With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default.
This is a big default change for DragonFlyBSD as up to now its default compiler was using the several year old GCC 5. With the default move to GCC 8 comes many optimizations, particularly for newer Intel and AMD CPU microarchitectures. This is especially good news for AMD Zen "znver1" CPU users. There is also support for newer C/C++ language features and many other enhancements as we've covered over the past few years.
One of the amazing functionalities of ZFS is the possibility of sending a whole dataset from one place to another. This mechanism is amazing to create backups of your ZFS based machines. Although, there were some issues with this functionality for a long time when a user sent a big chunk of data. What if you would do that over the network and your connection has disappeared? What if your machine was rebooted as you are sending a snapshot?
Presentations (15 mins each):
Mariusz Zaborski & Michał Mróz - "BSD news" Adam Wołk: "Otoro - tłusty tuńczyk w akwarium portów OpenBSD", "Otoro - fat tuna in the OpenBSD ports fish-tank" Piotr Jasiek: "Idiotoodporność aplikacji - dodatek czy wymóg?", "Apps Idiotproofing - addition or requirement"
FreeBSD 11.3 has been released, OpenBSD workstation, write your own fuzzer for the NetBSD kernel, Exploiting FreeBSD-SA-19:02.fd, streaming to twitch using OpenBSD, 3 different ways of dumping hex contents of a file, and more.
If you are running an em(4) or igb(4) device in DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the drivers. This brings it to Intel driver versions em-7.7.4 and igb-2.5.6.
19.7, nicknamed "Jazzy Jaguar", embodies an iteration of what should be considered enjoyable user experience for firewalls in general: improved statistics and visibility of rules, reliable and consistent live logging and alias utility improvements. Apart from the usual upgrades of third party software to up-to-date releases, OPNsense now also offers built-in remote system logging through Syslog-ng, route-based IPsec, updated translations with Spanish as a brand new and already fully translated language and newer Netmap code with VirtIO, VLAN child and vmxnet support.
DragonFly’s tcp keepalive was changed from milliseconds to seconds. This happened in both DragonFly-current and in the 5.6 release, and it changes the networking API, which means a dports rebuild is needed or a pkg upgrade, for which happily all packages have been rebuilt. So, on your next update of the system, be sure to update packages too.
Author's setup for using FreeBSD as a desktop operating system with Nvidia graphics.
While newer Linux distributions have run into problems on the new AMD Zen 2 desktop CPUs (fixed by a systemd patch or fundamentally by a BIOS update) and DragonFlyBSD needed a separate boot fix, FreeBSD 12.0 installed out-of-the-box fine on the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X test system with ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi motherboard.
Andrew Fresh ([email protected]) has committed OpenBSD::Unveil(3p), a Perl interface to unveil(2).
This is a packages update with some important bugfixes from upstream TrueOS.
In addition to better Wine support on NetBSD thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, another student developer has been working on DRM ioctl support including when running their Linux emulation packages. Ultimately the hope is they can run the Steam Linux binary on NetBSD.
Am5x86 based retro UNIX build log, setting up services in a FreeNAS Jail, first taste of DragonflyBSD, streaming Netflix on NetBSD, NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini, Hammer vs Hammer2, and more.
This report was prepared by Jason High as a part of Google Summer of Code 2019
The latest plugins update addresses several security advisories as well as a bug that prevented the successful installation of the Zoneminder plugin. The latest versions should appear in Plugins ⇾ Available and existing plugin installations can be updated to the new versions using the instructions in this blog.
You’re probably used to the ‘make buildworld; make buildkernel; make installkernel; etc etc’ dance on each upgrade at this point. ‘Tse’ has created a script that rolls that all up into a single action.
For four and a half years now, 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.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/11 branch.
Tasks regarding fork(2), vfork(2), clone(2)/_clone(2), and posixspawn(3) in the context of debuggers has been finished. There are no longer any known kernel issues for any of these calls. All of the calls are covered with ATF regression tests.
This article describes how to install and configure a Nginx server on FreeBSD 12.
Author had difficulties running Linux as a virtual machine using OpenBSD vmd(8). Ubuntu LTS crashed during installation wizard, Debian 9 does not seem to ship with virtio drivers, Alpine randomly freezes the console and Slackware … well slack has not been updated in years. Arch Linux seems to run well. And as they didn’t find a complete guide to install and run it using OpenBSD vmd(8), here are their notes.
Today’s struggle: replacing a disk within a FreeBSD ZFS pool.
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.
Why OpenBSD? Simply because it is the best tool for the job for me for my new-to-me Lenovo Thinkpad T420. Additionally, I do care about security and non-bloat in my personal operating systems (business needs can have different priorities, to be clear).
This report was written by Maciej Grochowski as a part of developing the AFL+KCOV project.
3 new FreeBSD Security Advisories and one Errata Notice are available:
This is a significant package update for the repository, not just for applications, but also for some of the base system packages. There are a lot of changes from upstream FreeBSD and TrueOS in this release, from additional “-bootstrap” base packages to the renaming of the “zol” flavor of base packages to “nozfs”, as the “zol” version of the ZFS packages was also renamed to “openzfs”. In addition to this, a ton of the default settings from upstream TrueOS were changed.
This report was written by Naveen Narayanan as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.
This report was written by Saurav Prakash as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.
Prepared by Manikishan Ghantasala (shannu) as a part of Google Summer of Code 2019.
Prepared by Siddharth Muralee(@R3x) as a part of Google Summer of Code 2019.
DragonflyBSD 5.6 is out, OpenBSD Vulkan Support, bad utmp implementations in glibc and FreeBSD, OpenSSH protects itself against Side Channel attacks, ZFS vs OpenZFS, and more.
Prepared by Akul Pillai as part of GSoC 2019: The first coding period of The Google Summer of Code has come to an end. It has been a great experience so far and I got the opportunity to learn a lot of new stuff. This is a report on the work I have during this coding period.
Because of some changes Matthew Dillon made to maxvnodes calculation in DragonFly, you may find yourself using 5%-10% less RAM. If you’ve upgraded to 5.6, you already have this benefit.
The OpenBSD installer is straight forward, but deploying tens of VM takes some time. So the author has set up an automated environment that provides fast and (nearly) finger-less deployment.
Somewhat surprisingly, OpenBSD has added the Vulkan library and ICD loader support as their newest port.
This new graphics/vulkan-loader port provides the generic Vulkan library and ICD support that is the common code for Vulkan implementations on the system.
Well known FreeBSD developer and leader of their release engineering team, Glen Barber, has left the FreeBSD Foundation but will continue working on FreeBSD as well as coordinating its releases.
Glen Barber has decided to take up a position at BSD-focused Netgate.
Damien Miller ([email protected]) has just committed a new feature for SSH that should help protect against all the various memory side channel attacks that have surfaced recently.
Ted Unangst ([email protected]) posted to the [email protected] mailing list regarding recent changes to environment handling in doas (in -current).
XigmaNAS is an embedded Storage distribution for Windows, Mac, & UNIX-like systems.
The best open filesystem just keeps getting better.
Author will show you how they have built so called Enterprise Storage based on FreeBSD system along with more then 1 PB (Petabyte) of raw capacity.
This version has a corrected sshd_config and fixes a lockup bug in ttm.
iXsystems Senior Analyst clears up what ZFS and OpenZFS refer to and how they differ.
With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0.
With nginx plugin OPNsense become a strong full featured Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Netflix has identified several TCP networking vulnerabilities in FreeBSD and Linux kernels.
The vulnerabilities specifically relate to the minimum segment size (MSS) and TCP Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) capabilities. The most serious, dubbed “SACK Panic,” allows a remotely-triggered kernel panic on recent Linux kernels.
There are patches that address most of these vulnerabilities. If patches can not be applied, certain mitigations will be effective. We recommend that affected parties enact one of those described below, based on their environment.
DragonFly 5.6.0 has been released. This version brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2.
After using UNIX for so many years you start to think the UNIX way. This article aims to automate and accelerate the flow of importing photos from camera and storing it for future use.
iXsystems has released TrueCommand 1.0, a unified management system that allows organizations to monitor and control all of their TrueNAS and FreeNAS systems from a “single pane of glass” interface. TrueCommand simplifies 24x7 operations, improves security, automates tasks, and enables faster problem resolution for NAS systems.
This will turn into a real 5.6 release probably by weekend if no problems are found.
Next hackathon report comes from Stefan Sperling ([email protected]).
FreeBSD had a very busy first quarter with a status report out today providing a look at to all of the ongoing development activities for this leading BSD platform.
The quarterly status report can be read in full here.
After being an experimental option in DragonFlyBSD for more than the past half-decade, HAMMER2 is the new default file-system of this FreeBSD derivative...
Vanilla is a simple discussion forum written in PHP. Vanilla source code is publicly hosted on Github. This guide will walk you through the Vanilla installation process on a fresh FreeBSD 12 Vultr server instance using PHP, MariaDB as a database, and Nginx as a web server.
Errata patches for OpenBGPD have been released for OpenBSD 6.5.
The third BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.3 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.
The start-2-L reference is a “small” server that ships with KVM over IP. It is based on SuperMicro X11SSE-F. So far, the hardware seems to be supported pretty well and it is possible to run OpenBSD with Full Disk Encryption.
Martin Pieuchot ([email protected]) wrote in with a report from g2k19.
Next up with a report from g2k19 is Andrew Hewus Fresh ([email protected]).
Moxie, the founder of Open Whisper Systems and Signal is hostile toward third party clients. Hence, there isn’t a very broad ecosystem around Signal. But luckily, some developers share the attitude that a messenger like Signal shouldn’t run inside a browser and started the signal-cli project. As the name implies, it is a commandline client - or rather a library.
How do I read my hard disk/SSD health using smartctl command on FreeBSD operating system? How can I hard drive health on FreeBSD and find out if my disk is dying?
Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, "What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?"
Here’s something that might be useful: an example cleaning file for creating an AWS DragonFly image.
The 16th annual BSDCan took place at the University of Ottawa from May 15th - 18th. As usual, the popular conference drew participants from all over the world, including many members of the iXsystems Team. From informative talks to insightful discussions, this conference was filled with inspiration for us Open Source developers.
This is a minor update to synchronize packages and move Project Trident to the 19.05 version of TrueOS (v20190516). This brings in all of the FreeBSD security fixes for the Intel vulnerabilities that were announced last week.
We'll implement a VPN gateway IPSec/IKEv2 because it's natively supported both by clients (Linux/Windows/macOS) and the server (OpenBSD), no extra software required.
Running AIX on QEMU on Linux on Windows, your NAS fleet with TrueCommand, Unleashed 1.3 is available, LLDB: CPU register inspection support extension, V7 Unix programs often not written as expected, and more.
With the latest hackathon finished, the subsequent BSDCan completed and its attendees having returned home, Claudio Jeker ([email protected]) writes in with the first report from g2k19.
In Version 11.2, the management platform was updated to make it even easier to manage and create new plugins. Going a step further, snapshots can also be replicated to other FreeNAS or TrueNAS systems to aid with disaster recovery and data protection.
This is an installation script that will turn a fresh install of FreeBSD 12.0 into based MATE desktop. It is inspired by GhostBSD. GhostBSD was a FreeBSD desktop distribution that originally used FreeBSD as it's base. After several years GhostBSD switch it's base to TrueOS. While GhostBSD continues to be a great desktop I require (and prefer) a FreeBSD base system. I created this installation script and the corresponding PKG repository to fill that gap.
It's recommended that you start with a clean install of FreeBSD 12.0 64-bit. Your non-root user should belong to the operator and wheel group so that it can perform administrative functions.
fetch -o - http://k.itty.cat/7 | sh
After about 30 minutes (depending on your Internet connection) your system will automatically reboot into a graphical desktop. See the GitHub repo or http://www.unibia.com/unibianet/freebsd/mate-desktop for additional information.
The next batch of updated Plugins has been released. The updated versions are now available for new installs in the Plugins ⇾ Available section of the UI. Existing plugin installations can be updated to the new versions using the CLI instructions in this post.
