Category Archives: FreeBSD

Stepping down from portmgr

Posted by on April 19, 2016 No comments

Almost to the day, 13 years ago I was elected as a voting member of portmgr, after several years as portmgr secretary. Time has come to take a break, knowing that I leave the ports infrastructure in good hands of the current team. Over the years, many things have changed. I’m especially glad to see how easy it has become to maintain a FreeBSD system without compiling anything, with the new pkg(8) frontend and poudriere(8) backend, which is also used in the build cluster. There are still a lot of ideas for improvements, and I’m looking forward to see what the team will come up with.

For me, it’s time to focus on other areas. While you won’t see me as much in FreeBSD channels and conferences, you’ll meet me more often in DNS related fora within ICANN, CENTR, DNS-OARC, and IETF.

It’s been, and still is, a great pleasure to be part of the FreeSBD community of portmgr, committers, and contributors, and I promise to no be a stranger. Safe winds!

FreeBSD Developer Summit – BSDCan 2014 – Ports and Packages WG

Posted by on July 16, 2014 No comments

Baptiste Daroussin started the session with a status update on package building. All packages are now built with poudriere. The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored some large machines on which it takes around 16 hours to build a full tree. Each Wednesday at 01:00UTC the tree is snapshot and an incremental build is started for all supported released, the 2 stable branches (9 and 10) and quarterly branches for 9.x-RELEASE and 10.x-RELEASE. The catalogue is signed on a dedicated signing machine before upload. Packages can be downloaded from 4 mirrors (us-west, us-east, UK, and Russia) and feedback so far has been very positive.

He went on to note that ports people need better coordination with src people on ABI breakage. We currently only support i386 and amd64, with future plans for ARM and a MIPS variant. Distfiles are not currently mirrored (since fixed), and while it has seen no progress, it’s still a good idea to build a pkg of the ports tree itself.

pkg 1.3 will include a new solver, which will help 'pkg upgrade' understand that an old packages needs to be replaced with a newer one, with no more need for 'pkg set' and other chicanery. Cross building ports has been added to the ports tree, but is waiting for pkg-1.3. All the dangerous operations in pkg have now been sandboxed as well.

EOL for pkg_tools has been set for September 1st. An errata notice has gone out that adds a default pkg.conf and keys to all supported branches, and nagging delays have been added to ports.

Quarterly branches based on 3 month support cycle has been started on an evaluation basis. We’re still unsure about the manpower needed to maintain those. Every quarter a snapshot of the tree is created and only security fixed, build and runtime fixed, and upgrades to pkg are allowed to be committed to it. Using the MFH tag in a commit message will automatically send an approval request to portmgr and an mfh script on Tools/ makes it easy to do the merge.

Experience so far has been good, some minor issues to the insufficient testing. MFHs should only contain the above mentioned fixes; cleanups and other improvements should be done in separate commits only to HEAD. A policy needs to be written and announced about this. Do we want to automatically merge VuXML commits, or just remove VuXML from the branch and only use the one in HEAD?

A large number of new infrastructure changes have been introduces over the past few months, some of which require a huge migration of all ports. To speed these changes up, a new policy was set to allow some specific fixes to be committed without maintainer approval. Experience so far has been good, things actually are being fixed faster than before and not many maintainers have complained. There was agreement that the list of fixes allowed to be committed without explicit approval should be a specific whitelist published by portmgr, and not made too broad in scope.

Erwin Lansing quickly measured the temperature of the room on changing the default protocol for fetching distils from MASTER_SITE_BACKUP from ftp to http. Agreement all around and erwin committed the change.

Ben Kaduk gave an introduction and update on MIT’s Athena Environment with some food for thought. While currently not FreeBSD based, he would like to see it become so. Based on debian/ubuntu and rolled out on hundreds of machines, it now has it’s software split into about 150 different packages and metapackages.

Dag-Erling Smørgrav discussed changes to how dependencies are handled, especially splitting dependencies that are needed at install time (or staging time) and those needed at run time. This may break several things, but pkg-1.3 will come with better dependency tracking solving part of the problem.

