While most hardcore UNIX users prefer keyboard shortcuts over anything else – and I often align with that view – I really do appreciate good mouse on my UNIX system. In the end its close to impossible to edit images in GIMP without mouse for example. This ‘shootout’ will definitely be subjective as it will be limited only to mice that I own(ed). I will not bore you with all the technical specifications of these devices – you can check them on your own.

Besides – UNIX has two copy/paste buffers instead of just one like in most systems. There is PRIMARY and SECONDARY buffers in X11 for mouse. One is used when you use Copy/Paste options from menus and/or keyboard shortcuts like [CTRL]+[C] and [CTRL]+[V] ones. The other one is used when you just SELECT the text. After releasing the left mouse button (and finishing the selection) you have that text stored in your SECONDARY buffer. You may now paste that with pressing the third/middle mouse button. But the PRIMARY buffer did not changed during that operation so you can also paste the other text you had in your PRIMARY buffer from the earlier [CTRL]+[C] operation. This makes mouse on UNIX more useful – definitely bigger then in other systems.

While Bluetooth is widely used on most mobile phones/tables and even cars now I do not find it desired as the only protocol for the mouse. I do not have anything against it when it comes as an additional possibility like with the Logitech M720 Triathlon mouse – its even nice that way – but I would not use mouse that the only possible way to connect/operate is by Bluetooth protocol. Maybe on a macOS UNIX but definitely not on FreeBSD UNIX

AMIGA ‘Tank’ Mouse

The first mouse device that I used was the oldschool AMIGA ‘Tank’ Mouse which I used alongside my first computer – AMIGA A600. When I used it or played Cannon Fodder it felt more then up to the task but using only two buttons mouse (without any scroll and third button) in 2021 feels almost impossible for me.

It was possible to run AMIGA UNIX (also known as Amix) on AMIGA hardware. That was an AT&T Unix System V Release 4 developed as alternative to default AmigaOS but you needed Amiga A3000UX hardware for that.

Unfortunately the AMIGA A600 was not supported

Lenovo and ThinkPad Twins

One of my older/earlier mouse models that I used were quite ‘identical’ mouse models Lenovo Wireless USB Mouse (0A36188) and ThinkPad Wireless USB Mouse (0A36193) – both made by Lenovo for the record. They have the same size and work mostly the same but the older one – ThinkPad model (0A36193) – had more responsive third button (the one under the wheel) – the Lenovo (0A36188) kinda needed real strength to press it – that was its downside.

I still own the ThinkPad one (0A36193) and use it from time to time when I travel – the two AA batteries allow quite long operation of more then a month – which is more then enough for my standards.

Its my first mouse that got additional buttons on the scroll wheel for left and right operations – I used it for volume control on my UNIX system which was (and still is) VERY convenient.

While I really like its/their small size – but after some longer use I really miss some more ergonomic shape under my hand. That means that it ‘will do’ for short periods of usage in travel situations but for long work use something more ergonomic then these.

Logitech Marathon M705 (GEN 1)

I got it after more then a year of using Lenovo and ThinkPad mice. It was real upgrade with quite nice profiled shape to the right hand. It was also quite heavy – but that was good – it felt really good to operate in hand. It was branded as very long to use without changing or charging the batteries and it really did provided in that department – I needed to change/charge the batteries maybe once a year or less often. It was also more precise then simple ThinkPad/Lenovo mouse.

The volume buttons from the wheel that I used on the Lenovo and ThinkPad mice was not quite possible here. While the mouse have these left/right buttons on the wheel they were clumsy and not very precise – so you loss more time trying to press them properly then doing it the other way. With Logitech M705 I ‘moved’ my volume controls to other two buttons that were available under the thumb button. Fortunately there are two of those additional buttons so it was perfect for volume up and volume down actions.

This is also the first mouse that allowed to toggle the wheel to be ‘clickless’ – you can literally spin it for several seconds without any resistance – it just keeps rolling itself – and to be honest – that is one of the features I now DEMAND from any mouse. It makes life so much better (and faster). Instead of scrolling many – many times to get where its needed – you just spin it once and wait till you get there – and even a lot faster then with ‘traditional’ clicking mouse wheel.

Another advantage of that approach is that tip of your finger does not hurt after all day long of scrolling … and if you need precision clicking wheel – then just toggle it and you can click-scroll as usual.

With Logitech Marathon M705 mouse I also grow another ‘useful’ habit (or need) in a mouse. I started to use the lower thumb button to toggle between pause/play for my Deadbeef music player. Before that I used to switch to Workspace 3 where it plays music and press [C] key to toggle pause/play. After adding additional deadbeef --play-pause action to my xbindkeys(1) config now all I have to do to toggle between play and pause is to just push my thumb mouse button. Way faster

Logitech Performance MX

After reading many comparisons with Logitech MX Master generations I finally settled on the Logitech Performance MX mouse. It is really big and that is really big advantage. It handles/lies really nice in a hand and being quite large and heavy it is very precise and you got ‘good’ feeling and confidence of using it. I really liked it till I got to know its two big downsides … first was the battery time. I needed to change/charge battery about once a week. That was REALLY disappointing. The other downside was that it was not able to properly operate on a flat WOOD surface (like on the photo below). Plain simple flat wood. All other mice worked well on this surface while this one did not. The marketed Darkfield sensor was useless. These were the two reasons that I got rid of it.

Same as with M705 the left/right buttons on the wheel were not very precise so I used the additional thumb buttons for volume management. The Logitech Performance MX mouse also comes with micro USB port at the front so you may use the mouse while you are charging it. Its real pity that Logitech did not used two (or even three) AA batteries for this mouse to make it last longer … but that would not resolve the Darkfield sensor not able to cope with movement on the wood

Logitech Marathon M705 (GEN 2)

I have read a lot of hate and disappointment about the latest generation of Logitech Marathon M705 mouse. Also the lower thumb button is missing and currently it uses only one AA battery. It still provides very long time without the need to change/charge and its lighter now. Its neither bad nor good – its just different. The precision is similar but after using Logitech Performance MX you really miss that big size.

The second generation of M705 did not improved the left/right buttons on the wheel so I decided to stick with additional thumb buttons for volume management.

I also really missed that lower thumb button that is gone from the GEN 2 Logitech Marathon M705 mouse – needed to go back to my [C] routine …

Logitech Triathlon M720

I recently got the possibility to check and use the Logitech Triathlon M720 mouse and I must say that I am positively surprised. Its both Bluetooth and USB dongle mouse so you can choose which way you would like to connect it to your computers. The plural form is intended here as the Logitech M720 allows you to switch between 3 computers with additional dedicated button. It also got ‘back’ the lower thumb button that was missing on the latest generation of the Logitech M705 mouse. The light/white lower bottom of the mouse looks little strange though … but its kinda not visible when it is laying on the table.

The M720 has more precise left/right buttons on the wheel but I got so used to manage volume with my thumb that I currently keep these ‘wheel’ buttons unused.

Having the lower thumb button again I was also able to get back to my toggle play/pause Deadbeef operation. Yay!

Missing

I never owned Logitech MX Master mouse. I used version ‘3’ for short time as one of my buddies own it and it felt quite similar to Logitech Performance MX in operation but not quite the same. Similar but different. I think that it would be comfortable but not sure about the precision on wood and battery time. Maybe I will got it some day and add an update here.

… but given the fact that Logitech MX Master mouse also has micro USB port at its front for charging I would suspect that battery time is also not that great. Similarly like the Logitech Triathlon M720 it also allows to switch its presence between 3 computers. There is also additional wheel for vertical scrolling. Never used that but maybe it would be useful in GIMP for example.

Summary

So what does a good UNIX mouse feature? I would summarize all the needed (or at least useful) feats in a list below.

• needs to be at lest a little ergonomic
• allows to toggle wheel between click and clickless operation
• have additional buttons for custom actions
• allows more then one month of work on batteries
• works on different surfaces without a problem
• has a USB dongle so Bluetooth is not needed

What other features you desire in mouse? I also thought about ‘vertical’ mouse type/shape and also about trackball. I tried my neighbor Logitech trackball several times but I am not sure I would get used to it after so many years of ricing the mice

External Discussions

• Hacker News
• Lobsters

EOF

The first FreeBSD 12.3-PRERELEASE snapshots are finally available. This means we can try them in a new ZFS Boot Environment without touching out currently running 13.0-RELEASE system. We can not take the usual path with creating new BE from our current one and upgrade it to newer version because 12.3 has older major version then the 13.0 one.

This is kinda a paradox in the FreeBSD release process that when released the 12.3-RELEASE will have some newer commits and features then older 13.0-RELEASE which was released earlier this year. Of course not all things that have been committed to HEAD goes into 12-STABLE or 13-STABLE automatically – but most of them do. Only the biggest changes will be limited only to 14.0-RELEASE – of course probably somewhere in the middle of 2022 when it will be having its release process.

One note about ZFS filesystem on FreeBSD. People often confuse ‘real’ ZFS Boot Environments with its trying-to-be substitutes like BTRFS snapshots or snapshots used by Ubuntu with zsysctl(8) command. Unfortunately they are only snapshots and are not full writable clones (or entire separate ZFS datasets). They can freeze your system in time so you will be able to get back to working configuration after updating packages for example – but You will not be able to install other separate version of a system as other ZFS dataset making it another independent ZFS Boot Environment.