OpenBSD doesn’t seem to have any mounting utilities for SAMBA shares any more. But it can mount NFS shares. And those can be automatically mounted and unmounted using the amd(8) stock tool. So let’s configure the OpenBSD instances for automounting NFS shares.
Over the last year, many changes have been made to the NetBSD 8 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. Now it is high time to cut a formal release, right before we go into the next release cycle with the upcoming branch for NetBSD 9.
It includes the following changes:
Fixed portable builds with older versions of MacOS, Android targets < API 21, and Solaris 10.
Fixed SRTP profile advertisement for DTLS servers.
OPNsense 19.1.8 is now available and should be considered a must-have for ACL users.
What if you could have a server OS that had built in RAID, NAS and SAN functionality, and could manage packages, containers and VMs in a GUI? What if that server OS was also free to download and install? Wouldn’t that be kind of awesome? Wouldn’t that be FreeNAS?
A rather deep explanation how to setup a SSH CA server. It is not 100% perfect but a very good start when you want to install it.
Update 1 of Project Trident version 19.04 is now available! Updating to version 19.04-U1 requires the update be performed twice. The first attempt will fail immediately after bootstrapping the new version of the sysup updater utility. Start the update again and the new version of the updater will pick up where the previous version left off. This fail/restart process is being improved for sysup and won’t be used in future updates.
expect a downtime of anoncvs.NetBSD.org and nyftp.NetBSD.org on Sunday 19th
This blog provides an overview of creating pools after installing FreeNAS.
The FreeBSD Project has released 8 new Security Advisories and Errata Notices regarding pf, mds, scp, ntp, xinstall, wpa and tzdata.
rss2email is a Python-based software. But OpenBSD 6.5 takes care of everything. Simple and straightforward: configure the RSS feeds and receive the items in your mailbox.
The french company OVH provides Kimsufi dedicated servers. The KS-10 ships with Intel® Core™ i5-2300 and 16GB DDR3 of RAM. The main drawback is that there is no KVM-IP or HTML console. This means you can’t run FDE configuration. AFAIK. But in case you don’t care, there’s a way to install the “unsupported” OpenBSD release...
Project Trident version 19.04 (based on TrueOS 19.04) is now available! If you experience an update error (code 150) before any packages are downloaded, please delete all Qt4 packages from your system before trying again: sudo pkg remove qt4-corelib.
FreeBSD ZFS vs. ZoL performance, Dragonfly 5.4.2 has been release, containing web services with iocell, Solaris 11.4 SRU8, Problem with SSH Agent forwarding, OpenBSD 6.4 to 6.5 upgrade guide, and more.
This update features a number of improvements such as link-local support for bridges, HA sync consolidation, adding local CAs to the trusted SSL certificates for most of the system download capabilities, plugin-based PAM authentication rework for IPsec and the web proxy as well as third party fixes for hostapd / wpa_supplicant 2.8 and Suricata 4.1.4.
Like other BSDs, DragonFlyBSD continues re-basing their Radeon and Intel driver code against what's in the mainline Linux kernel given that's where the vendors are working on the open-source graphics support without any catered driver to the BSDs, with the exception being NVIDIA and their binary driver being offered with official FreeBSD support.
In OpenBSD fashion, this is not going to be a copy-pasta recipe for installing WordPress on OpenBSD and having no idea how you got there. Instead, it aims to be a self-help guide, addressing the common gotchas you are likely to encounter.
OpenBSD 6.5 has been released, mount ZFS datasets anywhere, help test upcoming NetBSD 9 branch, LibreSSL 2.9.1 is available, Bail Bond Denied Edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, and one reason ed(1) was a good editor back in the days in this week’s episode.
The server has a Core i3-6100T CPU @ 3.20GHz, 8GB RAM, a ZFS setup with two mirror vdevs each consisting of two disks connected to the board via SATA3. And of course the onboard Gbit NIC (Realtek).
From the people who bring you FreeNAS and TrueNAS, the developers at iXsystems have released the first public beta of TrueCommand. The single pane of glass management platform TrueCommand is designed to simplify IT operations through administration and control of multiple systems.
Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5. If a userland program sets the IPv6 checksum offset on a raw socket, an incoming packet could crash the kernel. ospf6d is such a program. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
OpenBSD is renowned for its security innovations and code quality. With its emphasis on code correctness, exploit mitigation techniques, and a rigorous development process, OpenBSD provides a rich platform and environment for developers to create robust software.
This talk explores various OpenBSD programs, exploit mitigation techniques, tools, and development practices to show how you can use them to write code that is safe, robust, and resistant to exploits – even if your code is meant for platforms other than OpenBSD.
OpenBGPD is a free, functional, and secure implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP-4). It is a fairly complete BGP implementation and praised for ease of use, as well as its reliability.
Do you run BSD and want a RunBSD sticker? Submit your mailing address and they'll send you the stickers for free.
Willing to spend some money? Please donate to a BSD of your choice.
OnionBSD aims to be an alternative to Tails. Alternative in both the technical and philosophical way.
The project is in a very early development stage and is not to be used with any sensitive data yet. There's also no images available yet.
The FreeBSD Core Team invites you to complete the 2019 FreeBSD CommunitySurvey. Its purpose is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the project's priorities and efforts. It will remain open for 17 days and close at midnight May 13 UTC (Monday 5pm PDT).
While FreeBSD has long had the "pkg" utility for easily installing packages on FreeBSD, using Pkg to manage the FreeBSD base system hasn't been possible.
OpenBSD 6.5 advertises for an installer improvement: rdsetroot(8) (a build-time tool) is now available for general use. Used in combination with autoinstall.8, it is now really easy to do automatic upgrades of your OpenBSD instances.
Unix was the standard for mission-critical computing. Now it’s clinging for life. How will it end?
FreeBSD is testing a new upstream for its ZFS implementation, ZFS on Linux. Images for FreeBSD 12-STABLE and 13-CURRENT images are now available for testing FreeBSD + ZoL (ZFS on Linux).
Introducing funlinkat(), an OpenBSD Router with AT&T U-Verse, using NetBSD on a raspberry pi, ZFS encryption is still under development, Rump kernel servers and clients tutorial, Snort on OpenBSD 6.4, and more.
NomadBSD is a 64-bit live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. The project's latest release, NomadBSD 1.2, is based on FreeBSD 12.0. The new version includes on-disk documentation, enables TRIM support and fixes a number of issues related to video drivers.
With iX Systems having released new images of FreeBSD reworked with their ZFS On Linux code that is in development to ultimately replace their existing FreeBSD ZFS support derived from the code originally found in the Illumos source tree, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the FreeBSD 12 performance of ZFS vs. ZoL vs. UFS and compared to Ubuntu Linux on the same system with EXT4 and ZFS.
The torrents on the website are generated from files mirrored from an official OpenBSD mirror.
As in previous releases, 6.5 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.
Over the past decade there's been talks on a few occasions about either spinning NetBSD as a desktop platform or offering up various desktop usability improvements to make it easier to use this BSD as a desktop operating system. In 2019 there still isn't a great desktop experience to NetBSD but the new "OS108" is seeking to improve that with a NetBSD OS paired with the MATE desktop environment.
I would like to invite you to our monthly Polish BSD User group meetup. We have had eleven meetings, with the group running for almost a year now! A lot of interesting topics have been covered during that time and I’m sure this will continue in April!
In this video, they're going to show an overview of GhostBSD 19.04 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Finally, GhostBSD 19.04 is out! GhostBSD 19.04 has several improvements from the volume controller to the installer, and for the first time, we added and changed some code in the base system. GhostBSD 19.04 is available with our official MATE desktop, and there is also a community Xfce desktop version available. This release is a significant improvement from GhostBSD 18.12. Enjoy!
This week we have a special episode with a Michael W. Lucas interview about his latest jail book that’s been released. We’re talking all things jails, writing, book sponsoring, the upcoming BSDCan 2019 conference, and more.
A new hackathon report has arrived, this time from Stefan Sperling ([email protected]).
Kenneth R Westerback ([email protected]) wrote in with a report on his recent participation in t2k19.
BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.
Six months ago, I told myself I would write a small hypervisor for an old x86 AMD CPU I had. Just to learn more about virtualization, and see how far I could go alone on my spare time. Today, it turns out that I've gone as far as implementing a full, fast and flexible virtualization stack for NetBSD. I'd like to present here some aspects of it.
The Internet is full of Ads and Trackers. Some of them are useful to monetize free content. Some are used in a non-ethical manner. Savvy users will configure Ad-Blocker on their Web browser. Others won’t. Most Appliance and IoT modules won’t allow third-party blocking addons.
Belgium is known for great beer, the best chocolate, and delicious waffles! It’s also the home of the largest open source conference in Europe. FOSDEM 2019 was held in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, February 2-3. I was fortunate to attend it again this year, along with the co-located FreeBSD Developer Summit held on February 1.
After a longer pause we are back with considerable upgrades for IPsec, a new CSR feature for local CAs, PHP 7.2 migration and a number of other considerable third party updates.
Fresh from the t2k19 hackathon comes a report from Anthony J. Bentley ([email protected]), who writes: Seeing an Asia hackathon coming up was pretty exciting; I’d never been there before. I spent a month or so preparing by getting through the more mundane things in my backlog, mostly new ports and updates. That left my time in Taipei open to focus on fixing some bugs and broken things.
FreeBSD Q4 2018 status report, the GhostBSD alternative, the coolest 90s laptop, OpenSSH 8.0 with quantum computing resistant keys exchange, project trident: 18.12-U8 is here, and more.
The collected works of the FreeBSD community as presented at various conferences and summits.
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.
Currently only supports #FreeBSD and #OpenBSD. Inspired from cwm.
Author writes about creating port for GoCD, which is a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) system. This was a great opportunity to learn how to build a FreeBSD port while also contributing back to the community.
Experiment with NetBSD, the only open source Unix with direct lineage back to the original source code, on your Raspberry Pi.
Project Trident has finally finished some significant infrastructure updates over the last 2 weeks, and we are pleased to announce that package update 8 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available. To switch to the new update, you will need to open the “Configuration” tab in the update manager and switch to the new “Trident-release” package repository.
Storage changing software, what makes Unix special, what you need may be “pipeline +Unix commands”, running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL, the ultimate guide to memorable tech talks, light-weight contexts, and more.
OS108 is a fast, open and Secure replacement Operating System for Windows and macOS. Built on top of NetBSD, OS108 provides a simple desktop-oriented operating system.
Errata patches for vmm have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.4. GDT and IDT limits were improperly restored during VMM context switches.
Since we are still on this island among many in this vast ocean of the Internet, we write this message in a bottle to inform you of the work we have finished and what lies ahead of us. These deeds that we have wrought with our minds and hands, they are for all to partake of - in the hopes that anyone of their free will, will join us in making improvements.
Ken Westerback ([email protected]) writes in with his report from a2k19, the hackathon in New Zealand.
The Huawei MateBook X is a high-quality 13" ultra-thin laptop with a fanless Core i5 processor. It is obviously biting the design of the Apple 12" MacBook, but it does have some notable improvements such as a slightly larger screen, a more usable keyboard with adequate key travel, and 2 USB-C ports.
It also uses more standard PC components than the MacBook, such as a PS/2-connected keyboard, Intel WiFi card, etc., so its OpenBSD compatibility is quite good.
Install normally as you do NetBSD be sure to enable option "log" in partition to your FFSv2 file system. Create at least one user from configuration menu while installation.
After install login to root account and follow these steps while CD ISO is in cdrom device:
New features
Bug fixes
FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX, looking at NetBSD as an OpenBSD user, taking time-stamped notes in vim, OpenBSD 6.5 has been tagged, FreeBSD and NetBSD in GSoC 2019, SecBSD: an UNIX-like OS for Hackers, and more.
OpenRsync is a FREE, easy to use implementation of the rsync program.
The software is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license.
