Episode Details

In which we interview a unicorn, FreeNAS 11.0 is out, show you how to run Nextcloud in a FreeBSD jail, and talk about the connection between oil changes and software patches.

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Headlines

FreeNAS 11.0 is Now Here

• The FreeNAS blog informs us:

After several FreeNAS Release Candidates, FreeNAS 11.0 was released today. This version brings new virtualization and object storage features to the World’s Most Popular Open Source Storage Operating System. FreeNAS 11.0 adds bhyve virtual machines to its popular SAN/NAS, jails, and plugins, letting you use host web-scale VMs on your FreeNAS box. It also gives users S3-compatible object storage services, which turns your FreeNAS box into an S3-compatible server, letting you avoid reliance on the cloud.
FreeNAS 11.0 also introduces the beta version of a new administration GUI. The new GUI is based on the popular Angular framework and the FreeNAS team expects the GUI to be themeable and feature complete by 11.1. The new GUI follows the same flow as the existing GUI, but looks better. For now, the FreeNAS team has released it in beta form to get input from the FreeNAS community. The new GUI, as well as the classic GUI, are selectable from the login screen.
Also new in FreeNAS 11 is an Alert Service page which configures the system to send critical alerts from FreeNAS to other applications and services such as Slack, PagerDuty, AWS, Hipchat, InfluxDB, Mattermost, OpsGenie, and VictorOps. FreeNAS 11.0 has an improved Services menu that adds the ability to manage which services and applications are started at boot.
The FreeNAS community is large and vibrant. We invite you to join us on the FreeNAS forum and the #freenas IRC channel on Freenode. To download FreeNAS and sign-up for the FreeNAS Newsletter, visit freenas.org/download.

Building an IPsec Gateway With OpenBSD

• Pierre-Yves Ritschard wrote the following blog article:

With private networks just released on Exoscale, there are now more options to implement secure access to Exoscale cloud infrastructure. While we still recommend the bastion approach, as detailed in this article, there are applications or systems which do not lend themselves well to working this way.
In these cases, the next best thing is building IPsec gateways. IPsec is a protocol which works directly at layer 3. It uses its configuration to determine which network flows should be sent encrypted on the wire. Once IPsec is correctly configured, selected network flows are transparently encrypted and applications do not need to modify anything to benefit from secured traffic.

• In addition to encryption, IPSec also authenticates the end points, so you can be sure you are exchanging packets with a trusted host

For the purposes of this article we will work under the following assumptions: We want a host to network setup, providing access to cloud-hosted infras