Create New ZFS Dataset

host # beadm list
BE             Active Mountpoint  Space Created
13.0.w520      NR     /           12.8G 2021-09-14 17:27
13.0.w520.safe -      -            1.2G 2021-10-18 10:01

host # zfs list -r zroot/ROOT
NAME                        USED  AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT
zroot/ROOT                 12.8G  96.8G       88K  none
zroot/ROOT/13.0.w520       12.8G  96.8G     11.6G  /
zroot/ROOT/13.0.w520.safe     8K  96.8G     11.1G  /

host # zfs create -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=off zroot/ROOT/12.3

host # beadm list
BE             Active Mountpoint  Space Created
13.0.w520      NR     /           12.8G 2021-09-14 17:27
13.0.w520.safe -      -            1.2G 2021-10-18 10:01
12.3           -      -           96.0K 2021-10-18 13:14

Install FreeBSD 12.3-PRERELEASE

host # beadm mount 12.3 /var/tmp/12.3
Mounted successfully on '/var/tmp/12.3'

host # beadm list
BE             Active Mountpoint     Space Created
13.0.w520      NR     /              12.8G 2021-09-14 17:27
13.0.w520.safe -      -               1.2G 2021-10-18 10:01
12.3           -      /var/tmp/12.3  96.0K 2021-10-18 13:14

host # curl -o - https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/amd64/12.3-PRERELEASE/base.txz \
         | tar --unlink -xpf - -C /var/tmp/12.3
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  173M  100  173M    0     0  1889k      0  0:01:33  0:01:33 --:--:-- 2228k

host # exa -1 /var/tmp/12.3
bin
boot
dev
etc
lib
libexec
media
mnt
net
proc
rescue
root
sbin
tmp
usr
var
COPYRIGHT
sys

host # curl -o - https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/amd64/12.3-PRERELEASE/kernel.txz \
         | tar --unlink -xpf - -C /var/tmp/12.3
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 43.3M  100 43.3M    0     0  1733k      0  0:00:25  0:00:25 --:--:-- 1663k

host # exa -lh /var/tmp/12.3/boot/kernel/kernel
Permissions Size User Date Modified    Name
.r-xr-xr-x   37M root 2021-10-14 06:31 /var/tmp/12.3/boot/kernel/kernel

host # curl -o - https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/amd64/12.3-PRERELEASE/lib32.txz \
         | tar --unlink -xpf - -C /var/tmp/12.3

host # exa -ld /var/tmp/12.3/usr/lib32
drwxr-xr-x - root 2021-10-18 13:45 /var/tmp/12.3/usr/lib32

Install Same Packages as on Host

With the pkg prime-list we will get all installed by hand pkg(8)packages from our currently running system. You may omit this section or just install packages that you need instead all of them.

host # pkg prime-list > /var/tmp/12.3/pkg.prime-list

host # chroot /var/tmp/12.3 /bin/sh

(BE) # export PS1="BE # "

BE # mount -t devfs devfs /dev

BE # sed -i '' s/quarterly/latest/g /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf

BE # pkg install -y $( cat pkg.prime-list )
Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/latest, please wait...
Verifying signature with trusted certificate pkg.freebsd.org.2013102301... done
Installing pkg-1.17.2...
Extracting pkg-1.17.2: 100%
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.conf: 100%    163 B   0.2kB/s    00:01
Fetching packagesite.pkg: 100%    6 MiB   1.3MB/s    00:05
Processing entries: 100%
FreeBSD repository update completed. 31294 packages processed.
All repositories are up to date.
Updating database digests format: 100%
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'chromium' have been found in the repositories
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'drm-fbsd13-kmod' have been found in the repositories
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'geany-gtk2' have been found in the repositories
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'ramspeed' have been found in the repositories
pkg: No packages available to install matching 'vim-console' have been found in the repositories

As we can see some of the packages that we have installed in the FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE system are not currently available in the ‘latest‘ pkg(8) branch for the FreeBSD 12.3-PRERELEASE system. This sometimes happens when the build of such package will fail – but you may assume that such package will be available in a week or so as that is the period in which pkg(8) packages are (re)build in the ‘latest‘ branch.

We will now remove the missed packages and also rename some packages that may have different names for 12.x version of FreeBSD.

BE # sed -i '' \
         -e s/drm-fbsd13-kmod/drm-kmod/g \
         -e s/geany-gtk2/geany/g \
         -e s/vim-console/vim-tiny/g \
         pkg.prime-list

BE # pkg install -y $( cat pkg.prime-list | grep -v -e chromium -e ramspeed )
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 1072 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        (...)

Number of packages to be installed: 1072

The process will require 11 GiB more space.
2 GiB to be downloaded.
(...)

BE # rm pkg.prime-list

After hour or so later our packages have been installed.

BE # pkg stats
Local package database:
        Installed packages: 1073
        Disk space occupied: 11 GiB

Remote package database(s):
        Number of repositories: 1
        Packages available: 31294
        Unique packages: 31294
        Total size of packages: 96 GiB

Copy Configuration Files

You can now reboot to plain and unconfigured FreeBSD system but you may as well copy your configuration files from your current working installation. These are the files I have copied.

First files from the Base System /etc and /boot places.

host # for I in /boot/loader.conf \
                /etc/hosts \
                /etc/fstab \
                /etc/rc.conf \
                /etc/sysctl.conf \
                /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf \
                /etc/jail.conf \
                /etc/devfs.rules \
                /etc/resolv.conf
       do
         cp "${I}" /var/tmp/12.3/"${I}"
         echo "${I}"
       done
/boot/loader.conf
/etc/hosts
/etc/fstab
/etc/rc.conf
/etc/sysctl.conf
/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
/etc/jail.conf
/etc/devfs.rules
/etc/resolv.conf

Now the files for installed packages under /usr/local/etc dir.

host # for I in /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/* \
                /usr/local/etc/X11/xdm/{Xresources,Xsetup_0} \
                /usr/local/etc/automount.conf \
                /usr/local/etc/sudoers \
                /usr/local/etc/doas.conf \
                /usr/local/etc/zshrc
       do
         cp "${I}" /var/tmp/12.3/"${I}"
         echo "${I}"
       done
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/card.conf
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/flags.conf
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/keyboard.conf
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/touchpad.conf
/usr/local/etc/X11/xdm/Xresources
/usr/local/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0
/usr/local/etc/automount.conf
/usr/local/etc/sudoers
/usr/local/etc/doas.conf
/usr/local/etc/zshrc

Add Users and Set Passwords

You should now add your regular user and set passwords for both your user and root account.

BE # pw useradd vermaden -u 1000 -d /home/vermaden -G wheel,operator,video,network,webcamd,vboxusers

BE # passwd root

BE # passwd vermaden

Reboot Into New ZFS Boot Environment

You may now exit the chroot(8) of that ZFS Boot Environment and reboot. In the FreeBSD loader(8) menu select the 12.3 boot environment.

BE # exit

host # umount /var/tmp/12.3/dev

host # beadm unmount 12.3
Unmounted successfully

host # beadm list -D
BE             Active Mountpoint  Space Created
13.0.w520      NR     /           11.3G 2021-09-14 17:27
13.0.w520.safe -      -           11.1G 2021-10-18 10:01
12.3        -      -            9.5G 2021-10-18 13:14

host # shutdown -r now

Testing New System

The 12.3-PRERELEASE system started fine for me. I was able to login and use system as usual. One important thing to note … the ZFS pools. I have another newer ZFS pool with zstd compression enabled … and I was not able to import that ZFS pool as FreeBSD 12.3-PREELEASE does not use OpenZFS 2.0 but an older FreeBSD in-house ZFS version.

# zpool import data
This pool uses the following feature(s) not supported by this system:
        org.freebsd:zstd_compress (zstd compression algorithm support.)
        com.delphix:log_spacemap (Log metaslab changes on a single spacemap and flush them periodically.)
        org.zfsonlinux:project_quota (space/object accounting based on project ID.)
        org.zfsonlinux:userobj_accounting (User/Group object accounting.)
cannot import 'data': unsupported version or feature

Keep that in mind … but you can also install newer OpenZFS from the FreeBSD Ports and this is what we will now do.

# pkg install -y openzfs openzfs-kmod
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 2 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        openzfs: 2021090800
        openzfs-kmod: 2021090800

Number of packages to be installed: 2

The process will require 22 MiB more space.
4 MiB to be downloaded.
[1/2] Fetching openzfs-2021090800.pkg: 100%    3 MiB 975.3kB/s    00:03
[2/2] Fetching openzfs-kmod-2021090800.pkg: 100%    1 MiB 591.2kB/s    00:02
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
[1/2] Installing openzfs-kmod-2021090800...
[1/2] Extracting openzfs-kmod-2021090800: 100%
pkg: Cannot open /dev/null:No such file or directory
[2/2] Installing openzfs-2021090800...
[2/2] Extracting openzfs-2021090800: 100%
=====
Message from openzfs-kmod-2021090800:

--
Amend /boot/loader.conf as follows to use this module:

- change zfs_load="YES" to NO
- change opensolaris_load="YES" to NO
- add openzfs_load="YES"
- (for ARM64) add cryptodev_load="YES"
=====
Message from openzfs-2021090800:

--
Ensure that any zfs-related commands, such as zpool, zfs, as used in scripts
and in your terminal sessions, use the correct path of /usr/local/sbin/ and
not the /sbin/ commands provided by the FreeBSD base system.

Consider setting this in your shell profile defaults!

We will now have to modify our /boot/loader.conf file.

host # beadm mount 12.3 /var/tmp/12.3
Mounted successfully on '/var/tmp/12.3'

host # chroot /var/tmp/12.3

BE # cp /boot/loader.conf /boot/loader.conf.ZFS

BE # vi /boot/loader.conf

BE # diff -u /boot/loader.conf.ZFS /boot/loader.conf
--- /boot/loader.conf.ZFS       2021-10-19 10:57:04.180732000 +0000
+++ /boot/loader.conf   2021-10-19 10:57:23.992145000 +0000
@@ -12,7 +12,8 @@

 # MODULES - BOOT
   geom_eli_load=YES
-  zfs_load=YES
+  zfs_load=NO
+  openzfs_load=YES

 # DISABLE /dev/diskid/* ENTRIES FOR DISKS
   kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable=0

BE # shutdown -r now

After reboot and trying again I was able to import that newer ZFS pool.

Hope that you will find that guide useful.

Feel free to add your suggestions.

EOF

 Some Thoughts on Spelling Fixes

Use descriptive commit messages

Set your email correctly

Don't correct code

 Venix Emulator Update

Enter VM86VENIX

Tracking down a silly bug

% ls
ls: Sig 44
%

 That's weird. So I added tracing. I tried the cc command, which in this version is a simple program that orchestrates all the different parts of the compiler using fork, exec, dup and the strategic close/open pair to setup stdin etc. All the tracing looked good as well, we'd see something like:

123: fork() 124
123: wait()
124: ... lots of stuff
124: exit 0
123: wait pid 124 status 0

 and then 123 would proceed to delete all the temp files and exit. It was like it was getting an error, despite its children exiting without an error. Every time it was like this, but only when I ran the optimizer. When I'd re-run the ls test, I'd get different Sig values as well.

Available 8086 compilers in 1985

The wait(2) system call...

SYNOPSIS
        wait(statusp)
        int *statusp;

which shows wait taking a pointer. So I assumed this was what the kernel received in the first arg that's passed into the kernel (DX). I assumed that DS:DX pointed to an integer where I'd return the status. Most of the time, DX was something that looked like a pointer on the stack, so I just did a copyout. The problem is that's not right.

So, I took another look at the manual. At the end of the man page I saw:

8086      BX=7
              int 0xf1
              AX = pid of process
              DX = status

and then it hit me.  DX isn't a pointer to anything. After int 0xf1 AX is the pid of the process (the normal return value) and DX is the status. Disassembling wait.o confirmed this:if statusp is not 0, dx is copied back to *statusp. Doh! The classic pointer vs value mistake. Fixing my implementation to take out the copyout and replace it with setting DX in the processor context made pcc work. And cc worked. And the silly test programs I wrote in the middle to debug things worked. Woo Hoo!

