89: Exclusive Disjunction

This week on the show, we'll be talking to Mike Larkin about various memory protections in OpenBSD. We'll cover recent W^X improvements, SSP, ASLR, PIE and all kinds of acronyms! We've also got a bunch of news and answers to your questions, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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OpenSMTPD for the whole family

Setting up a BSD mail server is something a lot of us are probably familiar with doing, at least for our own accounts
This article talks about configuring a home mail server too, but even for the other people you live with
After convincing his wife to use their BSD-based Owncloud server for backups, the author talks about moving her over to his brand new OpenSMTPD server too
If you've ever run a mail server and had to deal with greylisting, you'll appreciate the struggle he went through
In the end, BGP-based list distribution saved the day, and his family is being served well by a BSD box ***

NetBSD on the Edgerouter Lite

We've talked a lot about building your own BSD-based router on the show, but not many of the devices we mention are in the same price range as consumer devices
The EdgeRouter Lite, a small MIPS-powered machine, is starting to become popular (and is a bit cheaper)
A NetBSD developer has been hacking on it, and documents the steps to get a working install in this blog post
The process is fairly simple, and you can cross-compile your own installation image on any CPU architecture (even from another BSD!)
OpenBSD and FreeBSD also have some support for these devices ***

Bitrig at NYC*BUG

The New York City BSD users group has semi-regular meetings with presentations, and this time the speaker was John Vernaleo
John discussed Bitrig, an OpenBSD fork that we've talked about a couple times on the show
He talks about what they've been up to lately, why they're doing what they're doing, difference in supported platforms
Ports and packages between the two projects are almost exactly the same, but he covers the differences in the base systems, how (some) patches get shared between the two and finally some development model differences ***

OPNsense, meet HardenedBSD

Speaking of forks, two FreeBSD-based forked projects we've mentioned on the show, HardenedBSD and OPNsense, have decided to join forces
Backporting their changes to the 10-STABLE branch, HardenedBSD hopes to introduce some of their security additions to the OPNsense codeba

Published on 10 years, 7 months ago