June 2018 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2018/06/302018/06/29

In Other BSDs for 2018/06/30

Some of this is overflow from last week.

m:tier subscription service for long-term OpenBSD updates. This is a good idea, connecting a service to the people that want to pay for it – without interfering with the “normal” free usage.
FreeBSD has lower latency, and Linux has faster application speeds. The comments at the link source may be better.
A Beginner’s Guide to Firewalling with pf. (via)
pfSense in VMware Workstation. (via)
“Would anyone be interested of this tool supported BSD?“
Using UNIX as IDE. (via)
FreeBSD 11.2 released.
HardenedBSD: Feature comparison vs other BSD distros. (via)
Booting OpenBSD kernels in EFI mode with QEMU. (via)
Call for testers – Audio improvements for NetBSD 8.1. (via)
WiFi Refresh. (via)
Rewards of Up to $500K Offered for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux Zero-Days. (via)
FreeBSD Desktop – Part 11 – Key Components – Blue Light Spectrum Suppress. I didn’t know about Redshift; I like it.
Michael W. Lucas has a Patreon account, and a video to go with it. I’ve wondered if I should do something like that for the Digest.

2018/06/29

BSDNow 252: Goes to 11.2

The summary for BSDNow episode 252: “FreeBSD 11.2 has been released, setting up an MTA behind Tor, running pfsense on DigitalOcean, one year of C, using OpenBGPD to announce VM networks, the power to serve, and a BSDCan trip report.”

2018/06/252018/06/24

X2APIC enabled by default on DragonFly

DragonFly-current, that is. Some newer multi-processor systems use X2APIC to boot, and DragonFly can now use it.

2018/06/242018/06/22

Lazy Reading for 2018/06/24

I’m going wide-topic this week.

The Toy That Talked Back. The Speak and Spell.
About Star Wars in ASCII, which I’ve linked directly to before.
Edible Games Cookbook: Play With Your Food. A Kickstarter.
Command-line file-based dedup. (via)
Genealogy of Elizas. Actual site here. (via)
Stamping copyright information onto academic papers. The pdftk usage is what I find interesting here. There’s a LOT of tools out there for automatic PDF manipulation.
Command line audio players.
Bread is lighter than whipped cream.
Break down of a C64 demo effect. (via)
One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla. I’ve seen people keeping vanilla beans in safes. (via)
A WinRAR joke.
Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents. The very first sentence is fun.

2018/06/232018/06/22

In Other BSDs for 2018/06/23

Lots of announcements, lots of reading. Note the first item listed is happening today.

Book Fair, 23 June 2018. Michael W. Lucas is at the Scriptorium Book Fest today, in Michigan. Go if you are near and get a signed BSD book.
Escape from System D, Episode V. Interesting cause it mentions BSD and interesting for spot-on characterization of Twitter/Hacker News feedback. (via)
25 years of FreeBSD. (via)
NetBSD Summer of Code reports: libfuzzer, kernel address sanitizer, and kernel undefined behavior sanitizer.
Valuable News 2018/06/17.
FreeBSD Desktop, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I linked to a few of the early ones before, but I want to present a complete (so far) list.
FreeBSD 11.2-RC3 Available.
OPNsense 18.1.10 released.
httpd(8) Gains Simple Request Rewrites.
SMT Disabled by Default in -current.
More Mitigations for (potential) CPU Vulnerabilities.
LDAP client added to -current. This, or a similar LDAP client, should be present in all BSDs.
KDE on FreeBSD – June 2018. 5 is almost working in DragonFly, too, by the way. (via)
itch.io Summer Sale + General itch.io Feature.
“what’s good in openbsd superior than freebsd?“
HardenedBSD 11-STABLE v1100055.4 Released. (via)
“Today I stumbled upon a BSD Wikipedia page. Why should I choose BSD over a Linux based distro?“

2018/06/222018/06/22

Extra DragonFly links

These would be ‘In Other BSD’ links, but this isn’t Other BSD – It’s DragonFly:

2018/06/22

Building your own DragonFly

Mixed in with the other documentation on the DragonFly website is a “how to build a release” explanation. I use it every time there’s a new DragonFly version. If you were wanting to build a DragonFly ISO/IMG with changes or different preinstalled dports, I’ve added some notes about what’s relevant for non-release building.