Once I fixed this, all weird combinations of compilations suddenly worked for me. I could optimize, strip, etc and there were no oddities.

Conclusion

usage: ec2-boot-bench --keys <keyfile> --region <name> --ami <AMI Id>
    --itype <instance type> [--subnet <subnet Id>] [--user-data <file>]

RunInstances API call took: 1.543152 s
Moving from pending to running took: 4.904754 s
Moving from running to port closed took: 17.175601 s
Moving from port closed to port open took: 5.643463 s

 I have a little shed out the back with a 100W solar panel on it and a 13.8v battery. Right now it's just running a Raspberry Pi 2 powering an ADS-B decoder which works pretty well.

So then I added a little bluetooth audio amplifier from Fosi - https://fosiaudio.com/products/bluetooth-amplifier-bt10a . It's small, it's relatively efficient, and it's dumb as bricks to use.

But then I discovered something amusing.

It draws like 30mA even when turned off.

Here is the current meter when plugged into the battery side, but with it turned off.

.. and then I disconnect the power to it entirely, and  ...

High levels of what the heck.

So, I did what I always do when I find silly electronics questions - I disassembled it!

Here's the active power islands when it's turned off.

The MOSFET at the bottom is an IRF part that's .. always on. Then every other thing circled? That's also always on. That includes what look like opamp bits for the bass/treble filtering, and something op-amp-y feeding into the bluetooth audio offload PCB (that blue module.)

So what's the switch switching? Well, here's what's on the reverse of the PCB, showing the two power switch pins:

Note that one of those power pins is grounded. Yes, it's just some logic line feeding a silicon switch somewhere. And it's definitely not switching the IRF MOSFET at the beginning of the circuit - that'd be too easy.

Anyway. This amplifier will just pull ~ 350mW when turned off. I'm going to wire up a separate little switch and LED to feed power into the amplifier so I'm not discharging the battery for no reason.

But in any case, that's kinda hilarious.

 I've built a few of ubitx/bitx40 radios over the last couple years. I built one of each for me, and a couple for other hams.

The biggest gotcha in this whole mess has been figuring out how to calibrate the thing. The ubitx has two oscillators to calibrate - the VFO and the BFO. The VFO is used for tuning, and the BFO is used for the third intermediate frequency (IF) to fall within the passband of the crystal filter.

However, exactly zero (0) of the PCBs I've received have been calibrated even remotely correctly, so I've had to go spend time figuring out how to do it myself. Unfortunately it's not been super easy - the instructions online make it sound way simpler than it really is, and unless you're super careful you're going to end up constantly being off frequency in SSB mode.

Ok, so here goes.

The ubitx radio is organised in a very specifically clever way for CW versus SSB, which makes calibration actually not TOO terrible. In SSB mode all three oscillators are used in a three stage IF design. In CW mode however, the transmit side doesn't bother with the SSB path at all - it directly unbalances the first IF mixer and transmits using the VFO oscillator directly on the transmit frequency.

So when calibrating the VFO, the reason it wants to calibrate it using transmit instead of receive is because it doesn't involve the BFO frequency /at all/. Instead, it's calibrating only the VFO frequency directly.

Now, what's it calibrating? Well, it's calibrating the crystal offset value, not a frequency offset in Hz. Ie, it's calibrating the offset between what you think 10MHz is when you program in 10MHz and what it's actually outputting. This affects all the clocks generated from the si5351 oscillator - not just the VFO!

This is important - when you calibrate the VFO, you're calibrating the whole frequency offset of the si5351, and that includes the BFO. Thus, if you calibrate the VFO, you will muck up your BFO offset.

When you do this stage, figure it out and write it down. I wish the offset was the whole 16 bit number so you could just dial THAT in, instead of how it's currently displayed (as a divided version of that, notionally ppm.)

I calibrate my VFO using a frequency counter and an RF tap. It's the only way to be sure. If you have a known-good receiver, you can tune it in SSB mode and do the math to figure out what the outputted tone will be at the given receive frequency. I've done this a couple times (before I bought a second hand frequency counter) using fldigi to display the audio spectrum, putting the radio into SSB mode and tuning to 9999.20 KHz. The 10MHz signal will show up as an 800Hz audio tone.

Anyway. Once you've done the VFO, it's time to calibrate the BFO. You have to NOT touch the VFO calibration at this point or it'll change your BFO calibration and you'll have to start again.

Ok, so the next oscillator is the USB/LSB frequency oscillator. The frequency is either ~57MHz or ~33MHz depending upon USB or LSB operation, so when the incoming signal mixes with this, the desired mixing product (either inverted or non inverted) shows up in the crystal filter passband. Now, in my v4 firmware I've made this also configurable, but by default it's a fixed value that they hope is in the passband of the crystal filter. I mention this only for completeness, you normally don't have to calibrate this.

The BFO calibration is more fiddly. This is the oscillator that when mixed with the output of the above stage brings the mixing product down to audio frequencies. (Ie, it's an SSB detector!)

When you start the calibration it'll reset to whatever the default is in the firmware, which is WAY off. When you start tuning in the BFO you'll hear the frequency spread of the background white noise shift as more of it comes into the passband, and .. then it'll disappear! And then as you keep tuning past the crystal filter frequency, it'll come back again! What's going on!

What's going on is that when you plot the frequency response of the crystal filter, it may not be exactly one big peak. A good example of it can be found here: https://ubitx.net/2018/04/14/ssb-crystal-filter-response/ .

Now, this is where things get a bit messy. When you change the BFO, it's not just changing the passband on the crystal oscillator. You need to make sure you're on the correct side of the filter so you're not getting an inverted copy of the mixing output.

The ubitx website suggests listening to an existing sideband transmission and figure out if you're on the right side by tuning the filter for maximum intelligibility. You can't use AM for this (eg WWV) because if you get the wrong side you'll hear a mirrored signal that sounds fine because it's AM, but you just won't be able to decode sideband.

What I do, since I have more than one good radio, is I hook up my ubitx to an antenna, my good radio to a dummy load, tune to them to the same frequency / sideband mode, set my transmit power to be like 5W on the good radio, and do a radio check. Yes, into my dummy load. The ubitx will definitely be able to hear it, and you can then set the BFO to maximise intelligibility and correct frequency centreing. You'll know for sure that you're on the right side of the crystal filter / mixing output because you'll definitely not hear yourself clearly otherwise.

After that? Well, I think we need a better way to characterise and calibrate both the USB/LSB frequencies rather than them being static as well as the BFO, and do them together. Ideally we'd be able to tweak both in order to definitely hit the right peak point of the crystal filter to minimise losses, but that will complicate the calibration quite a bit.

Anyway! Good luck calibrating your ubitx!

By: Jason Tubnor @tubsta

We have been performing some extensive and edge case updates from FreeBSD versions earlier than 13.0. While in most cases, there have been no issues and most users will have a smooth upgrade process when we finally have 13.0-RELEASE hit but there are some issues that we hit which will need a bit of clarification and some advice on how to work them.

There has been significant changes in how ifconfig(8) interacts with VLAN(4). While most users have hosts on PVID or untagged switch ports, those that have fully tagged hosts will have issues during the upgrade with the host not being available on the network after the first reboot. VLAN interfaces will not be available until the new version of ifconfig(8) is put in place during the second ‘freebsd-update install’ run.

To get around this issue, users will either need IPMI/LOM access to their hosts to execute the second:

freebsd-update install && shutdown -r now

at which point the host will reboot and again have access to the network because of the newer ifconfig(8) being able to configure VLANs correctly. Another method is to apply the above as a cron(8) entry and have is execute a couple of minutes after the host has been rebooted. For this, you will need to know how long it takes for your host to reboot and allow a couple of extra minutes for the system to settle down post boot.

The other issue is for those that have started using the zpool checkpoint feature. If you are using legacy boot (BIOS boot), you will have issues with the system on boot after you trigger the first reboot if you have an existing 12.2 checkpoint on the system:

Please note: During testing, it was found that systems that UEFI boot do not suffer this issue and users that use UEFI can use a checkpoint prior to their freebsd-update.

The following error (to assist search engines):

zio_read error: 5
zio_read error: 5
zio_read error: 5
ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable
ZFS: can not read checkpoint data.

Indicates that there are some checkpoint compatibility issues in the gptzfsboot for legacy booted systems. While this could be looked into by developers, I don’t think there will be many that hit this issue and really should be just documented in the release notes. If this happens to you, simply boot the installation media, drop to the shell prompt and issue:

zpool import poolname
zpool checkpoint --discard poolname
reboot

When the system reboots, the boot loader won’t try to read-in the checkpoint status and continue booting your half upgraded system cleanly. Further testing has shown that there is no on-going issues with checkpoints once you have successfully updated your system.

By: Jason Tubnor @tubsta

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop.  Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

I like to keep things simple when it comes to a desktop operating system so the description below is how I went from a fresh install of FreeBSD 13.0RC1 to a working environment that is based on using the XFCE4 desktop experience.

The FreeBSD install process is simple and well documented in other official locations, so I am not going to repeat that here.  However, some of the configuration items that I did select was to use ZFS on Root, encrypted swap and disabled all services (this is a workstation, not a server).

Once the machine had been rebooted, we need to set it up so that suspend/resume works correctly (and tests as such) and enable power management.  The main issue that people have getting the resume part of the suspend/resume to work is not having the drm or xf86 drivers loaded that are applicable to the onboard graphics.

For the T450 here, we have a standard Intel graphics chipset.  Install the following binary packages for the i915 drivers, enable them and the power management services, then reboot your machine for testing:

pkg bootstrap -f
pkg install -y drm-fbsd-kmod xf86-video-intel
kld_list=”i915kms” >> /etc/rc.conf
sysrc powerd_enable=YES
shutdown -r now

Once the machine has rebooted, you can test to see if your laptop can go into a suspend state and then resume without issue:

acpiconf -s 3

This will send the laptop into the S3 suspend state. Wait 30 seconds and then briefly press the power button. If all is working correctly, your laptop should come back to life including the screen.  This has been ‘hit and miss’ on the T450 in previous versions but seems to be working ok on 13.0.

Just a note, if you do experience some issues here, make sure your bios/firmware has been updated to the latest release.