Ed Maste presented the idea of “package transparency”, loosely based on Google’s Certificate Transparency. By logging certificate issuance to a log server, which can be publicly checked, domain owners can search for certificates issued for their domains, and notice when a certificate is issued without their authority. Can this model be extended to packages? Mostly useful for individually signed packages, while we currently only sign the catalogue. Can we do this with the current infrastructure?

Stacy Son gave an update on Qemu user mode, which is now working with Qemu 2.0.0. Both static and dynamic binaries are supported, though only a handful of system call are supported.

Baptiste introduced the idea of having pre-/post-install scripts be a library of services, like Casper, for common actions. This reduces the ability of maintainers to perform arbitrary actions and can be sandboxed easily. This would be a huge security improvement and could also enhance performance.

Cross building is coming along quite well and most of the tree should be able to be build by a simple 'make package'. Major blockers include perl and python.

Bryan Drewery talked about a design for a PortsCI system. The idea is that committer easily can schedule a build, be it an exp-run, reference, QAT, or other, either via a web interface or something similar to a pull request, which can fire off a build.

Steve Wills talked about using Jenkins for ports. The current system polls SVN for commits and batches several changes together for a build. It uses 8 bhyve VMs instances, but is slow. Sean Bruno commented that there are several package building clusters right now, can they be unified? Also how much hardware would be needed to speed up Jenkins? We could duse Jenkins as a fronted for the system Bryan just talked about. Also, it should be able to integrate with phabricator.

Erwin opened up the floor to talk about freebsd-version(1) once more. It was introduced as a mechanism to find out the version of user land currently running as uname -r only represents the kernel version, and would thus miss updates of the base system that do no touch the kernel. Unfortunately, freebsd-version(1) cannot really be used like this in all cases, it may work for freebsd-update, but not in general. No real solution was found this time either.

The session ended with a discussion about packaging the base system. It’s a target for FreeBSD 11, but lots of questions are still to be answered. What granularity to use? What should be packages into how many packages? How to handle options? Where do we put the metadata for this? How do upgrades work? How to replace shared libraries in multiuser mode? This part also included the quote of the day: “Our buildsystem is not a paragon of configurability, but a bunch of hacks that annoyed people the most.”

Thanks to all who participated in the working group, and thanks again to DK Hostmaster for sponsoring my trip to BSDCan this year, and see you at the Ports and Packages WG meet up at EuroBSDCon in Sofia in September.

FreeBSD Developer Summit – BSDCan 2014 – DNS WG

Posted by on July 16, 2014 1 comment

The DNS Working Group at the FreeBSD Developer Summit at BSDCan this year was off to a good start by noticing that DNSSEC validation could not work on the University of Ottawa’s wireless network. The university’s resolvers added additional records to the root zone, thus failing validation at the root. This led to some discussion on how to provide a user-friendly way to explain this in an understandable way to the user and giver the user a choice of turning off validation or find another network. This certainly is going to be a major problem when turning on validation by default as broken resolvers are very common at hotels, coffee shops, etc. etc.

On a more positive note, all the FreeBSD projects zones are DNSSEC signed and all project-owned servers have SSHFP records in the zone. Dog food was eaten.

Dag-Erling Smørgrav started off by giving an overview of the current state of affairs. ldns and unbound are imported into base in HEAD and 10.x. unbound is meant to act as a local resolver only and as it is not linked to libevent, it will not scale to anything else. For a network-wide resolver or any other configuration, it is recommended to install unbound from ports. DES further went into some of the implementation details on how the base unbound is installed to make sure it does not conflict with an unbound installed from ports.

DES explained some issues he encountered with local and RFC1918 zones which are filtered by default by unbound. Others reported no issues with the right configuration options, so more investigation is needed.

Some people reported having difficulty getting patches accepted upstream by NLNetLabs, which gave some cause for concern as we clearly want a good and active working relationship with our DNS vendor. Others reported no problem working with NLNetLabs, quite the opposite, they are very interested to see the work going on in operation systems, so we’ll just need to build upon that relationship and make sure to invite them to the next WG meeting. Patches that are currently being worked on, DES has some code cleanups, Björn a DNS64 feature, should be submitted through the “normal” submission process and review with NLNetLabs and we’ll see how that goes.

