Episode 138
Rushing into BSD
April 20th, 2016
1 hr 36 mins 30 secs
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About this Episode
This week on the show, we will be talking to Benedict Reushling about his role with the FreeBSD foundation and the journey that took him
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Headlines
HardenedBSD introduces full PIE support
- PIE base for amd64 and i386
- Only nine applications are not compiled as PIEs
- Tested PIE base on several amd64 systems, both virtualized and bare metal
- Hoped to be to enabled it for ARM64 before or during BSDCan.
- Shawn will be bringing ten Raspberry Pi 3 devices (which are ARM64) with to BSDCan, eight of which will be given out to lucky individuals. “We want the BSD community to hack on them and get ARM64/Aarch64 fully functional on them.” ***
Lessons learned from 30 years of MINIX
- Eat your own dog food.
- By not relying on idiosyncratic features of the hardware, one makes porting to new platforms much easier.
- The Internet is like an elephant; it never forgets.
- When standards exist (such as ANSI Standard C) stick to them.
- Even after you have adopted a strategy, you should nevertheless reexamine it from time to time.
- Keep focused on your real goal, Einstein was right: Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler. ***
pfSense 2.3 released
- Rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap
- TLS v1.0 disabled for the GUI
- Moved to a FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE base
- PHP Upgraded to 5.6
- The "Full Backup" feature has been deprecated
- Closed 760 total tickets of which 137 are fixed bugs
- Known Regressions
- OpenVPN topology change
- IP aliases with CARP IP parent lose their parent interface association post-upgrade
- IPsec IPComp does not work.
- IGMP Proxy does not work with VLAN interfaces.
- Many other updates and changes ***
OPNsense 16.1.10 released
- openvpn: revive windows installer binaries
- system: improved config history and backup pages layout
- system: increased backup count default from 30 to 60
- system: /var /tmp MFS awareness for crash dumps added
- trust: add “IP security IKE intermediate” to server key usage
- firmware: moved reboot, halt and defaults pages to new home
- languages: updates to Russian, French, German and Japanese
- Many other updates and changes ***
Interview - Benedict Reuschling - bcr@freebsd.org
- FreeBSD Foundation in Europe ***
News Roundup
Write opinionated workarounds
- Colin Percival has written a great blog post this past week, specifically talking about his policy of writing “opinionated workarounds”.
- The idea came about due to his working on multi-platform software, and the frustrations of dealing with POSIX violations
- The crux of the post is how he deals with these workarounds. Specifically by only applying them to the particular system in which it was required. And doing so loudly.
- This has some important benefits. First, it doesn’t potentially expose other systems to bugs / security flaws when a workaround doesn’t “work” on a system for which it wasn’t designed. Secondly it’s important to complain. Loudly. This lets the user know that they are running on a system that doesn’t adhere to POSIX compliance, and maybe even get the attention of a developer who could remedy the situation. ***
Privilege escalation in calendar(1)
- File this one under “Ouch that hurts” a new security vuln has been posted, this time against NetBSD’s ‘calendar’ command.
- Specifically it looks like some of the daily scripts uses the ‘-a’ flag, which requires super-user privs in order to process all users calendar files and mail the results.
- However the bug occurred because the calendar command didn’t drop priv properly before executing external commands (whoops!)
- To workaround you can set run_calendar=NO in the daily.conf file, or apply the fixed binary from upstream. ***
PGCon 2016
- PGCon 2016 is now only 4 weeks away
- The conference will be held at the University of Ottawa (same venue as BSDCan) from May 17th to 20th
- Tutorials: 17-18 May 2016 (Tue & Wed)
- Talks: 19-20 May 2016 (Thu-Fri)
- Wednesday is a developer unconference.
- Saturday is a user unconference.
- “PGCon is an annual conference for users and developers of PostgreSQL, a leading relational database, which just happens to be open source. PGCon is the place to meet, discuss, build relationships, learn valuable insights, and generally chat about the work you are doing with PostgreSQL. If you want to learn why so many people are moving to PostgreSQL, PGCon will be the place to find out why. Whether you are a casual user or you've been working with PostgreSQL for years, PGCon will have something for you.”
- New to PGSQL? Just a user? Long time developers? This conference has something for you. A great lineup of talks, plus unconference days focused on both users and developers ***
CfP EuroBSDCon 2016
- The call for papers has been issued for EuroBSDCon 2016 in Belgrade, Serbia
- The conference will be held from the 22nd to 25th of September, 2016
- The deadline for talk submissions is: Sunday the 8th of May, 2016
- Submit your talk or tutorial proposal before it is too late ***