A tutorial on pkgng, we talk with the developers of OpenSMTPD about running a mail server OpenBSD-style, answer YOUR questions and, of course, discuss all the latest news.

All that and more on BSD Now! The place to B… SD.

Direct Download:

Video | HD Video | MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed | HD Vid Feed | HD Torrent Feed

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Now based on FreeBSD 8.3

Lots of IPv6 features added

Security updates, bug fixes, driver updates

PBI package support

Way too many updates to list, see the full list

Brief explanation of iSCSI

This work replaces the older userland iscsi target daemon and improves the in-kernel iscsi initiator

Target layer consists of:

ctld(8), a userspace daemon responsible for handling configuration, listening for incoming connections, etc, then handing off connections to the kernel after the iSCSI Login phase

iSCSI frontend to CAM Target Layer, which handles Full Feature phase.

The work is being sponsored by FreeBSD Foundation

Commit here

MTier provides a number of things for the OpenBSD community

For example, regularly updated (for security) stable packages from their custom repo

openup is a utility to easily check for security updates in both base and packages

It uses the regular pkg tools, nothing custom-made

Can be run from cron, but only emails the admin instead of automatically updating

OpenSSH in base is now compiled with DNSSEC support

In this case the default setting for ‘VerifyHostKeyDNS’ is yes

OpenSSH will silently trust DNSSEC-signed SSHFP records

It is the secteam’s opinion that this is better than teaching users to blindly hit “yes” each time they encounter a new key

Interview – Gilles Chehade & Eric Faurot – gilles@openbsd.org / @poolpOrg & eric@openbsd.org

OpenSMTPD

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you got involved with OpenBSD?

Q: What exactly is OpenSMTPD and why was it created?

Q: How big is your team of developers? Who’s doing what?

Q: How compatible is it with things like dovecot, spamassassin, etc?

Q: Are there any advantages over the other mail servers like Postfix or Exim?

Q: If someone wanted to switch from them, is it an easy replacement?

Q: The config syntax is very nice and easy to grasp. Was inspired from PF’s at all?

Q: What made you decide to develop a portable version, a la OpenSSH?

Q: Tell us some cool, upcoming features in a future release

Q: Anything else you’d like to mention about the project?

Q: Where can people find more info and help with development if they want?

Tutorial

Live demo

pkgng is the replacement for the old pkg_add tools

Much more modern, supports an array of features that the old system didn’t

Works on DragonflyBSD as well

News Roundup

Newcons is a replacement console driver for FreeBSD

Supports unicode, better graphics modes and bigger fonts

Progress is being made, but it’s not finished yet

relayd is a load balancer for OpenBSD which does protocol layers 3, 4, and 7

Currently being ported to FreeBSD. There is a WIP port

Works by negotiating ECDHE (Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman) between the remote site and relayd to enable TLS/SSL Perfect Forward Secrecy, even when the client does not support it

Slides from LinuxCon

Will feature ‘Office Hours’ (Ask an Expert)

Goal is to reduce the differences between various open source implementations of ZFS, both user facing and pure lines of code

Glen Barber tagged the -CURRENT branch as 10.0-ALPHA

In preparation for 10.0-RELEASE, ALPHA2 as of 9/18

Everyone was rushing to get their big commits in before 10-STABLE, which will be branched soon

10 is gonna be HUGE

BSD Mag is a monthly online magazine about the BSDs

This month’s issue has some content written by Kris

Topics include MidnightBSD live cds, server maintenance, turning a Mac Mini into a wireless access point with OpenBSD, server monitoring, FreeBSD programming, PEFS encryption and a brief introduction to ZFS

The FreeBSD IRC channel is official

For many years, the FreeBSD freenode channel has been “unofficial” with a double-hash prefix

Finally it has freenode’s blessing and looks like a normal channel!

The old one will forward to the new one, so your IRC clients don’t need updating

After a big delay, Damien Miller announced the release of 6.3

Mostly a bugfix release, with a few new features

Of note, SFTP now supports resuming failed downloads via -a

Feedback/Questions

A couple people wrote in to tell us not only OpenBSD have 64bit time. We misspoke.

James writes in: http://slexy.org/view/s2wBbbSWGz

Elias writes in: http://slexy.org/view/s2LMDF3PYx

Gabor writes in: http://slexy.org/view/s2aCodo65X

Possibly the coolest feedback we’ve gotten thus far: Baptiste Daroussin, leader of the FreeBSD ports management team and author of poudriere and pkgng, has put up the BSD Now poudriere tutorial on the official documentation!

We always want more feedback, especially tutorial ideas and show topics you want to see