FreeBSD Port-Knocking

Dear Readers,
I repeat the same task every month where I get the chance to craft the editor’s words. It is quite interesting when choosing whether to start with “I hope you are well” or different way, and what to write thereafter. But to me, the most important thing is what you will find in the monthly BSD magazine issues, and if the featured articles will encourage you to start new projects and aid you in choosing your OS or programming direction. I hope that you will not only enjoy reading this month’s issue but also acquire additional knowledge and learn new skills.

INSIDE

In Brief
Ewa & The BSD Team
This column presents the latest news coverage of breaking news, events, product releases, and trending topics from the BSD sector.

Application Observability on SmartOS Using Dtrace Quickstart
Carlos Antonio Neira Bustos
In this article, Carlos takes a look at DTrace and what cool things it could do for you. The first requirement is an application to instrument. He chose a fairly-known application called Minecraft. In his article, you will use DTrace to see what we could observe. But you want to deal with the details on how to create your own scripts and thus, how to create DTrace scripts.

Taking Advantage of LIBC to Write Portable Assembly Programs
Rafael Santiago de Souza Netto
This article will introduce you to using LIBC in IA-32 Assembly code. The C calling convention will be discussed, equipping you, the reader, with the necessary knowledge to interface C code into your Assembly programs. In this article, a sample will be used in a Conway’s Game of Life, fully written in IA-32 Assembly. The discussed code works in FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MINIX, Linux, Solaris and also Windows. The text assumes that the readers have, at least, a basic knowledge of Assembly programming.

FreeBSD Port-Knocking
Abdorrahman Homaei
Port-knocking is not only about opening a port or something like that. You can do whatever you want like executing a special script or something like reverse shell or, etc. This article will show you how to install a Port-Knocking Client/Server, how to configure Port-Knocking Server, and lastly, how to create Reverse-Shell.

Design and Analysis of Object-Oriented Feedback Process Scheduler in User Level
Alexandre Beletti Ferreira and Victor Hugo Panisa Bezerra
Some operating systems need modularity between their components as one of the main factors to implement a microkernel that is both secure and fault tolerant. When we consider dealing with operating system structures as objects, we see that it greatly helps to implement the desired modularity in these systems. The purpose of this article is to present an object-oriented design for a feedback process scheduler that runs on user mode. The authors show the details of the original structured implementation, the new pro-posed design, and show the adopted mechanism to interface the new scheduler and the other servers or even the kernel.

INTERVIEW

Interview with Joshua D. Drake
Ewa & The BSD Team
Joshua D. Drake is the Founder of Command Prompt, Inc. and United States PostgreSQL. Additionally, he is a former Director of Software in the Public Interest, and the current Director of The Postgres Foundation. He has been doing this Open-Source thing since Linux SLS. He is an avid outdoorsman, family man, and a Linux and Postgres lover.

Interview with Steve Wong
Ewa & The BSD Team
Steve Wong is the Director of Storage Product Management at iXsystems, and he served in this role since December 2016. He sometimes gets asked what exactly a product manager does, and depending on who you ask, you may get a slightly different answer. But in general, a product manager has an overall responsibility and accountability for a product line or product lines. In his case, the TrueNAS, FreeNAS Mini, and the FreeNAS Certified product lines are under his team’s responsibilities.

COLUMN
The social implications of technological advancement are often presented in positive terms, yet our core working patterns have slightly changed since the agricultural age. With the increasing expansion of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence into traditionally secure employment sectors, what changes can we expect to see in a society where employment opportunities for the unskilled, semi-skilled and the professional rapidly shrink?
Rob Somerville