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.
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.
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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.