Erwin Lansing started the brainstorm session on future work. Some command line tools would be nice to have; drill does most things one wants, but people are too used to writing dig and dig has many more options; Peter Wemm would like to see contrib scripts line ldns-dane, which are just really easy to use; the control socket should be a unix socket, there’s a patch floating around and should be submitted upstream.

The “Starbucks” problem came up again, with a proposal to turn on val-permissive-mode by default. Another solution may be by looking at how unbound-trigger does its magic.

After a coffee break, Peter Losher, ISC, went over some of the recent changes at ISC. BIND10 development has been handed over to a new project and ISC will concentrate on BIND9 and a stand-alone project for the DHCP component. BIND 9.10 was recently released and plans are in place for 9.11. ISC is open to suggestions and feature requests.

Peter brought up the topic of clientID for which a IETF draft (draft-edns0-client-subnet) is available. This would help client find the nearest CDN node, etc. ISC wants this to be an opt-out in operating systems as it will peel off a layer of anonymisation, and should be controllable by the user.

Next up was Michael Bentkofsky, Verisign, who, while not involved in the project himself, gave an introduction into the getDNS API, which is a replacement for getaddrinfo and allows the stub resolver to get validation information down at the client level. It’s available in ports. The discussion went into more of a brainstorm on how applications should get DNS and DNSSEC information and who gets to make decisions about its security. There should be a clear separation between policy and mechanism, where application programmers should not have to worry about this; it should be a system policy. There should be a higher level API where an application basically can ask the operating system for a “connection” and the operation system takes care of everything behind the scenes, DNS, DNSSEC, SSL, DANE, etc. and just return a socket, with some information on how the connection was established and which security mechanisms were used. In FreeBSD, it would make sense to let the Casper daemon hand out the different sub-tasks to ensure all lookups, cryptography, etc. are properly compartmentalised. One potential problem with passing on additional information is that all DNS lookups currently go through nsswitch, which would need to grow knowledge about that data as well. Are people still using other mechanisms for hostname lookups besides the hosts file and DNS? We can probably just remove nsswitch for the hostname lookups.

The session ended with some aims for the 11.0 release. We’ll need to have a wider discussion about the aforementioned removal of nsswitch out of the hostname lookups. We’ll also need a better understanding of what API capabilities applications may need. Can Casper provide all these? Can it run unbound behind the scenes to do all the DNS “stuff” for it? Can we capsicumize unbound and will that be accepted upstream? Enough food for thought and even more for writing code.

Thanks again to DK Hostmaster for sponsoring my trip to BSDCan this year, and see you at the DNS WG meet up at EuroBSDCon in Sofia in September.

Vendor Summit at EuroBSDCon 2013

Posted by on August 9, 2013 No comments

For the third year in a row, we’ll be organizing a Vendor Summit during the Developer Summit prior to the EuroBSDCon conference, this year in Malta on September 26 and 27. In previous years, we’ve had a number of presentations by companies, like NETASQ, pfSense and Netflix, on how they successfully built their products and services on top of FreeBSD, and how contributing code back to the community actually can save them money in the long term by reducing internal maintenance costs.

This year, I’d like to change to focus more towards an open discussion between vendors and other large consumers, not only so you can learn from each other, but also so the FreeBSD community can learn more on how their product is used. We’ve long heard that binary packages were the Achilles heal of FreeBSD. Are we on the right track with PKGNG? Java-support is another issue, but is there anything else you are missing that maybe some other company may have an existing solution for they may be able to contribute, but hadn’t thought about anyone else was looking for? Or maybe you have an problem that’s too big for one company to fix, but can be fixed if some of you together fund a project to do so. The FreeBSD Foundation might be able to help.

This is an invitation-only event, please contact me at erwin@freebsdfoundation.org if you would like to attend. If you have anything to present or any topic you would like to discuss, please contact me as well. This will be an informal event, but we welcome a few short presentations.

Ports and Packages Summit at EuroBSDCon 2013

Posted by on August 9, 2013 No comments

The FreeBSD project has provided pre-built ready-to-install binary packages for many years on a best-effort basis. While these packages do work in a large number of cases, there are too many inconsistencies and failure combinations, from the unpredictable update frequency to dependency handling across upgrades, for them to be used on a wider scale. After many months of work, we’re nearing a paradigm shift in both the format of the packages, and the building and distribution of the packages with the new PKGNG tools.

