Coming up this week, we'll be chatting with Shawn Webb about his recent work with ASLR and PIE in FreeBSD. After that, we'll be showing you how you can create a reverse SSH tunnel to a system behind a firewall... how sneaky. Answers to your emails plus the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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Headlines
- The foundation has published a new PDF detailing some of their recent activities
- It includes project development updates, the 10.1-RELEASE schedule and some of its new features
- There is also a short interview with Dru Lavigne in the "voices from the community" section
- If you're into hardware, there's another section about some new FreeBSD server equipment
- In closing, there's an update on funding too
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- With BIND having been removed from FreeBSD 10.0, you might be looking to replace your old DNS setup
- This article shows how to use NSD for an authoritative DNS nameserver
- It's also got a link to a similar article on Unbound, the new favorite recursive and caching resolver (they work great together)
- All the instructions are presented very neatly, with all the little details included
- Less BIND means less vulnerabilities, everybody's happy
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- While we're on the topic of DNS servers, BIND was finally removed from OpenBSD as well
- The base system contains both NSD and Unbound, so users can transition over between 5.6 (November of this year) and 5.7 (May of next year)
- They've also removed nginx from the base system, in favor of the new custom HTTP daemon
- BIND and Nginx are still available in ports if you don't want to switch
- We're hoping to have Reyk Floeter on the show next week to talk about it, but scheduling might not work out, so it may be a little later on
- With Apache gone in the upcoming 5.6, It's also likely that sendmail will be removed before 5.7 - hooray for modern alternatives
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- A Japanese NetBSD developer has been uploading lots of interesting videos
- Unsurprisingly, they're all featuring NetBSD running on exotic and weird hardware
- Most of them are demoing sound or running a modern Twitter client on an ancient computer
- They're from the same guy that did the conference wrap-up we mentioned recently
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Address space layout randomization in FreeBSD
Tutorial
News Roundup
- If you've got a lot of BSD boxes under your control, or if you're just lazy, you've probably looked into Puppet before
- The author claims a lack of BSD-specific Puppet documentation, so he decided to write up some notes of his own
- He goes through some advantages of using this type of tool for deployments, even when you don't have a huge number of systems
- The rest of the post explains how to set up both the master and the agent configurations
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- We found a few miscellaneous pfSense articles this past week
- The first one is about the hunt for the "ultimate" free open source firewall, where pfSense is obviously a strong contender
- The second one shows how to log NAT firewall states (a good way to find out which family member has been torrenting!)
- In the third, you can see how to automatically back up your configuration files
- The fourth item shows how to set up PXE booting with pfSense, similar to one of our tutorials
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- If you've got a Mac you need to keep backed up, a FreeBSD server with ZFS can take the place of an expensive "time capsule"
- This post walks you through setting up netatalk and mDNS for a very versatile Time Machine backup system
- With a single command on the OS X side, you can write to and read from the BSD box just like a regular external drive
- Surprisingly simple to do, recommended for anyone with Macs on their network
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- Lumina, the BSD-exclusive desktop environment, seems to be coming along nicely
- The main developer has posted an update on the PCBSD blog with some screenshots
- Lots of new features have been added, many of which are documented in the post
- There just might be a BSD Now episode about Lumina coming up.. (cough cough)
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