50: VPN, My Dear Watson

It's our 50th episode, and we're going to show you how to protect your internet traffic with a BSD-based VPN. We'll also be talking to Robert Watson, of the FreeBSD core team, about security research, exploit mitigation and a whole lot more. The latest news and answers to all of your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

MeetBSD 2014 is approaching

The MeetBSD conference is coming up, and will be held on November 1st and 2nd in San Jose, California
MeetBSD has an "unconference" format, which means there will be both planned talks and community events
All the extra details will be on their site soon
It also has hotels and various other bits of useful information - hopefully with more info on the talks to come
Of course, EuroBSDCon is coming up before then ***

First experiences with OpenBSD

A new blog post that leads off with "tired of the sluggishness of Windows on my laptop and interested in experimenting with a Unix-like that I haven't tried before"
The author read the famous "BSD for Linux users" series (that most of us have surely seen) and decided to give BSD a try
He details his different OS and distro history, concluding with how he "eventually became annoyed at the poor quality of Linux userland software"
From there, it talks about how he used the OpenBSD USB image and got a fully-working system
He especially liked the simplicity of OpenBSD's "hostname.if" system for network configuration
Finally, he gets Xorg working and imports all his usual configuration files - seems to be a happy new user! ***

NetBSD rump kernels on bare metal (and Kansai OSC report)

When you're developing a new OS or a very specialized custom solution, working drivers become one of the hardest things to get right
However, NetBSD's rump kernels - a very unique concept - make this process a lot easier
This blog post talks about the process of starting with just a rump kernel and expanding into an internet-ready system in just a week
Also have a look back at episode 8 for our interview about rump kernels and what exactly they do
While on the topic of NetBSD, there were also a couple of very detailed reports (with lots of pictures!) of the various NetBSD-themed booths at the 2014 Kansai Open Source Conference that we wanted to highlight ***

OpenSSL and LibreSSL updates

OpenSSL pushed out a few new versions, fixing multiple vulnerabilities (nine to be precise!)
Security concerns include leaking memory, possible denial of service, crashing clients, memory exhaustion, TLS downgrades and more
Published on 11 years, 4 months ago