you to a virtual town hall meeting. They’ll be holding two sessions, one timed well for Europe and the Americas; the other timed well for Asia, Africa and India. Sessions will be held at 1800 UTC on July 7, 2020 and 0200 UTC on July 8, 2020. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/OfficeHours for details on how to join either a live stream to watch, or an interactive meeting to participate. A link to this agenda (and any updates) will be there as well.

They’ll be discussing the chosen topics and taking general questions at the end. They’ll have a moderator who will help call on people in the meeting to ask questions (or to offer comments) as well as relay relevant questions from IRC.

Releases

The release of NomadBSD 1.3.2 is now available, base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-p6. Many new utils has been added, like brightness_listener, load_iichid, volumecontrol and more. NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD.

TrueNAS 12 Beta 1 Released With Much Improved ZFS, Better AMD Ryzen CPU Support: As what was formerly FreeNAS, the first beta of TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is available for testing of this BSD-based operating system for NAS devices and other storage setups. The TrueNAS 12.0 Beta 1 both for the CORE and Enterprise editions includes much improved ZFS support with now relying upon the code that’s going to be released as OpenZFS 2.0, support for ZFS async copy-on-write, native ZFS dataset encryption, ZFS user quota capabilities, and more. In addition to much improved ZFS support there is also better hardware support with improved AMD Ryzen support as well as expanded network card coverage being two areas. TrueNAS 12.0 Beta 1 also brings a wide variety of performance improvements, support for fusion pools, API keys for scripted control of TrueNAS, and other changes.

OPNsense 20.1.8 released: OPNsense was delayed while they chased a race condition in the updates back to an issue with the latest FreeBSD package manager updates. For now they reverted to our current version but all relevant third party packages have been updated as updates became available over the last weeks, e.g. cURL and Python, and hostapd / wpa_supplicant amongst others.

BSDSec

Seems to be none.

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

News

First powerpc64 snapshots available for OpenBSD: Since we reported the first bits of powerpc64 support going into the tree on 16 May, work has progressed at a steady pace, resulting in snapshots now being available for this platform. So, if you have a POWER8 system idling around, go to your nearest mirror and fetch a snapshot. Keep in mind that as this is still very early days, very little handholding is available - you are basically on your own.

FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE Now Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, located at https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/thefreebsdfoundation.freebsd-12_1 Please provide feedback and report issues to the freebsd-cloud@ mailing list: https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-cloud. This work is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, with technical assistance from Microsoft.

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the completion of the 2020 Core Team election. Active committers to the project have elected your Eleventh FreeBSD Core Team.

Baptiste Daroussin (bapt)
Ed Maste (emaste)
George V. Neville-Neil (gnn)
Hiroki Sato (hrs)
Kyle Evans (kevans)
Mark Johnston (markj)
Scott Long (scottl)
Sean Chittenden (seanc)
Warner Losh (imp)

Let’s extend our gratitude to the outgoing Core Team members for their service over the past two years (some cases, many more).

Thanks to Daniel Fojt, awk(1) has jumped from the 2012 version in DragonFly, to the 2020 version.

Tutorials

If you happen to have an APU2, here’s some tips on the boot process for DragonFly.

Simple ipfw NAT for bhyve virtual machines and vnet jails: Author of this post had a hard time figuring out ipfw in-kernel NAT from guides, so instead here they present the simplest set of commands they could find to set up a NAT and a little explanation to help you debug when it doesn’t work.

Prometheus - Auto-deploying Consul and Exporters using Saltstack Part 4: FreeBSD: This is the fourth part in my ongoing series on using SaltStack to deploy Consul and Prometheus Exporters, enabling Prometheus to discover machines and services to monitor.

7 Days Of BSD Challenge: Youtube videos series from Linux Lounge about using FreeBSD on a laptop.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines, NetBSD code study, DRM Update on OpenBSD, Booting FreeBSD on HPE Microserver SATA port, 3 ways to multiboot, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/07/04 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week is new Core Team of FreeBSD and newly announced Core Team Office Hours. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest releases, news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 26", "date": "2020-07-01T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "July 01, 2020", "slug": "26", "html": "

Announcing FreeBSD Fridays: A Series of 101 Classes

Beginning on July 17, we hope you’ll join FreeBSD Foundation for an expanded #FreeBSDFridays series of 101 classes. They’re building on the FreeBSD Day content to offer 1 hour live sessions every Friday, designed to get you started with FreeBSD. The program kicks off with Deb Goodkin’s Intro to FreeBSD class, followed by a two-part Installfest led by Roller Angel. The sessions will take place at 10am PDT athttps://live.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/freebsdfriday/

Other classes include, Introduction to OpenZFS by Dan Langille, A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem by Kirk McKusick, and more.

Releases

Seems to be none.

BSDSec

End of support for NetBSD 7: Earlier, the EOL date for NetBSD 7 was extended to June 30, 2020, to accommodate people who could not update machines due to pandemic restrictions. Thus as of July 1, 2020, there will be no further maintenance to the NetBSD 7 branches (netbsd-7, netbsd-7-1 and netbsd-7-0). We recommend all users still running these ancient releases to test the latest 9.0_STABLE versions and update as soon as possible.

pkgsrc-2020Q2 released: The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 67th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 22,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/.

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

News

Virtual Bug Squash, Saturday 11th July 1400-2100UTC. On the 11th July 2020 from 1400-2100 UTC FreeBSD will be running a coordinated virtual Bug Squash. FreeBSD has a Problem Report (PR) database where users and developers are encouraged to file issues and regressions they find in both the base system and ports tree. A Bug Squash is a focused session where we try to triage, process, fix and close as many reports as we can from the PR database.

If you have a UEFI system, efibootmgr(8) is now available in Dragonfly.

Aaron LI has updated head(1) and tail(1) in DragonFly – new switches for head, a new switch for tail, and tac.

Orlando BSD user group: Currently they do not have our own general meetings. However if you wish to discuss anything BSD related please join their mailing list. Depending on the amount of interest they gain on this mailing list will determine the future of a local BSD user group. They also have a list of BSD resources.

The powerd++ daemon is a drop-in replacement for FreeBSD’s native powerd. Its purpose is to reduce the energy consumption of CPUs.

Did you know there’s a default size limit to pf’s routing table? If for some reason you bump into this limit, you can change it.

Tutorials

Android in FreeBSD bhyve: Do you want to use android apps? Android in FreeBSD bhyve works like a charm.

Prometheus - Auto-deploying Consul and Exporters using Saltstack Part 3: OpenBSD: This is the third part in ongoing series on using SaltStack to deploy Consul and Prometheus Exporters, enabling Prometheus to discover machines and services to monitor. Being able to manage OpenBSD in the same way you can manage Linux and Windows ensures consistency across your environment, no matter what role they serve in your infrastructure.

The FreeBSD binary package manager cheatsheet: Let’s find out the essential commands that are needed to manage our binary packages in FreeBSD operating system. By looking into 70 practical pkg commands.

Video review of the Homura Project - The Ultimate FreeBSD Gaming Tool for playing Windows games.

27 Years of FreeBSD and Why You Should Get Involved!: This is a webinar from Deb Goodkin, executive director of FreeBSD Foundation.

OpenZFS: All About the cache vdev or L2ARC: This is part of article series published as “OpenZFS in Depth and talks about one of the well-known support vdev classes under OpenZFS: the CACHE vdev, better (and rather misleadingly) known as L2ARC.

Whither chroot?: This blog post will examine original artifacts to clear up some confusion about where chroot(2) and chroot(8) came from. The answer turns out to be simple, and the confusion was understandable.

Adding a second disk with SIMH and 2.11BSD: Author recently followed some instructions to get 2.11BSD running under SIM. As part of their 2.11BSD patch level 0 restoration project , they needed to add another disk they could install chroot images to test building.

Command Line Bug Hunting in FreeBSD: FreeBSD uses bugzilla for tracking bugs, taking feature requests, regressions and issues in the Operating System. The web interface for bugzilla is okay, but if you want to do a lot of batch operations it is slow to deal with. There is a plan to run a bugsquash in July and that really needs some tooling to help any hackers that show up process the giant bug list project has. Thankfully there is a python3 command line tool for interacting with bugzilla, called pybugz. bugz allows you to search through, up date and modify bugs without having to use a web browser.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about TrueNAS is Multi-OS, Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD, FreeBSD’s new Code of Conduct, Gaming on OpenBSD, dig a little deeper, Hammer2 and periodic snapshots, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/06/27 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week is A Series of 101 Classes from FreeBSD. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 25", "date": "2020-06-24T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 24, 2020", "slug": "25", "html": "

BSD versus Linux distribution development

It is said that the BSDs have a distinct approach in terms of packaging the base system relative to userland apps, and that the Linux distros at the time were not following the same practice.

Are there Linux distros that have adopted the same approach in modern times? If not, are there technical limitations that are preventing them from doing so, such as some distros supporting multiple kernel versions maybe?

In short, while there are technical hurdles (such as distributed development) which make it harder for Linux distributions to provide the same sort of base platform isolated from third-party applications, it is possible for Linux distributions to offer this approach. There are several solutions available, each with their strengths and weaknesses. None of these approaches is exactly the same as the BSDs, but some of them are similar and offer some of the same benefits.

Releases

Seems to be none.

BSDSec

Seems to be none.

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

News

FreeBSD Day postponed: The FreeBSD Foundation has announced via Tweet that it is postponing FreeBSD day. Decisions comes due to fact that the same day is also “Juneteenth” - a holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. The same day is significant to Project origins and thus was designated as “FreeBSD Day”.

DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Ubuntu 20.04 On Intel’s Core i9 10900K Comet Lake: One of the areas where Intel has the leg up over AMD when it comes to open-source software support is on the BSD side where generally the likes of FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD often exhibit better out-of-the-box support at launch. Here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD are running on the Core i9 10900K “Comet Lake” processor with Z490 motherboard.

wg(4), an in kernel driver for WireGuard vpn communication has been committed into OpenBSD.

History of FreeBSD – Part 1: Unix and BSD: FreeBSD, a free and open-source Unix-like operating system has been around since 1993. However, its origins are directly linked to that of BSD, and further back, those of Unix. During this History of FreeBSD series, we will talk about how Unix came to be, and how Berkeley’s Unix developed at Bell Labs.

Tutorials

In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker, mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM, a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu. NetBSD would be a perfect match for this kind of target, as the kernel and the entire OS can be stripped down easily, so one user indeed tried and wrote about it.

FreeBSD’s METALOG: unprivileged installs. When you 'make installworld -DNOROOT DESTDIR=blah', the system will create a $DESTDIR/METALOG file. This file contains all the permission and modes for the files. Normally, installworld requires root permission. -DNOROOT instructs the build system to install them as the user and to note what permissions, etc in a METALOG.

Running Jitsi-Meet in a FreeBSD Jail: How-to for running Jitsi-Meet videoconferencing system in a FreeBSD jail.

Grafana Dashboard for Jitsi-Meet: Setting up the Jitsi-Meet Grafana Dashboard on FreeBSD.

Renaming and replacing zroot filesystems using mfsBSD: Post about replacing one zroot with another because of missing binaries and suspect layout. The existing zroot is an old system predating current zroot layouts.

MTA-STS on MidnightBSD: Steps to setup MTA-STS for inbound mail on MidnightBSD.

Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With “pot” Within 5 Minutes: When using FreeBSD on your desktop, you can use “pot” to easily create “throw away” browser jails. That way, the browser environment is reliably and completely erased and reset each time you re-create it with one single, simple command.

Graphical view of the x86 OpenBSD boot process: Ever wanted to know how PCs boot into OpenBSD? This document shows which files are related to each step, in which order things are read/executed and a human readable list of the operations done by /etc/rc up to the point where you can log in to your system and your personal customizations start.

Running pgbackrest on FreeBSD: pgbackrest is a tool for backup and recovery of a PostgreSQL database. It fully supports non-Linux platforms, including FreeBSD, thanks to the changes in the compilation approach. It is therefore a simple process to get pgbackrest installed on your FreeBSD machine.

OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS: This post will cover setting up bhyve on OmniOS, so it will also be a good introduction to bhyve. As well, it looks into OpenBSD’s uEFI boot loader so if you have had trouble with this, then you are in the right place.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Upgrading OpenBSD, Where do Unix man pages come from?, Help for NetBSD’s VAX port, FreeBSD on Dell Latitude 7390, PFS Tool changes in DragonflyBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/06/20 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week is BSD versus Linux distribution development. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 24", "date": "2020-06-17T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 17, 2020", "slug": "24", "html": "

National FreeBSD day

National FreeBSD Day on June 19th commemorates the launch date of an innovative technology that many of us use every day.

FreeBSD Foundation founded National FreeBSD Day to recognize its pioneering and continuing impact on technology and honor its legacy. Commemorating the launch date of FreeBSD, June 19th, was selected.

On June 15, 2017, the Registrar atNational Day Calendar declared the day to be officially observed on June 19th, annually.

Share your experiences with FreeBSD and explore the possibilities and join the discussion using #FreeBSDDay on social media.

Releases

pfSense 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1 Now Available: pfSense software version 2.4.5-p1 is a maintenance release which brings several important stability and bug fixes for issues present in pfSense 2.4.5-RELEASE.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth and final release of the stable/11 branch. Some of the highlights:

The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, and compiler-rt utilities as well as libc++ have been updated to upstream version 10.0.0.
OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.2u.
Unbound has been updated to version 1.9.6.
The pkg(8) utility has been updated to version 1.13.2.
The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version 5.18.4.1.19.12.3.
The GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 3.28.
Support for renaming ZFS bookmarks has been added.
The certctl(8) utility has been added.
Several feature additions and updates to userland applications.
Warnings for features deprecated in future releases will now be printed on all FreeBSD versions.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 11th, 2020 (x509): Errata patches for LibreSSL have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. libcrypto may fail to build a valid certificate chain due to expired untrusted issuer certificates. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

The FreeBSD Project has adopted a new LLVM-derived code of conduct. The new code of conduct can be found at https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html. This comes as a result of two surveys related to Code of Conduct for active FreeBSD developers.

HardenedBSD June 2020 Status Report: Now that HardenedBSD’s infrastructure has found its new home, it’s time to ramp up development again.

MidnightBSD is available on Amazon Web Services. On the marketplace, you can use the MidnightBSD 0.8.6 release. A newer version was submitted to Amazon, but not approved yet.

Are you into the code of different OSs? Well, read this article for fascinating dive into NetBSD code.

The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system.

LibreSSL 3.1.3 Released and it includes the following fix:

libcrypto may fail to build a valid certificate chain due to expired untrusted issuer certificates

Tutorials

FreeBSD VNET Jail HowTo: An example on how to get started with VNET Jails with jail.conf, with FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE.

WireGuard VPN Server on a Cloud VPS on OpenBSD 6.6 with Full Disk Encryption: This guide will deploy WireGuard on top of the OpenBSD Operating System (OS) in Vultr.

Guides to enable webcam support in FreeBSD seem to stop short of using the webcam in a browser (e.g. Chrome or Firefox). This article describes how to use the webcam on FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE-p3 with Chromium 81.0.4044.113 and Firefox 75.0 (currently both from the ‘latest’ branch of packages).

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD 11.4-RC 2 available, OpenBSD 6.7 on a PineBook Pro 64, How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe, Bringing FreeBSD to EC2, FreeBSD 2020 Community Survey, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/06/13 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week is National FreeBSD day coming up this Friday. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 23", "date": "2020-06-10T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 10, 2020", "slug": "23", "html": "

2020 FreeBSD Community Survey

The FreeBSD Core Team invites you to complete the 2020 FreeBSD Community Survey:

https://www.research.net/r/freebsd-2020-community-survey

The purpose of the survey is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the project’s priorities and efforts. As an example, last year’s survey results helped fuel the project’s conversion to git. The survey will remain open for 14 days and will close on June 16 at 17:00 UTC (Tuesday 10am PDT).

Please feel free to share the survey URL on social media or with your peers, co-workers, employer, friends, or anyone else interested in FreeBSD.

The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete.

Releases

Seems like none.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 5th, 2020 (hid): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Malicious HID descriptors could be misparsed. 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: June 8th, 2020 (asr): Errata patches for libc have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. libc’s resolver could get into a corrupted state. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:11.ena: The ena(4) driver attempts to allocate a large number of 16 kB mbuf clusters to use as buffers for received packets. Under low memory conditions, the process of attempting to allocate these buffers may take a long time. On FreeBSD 12.x, these allocations are attempted from an interrupt thread running at high priority, and can subsequently starve other parts of the system of CPU time. It appears that systems using the ZFS filesystem may be more likely to experience this issue, possibly due to the memory pressure created by the allocation of memory to the ZFS ARC. The system may become unresponsive, appearing to “lock up” for periods of several seconds.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:12.iflib: The iflib watchdog would sometimes trigger a false positive queue hang just after a link state change.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:17.usb: USB Human Interface Device (HID) descriptors may push/pop the current state to allow description of items residing in a so-called union. FreeBSD supports 4 such pop levels. If the push/pop level is not restored within the processing of the same HID item, an invalid memory location may be used for subsequent HID item processing. An attacker with physical access to a USB port may be able to use a specially crafted USB device to gain kernel or user-space code execution. Setting “sysctl hw.usb.disable_enumeration=1” disables USB device enumeration preventing the error from occurring.

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

News

While no one would expect this, there are huge efforts from a small team to bring more games into OpenBSD. In fact, now some commercial games works natively now, thanks to Mono or Java. There are no wine or linux emulation layer in OpenBSD. Read on for a list of most well known games that run on OpenBSD.

Jonathan Gray (jsg@) has just committed an update to the DRM code to the tree. This update brings support for newer AMD and Intel graphics parts. This work was sponsored by the OpenBSD Foundation.

TrueNAS isn’t abandoning BSD—but it is adopting Linux: To the surprise—and likely consternation—of BSD fans everywhere, FreeNAS vendor iXsystems is building a new version of its core product, TrueNAS, on top of Debian Linux.

FreeBSD HEAD Binary Upgrades: up.bsd.lv is a proof-of-concept of binary updates for FreeBSD/amd64 CURRENT/HEAD to facilitate the exhaustive testing of FreeBSD and the bhyve hypervisor and OpenZFS 2.0 specifically. Updates are based on the SVN revisions of official FreeBSD Release Engineering bi-monthly snapshots. This proof-of-concept is not a publication of FreeBSD.

A collection of FreeBSD desktop distributions that have taken the FreeBSD operating system in a new direction while still relying on the incredibly powerful and stable base operating system of FreeBSD. From integrated desktop environments, portable USB-based systems, to data recovery tools, FreeBSD has been used by a wide variety of open-source projects. This page hopes to highlight just a few of these projects.

NetBSD’s VAX port needs help. The VAX is the oldest machine architecture still supported by NetBSD. Unfortunately there is another challenge, totally outside of NetBSD, but affecting the VAX port big time: the compiler support for VAX is … let’s say sub-optimal. It is also risking to be dropped completely by gcc upstream.

Check this video about 10 Myths about FreeBSD, and a reply against them.

Tutorials

Manage Kubernetes clusters from OpenBSD: In this article author will talk about how they manage work infrastructure (all cloudy and containery) from the comfort of their OpenBSD-current workstation.

This document is work in progress of a user installing OpenBSD 6.7-current on a PineBook Pro 64.

Following is the roadmap on how to get yubikey-agent set up on FreeBSD. The actual details depend on your system.

Asset inventory with Rumble on FreeBSD: Inventory and control of your IT hardware and software based assets is one of the basic processes you must have in place managing and securing an IT infrastructure properly. Rumble is a network asset discovery tool and as of 2 June 2020 it is also available on FreeBSD.

Installing Debian under FreeBSD’s bhyve: It turns out that Debian tries to make multi-booting possible and puts its EFI binary into a non-standard location. That combined with bhyve not persisting EFI variables after shutdown results in any boot after the the first poweroff not even trying to look at the Debian-specific path.

Fuguita OpenBSD server - building a new wifi-router/server: Podcast episode from Hacker Public Radio: Your ideas, projects, opinions - podcasted.

Crossplatform .dotfile management: One of the defining feautures of Unix is that all your user-specific configuraiton is contained in dotfiles in your home directory. With a bit of care to make them POSIX or portable, one could use the same dotfiles on FreeBSD, macOS, illumos/Solaris, and Linux.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about scheduling in NetBSD, ZFS vs. RAID on Ironwolf disks, OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go 2, FreeBSD for Linux sysadmins, FreeBSD on Lenovo T480, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/06/06 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week is FreeBSD Community Survey. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 22", "date": "2020-06-03T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "June 03, 2020", "slug": "22", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 11.4-RC2 Available. The second RC build for the FreeBSD 11.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: June 1st, 2020 (perl). Errata patches for Perl have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Several problems in Perl’s regular expression compiler could lead to corruption of the intermediate language state of a compiled regular expression. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

Thanks to Daniel Fojt, wpa_supplicant(8) in DragonFly jumped from version 2.1 to 2.9. There’s a nice changelog for the curious.

Bastille templates have been updated to include dnsmasq percona and asterisk services on FreeBSD.

OpenBSD 6.7 and ffs2 FAQs: Otto Moerbeek (otto@) posted to misc@ a useful summary of the state of play of FFS2 in the 6.7 release (and, to some extent, -current). In his mail, Otto clarifies some things about the latest release.

New fuzzing tool finds 26 USB bugs in Linux, Windows, macOS, and FreeBSD: Academics say they discovered 26 new vulnerabilities in the USB driver stack employed by operating systems such as Linux, macOs, Windows, and FreeBSD. Only one bug was found in FreeBSD.

Bringing FreeBSD to EC2 with Colin Percival: Podcast episode with Colin Percival, the founder of Tarsnap and a member of the FreeBSD project for 15 years. Starting in 2008 he led the efforts to bring FreeBSD to the Amazon EC2 platform, and for the past 7 years he has been maintaining this support, keeping FreeBSD up to date with all of the latest changes and functionality in Amazon EC2.

Recently, two new features has been added (EFS automount and ebsnvme-id) which are available in the weekly HEAD and 12-STABLE snapshots and will appear in releases starting from 12.2-RELEASE.

FreeBSD Office Hours - May 27 2020: Core Team Candidates. Recording of the forth meeting of FreeBSD Office Hours. In this session they invited the candidates from the 2020 Core Team Election to answer questions from the audience.

LibreSSL 3.2.0 Released. This is the first development release from the 3.2.x series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.8. Biggest change is that it enables TLS 1.3 server side in addition to client by default.

Tutorials

Learn how to self-host S3 Object Storage on FreeNAS with Minio with this video tutorial.

OpenBSD 6.2+ setup and guide to building and installing CDE: These instructions are verified with a default OpenBSD 6.3 install. X windows components installed from CD. Make sure OpenBSD ports and packages system are set up.

OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines APU4D: One user just got a PC Engines APU4D4 to make an OpenBSD box for providing home services. It was quite simple to install and run OpenBSD on machine, and you can even update the BIOS from OpenBSD.

Learn how you can import DHCP reservations from Synology DHCP Server to OpenBSD dhcpd(8).

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about a brief introduction to randomness, logs grinding netatalk to a hault, NetBSD core team changes, Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests, WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD, FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/30 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week brings new RC for FreeBSD 11.4. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 21", "date": "2020-05-27T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 27, 2020", "slug": "21", "html": "

Submit Your FreeBSD Project Proposal

Do you have a project you’d like to work on that would improve FreeBSD?

The FreeBSD Foundation is still soliciting the submission of proposals for work that directly benefits any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system.