Errata patches for pf have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.4. A state in pf could pass ICMP packets to a destination IP address that did not match the state. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
Verification As Code of Infrastructure As Code, Raul Cuza
2019-04-03 @ 18:45 - Suspenders, 108 Greenwich Street; typically on the second floor, otherwise on the first
Many times I have found myself watching the various ‘debug’ commands like top/ps/mount/df or various log files like /var/log/messages or /var/log/automount.log when I thought something went wrong … or just takes little too long. I needed to open several terminal xterm(1) sessions (which is quite fast as I open them with [WIN]+[SPACE] and then [ENTER] but still …) and check what went wrong.
These actions tired my so I created a thing called Global Dashboard with all information I would ever need for such debugging.
6 tutorials and 2 meetings will be held in the first 2 days, and 21 papers will be presented this weekend.
Schedule
Jason Tubnor: Building a virtualisation appliance for OpenBSD and Windows Server with FreeBSD, bhyve, OpenZFS, from challenge, to concept, and production Philipp Buehler: WIP: Adding OpenBSD vmm support to 'packer'. Porting Go software! Peter Hessler: WIP: OpenBSD vmm and bsd.network on Mastodon.social Lunch Kamil Rytarowski: NetBSD Virtualization Status Report Mike Larkin: OpenBSD Virtualization Status Report and related Works in Progress Politehnica University of Bucharest Updates: Save/Restore, Live Migration, Machine Independent/Machine Dependent Separation, and QCOW Support Open Discussion
There are some FreeBSD machines in our infrastructure which run NGINX. After the recent announcement of the F5 purchase of NGINX we decided to move back to Lighttpd.
On 27 February 2019, the majority of the HardenedBSD Foundation Board of Directors attended its annual early-year planning meeting. It was a very productive meeting, spanning the full allotted hour.
Some time ago I have bought a bunch of thin clients without much thought of what I would use them for. I would never expect that this would be the way I'd get involved in OS kernel development!
An UEFI boot panic scenario was debugged last week with the help of the community. This update includes a fix that will allow the ones affected by this 19.1 issue to upgrade or install (and boot of course) correctly. We are also including the IPsec VTI support and the latest Suricata 4.1.3 with stability and compatibility fixes.
A kernel of failure, IPv6 fragmentation vulnerability in OpenBSD’s pf, a guide to the terminal, using a Yubikey for SSH public key authentication, FreeBSD desktop series, and more.
This post is meant to be a guide on setting up HAXM accelerated QEMU on NetBSD 8.0. The HAXM-capable qemu is currently provided in pkgsrc as wip/qemu-haxm.
March 14, 2019, 18:15 - 21:00 Where: Wheel Systems Office, Aleje Jerozolimskie 178, Warsaw
Can you run the Olympiad in Informatics on BSD? by Michał Sidor KARL - like a snowflake, a unique kernel. by Adam Wołk Exploring Bitcoin. by Tomasz Jadachowski
What you dislike, or maybe what was the biggest surprise for you in OpenBSD? Also those surprises that you accepted and learned to live with them while using the system.
The binary package repository for DragonFly-current has been updated with the latest build of all packages, thanks to tuxillo and others on EFNet #dragonflybsd doing a lot of work.
Running OpenBSD on the laptop makes is safe by default. But encrypting the storage of the OpenBSD laptop makes it even safer. This is how my ThinkPad X230i gets encrypted and won’t boot without the proper USB thumb drive plugged in.
Trident system changes of note: The post-install default ZFS block size has been changed to 4KB (ashift=12). This is better for performance, but only impacts new ZFS datasets that are created after this change. No impact for current ZFS system layout. The “Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation” system control has now been enabled for all Project Trident systems. This should ensure a higher level of security.
Software will never fix Spectre-type bugs, a proof that sed is Turing complete, managed jails using Bastille, new version of netdata, using grep with /dev/null, using GMail with mutt, and more.
Getting MRTG working with OpenBSD snmpd and collecting traffic is not a very big deal, cfgmaker is your friend! Getting CPU load was more of a challenge.
As mentioned last week, there’s a new build of dports for 5.4, now available.
Thanks to [email protected], it is now possible to use Telegraf from OpenBSD ports.
For the 4th year in a row and for the 13th time The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2019!
If you are a student and would like to learn more about Google Summer of Code please go to the Google Summer of Code homepage.
SecBSD is an UNIX-like operating system focused on computer security based on OpenBSD. Designed for security testing, hacking and vulnerability assessment, it uses full disk encryption and ProtonVPN + OpenVPN by default.
A security BSD enviroment for security researchers, penetration testers, bug hunters and cybersecurity experts. Developed by Dark Intelligence Team for private use and will be public release coming soon.
Some tools working by default in SecBSD 1.3:
OpenVPN + ProtonVPN.
Nmap by Fyodor.
Metasploit by Rapid7.
Burp Suite Community Edition by PortSwigger Web Security.
Social Engineer Toolkit by Dave Kennedy (ReL1K).
Gobuster by OJ Reeves.
Aquatone & Gitrob by Michael Henriksen.
R3con1z3r by Raji Abdulgafar.
OWASP Zed Attack Proxy by The OWASP ZAP core project.
Radare2 by pancake aka trufae.
WAFW00F by Sandro Gauci && Wendel G. Henrique.
Arjun & Photon by Somdev Sangwan.
Red Hawk by R3D#@0R_2H1N A.K.A Tuhinshubhra.
Exploit pattern by Sven Steinbauer.
Hydra by Van Hauser.
Sublist3r by Ahmed Aboul-Ela.
Wireshark by Gerald Combs.
X Attacker by Mohamed Riahi.
DataSploit by Shubham Mittal, Sudhanshu Chauhan & Kunal Aggarwal.
Cloudflare Enumeration Tool by Matthew Bryant.
Tko-Subs by Anshuman Bhartiya.
Parameth by Ciaran McNally.
Routersploit by Threat9.
Tplmap by Emilio Pinna.
Commmix by Anastasios Stasinopoulos.
Auto Sub Takeover by Jordy Zomer.
Sqlmap by Sqlmap Project.
Hostile Sub Bruteforcer by Ben Sadeghipour.
Aircrack-ng by Thomas d’Otreppe.
Nikto by Chris Sullo.
Can I take over XYZ by EdOverflow.
SSH Punk 1337 by Giuseppe Corti.
SpiderFoot by Steve Micallef.
Knockpy by Gianni Amato.
Exploit Framework by Wang Yihang.
Autosploit by NullArray.
Dirsearch.by Mauro Soria.
ShellPop & ShellKiller by Andre Marques.
Nvidia released new long-lived graphics drivers for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems with support for new GPUs, as well as various other improvements and bug fixes.
Jails are extremely lightweight containers that provide a full-featured UNIX-like operating system inside. These containers can be used for software development, rapid testing, and secure production Internet services.
Bastille provides an interface to create, manage and destroy these secure virtualized environments.
The system call brk() in DragonFly has been replaced with sbrk(). It won’t affect you from an end-user perspective other than making sure you upgrade everything on the next release.
For information, all these steps were done using 2 PC Engines APU2 (upgraded with latest BIOS for iPXE support), so it's a headless (serial port only, this can be IPMI SoL with different hardware).
Upgrading XigmaNAS® "Embedded" or "Full" from any version below XigmaNAS 11.2.0.4.6154 by webgui or from LiveCD/USB will be problematic! Please download and save your config from WebGUI first and backup all files from the second data partition if used on the install media! Now you can perform a reinstall from LiveCD/USB, after installation you can restore your previously saved config.
Adding glue to a desktop environment, flashing the BIOS on a PC Engine, revive a Cisco IDS into a capable OpenBSD computer, An OpenBSD WindowMaker desktop, RealTime data compression, the love for pipes, and more.
This is the serie about iSCSI and OpenBSD. iSCSI is a protocol designed for sharing a block device across network as if it was a local disk.
Package update 5 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available. The graphical system update utility has a new version now with a couple new features: When starting updates, there will now be a prompt about whether to perform a “full” update (forcibly resync your system with the versions of packages in the repository). This option takes a bit longer to download/perform the updates, but is very useful if your system has gotten out of sync with the repo from manually testing packages or you are moving backwards to an older version of the package repository.
The second release candidate of NomadBSD 1.2 is now available! We would like to thank all the RC1 testers who sent us feedback and bug reports. If you notice any problems, please let us know.
Two years ago we observed that vlan(4) performances suffered from the locks added to the queueing API. At that time, the use of SRP was also pointed out as a possible responsible for the regression. Since [email protected] recently reworked if_enqueue() to allow pseudo-drivers to bypass the use of queues, and their associated locks, let's dive into vlan(4) performances again.
Do you have Realtek hardware for your network link? Specifically, re(4)? Then there is a patch for you to try.
A 2019 flavored WindowMaker Desktop, running on OpenBSD 6.4/amd64.
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE is now available as AMIs with ZFS root disks in all 16 publicly available EC2 regions.
This is a very simple and easy to follow guide on securely administer your FreeBSD server. In this guide we will cover the minimal basics which in turn can be very deep and insightful topics on their own right. I will talk about user behaviour, network, operating system and applications running on top.
A die hard FreeBSD user trying out a little bit of NetBSD 8 - from the install to using Mate and installing a few things inbetween.
Strategic thinking to keep FreeBSD relevant, reflecting on the soul of a new machine, 10GbE Benchmarks On Nine Linux Distros and FreeBSD, NetBSD integrating LLVM sanitizers in base, FreeNAS 11.2 distrowatch review, and more.
If you Google “UNIX timeline”, you’ll get a bunch of different results that are either incomplete, incorrect, complicated to the point where it’s unreadable, or a combination of all of these things. So this blog post aims to rectify this.
Package update 4 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available.
There have also been a couple more minor updates to the automatic Xorg setup routines which Project Trident provides.
This is a set of scripts that generates a bootable image (and/or ISO file), that creates a working minimal installation of FreeBSD (mfsBSD) or Linux (mfslinux). It is completely loaded into memory.
Project Trident is a desktop operating system based on TrueOS. Trident takes the rolling base platform of TrueOS, which is in turn based on FreeBSD's development branch, and combines it with the Lumina desktop environment.
Announcement: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.15.0.php
Changelog: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.5-5.15.0-changelog.php
If you’re really qualified to tech review a jails book, and you desperately want to spend your next couple weeks doing just that, drop an email to the author and tell them why you should be a reviewer.
Post describes creating the snapshot and then restoring the snapshot
openrsync, a clean-room implementation of rsync, is being developed by Kristaps Dzonsons as part of the rpki-client(1) project. openrsync(1) has been imported into the tree (as "rsync") by Sebastian Benoit.
Today the post author will upgrade knew from FreeBSD 11.2 to FreeBSD 12.0.
OpenBSD ships with a graphical login screen named xenodm. The default configuration looks a bit old (to my taste). So I decided to look at how to have it feel a bit more modern.
Author had categorized the list of items they think are important into (new) code/features, docs, polishing and project infrastructure.
They recap FOSDEM 2019, FreeBSD Foundation January update, OPNsense 19.1 released, the hardware-assisted virtualization challenge, ZFS and GPL terror, ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE, and more.
With TrueOS offering daily snapshots built against the "ZFS on FreeBSD" code derived from OpenZFS / ZFS on Linux, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how the performance compares to that of FreeBSD 12.0 with its ZFS file-system support, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 with its HAMMER2 file-system alternative, and then Linux with ZFS/ZoL and other file-system options.
New FreeBSD development branch installation ISOs and virtual machine disk images have been uploaded to the FreeBSD Project mirrors.
As with any development branch, the installation snapshots are not intended for use on production systems. We do, however, encourage testing on non-production systems as much as possible.
Several kernel memory disclosure bugs were discovered. For all NetBSD versions, you need to obtain fixed kernel sources, rebuild and install the new kernel, and reboot the system. The fixed source may be obtained from the NetBSD CVS repository.
FreeBSD doesn't include a GUI desktop, but there is a way to install GNOME and give a user sudo privileges.
Package update 3 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available. This biggest changes of note are: owncloud has been “flavorized” according to the PHP versions. The “owncloud” package has been removed, and there are a number of different “owncloud-php[71/72/73]” packages available now corresponding to the various versions of PHP which are supported (7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 at the present time). Anybody using owncloud will need to manually install one of the newer owncloud packages, as the old one will be automatically removed as part of the update (custom config files will remain, just the package will get automatically removed since it no longer exists in the package repository).