We used to have “GUI” releases of DragonFly which were based on the nrelease process installing pkgsrc packages and adding some configuration files. It doesn’t happen now mostly because nobody has had the time to reconfigure for dports; if you were looking for a project this weekend, may I suggest…?

2018/06/21

BSDNow 251: Crypto HAMMER

BSDNow 251 has one of the more fun titles ever, and goes into HAMMER encryption, BSDCan details, and a number of other things that make for good BSD news.

2018/06/20

Half billion tries for a HAMMER2 bug

I’m pulling a quote off of IRC to show some of the testing on HAMMER2, specifically as the background for this commit:

14:22 <@dillon_> ^^^ hammer2 bug, could reproduce it around once a day doing a continuous rm -rf on hardlinked snapshots. reproduced about once every 500 million directory entries or so

I am somewhat tickled by the notion that you might have a problem after deleting half a billion directory entries.

2018/06/192018/06/20

SemiBUG, tonight: James Turner and BHCS

SemiBUG meets tonight at 7 PM, and James Turner is presenting about BHCS. I rarely say this, but: I wish I was closer to Michigan. Go, if you are near.

Update: the files referenced during the talk.

2018/06/182018/06/18

DragonFly 5.2.2 tagged

I’ve tagged and built DragonFly 5.2.2. This is mostly so that our current release image includes the fixes for the LazyFP bug, CVE-2018-3665. My email to users@ has upgrade details.

2018/06/172018/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2018/06/17

I’m going heavy on history this week.

“an imaginary mail order computer games shop in 1985“.
NeoVim, a refactoring of Vim.
“The Obscuritory, a blog about lesser-known, odder games and software.” (via)
Pulling the rug out from under an internet protocol.
Building the Commodore that should have existed. (via)
Via the previous link, the C256 Foenix Project. A Commodore 128 sequel.
The Arcade Flyer Archive, advertising material around arcade games. (via)
AtlTVHead, a project. (Video)
OpenStreetMap Should Be a Priority for the Open Source Community. (via)
Webrings. Was there ever a BSD one? I don’t know…
Student events at SC18 this fall – sign up now to participate. That’s “SC” as in “SuperComputing” – they will have a Cray on display, for instance. (via)
“There’s real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, et al“. The argument isn’t valid, I think – you’ll get the same problem with new tools; it’s really reinvention, not improvement. (via)
Yore Computer, old UK computer magazine pages. (via)

2018/06/162018/06/15

In Other BSDs for 2018/06/16

Lots of different items, probably because of BSDCan.

EuroBSDCon 2018 is happening September 20-23 at University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania – Call for papers ends tomorrow.
June HardenedBSD Foundation Update. (via)
FreeBSD 11.2-RC2 Available.
Valuable News – 2018/06/09.
Pledge and Unveil in OpenBSD [pdf]. Knew about pledge, not about unveil. (via)
OpenBSD at BSDCan 2018. A summary post.
TBW60: #OpenBSD @BSDCAN 2017 Interview. Video. “TBW” == The Brothers WISP; a series I did not know about. Stumbled into this by accident.
Project Trident, the GUI version of TrueOS.
BSDCan 2018 Recap and SELF 2018 Recap from iXSystems.
Apple Airport Extreme == NetBSD, which I did not know.
OpenBSD adds “-n” to crontab(5): “no mail when everything went OK” A good idea. (via)
pNFS server in FreeBSD. (via)
(Open)BSD equivalent of nmtui (curses Wi-Fi network chooser)
syspatch(8) for OpenBSD. Included in other convention coverage, I’m sure, but I found this tool interesting. (PDF, via).