Proposals will be accepted for work on any of the subsystems or infrastructure in FreeBSD, although the Foundation is particularly interested in receiving project grant proposals in a few key areas:

Installation and deployment tooling, including pkgbase
Containerization improvements, such as jail orchestration or Docker compatibility
Improving the security of FreeBSD and of applications running on FreeBSD
Development tooling, such as debuggers, fuzzers, static analysis tools
Establishes FreeBSD as a leader in projects with multiple operating system support, for example ZFS, LLVM, or libarchive
Developing improvements to ports infrastructure and tooling

Releases

FreeBSD 11.4-RC1 Available. The first RC build for the FreeBSD 11.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of FreeBSD mirror sites.

FuguIta 6.7 released. FuguIta is OpenBSD live system. This is a first test release of 6.7. Fast-boot-cache has not been installed yet.

OPNsense 20.1.7 released. OPNsense moves to PHP 7.3 in order to be able to complete testing for the 20.7-BETA online upgrades. It also included is a patch for the packet filter kernel code which could crash with shared forwarding when interfaces disappeared due to use after free in the default network stack path.

BSDSec

Errata patches for LibreSSL have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and OpenBSD 6.6.

OpenBSD Errata: May 22nd, 2020 (libssl)- a TLS client with peer verification disabled may crash when contacting a server that sends an empty certificate list,
OpenBSD Errata: May 22nd, 2020 (unbound) - specially crafted queries may crash unbound and unwind. Both can be tricked into amplifying an incoming query,
OpenBSD Errata: May 25th, 2020 (smtpd_sockaddr) - Incorrect use of getpeername(2) storage for outgoing IPv6 connections corrupts stack memory. The nature of the corruption and existing mitigations appear to make this difficult to effectively target.

Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. After patching, restart affected services.

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

News

DarkMate 12.1 is a desktop install script for FreeBSD 12.1. This script helps you set up a desktop system on top of FreeBSD 12.1. It will install PKG, X, MATE, SLiM, some additional tools and set up a ‘wheel video’ user.

In a commit touching quite a few files, Theo recently renamed the installation images from installXX.fs to installXX.img. These are UFS filesystem images, but additionally have a bootblock in the first 8K (since UFS does not use that space). There are some UEFI direct-from-internet bootloaders that require the name *.img. So this makes things more convenient for those, while keeping it consistent in all architectures.

LibreSSL 3.1.2 have been released. It includes the following fix: A TLS client with peer verification disabled may crash when contacting a server that sends an empty certificate list.

BSD Hardware: This is a project to collect hardware details of BSD-powered computers over the world and help BSD users and developers to collaboratively debug hardware related issues, check for BSD-compatibility and find drivers. Make a probe of your computer in order to participate and discover the world of hardware in details. Share your probes and logs with BSD developers to debug and fix problems on your computer.

This short blog post summarizes the KDE/Qt work done in OpenBSD 6.7 and plans for 6.8.

Tutorials

FreeBSD Laptop: Dell Latitude 7390. FreeBSD developer explains why they decided to get this laptop, and how to get the most of it with FreeBSD. FYI, they run KDE. At the end of article you can find the list of things that do and don’t work.

Setting Up Windows iSCSI Block Shares on TrueNAS & FreeNAS. In this tutorial, we’ll cover the basics of iSCSI, configuring iSCSI on FreeNAS (soon to be TrueNAS CORE), and setting up access from a Windows machine.

Upgrade your OpenBSD VM. OpenBSD 6.7 has been released last week. There are two ways you can upgrade your VM. Either use sysupgrade(8) or do a manual upgrade.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Backup and Restore on NetBSD, OpenBSD 6.7 available, Building a WireGuard Jail with FreeBSD’s standard tools, who gets to chown things and quotas, influence TrueNAS CORE roadmap, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/23 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Developer? You can get a grant from FreeBSD to work on it. Plus the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 20", "date": "2020-05-20T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 20, 2020", "slug": "20", "html": "

Releases

FreeBSD 11.4-BETA2 Available: ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of FreeBSD mirror sites.

The OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 6.7, marking the 48th release of operating system. These are some highlights of the improvements in the present release:

For new installs on nearly all architectures the default file system is now FFS2, sporting 64-bit timestamps and block counters
There are numerous SMP improvements, including unlocking of several system calls
Hardware support in all architectures is much improved and expanded, with a number of new drivers including the iwx(4) driver for new Intel WiFi devices as well as significant expansion of arm64 and armv7 hardware support.
Enabled rpki-client(8), to support Origin Validation in BGP-speaking routers in the base install.
New versions of programs and subsystems maintained as part of OpenBSD but widely reused elsewhere (LibreSSL 3.1.1, OpenSSH 8.3, OpenSMTPD 6.7.0)

BSDSec

This week was really busy with Security Advisories and Errata notices both for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

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

News

tcplay(8) in DragonFly jumped from 2.0 to 3.3. This will be most relevant to you if you encrypt your disks.

You can now use newsyslog(8) to rotate logs being written by daemon(8) in DragonFly.

Martin Ivanov has completed his multiboot + DragonFly tutorial. You can read his users@ post on it now, though it should show up in dragonflybsd.org documentation soon.

TrueOS development ceased. Does anyone remember PC-BSD, the FreeBSD-based distribution aimed at desktop users? After being acquired by iXsystems and renamed to TrueOS, the graphical installer was removed in 2018 because TrueOS served more as a base for iXsystems’ other offerings, such as FreeNAS, And now, development has been halted entirely.

The FreeBSD Project is once again participating as a mentoring organization in the Google Season of Docs program. The goal of the program is to bring open source and technical writers together. Technical writers spend three months working closely with open source communities to bring their expertise to the project’s documentation. The list of available tasks and contact information is available on the FreeBSD wiki.

OpenZFS 0.8.4 is out as the latest update to this leading open-source ZFS file-system base for Linux and FreeBSD and coming together as well for macOS. OpenZFS 0.8.4 has a number of bug fixes, better AES-GCM performance, init script updates, enhancements to the systemd mount generator, and other miscellaneous changes.

First seed for OpenBSD/powerpc64 planted. In a set of commits to the tree on Saturday, Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) added the early beginnings of support for the 64-bit PowerPC platform. As support for additional hardware platforms brings opportunities to find (and fix) bugs on other, more established environments, this is definitely an interesting development. Of course it is still currently very much in its infancy, so don’t drag out your POWER9 systems just yet, unless you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and get some diffs submitted.

Communauté française autour d’OpenBSD: There’s a new French OpenBSD community.

rpki-client 6.7 has just been released and will be available in the rpki-client directory of any OpenBSD mirror soon. rpki-client is a FREE, easy-to-use implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for Relying Parties (RP) to facilitate validation of the Route Origin of a BGP announcement.

Tutorials

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests. He made a few enhancements for OpenBSD Journal.

Backup and Restore on NetBSD. Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most Admin Handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing old Mac Mini’s OS by NetBSD, author tried to implement an automated backup, allowing them to handle it similarly to the time machine backups they’ve been using before.

Thinking about trying out OpenBSD on Surface Go 2? Someone did.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about 5x if_bridge Performance Improvement, How Unix Won, Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD, Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS, TrueNAS 11.3-U2 Available, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/16 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week was busy one for OpenBSD and FreeBSD. There are new releases for both and bunch of SAs. Plus the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 19", "date": "2020-05-13T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 13, 2020", "slug": "19", "html": "

Google Summer of Code 2020: NetBSD and FreeBSD projects

NetBSD team is very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2020 projects:

Apurva Nandan - Benchmark NetBSD
Jain Naman - Curses library automated testing
Nikita Gillmann - Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally
Ayushi Sharma - Enhance the syzkaller support for NetBSD
Aditya Vardhan Padala - Rumpkernel Syscall Fuzzing
Nisarg Joshi - Fuzzing the network stack of NetBSD in a rumpkernel environment
Jason High - Extending the functionality of the netpgp suite

The community bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started on May 4 and will go on until June 1. The coding period will be June 1 to August 24.

FreeBSD is partaking this year as well. Prominent FreeBSD developers are mentoring students to develop for NetFPGA, Network Configuration Libraries, eBPF XDP Hooks, audit(4) Kernel Dump Regression Testing, and Capsicumization of the base system.

Releases

DragonFly 5.8.1 is released, a bugfix update for 5.8.0. The release tag commit has the list of changes, or you can go right to the release page.

The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

We have new release - LibreSSL 3.1.1, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This is the first stable release from the 3.1 series, which is included with OpenBSD 6.7. The LibreSSL project continues improvement of the codebase to reflect modern, safe programming practices.

OpenBSD Errata: May 10th, 2020 (ospfd). Errata patches for ospfd have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. ospfd could generate corrupt OSPF Router (Type 1) LSAs in certain situations. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-07: The HamBSD project aims to bring amateur packet radio to OpenBSD, including support for TCP/IP over AX.25 and APRS tracking/digipeating in the base system. Right now, work on HamBSD is still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). Next steps:

Keep track of number of packets uploaded and downloaded
Add those statistics to station capabilities packet

NetBSD Core Team Changes. Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions. Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group,and bringing it up to date with modern functionality.

My Experience as a FreeBSD Foundation Co-Op Student: Zhengyuan “Tiger” Gao joined the Foundation team in January as part of their continued work with the co-op program at University of Waterloo, Ontario. He shares his experience working with the FreeBSD Project.

WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD: In a post to tech@, Matt Dunwoodie announced the availability of a WireGuard® patchset for OpenBSD. From the WireGuard® point-of-view, this is an official patchset. WireGuard is a free and open-source software application and communication protocol that implements virtual private network techniques to create secure point-to-point connections in routed or bridged configurations.

TLSv1.3 server code enabled in LibreSSL in -current: Joel Sing (jsing@) enabled the TLSv1.3 server code (in LibreSSL) in -current. The client code was already enabled in -current (and will be in the 6.7 release).

Tutorials

Getting started with FreeBSD as a desktop operating system. FreeBSD is a great operating system, but, by design, it does not come with a desktop environment. Without installing additional software from FreeBSD’s ports and packages collection, FreeBSD is a command-line only experience. FreeBSD can be turned into a desktop operating system with any of a wide selection of desktop environments, but it takes time, effort, and following a lot of written instructions. FuryBSD solves that problem by providing a live desktop image that users can evaluate before installing. Currently, FuryBSD provides an Xfce image and a KDE image. Each of these images provides an installation of FreeBSD that has a desktop environment pre-installed.

FreeBSD 12.1 on a workstation: This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1 and covers:

Intel graphics hardware support
Install MATE
Setting up the graphical interface
Power management

How to Create a Basic DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) Network in OPNsense: DMZ (demilitarized zone) is a segmented part of a network that is used to host all publicly accessible websites and services. The intention is to protect the internal network from external threats. It is an effective strategy to minimize public exposure of your critical assets as well as limit the damage caused when an intruder is able to penetrate your network.

ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance: Learn to get the most out of your ZFS filesystem in new series on storage fundamentals.

List of useful FreeBSD Commands one users uses daily on their system.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD, Time on Unix, Improve ZVOL sync write performance with a taskq, central log host with syslog-ng, NetBSD Entropy overhaul, Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/09 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

This week we take a look at NetBSD and FreeBSD projects accepted into Google Summer of Code. Then at the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 18", "date": "2020-05-06T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "May 06, 2020", "slug": "18", "html": "

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.

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.

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

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

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.

" }, { "title": "Issue 17", "date": "2020-04-29T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 29, 2020", "slug": "17", "html": "

Improving `libossaudio`, and the future of OSS in NetBSD

There’s two ways user applications can communicate with the kernel audio layer in NetBSD:

audio(4) – the native API, based on the Sun API with a number of very useful NetBSD extensions
ossaudio(3) – a translation layer providing approximate compatibility with OSSv4’s ioctls, as also supported in FreeBSD, Solaris, and popular in the past on Linux.

Linux drifted away from OSS and towards ALSA due to licensing disagreements.

Because of this drift, we’re seeing increasing problems with OSS adoption today, even if the licensing concerns are no longer relevant, and other implementations of OSS have surpassed the original Linux OSSv3 implementation as far as their feature set and usability are concerned.

So, in NetBSD, it’s recommended to use the native API for new code and only rely on the OSS layer for compatibility with existing code.

