Time for a Change

This week, we'll be talking to Henning Brauer about OpenNTPD and its recently revived portable version. After that, we'll be discussing different ways to securely tunnel your traffic: specifically OpenVPN, IPSEC, SSH and Tor. All that and the latest news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Strange timer bug in FreeBSD 11

• Peter Wemm wrote in to the FreeBSD -CURRENT mailing list with an interesting observation
• Running the latest development code in the infrastructure, the clock would stop keeping time after 24 days of uptime
• This meant things like cron and sleep would break, TCP/IP wouldn't time out or resend packets, a lot of things would break
• A workaround until it was fixed was to reboot every 24 days, but this is BSD we're talking about - uptime is our game
• An initial proposal was adding a CFLAG to the build options which makes makes signed arithmetic wrap
• Peter disagreed and gave some background, offering a different patch to fix the issue and detect it early if it happens again
• Ultimately, the problem was traced back to an issue with a recent clang import
• It only affected -CURRENT, not -RELEASE or -STABLE, but was definitely a bizarre bug to track down ***

An OpenBSD mail server

• There's been a recent influx of blog posts about building a BSD mail server for some reason
• In this fancy series of posts, the author sets up OpenSMTPD in its native OpenBSD home, whereas previous posts have been aimed at FreeBSD and Linux
• In addition to the usual steps, this one also covers DKIMproxy, ClamAV for scanning attachments, Dovecot for IMAP and also multiple choices of spam filtering: spamd or SpamAssassin
• It also shows you how to set up Roundcube for building a web interface, using the new in-base httpd
• That means this is more of a "complete solution" - right down to what the end users see
• The series is split up into categories so it's very easy to follow along step-by-step ***

How DragonFlyBSD uses git

• DragonFlyBSD, along with PCBSD and EdgeBSD, uses git as its version control system for the system source code
• In a series of posts, Matthew Dillon (the project lead) details their internal setup
• They're using vanilla git over ssh, with the developers' accounts set to git-only (no shell access)
• The maintainers of the server are the only ones with shell access available
• He also details how a cron job syncs from the master to a public box that anyone can check out code from
• It would be interesting to hear about how other BSD projects manage their master source repository ***

Why not try PCBSD?

• ITwire, another more mainstream tech site, published a recent article about switching to PCBSD
• They interview a guy named Kris that we've never heard of before
• In the article, they touch on how easy it can potentially be for Linux users looking to switch over to the BSD side - lots of applications are exactly the same
• "With the growing adoption of systemd, dissatisfaction with Linux has reached proportions not seen in recent years, to the extent that people have started talking of switching to FreeBSD."
• If you have some friends who complain to you about systemd all the time, this might be a good article to show them ***

Interview - Henning Brauer - henning@openbsd.org / @henningbrauer

OpenNTPD and its portable variant

News Roundup

Authenticated time in OpenNTPD

• We recorded that interview with Henning just a few days ago, and it looks like part of it may be outdated already
• While at the hackathon, some developers came up with an alternate way to get authenticated NTP responses
• You can now add an HTTPS URL to your ntpd.conf in addition to the time server pool
• OpenNTPD will query it (over TLS, with CA verification) and look at the date sent in the HTTPS header
• It's not intended to be a direct time source, just a constraint to keep things within reason
• If you receive regular NTP packets that are way off from the TLS packet, those will be discarded and the server(s) marked as invalid
• Henning and Theo also weigh in to give some of the backstory on the idea
• Lots more detail can be found in Reyk's email explaining the new feature (and it's optional of course) ***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Oita and Hamanako

• It's been a while since we've featured one of these trip reports, but the Japanese NetBSD users group is still doing them
• This time the conferences were in Oita and Hamanako, Japan
• Machines running NetBSD included the CubieBoard2 Allwinner A20, Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi, Sharp NetWalker and a couple Zaurus devices
• As always, they took lots of pictures from the event of NetBSD on all these weird machines ***

Poudriere in a jail

• A common question we get about our poudriere tutorial is "how do I run it in a jail?" - this blog post is about exactly that
• It takes you through the networking setup, zpool setup, nginx setup, making the jail and finally poking the right holes in the jail to allow poudriere to work its magic ***

Bruteblock, another way to stop bruteforce

• We've mentioned a few different ways to stop ssh bruteforce attempts in the past: fail2ban, denyhosts, or even just with pf's built-in rate limiting
• Bruteblock is a similar tool, but it's not just for ssh logins - it can do a number of other services
• It can also work directly with IPFW, which is a plus if you're using that as your firewall
• Add a few lines to your syslog.conf and bruteblock will get executed automatically
• The rest of the article takes you through the different settings you can configure for blocking ***

New iwm(4) driver and cross-polination

• The OpenBSD guys recently imported a new "iwm" driver for newer Intel 7260 wireless cards (commonly found in Thinkpads)
• NetBSD wasted no time in porting it over, giving a bit of interesting backstory
• According to Antti Kantee, "it was created for OpenBSD by writing and porting a NetBSD driver which was developed in a rump kernel in Linux userspace"
• Both projects would appreciate further testing if you have the hardware and can provide useful bug reports
• Maybe FreeBSD and DragonFly will port it over too, or come up with something that's partially based on the code ***

PCBSD current images

• The first PCBSD -CURRENT images should be available this weekend
• This image will be tagged 11.0-CURRENTFEB2015, with planned monthly updates
• For the more adventurous this will allow testing both FreeBSD and PCBSD bleeding edge ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Richard writes in
• Charlie writes in
• Ben writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• A systematic effort
• GCC's lunch
• Hopes and dreams ***

Discussion

Comparison of ways to securely tunnel your traffic

• OpenVPN, OpenBSD IKED, FreeBSD IPSEC, OpenSSH, Tor ***