If the above worked ok, then you can set the sysctl parameter to suspend on lid closure:

sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3

Also set it in the sysctl.conf file so it is set correctly each boot:

echo ‘hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3’ >> /etc/sysctl.conf

The final thing to do is load up xorg, XFCE4 and a few of our favourite apps to get us going.

pkg install -y xorg xfce xfce-goodies xscreensaver \
slim-freebsd-black-theme openntpd amigafonts mc \
oksh otter-browser cool-retro-term bluefish

Once all the packages have been installed, enable dbus, slim and openntpd then start the services (except slim, reboot when you are ready to start XFCE4):

sysrc dbus_enable=YES && service dbus start
sysrc openntpd_enable=YES && service openntpd start
sysrc slim_enable=YES

At some point, I’ll change to the OpenBSD ksh shell (oksh in FreeBSD packages) so I’ll add an entry into the ~/.profile file to read in ~/.kshrc

ENV=$HOME/.kshrc; export ENV

And the skeleton of my ~/.kshrc file will look something like the following:

HISTFILE=”$HOME/.ksh_history”
HISTSIZE=5000
export VISUAL=”emacs”
export EDITOR=”vi”
set -o emacs

Log out and log back in to ingest the above environment variables (or wait for the reboot below).

The final part is to get a vanilla XFCE4 desktop setup and enable/disable some of the default settings so the desktop works efficiently with the suspend/resume function and change the screensaver/lock screen.

Setup the slim display manager.  Edit the /usr/local/etc/slim.conf and change the default theme to slim-freebsd-black-theme:

current_theme slim-freebsd-black-theme

Set XFCE4 to auto-start after login, create the ~/.xinitrc file and then insert the lines:

ENV=$HOME/.kshrc; export ENV
exec startxfce4

Restart the laptop for the DM to take affect (this will also allow reboot and shutdown directly from within XFCE4 for users):

shutdown -r now

Login and once at the XFCE4 desktop, go to Applications -> Settings -> Settings Manager

In settings, scroll down to System and select ‘Session and Startup’

Select ‘Application Autostart’, de-select XFCE Screensaver, select both Screensaver and AP-SPI D-Bus Bus.

Once the above is done, log out of XFCE4 and log back in, then you can configure the xscreensaver program as well as being able to suspend and resume your laptop by closing and opening the lid at any point in the use of the laptop.

I’ll setup a jail dedicated to run bhyve vms , for jail creation I’ll use bastillebsd

Install bastillebsd to create and manage jails.

# pkg install bastillebsd

Setup bastillebsd

Follow the getting started guide at https://bastillebsd.org/getting-started/
I’m using zfs so /usr/local/etc/bastille/bastille.conf I must edit bastille.conf (this must be done before bootstraping a release).

I used this on bastille.conf.

bastille_zfs_enable="YES"
bastille_zfs_zpool="zroot"

Create a set of rules to allow to run bhyve inside a jail edit /etc/devfs.rules, create it if does not exists.

[devfs_rules_bhyve_jail=25]
add include $devfsrules_jail
add path vmm unhide
add path vmm/* unhide
add path tap* unhide
add path nmdm* unhide

Create a new jail that will be use these rules.

sudo bastille create --vnet test-bhyve 12.2-RELEASE 192.168.1.225 em0

Modify test-bhyve jail.conf for this jail:

sudo bastille edit test-bhyve

Now add

allow.vmm;

So the jail.conf will look like:

test-bhyve {
  devfs_ruleset =25;
  enforce_statfs = 2;
  exec.clean;
  exec.consolelog = /var/log/bastille/test-bhyve_console.log;
  exec.start = '/bin/sh /etc/rc';
  exec.stop = '/bin/sh /etc/rc.shutdown';
  host.hostname = test-bhyve;
  mount.devfs;
  mount.fstab = /usr/local/bastille/jails/test-bhyve/fstab;
  path = /usr/local/bastille/jails/test-bhyve/root;
  securelevel = 2;
  allow.vmm;
  allow.raw_sockets;
  vnet;
  vnet.interface = e0b_bastille0;
  exec.prestart += "jib addm bastille0 em0";
  exec.poststop += "jib destroy bastille0";
}
~

Load the required modules:

kldload vmm
kldload nmdm

Start test-bhyve jail

sudo bastille start test-bhyve

Go inside the new jail

sudo bastille console test-bhyve

Now install vm-bhyve inside the jail follow the vm-bhyve setup at https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

pkg install vm-bhyve
sysrc vm_enable="YES"
mkdir /vms
sysrc vm_dir="/vms"
vm init
cp /usr/local/share/examples/vm-bhyve/* /vms/.templates/
vm switch create public
vm switch add public vtnet0
vm iso https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.2/FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
vm create test
vm install -f test FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

by default a vm-bhyve vm has 256mb, if you need more you will need to run

vm config test

And configure how much RAM do you need.

Issues

If you are going to use dhcp on the vm, you will need to configure the interface to
use SYNCDHCP.
According to this post using SYNCDHCP works, but we need to reboot the vm first.

This gives me an interface named vnet0 in my jails that i can then configure through the jail’s rc.conf. for some reason SYNCDHCP works but not DHCP in the guest rc.conf.

References

• https://github.com/lattera/articles/blob/master/freebsd/2018-10-27_jailed_bhyve/article.md
• https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve/issues/267
• https://bastillebsd.org/getting-started/
• https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

This is not about how to generate a self-signed certificate, this is about how to configure an ldap client to connect securely to a ldap server which has a self-signed certificate.

Recently I was searching a lot how to make this kind of setup work, but it seems nobody is using the keywords of the headline in their HOWTOs, or everyone is not really setting up a really secure connection with self-signed certificates. As such here my try to document this for those which are interested in a secure setup.

How OpenLDAP is checking the certificates normally

OpenLDAP is using the certificate store which is configured for OpenSSL. So any certificate which is signed by one of the CAs in the OpenSSL cert-ctore are trusted.

Secure setup

Most of the time you do not expose an LDAP server to the outside where a certificate from one of the trusted-by-default CAs is needed. A certificate from your internal CA is enough, and in some cases a self-signed certificate is sufficient too.

An easy solution could be to add either the root-certificate of your CA or the self-signed certificate into the trust-store of OpenSSL (not every OS / distribution has this in the same location, you have to check where this is for your OS, for FreeBSD 13+ this is /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/, see also certctl(8) there). But this would mean you trust the certitifacate which you put there additionally to the default certificates (modulo any blacklisting you made yourself). Theoretically this means anyone who is able to get hold of a certificate from a public-CA for your LDAP server, could perform a man-in-the-middle attack (you need to consider yourself how feasible this is in your infrastructure setup and how likely this is to happen).

More secure operation

Let’s say you run a service which needs to be able to make TLS sessions to systems which use certificates from public CAs and you want to make sure a connection to the LDAP backend can not use certificates from public CAs.

To tighten the setup in this case, you need to specify that the client which uses OpenLDAP-client libraries is using a different trust-store for the certifcate validation.

For the openldap client utilities there is a global config file for this (on FreeBSD this is /usr/local/etc/openldap/ldap.conf). For other tools, like PHP, this needs to be done in the per-user config file ~/.ldaprc. Both file have the same syntax.

With php-ldap you normally run the service either in php-fpm or in an apache-php-module. In both cases the process which runs is configured to run as a non-root user which may or may not have a home directory (in FreeBSD the www user which is typically used for that has no home directory).

HOWTO

1. create a home directory
2. create a separate trust-store for LDAP
3. configure php-ldap / py-ldap to make use of the separate trust-store

Step 1 – create a home directory

Chose a place which is suitable, and create a directory there. It doesn’t need to be in /home, it can be anywhere. The important part is, that it is readable by the user which runs the application which is using php-ldap. It does not need to be writable by this user. In there you need to create the .ldaprc file (again, needs only be readable by the user) with the content from step 3.

Step 2 – create a separate trust-store for LDAP

In FreeBSD the global ldap config is in /usr/local/etc/openldap/ldap.conf. Theoretically you can put the trust-store for LDAP in any place wou want. In my setup I consider it to belong into /usr/local/etc/openldap/ssl/. So make a directory – like /usr/local/etc/openldap/ssl – for the trust-store, and copy the certificate of the LDAP server there.

Attention! Only the public certificate, not the private key! If you only have one file on the server for this, it is the combined key+certificate (if you don’t know or are able to deduct by looking into the file how to get rid of the key… there is a lot of info out there in the WWW which explains it). The directory and the certificate need to be accessible (read for the file, execute for the directory) by any user which shall make use of this. It does not hurt to have it accessible by everyone (you made sure there is not the private-key from the server, right?).

Step 3 – configure php-ldap / py-ldap to make use of the separate trust-store

If you use php-fpm, you need to configure a home directory in the FPM pool configureation section. As already said above, it does not need to be inside /home, but it dpends upon your needs. Here in this example let me use /home. The FPM config line to add is then something like:
env[HOME] = /home/php-fpm
You could achieve the same via changing the home directory in the password database, but this would have an effect on all processes run with this user, whereas here it is just for the php-fpm processes (and childs).

If you use apache instead of php-fpm, you need to configure something similar for the corresponding virtual host:
SetEnv HOME /home/php-fpm

With this you can now configure /home/php-fpm/.ldaprc to point to the LDAP trust-store:
TLS_CACERT /usr/local/etc/openldap/ssl/ldap_server_cert.pem
TLS_CACERTDIR /usr/local/etc/openldap/ssl

If you use some python based application, you have to do something similar… if all else fails, it needs to be via a real home directory in the password database.

If you want to use the ldap client tools with any user, you need to add those lines to the /usr/local/etc/openldap/ldap.conf file too (there you can also set the default BASE – e.g. “BASE dc=example,dc=com” – and URI – e.g. “URI ldaps://ldap.example.com:639″).

After restarting php-fpm or apache, you should now be able to make really secure connections to the ldap server.

Some important things

• Every time you change the certificate of the LDAP server, you need to update the certifacte in the clients.
• There are two TLS modes for the LDAP server, one is “ldaps”, and one is “ldap+starttls”. If you have your LDAP server running in ldaps-mode (typically on port 639), you do not need to specify in your php-ldap using application to enable TLS (which is doing a starttls after connecting… typically on port 389), but you need to specify “ldaps://servername:639” (assuming it runs on port 639) instead of just “servername” at the place in your application where you are told to enter the server name. For py-ldap I have checked just one application (netdata), and there TLS needs to be enabled, and the server name has to be without “ldaps://” as netdata is prefixing the “ldaps://” itself if tls is enabled.
• Some places in the internet are telling to add “TLS_REQCERT never” into ldap.conf / .ldaprc. Technically this is not needed. Depending on your point of view this can either be good or bad (specifying it saves some CPU cycles on the server and the client, and some transfer time over the network – not specifying it allows to validate the certificated received to be compared to the certifcate being available locally, but I do not know if OpenLDAP is doing this, nor did I spend some time to evaluate if this improves security (if the important parts of the certificate are out-of-sync, the connection will fail)).