Releases

TrueNAS versions 11.3-U2 and 11.3-U2.1 are generally available! These updates are based on FreeNAS 11.3-U2 . It supports API and Web UI improvements of the previous FreeNAS release. It also introduces easy-setup wizards, major replication improvements, and over 500 other enhancements.

BSDSec

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

News

500% if_bridge Performance Improvement in FreeBSD: With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Kristof Provost harnesses new parallel techniques to uncork performance bottleneck Independent embedded systems developer Kristof Provost certainly knows his way around the networking stack. For the past several years, (since George Neville-Neil approached him at AsiaBSDCon with an offer he couldn’t refuse) he has maintained FreeBSD’s port of the OpenBSD Packet Filter (pf) firewall. Even before this, if you’ve used IPv6, you’ve benefited from Kristof’s work to clean up fragment handling in the firewall. But it’s his 2018 engagement with Orange (France Telecom) that marks the beginning of this particular story.

MixerTUI 1.1 is out! MixerTUI is an audio mixer with a Terminal User Interface for FreeBSD. The new features of this version are: -d -h -m -v options and TAB to switch view mode. To install the port audio/mixertui: # cd /usr/ports/audio/mixertui/ && make install clean. To add the package: # pkg install mixertui.

Tutorials

A Look at SoundScrape on FreeBSD: SoundScrape makes it super easy to download artists from SoundCloud (and Bandcamp and MixCloud) - even those which don’t have download links! It automatically creates ID3 tags as well (including album art), which is handy.

Building a WireGuard Jail with the FreeBSD’s Standard Tools: If you would like to use WireGuard app on Android phone to access home NAS (a vanilla FreeBSD server) via the WireGuard tunnel and reach the Internet through the tunnel too.

urtwn0 altq_maxlen errors in DragonFly: If you’ve got an urtwn(4) device (RealTek USB wireless), and you are getting errors on altq_maxlen, take a look at this solution.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Rethinking OpenBSD security, FreeBSD 2020 Q1 status report, the notion of progress and user interfaces, Comments about Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses, making Unix a little more Plan9-like, Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/04/25 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Let’s take a look at the future of OSS in NetBSD. Plus all the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 16", "date": "2020-04-22T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 22, 2020", "slug": "16", "html": "

OpenZFS Merges The New FreeBSD Support

FreeBSD developers have been working on transitioning to using OpenZFS as their ZFS file-system upstream code rather than the dormant Illumos base. That initial FreeBSD support has been mainlined this week into the OpenZFS repository, now providing a common code-base between for the open-source ZFS file-system code between Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and work-in-progress macOS.

The FreeBSD code was merged this week into the OpenZFS repository and in turn FreeBSD ports is now making use of this branch.

Compared to the existing ZFS support in FreeBSD, migrating to OpenZFS means better SSD TRIM support, native encryption capabilities, persistent L2ARC, and a variety of new/improved features compared.

Up until this chage, sync writes to a ZVOL were done serially. But with the new code, ZVOLs are processed concurrently with sync writes in parallel. Following this change, “The result is that the throughput of sync writes is tripled.”

Releases

FuryBSD 2020-Q2 images are available for XFCE, and KDE. The Q2 2020 images are not a visible leap forward but a functional leap forward. Most effort was spent creating a better out of box experience for automatic Ethernet configuration, working WiFi, webcam, and improved hypervisor support.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: April 19th, 2020 (drm): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. There was an incorrect test for root in the DRM Linux compatiblity code. 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.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:07.quotad. The Network File System (NFS) allows a system to share directories and files with others over a network. By using this, users and programs can access files on remote systems almost as if they were local files.

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:10.ipfw. The ipfw system facility allows filtering, redirecting, and other operations on IP packets travelling through network interfaces. Incomplete packet data validation may result in accessing out-of-bounds memory (CVE-2019-5614) or may access memory after it has been freed (CVE-2019-15874).

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:11.openssl. Server or client applications that call the SSL_check_chain() function during or after a TLS 1.3 handshake may crash due to a NULL pointer dereference as a result of incorrect handling of the “signature_algorithms_cert” TLS extension. The crash occurs if an invalid or unrecognized signature algorithm is received from the peer.

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

News

Bastille 0.6.20200414 has been published to GitHub. This is a hotfix release to address reported issues. Upgrading is recommended! Bastille is an open-source system for automating deployment and management of containerized applications on FreeBSD.

FreeBSD progress on Slimbook Base14: Some notes on the – thusfar unsuccessful – work towards getting a full KDE-on-FreeBSD environment working on the Slimbook Base14. tl;dr version: “driver issues”.

OpenBSD on the HP Envy 13: After one user managed to break their existing setup, they decided to give OpenBSD a try and put a blowfish in their laptop.

If you want to work on Bluetooth on DragonFly, there’s more people adding to the bounty.

rpki-client 6.6p2 has just been released. It is the first public portable release of the rpki-client code, available in OpenBSD. rpki-client is a FREE, easy-to-use implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for Relying Parties (RP) to facilitate validation of the Route Origin of a BGP announcement.

Tutorials

Setting Up Users, Permissions, and ACLs on FreeNAS: In this tutorial, we’re going to talk about setting up Users, Permissions, and ACLs in FreeNAS. ACL stands for Access Control List, which designates access control entries for users and administrators on FreeNAS systems, specifically for Windows SMB shares.

Using OpenVPN with Multi-WAN: OpenVPN servers can be used with any WAN, or multiple WANs, as can OpenVPN clients. This document covers only a remote access OpenVPN server, but a similar process could be applied for site to site VPNs.

3-Antivirus Protection using OPNsense Plugins: This How To video will use the Plugins C-ICAP and ClamAV to protect your Network with OPNsense.

This write up is going to consist of “things to do” after you have FreeBSD installed. While not necessarily a set of standards, it is essentially what author did to get their development environment up and running on FreeBSD.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Tales from a core file, Lenovo X260 BIOS Update with OpenBSD, the problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines, Hugo workflow using FreeBSD Jails, Caddy, Restic; extending NetBSD-7 branch support, a tale of two hypervisor bugs, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/04/18 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

OpenZFS has now merged the new FreeBSD support. Plus all the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

" }, { "title": "Issue 15", "date": "2020-04-15T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 15, 2020", "slug": "15", "html": "

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.

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

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

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.

" }, { "title": "Issue 14", "date": "2020-04-08T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 08, 2020", "slug": "14", "html": "

Releases

GhostBSD 20.03 Now Available. This new build comes with some minor system update and numerous software applications updates. What has changed since 20.02:

The default pkg configuration now points to the GhostBSD packages repository instead of FreeBSD.
Fixed Update Station to make sure it only runs pkg update alone.
Added code to make sure that the update icon appears appropriately.
Added wg in notnics of NetworkMgr to avoid adding wireguard as a nics.

The third release in the NetBSD-8 is now available. This release includes all the security fixes in NetBSD-8 up until this point, and other fixes deemed important for stability.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: April 7th, 2020 (dhcpd). Errata patches for dhcpd have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. dhcpd could reference freed memory after releasing a lease with an unusually long uid. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. After patching, restart the dhcpd service.

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

News

FreeBSD Office Hours - April 1 2020. This was the first of the FreeBSD Office Hours sessions. Each Office Hours session, they invite users, contributors, and developers to ask questions, and a team of developers will try to answer or direct the questioner in the appropriate direction.

MixerTUI 0.1 is out! MixerTUI is an audio mixer with a Terminal User Interface built on the FreeBSD sound system wiki.freebsd.org/Sound. It can show the current Sound Driver configuration and select an audio device: to get its information, change the volume or to set as default, the last feature allows to switch easily audio from/to laptop and hdmi, headphones and speakers, etc.

Extending support for the NetBSD-7 branch. Typically, some time after releasing a new NetBSD major version (such as NetBSD 9.0), NetBSD team will announce the end-of-life of the N-2 branch, in this case NetBSD-7. They’ve decided to hold off on doing that to ensure our users don’t feel rushed to perform a major version update on any remote machines, possibly needing to reach the machine if anything goes wrong. Security fixes will still be made to the NetBSD-7 branch.

NetBSD’s LLDB work concluded. Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February 2019, work on LLDB have started, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation, working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD’s ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues, fixing watchpoint and threading support, porting to i386. March 2020 was the last month of contract. During it, the primary focus was to prepare integration of LLDB into NetBSD’s src tree.

The ssh-copy-id utility is now included in DragonFly 5.8 and in -current. Useful for your next machine setup.

Tutorials

Tale of two hypervisor bugs - Escaping from FreeBSD bhyve. VM escape has become a popular topic of discussion over the last few years. A good amount of research on this topic has been published for various hypervisors like VMware, QEMU, VirtualBox, Xen and Hyper-V. Bhyve is a hypervisor for FreeBSD supporting hardware-assisted virtualization. This paper details the exploitation of two bugs in bhyve - FreeBSD-SA-16:32.bhyve (VGA emulation heap overflow) and CVE-2018-17160 (Firmware Configuration device bss buffer overflow) and some generic techniques which could be used for exploiting other bhyve bugs. Further, the paper also discusses sandbox escapes using PCI device passthrough, and Control-Flow Integrity bypasses in HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT.

Update Lenovo X260 BIOS with OpenBSD: X260 runs OpenBSD fine, but has no CD driver. But one might still need to upgrade its BIOS from time to time. And this is possible using the ISO BIOS image. There are tools on OpenBSD to get this working.

NextCloud and OpenBSD are complimentary to one another. NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for propietary platforms, whereas OpenBSD forms the most secure and solid foundation to serve it on. Setting it up in the best way isn’t hard, especially using this step by step tutorial for NextCloud on OpenBSD.

“I’ve been playing with Bastille for a few months now. The more I use it, the more it makes 100% sense.” Learn how to use Bastille, caddy, restic and more to build a self hosted secure static website on FreeBSD.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Shell text processing, data rebalancing on ZFS mirrors, Add Security Headers with OpenBSD relayd, ZFS filesystem hierarchy in ZFS pools, speeding up ZSH, How Unix pipes work, grow ZFS pools over time, the real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated, clear your terminal in style, and more.

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

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Last week we have seen releases of GhostBSD and NetBSD plus OpenBSD Errata for dhcpd. Read on because as always we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 13", "date": "2020-04-01T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "April 01, 2020", "slug": "13", "html": "

Rethinking OpenBSD security

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad.

The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. It’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.

Read on to see what the author concludes…

Releases

pfSense software version 2.4.5 brings security patches, several new features, support for new Netgate hardware models, and stability fixes for issues present in previous pfSense 2.4.x branch releases.

OPNsense 20.1.3 released is a quick reliability release for all of you out there doing the impossible providing VPN for road warriors and what not. Keep it up!

A collection of prebuilt BSD cloud images: These unofficial images are tested on OpenStack and NoCloud (with Virt-Lightning). Since, they integrate Cloud-init, should support all the main Cloud providers.

BSDSec

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

News

Bob Beck Interview from EuroBSDCon 2018: asking Bob some questions about the OpenBSD Project, its approaches and some of his favourite aspects of the Operating System and its projects.

Jails on DragonFly can now route to loopback addresses (i.e. 127.0.0.1). Because of this, they can work like shared IPs and the jail can connect to the host.

Developer Otto Moerbeek (otto@) has been working on support to boot OpenBSD from FFS2. He writes in with the article, to give us a little insight into the challenges he faced while working on this.

For the third year in a row, Anne Dickison from FreeBSD Foundation attended FOSDEM, an amazing open source conference in Brussels, Belgium. Taking place, February 1-2, the event is a totally volunteer run conference geared towards promoting the widespread use of free and open source software. The Foundation has sponsored and organized a FreeBSD table there for a few years now.

Flame graphs are a way to see what code paths are most used in a stack trace. DragonFly now has a flame_graph utility.

It’s been on life support for a while but to much sadness, TrueOS indeed is no longer being maintained as the once very promising downstream of FreeBSD that for a while offered arguably the best out-of-the-box BSD desktop experience. TrueOS, formerly known as PC-BSD, is dead. Kris Moore, the VP of Engineering at iXsystems, confirmed earlier this month on their forums that work has ceased on the operating system.

