90: ZFS Armistice

This time on the show, we'll be chatting with Jed Reynolds about ZFS. He's been using it extensively on a certain other OS, and we can both learn a bit about the other side's implementation. Answers to your questions and all this week's news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Playing with sandboxing Sandboxing and privilege separation are popular topics these days - they're the goal of the new "shill" scripting language, they're used heavily throughout OpenBSD, and they're gaining traction with the capsicum framework This blog post explores capsicum in FreeBSD, some of its history and where it's used in the base system They also include some code samples so you can verify that capsicum is actually denying the program access to certain system calls Check our interview about capsicum from a while back if you haven't seen it already *** OpenNTPD on by default OpenBSD has enabled ntpd by default in the installer, rather than prompting the user if they want to turn it on In nearly every case, you're going to want to have your clock synced via NTP With the HTTPS constraints feature also enabled by default, this should keep the time checked and accurate, even against spoofing attacks Lots of problems can be traced back to the time on one system or another being wrong, so this will also eliminate some of those cases For those who might be curious, they're using the "pool.ntp.org" cluster of addresses and google for HTTPS constraints (but these can be easily changed) *** FreeBSD workshop in Landshut We mentioned a BSD installfest happening in Germany a few weeks back, and the organizer wrote in with a review of the event The installfest instead became a "FreeBSD workshop" session, introducing curious new users to some of the flagship features of the OS They covered when to use UFS or ZFS, firewall options, the release/stable/current branches and finally how to automate installations with Ansible If you're in south Germany and want to give similar introduction talks or Q&A sessions about the other BSDs, get in touch We'll hear more from him about how it went in the feedback section today *** Swap encryption in DragonFly Doing full disk encryption is very important, but something that people sometimes overlook is encrypting their swap This can actually be more important than the contents of your disks, especially if an unencrypted password or key hits your swap (as it can be recovered quite easily) DragonFlyBSD has added a new experimental option to automatically encrypt your swap partition in fstab There was another way to do it previously, but this is a lot easier You can achieve similar results in FreeBSD by adding ".eli" to the end of the swap device in fstab, there are a few steps to do it in NetBSD and swap in OpenBSD is encrypted by default A one-time key will be created and then destroyed in each case, making recovery of the plaintext nearly impossible *** Interview - Jed Reynolds - [email protected] / @jed_reynolds Comparing ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD News Roundup USB thermometer on OpenBSD So maybe you've got BSD on your server or router, maybe NetBSD on a toaster, but have you ever used a thermometer with one? This blog post introduces the RDing TEMPer Gold USB thermometer, a small device that can tell the room temperature, and how to get it working on OpenBSD Wouldn't you know it, OpenBSD has a native "ugold" driver to support it with the sensors framework How useful such a device would be is another story though *** NAS4Free now on ARM We talk a lot about hardware for network-attached storage devices on the show, but ARM doesn't come up a lot That might be changing soon, as NAS4Free has just released some ARM builds These new (somewhat experimental) images are based on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT Included in the announcement is a list of fully-supported and partially-supported hardware that they've tested it with If anyone has experience with running a NAS on slightly exotic hardware, write in to us *** pkgsrcCon 2015 CFP and info This year's pkgsrcCon will be in Berlin, Germany on July 4th and 5th They're looking for talk proposals and ideas for things you'd like to see If you or your company uses pkgsrc, or if you're just interested in NetBSD in general, it would be a good event to check out *** BSDTalk episode 253 BSDTalk has released another new episode In it, he interviews George Neville-Neil about the 2nd edition of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" They discuss what's new since the last edition, who the book's target audience is and a lot more We're up to 90 episodes now, slowly catching up to Will... *** Feedback/Questions Dominik writes in Brad writes in Corvin writes in James writes in ***