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I wrote an introductory article on how the audio subsystem on SBCs work: CODECs, I²S, DTS, whole nine yards. WordPress editor didn’t seem to be a very convenient tool for this kind of write up so I gave asciidoc a try and so far liked it.

Link to the article: https://kernelnomicon.org/texts/sbc-audio.html

Some time ago Filippo Valsorda wrote yubikey-agent, seamless SSH agent for YubiKeys. I really like YubiKeys and worked on the FreeBSD support for U2F in Chromium and pyu2f, getting yubikey-agent ported looked like an interesting project. It took some hacking to make it work but overall it wasn’t hard. Following is the roadmap on how to get it set up on FreeBSD. The actual details depend on your system (as you will see)

The first step is to set up middleware for accessing smart cards (YubiKey implements CCID smart-card protocol). The pcsc-lite package provides a daemon and a library for clients to communicate with the daemon. ccid is a plugin for pcsc-lite that implements the actual CCID protocol over USB. devd rules are to make the daemon re-scan USB devices on hotplug

sudo pkg install ccid pcsc-lite
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/devd
sudo tee /usr/local/etc/devd/pcscd.conf << __EOF__
attach 100 {
        device-name "ugen[0-9]+";
        action "/usr/local/sbin/pcscd -H";
};
detach 100 {
        device-name "ugen[0-9]+";
        action "/usr/local/sbin/pcscd -H";
};
__EOF__

sudo service devd restart
sudo sysrc pcscd_enable="YES
sudo service pcscd start

go and git are build requirements for the app. go get command is required because FreeBSD support was only recently merged into piv-go and the latest release, referenced in go.mod, still does not have it. go install command installs the app in ~/go/bin/. When new version of piv-go is released and yubikey-agent switches to using it, all these commands can be replaced with single go get github.com/FiloSottile/yubikey-agent command.

sudo pkg install go git
git clone https://github.com/FiloSottile/yubikey-agent.git
cd yubikey-agent
go get github.com/go-piv/piv-go@a3e5767e
go build
go install

The binary is in ~/go/bin/ directory, you can add it to your $PATH to type less.

The next step is setting up a Yubikey, it’s well documented on the official site. One caveat though is if PIN length is less than 6 chars the setup fails with the somewhat confusing message: “ The default PIN did not work.”

The actual usage of yubikey-agent depends on your setup. First of all, yubikey-agent is a “eventually GUI” app. At some point, when entering PIN is required it starts pinentry command which task is to present user with a dialog entry, get PIN, and pass it to the app. There are multiple pinentry flavors, with different front-ends: TTY, Qt, GTK. gopass module used in yubikey-agent does not work with plain TTY backend, and requires pinentry to be a GUI app. On Debian/Ubuntu users can switch between flavors and make /usr/bin/pinentry point to either Qt5 or GTK version, but in FreeBSD /usr/local/bin/pinentry is always TTY one. I worked around it by installing pinentry-qt5 package and making symlink.

sudo pkg install pinentry-qt5
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/pinentry-qt5 /usr/local/bin/pinentry

If you need /usr/local/bin/pinentry to be TTY version for some other stuff, there may be a problem. How to work around this depends on your requirements. I don’t have a ready recipe.

Because yubikey-agent is “eventually GUI” you can either start it in .xsession or .xinitrc files or start it some other way with DISPLAY env variable set. Other than that official documentation is a good source of information on how to use it.

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Here is a quick HOWTO for those which want to provide some FreeBSD based compute resources to help finding vaccines. I have not made a port out of this and do not know yet if I get the time to make one. If someone wants to make a port, go ahead, do not wait for me.

UPDATE 2020-03-22: 0mp@ made a port out of this, it is in “biology/linux-foldingathome”.

• Download the linux RPM of the Folding@Home client (this covers fahclient only).
• Enable the linuxulator (kernel moduls and linux_base (first part of chapter 10.2) is enough).
• Make sure linprocfs/linsysfs are mounted in /compat/linux/{proc|sys}.
• cd /compat/linux
• tar -xf /path/to/fahclient....rpm
• add the “fahclient” user (give it a real home directory)
• make sure there is no /compat/linux/dev or alternatively mount devfs there
• mkdir /compat/linux/etc/fahclient
• cp /compat/linux/usr/share/doc/fahclient/sample-config.xml /compat/linux/etc/fahclient/config.xml
• chown -R fahclient /compat/linux/etc/fahclient
• edit /compat/linux/fahclient/config.xml: modify user (mandatory) / team (optional: FreeBSD team is 11743) / passkey (optional) as appropriate (if you want to control the client remotely, you need to modify some more parts, but somehow the client “loses” a filedescriptor and stops working as it should if you do that on FreeBSD)
• If you have the home directories of the users as no-exec (e.g. seperate ZFS datasets with exec=off): make sure the home directory of the fahclient user has exec permissions enabled
• cd ~fahclient (important! it tries to write to the current work directory when you start it)
• Start it: /usr/sbin/daemon /compat/linux/usr/bin/FAHClient /compat/linux/etc/fahclient/config.xml --run-as fahclient --pid-file=/var/run/fahclient.pid >/dev/null 2>&1

Per default it will now pick up some SARS-CoV‑2 (COVID-19) related folding tasks. There are some more config options (e.g. how much of the system resources are used). Please refer to the official Folding@Home site for more information about that. Be also aware that there is a big rise in compute resources donated to Folding@Home, so the pool of available work units may be empty from time to time, but they are working on adding more work units. Be patient.

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With the arrival of OpenSSL 1.1.1, an upgraded Unbound, and some changes to the setup and init scripts, FreeBSD 12.0, currently in beta, now supports DNS over TLS out of the box.

DNS over TLS is just what it sounds like: DNS over TCP, but wrapped in a TLS session. It encrypts your requests and the server’s replies, and optionally allows you to verify the identity of the server. The advantages are protection against eavesdropping and manipulation of your DNS traffic; the drawbacks are a slight performance degradation and potential firewall traversal issues, as it runs over a non-standard port (TCP port 853) which may be blocked on some networks. Let’s take a look at how to set it up.

Basic setup

As a simple test case, let’s set up our 12.0-ALPHA10 VM to use Cloudflare’s DNS service:

# uname -r
12.0-ALPHA10
# cat >/etc/rc.conf.d/local_unbound <<EOF
local_unbound_enable="YES"
local_unbound_tls="YES"
local_unbound_forwarders="1.1.1.1@853 1.0.0.1@853"
EOF
# service local_unbound start
Performing initial setup.
destination: 
/var/unbound/forward.conf created
/var/unbound/lan-zones.conf created
/var/unbound/control.conf created
/var/unbound/unbound.conf created
/etc/resolvconf.conf not modified
Original /etc/resolv.conf saved as /var/backups/resolv.conf.20181021.192629
Starting local_unbound.
Waiting for nameserver to start... good
# host www.freebsd.org
www.freebsd.org is an alias for wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org.
wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org has address 96.47.72.84
wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org has IPv6 address 2610:1c1:1:606c::50:15
wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org mail is handled by 0 .

Note that this is not a configuration you want to run in production—we will come back to this later.

Performance

The downside of DNS over TLS is the performance hit of the TCP and TLS session setup and teardown. We demonstrate this by flushing our cache and (rather crudely) measuring a cache miss and a cache hit:

# local-unbound-control reload
ok
# time host www.freebsd.org >x
host www.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.553 total
# time host www.freebsd.org >x
host www.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.005 total

Compare this to querying our router, a puny Soekris net5501 running Unbound 1.8.1 on FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE:

# time host www.freebsd.org gw >x
host www.freebsd.org gw > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.232 total
# time host www.freebsd.org 192.168.144.1 >x
host www.freebsd.org gw > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.008 total

or to querying Cloudflare directly over UDP:

# time host www.freebsd.org 1.1.1.1 >x      
host www.freebsd.org 1.1.1.1 > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.272 total
# time host www.freebsd.org 1.1.1.1 >x
host www.freebsd.org 1.1.1.1 > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.013 total

(Cloudflare uses anycast routing, so it is not so unreasonable to see a cache miss during off-peak hours.)

This clearly shows the advantage of running a local caching resolver—it absorbs the cost of DNSSEC and TLS. And speaking of DNSSEC, we can separate that cost from that of TLS by reconfiguring our server without the latter:

# cat >/etc/rc.conf.d/local_unbound <<EOF
local_unbound_enable="YES"
local_unbound_tls="NO"
local_unbound_forwarders="1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1"
EOF
# service local_unbound setup
Performing initial setup.
destination: 
Original /var/unbound/forward.conf saved as /var/backups/forward.conf.20181021.205328
/var/unbound/lan-zones.conf not modified
/var/unbound/control.conf not modified
Original /var/unbound/unbound.conf saved as /var/backups/unbound.conf.20181021.205328
/etc/resolvconf.conf not modified
/etc/resolv.conf not modified
# service local_unbound start
Starting local_unbound.
Waiting for nameserver to start... good
# time host www.freebsd.org >x
host www.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.080 total
# time host www.freebsd.org >x
host www.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.004 total

So does TLS add nearly half a second to every cache miss? Not quite, fortunately—in our previous tests, our first query was not only a cache miss but also the first query after a restart or a cache flush, resulting in a complete load and validation of the entire path from the name we queried to the root. The difference between a first and second cache miss is quite noticeable:

# time host www.freebsd.org >x 
host www.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.546 total
# time host www.freebsd.org >x
host www.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.004 total
# time host repo.freebsd.org >x
host repo.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.168 total
# time host repo.freebsd.org >x
host repo.freebsd.org > x  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 0.004 total

Revisiting our configuration

Remember when I said that you shouldn’t run the sample configuration in production, and that I’d get back to it later? This is later.