This is a security and reliability release: WAN DHCP will no longer trust the server MTU given. Uncoordinated cross site scripting issues have been fixed. And the Python request library was patched due to CVE 2018-18074.
New FreeBSD Security Advisories and Errata Notices
It's been a love affair going on for years, but should you not already know, Netflix has long been leveraging FreeBSD as part of its in-house content delivery network (CDN) for serving its millions of users with on-demand video. This weekend at FOSDEM, Jonathan Looney of the company talked about their usage of FreeBSD.
The recently releases of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.4 have been exciting in the BSD space while moving forward there is the NetBSD 9.0 release a ways out on the horizon.
NetBSD 9.0 has yet to be branched, but it was talked about this weekend at FOSDEM 2019 by developer Benny Siegert. Enhancing the security of NetBSD 9.0 is now kernel ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), a kernel leak detector, Kernel Address Space Address Sanitizer (KASAN), Kernel Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (KUBSAN), user-space sanitizers, and other security work.
MidnightBSD, the downstream of FreeBSD focused on desktop support and offers the Lumina desktop as well as GNOME 3 and other options, is out with its minor v1.1 update.
MidnightBSD 1.1 is a minor update over the v1.0 release from a few months back. This update features an updated OpenSSL and various other package updates, support for disabling TRIM on problematic controllers, various networking driver fixes, and other maintenance items carried out.
FreeBSD is usually not the first choice for music art, but it has quite a lot to offer.
This presentation is about tuning FreeBSD OS to give more in the sense of real time audio, possibilities of such a studio and how to make one.
FreeNAS is an operating system for network attached storage (NAS) devices. The system is based on FreeBSD and features a streamlined setup process and friendly web-based administration interface.
This is a minor release to fix a few hardware and security issues that have come up since the 1.0 release. It is strongly recommended that you upgrade, particularly if you have newer Intel hardware. This release also includes a new version of OpenSSL.
When you run an OpenBSD desktop inside VirtualBox, you don’t get the easy “change resolution” feature. Mostly because there is no “VirtualBox Tools” for OpenBSD, AFAIK. But there is a way to get a customized video resolution.
OS108 is a fast, open and Secure replacement Operating System for Windows and macOS. Built on top of NetBSD, OS108 provides a simple desktop-oriented operating system.
Some suggestions on how to get UTF8-aware $TERM descriptions on NetBSD, as well as author's personal vi(1) and tmux configurations.
Package update 2 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available. This biggest differences are: Newer version of the Lumina desktop (and utilities) This includes significant updates to the lumina-fm utility (Insight File Manager) KF5 Framework update from 5.53.0 -> 5.54.0_1 Browser updates Firefox : 64.0.2,1 -> 65.0,1
Over two years ago, Kamil Rytarowski made a pledge to use NetBSD as his sole OS and only operating system, and to resist booting into any other OS until he had implemented hardware-accelerated virtualization in the NetBSD kernel (the equivalent of Linux' KVM, or Hyper-V). Today, he is here to report: Mission Accomplished!
HardenedBSD is a security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD that aims to provide the BSD community with a clean-room reimplementation of the publicly-documented parts of the grsecurity patchset for Linux. They maintain close compatibility with FreeBSD by syncing every six hours with FreeBSD.
Due to lack of time, the hosts of the garbage.fm decided to stop producing new episodes.
The obvious conclusion we can draw from FreeBSD ZFS's shift to being based on ZFS on Linux is that the center of gravity of open source ZFS development has shifted to ZFS on Linux. FreeBSD ZFS is shifting its upstream because ZFS on Linux is increasingly where new development happens. A more imprecise and deeper conclusion is that in some sense, the ZFS userbase as a whole is increasingly shifting to Linux.
Presented by Joel Sing , this talk will look at various long standing mitigations such as W^X and Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR), before moving on to more recent developments such as pledge, unveil, KARL, trapsleds, retguard and MAP_STACK.
Project Trident 18.12 released, Spotifyd on NetBSD, OPNsense 18.7.10 is available, Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation, OpenRsync, LLD porting to NetBSD, and more.
Package update 1 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available. This is just the first of our weekly updates to the package repositories for the 18.12-RELEASE. This biggest differences are: Postgresql 9.3 no longer available (migrate to a newer version as needed). KF5 applications updated from 18.12 to 18.12.1 KDE Plasma 5 updated from 5.14.4 to 5.14.5 Browser updates Chromium : 68.
The NetBSD project has been making good progress in utilizing the LLVM compiler stack not only for the Clang C/C++ compiler but also for the different sanitizers, the libc++ standard library for C++, and other improvements most of which are working their way into the upstream code-bases.
While Wayland was designed on and for Linux systems, the BSD support for Wayland and the various compositors has continued improving particularly over the past year or so but it's still a lengthy journey.
For almost four years now, 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.
Alongside FreeBSD 12.0 they tested Antergos 19.1, CentOS 7, Clear Linux, Debian 9.6, Fedora Server 29, openSUSE Leap 15.0, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, and Ubuntu 18.10.
All of the tests were done with a Tyan S7106 1U server featuring two Intel Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs, 96GB of DDR4 system memory, and Samsung 970 EVO SSD. For the 10GbE connectivity on this server was an add-in HP NC523SFP PCIe adapter providing two 10Gb SPF+ ports using a QLogic 8214 controller.
If you’re looking to use disk encryption and HAMMER2, follow this short thread for some of the naming details.
First, the plan is to release 1.1 in the next few weeks. This is mostly a security update with new versions of several popular software packages. As a result of this work, plans for package manager changes have been pushed to 1.2 along with the related installer work.
In terms of ports, we plan on looking into the flavors feature available in FreeBSD and other BSDs ports systems. Some of the plumbing has already been put into the package manager to support this.
This change expands the direct map to 4 slots (512GB each), to support machines with up to 2TB physical memory. Should further expansion be required, this change provides the means to do that with a single #define change.
Isotop is a customised OpenBSD installation media. Its goal is to provide a ready-to-use environment to help you get in touch with OpenBSD.
An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients.
Spotifyd requires a Spotify Premium account.
WWW: https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd
This is a port of OpenBGPD to other operating systems. It is based on portability code from the OpenNTPD, OpenSSH, and LibreSSL portable projects.
OpenBGPD has a web site at http://openbgpd.com/
SCP client vulnerabilities, BSDs vs Linux benchmarks on a Tyan EPYC Server, fame for the Unix inventors, Die IPv4, GhostBSD 18.12 released, Unix in pictures, and more.
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.
The history of the development of UNIX has been well documented, and over the past decade or so, efforts have been made to find and conserve the software and documentation artifacts from the earliest period of UNIX history. This paper details the work that has been done to restore the artifacts from this time to working order and the lessons learned from this work.
The first official release version of Project Trident is now available on the download page! This version is based off the 18.12-stable branch of TrueOS (FreeBSD 13-CURRENT), using the new TrueOS distribution framework with several add-ons by Project Trident itself. The packages with this release were created from the TrueOS ports tree as-of January 7th. We are planning to release regular updates to packages every week or two depending on the state of the ports tree at any given time.
Download shell client from https://pkgstat-openbsd.perso.pw/send_stats.sh to participate, it only send pkglist, architecture and OpenBSD version
Filtering is possible by architecture and/or os version with arch and osversion GET param on index.php
SecBSD is an UNIX-like operating system focused on computer security. A BSD environment for security researchers, pentesters, bug hunters & cybersecurity experts.
BSDCan is an enormously successful grass-roots style conference. It brings together a great mix of *BSD developers and users for a nice blend of both developer-centric and user-centric presentations, food, and activities.
BSDCan 2019 will be held 17-18 May 2019 (Fri/Sat), in Ottawa. We are now requesting proposals for talks. We do not require academic or formal papers. If you wish to submit a formal paper, you are welcome to, but it is not required.
The talks should be written with a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not appropriate for this venue.
A EULA in FOSS clothing, NetBSD with more LLVM support, Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0, FreeBSD Performance against Windows and Linux on Xeon, Microsoft shipping NetBSD, and more.
Another major step forward just happened in mandoc(1) HTML output: paragraphs are now represented with real HTML
elements, and a number of cases were fixed in which mandoc used to generate output violating HTML syntax, mostly related to macros and requests that control line filling in paragraphs of text.
The article is about setting up GlusterFS cluster on a FreeBSD system with Ansible and GNU Parallel tools. GlusterFS is a scale-out network-attached storage file system.
Link has a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 6.5.
pfSense software version 2.4.4-p2 is a maintenance release, adding support for our new SG-1100 product as well as a handful of fixes for issues present in the 2.4.4-p1 release.
To see a complete list of changes and find more detail, see the Release Notes.
2019 means 19.1 is almost here. In the meantime accept this small incremental update with goodies such as Suricata 4.1, custom passwords for P12 certificate export as well as fresh fixes in the FreeBSD base.
A lot of cleanups went into this update to make sure there will be a smooth transition to 19.1-RC for you early birds. We expect RC1 in 1-2 weeks and the final 19.1 on January 29.
For those not following the BSD operating systems on a daily basis, here is a look back at the biggest highlights in the BSD land for 2018 ranging from OpenBSD's continued security conscious decisions, NetBSD 8.0 bringing USB 3.0 and other hardware support improvements, DragonFlyBSD running great on Threadripper 2, FreeBSD 12.0 making its highly anticipated debut, and much more.
It was recently decided that FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support would be re-based atop ZFS On Linux. That new "ZFS On BSD" implementation based on ZOL continues moving along and it's now easier to test thanks to iX Systems and their TrueOS platform.
From zfsonfreebsd.github.io are now daily ISO snapshots of the latest ZoF code paired with TrueOS while disabling the "legacy" ZFS code.
FreeBSD is a member of the UNIX family of operating systems and probably the most widely used member of the major BSD flavours. FreeBSD offers a famously stable and high performance core which has resulted in the operating system being used by Netflix to stream content and by Sony as a basis for their PlayStation operating system. FreeBSD tends to be especially popular on servers where long term reliability is required. Though FreeBSD can function as a desktop operating system, its market share on the desktop remains low and people who want to run a FreeBSD-based desktop are likely to use a related project such as GhostBSD where the graphical configuration has been done for us.
The future of ZFS in FreeBSD, we pick highlights from the FreeBSD quarterly status report, flying with the raven, modern KDE on FreeBSD, many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2, GOG installers on NetBSD, and more.
The NetBSD support is no longer visibly lacking behind Linux in sanitizers, although there are still failing tests on NetBSD that are not observed on Linux. On the other hand there are features working on NetBSD that are not functional on Linux, like sanitizing programs during early initialization process of OS (this is caused by /proc dependency on Linux that is mounted by startup programs, while NetBSD relies on sysctl(3) interfaces that is always available).
I'm really happy to announce that DiscoverBSD can now be found on Mastodon.
To be more precise, on bsd.network instance as @discoverbsd or @[email protected].
Hope to talk to you there, all articles will be posted there the same as on Twitter.
In this article, author tries to answer 1) why Ravenports exists in the first place and 2) what sets it apart from Pkgsrc and other ports systems.
Video thanking the FreeBSD Community for supporting the Foundation in 2018 showcasing improvements done in 2018.
GhostBSD 18.12 is an updated iso of GhostBSD 18.10 with some little changes to the live DVD/USB and with updated packages.
What has changed since 18.10
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 61st quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 22,500 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/.
In total, 150 packages were added, 14 packages were removed, and 1,435 package updates (to 1,060 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2018Q3 release.
We sat down at BSDCan 2018 to interview Kirk McKusick about various topics ranging about the early years of Berkeley Unix, his continuing work on UFS, the governance of FreeBSD, and more.
Talking to FreeBSD users recently, I became aware that while I've created a lot of tools, I haven't done a very good job of explaining how, and more importantly when to use them. So for all of the EC2-curious FreeBSD users out there: Here are the many ways to launch and configure FreeBSD in EC2 — ranging from the simplest to the most complicated (but most powerful).