The sysctl() system call can get or set the state of the system, the FreeBSD kernel exposes the parameters for sysctl() as objects of a Management information Base (MIB). sysctlview is a graphical sysctl MIB explorer, it shows the properties and the value of an object, the new version 2 allows to set its value, too.

This coming Wednesday at 18:00 UTC we will hold the first ”FreeBSD Office Hours”, an interactive online event where users, contributors, and developers can ask questions and get advice. The first iteration will be an open Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/yak-ydnk-rnc. That will also be recorded and posted to Youtube later in the day.

Full history of DragonFly, documented: Aaron LI managed to graft FreeBSD code history onto the DragonFly BSD git repository, and he’s documented how he did it. So, you can follow DragonFly code all the way back to 2003.

Tutorials

The NetBSD rump kernel has been developed for some years now, allowing NetBSD kernel drivers to be used unmodified in many environments, for example as userspace code. However it is only since last year that it has become possible to easily run unmodified applications on the rump kernel, initially with the rump kernel on Xen port, and then with the rumprun tools to run them in userspace on Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. This talk will look at how this is achieved, and look at use cases, including kernel driver development, and lightweight process virtualization.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD, Wireguard VPN Howto in OPNsense, NomadBSD 1.3.1 available, fresh GhostBSD 20.02, New FuryBSD XFCE and KDE images, pf-badhost 0.3 released, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/03/28 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

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

", "excerpt": "

Should OpenBSD be rethinking it’s security model? Find inside and then read on because as always we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 12", "date": "2020-03-25T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 25, 2020", "slug": "12", "html": "

Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.

Students can register and submit their applications to mentor organizations until March 31, 2020 at 20:00 (Central European Summer Time). As almost every year (or every single one of them?), BSDs are there as well, so if you know a student that could be interested, let them know!

Searchable list of all organizations is available.

We were able to find these BSD projects:

But there are many other interesting projects that help BSD community like Wine, LLVM, different databases and much more!

Releases

New FuryBSD 12.1 based images are available for XFCE, and KDE. This new release is now based on FreeBSD 12.1 with the latest FreeBSD quarterly packages. This brings XFCE up to 4.14, and KDE up to 5.17. In addition to updates this new ISO mostly addresses community bugs, community enhancement requests, and community pull requests. Due to the overwhelming amount of reports with GitHub hosting all new releases are now being pushed to SourceForge only for the time being. Previous releases will still be kept for archive purposes.

The os108 project is one of the few (or only?) distributions based on NetBSD currently providing a MATE-based desktop experience atop this BSD. The os108 9.0 release is now available that re-bases against the recent NetBSD 9.0 release while continuing to provide its out-of-the-box desktop goodness.

XIGMANAS 12.1.0.4 Ingva Released. This build has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE P3 and brings updates to many packages. It is not recommended to perform an in-place upgrade via the firmware update page because of recent changes to the partition layout with a revision older than 6625.

BSDSec

New FreeBSD Errata Notices and Security Announcements has been released:

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

News

TrueNAS 12.0 CORE, which up until the new TrueNAS / FreeNAS branding unification would have been called FreeNAS, will in its next release support ZFS async copy-on-write functionality. iXsystems’ Kris Moore announced last week that the ZFS asynchronous copy-on-write support has landed in the TrueNAS CORE 12.0 snapshots.

NomadBSD now have a forum for you to look for help and give them feedback.

The FreeBSD Community day that was intended to be held on March 29 has been cancelled due to COVID-19. There are plans to host the event November 1. More details about this will be posted as we get closer to the event.

On March 4, members of the Foundation team and FreeBSD Community headed to Pasadena, California for a packed agenda of FreeBSD activities at SCALE x18. In the end, SCALE was, yet again, another successful advocacy effort to encourage more people to use and contribute to FreeBSD.

As previously announced, on February 29, 2020 FreeBSD removed GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) version 4.2.1 from the base system. Although GCC has not been used by default for anything in FreeBSD-current / svn head for some time before this commit, this milestone marks the completion of a major journey to modernize the FreeBSD toolchain. The purpose of this blog is to provide detail about the motivation, scope, and timeline for this initiative.

Tutorials

FreeBSD ZFS on Root Migration: a simple how-to guide for migrating a FreeBSD system from one machine to another.

The FreeBSD-linuxulator explained (for users): After another mail where the author explained a little bit of the linuxulator behavior, they decided it is time to try to make an easy text which they can reference in future answers.

How to set up vsftpd on FreeBSD 12? An FTP server, although for many it can be a bit old-fashioned, is quite useful. Especially in computer networks where you need to share files internally. Or even if we are in a house with several computers, it would also be useful. Best of all, it is still easy to set up one and more on FreeBSD 12. So in this post, you will learn how to set up vsftpd on FreeBSD 12.

In this video, we are going to see an overview of FuryBSD 12.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about OpenBSD Full disk encryption with coreboot and tianocore, FreeBSD 12.0 EOL, ZFS DVA layout, OpenBSD’s Go situation, AD updates requires changes in TrueNAS and FreeNAS, full name of FreeBSD’s root account, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/03/21 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

University student or know some? Google Summer of Code deadline to apply is coming and there are BSD projects to apply. Find them inside and then read on because as always we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 11", "date": "2020-03-18T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 18, 2020", "slug": "11", "html": "

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.

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.

In Other BSDs for 2020/03/14 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

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.

" }, { "title": "Issue 10", "date": "2020-03-04T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "March 04, 2020", "slug": "10", "html": "

POWER to the People: Making FreeBSD a First Class Citizen on POWER

The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc.

The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs.

This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users.

Releases

FreeNAS 11.3-U1: This is the first maintenance release of 11.3 with nearly one hundred fixes and improvements for both FreeNAS and the upcoming TrueNAS 11.3 release train. You’ll find numerous improvements to the snapshot, replication, and directory service features, improved support for encrypted pools, an update to Samba to address CVE-2019-14907, and many other visual or help text refinements throughout the UI.

TrueNAS 11.3 represents another major advancement in the quality and functionality of the leading Open Storage platform. TN 11.3 supports the very popular API and Web UI improvements of the previous FreeNAS release. It also introduces easy-setup wizards, major replication improvements, and over 1400 other improvements from TrueNAS 11.2-U8!

GhostBSD 20.02 Now Available: A custom ZFS partition editor has been added, and t is possible to install GhostBSD with ZFS on the same disk containing Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX partitions. The system has been updated to 1201512. The Update Station application has multiple improvements, and numerous software applications have been updated.

DragonFlyBSD 5.8 is another big step forward for the operating system and their first release of 2020. DragonFlyBSD 5.8 brings performance improvements to TMPFS, updated Intel and Linux DRM graphics drivers including for AMD Radeon hardware, FSCK support for their modern HAMMER2 file-system, DSynth is getting into order, AMD Zen 2 support improvements, and other work. DragonFlyBSD 5.8 release images can be obtained from their mirrors.

BSDSec

There were none SA this week, but it’s always worth following BSDSec.

News

Due to increasing risk of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Japan, AsiaBSDCon’s organizing team has decided to cancel the conference which was planned March 19-22 2020. For registration fees, they will accept cancel requests and 50% refund.

In the last couple of months, a few new desktop BSD have been announced. There is HyperbolaBSD which was Hyperbola GNU/Linux previously. Another new entry in the BSD world is FuryBSD. “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer. Read more of from itsfoss.com’s review.

u2f/fido support has been just committed in NetBSD -current. You need to cvs update, recompile the kernel and rebuild userland to get the new packages. Read how to set this up in the message.

ZFSonLinux is now OpenZFS. OpenZFS is an advanced file system and volume manager which was originally developed for Solaris and is now maintained by the OpenZFS community. Because it will contain the ZFS source code for both Linux and FreeBSD, we will rename the “ZFSonLinux” code repository to “OpenZFS”.

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. These new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet. FreeNAS and TrueNAS users should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.

a2k20 Hackathon Reports (OpenBSD’s hackathon in Hobart, Australia):

Ken Westerback wrote a report on xhci(4), dhclient(8), and scsi
Rafael Sadowski on KDE+Qt5 progress and more

2020 FreeBSD Community day, co-located with FOSS-north 2020, will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, March 29. . This is a public event intended for developers and anyone with an interest in FreeBSD, or who is looking to learn more about FreeBSD and the FreeBSD project. The idea is to have a good mix of interesting FreeBSD talks, discussions and to use the day as a way to show off FreeBSD to people interested in the Project. It will also be a chance for attendees to meet developers and to try FreeBSD. No pre-registration is required.

Tutorials

How to Configure DHCP When Using VLANs in OPNsense: When you are new to creating VLANs on your network, you may wonder about the necessary steps in order to create a properly functioning VLAN. If you set up OPNsense with one WAN and one LAN interface, it is kind enough to set up a basic configuration for the LAN interface with DHCP enabled and a single firewall rule that allows access to the Internet. You can consider this configuration to be a “flat” network, which means that every device is on the same network and can communicate.

The situation with Go on OpenBSD: If you stick to supported OpenBSD versions, upgrading your machines as older OpenBSD releases fall out of support (as the OpenBSD people want you to do), you should not have any problems with your own Go programs. The latest Go release will support the currently supported OpenBSD versions (as long as OpenBSD remains a supported platform for Go), and the Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee means that you can always rebuild your current Go programs with newer versions of Go. You might have problems with compiled binaries that you don’t want to rebuild, but the understanding is that this is the case for OpenBSD in general; it doesn’t guarantee a stable ABI even for C programs (cf). If you use OpenBSD, you have to be prepared to rebuild your code after OpenBSD upgrades regardless of what language it’s written in.

This video tutorial is an install of Enlightenment 0.22.4, and Slim with a few configs on FreeBSD 12.1.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Meet FuryBSD, NetBSD 9.0 has been released, OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup, a retrospective on OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers, NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal, OpenSSH 8.2 released, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/29 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

This week learn more about FreeBSD and their hardware support processes. Then, as always, we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 9", "date": "2020-02-26T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 26, 2020", "slug": "9", "html": "

Supporting an open source operating system: a Q&A with the FreeBSD Foundation

When discussing alternative operating systems to Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s macOS, Linux often comes to mind. However, while Linux is a recreation of UNIX, FreeBSD is more of a continuation. The free and open source operating system was initially developed by students at the University of California at Berkeley which is why the BSD in its name stands for Berkeley Software Distribution.

FreeBSD runs on its own kernel and all of the operating system’s key components have been developed to be part of a single whole. This is where it differs the most from Linux because Linux is just the kernel and the other components are supplied by third parties.

To learn more about FreeBSD and its ongoing development, TechRadar Pro spoke to the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin.

Questions include:

What aspects of your job excite you the most?
How does the FreeBSD Foundation work to support the development of FreeBSD?
How is FreeBSD the antithesis of Linux?
FreeBSD doesn’t come with a GUI by default. Why is this and how can users install their own GUI when running FreeBSD?
Can you tell us a bit more about how BSD forms the core of macOS?
Are there any upcoming features or developments planned for FreeBSD that you can tell us about?
What kind of user should consider giving FreeBSD a try?

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: February 24th, 2020 (smtpd_envelope)
\nErrata patches for OpenSMTPD have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. An out of bounds read in smtpd allows an attacker to inject arbitrary commands into the envelope file which are then executed as root. Separately, missing privilege revocation in smtpctl allows arbitrary commands to be run with the _smtpq group. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. After patching, restart the smtpd service.

It’s always worth following BSDSec.

News

DragonflyBSD 5.8 has been tagged a few days ago. Release should be soon, but probably not before this weekend.

BSD Users Stockholm Meetup 8. Next meeting will be at the B3 offices in central Stockholm. Mark your calendar for March 3. There will also be some food, interesting discussions and nice company.

checkrestart is a FreeBSD tool to find stale processes that may need restarting after an upgrade. It searches for processes without associated executable or library paths, implying a software upgrade has replaced them since it was started. checkrestart does not perform any system changes itself - it is strictly informational. It is the responsibility of the system administrator to interpret the results and take any necessary action.

