Don't Buy a Router

This week on the show we're joined by Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the creator of both FreeNAS and the BSD Router Project! We'll be discussing what the BSD Router Project is, what it's for and where it's going. All this week's headlines and answers to viewer-submitted questions, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSD Devroom CFP

• This year's FOSDEM conference (Belgium, Jan 31st - Feb 1st) is having a dedicated BSD devroom
• They've issued a call for papers on anything BSD-related, and we always love more presentations
• If you're in the Belgium area or plan on going, submit a talk about something cool you're doing
• There's also a mailing list and some more information in the original post ***

Bhyve SVM code merge

• The bhyve_svm code has been in the "projects" tree of FreeBSD, but is now ready for -CURRENT
• This changeset will finally allow bhyve to run on AMD CPUs, where it was previously limited to Intel only
• All the supported operating systems and utilities should work on both now
• One thing to note: bhyve doesn't support PCI passthrough on AMD just yet
• There may still be some issues though ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference Tokyo

• The Japanese NetBSD users group held a booth at another recent open source conference
• As always, they were running NetBSD on everything you can imagine
• One of the users reports back to the mailing list on their experience, providing lots of pictures and links
• Here's an interesting screenshot of NetBSD running various other BSDs in Xen ***

More BSD switchers every day

• A decade-long Linux user is considering making the switch, and asks Reddit about the BSD community
• Tired of the pointless bickering he sees in his current community, he asks if the same problems exist over here and what he should expect
• So far, he's found that BSD people seem to act more level-headed about things, and are much more practical, whereas some FSF/GNU/GPL people make open source a religion
• There's also another semi-related thread about another Linux user wanting to switch to BSD because of systemd and GNU people
• There are some extremely well written and thought-out comments in the replies (in both threads), be sure to give them all a read
• Maybe the OPs should've just watched this show ***

Interview - Olivier Cochard-Labbé - olivier@cochard.me / @ocochardlabbe

The BSD Router Project

News Roundup

FreeBSD -CURRENT on a T420

• Thinkpads are quite popular with BSD developers and users
• Most of the hardware seems to be supported across the BSDs (especially wifi)
• This article walks through installing FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Thinkpad T420 with UEFI
• If you've got a Thinkpad, or especially this specific one, have a look at some of the steps involved ***

FreeNAS on a Supermicro 5018A-MHN4

• More and more people are migrating their NAS devices to BSD-based solutions
• In this post, the author goes through setting up FreeNAS on some of his new hardware
• His new rack-mounted FreeNAS machine has a low power Atom with eight cores and 64GB of RAM - quite a lot for its small form factor
• The rest of the post details all of the hardware he chose and goes through the build process (with lots of cool pictures) ***

Hardening procfs and linprocfs

• There was an exploit published recently for SFTP in OpenSSH, but it mostly just affected Linux
• There exists a native procfs in FreeBSD, which was the target point of that exploit, but it's not used very often
• The Linux emulation layer also supports its own linprocfs, which was affected as well
• The HardenedBSD guys weigh in on how to best solve the problem, and now support an additional protection layer from writing to memory with procfs
• If you want to learn more about ASLR and HardenedBSD, be sure to check out our interview with Shawn too ***

pfSense monitoring with bandwidthd

• A lot of people run pfSense on their home network, and it's really useful to monitor the bandwidth usage
• This article will walk you through setting up bandwidthd to do exactly that
• bandwidthd monitors based on the IP address, rather than per-interface
• It can also build some cool HTML graphs, and we love those pfSense graphs
• Have a look at our bandwidth monitoring and testing tutorial for some more ideas ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dave writes in
• Chris writes in
• Zeke writes in
• Bostjan writes in
• Patrick writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• More old bugs
• The Right Font™ (see also) ***