14: Zettabytes for Days

This week is the long-awaited episode you've been asking for! We'll be giving you a crash course on becoming a ZFS wizard, as well as having a chat with George Wilson about the OpenZFS project's recent developments. We have answers to your feedback emails and there are some great news items to get caught up on too, so stay tuned to BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

Headlines

pkgng 1.2 released

bapt and bdrewery from the portmgr team released pkgng 1.2 final
New features include an improved build system, plugin improvements, new bootstrapping command, SRV mirror improvements, a new "pkg config" command, repo improvements, vuXML is now default, new fingerprint features and much more
Really simple to upgrade, check our pkgng tutorial if you want some easy instructions
It's also made its way into Dragonfly
See the show notes for the full list of new features and fixes ***

ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH

Damien Miller recently committed support for a new authenticated encryption cipher for OpenSSH, chacha20-poly1305
Long blog post explaining what these are and why we need them
This cipher combines two primitives: the ChaCha20 cipher and the Poly1305 MAC
RC4 is broken, we needed an authenticated encryption mode to complement AES-GCM that doesn't show the packet length in cleartext
Great explanation of the differences between EtM, MtE and EaM and their advantages
"Both AES-GCM and the EtM MAC modes have a small downside though: because we no longer desire to decrypt the packet as we go, the packet length must be transmitted in plaintext. This unfortunately makes some forms of traffic analysis easier as the attacker can just read the packet lengths directly." ***

Is it time to dump Linux and move to BSD

ITworld did an article about switching from Linux to BSD
The author's interest was sparked from a review he was reading that said "I feel the BSD communities, especially the FreeBSD-based projects, are where the interesting developments are happening these days. Over in FreeBSD land we have efficient PBI bundles, a mature advanced file system in the form of ZFS, new friendly and powerful system installers, a new package manager (pkgng), a powerful jail manager and there will soon be new virtualization technology coming with the release of FreeBSD 10.0"
The whole article can be summed up with "yes" - ok, next story! ***

OpenZFS devsummit videos

The OpenZFS developer summit discussion and presentation videos are up
People from various operating systems (FreeBSD, Mac OS X, illumos, etc.) were there to discuss ZFS on their platforms and the challenges they faced
Question and answer session from representatives of every OS - had a couple FreeBSD guys there including one from the foundation
Presentations both about ZFS itself and some hardware-based solutions for implementing ZFS in production
TONS of video, about 6 hours' worth
This leads us into our interview, which is... ***

Interview - George Wilson - wilzun@gmail.com / @zfsdude

OpenZFS

Published on 12 years ago