Must Be Rigged

Coming up this week on the show, we've got an interview with Patrick Wildt, one of the developers of Bitrig. We'll find out all the details of their OpenBSD fork, what makes it different and what their plans are going forward. We've also got all the week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Bitrig 1.0 released

• If you haven't heard of it, Bitrig is a fork of OpenBSD that started a couple years ago
• According to their FAQ, some of their goals include: only supporting modern hardware and a limited set of CPU architectures, replacing nearly all GNU tools in base with BSD versions and having better virtualization support
• They've finally announced their first official release, 1.0
• This release introduces support for Clang 3.4, replacing the old GCC, along with libc++ replacing the GNU version
• It also includes filesystem journaling, support for GPT and - most importantly - a hacker-style console with green text on black background
• One of the developers answered some questions about it on Hacker News too ***

Is it time to try BSD?

• Here we get a little peek into the Linux world - more and more people are considering switching
• On a more mainstream tech news site, they have an article about people switching away from Linux and to BSD
• People are starting to get even more suspicious of systemd, and lots of drama in the Linux world is leading a whole new group of potential users over to the BSD side
• This article explores some pros and cons of switching, and features opinions of various users ***

Poudriere 3.1 released

• One of the first things we ever covered on the show was poudriere, a tool with a funny name that's used to build binary packages from FreeBSD ports
• It's come a long way since then, and bdrewery and bapt have just announced a new major version
• This new release features a redesigned web interface to check on the status of your packages
• There are lots of new bulk building options to preserve packages even if some fail to compile - this makes maintaining a production repo much easier
• It also introduces a useful new "pkgclean" subcommand to clean out your repository of packages that aren't needed anymore, and poudriere keeps it cleaner by default as well now
• Check the full release notes for all the additions and bug fixes ***

Firewalling with OpenBSD's pf and pfsync

• A talk by David Gwynne from an Australian conference was uploaded, with the subject matter being pf and pfsync
• He uses pf to manage 60 internal networks with a single firewall
• The talk gives some background on how pf originally came to be and some OpenBSD 101 for the uninitiated
• It also touches on different rulesets, use cases, configuration syntax, placing limits on connections, ospf, authpf, segregating VLANs, synproxy handling and a lot more
• The second half of the presentation focuses on pfsync and carp for failover and redundancy
• With two BSD boxes running pfsync, you can actually patch your kernel and still stay connected to IRC ***

Interview - Patrick Wildt - patrick@bitrig.org / @bitrig

The initial release of Bitrig

News Roundup

Infrastructural enhancements at NYI

• The FreeBSD foundation put up a new blog post detailing some hardware improvements they've recently done
• Their eastern US colocation is hosted at New York Internet, and is used for FTP mirrors, pkgng mirrors, and also as a place for developers to test things
• There've been fourteen machines purchased since July, and now FreeBSD boasts a total of sixty-eight physical boxes there
• This blog post goes into detail about how those servers are used and details some of the network topology ***

The long tail of MD5

• Our friend Ted Unangst is on a quest to replace all instances of MD5 in OpenBSD's tree with something more modern
• In this blog post, he goes through some of the different areas where MD5 still lives, and discovers how easy (or impossible) it would be to replace
• Through some recent commits, OpenBSD now uses SHA512 in some places that you might not expect
• Some other places require a bit more care… ***

DragonFly cheat sheet

• If you've been thinking of trying out DragonFlyBSD lately, this might make the transition a bit easier
• A user-created "cheat sheet" on the website lists some common answers to beginner questions
• The page features a walkthrough of the installer, some shell tips and workarounds for various issues
• At the end, it also has some things that new users can get involved with to help out ***

Experiences with an OpenBSD laptop

• A lot of people seem to be interested in trying out some form of BSD on their laptop, and this article details just that
• The author got interested in OpenBSD mostly because of the security focus and the fact that it's not Linux
• In this blog post, he goes through the steps of researching, installing, configuring, upgrading and finally actually using it on his Thinkpad
• He even gives us a mention as a good place to learn more about BSD, thanks! ***

PC-BSD Updates

• A call for testing of a new update system has gone out
• Conversion to Qt5 for utils has taken place ***

Feedback/Questions

• Chris writes in
• AJ writes in
• Dan writes in
• Jeff writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Over 440% faster
• The PF conundrum (edit: Allan misspoke about PF performance during this segment, apologies.)
• Violating bad standards
• apt-get rid of systemd ***