FreeBSD vs. Linux Scaling Up To 128 Threads With The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X: This article is looking at the FreeBSD 12.1 performance and seeing how the performance scales compared to Ubuntu 20.04 Linux and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 based CentOS Stream.

Tutorials

How to run Orchestrator on FreeBSD? In this post, author is going to show you how to run Orchestrator on FreeBSD. The instructions have been tested in FreeBSD 11.3 but the general steps should apply to other versions as well. At the time of this writing, Orchestrator doesn’t provide FreeBSD binaries, so we will need to compile it.

Disable Logging into OPNsense as the Root User. After installing OPNsense, the default login is the root user. Logging in as the root user is generally not advised because the root user has full access to files and processes. Linux users, for instance, are asked to create a separate user account upon installation. The user can then use the sudo command to elevate privileges to perform administrative tasks. If the user’s account is compromised, in theory the root account is still protected (assuming there is no privilege escalation vulnerability being exploited or the password has been discovered). OpenSSH has an option to disable root user access for the SSH server. It prevents logging in directly as the root user as a security mechanism. OPNsense, being built upon FreeBSD (HardenedBSD to be more precise), is no exception to this recommendation.

Bitwarden is Open Source, available on many platforms and clients and it can be hosted on OpenBSD using Rubywarden. Let’s talk about experience of changing from 1Password on iCloud to Bitwarden on OpenBSD.

FreeBSD is a solid choice on a server, and it’s ubiquitous in the infrastructure world, buthow does FreeBSD hold up as a desktop machine? As a developer workstation? Article talks:

How it was setting it up in 2020
What kind of developers can benefit from FreeBSD
What you can do to get started

There is also yet another FreeBSD user’s experience of following tutorial to get OpenVPN running on FreeBSD.

Project Trident used to be a FreeBSD desktop operating system based on TrueOS but recently the decision was to move it to Void Linux. Since I would like to continue using FreeBSD as my desktop workstation, here is a few simple steps needed to rebase the existing Project Trident installation (prior to Void Linux migration) to GhostBSD. GhostBSD is another alternative of FreeBSD desktop operation system based on TrueOS where the default desktop environment is Mate.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Distrowatch reviews FuryBSD, LLDB on i386 for NetBSD, wpa_supplicant as lower-class citizen, KDE on FreeBSD updates, Travel Grant for BSDCan open, ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/22 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

This week take a look at a Q&A with the FreeBSD Foundation’s Deb Goodkin. Then, as always, we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 8", "date": "2020-02-19T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 19, 2020", "slug": "8", "html": "

Unix Toolbox

Unix Toolbox is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing. It covers mostly Linux and FreeBSD.

Topics include Hardware, Statistics, Users, Limits, Runlevels, root password, Compile kernel, Repair grub and more.

There are also more versions available, such as PDF etc.

Releases

NetBSD 9.0 Debuts As The “Best NetBSD Release Ever”. The NetBSD 9.0 release is a big one with finally supporting Arm AArch64 (64-bit ARMv8) and as part of that Arm ServerReady SBBR+SBSA system support. NetBSD 9.0 also improves its existing ARMv7 32-bit support, ships with updated Intel DRM GPU drivers, improves its virtualization support and introduces NVMM virtualization, adds Kernel ASLR support, supports various compiler sanitizers, updates the ZFS file-system support, finally supports NCQ with SATA, and various other hardware improvements along with performance and security benefits.

DragonFlyBSD 5.8-RC1 is ready with many changes from DSynth to performance optimizations. DragonFlyBSD 5.8 is the next version of this long ago forked FreeBSD. DragonFlyBSD 5.8 is bringing big improvements to its TMPFS support, updated Intel graphics driver code, updated AMD Radeon graphics driver code, FSCK support for its HAMMER2 file-system, DSynth has been taking shape, AMD Zen 2 improvements, various code brought in from FreeBSD, and plenty of other work.

OPNsense 20.1.1 has been released. This release is a tiny update with few fixes and updates. Check the post for specific issues fixed.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: February 17th, 2020 (vmm_pvclock). Errata patches for vmm have been released for OpenBSD 6.6: A missing range check in the vmm pvclock allows a guest to write to host memory. Binary updates for the amd64 platform are available via the syspatch utility. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.

FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life. As of February 29, 2020, FreeBSD 12.0 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 12.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible. Please refer to https://security.freebsd.org/ for an up-to-date list of supported releases and the latest security advisories.

It’s always worth following BSDSec.

News

The last fundraising drive for NetBSD was back in 2009 and they have lived off it until now. NetBSD would like to ask for your donations again. They are trying to raise $50,000 in 2020, to support ongoing development and new upcoming contracts - helping to make NetBSD 10 happen this year and be the best NetBSD ever. The NetBSD Foundation is a non-profit organization as per section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

DragonFlyBSD Improves Its TMPFS Implementation For Better Throughput Performance: DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon landed some significant temporary file-system “TMPFS” optimizations for better throughput including with swap. Of several interesting commits merged, the improved write clustering is a big one. In particular, “Reduces low-memory tmpfs paging I/O overheads by 4x and generally increases paging throughput to SSD-based swap by 2x-4x. Tmpfs is now able to issue a lot more 64KB I/Os when under memory pressure.”

OpenSSH 8.2 is out this Valentine’s Day as the leading SSH suite. Besides working to disable the SSH-RSA public key signature algorithm due to SHA1 collision attacks, OpenSSH 8.2 also comes with new feature, support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators. Other changes in this release include further defenestrating SSH-RSA for certificate signatures, a new “Include” keyword for including additional sshd configuration files, various portability improvements, and a number of bug fixes.

Due to a number of factors, there will not be a bhyvecon Tokyo 2020. Above all, zero communication from the host event organizers seems to be the reason.

pkg-provides is pkgng plugin for querying which package will provide you a particular file. v0.7.0 adds option to restrict results to specific repository. pkg-provides can be installed from FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD packages.

Sunny Valley Networks is a startup company that has partnered with Deciso, the creators of OPNsense, to create a plugin called Sensei which adds deep packet inspection and more to OPNsense. These features add greater visibility into your network. Sensei also has built-in cloud threat intelligence that can be used to block web/application access and to prevent known malware attacks. This post will focus on the features of Sensei and the differences between the Free Edition and the Home Edition.

Tutorials

In the third of the series Building an OpenBSD WireGuard VPN server, the author is extending the existing configuration to include some basic block lists for known ad and tracking servers – Unbound DNS filtering.

This blog post continues where the blog post A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD left off. It describes a simple method to check the logs of the central log host with a shell script.

Easy FreeBSD Jail Management with Bastille: In this blog post a FreeBSD user distills the Bastille getting started guide into minimal steps to get going with ZFS backed containers.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work, building a FreeBSD fileserver, Kubernetes on FreeBSD bhyve, NetBSD 9 RC1 available, OPNSense 20.1 is here, HardenedBSD’s idealistic future, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/15 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

This week take a look at Unix Toolbox, a Linux/BSD commands and tasks collection. As always, we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 7", "date": "2020-02-12T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 12, 2020", "slug": "7", "html": "

FOSDEM 2020

FOSDEM has come and gone for 2020, so it’s time to look back. FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

FOSDEM had a BSD Devroom as well, and all 11 videos of talks are now available (search for BSD Devroom) or look at the schedule for links to talks.

There’s a huge range of kernel related stuff to KDE or Wayland, so there’s a bit for everyone.

BSDSec

There were none SAs last week, but it’s always worth following BSDSec.

News

LLDB now works on i386. The original NetBSD port of LLDB was focused on amd64 only. Now, it supports both 32-bit builds of LLDB (running natively on i386 kernel or via compat32) and debugging 32-bit programs from 64-bit LLDB. Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.

Random number generation on DragonFly now runs per–CPU, and a bit faster. No real user effect, but randomness is one of those endlessly complex topics that are fun to read about.

BastilleBSD 0.6.20200202 has been released. This is Bastille’s biggest release yet, adding five new sub-commands. These additions include support for importing and exporting container archives on UFS or ZFS, converting container types (thin to thick), container resource limits via rctl, dynamic port redirection and more.

Travel Grant Application for BSDCan is now open. The Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development.

KDE user on FreeBSD? Read some bits and bobs from the KDE FreeBSD team in february 2020. They met at the FreeBSD devsummit before FOSDEM, along with other FreeBSD people. Plans were made, schemes were forged, and Groff the Goat was introduced to some new people.

NetBSD sponsored work work on ptrace(2) is approaching the end. This is one of the last reports on enhancements on ptrace(2) and the surrounding code.

Tutorials

How to Install Sylius eCommerce Platform on FreeBSD 12: Sylius is a modern e-commerce platform for PHP, based on the Symfony Framework. Sylius source code is hosted on GitHub. This guide will walk you through the Sylius installation process on a fresh FreeBSD 12 Vultr instance using PHP, MariaDB as a database, and Nginx as a web server.

Netdata Cloud on FreeBSD: First Impressions. Netdata is an all-in-one monitoring solution, expertly crafted with a blazing-fast C core, flanked by hundreds of collectors. Featuring a comprehensive dashboard with thousands of metrics, extreme performance and configurability, it is the ultimate single-node monitoring tool.

Setting up a Samba server on NetBSD. There’s already a HOWTO article on the NetBSD wiki but it’s super old and the instructions don’t apply anymore. Here’s a more up-to-date tutorial to get going with Samba. I just confirmed these instructions work on NetBSD/amd64 9.0 RC 2, which is pretty recent.

How to setup Bluetooth audio on devices without Bluetooth but with mini jack out and AUX ports (on ThinkPad x240 laptop, which is running FreeBSD).

One of the best aspects of ZFS is its reliability. This can be accomplished using a few features like copy-on-write approach and checksumming. In this article we will look at how ZFS does checksumming and why it does it the proper way.

Watch this video to learn how to setup a port forward in pfsense.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Linux couldn’t duplicate OpenBSD, FreeBSD Q4 status report, OPNsense 19.7.9 released, archives retain and pass on knowledge, HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/08 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

Videos from FOSDEM are now available and there’s a bit for everyone. We also cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 6", "date": "2020-02-05T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "February 05, 2020", "slug": "6", "html": "

FreeBSD 7 Days Challenge

FreeBSD is an excellent platform to build out a production server environment. It also makes for a great desktop environment. Whatever the use case is we want people to understand FreeBSD well enough (and quickly enough) to achieve their goals with as little friction as possible.

The 7 Days Challenge will have people running on FreeBSD within the seven days.

Getting user onboard with FreeBSD quickly
Helping the user to understand basic concepts like the file system layout and core system utilities
Walking users through common FreeBSD use cases, such as desktop environments
Maintaining an installation after the fact to keep it secure and stable
Using FreeBSD as a development or production environment for software development and more
Putting FreeBSD on the front line as a production platform for hosting enterprise grade solutions
Allowing for the continued use of modern technologies and concepts to manage FreeBSD installations
And more…

Releases

As the last preparations for 20.1 are underway, a quick relief is here for the End-Of-Life release of the 19.7 series with a tiny number of updates.

OPNsense 20.1 was then released, nicknamed “Keen Kingfisher”. It is a subtle improvement on sustainable firewall experience. This release adds VXLAN and additional loopback device support, IPsec public key authentication and elliptic curve TLS certificate creation amongst others. Third party software has been updated to their latest versions. The logging frontend was rewritten for MVC with seamless API support. On the far side the documentation increased in quality as well as quantity and now presents itself in a familiar menu layout.

FreeNAS 11.3 has a year’s worth of improvements and features a much improved Replication Engine, managing SMB ACLs via the FreeNAS web user-interface, SMB Shadow Copies being enabled by default for new shares, an iSCSI wizard, dashboard updates, ZFS performance optimizations, new APIs, and much more.

Second release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 is available. Since the start of the release process a lot of improvements went into the branch - nearly 700 pullups were processed. This includes usbnet (a common framework for usb ethernet drivers), aarch64 stability enhancements and lots of new hardware support, installer/sysinst fixes and changes to the NVMM (hardware virtualization) interface.

BSDSec

It is upgrade time!

