We kick off the first episode with the latest BSD news, show you how to avoid intrusion detection systems and talk to Peter Hessler about BGP spam blacklists!
Headlines
- Committed by Jean-Sebastien Pedron
- Brings kernel mode setting to -CURRENT, will be in 10.0-RELEASE (ETA 12/2013)
- 10-STABLE is expected to be branched in October, to begin the process of stabilizing development
- Initial testing shows it works well
- May be merged to 9.X, but due to changes to the VM subsystem this will require a lot of work, and is currently not a priority for the Radeon KMS developer
- Still suffers from the syscons / KMS switcher issues, same as Intel video
- More info: https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU
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- "BSD is quite literally at the very core foundation of what makes the Internet work"
- Using BSD and Linux together provides reliability and diversity
- Verisign gives back to the community, runs vBSDCon
- "You get comfortable with something because it works well for your particular purposes and can find a good community that you can interact with. That all rang true for us with FreeBSD."
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- Adds support for SSL certificate verification
- Requires root ca bundle (security/root_ca_nss)
- Still missing TLS SNI support (Server Name Indication, allows name based virtual hosts over SSL)
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- The FreeBSD Foundation took the 20th anniversary of FreeBSD as an opportunity to look at where the project is, and where it might want to go
- The foundation sets out some basic goals that the project should strive towards:
- Unify User Experience
- “ensure that knowledge gained mastering one task translates to the next”
- “if we do pay attention to consistency, not only will FreeBSD be easier to use, it will be easier to learn”
- Design for Human and Programmatic Use
- 200 machines used to be considered a large deployment, with high density servers, blades, virtualization and the cloud, that is not so anymore
- “the tools we provide for status reporting, configuration, and control of FreeBSD just do not scale or fail to provide the desired user experience”
- “The FreeBSD of tomorrow needs to give programmability and human interaction equal weighting as requirements”
- Embrace New Ways to Document FreeBSD
- More ‘Getting Started’ sections in documentation
- Link to external How-Tos and other documentation
- “upgrade the cross-referencing and search tools built into FreeBSD, so FreeBSD, not an Internet search engine, is the best place to learn about FreeBSD”
- Spring Fundraising Campaign, April 17 - May 31, raised a total of $219,806 from 12 organizations and 365 individual donors. In the same period last year we raised a total of $23,422 from 2 organizations and 53 individuals
- Funds donated to the FreeBSD Foundation have been used on these projects recently:
- Capsicum security-component framework
- Transparent superpages support of the FreeBSD/ARM architecture
- Expanded and faster IPv6
- Native in-kernel iSCSI stack
- Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms
- Direct mapped I/O to avoid extra memory copies
- Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot environment
- Porting FreeBSD to the Genesi Efika MX SmartBook laptop (ARM-based)
- NAND Flash filesystem and storage stack
- Funds were also used to sponsor a number of BSD focused conferences: BSDCan, EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, BSDDay, NYCBSDCon, vBSDCon, plus Vendor summits and Developer summits
- It is important that the foundation receive donations from individuals, to maintain their tax exempt status in the USA. Even a donation of $5 helps make it clear that the FreeBSD Foundation is backed by a large community, not only a few vendors
- Donate Today
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The place to B...SD
- Very BSD friendly
- Kirk McKusick giving the keynote
- BSD Certification on the 15th, all other stuff on the 14th
- Multiple BSD talks
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- Dru Lavigne and Kris Moore will be manning a FreeBSD booth
- Number of talks of interest to BSD users, including ZFS coop
- Tutorials on the 26 & 27th (plus private FreeBSD DevSummit)
- 43 talks spread over 3 tracks on the 28 & 29th
- Keynote by Theo de Raadt
- Hosted in the picturesque St. Julians Area, Malta (Hilton Conference Centre)
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Using BGP to distribute spam blacklists and whitelists
Tutorial
News Roundup
- First security/bug fix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch
- Fixes 4 security vulnerabilities
- Adds 4 new sysctls to avoid IPv6 DoS attacks
- Misc. other updates
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- MWL is a well-known author of many BSD books
- Also does SSH, networking, DNSSEC, etc.
- Next book is about sudo, which comes from OpenBSD (did you know that?)
- Available for preorder now at a discounted price
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- Gábor Kövesdán has completed a funded project to improve the infrastructure behind the documentation project
- Will upgrade documentation from DocBook 4.2 to DocBook 4.5 and at the same time migrate to proper XML tools.
- DSSSL is an old and dead standard, which will not evolve any more.
- DocBook 5.0 tree added
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- FIBs (as discussed earlier in the interview) are Forward Information Bases (technical term for a routing table)
- The FreeBSD kernel can be compiled to allow you to maintain multiple FIBs, creating separate routing tables for different processes or jails
- In r254943 ps(1) is extended to support a new column ‘fib’, to display which routing table a process is using
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- Many improvements in nearly all areas, big upgrade
- Based on FreeBSD 9-STABLE, lots of new ZFS features
- Cherry picked some features from 10-CURRENT
- New volume manager and easy to use plugin management system
- 9.1.1 released shortly thereafter to fix a few UI and plugin bugs
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- bsdpatch has become mature, does what GNU patch can do, but has a much better license
- Approved by portmgr@ for use in ports
- Added WITH_GNU_PATCH build option for people who still need it
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