Episode Details

This time on the show, we'll be talking with Pascal Stumpf about static PIE in the upcoming OpenBSD release. He'll tell us what types of attacks it prevents, and why it's such a big deal. We've also got answers to questions from you in the audience and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Solaris' networking future is with OpenBSD

• A curious patch from someone with an Oracle email address was recently sent in to one of the OpenBSD mailing lists
• It was revealed that future releases of Solaris are going to drop their IPFilter firewall entirely, in favor of a port of the current version of PF
• For anyone unfamiliar with the history of PF, it was actually made as a replacement for IPFilter in OpenBSD, due to some licensing issues
• What's more, Solaris was the original development platform for IPFilter, so the fact that it would be replaced in its own home is pretty interesting
• This blog post goes through some of the backstory of the two firewalls
• PF is in a lot of places - other BSDs, Mac OS X and iOS - but there are plenty of other OpenBSD-developed technologies end up ported to other projects too
• "Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you're neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD's PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project's emphasis on correctness, quality and security"
• You're welcome, Oracle ***

BAFUG discussion videos

• The Bay Area FreeBSD users group has been uploading some videos from their recent meetings
• Sean Bruno gave a recap of his experiences at EuroBSDCon last year, including the devsummit and some proposed ideas from it (as well as their current status)
• Craig Rodrigues also gave a talk about Kyua and the FreeBSD testing framework
• Lastly, Kip Macy gave a talk titled "network stack changes, user-level FreeBSD"
• The main two subjects there are some network stack changes, and how to get more people contributing, but there's also open discussion about a variety of FreeBSD topics
• If you're close to the Bay Area in California, be sure to check out their group and attend a meeting sometime ***

More than just a makefile

• If you're not a BSD user just yet, you might be wondering how the various ports and pkgsrc systems compare to the binary way of doing things on Linux
• This blog entry talks about the ports system in OpenBSD, but a lot of the concepts apply to all the ports systems across the BSDs
• As it turns out, the ports system really isn't that different from a binary package manager - they are what's used to cr