PC-BSD 10.1.2-RC1 Now Available | Hacker News Reader

PC-BSD 10.1.2-RC1 Now Available

blog.pcbsd.org

37 pointstete6 comments

I am mainly mentioning this, because this release is going to bring a load of privacy and security enhancements:

New PersonaCrypt Utility allows moving all of users $HOME directory to an encrypted USB Drive. This drive can be connected at login, and used across different systems

Stealth Mode allows login to a blank $HOME directory, which is encrypted with a one-time GELI key. This $HOME directory is then discarded at logout, or rendered unreadable after a reboot

Tor mode switches the firewall to running transparent proxy, blocking all traffic except what is routed through Tor

Migrated to IPFW firewall for enabling VIMAGE in 10.2

New PersonaCrypt Utility allows moving all of users $HOME directory to an encrypted USB Drive.

This is really a terrific idea with large/fast USB 3.0 drives becoming the norm.

I'm not sure. If your goal of carrying your data with you is that you don't trust it to stay secure on a system, then plugging in your USB stick to the computer seems like a security risk right there. Once you decrypt it, another person could have some kernel stuff running that grabs all your home data at that time. If you trust the box, you may as well leave your data there with regular encrypted home folders.

For the general idea of you having multiple computers and wanting to use the same home folder on each of them, then the encrypted USB stick would be a nice safeguard against accidentally losing said stick (prevents the finder from reading it. As if even 1:1,000 random people would even be able to read a UFS or ZFS stick :P - of course, you should still encrypt anyway for that case.)

Still a cool feature though.

I think your second use case is probably the intended one. E.g I have several computers at home and work that are all "trusted" and I want to conveniently plug in my home directory on whichever one I'm using.

Those are some awesome features. I'll have to give PC-BSD a try again, last time I played with it was about a year ago. I doubt I'll use it as a main desktop anytime soon, but I am glad they've got some development inertia.

To be honest on desktop hardware... or laptop to be more precise you might or might not be lucky. A lot of stuff changed in that area for FreeBSD (and the other BSDs too actually, despite them all having their own kernels).

So if you end up not being lucky just know that a lot of things already have been working nicely in FreeBSD 11 for a while, which isn't released yet. It will still take a while until it is released, but if you just want to play with it it actually is a viable option and there are people running the -CURRENT branch on their main desktops.

It's probably not too fun though if you don't know the system yet.

FreeBSD 11 schedule can be found here btw:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html

And one more side note: A FreeBSD 10.x Release might actually bring a lot of new hardware support much earlier. It is also way more stable. It's called 10-STABLE branch for a reason. :)

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.2R/schedule.html

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