The Open Source midlife crisis, Donald Knuth The Yoda of Silicon Valley, Certbot For OpenBSD's httpd, how to upgrade FreeBSD from 11 to 12, level up your nmap game, NetBSD desktop, and more.
With FreeBSD having gone all the way to 12, it is perhaps useful to take a look back at all the things that have been accomplished, in terms of many visible changes, as well as all the things that happen behind the scenes to ensure that FreeBSD continues to offer an alternative in both design, implementation, and execution.
The things you can look forward to reading about are too numerous to summarize, but cover just about everything from finalizing releases, administrative work, optimizations and depessimizations, features added and fixed, and many areas of improvement that might just surprise you a little.
Please have a cup of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, or other beverage of choice, and enjoy this culmulative set of reports covering everything that's been done since October, 2017.
DragonFly 5.4.1 is out, just in time for Christmas. The changes in this version are in the tag commit, which can be summed up as “keyboard fix, dhcpcd support, HAMMER2 improvement”.
13 If you’re an avid Linux system user like me or are working as a sysadmin for managing company networks, chances are you’ve stumbled at least once with terms like FreeBSD and BSD. So, what are these and what is their significance? In this guide, we’ll cover the differences between FreeBSD vs Linux thoroughly, and will also highlight their similarities at the same time. Overall, our objective is to enlighten our readers about the different variations of the infamous Unix systems and how they are categorized. Stay tuned throughout this guide to learn more about these legacy systems in order to choose the right one for your job.
Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.4. The setsockopt(2) system call could overflow mbuf cluster kernel memory by 4 bytes. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
Source code patches can be found on the respective errata page:
https://www.openbsd.org/errata63.html https://www.openbsd.org/errata64.html
As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.
There is a talk about using ZFS on Linux as base for FreeBSD's ZFS. This port would provide FreeBSD users with multi modifier protection, project quotas, encrypted datasets, allocation classes, vectorized raidz, vectorized checksums, and various command line improvements.
Before ZoF can be merged back in to ZoL several steps need to be taken:
FreeBSD has an official image for Pinebook, 14″ edition which was initially released on November 2018. Since then they have released multiple versions which the latest one at the time of authoring this article is r342020, released on December 13.
In this article, first, we go through the installation process of FreeBSD on Pinebook.
Then we do a quick review of how FreeBSD works on Pinebook and what things work and what things don’t.
Lastly, we discuss how to overcome some of the obstacles such as connecting to the internet and installing some of the packages.
Join us for a FreeBSD Hackathon at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. This event is placed at the half way point between AsiaBSDCon and BSDCan to give ardent hackers something to fill their time. More information can be found on the wiki. The registration deadline is March 31, 2019.
The Hackathon is by-invitation only.
As planned, there will be a 5.4. 1 release for DragonFly. Matthew Dillon’s work on HAMMER2 will be in there, as will be a fix for keyboard attachment and updates from Aaron LI on dhcpcd support. It will be tagged and built this weekend, just in time for Christmas.
Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.4.
While recv(2) with the MSG_WAITALL flag was receiving control messages from a socket, the kernel could panic.
Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. Source code patches can be found on the respective errata page:
https://www.openbsd.org/errata63.html https://www.openbsd.org/errata64.html
As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.
The first public release of hardened/12-stable/master branch, which contains lots of security improvements over 11-STABLE.
Among those improvements are:
BSD Router Project (BSDRP) is an embedded free and open source software router distribution based on FreeBSD with FRRouting (Quagga fork) and Bird.
To keep it snappy: enclosed are assorted updates and fixes, a new dnscrypt-proxy plugin as well as security updates from FreeBSD and third parties. Happy patchday!
Author was tentatively optimistic going into experiment with GhostBSD. The shift from a stable FreeBSD base to a rolling TrueOS base was one which they had hoped would bring new features and hardware support, but they were also concerned the result might be rough around the edges. For the most part they were pleased with what GhostBSD 18.10 provided.
The FreeBSD project announces the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. It is the first release of the stable/12 branch. 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 jails and more.
FreeBSD 12.0 is finally here, partly-cloudy IPsec VPN, KLEAK with NetBSD, How to create synth repos, GhostBSD author interview, and more.
Matthew Dillon’s been working on “reliable on-media topology” for HAMMER2. If you had a crash at just the right time with HAMMER2, you wouldn’t lose data but you might have to do some manual cleanup. With these changes, that doesn’t happen any more. It’s present now in -master and will be in what should be DragonFly 5.4.1 by the end of the year.
This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different ”visions” and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way.
Under certain circumstances bozohttpd(8) can be tricked into revealing the contents of certain special files. These special files are configuration files for ozohttpd(8) and include the standard .htpasswd file for HTTP Basic Authorisation (RFC-7617), which contains both a list of user names and their encrypted passwords.
Version 18.12-PRERELEASE of Project Trident is now available on the download page! We are rapidly approaching a “real” release of Trident later this month after TrueOS branches their 18.12 STABLE version, but we anticipate there will be one more prerelease image after this one to catch/fix any last bugs that might crop up during that STABLE release procedure for TrueOS. WARNINGS There is a known bug where the AppCafe will not allow you to browse the packages available on the remote repository.
Nowadays if you want some of that BSD on your personal desktop how to go about? There is a distro called GhostBSD which is now based on TrueOS which itself is derived from FreeBSD.
FreeBSD is an advanced computer operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms. It's advanced networking, security, and storage features have made FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive networking and storage devices.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.
Some of the highlights:
* OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS).
* Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been
enabled by default.
* OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1.
* Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8).
* Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to
version 6.0.1.
* The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been update to version 4.46.
* The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation
option.
* The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default.
* The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and
MINIMAL kernel configurations.
* The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through
which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a
system panic.
* The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements,
drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.
* Various improvements to graphics support for current generation
hardware.
* Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by
default.
* The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate
TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer
TRIM messages being sent simultaneously.
* The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support.
* The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9).
* The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation.
* The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run withing a jail(8).
* Various Lua loader(8) improvements.
* KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.
* And more...
FreeBSD support was recently added to the Cirrus CI system. Cirrus CI makes your development cycle fast, efficient, and secure by leveraging modern cloud technologies. Cirrus CI scales with your team and makes shipping software faster and cheaper. Follow the FreeBSD Virtual Machines guide to find out more.
DragonflyBSD 5.4 has been released, down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, OpenBSD in stereo with VFIO, BSD/OS the best candidate for legally tested open source Unix, OpenBGPD adds diversity to the routing server landscape, and more.
Ladislav Sirovy has announced the release of FreeNAS 11.2, the latest stable version of the project's specialist FreeBSD-based operating system designed for computers providing Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services. The new release brings a completely redesigned web interface, among many other changes: "FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE introduces a ton of new features, including a major revamp of the web interface, support for self-encrypting drives, and new, backwards-compatible REST and WebSocket APIs. This update also introduces iocage for improved Plugin and Jail management and simplified Plugin development. FreeNAS 11.2 introduces an updated web interface. Based on Angular and Javascript, the web interface has been modernized to be more user-friendly, snappier and aesthetically pleasing. The redundant top bar has been removed and most FreeNAS configuration menus can be accessed by clicking the appropriate item in the left column. The new design streamlines the layout with cleaner dropdown menus, while maintaining the same functionality and workflow you’ve grown familiar with while using FreeNAS. All your favorite FreeNAS features are still available, including the same robust protocol support, snapshots and pool management."
While XDM may not support xft, GTK/Qt themes, and other eye-candy hacks which things like GDM, SDDM, and LightDM may have, it’s extremely low on resources, quite easy to customize, included in base, and most of all, it just works.
A guest OS using a firmware image can cause the bhyve process to crash, or possibly execute arbitrary code on the host as root.
FreeBSD 11.2 at thinkpad x240 - Post installer configurations and steps and much more.
Last week,Michael Shirk gave a talk at the CharmBUG meetup on the recent Xorg vulnerability that allowed for local users to elevate their privileges through a vulnerability in the Xorg command line options. The vulnerability allowed users to overwrite files and run code as the root user. The original vulnerability was found in recent versions of Xorg on Debian, RHEL, and CentOS, but was not patched in OpenBSD until the details of the vulnerability were released. Credit for the vulnerability discovery goes to Narendra Shinde, with Matt Hickey providing an exploit for OpenBSD.
The presentations held for MeetBSD 2018 at Intel’s Santa Clara campus back on October are now up. The talks range from Kris Moore’s TrueOS, ZFS panel discussion, Ben’s Intel and FreeBSD talk, to a history by Dr. Kirk McKusick.
DragonFly 5.4.0 has been released. It is the latest stable release of BSD distribution that travels in a unique direction.
FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 is out as likely the last test release before the official FreeBSD 12.0 debut in the next week.
Approaching the finish line, FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 is understandably light on changes besides some fixes. FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 has fixes for vulnerabilities within the NFS server code, various bug fixes, and also various memory leak fixes have also been addressed.
Last week, the author of post rescued a server from a pile of computers destined to be scrapped and recycled. It looked like the perfect setup for getting serious with OpenBSD VMM in home lab. Two older Xeon E5-2620 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM. No hard drives, but it came with enough empty drive trays for getting started. Author threw a pair of old SAS drives into it.
This article covers an interesting use case of NetBSD's Linux compatibility layer: to install GOG.com's distributions of Linux games, using their Linux installer.
It’s really interesting to hear how Eric, without having a computer sciences degree, began the GhostBSD project and how he pushes it forward with every release.
Version 18.11-PRERELEASE_2 of Project Trident is now available on the download page! This version has several significant changes: ISO support for NVIDIA Optimus or other dual-GPU systems. There has been a lot of work to make the graphics driver setup aware of and support systems with multiple graphics cards now. This is still fairly new, so please make sure you submit bug reports with the associated pciconf -lv output on your system if this still does not work properly for your hardware.
Assembly language on OpenBSD, using bhyve for FreeBSD development, FreeBSD Gaming, FreeBSD for Thanksgiving, no space left on Dragonfly’s hammer2, and more.
BSDSec, the deadsimple BSD Security Advisories and Announcements website brings you 4 new OpenBSD Errata:
Not following BSDSec, yet? You should.
From 27. November 2018 it brings new Security Advisory and Errata Notices for FreeBSD regarding icmp, tzdata, loader and nfs.
This is a utility for FreeBSD system to execute a command from host system in a jail. This makes it possible to adjust jail environment without depending on its content (e.g. run ifconfig for a VNET jail with Linux system root).
Try out some historical UNIX systems. Presented by the SDF Public access UNIX System.
Configuration for PINEBOOK images are being added. Pinebook is a arm64 laptop based on a Pine64 board.
Since the usb trackpad needs a quirk, they are adding a common function for adding quirk for arm board. A default one is supplied as most board do not need quirks.
After you’ve finished with the turkey and the shopping, take a minute to give back to your favorite OS! The Foundation is kicking off its prime giving season on one of the biggest giving days of the year, #GivingTuesday. Now in its seventh year, #GivingTuesday is a global day of giving that brings together diverse communities to foster generosity .
The Foundation is calling on the FreeBSD community to channel your passion for FreeBSD into helping us reach our #GivingTuesdayFreeBSD campaign goal of raising $5,000 in the 24 hour period. Your support, no matter the size, will have a lasting impact on the Project.
New FreeBSD development branch installation ISOs and virtual machine disk images have been uploaded to the FreeBSD Project mirrors.
As with any development branch, the installation snapshots are not intended for use on production systems. We do, however, encourage testing on non-production systems as much as possible.
Please also consider installing the sysutils/panicmail port, which can help in providing FreeBSD developers the necessary information regarding system crashes.
Snapshots may be downloaded from the corresponding architecture directory from:
Mariusz Zaborski (oshogbo) did the porting work and you can now play Stardew Valley (and other games) on FreeBSD. In this post I’ll describe the steps I took to get it running.
Some screenshots of GhostBSD 18.10. GhostBSD 18.10 is the first release of the project with TrueOS base.