Errata patches for OpenSMTPD have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6.

smtpd can crash on opportunistic TLS downgrade, causing a denial of service
an incorrect check allows an attacker to trick mbox delivery into executing arbitrary commands as root and lmtp delivery into executing arbitrary commands as an unprivileged user

Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. After patching, restart the smtpd service.

New FreeBSD errata notices has been released:

FreeBSD-EN-20:02.nmount - A userland process authorized to mount filesystems can possibly trigger a kernel panic
FreeBSD-EN-20:01.ssp - Affected programs will abort and log a “stack overflow detected” message to syslog(3)

Consider upgrading your system to a supported FreeBSD stable or release / security branch (releng) dated after the correction date.

Also, 3 new FreeBSD Security Advisories has been released:

FreeBSD-SA-20:02.ipsec - an attacker who can capture and inject packets could cause an action that was intentionally performed once to be repeated
FreeBSD-SA-20:03.thrmisc - sensitive kernel data may be disclosed
FreeBSD-SA-20:01.libfetch - an attacker in control of the URL to be fetched (possibly via HTTP redirect) may cause a heap buffer overflow, resulting in program misbehavior or malicious code execution\nConsider upgrading your vulnerable system to a supported FreeBSD stable or release / security branch (releng) dated after the correction date.

libfetch has a vulnerability, and now it has been fixed on DragonFly in current and release.

News

Anatomy of OpenBSD’s OpenSMTPD hijack hole: How a malicious sender address can lead to remote pwnage. Infosec biz Qualys discovered and this week disclosed CVE-2020-7247, a root privilege-escalation and remote code execution flaw in OpenSMTPD. It can be exploited locally by a normal user to execute shell commands as root, if using the daemon’s default configuration, or locally and remotely if the daemon is using its “uncommented” default configuration, in which it listens on all interfaces and accepts external mail. Getting root access means it’s game over: the machine is now yours. This article discusses what could have prevented escalation despite the bug.

Filters have been a long awaited feature in OpenSMTPD. This article describes how filters are implemented and what to expect. Switching to new config is not too hard and can be done in minutes. The new config is also a new queue that is not backwards compatible. The easiest way is to flush the mail queue before switching.

HardenedBSD has been working on deploying Tor Onion Service v3 nodes across their build infrastructure. Public portion of this is now completed. Read more to find various onion service hostnames and their match to the infrastructure.

Out this weekend is Lumina 1.6 as the latest release of this Qt-powered desktop environment originally developed by iXsystems as part of PC-BSD / TrueOS. Lumina 1.6 is the new release and their first version update in nine months. Lumina 1.6 is primarily carrying bug fixes and minor improvements but there is detection for Void Linux, new default keyboard shortcuts, and other small changes.

Hikari is a stacking window manager with tiling support that has also work-in-progress code for serving as a Wayland compositor. However, unlike most X11 window managers and Wayland compositors being focused on Linux systems, Hikari is BSD-focused. Hikari was presented at this weekend’s Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels as a window manager / compositor initially targeting FreeBSD but is being ported ultimately to other platforms as well: Hikari can also be built for OpenBSD and the Wayland support should work on Linux systems.

Tutorials

FDE on OpenBSD.Amsterdam opinionated VM: OBSD.ams provides VMs with unencrypted disks. This means the VM will be able to boot on its own in case the vmd(8) host reboots. As far as we could see from their Twitter account, there are not that much crashes. But the host would reboot from time to time (for system updates or upgrades). If that’s a problem, one should probably not use FDE (Full Disk Encryption); or should be ready to connect to the console to enter the passphrase.

Ditch your Playstation! Throw away your Xbox! Become the REAL PC Master race game player - Console game player that is… Just a small look at six games for the terminal in FreeBSD.

Install OpenBSD on dedibox with full-disk encryption: “dedibox” servers at servers available at online.ne. OpenBSD is not officially supported so you have to work-around. Running full-disk encrypted OpenBSD there is a piece of cake.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Hyperbola Developer interview, why you should migrate from Linux to BSD, FreeBSD is an amazing OS, improving the ptrace(2) API in LLVM 10, First FreeBSD conference in Australia, and a guide to containers on FreeNAS.

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/01 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

Main topic of this week is FreeBSD 7 Days Challenge to get users started with FreeBSD. There were a lot of releases and security advisories this week, as well. We also cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 5", "date": "2020-01-29T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 29, 2020", "slug": "5", "html": "

Mitigating Cable Haunt

Cable Haunt is a recent vulnerability that has been found in over 200 million cable modems in Europe and likely many more in other countries as well. Many modern modems use similar Broadcom chipsets and used the same reference firmware which contained the vulnerability. Because of this, the impact of this vulnerability is much greater than it would have been otherwise.

If you have a router that has the ability to add firewall rules such as OPNsense, you can simply block access to the cable modem’s spectrum analyzer port which hosts the web page that contains the Cable Haunt vulnerability!

Learn how to secure your network today.

Releases

GhostBSD 20.01 is now available with some improvements made to the installer, mainly improvements to the way the installer UI deals with custom partitions involving GTP and UEFI. Also, some system and software has been updated. For current installations there’s no need to reinstall.

The release candidate of OPNsense 20.1 is available, the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based networking/firewall OS that forked from pfSense now a half-decade ago. The OPNsense 20.1 release has been working on a variety of security improvements, VXLAN device support, working on the transition to a fully plug-able device infrastructure, plug-in updates, and many other changes.

BSDSec

NetBSD Security Advisory 2020-001: Missing permissions checks for network ioctls. Three network interface related ioctls that should have been only allowed for privileged users were not adequately protected. An unprivileged user can set network interface descriptions, get and set diagnostic data from some atheros interfaces, and retrieve descriptor information from umb (usbmobile network device).

News

In late December 2019, Hyperbola announced that they would be making major changes to their project. They have decided to drop the Linux kernel in favor of forking the OpenBSD kernel. This announcement only came months after Project Trident announced that they were going in the opposite direction (from BSD to Linux). To get more insight into the future of their new project read this interview with Andre, co-founder of Hyperbola.

In order to make the process of translating FreeBSD’s official articles and books more accessible to new contributors, the project is adopting Weblate as its web-based continuous localization platform.

SerenityOS is to be the second operating system to adopt the excellent pledge() and unveil() mechanisms from the OpenBSD project. This post describes the implementation and use of them in SerenityOS. In case you’re wondering, SerenityOS is a graphical Unix-like operating system for x86 computers and it is licensed under a 2-clause BSD license.

The hosts of Choose Linux podcast serves up something very different in the form of desktop BSD, and we reveal how important freedom is to us all. They specifically discuss GhostBSD.

OpenSMTPD has had quite a few features implemented since its latest major release. As we get closer and closer to the next major release, work on new features will slow down to focus more on getting the release in shape. This report talks about libasr and libtls. Next report focuses on the reporting bits. The format is improving further and has extended to outgoing trafic reporting.

We already talked about FreeBSD MiniConf at LCA2020 Conference but there is now a new report: Though this was primarily a Linux conference, there had been a lot of productive conversations with other people in our industry. In addition, many of us FreeBSDers found quite a few talks that were informative and helpful in the work they do.

Distrowatch was on news lately because of switching their infrastructure to FreeBSD. In this week’s “DistroWatch Weekly” they review FuryBSD, the most recent addition to the DistroWatch database that provides a live desktop operating system based on FreeBSD.

Fresh in from u2k20 is this report from Tracey Emery, who visited the hackathon in Uckermark, Germany after getting invited by Stefan Sperling (stsp@). He discusses GotWeb.

Here is the last FreeBSD quarterly status report for 2019. As you might remember from last report, they changed our timeline: now they collect reports the last month of each quarter and they edit and publish the full document the next month. Thus, they cover here the period October 2019 - December 2019.

Tutorials

This blog will explain how to set up Google Drive sync with FreeNAS 11.3, as well as provide a few caveats and workarounds when backing up Google Docs and other Google created content.

Building FreeBSD File Server? This article is describing the process of building a test environment while concentrating primarily on the details of the configuration (FreeBSD + SAMBA + AD). Author believes that their solution should be harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since it enables admins with the broad range of possibilities for access control

When installing Plex Media Server, FreeNAS 11.3 or newer is required. The plugin is included in the official FreeNAS plugin repository and can be easily installed from the FreeNAS web interface.

Have you ever wanted to run your own online music station? Want to broadcast your podcast direct from your own server? Or even want to access your music on any device from a central music server? Then this video will show you that FreeBSD can step up and serve your needs!

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1, Distrowatch switching to FreeBSD, Torvalds says don’t run ZFS, iked(8) removed automatic IPv6 blocking, working towards LLDB on i386, and memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme in NetBSD.

In Other BSDs for 2020/01/25 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

Using BSD to fight against recently found Cable Haunt is this week’s topic. We also cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 4", "date": "2020-01-22T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 22, 2020", "slug": "4", "html": "

To BSD, or not to BSD

Last week brought a bit of controversy on different community websites, after article called ”Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD” has been shared around. It is a opinionated blog post discussing Linux problems and presenting reasons to switch to BSD.

There is an interesting response ”Should you migrate from Linux to BSD? It depends”. While author agrees, that there may be reasons to migrate to BSD, they think, that mentioned article lists the wrong reasons. Then they take a look at the points, one by one.

BSDSec

Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. Execution Unit state was not cleared on context switch with Intel Gen9 graphics hardware. Binary updates for the amd64 and i386 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. Source code patches can be found on the respective errata page: https://www.openbsd.org/errata65.html and https://www.openbsd.org/errata66.html. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.

News

The first report from the just concluded u2k20 hackathon (OpenBSD) comes from Alexandr Nedvedicky (sashan@).

With the relaunch of a certification for BSD professionals, the Linux Professional Institute wants to help support and raise awareness of the BSD projects. Watch the talk “LPI and BSD Working Together” by G Matthew Rice (from LCA 2020) and learn what’s next for this undertaking and share your ideas in how LPI can make it valuable to the free software community.

Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand. This the first FreeBSD conference in Australia. Videos from the event are available as well.

There’s a new server for BSDs on Discord. Discord itself doesn’t seems to have a client version for BSD, but you can use browser or mobile version of their app.

How much Unix trivia do you know? Test your knowledge.

Tutorials

A FEMP stack, which is akin to a LEMP stack on Linux, is a collection of open-source software that is typically installed together to enable a FreeBSD server to host dynamic websites and web applications. FEMP is an acronym that stands for FreeBSD (operating system), Nginx (HTTP server), MySQL (database server), and PHP (programming language to process dynamic PHP content). In this tutorial, we’ll set up components of a FEMP stack on a FreeBSD 12.1 server using pkg, the FreeBSD package manager.

Last week, we have talked about why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of FreeBSD based infrastructure. Today, we can learn how to run syslog-ng in jail with help of BastilleBSD. There is even more simple way using a prepared template.

Planning to upgrade FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1? There is a set of notes while cranking through upgrading about 30 machines from 11.3 to 12.1 since they are not specific and this process isn’t very well documented.

ZFS pools can be made with a single disk, then turned into a mirror after the fact by adding additional drives. This is especially useful for staging or homelabs, where you might not have the money upfront to buy both drives, or want to test it before spending time resilvering.

FreshPorts runs on a FreeBSD server which hosts multiple jails. Two of these jails run PostgreSQL server. When upgrading from one version of PostgreSQL to another, they run pg_dump in the new jail, and load the backup into that database server. Learn step by step how they do this process.

WireGuard is quickly gaining popularity in the VPN marketplace due to its speed, simplicity, and modern cryptography standards. Starting with FreeNAS version 11.3-RC1, it is possible to connect your NAS directly to a WireGuard network with a few easy steps.

Forgot Swap? With this quick video tutorial you can learn how to add a Swap to your FreeBSD install.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2019, Wireguard on OpenBSD Router, Amazon now has FreeBSD/ARM 12, pkgsrc-2019Q4, The Joys of UNIX Keyboards, OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, and more..