The problem with our first configuration is that while it encrypts our DNS traffic, it does not verify the identity of the server. Our ISP could be routing all traffic to 1.1.1.1 to its own servers, logging it, and selling the information to the highest bidder. We need to tell Unbound to validate the server certificate, but there’s a catch: Unbound only knows the IP addresses of its forwarders, not their names. We have to provide it with names that will match the x509 certificates used by the servers we want to use. Let’s double-check the certificate:

# :| openssl s_client -connect 1.1.1.1:853 |& openssl x509 -noout -text |& grep DNS
            DNS:*.cloudflare-dns.com, IP Address:1.1.1.1, IP Address:1.0.0.1, DNS:cloudflare-dns.com, IP Address:2606:4700:4700:0:0:0:0:1111, IP Address:2606:4700:4700:0:0:0:0:1001

This matches Cloudflare’s documentation, so let’s update our configuration:

# cat >/etc/rc.conf.d/local_unbound <<EOF
local_unbound_enable="YES"
local_unbound_tls="YES"
local_unbound_forwarders="1.1.1.1@853#cloudflare-dns.com 1.0.0.1@853#cloudflare-dns.com"
EOF
# service local_unbound setup            
Performing initial setup.
destination: 
Original /var/unbound/forward.conf saved as /var/backups/forward.conf.20181021.212519
/var/unbound/lan-zones.conf not modified
/var/unbound/control.conf not modified
/var/unbound/unbound.conf not modified
/etc/resolvconf.conf not modified
/etc/resolv.conf not modified
# service local_unbound restart
Stopping local_unbound.
Starting local_unbound.
Waiting for nameserver to start... good
# host www.freebsd.org
www.freebsd.org is an alias for wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org.
wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org has address 96.47.72.84
wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org has IPv6 address 2610:1c1:1:606c::50:15
wfe0.nyi.freebsd.org mail is handled by 0 .

How can we confirm that Unbound actually validates the certificate? Well, we can run Unbound in debug mode (/usr/sbin/local-unbound -dd -vvv) and read the debugging output… or we can confirm that it fails when given a name that does not match the certificate:

# perl -p -i -e 's/cloudflare/cloudfire/g' /etc/rc.conf.d/local_unbound
# service local_unbound setup
Performing initial setup.
destination: 
Original /var/unbound/forward.conf saved as /var/backups/forward.conf.20181021.215808
/var/unbound/lan-zones.conf not modified
/var/unbound/control.conf not modified
/var/unbound/unbound.conf not modified
/etc/resolvconf.conf not modified
/etc/resolv.conf not modified
# service local_unbound restart
Stopping local_unbound.
Waiting for PIDS: 33977.
Starting local_unbound.
Waiting for nameserver to start... good
# host www.freebsd.org
Host www.freebsd.org not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

But is this really a failure to validate the certificate? Actually, no. When provided with a server name, Unbound will pass it to the server during the TLS handshake, and the server will reject the handshake if that name does not match any of its certificates. To truly verify that Unbound validates the server certificate, we have to confirm that it fails when it cannot do so. For instance, we can remove the root certificate used to sign the DNS server’s certificate from the test system’s trust store. Note that we cannot simply remove the trust store entirely, as Unbound will refuse to start if the trust store is missing or empty.

While we’re talking about trust stores, I should point out that you currently must have ca_root_nss installed for DNS over TLS to work. However, 12.0-RELEASE will ship with a pre-installed copy.

Conclusion

We’ve seen how to set up Unbound—specifically, the local_unbound service in FreeBSD 12.0—to use DNS over TLS instead of plain UDP or TCP, using Cloudflare’s public DNS service as an example. We’ve looked at the performance impact, and at how to ensure (and verify) that Unbound validates the server certificate to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

The question that remains is whether it is all worth it. There is undeniably a performance hit, though this may improve with TLS 1.3. More importantly, there are currently very few DNS-over-TLS providers—only one, really, since Quad9 filter their responses—and you have to weigh the advantage of encrypting your DNS traffic against the disadvantage of sending it all to a single organization. I can’t answer that question for you, but I can tell you that the parameters are evolving quickly, and if your answer is negative today, it may not remain so for long. More providers will appear. Performance will improve with TLS 1.3 and QUIC. Within a year or two, running DNS over TLS may very well become the rule rather than the experimental exception.

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of my FreeBSD commit bit, and tomorrow will be the twentieth anniversary of my first commit. I figured I’d split the difference and write a few words about it today.

My level of engagement with the FreeBSD project has varied greatly over the twenty years I’ve been a committer. There have been times when I worked on it full-time, and times when I did not touch it for months. The last few years, health issues and life events have consumed my time and sapped my energy, and my contributions have come in bursts. Commit statistics do not tell the whole story, though: even when not working on FreeBSD directly, I have worked on side projects which, like OpenPAM, may one day find their way into FreeBSD.

My contributions have not been limited to code. I was the project’s first Bugmeister; I’ve served on the Security Team for a long time, and have been both Security Officer and Deputy Security Officer; I managed the last four Core Team elections and am doing so again this year.

In return, the project has taught me much about programming and software engineering. It taught me code hygiene and the importance of clarity over cleverness; it taught me the ins and outs of revision control; it taught me the importance of good documentation, and how to write it; and it taught me good release engineering practices.

Last but not least, it has provided me with the opportunity to work with some of the best people in the field. I have the privilege today to count several of them among my friends.

For better or worse, the FreeBSD project has shaped my career and my life. It set me on the path to information security in general and IAA in particular, and opened many a door for me. I would not be where I am now without it.

I won’t pretend to be able to tell the future. I don’t know how long I will remain active in the FreeBSD project and community. It could be another twenty years; or it could be ten, or five, or less. All I know is that FreeBSD and I still have things to teach each other, and I don’t intend to call it quits any time soon.

Previously

A while ago, my dear colleague Mattijs came with an interesting option in BIND. Response zones. One can create custom "zones" and enforce a policy on that.

I never worked with it before, so I had no clue at all what to expect from it. Mattijs told me how to configure it (see below for an example) and offered to slave his RPZ policy-domains.

All of a sudden I was no longer getting a lot of ADS/SPAM and other things. It was filtered. Wow!

His RPZ zones were custom made and based on PiHole, where PiHole adds hosts to the local "hosts" file and sends it to 127.0.0.1 (your local machine), which prevents it to reach the actual server at all, RPZ policies are much stronger and more dynamic.

RPZ policies offer the use of "redirecting" queries. What do I mean with that? well you can force a ADVERTISEMENT (AD for short) site / domain to the RPZ policy and return a NXDOMAIN. It no longer exists for the end-user. But you can also CNAME it to a domain/host you own and then add a webserver to that host and tell the user query'ing the page: "The site you are trying to reach had been pro-actively blocked by the DNS software. This is an automated action and an automated response. If you feel that this is not appropriate, please let us know on <mail link>", or something like that.

Once I noticed that and saw the value, I immediately saw the benefit for companies and most likely schools and home people. Mattijs had a busy time at work and I was recovering from health issues, so I had "plenty" of time to investigate and read on this. The RPZ policies where not updated a lot and caused some problems for my ereaders for example (msftcncsi.com was used by them, see another post on this website for being grumpy about that). And I wanted to learn more about it. So what did I do?

Yes, I wrote my own parser. In perl. I wrote a "rpz-generator" (its actually called like that). I added the sources Mattijs used and generated my own files. They are rather huge, since I blocked ads, malware, fraud, exploits, windows stuff and various other things (gambling, fakenews, and stuff like that).

I also included some whitelists, because msfctinc was added to the lists and it made my ereaders go beserk, and we play a few games here and there which uses some advertisement sites, so we wanted to exempt them as well. It's better to know which ones they are and selectively allow them, then having traffic to every data collector out there.

This works rather well. I do not get a lot of complaints that things are not working. I do see a lot of queries going to "banned" sites everyday. So it is doing something .The most obvious one is that search results on google, not always are clickable. The ones that have those [ADV] sites, are blocked because they are advertising google sponsored sites, and they are on the list.. and google-analytics etc. It doesn't cause much harm to our internet surfing or use experience, with the exception of the ADV sites I just mentioned. My wife sometimes wants to click on those because she searches for something that happends to be on that list, but apart from that we are doing just fine.

One thing though, I wrote my setup and this article with my setup using "NXDOMAIN" which just gives back "site does not exist" messages. I want to make my script more smart by making it a selectable, so that some categories are CNAMED to a filtering domain and webpage, and some are NXDOMAIN'ed. If someone has experience with that, please show me some idea's and how that looks like and whether your end-users can do something with it or not. I think schools will be happy to present a block-page instead of NXdomain'ing some sites 🙂

Acknowledgements: Mattijs for teaching and showing me RPZ, ISC for placing RPZ in NAMED, and zytrax.com for having such excellent documentation to RPZ. The perl developers for having such a great tool around, and the various sites I use to get the blocklists from. Thank you all!

If you want to know more about the tool, please contact me and we can share whatever information is available 🙂

If you go looking for a usable webmail application, then you might end up with Open-Xchange (OX for short). Some larger ISP's are using OX as their webmail application for customers. It has a multitude of options available, using multiple email accounts, caldav/carddav included (not externally (yet?)) etc. There are commercial options available for these ISP's, but also for smaller resellers etc.

But, there is also the community edition available. Which is the installation you can run for free on your machine(s). It does not have some of the fancy modules that large setups need and require, and some updates might follow a bit later which are more directly delivered to paying customers, but it is very complete and usable.

I decided to setup this for my private clients who like to use a webmail client to access their email. At first I ran this on a VM using Bhyve on FreeBSD. The VM ran on CentOS6 and had the necessary bits installed for the OX setup (see: https://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=AppSuite:Open-Xchange_Installation_Guide_for_CentOS_6). I modified the files I needed to change to get this going, and there, it just worked. But, running on a VM, with ofcourse limited CPU and Memory power assigned (There is always a cap) and it being emulated, I was not very happy with it. I needed to maintain an additional installation and update it, while I have this perfectly fine FreeBSD server instead. (Note that I am not against using bhyve at all, it works very well, but I wanted to reduce my maintenance base a bit :-)).

So a few days ago I considered just moving the stuff over to the FreeBSD host instead. And actually it was rather trivial to do with the working setup on CentOS.

At this moment I do not see an easy way to get the source/components directly from within FreeBSD. I have asked OX for help on this, so that we can perhaps get this sorted out and perhaps even make a Port/pkg out of this for use with FreeBSD.

The required host changes and software installation

The first thing that I did was to create a zfs dataset for /opt. The software is normally installed there, and in this case I wanted to have a contained location which I can snapshot, delete, etc, without affecting much of the normal system. I copied over the /opt/open-xchange directory from my CentOS installation. I looked at the installation on CentOS and noticed that it used a specific user 'open-xchange', which I created on my FreeBSD host. I changed the files to be owned by this user. Getting a process listing on the CentOS machine also revealed that it needed Java/JDK. So I installed the openjdk8 pkg (''pkg install openjdk8''). The setup did not yet start, there were errors about /bin/bash missing. Obviously that required installing bash (''pkg install bash'') and you can go with two ways, you can alter every shebang (#!) to match /usr/local/bin/bash (or better yet #!/usr/bin/env bash), or you can symlink /usr/local/bin/bash to /bin/bash, which is what I did (I asked OX to make it more portable by using the env variant instead).