Next year, the one of the world’s first Operating Systems (OS) UNIX will celebrate its 50th birthday. This relic of the past is objectively one of the most important creations that has ever influenced the field of Computer Science. However, mysteries of this artifact were discovered in 1995. Two engineers, Paul Vixie and Keith Bostic, dug deep enough to find several DEC tapes “under the floor of the computer room [at Bell Labs]” (UNIX Past) which held several original binary files for UNIX. With much help from several individuals, these two engineers were able to reverse engineer the binary tapes they found and 15 years later, put up a repository for this ancient system on GitHub. There it has stayed, waiting for someone to use it like it was meant to be used, on a DEC PDP 11/20, the computer UNIX v1 was initially written for. Currently, the PDP 11/20 can send and receive data via a homemade serial emulator we have written in Java, and the PDP 11/20 has been loaded with a binary file for the BASIC programming language. Once the entry point for BASIC can be determined, we will start to write code to emulate paper tape readers to assist in loading UNIX v1 into the PDP 11/20's memory. In the end, we hope to have a fully functional system running the one of the world’s first Operating Systems.
capsicumizer is a sandbox launcher that imposes Capsicum capability mode onto an unsuspecting program, allowing "sysadmin style" or "oblivious" sandboxing (i.e. no source code modifications, all restrictions added externally).
You just write AppArmor-esque "profiles" and capsicumizer takes care of sandboxing the applications.
capsicumizer is capable of launching some GUI applications (like gedit) on both Wayland and X11.
The second RC build for the FreeBSD 12.0 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.
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. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here so someone else can
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
With DragonFlyBSD 5.4 releasing in the days ahead, its code has been branched while now open on Git master is the DragonFlyBSD 5.5 development tree.
DragonFlyBSD 5.4.0 is coming soon with all of its great improvements that were developed under the DragonFlyBSD "5.3" development series while now DragonFlyBSD 5.5 is in development for what should be released as DragonFlyBSD 5.6 in about six months time. The DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release is coming out just days before the big release of FreeBSD 12.0.
This stable update finally brings you the promised LDAP+TOTP authentication, but also renewed language translations and several third party software updates for software such as OpenSSL, OpenSSH and Sudo. A reboot is not required, but recommended.
What do all programmers like to do after work? Ok, what do most programers like to do after work? The answer is simple: play a good game! Recently at the Polish BSD User Group meetup mulander was telling us how you can play games on OpenBSD. Today let’s discuss how this looks in the FreeBSD world using the “server only” operating system.
This article is an update/rewrite to the already published FreeBSD Desktop – Part 2 – Install. With the upcoming introduction of the FreeBSD 12.0-RELESE version new possibilities arise when it comes to installation.
From article: I last tried NetBSD 7.0 about three years ago and decided it was time to test drive the operating system again. In the past three years NetBSD has introduced a few new features, many of them security enhancements. For example, NetBSD now supports write exclusive-or execute (W^X) protection and address space layout randomization (ASLR) to protect programs against common attacks. NetBSD 8.0 also includes USB3 support and the ability to work with ZFS storage volumes.
The first RC build for the FreeBSD 12.0 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.
New OpenBSD Errata for November 17th, 2018 are available for lockf, portsmash and blinding.
You can find the archive of past newsletters here: https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php
Byproducts of reading OpenBSD’s netcat code, learnings from porting your own projects to FreeBSD, OpenBSD’s unveil(), NetBSD’s Virtual Machine Monitor, what 'dependency' means in Unix init systems, jailing bhyve, and more.
This scripts injects running jails from a FreeBSD host into carbon database. It may be consumed then by tools like graphite or grafana.
A common way to use this is set-up a crontab entry.
The OpenBSD Foundation is happy to announce that Microsoft has increased its support level from Silver to Gold for 2018. This is the fourth consecutive year that Microsoft has made a contribution to the OpenBSD Foundation and we are grateful for their continuing support.
A team of nine academics has revealed today seven new CPU attacks. The seven impact AMD, ARM, and Intel CPUs to various degrees.
Two of the seven new attacks are variations of the Meltdown attack, while the other five are variations on the original Spectre attack -- two well-known attacks that have been revealed at the start of the year and found to impact CPUs models going back to 1995.
Blog post author uses a Huawei Matebook X as his primary OpenBSD laptop and one aspect of its hardware support has always been lacking: audio never played out of the right-side speaker. The speaker did actually work, but only in Windows and only after the Realtek Dolby Atmos audio driver from Huawei was installed. Under OpenBSD and Linux, and even Windows with the default Intel sound driver, audio only ever played out of the left speaker.
Now, after some extensive reverse engineering and debugging with the help of VFIO on Linux, author finally have audio playing out of both speakers on OpenBSD.
NanoPi NEO2 is a little board (40*40mm), which is probably the best of the smallest possible device one can run OpenBSD on.
The CPU is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 which is quite capable, a GENERIC.MP kernel build taking 15 minutes. On the downside, the board only has 512MB of RAM.
Reasoning behind monitoring, General Unix monitoring, FreeBSD specifics and pitfalls.
From the post: I work on the networking subsystem of the Linux kernel and I find networks rather fascinating. Often I read statements about the FreeBSD networking stack being faster and more mature than the Linux counterpart, but I didn’t find any comparative tests between the two OS, and I was so curious that I decided to do some tests myself.
Next formal CharmBUG meeting will be held at Onyx Point in Hanover, MD. The goal for this meeting will be to discuss any BUG topics, or general issues, followed by a talk on Xorg and fun with local root privileges.
Michael Shirk will be giving a talk about the events that unfolded at the end of October 2018 with an interesting local root privilege escalation bug in the Xorg server. He will discuss what happened as details emerged and how the vulnerability impacted FreeBSD and OpenBSD. At the end of the talk, attendees are invited to join in on an interactive search for all of the setuid/setgid binaries in a base install of FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as ports that install setuid/setgid binaries to highlight the issues with root privileges.
NOTE: This talk will occur on Wednesday, November 28th.
For better or worse, there’s different browser options out there, especially for non-mainstream platforms. You know what I mean. DragonFly developer tuxillo has put together a helpful page listing options and how to get them to build.
SBUG was founded in April 2015.
At the moment, they are trying to raise awareness about the group and gather BSD enthusiasts in the Subcarpathian voivodeship, so please help them reach users in the area and join our mailing-list if you are interested.
Since December 2015, there is also an #sbug IRC channel on Freenode. Lastly, you can follow SBUG on Twitter : @sbugpl
In this conference call recording, you will get an insider's view of the development of some of the key pieces of the modern computing world.
The fourth BETA build for the FreeBSD 12.0 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.
Release Candidate 3 of Project Trident is now available on the download page! This version is the first one based on the “trueos-master” branch of TrueOS, and with that comes a lot of changes and breaks from the previous versions. FreeBSD version is now listed as 13-CURRENT instead of 12-CURRENT. This may cause issues with upgrading if you try to use any method other than the trueos-update utility. The default bootloader has been changed by FreeBSD to the new “lua”-based version.
Today we are addressing CVE-2018-18958 regarding an unenforced "deny config write" privilege. The issue was reported by brainrecursion this Monday and subsequently fixed along with several related issues. The "deny config write" privilege coupled with admin or user and group manager rights are affected combinations. It is an uncommon way to configureaccess as the "deny config write" privilege is commonly used for role-based access to non-system services, e.g. captive portals.
As we cannot be sure that no further issues of this sort exist please refrain from using the "deny config write" privilege or at least stop giving access to system services or full admin rights to these users or groups. In the midterm we will be looking for replacements of the current privilege for something that is more generic and robust in enforcement.
Additionally, the update to Suricata 4.0.6 addresses the SMTP crash vulnerability CVE-2018-18956. Since the update does not reboot without an operating system update please manually restart the intrusion detection service.
Imagine an application that can do anything with your data. Literally anything. Imagine an application which can get your private photos and send them over the internet to some external server. In UNIX-like operating systems almost all applications can do that. If you had an exploitable bug in grep(1) somebody would be able to do so. If you had an exploitable bug in cat(1) somebody would be able to do so. When your application has access to all your user data we are talking about ambient authority.
What if you could do stuff another way? What if your application could have only a capability to use the things it really needs to use. What if you grep(1) would have only read-only rights to a file that it’s should parse, and it couldn’t create a network connection or send signals to different processes. This is a capability world which Capsicum implements.
If you happen to be using DragonFly from a network location that only allows http/https as outbound traffic, you won’t be able to update /usr/src using defaults. /usr/Makefile pulls DragonFly source using a git:// URL.
The fix is to use the read-only Github mirror. You can set origin manually or just change GITHOST in /usr/Makefile (or GITURL_SRC if you are on DragonFly-master) to “https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD”.
MidnightBSD 1.0 released, MeetBSD review, EuroBSDcon trip reports, DNS over TLS in FreeBSD 12, Upgrading OpenBSD with Ansible, how to use smartd to run tests on your drives automatically, and more.
Brett Lymn added support for two finger scroll emulation for synaptics touchpads
As of October 31, 2018, FreeBSD 10.4 reached end-of-life and is no longer supported by the FreeBSD Security Team.
Users of FreeBSD 10.4 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.
Otto Moerbeek ([email protected]) moved malloc handling from a softlink in /etc to a sysctl instead.
TL;DR: Filters have been a (the most ?) long awaited feature in OpenSMTPD. There is still a bit of work required but the trickiest parts are done.
This article describes how filters are implemented and what to expect.
Author have just discovered some issues with previous article on OpenLDAP replication between Synology DSM and OpenBSD OpenLDAP. In the end, it is not possible to log-in on the OpenBSD LDAP instance using the original userPassword. Short story: CRYPT seem to not be various-platform-compatible.
User genneko shares us their notes on what they learned about FreeBSD after using it in a production environment. They walk us through templates, configuring the jail NAT, to building the VIMAGE-enabled kernel.
XigmaNAS is an embedded Storage distribution for Windows, Mac, & UNIX-like systems based on FreeBSD.
A while back, OpenSSH gained support for doing host and user authentication through a local Certificate Authority. Instead of directly trusting public keys, you configured a CA (or more than one) and then trusted anything signed by that CA. For user keys, this has the usual weakness of the basic CA model; for host keys, it's probably an improvement in practice but I'd like to know what happens if you get handed a new CA-signed host key for a host that you already saw one for.
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.
OpenBSD 6.4 released, GhostBSD RC2 released, MeetBSD - the ultimate hallway track, DragonflyBSD desktop on a Thinkpad, Porting keybase to NetBSD, OpenSSH 7.9, and draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag in FreeBSD.
Cloud and automation are hot in the infrastructure space these days. As such I am constantly looking at how to automate things for FreeBSD. HashiCorp provides some very cool and good Cloud Infrastructure Automation tools. The nice thing is that these are all available for FreeBSD! One such tool is Packer. It is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
This post shows how to create a customized FreeBSD image with Packer for Azure. And all is done from a FreeBSD box!
GhostBSD 18.10 is the first official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood, and the official desktop is MATE. However, in the future, there might be some community release, but for now, there is no community released yet.
ll images checksum, hybrid ISO(DVD, USB) and torrent are available here:
https://www.ghostbsd.org/download
It is time for the fourth BSD Users Stockholm Meetup!
Once again, we meet at the B3 offices in central Stockholm to talk about our favorite operating systems. Mark your calendar for November 13. There will be presentations, food and interesting discussions.
If you have something you like to present, long or short, or just want to help out, please let me know. Presentations can be in either Swedish or English.
New newsletter is out. You can find the archive of past newsletters here: https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php
The purpose of this tutorial is to help familiarize you with creating shellcode on the FreeBSD operating system. The code within was adapted from linux code examples in The Shellcoders Handbook
In this post, I’m going to show benchmark results of the recently released PostgreSQL 10.1. I’ve benchmarked the DB on these OSes (all are 64-bit):
MeetBSD 2018 took place at the sprawling Intel Santa Clara campus. The venue itself felt more like an olive branch than a simple friendly gesture by Intel. In truth it felt like a bit of an apology. You get the subtle sense they feel bad about how the BSD's were treated with the Meltdown and Specter flaws. In fact, you may be right to think they felt a bit sorry towards the entire open source community.
