[Vivian Voss (.net)]
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26/09/14
⇒ The Firewall I Never Had to Relearn
A complete home router in twenty-three lines, in a grammar I learned once and have been writing for twenty years. The bill for that arrangement has never arrived. Unix Universe.
26/09/15
⇒ What Was Already Watching
The standard answer to brute force costs a hundred megabytes of interpreter and twenty-seven regular expressions, to work out something the daemon already knew. There are three other answers, and two of them were running before I installed anything. The Bench Marker.
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26/09/21
⇒ The udev Rule That Runs as Root
Six actions make up the entire rule language that decides what my machines show in /dev, and not one of them can execute anything. The other answer to the same problem grew a technique number in the ATT&CK catalogue. Unix Universe.
26/09/23
⇒ The Two Dollars Between dma and the Inbox
A 67-kilobyte program in the base system will send your mail. The invoice is for the part where somebody agrees to accept it. Lean Software.
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26/09/29
⇒ What FreeBSD Charges at the Boundary
A system call on this machine costs fifty-two nanoseconds. The same call in a Linux guest on the very same processor costs eight hundred and sixteen. Neither number is about the kernel type, and that is the finding. The Bench Marker.
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26/09/30
⇒ The Forty-Four Switches on ls
The standard asks ls for 26 switches. This machine gives it 44, and the GNU tree gives it 60. Every single one of them had a reason. Lean Software.
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26/10/12
⇒ Your Precious Linux Binaries Already Run on FreeBSD
Most migrations away from Linux stop at one program that ships only as a Linux binary. FreeBSD has run such programs since 1995, when somebody wanted to play Doom, and today it runs one as a service in a jail without an address, started without a shell and out of reach of the Linux kernel interfaces that attackers have liked best in recent years. Unix Universe.
26/10/13
⇒ Your Edited Config Survives the Upgrade on FreeBSD
On Debian an upgrade stops to ask what to do about every configuration file you have changed, and an unattended one quietly leaves the package behind, security fixes included. RHEL writes the new version beside yours and says nothing. FreeBSD keeps a copy of what it shipped last time and merges both sets of changes on its own. Like for Like.
26/10/14
⇒ What cloud-init Installs to Read One YAML File
A new virtual machine learns who it is, and who may log in, from a note of eleven lines. On Debian 13 the program that reads the note arrives with 46 packages and a Python interpreter. On FreeBSD the reader was in the base system before the machine had a name. Lean Software.
26/10/15
⇒ Your Software Need Not Wait
An operating system release is a promise about the operating system. The stable Linux distributions stretch it over every application on top, and the admin settles the difference with somebody else's repository or a container. FreeBSD has kept two calendars from the start. IT Philosophy.
26/10/16
⇒ CARP Fails Over Without a Daemon
Two FreeBSD machines can share one IP address with two lines of configuration and no process to keep alive, because the heartbeat runs in the kernel, and the same interface speaks VRRPv3 whenever the other side of the switch expects it. Technical Beauty Scope.
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26/10/19
⇒ Ubuntu Replaced Its coreutils
On 15 October 2026 Ubuntu 26.10 shipped with ls, cp, mv, rm and a hundred-odd other commands replaced by a rewrite in Rust, a year after the first wave and six months after the LTS held three of them back. The audit Canonical commissioned found 113 issues in the new tools, and 44 of them became CVEs. On FreeBSD the same commands have lived in one tree with the kernel since 1994, and nobody has ever had to swap them under a running fleet. Unix Universe.
26/10/20
⇒ ufw allow 22 Is a Hundred Rules Deep
Three lines of ufw give an Ubuntu server a firewall, and ufw status reports three rules. The kernel underneath holds a hundred-odd, in more than forty chains, written by a Python script into an iptables compatibility layer that rewrites them for nftables. On FreeBSD the same policy is four lines in pf.conf, they become six rules, and pfctl prints all six back. Like for Like.
26/10/21
⇒ FreeBSD's Base Comes From One Team
A Debian cloud image is 322 packages, drawn from 216 source packages and 94 upstream projects and carried by 129 maintainers, assembled by a distribution. FreeBSD's base system comes from one tree and one team, with nine elected people at the top and one security officer for every supported release, and the difference shows up where bugs live: at the seams. Lean Software.
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26/10/23
⇒ newsyslog Rotates a Log in One Line
FreeBSD rotates its logs with a program written in 1987 that reads one line per file, renames, sends a signal, waits ten seconds and compresses. On Debian the same job for nginx takes eighteen lines and a shell. Technical Beauty Scope.
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