Category: English

DNS in FreeBSD 10

Yesterday, I wrote about the local caching resolver we now have in FreeBSD 10. I’ve fielded quite a few questions about it (in email and on IRC), and I realized that although this has been discussed and planned for a long time, most people outside the 50 or so developers who attended one or both of the last two Cambridge summits (201208 and 201308) were not aware of it, and may not understand the motivation.

There are two parts to this. The first is that BIND is a support headache with frequent security advisories and a lifecycle that aligns poorly with our release schedule, so we end up having to support FreeBSD releases containing a discontinued version of BIND. The second part is the rapidly increasing adoption of DNSSEC, which requires a caching DNSSEC-aware resolver both for performance reasons (DNSSEC validation is time-consuming) and to avoid having to implement DNSSEC validation in the libc resolver.

We could have solved the DNSSEC issue by configuring BIND as a local caching resolver, but for the reasons mentioned above, we really want to remove BIND from the base system; hence the adoption of a lightweight caching resolver. An additional benefit of importing LDNS (which is a prerequisite for Unbound) is that OpenSSH can now validate SSHFP records.

Note that the dns/unbound port is not going away, and that users who want to run Unbound as a caching resolver for an entire network rather than just a single machine have the option of either moving their configuration into /var/unbound/unbound.conf, or running the base and port versions side-by-side. This should not be a problem as long as the port version doesn’t try to listen on 127.0.0.1 or ::1.

I’d like to add that since my previous post on the subject, and with the help of readers, developers and users, I have identified and corrected several issues with the initial commit

  • /etc/unbound is now a symlink to /var/unbound. My original intention was to have the configuration files in /etc/unbound and the root anchor, unbound-control keys etc. in /var/unbound, but the daemon needs to access both locations at run-time, not just on start-up, so they must all be inside the chroot. Running the daemon un-chrooted is, of course, out of the question.
  • The init script ordering has been amended so the local_unbound service now starts before most (hopefully all) services that need functioning DNS.
  • resolvconf(8) is now blocked from updating /etc/resolv.conf to avoid failing over from the DNSSEC-aware local resolver to a potentially non-DNSSEC-aware remote resolver in the event of a request returning an invalid record.
  • The configure command line and date / time are no longer included in the binary.

Finally, I just flipped the switch so that BIND is now disabled by default and the LDNS utilities are enabled. The BIND_UTILS and LDNS_UTILS build options are mutually exclusive; in hindsight, I should probably have built and installed the new host(1) as ldns-host(1) so both options could have been enabled at the same time. We don’t yet have a dig(1) wrapper for drill(1), so host(1) is the only actual conflict.

Local caching resolver in FreeBSD 10

As of a few hours ago, all it takes to set up a local caching resolver in FreeBSD 10 is:

# echo local_unbound_enable=yes >>/etc/rc.conf
# service local_unbound start

Yes, it really is that simple—and it works fine with DHCP, too. Hold my beer and watch this:

# pgrep -lf dhclient
1316 dhclient: vtnet0
1265 dhclient: vtnet0 [priv]
# cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by resolvconf
search example.com
nameserver 192.0.2.53
# time host www.freebsd.org
www.freebsd.org is an alias for wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org.
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org has address 8.8.178.110
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org has IPv6 address 2001:1900:2254:206a::50:0
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org mail is handled by 0 .
        0.02 real         0.00 user         0.01 sys

As you can see, we’re running DHCP on a VirtIO network interface. Let’s work our magic:

# echo local_unbound_enable=yes >>/etc/rc.conf
# service local_unbound start
Performing initial setup.
Extracting forwarders from /etc/resolv.conf.
/var/unbound/forward.conf created
/var/unbound/unbound.conf created
/etc/resolvconf.conf created
original /etc/resolv.conf saved as /etc/resolv.conf.20130923.075319
Starting local_unbound.