It’s no secret that configuration for OpenSMTPD changed a lot with version 6.4.0. Despite the fact that changes were announced long time ago and that many configuration examples have popped-up, my particular usage wasn’t covered(1). Namely: using OpenSMTPD with Dovecot and Rspamd as chained MTA.
Select your board from the list and download a ready-to-go SD card images.
Hardkernel ODROID-XU3 and XU4 images for NetBSD are the latest additions available.
This third release candidate of GhostBSD 18.10 is the third official testing release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood. The official desktop of GhostBSD is MATE. However, in the future, there might be an XFCE community release, but for now, there is no community release yet.
Returning readers are likely aware that OpenBSD in its OpenBSD/amd64 and OpenBSD/i386 varieties comes with virtualization built in, brought to you by the vmm(4) subsystem. Now getting started with OpenBSD virtualization has become even easier: The OpenBSD FAQ has a new Virtualization section, written mainly by Solene Rapenne ([email protected]) and added to the site in this commit, that offers an introduction to the concepts as well as instructions on how to get started with vmm(4). That's right: go read the thing, and play with vmm!
Reported at the start of the month were plans for FreeBSD 12 to deprecate many of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers with just leaving the popular fast Ethernet drivers and focusing on Gigabit and beyond networking drivers moving forward.
There was some backlash to deprecating all of the 10/100 Ethernet drivers with some still relying upon some older NICs, but a good portion of them did get deprecated for this week's FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 2 release.
There is a new build of SoloBSD 11.2-STABLE-1028 based on the latest HardenedBSD stable branch version v1100056.7.
With the arrival of OpenSSL 1.1.1, an upgraded Unbound, and some changes to the setup and init scripts, FreeBSD 12.0, currently in beta, now supports DNS over TLS out of the box.
DNS over TLS is just what it sounds like: DNS over TCP, but wrapped in a TLS session. It encrypts your requests and the server’s replies, and optionally allows you to verify the identity of the server. The advantages are protection against eavesdropping and manipulation of your DNS traffic; the drawbacks are a slight performance degradation and potential firewall traversal issues, as it runs over a non-standard port (TCP port 853) which may be blocked on some networks. Let’s take a look at how to set it up.
The post's author set up a local FreeBSD VirtualBox VM to test something, and it seemed to work very well. Due to the novelty factor, they decided to get their software projects to build and pass the tests there.
I am FINALLY able to use my Apple Bluetooth keyboard with NetBSD! I am writing this blog post right now using it. The NetBSD Guide helped me a LOT with this, but I believe it requires a little bit of updating… so in the meantime, let me show you how I did it.
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. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here so someone else can
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
This second release candidate of GhostBSD 18.10 is the second official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood. The official desktop of GhostBSD is MATE. However, in the future, there might be an XFCE community release, but for now, there is no community release yet.
Errata patches for Xorg have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.4.
The Xorg X server incorrectly validates certain options, allowing arbitrary files to be overwritten.
Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
Noteworthy are the addition of the PIE shaper option and firewall alias API. Both Unbound and Dnsmasq have been updated to their latest version.
FreeBSD Foundation September Update, tiny C lib for programming Unix daemons, EuroBSDcon trip reports, GhostBSD tested on real hardware, and a BSD auth module for duress
A new software packages build did finish you can now upgrade.
For those who run on 18.10 RC1 do the following command to fix issues from RC1:
sudo pkg update -f
sudo pkg install -f libarchive curl libgksu
sudo pkg upgrade
This will update you to RC2 also.
For 2018 The OpenBSD Foundation will recognize donors in the following categories based on contribution amount. Recognition is based on the Canadian dollar value of the contribution at the time the contribution is received. If you wish to achieve a particular recognition level please contact [email protected] to ensure your donation will be sufficient to get the desired recognition.
On request we will provide a link to your website for donations of $5000 or more, and display your logo for donations of $10,000 or more.
This is the first stable release from the 2.8 series.
It includes the following changes from 2.8.1
Added Wycheproof support for ECDH and ECDSA Web Crypto test vectors, along with test harness fixes.
Fixed memory leak in nc(1)
Arcan from the beginning has had good FreeBSD support. This is a guide for installing it on your FreeBSD system and additional tips for getting it configured for graphical acceleration without utilizing Xorg/X11. For the most part the build instructions just work as described on the project page and Wiki for Arcan.
FuguIta-6.4-{i386,amd64}-201810231beta.iso (OpenBSD live system) - a test version for debugging is available
Following ten alpha releases and several schedule adjustments, the development process of FreeBSD 12.0 is back on track with the arrival of the first beta build. The supported architectures include amd64, i386, aarch64, armv6, armv7, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe and sparc64.
A DragonFly BSD developer, who goes by the nickname "ddegroot", has created a special driver which allows the user to increase or decrease the amount of memory available to a guest operating system in a virtual machine. The driver uses what is called a "memory balloon" which expands or shrinks to change the amount of RAM available to the guest operating system.
This first release candidate of GhostBSD 18.10 is the first official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood. The official desktop of GhostBSD is MATE, in the future there might be some community release like XFCE, but for there is no community release yet.
Twitter's @freebsdbytes has a spare copy of Absolute OpenBSD by @mwlauthor, in nearly new condition. Happy to give it away to anyone interested.
If you want a chance to get it for free, follow @freebsdbytes and retweet the tweet message with hashtag #FollowBSD before 27/10.
While the HardenedBSD 11.2 adoption is almost finished behind the scenes, this release merely revolves around minor corrections and additions that make your life easier. We are also confident that 18.7.6 finally ships the firewall alias API.
Of worthy mention are also the IPsec phase 1 changes that allow multiple DH groups and hashes to be selected simultaneously to tackle interoperability between different mobile client requirements. Also check out the Nginx plugin which has again extended its utility belt to include limiting, permanent bans, caching and more.
We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.4. This is our 45th release. We 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, 6.4 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.
6 metrics for zpool performance, 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD, ZFS maintaining file type information in dirs, everything old is new again, netcat demystified, and more.
New newsletter is out. You can find the archive of past newsletters here:https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php
Did you use the digi(4), rp(4) and si(4) serial device drivers in DragonFly? I don’t think so, but you definitely can’t now.
While FreeBSD isn’t in any danger of disappearing any time soon, it does have issues with attracting new contributors, keeping its existing contributors and keeping its community healthy. These issues are not always unique to FreeBSD but FreeBSD provides an interesting case study.
This presentation will cover:
NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for proprietary platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive. Installing NextCloud can be achieved easily with pkg_add nextcloud - but I'd like to do it manually to benefit performance and stability.
Grab an ebook/print bundle direct from No Starch Press. NSP coupon code ILUVMICHAEL gives you 30% off any NSP purchase and puts a few extra bucks in my pocket, so that’s cool. And there’s Amazon. There’s always Amazon, the company we all love to loathe.
Long story to short, reading classical source code is a rewarding process, and you can consider to try it yourself.
What should longtime Linux users know about DragonFly? Also, how is the project organized and what are the rules for contribution?
slant is a remote system monitor. For the time being, it only works with OpenBSD hosts. All sources use the ISC (like OpenBSD) license.
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. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here so someone else can
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
In case it’s useful to you, here’s several laptop recommendations for DragonFly.
MidnightBSD is happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 1.0 for amd64 and i386. Over the years, many ambitious goals were set for our 1.0 release. As it approached, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to accomplish all of them. This release is more of a natural progression rather than a groundbreaking event. It includes many updates to the base system, improvements to the package manager, an updated compiler, and tools.
Of particular note, you can now boot off of ZFS and use NVME SSDs and some AMD Radeon graphics cards support acceleration. AMD Ryzen support has greatly improved in this release. We also have added bhyve from FreeBSD.
In this article in the FreeBSD Desktop series author will introduce various methods to automatically (or not) mount external/removable devices such as USB or eSATA disks/pendrives or SD/microSD flash cards.
Keybase significantly simplifies the whole keypair/PGP thing and makes what is usually a confusing, difficult experience actually rather pleasant. At its heart is an open-source command line utility that does all of the heavy cryptographic lifting. But it's also hooked up to the network of all other Keybase users, so you don't have to work very hard to maintain big keychains. Pretty cool! So, this evening, I tried to get it to all work on NetBSD.
One of the key aspects of hardening the user-space side of an operating system is to provide mechanisms for restricting which parts of the filesystem hierarchy a given process can access. Linux has a number of mechanisms of varying capability and complexity for this purpose, but other kernels have taken a different approach. Over the last few months, OpenBSD has inaugurated a new system call named unveil() for this type of hardening that differs significantly from the mechanisms found in Linux.
This post is for bids on the brand new third edition of “Absolute FreeBSD” that I’m going to have signed by every developer I can catch at MeetBSD. Proceeds go to the FreeBSD Foundation.
Rules are on the announcement page, but in short: the auction ends on 20 October 2018, at the close of MeetBSD. Each bid must be at least $5 more than the prior bid. I’ll hand over or mail the copy upon getting a copy of the receipt for the FreeBSD Foundation.
The auction takes place entirely on the page. Folks at MeetBSD get no special advantage.
New FreeBSD development branch installation ISOs and virtual machine disk images have been uploaded to the FreeBSD Project mirrors.
As with any development branch, the installation snapshots are not intended for use on production systems. We do, however, encourage testing on non-production systems as much as possible.
Please also consider installing the sysutils/panicmail port, which can help in providing FreeBSD developers the necessary information regarding system crashes.
When: October 11, 2018, 18:15 - 21:15
Where: Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, ul. Koszykowa 75, Warsaw
What:
BSD-PL 0.5. Usergroup Half-birthday. Krzysztof Szczepański
A Brief History of Time in FreeBSD. Miłosz Kaniewski
What are containers anyway? Maciej Pasternacki
Project Cardigan - Deep Learning Based Image Retrieval Mariusz Wołoszyn
Long interview with fiction and non-fiction author Michael W. Lucas for you this week as well as questions from the audience.
This month saw the release of a fascinating oral history, in which 76-year-old Brian Kernighan remembers the origins of the Unix command grep.
Kernighan is already a legend in the world of Unix — recognized as the man who coined the term Unix back in 1970. His last initial also became the “k” in awk — and the “K” when people cite the iconic 1978 “K&R book” about C programming.
Since the release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this past April there have been many improvements to this popular BSD operating system, including on the performance front.
A lot of recent DragonFlyBSD coverage has been around its support/optimizations for Threadripper 2 with lead DragonFlyBSD developer Matthew Dillon being a big fan of these new high-core count CPUs. In this article though tests are being done from an Intel Xeon "Skylake" CPU for looking at the performance work outside of that scope.
Among the work that has landed in DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT have been SMP performance improvements, improvements around Spectre/Meltdown, continuing to mature its homegrown HAMMER2 file-system, defaulting to the GCC 8 compiler over the old GCC5 previous default, and countless other tweaks large and small.
bhyve is a hypervisor/virtual machine manager developed on FreeBSD.
xhyve is port of bhyve to OS X. It is built on top of Hypervisor.framework in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and higher, runs entirely in userspace, and has no other dependencies.
There is a new build of SoloBSD 11.2-STABLE-1009 based on the latest HardenedBSD stable branch version v1100056.6.
We now invite proposals for main track presentations, developer rooms, stands and lightning talks.
FOSDEM offers open source and free software developers a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Renowned for being highly developer-oriented, the event brings together some 8000+ geeks from all over the world.
The nineteenth edition will take place on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd February 2019 at the usual location: ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.
We will record and stream all main tracks, devrooms and lightning talks live. The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). If, exceptionally, you believe there is a legitimate reason why your presentation should not be streamed or recorded, you must seek our agreement before submitting it.
Last month, TrueOS announced that they would be spinning off their desktop offering. The team behind the new project, named Project Trident, have been working furiously towards their first release. They did take a few minutes to answer some of our question about Project Trident and TrueOS.