In Other BSDs for 2020/01/18 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

To BSD, or not to BSD: that is the question and this week’s topic. We also cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 3", "date": "2020-01-15T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 15, 2020", "slug": "3", "html": "

Distrowatch running on FreeBSD

Distrowatch, website dedicated to talking about, reviewing and keeping up to date with open source operating systems, has been working on a new server last weekend. They are now using FreeBSD for their data and hosting needs.

There is a very interesting AMA session going on on Reddit, where they explain why they decided to switch to FreeBSD.

Netcraft confirms Apache/2.4.41 FreeBSD OpenSSL/1.1.1a-freebsd PHP/7.4.1.

Releases

OPNsense 19.7.9 has been released. This update brings you a GeoIP database configuration page for aliases which is now required due to upstream database policy changes and a number of prominent third-party software updates.

FreeNAS 11.3-RC2 is out. The 11.3 series represent a year-long development and testing effort. In a departure from previous BETA release cycles, this RC has been fully vetted by the iXsystems QA team internally and users should notice a significant improvement in both stability and usability.

News

ShopFreeBSD - Official Store for FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation Branded Swag is now on.

Attending SCaLE? Friday, March 6, 2020 - 10:00 to 17:00 you can join full day workshop that will teach you how to install FreeBSD and the ports and packages necessary to get you up and running. You’ll leave the workshop with the knowledge to install and administer a FreeBSD Operating System and know where to go to learn even more about using FreeBSD.

2020 brings about even more opportunities to spread the word about your work with BSD. Submit to these upcoming conferences:

OSCON 2020: July 13-16, 2020, Portland, OR - Submission Deadline Approaching: January 14, 2020
Mini FreeBSD Developers Summit at FOSDEM 2020, January 31, Brussels, Belgium - Submission Deadline Approaching: January 15, 2020
LinuxFest Northwest: April 24-26, 2020, Bellingham, Washington - Submission Deadline Approaching: January 15, 2020
BSDCan 2020: June 2-6, 2020, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada - Submission Deadline: January 19, 2020
Open Source Summit, North America 2020: June 22 – 24, 2020, Austin, Texas - Submission Deadline: February 16, 2020

FreeBSD Journal - Network Virtualization - November/December 2019 is out, covering: Jail Migration, Arranging Your Virtual Network on FreeBSD, Interview with Kirk McKusick, Foundation Letter, Conference Report, New Faces of FreeBSD, We Get Letters, and Events Calendar.

With the 50th birthday of the UNIX operating system being in the news of late, there has been a bit of a spotlight shone upon its earliest origins. At the Living Computers museum in Seattle though they’ve gone well beyond a bit of historical inquiry though, because they’ve had UNIX version 0 running on a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer. This primordial version on the original hardware is all the more remarkable because unlike its younger siblings very few PDP-7s have survived.

Due to Firefox being too complicated to package on the stable branch, OpenBSD’s Firefox pkg for 6.6-stable won’t receive updates, so it will remain vulnerable to MFSA2020-03 and vulnerabilities that may appear after. On the other hand, firefox-esr is still updated so we recommend switching to firefox-esr if you are running 6.6-stable.

cpdup(1), a DragonFly copying tool that really should be more used, now uses microseconds for comparison. This is probably related to the sysctl vfs.timestamp_precision also now using microseconds.

Read this Start of the year update for KDE on FreeBSD to learn about latest FreeBSD and KDE developments. Good news, we’re almost up to date.

NetBSD folks started working on bringing proper i386 support to LLDB. Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.

This month, there have also been improvements on the NetBSD ptrace(2) API: removing one legacy interface with a few flaws and replacing it with two new calls with new features, and removing technical debt. As LLVM 10.0 is branching now soon (Jan 15th 2020), they have worked on proper support of the LLVM features for NetBSD 9.0 (today RC1) and NetBSD HEAD (future 10.0).

For the final report, another NetBSD team provides an overview of what changes were made to complete the GSoC project of Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD.

Tutorials

The broot file manager is quite fresh and nice approach to files and directories. The broot tools is not yet available on the FreeBSD systems (as package or port). This guide will show you how to built and install it on your FreeBSD system.

Hunspell is an excellent spell checking library. It’s also the spell checker used for LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org, and Mozilla applications. It requires installation of the library, and one or more word lists to compare words against. FreeBSD installation is straightforward using ports or packages.

Getting Started With Containers on FreeBSD? BastilleBSD wrote a great tutorial on getting started with containers on FreeBSD. BastilleBSD also has a growing number of videos on YouTube explaining and demonstrating what is possible with FreeBSD Jail automation.

Encryption is a great feature of ZFS, but you can do it in UFS as well using GEOM ELI although it does take a little bit more work. This video tutorial will create an unencrypted boot partition, then will add encryption to the system partition - then the rest of the normal install can take place.

Owner of Nvidia Optimus? This post is a “step by step” tutorial to describe how you can use Nvidia GeForce GT540M graphic card of FreeBSD laptop. Refer to github project pouya-eghbali/freebsd-nvidia-optimus for extra description and options.

If you want to lock and unlock your UNIX laptop with your phone – by just attaching it to your device – this is where the FreeBSD’s devd(8) subsystem come handy. Read this tutorial to learn hot to do it.

There’s also new quick how-to video on installing ClamAV in FreeBSD + a chkrootkit install and scan.

OpenBSD had supported installation templates for a few years now. The central tool of autoinstallation of OpenBSD is the “install.conf” file, which contains answers to every question that the install wizard would normally ask you interactively. Read this to learn more.

syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of FreeBSD based infrastructure.

(sys)Upgrade encrypted OpenBSD 6.5 to 6.6 on Vultr hosting - Author runs an OpenBSD instance with encrypted root on Vultr VPS since v6.2. It has never been reinstalled and with 6.5, they used sysupgrade(8), and it went as smooth as expected.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about announcing HyperbolaBSD, IPFW In-Kernel NAT setup on FreeBSD, Wayland and WebRTC enabled for NetBSD 9/Linux, LLDB Threading support ready for mainline, OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support in base, Dragonfly drm/i915: Update, and more.

BSD is one of the first UNIX implementations, and the IP stack in BSD is one of the first widely used open-source implementations of TCP/IP. Rodney Grimes joins the History of Networking to talk about the origins of BSD and these first IP implementations.

In Other BSDs for 2020/01/11 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Do you know anyone who would like this newsletter? Consider forwarding and tell them to subscribe.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

Last week was very interesting for FreeBSD, again. Distrowatch migrated to it, there is new FreeBSD Journal issue, FreeBSD swag shop and FreeBSD-based FreeNAS and OPNsense had their new releases. We also cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

" }, { "title": "Issue 2", "date": "2020-01-08T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 08, 2020", "slug": "2", "html": "

The second most reliable hosting company site in December 2019 runs FreeBSD

Linux was the most popular operating system in December 2019, used by eight of the top 10 most reliable hosting company sites. FreeBSD appears in second place with New York Internet and SmartOS makes an appearance in ninth place with EveryCity.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around twenty leading hosting providers’ sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

Releases

New FreeBSD development branch installation ISOs and virtual machine disk images have been uploaded to the FreeBSD Project mirrors. Read specifics about stable/11, stable/12 and current/13. As with any development branch, the installation snapshots are not intended for use on production systems. Testing on non-production systems is encouraged as much as possible.

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 65th quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2019Q4, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 20,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms.

News

i915 DRM has been updated to match the Linux 4.8.17 version, in DragonFly BSD. It includes some OpenBSD work too, interestingly. There’s also a refresh of the iwm(4) driver in DragonFly, which will apparently help most for iwm-9000 and iwm-9260 owners. Also, mrouted(8) is being removed from DragonFly – but it’s available as a port if you need it.

Tom Smyth writes about an interview he did with Theo de Raadt in between g2k19, the general hackathon in Ottawa, and BSDCAN 2019.

If you use the GeoIP functionality of pfBlockerNG or if you use the “IP Reputation” component of pfBlockerNG or if you want to continue to see the Country for IP blocked events in the Reports Tab, then you must register for a free MaxMind account and obtain a License key.

Is it possible to run a virtualized FreeNAS server inside a ProxMox (open-source platform for enterprise virtualization), giving you the best of both worlds? Well, not only does it work, this build is insanely fast and quiet, making it quite possibly the perfect home server.

BSD Notizie created a list of different BSD groups in Italy.

Do you want to run Nextcloud in FreeBSD? Read this guide that covers how to run Nextcloud 17 with FreeBSD 12.1.

There’s a new tool in works for fans of bhyve: Runhyve is a virtual machines and virtual networks manager for FreeBSD+bhyve. Runhyve consists of two parts: hypervisor and web application - panel. To build hypervisor we chose software like FreeBSD, ZFS, vm-bhyve, nginx. Panel is powered by Elixir and Phoenix.

Heads up for pkgsrc users: the Wayland option is now turned on by default for NetBSD 9 and Linux in cases where it peacefully coexists with X11. Right now, this effects the following packages: graphics/MesaLib, devel/SDL2, www/webkit-gtk, x11/gtk3. The WebRTC option has also been enabled by default on NetBSD 9 for two Firefox versions: www/firefox, www/firefox68.

If you are keen on attending next year’s EuroBSDcon conference and require financial support, please consider applying for Paul Schenkeveld Travel Grant by filling out the contact form before January 21st 2020, stating who you are, what you are doing with BSD, and why you should receive the grant. The EuroBSDcon Foundation board will consider all valid submissions in its sole discretion and communicate its selection by February 1st 2019.

bhyvecon Tokyo 2019 videos are now online for your enjoyment.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about How learning OpenBSD makes computers suck a little less, How Unix works, FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Well on Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, BSDCan CFP, HardenedBSD Infrastructure Goals, and more.

In Other BSDs for 2020/01/04 is out, too.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

This week we’ve learned that the second most reliable hosting company site in December 2019 runs FreeBSD. There were also new development branch installation ISOs available for FreeBSD and pkgsrc-2019Q4 is out as well. Read on to learn more about all BSD from last week and for links to the videos from bhyvecon Tokyo 2019.

" }, { "title": "Issue 1", "date": "2020-01-01T12:00:00.000Z", "printDate": "January 01, 2020", "slug": "1", "html": "

2019 Top DiscoverBSD and BSDSec

Our subjective feeling was that the most of news submitted were FreeBSD related, but it seems that people are the most interested in OpenBSD related stuff. Let’s check the top 5, but you can see all of the top 10 posts here.

DiscoverBSD

BSDSec

Thanks to everyone who submitted to DiscoverBSD and to all the good people working on BSD security teams!

Releases

Project Trident 12-U13 is now available. This is the final package update to the STABLE release repository based upon TrueOS 12-Stable. Next one will be Linux-based.

News

FreeBSD Foundation December 2019 Update brings the message from director, review of Foundation-sponsored FreeBSD software development, Foundation’s Advocacy work and more.

Another year-review about FreeBSD comes from Phoronix.

Do you want to contribute to BSD’s but don’t know how? One of the good way to start is doing translations. How To: Contributing Language Translations to FreeNAS can help you do that.

The KDE FreeBSD initiative got a new website. This moves a new site away from the old deprecated KDE Web framework and is more consistent with the other KDE websites, making it easier to maintain and strengthening the KDE brand. Check it out at freebsd.kde.org.

Visual Studio Code landed in FreeBSD ports. VS Code is a type of tool that combines the simplicity of a code editor with what developers need for their core edit-build-debug cycle. It provides comprehensive editing and debugging support, an extensibility model, and lightweight integration with existing tools.

Never enough of BSD news? Latest BSD Now podcast Happy Holidays, All(an) talks about Authentication Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD, NetBSD 9.0 RC1 is available, Running FreeNAS on a DigitalOcean droplet, NomadBSD 1.3 is here, at e2k19 nobody can hear you scream, and more.

Did we miss anything?

This newsletter is made from your content on DiscoverBSD and BSDSec. Submit the stuff we missed so it can appear next time.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

", "excerpt": "

Welcome to the first-ever BSD Weekly! In this issue we will look into the most popular posts of 2019 from DiscoverBSD and BSDSec as well as all the BSD from last week!

" } ] }