The /var/log/open-xchange directory does not normally exist, so I created that and made sure that ''open-xchange'' could write to that. (mkdir /var/log/open-xchange && chown open-xchange /var/log/open-xchange).

I was able to startup the /opt/open-xchange/sbin/open-xchange process with that. I could not yet easily reach it, on the CentOS installation there are two files in the Apache configuration that needed some attention on my FreeBSD host. The Apache include files: ox.conf and proxy_http.conf will give away hints about what to change. In my case I needed to do the redirect on the Vhost that runs OX (RedirectMatch ^/$ /appsuite/) and make sure the /var/www/html/appsuite directory is copied over from the CentOS installation as well. You can stick it in any location, as long as you can reach it with your webuser and Alias it to the proper directory and setup directory access).

Apache configuration (Reverse proxy mode)

The proxy_http.conf file is more interesting, it includes the reverse proxy settings to be able to connect to the java instance of OX and service your clients. I needed to add a few modules in Apache so that it could work, I already had several proxy modules enabled for different reasons, so the list below can probably be trimmed a bit to the exact modules needed, but since this works for me, I might as well just show you;

LoadModule slotmem_shm_module libexec/apache24/mod_slotmem_shm.so
LoadModule deflate_module libexec/apache24/mod_deflate.so
LoadModule expires_module libexec/apache24/mod_expires.so
LoadModule proxy_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule proxy_scgi_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_scgi.so
LoadModule proxy_wstunnel_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_wstunnel.so
LoadModule proxy_ajp_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_ajp.so
LoadModule proxy_balancer_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_balancer.so
LoadModule lbmethod_byrequests_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_byrequests.so
LoadModule lbmethod_bytraffic_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_bytraffic.so
LoadModule lbmethod_bybusyness_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_bybusyness.so

After that it was running fine for me. My users can login to the application and the local directory's are being used instead of the VM which ran it first. If you notice previous documentation on this subject, you will notice that there are more third party packages needed at that time. It could easily be that there are more modules needed than that I wrote about. My setup was not clean, the host already runs several websites (one of them being this one) and ofcourse support packages were already installed.

Updating is currently NOT possible. The CentOS installation requires running ''yum update'' periodically, but that is obviously not possible on FreeBSD. The packages used within CentOS are not directly usable for FreeBSD. I have asked OX to provide the various Community base and optional modules as .tar.gz files (raw) so that we can fetch them and install them on the proper location(s). As long as the .js/.jar files etc are all there and the scripts are modified to start, it will just work. I have not (yet) created a startup script for this yet. For the moment I will just start the VM and see whether there are updates and copy them over instead. Since I did not need to do additional changing on the main host, it is a very easy and straight forward process in this case.

Support

There is no support for OX on FreeBSD. Ofcourse I would like to see at least some support to promote my favorite OS more, but that is a financial situation. It might not cost a lot to deliver the .tar.gz files so that we can package them and spread the usage of OX on more installations (and thus perhaps add revenue for OX as commercial installation), but it will cost FTE's to support more then that. If you see a commercial opportunity, please let them know so that this might be more and more realistic.

The documentation written above is just how I have setup the installation and I wanted to share it with you. I do not offer support on it, but ofcourse I am willing to answer questions you might have about the setup etc. I did not include the vhost configuration in it's entirely, if that is a popular request, I will add it to this post.

Open Questions to OX:

So as mentioned I have questioned OX for some choices:

• Please use a more portable path for the Bash shell (#!/usr/bin/env bash)
• Please allow the use of a different localbase (/usr/local/open-xchange for example)
• Please allow FreeBSD packagers to fetch a "clean" .tar.gz, so that we can package this for OX and distribute it for our end-users.
• Unrelated to the post above: Please allow the usage of external caldav/carddav providers

Edit:

I have found another thing that I needed to change. I needed to use gsed (Gnu-sed) instead of FreeBSD-sed so that the listuser scripts work. Linux does that a bit differently but if you replace sed with gsed those scripts will work fine.

I have not yet got some feedback from OX.

I've been away from FreeBSD for a few years but I wanted some more functionality on my home network that I was able to configure with my Synology NAS and router. Specifically, I wanted:

• a configurable caching name server that would serve up authoritative private names on my LAN and also validates responses with DNSSEC.
• a more configurable DHCP server so I could make the server assign specific IPs to specific MAC addresses.
• more compute power for transcoding videos for Plex.

Running FreeBSD 11 on an Intel NUC seemed like an ideal solution to keep my closet tidy. As of this week, $406.63 on Amazon buys a last generation i3 Intel NUC mini PC (NUC5I3RYH), with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD storage. This was the first model I tried since I found reports of others using this with FreeBSD online, but I was also able to get it working on the newer generation i5 based NUC6i5SYK with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. The major issue with these NUCs is that the Intel wireless driver is not supported in FreeBSD. I am not doing anything graphical with these boxes so I don't know how well the graphics work, but they are great little network compute nodes.

Installation

I downloaded the FreeBSD 11 memory stick images, and was pleased to see that the device booted fine off the memory stick without any BIOS configuration required. However, my installation failed trying to mount root ("Mounting from ufs:/dev/ufs/FreeBSD_Install failed with error 19."). Installation from an external USB DVD drive and over the network with PXE both proved more successful at getting me into bsdinstaller to complete the installation.

I partitioned the 128GB SSD device with 8GB of swap and the rest for the root partition (UFS, Journaled and Soft Updates). After installation I edited /etc/fstab to add a tmpfs(5) mount for /tmp. The dmesg output for this host is available in a Gist on Github.

Warren Block's article on SSD on FreeBSD and the various chapters of the FreeBSD Handbook were helpful. There were a couple of tools that were also useful in probing the performance of the SSD with my FreeBSD workload:

• The smartctl tool in the sysutils/smartmontools package allows one to read detailed diagnostic information from the SSD, including wear patterns.
• The basic benchmark built into diskinfo -t reports that the SSD is transferring 503-510MB/second.

Rough Benchmarks

This post isn't meant to report a comprehensive suite of FreeBSD benchmarks, but I did run some basic tests to understand how suitable these low power NUCs perform in practice. To start with, I downloaded the 11-stable source from Subversion and measured the build times to understand performance of the new system. All builds were done with a minimal 2 line make.conf:

MALLOC_PRODUCTION=yes
CPUTYPE?=core2

Build Speed

Bonnie

The block input rates from my bonnie benchmarks on the SSD were within 5% of the value provided by the much quick and dirtier diskinfo -t test.

Running Bonnie with less than 40GB file size yielded unreliable benchmarks due to caching at the VM layer. The following boxplot shows the random seek performance during 3 runs each at 24, 32, and 40GB file sizes. Performance starts to even off at this level but with smaller file sizes the reported random seek performance is much higher.

Open Issues

As mentioned earlier, I liked the performance I got with running FreeBSD on a 2015-era i3 NUC5I3RYH so much that I bought a newer, more powerful second device for my network. The 2016-era i5 NUC 6i5SYK is also running great. There are just a few minor issues I've encountered so far:

• There is no FreeBSD driver for the Intel Wireless chip included with this NUC. Code for other platforms exists but has not been ported to FreeBSD.
• The memory stick booting issue described in the installation section. It is not clear if it didn't like my USB stick for some reason, or the port I was plugging into, or if additional boot parameters would have solved the issue. Documentation and/or code needs to be updated to make this clearer.
• Similarly, the PXE Install instructions were a bit scattered. The PXE section of the Handbook isn't specifically targetting new manual installations into bsdinstall. There are a few extra things you can run into that aren't documented well or could be streamlined.
• Graphics / X11 are outside of the scope of my needs. The NUCs have VESA mounts so you can easily tuck them behind an LCD monitor, but it is not clear to me how well they perform in that role.

I have started using rcirc as my main IRC client for a while now, and I really like the simplicity of its configuration. All of my important IRC options now fit in a couple of screens of text.

All the rcirc configuration options are wrapped in an eval-after-load form, to make sure that rcirc settings are there when I need them, but they do not normally cause delays during the startup of all Emacs instances I may spawn:

(eval-after-load "rcirc"
  '(progn

     rcirc-setup-forms

     (message "rcirc has been configured.")))

The “rcirc-setup-forms” are then separated in three clearly separated sections:

• Generic rcirc configuration
• A hook for setting up nice defaults in rcirc buffers
• Custom rcirc commands/aliases

Only the first set of options is really required. Rcirc can still function as an IRC client without the rest of them. The rest is there mostly for convenience, and to avoid typing the same setup commands more than once.

The generic options I have set locally are just a handful of settings to set my name and nickname, to enable logging, to let rcirc authenticate to NickServ, and to tweak a few UI details. All this fits nicely in 21 lines of elisp:

;; Identification for IRC server connections
(setq rcirc-default-user-name "keramida"
      rcirc-default-nick      "keramida"
      rcirc-default-full-name "Giorgos Keramidas")

;; Enable automatic authentication with rcirc-authinfo keys.
(setq rcirc-auto-authenticate-flag t)

;; Enable logging support by default.
(setq rcirc-log-flag      t
      rcirc-log-directory (expand-file-name "irclogs" (getenv "HOME")))

;; Passwords for auto-identifying to nickserv and bitlbee.
(setq rcirc-authinfo '(("freenode"  nickserv "keramida"   "********")
                       ("grnet"     nickserv "keramida"   "********")))

;; Some UI options which I like better than the defaults.
(rcirc-track-minor-mode 1)
(setq rcirc-prompt      "»» "
      rcirc-time-format "%H:%M "
      rcirc-fill-flag   nil)

The next section of my rcirc setup is a small hook function which tweaks rcirc settings separately for each buffer (both channel buffers and private-message buffers):

(defun keramida/rcirc-mode-setup ()
  "Sets things up for channel and query buffers spawned by rcirc."
  ;; rcirc-omit-mode always *toggles*, so we first 'disable' it
  ;; and then let the function toggle it *and* set things up.
  (setq rcirc-omit-mode nil)
  (rcirc-omit-mode)
  (set (make-local-variable 'scroll-conservatively) 8192))

(add-hook 'rcirc-mode-hook 'keramida/rcirc-mode-setup)

Finally, the largest section of them all contains definitions for some custom commands and short-hand aliases for stuff I use all the time. First come a few handy aliases for talking to ChanServ, NickServ and MemoServ. Instead of typing /quote nickserv help foo, it’s nice to be able to just type /ns help foo. This is exactly what the following three tiny forms enable, by letting rcirc know that “/cs”, “/ms” and “/ns” are valid commands and passing-along any arguments to the appropriate IRC command:

