martes, 30 de diciembre de 2008

FreeBSD: Foundation Fundraising Update

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce we are only $38,000 away from our 2008 fundraising goal of $300,000! We have received so many donations in the last few weeks. We want to thank everyone who has made a donation. By donating to the foundation, you are helping to support the FreeBSD Project and community.


(more...)

jueves, 25 de diciembre de 2008

FreeBSD 6.4 CDs/DVDs Now Shipping from FreeBSDMall

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.4-based products. The four CD set and DVD are now shipping to subscribers around the world.

If you haven't yet placed your order, you may do so at http://www.freebsdmall.com.

You may also elect to start your subscription with the upcoming 7.1 release.

(more...)

Jemdoc - A Tool For Creating Static HTML Pages

Jemdoc is a python script, which processes files written in jemdoc’s syntax (which is far much easier than html) to generate clean XHTML 1.1 compliant static html webpages. Ah, and the most important fact about Jemdoc: It’s free (as in free speech).


(more...)

FreeBSD 7.1-RC2 Available

FreeBSD 7.1-RC2 is now available, the second of the Release Candidates. Unless an as yet undiscovered show-stopper comes along the release itself will be anywhere from a week to two weeks from now. We *might* be doing it next week since the release test cycle has gone on for quite a while now and the latest thing that delayed the release was a Security Advisory (SAs don't typically get or need much in the way of public
testing). The traffic we're seeing on the lists and in Gnats is certainly stuff we'll pay attention to and deal with but isn't quite severe enough to warrant further delaying an already severely delayed release.


(more...)

viernes, 19 de diciembre de 2008

5 Ways To Create Custom Multiple Signatures In GMail

Has Google missed the tree because of the forest? Gmail has done a lot for unwrapping email from the staid “click and send”. It enables us to do many things such as collect our mails from several POP3 accounts, configure some custom addresses with a dot here and there…but it just plain ‘forgot’ to put in a box to add multiple HTML Gmail signatures...

Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux released

Adobe Systems has released Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux. Adobe Air 1.5 is main component in Adobe Flash platform and it enables framework and support for web developers (HTML, JavaScript, Flex) for running Web applications without browser.

Now, web developers can use Adobe Air 1.5 framework for developing applications that will work as native on Linux, Windows and MacOS.

(more...)

martes, 16 de diciembre de 2008

NVIDIA on PcBSD

"PcBSD has full support from NVIDIA, so if you are using NVIDIA graphic card you souldn't have problem with that. But, usually if you just buy a new NVIDIA graphic card its no driver avalaible on the installation DVD. To get the newest driver you can go to NVIDIA download page.

Just download the suitable driver for your graphic card, and install it. Its little different with Linux systems, on Linux systems you have to use run level 3 to install NVIDIA driver. But on PcBSD systems, just open your konsole, extract the compressed file, and install it."

(more...)

NetBSD feature end-of-life announcement: soft dependencies

Soft dependencies, also known as soft updates or softdep, is a method of maintaining file system integrity across an unscheduled system shutdown. It improves file system performance by allowing metadata writes to the file system to take place asynchronously. Soft dependencies was introduced with NetBSD 1.5.

The upcoming 5.0 release of NetBSD will include an alternative technology contributed by Wasabi Systems Inc.: Write Ahead Physical Block Logging, or logging. Logging will provide a feature set and performance profile superior to soft dependencies. One compelling advantage is that file systems using it need not be checked with the fsck utility after an unscheduled system shutdown.

(more...)

domingo, 14 de diciembre de 2008

Stopping SSH & FTP brute force attacks with IPFW

Brute force attacks are becoming more and more common in todays security landscape; if you receive security cron logs from your FreeBSD server you will know exactly what I mean. These attacks usually use automated software to try thousands of username and password combinations on SSH and FTP, continually aiming to find a weak account on your system and exploit it.

If an attacker can get access to one system account, that is the first step to doing some very bad things on your system, a nightmare for users and administrators. Luckily, there is a way to stop these attacks, and they’re freely available in the ports collection.

IPTables on Linux has the ability to dynamically add rules to block brute force attacks, however IPFW, a widely used firewall and packet filter, does not have an ability. We are forced to turn to look for 3rd party apps, lucky for us there are some very good ones out there, and we will look at 2 here.

sábado, 13 de diciembre de 2008

3 reasons why you should let Google host jQuery for you

http://encosia.com

Best Backup Solutions for Desktop Linux

Despite common misconceptions, there are more solid backup solutions for desktop Linux than most people might suspect. Best of all, many of them are completely free with the code being open source. Some of them however, are not.

In this piece, I will give you a break down of each of them. How they can work in your specific situation, where you will find the applications, and I'll provide the needed details so that you can better decide what option is best for you.


Move Over Eclipse. NetBeans 6 Rocks!

