76: Time for a Change

Author: JT Pennington
Published: Wed 11 Feb 2015
Episode Link: https://www.bsdnow.tv/76

This week, we'll be talking to Henning Brauer about OpenNTPD and its recently revived portable version. After that, we'll be discussing different ways to securely tunnel your traffic: specifically OpenVPN, IPSEC, SSH and Tor. All that and the latest news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Strange timer bug in FreeBSD 11

Peter Wemm wrote in to the FreeBSD -CURRENT mailing list with an interesting observation

Running the latest development code in the infrastructure, the clock would stop keeping time after 24 days of uptime

This meant things like cron and sleep would break, TCP/IP wouldn't time out or resend packets, a lot of things would break

A workaround until it was fixed was to reboot every 24 days, but this is BSD we're talking about - uptime is our game

An initial proposal was adding a CFLAG to the build options which makes makes signed arithmetic wrap

Peter disagreed and gave some background, offering a different patch to fix the issue and detect it early if it happens again

Ultimately, the problem was traced back to an issue with a recent clang import

It only affected -CURRENT, not -RELEASE or -STABLE, but was definitely a bizarre bug to track down
***

An OpenBSD mail server

There's been a recent influx of blog posts about building a BSD mail server for some reason

In this fancy series of posts, the author sets up OpenSMTPD in its native OpenBSD home, whereas previous posts have been aimed at FreeBSD and Linux

In addition to the usual steps, this one also covers DKIMproxy, ClamAV for scanning attachments, Dovecot for IMAP and also multiple choices of spam filtering: spamd or SpamAssassin

It also shows you how to set up Roundcube for building a web interface, using the new in-base httpd

That means this is more of a "complete solution" - right down to what the end users see

The series is split up into categories so it's very easy to follow along step-by-step
***

How DragonFlyBSD uses git

DragonFlyBSD, along with PCBSD and EdgeBSD, uses git as its version control system for the system source code

In a series of posts, Matthew Dillon (the project lead) details their internal setup

They're using vanilla git over ssh, with the developers' accounts set to git-only (no shell access)

The maintainers of the server are the only ones with shell access available

He also details how a cron job syncs from the master to a public box that anyone can check out code from

It would be interesting to hear about how other BSD projects manage their master source repository
***

Why not try PCBSD?

ITwire, another more mainstream tech site, published a recent article about switching to PCBSD

They interview a guy named Kris that we've never heard of before

In the article, they touch on how easy it can potentially be for Linux users looking to switch over to the BSD side - lots of applications are exactly the same

"With the growing adoption of systemd, dissatisfaction with Linux has reached proportions not seen in recent years, to the extent that people have started talking of switching to FreeBSD."

If you have some friends who complain to you about systemd all the time, this might be a good article to show them
***

Interview - Henning Brauer - [email protected] / @henningbrauer

OpenNTPD and its portable variant

News Roundup

Authenticated time in OpenNTPD

We recorded that interview with Henning just a few days ago, and it looks like part of it may be outdated already

While at the hackathon, some developers came up with an alternate way to get authenticated NTP responses

You can now add an HTTPS URL to your ntpd.conf in addition to the time server pool

OpenNTPD will query it (over TLS, with CA verification) and look at the date sent in the HTTPS header

It's not intended to be a direct time source, just a constraint to keep things within reason

If you receive regular NTP packets that are way off from the TLS packet, those will be discarded and the server(s) marked as invalid

Henning and Theo also weigh in to give some of the backstory on the idea

Lots more detail can be found in Reyk's email explaining the new feature (and it's optional of course)
***

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Oita and Hamanako

It's been a while since we've featured one of these trip reports, but the Japanese NetBSD users group is still doing them

This time the conferences were in Oita and Hamanako, Japan

Machines running NetBSD included the CubieBoard2 Allwinner A20, Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi, Sharp NetWalker and a couple Zaurus devices

As always, they took lots of pictures from the event of NetBSD on all these weird machines
***

Poudriere in a jail

A common question we get about our poudriere tutorial is "how do I run it in a jail?" - this blog post is about exactly that

It takes you through the networking setup, zpool setup, nginx setup, making the jail and finally poking the right holes in the jail to allow poudriere to work its magic
***

Bruteblock, another way to stop bruteforce

We've mentioned a few different ways to stop ssh bruteforce attempts in the past: fail2ban, denyhosts, or even just with pf's built-in rate limiting

Bruteblock is a similar tool, but it's not just for ssh logins - it can do a number of other services

It can also work directly with IPFW, which is a plus if you're using that as your firewall

Add a few lines to your syslog.conf and bruteblock will get executed automatically

The rest of the article takes you through the different settings you can configure for blocking
***

New iwm(4) driver and cross-polination

The OpenBSD guys recently imported a new "iwm" driver for newer Intel 7260 wireless cards (commonly found in Thinkpads)

NetBSD wasted no time in porting it over, giving a bit of interesting backstory

According to Antti Kantee, "it was created for OpenBSD by writing and porting a NetBSD driver which was developed in a rump kernel in Linux userspace"