;;
;; Handy aliases for talking to ChanServ, MemoServ and NickServ.
;;

(defun-rcirc-command cs (arg)
  "Send a private message to the ChanServ service."
  (rcirc-send-string process (concat "CHANSERV " arg)))

(defun-rcirc-command ms (arg)
  "Send a private message to the MemoServ service."
  (rcirc-send-string process (concat "MEMOSERV " arg)))

(defun-rcirc-command ns (arg)
  "Send a private message to the NickServ service."
  (rcirc-send-string process (concat "NICKSERV " arg)))

Next comes a nifty little /join replacement which can join multiple channels at once, as long as their names are separated by spaces, commas or semicolons. To make its code more readable, it’s split into 3 little functions: rcirc-trim-string removes leading and trailing whitespace from a string, rcirc-normalize-channel-name prepends “#” to a string if it doesn’t have one already, and finally rcirc-cmd-j uses the first two functions to do the interesting bits:

(defun rcirc-trim-string (string)
  "Trim leading and trailing whitespace from a string."
  (replace-regexp-in-string "^[[:space:]]*\\|[[:space:]]*$" "" string))

(defun rcirc-normalize-channel-name (name)
  "Normalize an IRC channel name. Trim surrounding
whitespace, and if it doesn't start with a ?# character, prepend
one ourselves."
  (let ((trimmed (rcirc-trim-string name)))
    (if (= ?# (aref trimmed 0))
        trimmed
      (concat "#" trimmed))))

;; /j CHANNEL[{ ,;}CHANNEL{ ,;}CHANNEL] - join multiple channels at once
(defun-rcirc-command j (arg)
  "Short-hand for joining a channel by typing /J channel,channel2,channel,...

Spaces, commas and semicolons are treated as channel name
separators, so that all the following are equivalent commands at
the rcirc prompt:

    /j demo;foo;test
    /j demo,foo,test
    /j demo foo test"
  (let* ((channels (mapcar 'rcirc-normalize-channel-name
                           (split-string (rcirc-trim-string arg) " ,;"))))
    (rcirc-join-channels process channels)))

The last short-hand command lets me type /wii NICK to get “extended” whois information for a nickname, which usually includes idle times too:

;; /WII nickname -> /WHOIS nickname nickname
(defun-rcirc-command wii (arg)
  "Show extended WHOIS information for one or more nicknames."
  (dolist (nickname (split-string arg " ,"))
    (rcirc-send-string process (concat "WHOIS " nickname " " nickname))))

With that, my rcirc setup is complete (at least in the sense that I can use it to chat with my IRC friends). There are no fancy bells and whistles like DCC file transfers, or fancy color parsing, and similar things, but I don’t need all that. I just need a simple, fast, pretty IRC client, and that’s exactly what I have now.

Sato-san has once created a playlist of videos from AsiaBSDCon. There were 20 videos from the conference held March 15-16, 2014 and papers can be found here. Congrats to the organizers for running another successful conference in Tokyo. A full list of videos is included below. Six years ago when I first created this channel videos longer than 10 minutes couldn't normally be uploaded to YouTube and we had to create a special partner channel for the content. It is great to see how the availability of technical video content about FreeBSD has grown in the last six years.

• Matthew Ahrens, OpenZFS ensures the continued excellence of ZFS on FreeBSD, Linux, and illumos
• Eric Allman, Bambi Meets Godzilla: They Elope - Open Source Meets the Commercial World
• Scott Long, Modifying the FreeBSD kernel Netflix streaming servers
• Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, An Overview of Security in the FreeBSD Kernel
• Luba Tang, Bold, fast optimizing linker for BSD (P1A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• David Chisnall, The Future of LLVM in the FreeBSD Toolchain (P2A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Kris Moore, Snapshots, Replication, and Boot Environments (P3A, AsiaBSDCon 2014
• Dru Lavigne, ZFS for the Masses: Management Tools Provided by the PC BSD and FreeNAS Projects (P4A)
• John Hixson, Introduction to FreeNAS development (P5A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Peter Grehan, Nested Paging in Bhyve (P6A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM (P8A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Martin Matuška , Deploying FreeBSD systems with Foreman and mfsBSD (P7A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• James P. Brown, Analysys of BSD Associate Exam Results (P10A, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Michael Dexter, Visualizing Unix: Graphing bhyve, ZFS and PF with Graphite (P1B, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Mindaugas Rasiukevicius, NPF - progress and perspective (P2B, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Luigi Rizzo, Netmap as a core networking technology (P3B, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Reyk Floeter, VXLAN(4) and Cloud based networking with OpenBSD (P5B, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Masanobu Saitoh, Developing CPE Routers based on NetBSD: Fifteen Years of SEIL (P6B)
• Pierre Pronchery, Guillaume Lasmayous, Carve your NetBSD (P8B, AsiaBSDCon 2014)
• Jos Jansen, Adapting OSX to the enterprise (P9B, AsiaBSDCon 2014)

I recently wrote a tiny demo program to demonstrate to co-workers how one can build a cache with age-based expiration of its entries, using purely immutable Scala collections. The core of the cache was something like 25-30 lines of Scala code like this:

class FooCache(maxAgeMillis: Long) {
  def now: Long = System.currentTimeMillis

  case class CacheEntry(number: Long, value: Long,
                        birthTime: Long) {
    def age: Long = now - birthTime
  }

  lazy val cache: AtomicReference[Hashmap[Long, CacheEntry]] =
    new AtomicReference(HashMap[Long, CacheEntry]]())

  def values: Hashmap[Long, CacheEntry] =
    cache.get.filter{ (key, entry) =>
      entry.age <= maxAgeMillis }

  def get(number: Long): Long = {
    values.find{ case (key, entry) =>
      key == number && entry.age <= maxAgeMillis
    } match {
      case Some((key, entry)) =>
        entry.value                // cache hit
      case _ =>
        val entry = CacheEntry(number, compute(number), now)
        cache.set(values + (number -> entry))
        entry.value
    }
  }

  def compute(number: Long): Long =
    { /* Some long-running computation based on 'number' */ }
}

The main idea here is that we keep an atomically updated reference to an immutable HashMap. Every time we look for entries in the HashMap we check if (entry.age <= maxAgeMillis), to skip over entries which are already too old to be of any use. Then on cache insertion time we go through the ‘values’ function which excludes all cache entries which have already expired.

Note how the cache itself is not ‘immutable’. We are just using an immutable HashMap collection to store it. This means that Scala can do all sorts of optimizations when multiple threads want to iterate through all the entries of the cache looking for something they want. But there’s an interesting performance bug in this code too…

It’s relatively easy to spot once you know what you are looking for, but did you already catch it? I didn’t. At least not the first time I wrote this code. But I did notice something was ‘odd’ when I started doing lookups from multiple threads and looked at the performance stats of the program in a profiler. YourKit showed the following for this version of the caching code:

See how CPU usage hovers around 60% and we are doing a hefty bunch of garbage collections every second? The profiler quickly led me to line 17 of the code pasted above, where I am going through ‘values’ when looking up cache entries.

Almost 94% of the CPU time of the program was spent inside the .values() function. The profiling report included this part:

+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------|------+
|                           Name                            | Time   | Time |
|                                                           | (ms)   | (%)  |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------|------+
| demo.caching                                              | 62.084 | 99 % |
| +-- d.caching.Numbers.check(long)                         | 62.084 | 99 % |
|   +-- d.caching.FooCacheModule$FooCache.check(long)       | 62.084 | 99 % |
|     +---d.caching.FooCacheModule$FooCache.values()        | 58.740 | 94 % |
|     +---scala.collection.AbstractIterable.find(Function1) |  3.215 |  5 % |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------|------+

We are spending far too much time expiring cache entries. This is easy to understand why with a second look at the code of the get() function: every cache lookup does old entry expiration and then searches for a matching cache entry.

The way cache-entry expiration works with an immutable HashMap as the underlying cache entry store is that values() iterates over the entire cache HashMap, and builds a new HashMap containing only the cache entries which have not expired. This is bound to take a lot of procesisng power, and it’s also what’s causing the creation of all those ‘new’ objects we are garbage collecting every second!

Do we really need to construct a new cache HashMap every time we do a cache lookup? Of course not… We can just filter the entries while we are traversing the cache.

Changing line 17 from values.find{} to cache.get.find{} does not do cache-entry expiration at the time of every single lookup, and now our cache lookup speed is not limited by how fast we can construct new CacheEntry objects, link them to a HashMap and garbage-collect the old ones. Running the new code through YourKit once more showed an immensely better utilization profile for the 8 cores of my laptop’s CPU:

Now we are not spending a bunch of time constructing throw-away objects, and garbage collector activity has dropped by a huge fraction. We can also make much more effective use of the available CPU cores for doing actual cache lookups, instead of busy work!

This was instantly reflected at the metrics I was collecting for the actual demo code. Before the change, the code was doing almost 6000 cache lookups per second:

-- Timers -------------------------------
caching.primes.hashmap.cache-check
             count = 4528121
         mean rate = 5872.91 calls/second
     1-minute rate = 5839.87 calls/second
     5-minute rate = 6053.27 calls/second
    15-minute rate = 6648.47 calls/second
               min = 0.29 milliseconds
               max = 10.25 milliseconds
              mean = 1.34 milliseconds
            stddev = 1.45 milliseconds
            median = 0.62 milliseconds
              75% <= 0.99 milliseconds
              95% <= 4.00 milliseconds
              98% <= 4.59 milliseconds
              99% <= 6.02 milliseconds
            99.9% <= 10.25 milliseconds

After the change to skip cache expiration at cache lookup, and only do cache entry expiration when we are inserting new cache entries, the same timer reported a hugely improved speed for cache lookups:

-- Timers -------------------------------
caching.primes.hashmap.cache-check
             count = 27500000
         mean rate = 261865.50 calls/second
     1-minute rate = 237073.52 calls/second
     5-minute rate = 186223.68 calls/second
    15-minute rate = 166706.39 calls/second
               min = 0.00 milliseconds
               max = 0.32 milliseconds
              mean = 0.02 milliseconds
            stddev = 0.02 milliseconds
            median = 0.02 milliseconds
              75% <= 0.03 milliseconds
              95% <= 0.05 milliseconds
              98% <= 0.05 milliseconds
              99% <= 0.05 milliseconds
            99.9% <= 0.32 milliseconds

That’s more like it. A cache lookup which completes in 0.32 milliseconds for the 99-th percentile of all cache lookups is something I definitely prefer working with. The insight from profiling tools, like YourKit, was instrumental in both understanding what the actual problem was, and verifying that the solution actually had the effect I expected it to have.

That’s why profiling is our friend!