Ok, I admit the title is a bit inflammatory to Eclipse fans. But after working with NetBeans 6 over the last week, I have to say I am very impressed. This is not simply a minor upgrade, as is so common in IDEs these days even when they are given a new major version number. Quite the contrary, NetBeans 6 is a major new release, and a major improvement over NetBeans 5.5.


(more...)

NetBeans 6.5 review

During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio.

What features does NetBeans 6.5 have for PHP developers? How does it compare against Zend Studio for Eclipse?

(more...)

10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming

PHP programming has climbed rapidly since its humble beginnings in 1995. Since then, PHP has become the most popular programming language for Web applications. Many popular websites are powered by PHP, and an overwhelming majority of scripts and Web projects are built with the popular language.

Because of PHP’s huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.

(more...)

Tripwire: Linux Host Based Intrusion Detection System

Tripwire is a host based Intrusion detection system for Linux. Tripwire monitors Linux system to detect and report any unauthorized changes to the files and directories. Once a baseline is created, tripwire monitors and detects, which file is added, which file is changed, what is changed, who changed it, and when it was changed. If the changes are legitimate, you can update the tripwire database to accept these changes.

This step by step instruction guide explains how to install and configure open source version of tripwire.

Software RAID in FreeBSD

FreeBSD provides a helpful tool to manage software RAID with ATA deivces. This tool provides features such as hot swapping ATA RAID devices, which was previously unheard of. This functionality and features will be elaborated here.

(more...)

How To Install FreeBSD 7.x From USB

I have the horrible habit of not putting a label on a CD after I’ve burned it. This leads to having a stack of CDs and not knowing which does what. This was my problem recently when installing FreeBSD, so I decided to start using USB based installations where possible. I prefer the multiple-write capability of USB, and this way I don’t waste CDs.


(more...)

miércoles, 10 de diciembre de 2008

Foundation End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive Update

Dear FreeBSD Community,

First, we would like to thank everyone who has donated to the FreeBSD Foundation this year. We have raised $198,583 towards our 2008 goal of $300,000! We are almost 2/3 of the way to reaching our goal!

Like most non-profits, we are seeing the affects of the weak economy. This time last year we had raised $346,587. By meeting our goal this year will allow us to continue the same amount of support next year, as well as continue to invest some of the funds.

Why do we need donations?

The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide software that may be used for any purpose -- and without strings attached. Our mission is to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Our funding comes from people like you – those who are determined to keep FreeBSD free!

(more...)

FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 Available

"FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 is now available, the first of the Release Candidates. There will be at least one more Release Candidate before the release so the release itself is likely around 3 weeks from now IF no new show-stoppers are uncovered during testing."

(more...)

lunes, 8 de diciembre de 2008

OpenVPN - creating a routed VPN

"In this article, I will show you how I created a routed VPN using OpenVPN. In this network, multiple clients can attach to the server, each of which has access to the network attached to the server. Each client can also contact any other client, subject to firewall rules.

In my case, I wanted a way for all my servers (on the internet, in data centers) to contact my CVS repository behind my firewall at home. Given that home has a dynamic IP address, it complicates matters. A VPN solves this issue and provides several benefits."

OpenVPN - getting it running

"This article is about OpenVPN, a full-featured open source SSL VPN solution. I first started using OpenVPN in December 2006. That is nearly two years ago. I took some notes but I never published anything until today. My original use for OpenVPN was easy access to my home network while away from home. For this is was wonderful. Being able to ssh "directly" to my machines, cvsup, etc, was very convenient."

Creating your own Certificate Authority

"In this article, I write about creating your own Certificate Authority (CA) and generating certificates and keys for an OpenVPN server and multiple clients. It is based around the the OpenVPN How To and the README provided with that package.

There is an abundance of material for creating a CA. Why bother? I bother because getting this right is easy. It's easy if you know the goals and how to accomplish them. However, getting there is often trial and error. I don't want to do the error bit the next time I need to do this. The added bonus is neither do you. You can use these steps."

Cutting Edge Browsers and Their Development Tools

"This is a hot time in the world of browsers. Despite a rocky morning, Firefox 3 got over 8 million downloads when it was released. It’s up to over 24 million now. I bet many of you are amongst these downloaders, I know I was =)

I bet many of you do your web design and development in Firefox. Things just seem to behave as you expect them to in Firefox. Plus, it has a wealth of invaluable development tools like the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. If you have never heard of or aren’t currently using Firebug, I did an introductory screencast for it you can check out.