2018/06/14

BSDNow 250: BSDCan 2018 recap

I am typing BSDXXX phrases a lot, it seems. BSDNow 250 goes over the just-finished BSDCan. There’s a ton of events, so get reading/listening.

2018/06/14

NX on by default for reads

DragonFly has had NX (Non-eXecutable) support for some time. It’s now on by default for read operations in DragonFly master – not the current release. You can step it up to level 2, for write operations, with a loader tunable, but it may cause issues with dports.

2018/06/122018/06/14

CPU bug hardening added to DragonFly

Matthew Dillon’s added some patches to DragonFly related to securing floating point state, following similar work in OpenBSD. There isn’t a reported catchy-name issue to match it, like Spectre/Meltdown – yet.

(If anyone has a good link to the similar OpenBSD commits, please share; I did not find them on a cursory search.)

Update: the fix is now in 5.2 and an update is recommended.

2018/06/112018/06/11

mkinitrd out, initrd in

There was an optional ‘make initrd’ step in the DragonFly build process, where you can create a small binary to use for mounting encrypted root drives.

Aaron LI has removed mkinitrd in favor of ‘make initrd’, which builds a separate binary to use in exactly those situations. See the commit message for more detail. It incidentally creates a ‘/rescue’ directory and works as a rescue ramdisk, similar to other BSDs, if you should ever need it. (See updated MOTD for details)

2018/06/102018/06/08

Lazy Reading for 2018/06/10

It’s been a busy week and I didn’t have overflow from last week to help, so these are very fresh links.

With ARM Wide Open. Acorn, where ARM processors first showed up.
That led me to the BBC film Micro Men, a neat movie about not-Silicon-Valley early computing.
MXE11: run UNIX on a microcontroller. Pocket PDP/11. (via)
WiGLE, mapping of WiFi everywhere. There’s a certain amount of approximation, but still interesting. (via)
DungeonFS, both a FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawl. (via)
A few notes on daily blogging. Relevant to why I do this thing you are reading now.
How Instagram’s Feed Works. It bothers me that what you see is filtered by how you use their tools, not by what you actually like. (via)
The History of Telecommunications. (via)
OpenVMS/x86_64: Proof Points to x86-64 First Boot (May 29th 2018). As someone who still has a VAX running… I’m interested.
Stupid cmd.exe tricks: Changing directories with forward slashes instead of backslashes. I find this entertaining.
Six hacks for less(1). I don’t think of less(1) as configurable, but it is.
GitHub: quo vadis? This note gets it right: self host, self host, self host self host self host. We all have the tools; don’t let a startup sell them back to you.

2018/06/092018/06/08

In Other BSDs for 2018/06/09

BSDCan is running this weekend. There is, depending on what time you are reading this, a livestream.

Retguard: An improved stack protector for OpenBSD. (via)
Mailing lists vs Github. Relevant to most every BSD project. (via)
need help determining the best HA solution for 3 pfSense VM guests.
OpenBSD’s ksh(1) does not export PWD, causing unexpected problems. (via)
GOG.com summer sale – OpenBSD highlights.
libcsi – Crypto Simplified Interface.
Author Discoverability.
Your own VPN with OpenIKED & OpenBSD. (via)
zedenv, a ZFS Boot Environment Manager for FreeBSD and Linux. (via)
TrueOS to Focus On Core Operating System. Not a name change; it’s work on becoming a base like Debian. (via)
Isotop: French desktop-oriented OpenBSD distro. (via)
May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
Silent Fanless FreeBSD Desktop/Server.
Valuable News – 2018/06/05.

2018/06/082018/06/07

MosChip PCIe serial com support in DragonFly

If you have a serial card add-in, DragonFly can now output the console to it – a way to run completely headless. It’s not quite like a normal on-motherboard serial port boot, so look at the commit notes for implementation details.