Episode Details

161: The BSD Bromance

Published 9 years, 6 months ago

This week on BSDNow, we’re going to be hearing about Allan’s trip to EuroBSDCon, plus an Interview about “Bro on BSD”! Stay tuned, for your place to

We don’t get to feature too many stories on NetBSD being deployed as a Power PC (Not PowerPC, you know, a Powerful “PC”), so we jumped at this one.
Specifically it starts off with some of the pre-req’s that you’ll need to get started, such as NetBSD 7.0.1 / amd64, along with some information about which wireless nics you may be using. (NetBSD like other BSD’s will give a driver based device name for network interfaces)
From there, instructions on how to write your WPA_supplicant config are provided, in order for us to fetch the NetBSD sources and convert to their -STABLE branch.
After doing a CVS checkout of the sources, he then provides a walkthrough of doing a kernel compile / install, however it mentions changing the config, but doesn’t provide an example of what options were changed. Perhaps to remove drivers we don’t need?
At this point the rest of the “desktop” setup is pretty straight forward. Some packages are added such as openbox, lxappearance, firefox, etc.
To get working sound, firefox requires pulseaudio, which in turn needs dbus, so instructions on getting that service up and running are provided as well.
When it’s all said and done, you’ll end up with your shiny new NetBSD -STABLE desktop (or laptop), bragging rights achieved! ***

OpenSMTPd 6.0.0 has just been released “and it's quite different from former releases.”
“Unlike most of our releases, it comes out with almost no new feature.”, “Turns out most of the changes are not visible.”
Changelog:
- new fork+reexec model so each process has its own randomized memory space
- logging format has been reworked
- a "multi-line response" bug in the LMTP delivery backend has been fixed
- connections concurrency limits have been bumped
- artificial delaying in remote sessions have been reduced
- dhparams option has been removed
- dhe option has been added, supporting auto and legacy modes
- smtp engine has been simplified
- various cosmetic changes, code cleanup and documentation improvement
“The OpenSMTPD bootstrap process was quite simple: Upon executation, the parent process would read configuration, build a memory representation of it and would then create a bunch of socketpair() before fork()-ing all of its child processes.”
The problem is that this does not take advantage of the new address randomization feature. Each child will have the same memory layout, copied from the parent process
“So deraadt@ suggested that if OpenSMTPD would not just fork() children but instead fork() them and reexecute th