The ability to view and manipulate the entire DOM of a web page after it is rendered is crazy powerful. I’m not sure if Firebug was the first tool ever created to do this (I doubt it), but it has certainly popularized it. The way that it works, being part of the browser itself, has started a new paradigm of browser-specific development tools. Let’s take a look at all the browsers and their latest offerings."

domingo, 7 de diciembre de 2008

New channel on YouTube for BSD technical talks

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a dedicated YouTube channel for technical lectures about FreeBSD and other BSD operating systems :

http://www.youtube.com/bsdconferences

This channel allows us to post full hour long lectures from FreeBSD conferences. The first four videos that Julian Elisher recorded at MeetBSD 2008 have been posted :

Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability, Brooks Davis, MeetBSD 2008
BSD Certification, Dru Lavigne, MeetBSD 2008
Embedding FreeBSD, Warner Losh, MeetBSD 2008
FreeBSD Foundation Update & Recognition, Robert Watson, MeetBSD 2008

This channel provides the rich YouTube API for extracting and embedding these videos in other websites. You can also simply subscribe to the RSS feed in your feedreader to be notified when new videos are posted. Work is ongoing to integrate the video content here with the multimedia area of the FreeBSD web site.

If you have video content from a previous BSD conference that you would like to see added to this channel, please let me know.

Thanks to the Google Open Source Program Office for their help in setting up this special channel for the BSD community.


- Murray


FreeBSD ports that you maintain which are currently marked broken

Dear FreeBSD port maintainer:

As part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of problems in the FreeBSD ports system, we periodically notify users of ports that are marked as "broken" in their Makefiles. In many cases these ports are failing to compile on some subset of the FreeBSD build environments. The most common problem is that recent versions of -CURRENT include gcc4.2, which is much stricter than older versions.

The next most common problem is that compiles succeed on the i386 architecture (e.g. the common Intel PC), but fail on one or more of the other architectures due to assumptions about things such as size of various types, byte-alignment issues, and so forth.


(more...)

sábado, 29 de noviembre de 2008

Build a Samba PDC with LDAP backend

"This will not let you authenticate ssh users just a plain samba server for your windows clients."

(more...)

FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE. At this time 6.4-RELEASE is expected to be the last of the 6-STABLE releases. Some of the highlights:

- New and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client
- Support for the Camellia cipher
- boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes
- DVD install ISO images for amd64/i386
- KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3
- Updates for BIND, sendmail, OpenPAM, and others

(more...)

lunes, 24 de noviembre de 2008

FreeBSD-SA-08:11.arc4random

Topic: arc4random(9) predictable sequence vulnerability

Category: core
Module: sys
Announced: 2008-11-24
Credits: Robert Woolley, Mark Murray, Maxim Dounin, Ruslan Ermilov
Affects: All supported versions of FreeBSD.
Corrected: 2008-11-24 17:39:39 UTC (RELENG_7, 7.1-PRERELEASE)
2008-11-24 17:39:39 UTC (RELENG_7_0, 7.0-RELEASE-p6)
2008-11-24 17:39:39 UTC (RELENG_6, 6.4-STABLE)
2008-11-24 17:39:39 UTC (RELENG_6_4, 6.4-RELEASE)
2008-11-24 17:39:39 UTC (RELENG_6_3, 6.3-RELEASE-p6)
CVE Name: CVE-2008-5162

For general information regarding FreeBSD Security Advisories, including descriptions of the fields above, security branches, and the following sections, please visit .

(more...)

domingo, 16 de noviembre de 2008

Official FreeBSD Forums

Dear FreeBSD users,

The FreeBSD project is finally, after much work, pleased to announce the
availability of an official FreeBSD web based discussion forum. It is our hope that this forum will serve as a public support channel for FreeBSD users around the world and as a complement to our fine mailing lists.

You can register and start using our new service here:

http://forums.FreeBSD.org

The structure of the forum is still in a late beta stage, so if you have ideas, suggestions for improvements or bug reports, send them to: forum-moderators at FreeBSD dot org.

(more...)


Flash 9 for FreeBSD 7.1

"I hear the cheers already... Flash 9 for FreeBSD at last! And I don't mean having to run a Windows or Linux browser — Flash 9 in native Firefox 3. FreeBSD's linux emulation layer has undergone some upgrades recently, and as of FreeBSD 7.1 it is able to provide enough kernel support to get the linux Flash player version 9 running. Very good indeed, and hopefully it'll hold us out until Adobe create official native FreeBSD support (assuming that rumour comes true). Note: this only works on i386 and AMD64 platforms."

(more...)

Foundation Project Announcement

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce one of the projects from the accepted project proposals!

The project is to make FreeBSD tolerate the removal of active disk devices, such as when a USB flash device with a mounted filesystems is physically detached by a user. Currently the system may panic in this situation. The work involves adding proper reference counting to strategic portions of the kernel and modifying filesystems to properly handle "device lost" errors.