First up will be Kevin Xu from PingCAP presenting, "Introducing TiDB: an open-source MySQL compatible Distributed Database that Handles Hybrid Data Workloads"
His talk will introduce TiDB's architecture, technology, key use cases, a deep-dive user story with Mobike, one of the largest bikesharing platforms in the world, and a live demo of how to deploy TiDB in a cloud-native environment.
Next up to bat will be iXsystem's Kris Moorse to talk about, "Using TrueOS as a platform to build your own FreeBSD based project".
FreeBSD has this concept of a jail which allows you to isolate an environment from the host operating system. This isolation keeps the rest of the system safe from whatever is being run inside of the jail. You can liken it to running an application in a virtual machine, but without the overhead of emulating a computer within another computer.
Article shows using of the ezjail-admin application to update jails the right way and how to recover from doing it the wrong way.
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. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here so someone else can
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 60th 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, 161 packages were added, 25 packages were removed, and 1,321 package updates (to 996 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2018Q2 release.
Installing a Gopher server is very easy. With OpenBSD you only have to install from packages or ports the Gophernicus server.
Running OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve, vermaden’s FreeBSD story, thoughts on OpenBSD on the desktop, history of file type info in Unix dirs, Multiboot a Pinebook KDE neon image, and more.
Polish BSD User Group has been running for almost half a year! Are you interested in how the organisation of it looks behind the scenes?
If you were the Linus Torvalds of FreeBSD and there was no Core Team, what would be the first thing you'd change (kernel, userland, organisation, governance etc.)?
During EuroBSDCon 2018 in Bucuresti, Adam Kalisz suggested to add a table of contents near the top of the HTML output of mandoc, and Ingo Schwarze just implemented and committed that.
Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a required solution in our current interconnected world to protect our own privacy and to interconnect different network through internet. Lot of commercial solutions exists around the world to deploy any kind of VPN, but, can we trust big corporation? In this series, the author will show you how to deploy rapidly multiple VPN software on my two favorites operating systems: OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
They meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.
Topics Include: Michael W. Lucas talks FreeBSD (and whatever else he wants)
Kamil Rytarowski presented the state of NetBSD sanitizers during EuroBSDCon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania. He gave two talks, one covered userland sanitizers and the other one kernel sanitizers. Unfortunately video recordings from the conference are not available, but he uploaded slides online:
LLVM Sanitizers in the NetBSD userland Taking NetBSD kernel bug roast to the next level: Kernel Sanitizers
Exploring-two-operating-systems asks: I think a good topic for your Q&A section would be dual-booting BSDs (if you need a specific one FreeBSD would likely be best) and Linux. It's not something that is well documented on-line and many Linux users are at least somewhat interested in trying out BSDs.
Follow them for news, announcements, security advisories, noteworthy commits and much more.
Article about the installation of Hugo - a static site generator and then hosting static web pages on OpenBSD server (6.3).
Reddit question: I've been interested in BSDs for a long time, and think it's about time I install it on a machine or two. Everyone I've asked says OpenBSD is a good choice. What should I know before I dive in?
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.
This update reboots into the latest and greatest Realtek driver version 1.95. Also included is a web proxy implementation of the WPAD protocol. Furthermore LibreSSL was moved from version 2.6 to 2.7.
Originally planned was the release of the firewall alias API, but this will have to way a while longer.
Read article for the full patch notes.
Author's home network is connected to NYCMesh, a community-owned open network. Recently, the failure of an SD card inside a Raspberry Pi at an adjacent large hub has left the area of the network without a caching recursive resolver to serve DNS for both the .mesh TLD and the wider internet. Author stood up own instance of the 10.10.10.10 anycast DNS resolver to service DNS in the neighbourhood of the network.
We have released LibreSSL 2.8.1, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This is the second development release from the 2.8 series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.4.
The LibreSSL project continues improvement of the codebase to reflect modern, safe programming practices. We welcome feedback and improvements from the broader community. Thanks to all of the contributors who helped make this release possible.
Article takes a look at ZFS, an advanced file system. It will discuss where it came from, what it is, and why it is so popular among techies and enterprise.
EuroBSDcon 2018 is now over, and slides for OpenBSD-related presentations are now available from the usual place. As always, there's some great reading there (especially for those of us who were unable to attend the conference).
Unfortunately, there will not be any video this year.
pkgsrc is now frozen. Please use this opportunity to test pkgsrc bootstraps on your favourite esoteric OS or architecture, view the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list and fix some low-hanging fruit, and help them make this a great release.
If everything goes well there will be cutting the release some time over the weekend.
Nowadays if you want some of that BSD on your personal desktop how to go about? Well there is a full package or distro called GhostBSD which is based on FreeBSD current with a Mate or XFCE desktop preconfigured.
Netgate is excited to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4.4, now available for new installations and upgrades!
pfSense software version 2.4.4 brings security patches, numerous new features, support for new Netgate hardware models, and stability fixes for issues present in previous pfSense 2.4.x branch releases.
pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE updates and installation images are available now!
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. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here so someone else can
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD benchmarks on AMD’s Threadripper, NetBSD 7.2 has been released, optimized out DTrace kernel symbols, stuck UEFI bootloaders, why ed is not a good editor today, tell your BSD story, and more.
On AMD CPUs, LDTR must be managed crossing between VMs.
Binary updates for the amd64 platform are available via the syspatch utility. Source code patches can be found on the respective errata pages:
https://www.openbsd.org/errata62.html https://www.openbsd.org/errata63.html
As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.
Network security is serious business so let’s get right to the point: pfSense® software version 2.3.x is nearing End Of Life, October 31, 2018.
This talk presents this collection of enhancements required to provide Virtual Private Clouds using FreeBSD. We will walk through some of the problems seen with running FreeBSD as a hypervisor, the kernel modifications required to provide performant bhyve guest networking, and the required userland administrative interfaces required to stitch together a working VPC based on FreeBSD/VPC.
Article will show you how to freeze any X11 application with single keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture if you utilize them in any way with small simple script.
KnoxBUG will welcome Nick Principe as guest speaker . He will being doing an encore presentation of his SDC 2018 talk: Real-world Performance Advantages of NVDIMM and NVMe: A Case Study with OpenZFS
Date: Monday, October 1, 2018 - 6:00pm Place: at the New iX Systems offices (by FootHills Mall)
On 06 September 2018, HardenedBSD Foundation Corp was granted 501(c)(3) status, from which point all US-based persons making donations can deduct the donation from their taxes.
Do you have a self-hosted matomo instance? Would you like to create an account for DiscoverBSD and help us?
Here at DiscoverBSD, we value privacy of our users, therefore we are not using Google Analytics. But at the same time, we would like to be able track how many people come here. Can you help us?
There is a new build of SoloBSD 11.2-STABLE-0916 Viva Mexico! Edition based on the latest HardenedBSD stable branch version v1100056.5.
Highly available DHCP server setup on FreeBSD system, but it should be similarly simple on other UNIX and Unix-like systems. We will use the most obvious choice here – the Internet Systems Consortium implementation – ISC DHCP server – available in the FreeBSD Ports and packages as well.
Fresh from the just concluded n2k18 hackathon comes this report from Ken Westerback ([email protected]).
Highlights:
Mitigating Spectre/Meltdown on HP Proliant servers, omniOS installation setup, debugging a memory corruption issue on OpenBSD, CfT for OpenZFS native encryption, Asigra TrueNAS backup appliance shown at VMworld, NetBSD 6 EoL, and more.
Improper ELF header parsing and LazyFPU remediation causes potential data corruption
Read up to learn about what is Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage, how much work did it wind up being, how to set up Backblaze B2, configuring FreeNAS and few gotchas.
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go, FreeBSD Foundation August Update, What’s taking so long with Project Trident, pkgsrc config file versioning, and MacOS remnants in ZFS code.
New release brings lots of third party security updates, plugin updates and minor enhancements in overall system reliability.
In other news the firewall alias API has been finished in the development version. If you use the development version you cannot go back to the production version until the API has been released there as well, which is probably 18.7.3 so not too far away.
They will soon also begin the migration work for FreeBSD 11.2 for 19.1, but please keep in mind that they will be issuing security advisories to 11.1 when they arise even beyond the original end of life policy.
Anton Lindqvist ([email protected]) gave a talk at BSD Users Stockholm Meetup #3 on the kernel coverage tracing kit he committed recently. Slides are now available via the OpenBSD Events and Papers page.
The slides contain a list of bugs found and fixed as a result of this work.
With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default.
This is a big default change for DragonFlyBSD as up to now its default compiler was using the several year old GCC 5. With the default move to GCC 8 comes many optimizations, particularly for newer Intel and AMD CPU microarchitectures. This is especially good news for AMD Zen "znver1" CPU users. There is also support for newer C/C++ language features and many other enhancements as we've covered over the past few years.
As of September 30, 2018, FreeBSD 11.1 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team.
Users of FreeBSD 11.1 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.
Read more about honggfuzz ptrace(2) features, Sanitizers and merged commits.
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.2, the second feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch.
It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD and are (for whatever reasons) not able to update to the latest major release, NetBSD 8.0, we suggest updating to 7.2.
For more details, please see the release notes at:
https://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-7/NetBSD-7.2.html
Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, and other services may be found at:
http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/
Recently Microsoft announced a smaller, cheaper version of its Surface tablets called Surface Go which piqued author's interest. Read the article to learn support status relative to OpenBSD-current as of 2018-08-31.
Insight into TrueOS and Trident, stop evildoers with pf-badhost, Flashback to FreeBSDcon ‘99, OpenBSD’s measures against TLBleed, play Morrowind on OpenBSD in 5 steps, DragonflyBSD developers shocked at Threadripper performance, and more.
Author wants to show you what games are available on OpenBSD. How can you search for something you don't know exists? After reading this document you will have an overview of what games, emulators, and other game tools are out there and be able to find more on your own.
This is a tour of FreeBSD laptop. Goal is configuring a Unix laptop with focused and efficient user interface, suitable for all sorts of office work, research and entertainment tasks. Point of reference for this machine is the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro 2015 and Jobs-era MacOS versions, on which my choices of user interface elements are mainly based.
The OpenBSD Foundation is excited to announce that it has received the first 2018 Iridium level donation. This year the first $100K+ donation came from Handshake (https://www.handshake.org).
We thank Handshake for its very generous support! This donation will no doubt fund many exciting projects in the coming years.
When: 13th September 2018, 18:30 - 21:00
Where: Wheel Systems Office, Aleje Jerozolimskie 178, Warsaw
What:
Trip reports from the Essen Hackathon and BSDCam, CfT: ZFS native encryption and UFS trim consolidation, ZFS performance benchmarks on a FreeBSD server, how to port your OS to EC2, Vint Cerf about traceability, Remote Access console to an RPi3 running FreeBSD, and more.
Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.2.
In keeping with NetBSD's policy of supporting only the latest (8.x) and next most recent (7.x) major branches, the recent release of NetBSD 8.0 marks the end of life for NetBSD 6.x.
As of now, the following branches are no longer maintained:
What’s more, Matthew Dillon has published some testing results showing how power, CPU use, and memory speed all interact with these things.
Netgate® SG-5100 pfSense® Security Gateway appliance, Intel C3000 based appliance, which provides significant performance and engineering improvements relative to the SG-4860, is now available for pre-order.
This is the first stable update and includes security updates for several third party software and FreeBSD. A Bind plugin was released with DNSBL support and the reported problems with the HAProxy plugin have been sorted out thanks to enthusiastic reporters and testers.
NAS4Free were working on the trademark for project. However they faced some difficulties as they tried to trademark NAS4Free as name.
NomadBSD is a 64-bit live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery
This tutorial is designed for people with some C experience on a POSIX, BSD like machine with the latest libtls installed.
It focuses on changes that are necessary to make an existing program written in C that uses the POSIX sockets api to use TLS over those same connections.
A summary of the one more one year experience with OpenBSD.
NetBSD 8.0 available, FreeBSD on Scaleway’s ARM64 VPS, encrypted backups with OpenBSD, Dragonfly server storage upgrade, zpool checkpoints, g2k18 hackathon reports, and more.