And presto:

# pgrep -lf unbound
3799 /usr/sbin/unbound -c/var/unbound/unbound.conf
# cat /var/unbound/unbound.conf 
# Generated by local-unbound-setup
server:
        username: unbound
        directory: /var/unbound
        chroot: /var/unbound
        pidfile: /var/run/local_unbound.pid
        auto-trust-anchor-file: /var/unbound/root.key

include: /var/unbound/forward.conf
# cat /var/unbound/forward.conf
# Generated by local-unbound-setup
forward-zone:
        name: .
        forward-addr: 192.0.2.53
# cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by resolvconf
search example.com
# nameserver 192.0.2.53

nameserver 127.0.0.1
options edns0

We can see the cache at work; the first request takes significantly longer than before, but the second is served from cache:

# time host www.freebsd.org
www.freebsd.org is an alias for wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org.
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org has address 8.8.178.110
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org has IPv6 address 2001:1900:2254:206a::50:0
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org mail is handled by 0 .
        0.07 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
# time host www.freebsd.org
www.freebsd.org is an alias for wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org.
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org has address 8.8.178.110
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org has IPv6 address 2001:1900:2254:206a::50:0
wfe0.ysv.freebsd.org mail is handled by 0 .
        0.01 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys

Finally, let’s see how this interacts with DHCP:

# resolvconf -u
# cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by resolvconf
search example.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 192.0.2.53
options edns0

# cat /var/unbound/forward.conf 
# Generated by resolvconf

forward-zone:
        name: "example.com"
        forward-addr: 192.0.2.53

forward-zone:
        name: "."
        forward-addr: 192.0.2.53

Note that resolvconf(8) re-added the 192.0.2.53 entry. It doesn’t really matter, as long as 127.0.0.1 comes first.

[ETA: it does matter—see Jakob Schlyter’s comment below and my reply.]

[ETA: see my followup about the motivation for importing Unbound.]

Backpedaling

The Norwegian Conservative Party didn’t win the election. It doesn’t even have a relative majority—the Labor Party is still hanging on in there. But the sum of nominally conservative representatives is now greater than the sum of nominally socialist representatives, so they’re going to try to scrape together a coalition. Unfortunately, they can’t do so without the support of the brownshirts in the Progress Party, who did very badly in the election—losing a third of their parliament seats—but have petulantly threatened to sabotage any conservative coalition they’re not invited to join.

Said brownshirts are trying very hard to pretend that they’re not really brownshirts, and local and national media are mostly willing to accept that. International media, less so. Some of them have latched onto the fact that Anders Behring Breivik was once a member, which is unfair in the sense that he was never a party official or an elected representative or even a candidate and the Progress Party has never advocated violence. It is, however, spot on in the sense that several prominent members of the Progress Party have repeatedly and unrepentently expressed the same extremist philosophy, and even dabbled in victim blaming. Come election season, Progress Party candidates wring their hands and shed crocodile tears and point to their party program, which carefully wraps the issue in euphemisms about tradition and culture, and call their detractors liars and bullies.

The Conservative Party is now desperately trying to whitewash its brownshirt allies so it can realize its dream of forming the first conservative government in eight years, and the first in 23 years to be led by the Conservative Party. Frankly, it seem a bit too desperate—especially when you consider the fact that it’s in a better position now than the last time it formed a government without the Progress Party.

The Progress Party is effectively trying to blackmail its way into the coalition, and unfortunately, it’s likely to succeed. But I think it’s in for a rude awakening—and given its habitual intransigence, I think the odds are good that the coalition will crumble well before the next election. Fingers crossed.

Growing a VirtualBox disk with ZFS on it

I have a VirtualBox VM on a Windows host with a 32 GB disk. That disk is partitioned with GPT and has four partitions: a boot partition, a swap partition, a smallish UFS root partition, and a ZFS partition. I need more space in the latter, so let’s grow it.

Continue reading “Growing a VirtualBox disk with ZFS on it”

Challenges in Identity Management and Authentication

This was my presentation at the 2012 EuroBSDCon in Warsaw, Poland. I’ve been meaning to write more extensively on this subject, but never got around to it. I just watched through the video twice, and it was a lot less cringe-inducing than I expected (especially when you consider that I was sick and sleep-deprived when I gave it).

Towards the end, I got a question about Apple’s security framework. In my answer, I referred to it as CDDL. That was a slip of the tongue; I was referring to CDSA, which is actually an Open Group specification which Apple implemented and open-sourced. Furthermore, CDSA does not to everything I said it does. However, Apple built their Security Services Framework (described in their Authentication, Authorization and Permissions Guide and various other documents) on top of CDSA; so the combination of CDSA and what Apple added on top does everything from key management to authentication and authorization.

My presentation at the 2013 EuroBSDCon in St Julians, Malta will continue where I left off last year, outlining a concrete solution based on the principles set forth in the second part of last year’s presentation (starting at 32:06).