86: Business as Usual

Coming up this time on the show, we'll be chatting with Antoine Jacoutot about how M:Tier uses BSD in their business. After that, we'll be discussing the different release models across the BSDs, and which style we like the most. As always, answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Optimizing TLS for high bandwidth applications

Netflix has released a report on some of their recent activities, pushing lots of traffic through TLS on FreeBSD
TLS has traditionally had too much overhead for the levels of bandwidth they're using, so this pdf outlines some of their strategy in optimizing it
The sendfile() syscall (which nginx uses) isn't available when data is encrypted in userland
To get around this, Netflix is proposing to add TLS support to the FreeBSD kernel
Having encrypted movie streams would be pretty neat ***

Crypto in unexpected places

OpenBSD is somewhat known for its integrated cryptography, right down to strong randomness in every place you could imagine (process IDs, TCP initial sequence numbers, etc)
One place you might not expect crypto to be used (or even needed) is in the "ping" utility, right? Well, think again
David Gwynne recently committed a change that adds MAC to the ping timestamp payload
By default, it'll be filled with a ChaCha stream instead of an unvarying payload, and David says "this lets us have some confidence that the timestamp hasn't been damaged or tampered with in transit"
Not only is this a security feature, but it should also help detect dodgy or malfunctioning network equipment going forward
Maybe we can look forward to a cryptographically secure "echo" command next... ***

Broadwell in DragonFly

The DragonFlyBSD guys have started a new page on their wiki to discuss Broadwell hardware and its current status
Matt Dillon, the project lead, recently bought some hardware with this chipset, and lays out what works and what doesn't work
The two main show-stoppers right now are the graphics and wireless, but they have someone who's already making progress with the GPU support
Wireless support will likely have to wait until FreeBSD gets it, then they'll port it back over
None of the BSDs currently have full Broadwell support, so stay tuned for further updates ***

DIY NAS software roundup

In this blog post, the author compares a few different software solutions for a network attached storage device
He puts FreeNAS, one of our favorites, up against a number of opponents - both BSD and Linux-based
NAS4Free gets an honorable mention as well, particularly for its lower hardware requirements and sleek interface
If you've been thinking about puttin

Published on 10 years, 8 months ago

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