32: PXE Dust

This week on the big show we'll be showing off OpenBSD's new "autoinstall" feature to do completely automatic, unattended installations. We also have an interview with Dru Lavigne about all the writing work she does for FreeBSD, PCBSD and FreeNAS. The latest headlines and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - it's the place to B.. SD.

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FreeBSD ASLR status update

Shawn Webb gives us a little update on his address space layout randomization work for FreeBSD
He's implemented execbase randomization for position-independent executables (which OpenBSD also just enabled globally in 5.5 on i386)
Work has also started on testing ASLR on ARM, using a Raspberry Pi
He's giving a presentation at BSDCan this year about his ASLR work
While we're on the topic of BSDCan... ***

BSDCan tutorials, improving the experience

Peter Hansteen writes a new blog post about his upcoming BSDCan tutorials
The tutorials are called "Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter" and "Transitioning to OpenBSD 5.5" - both scheduled to last three hours each
He's requesting anyone that'll be there to go ahead and contact him, telling him exactly what you'd like to learn
There's also a bit of background information about the tutorials and how he's looking to improve them
If you're interested in OpenBSD and going to BSDCan this year, hit him up ***

pkgsrc-2014Q1 released

The new stable branch of pkgsrc packages has been built and is ready
Python 3.3 is now a "first class citizen" in pkgsrc
14255 packages for NetBSD-current/x86_64, 11233 binary packages built with clang for FreeBSD 10/x86_64
There's a new release every three months, and remember pkgsrc works on MANY operating systems, not just NetBSD - you could even use pkgsrc instead of pkgng or ports if you were so inclined
They're also looking into signing packages ***

Only two holes in a heck of a long time, who cares?

A particularly vocal Debian user, a lost soul, somehow finds his way to the misc@ OpenBSD mailing list
He questions "what's the big deal" about OpenBSD's slogan being "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
Luckily, the community and Theo set the record straight about why you should care about this
Running insecure applications on OpenBSD is actually more secure than running them on other systems, due to things like ASLR, PIE and all the security features of OpenBSD
It spawned a discussion about ease of management and Linux's poor security record, definitely worth reading ***

Interview - Dru Lavigne - dru@freebsd.org / @bsdevents

FreeBSD's documentatio

Published on 11 years, 8 months ago

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