At the upcoming Developer Summit at the EuroBSDCon conference in Malta on September 26 and 27, there will be another Ports and Packages Summit, which will center on a round-table brainstorm that begins with a summary of the tremendous progress made in the last 12 months, and closes with a discussion of the roadmap on how to improve binary package creation, distribution, installation and upgrading. Please contact me if you have any topics you’d like to present or discuss. It will be an informal gathering, no formal slides or presentations are required.

As always, the DevSummit is an invitation-only event, so also contact me at erwin@FreeBSD.org if you want to participate.

3 weeks left to Ports and Packages Summit at EuroBSDCon

Posted by on September 26, 2012 No comments

With only three weeks to go, we so far have 7 people registered for the Ports and Packages Summit during the DevSummit at EuroBSDCon in Warsaw.
I’m sure that can’t be right. If you intend to come, please register (by sending an email to me) as soon as possible. If you don’t intend to come, please reconsider.

So far we have 4 main topics to discuss in 2 1,5 hour slots:
– Status of the move to subversion
– Status of the implementation and uptake of the new package tools
– Status and proposed schedule for scheduled releases of binary packages
– Quality assurance in all shapes and forms: QAT, redports, pointyhat

Please send any topics you’d like to discuss, presentations to present, and other items that should go on the schedule to me in the next week or two so I can prepare a draft agenda at least a week before.

Thank you and see you there!

FOSDEM 2012

Posted by on January 31, 2012 No comments

In a few days, I’ll be heading to the FOSDEM conference in Brussels again this year. On Saturday, you’ll most likely find me around the FreeBSD booth representing the FreeBSD Foundation, so if you’re there drop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation’s work, pick up a Foundation flyer, check out the swag, or make a donation. On Sunday, I’ll be in the BSD DevRoom where there will be some interesting presentations and discussions. Remember, FOSDEM is free to attend. Hope to see you there!

Note to self: IPv6 on Hetzner

Posted by on June 20, 2011 No comments

Hetzner has a strange IPv6 routing setup where the default gateway is not in the same subnet as the host. Clearly, this is to avoid wasting space on glue nets, but it does not look pretty. Obviously, Linux just ignores the fact that it isn’t supposed to work, but no such luck on FreeBSD. As Bitmand wrote some time ago, it can be solved with a static route but the FreeBSD startup scripts, apply the default route before static routes, leaving it no other option but to reject the default route as it has no route to its target at that time. Instead of hacking the startup scripts, this can be solved easier with two static routes with fixed order, which is still a hack though not as ugly and less error prone when upgrading the system files. For reference, especially for myself next time I need this, here’s my full ipv6 startup configuration:

rc.conf:
ipv6_enable="YES"
ipv6_default_interface="re0"
ipv6_static_routes="defgw def"
ipv6_route_defgw="2a01:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX::1/59 -prefixlen 59 -iface re0"
ipv6_route_def="default 2a01:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX::1"
ipv6_ifconfig_re0="2a01:YYYY:YYYY:YYYY::2/64"

systctl.conf
net.inet6.ip6.accept_rtadv=1

Summary of the FreeBSD Ports and Packages Summit at BSDCan 2011

Posted by on May 14, 2011 No comments

Just a quick note to point to my slides that summarize the Ports and Packages Summit at the FreeBSD DevSummit during BSDCan 2011, which can be found here. Also, we looking forward to feedback on the PKGNG project that was announced earlier and will replace the current pkg_* tools to handle ports installation and package handling and which will be a focus for portmgr over the next few months.

FOSDEM 2011

Posted by on January 14, 2011 No comments

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading to the FOSDEM conference in Brussels again this year. I’ll spend most of my time at the FreeBSD booth for the FreeBSD Foundation, so if you’re there drop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation’s work, pick up a Foundation flyer, check out the swag, or make a donation. There will also be a BSD DevRoom where there will be some interesting presentations and discussions that I might attend. Remember, FOSDEM is free to attend. Hope to see you there!