Edward Tomasz Napierala is the developer working on this project...

lunes, 3 de noviembre de 2008

FreeBSD 6.4-RC2 available

"The second Release Candidate for FreeBSD 6.4 is now available. FreeBSD 6.4-RC2 should be the last of the public test builds for the FreeBSD 6.4 release cycle. Unless a big show-stopper is found from this round of testing we should begin the 6.4-RELEASE builds in about a week and a half. We encourage you to test out 6.4-RC2 and report any problems by submitting PRs or via email to the freebsd-stable list."

(more...)

sábado, 1 de noviembre de 2008

How to mount Linux filesystem under FreeBSD

Here's a brief how-to.

Video review of OpenBSD 4.4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaZv9hZBLzw


viernes, 31 de octubre de 2008

A How-to Guide to Migrating a Website to WordPress

Over the past few months, I have been working with a client converting his existing Website into a site built on WordPress.

I am writing this post to document the steps I took in this process, both to record for myself (something I can refer to on future projects) and to help other people who want to migrate a site onto WordPress.

I also hope that people with more experience in this will comment on this post to help make it more comprehensive.

(more...)

PC-BSD 7.0.1 Released!

After much hard work and testing the PC-BSD Team is happy to announce the availability of PC-BSD 7.0.1, i.e. the first upgrade in the 7 series, with FreeBSD 7.0 under the hood.

Version 7.0.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the changes are:

* KDE 4.1.2
* AMD64 version
* NTFS write support
* Adobe Flash 9 support (Linux -flashplugin9)
* Better WIFI support
* Updates to the System Updater

(changelog)

OpenBSD 4.4 RELEASED

"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.4. This is our 24th release on CD-ROM (and 25th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install."

(more...)

domingo, 19 de octubre de 2008

FreeBSD 7.1-BETA2 Available

"As the next step in the release cycle for FreeBSD 7.1 builds for FreeBSD 7.1-BETA2 are now available for testing."

(more...)

sábado, 18 de octubre de 2008

Linux: Using more than 3 GB of RAM

"Just like Windows, the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Linux has a serious defect: does not support more than 3 GB of RAM. A quantity of memory, while a few years ago could be labeled under the genre Unbelievable (regarding the home PC), today is not difficult to find in many computer geek, all over the world.
That is why urgent to put a "patch" to the problem, then, rimbocchiamoci their sleeves and "armiamoci" terminal because there will be long hours to move seamlessly between commands and incomprehensible decisions that could undermine the stability of the PC. There are cascati? Do not worry, it was only a joke: Use more than 3 GB of RAM is possible in a handful of minutes, following the simple steps below".


Why FreeBSD Is My Favorite *nix OS

webmastersbydesign.com

No cost FreeBSD shell accounts online

"Having an online *BSD shell account is great for experimenting with BSD, network debugging or testing environments. There is a number of shell providers available for different flavours of BSD."

(more...)

pkg_trans progress

Ivan Voras, wrote:

"Some time ago I've written about an idea to extend the standard
ports/package infrastructure with "transactions". Here are some notes on it:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/IvanVoras/PkgTransProposal

I've been working on it, and the code itself appears to have severely
bad karma, being twice almost completely lost in hardware or software
failures, so I'm publishing it now so it doesn't get lost again :)

The build tree is at

http://people.freebsd.org/~ivoras/big/pkg_install.tgz

To use it:

* Extract it somewhere
* Run make in the created directory
* su to root
* Run make install"

(more...)


Benchmarking Wine 1.1.2 on FreeBSD 7.0

"I installed some benchmarks into Wine 1.1.2 on FreeBSD and gave them another run today to see what gains I would see over the last benchmarks that I ran. The last time the benchmarks were run on FreeBSD 7.0 Beta 2 and Nvidia driver Version: 100.14.19 that was edited so it would install and run on FreeBSD 7 bets 2."

(more...)

Setup and Anonymous FTP server on FreeBSD

To test the speed differences between SFTP and FTP I decided to setup an anonymous FTP server on my trusted old 266 Mhz Celeron running FreeBSD 7.0.

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) provides a simple and classic method for transferring files from one computer to another across the internet.

FreeBSD base install includes FTP server software, namely ftpd.

I'm fully aware of the security implications regarding FTP's transmission of usernames and passwords in clear text hence the choice of an anonymous FTP server in real-only mode.


Tuning FreeNAS & ZFS

I am running FreeNAS 0.7 (rev. 3514) since several weeks as my 'production' server at home on a Mini-ITX Atom based system (see FreeNAS 0.7 on a Intel D945GCLF).

I've done some tuning of FreeBSD and ZFS with good experiences (good performance, no panics, etc.).

Here is what I've done...


NetBSD 4.0.1 Released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that update 4.0.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 4.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 4.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons, no new features have been added.

How to install PC-BSD 7 in VMware Fusion

This tutorial will guide you every step of the way through installing PC-BSD 7 in VMware Fusion (version 2.0).

viernes, 17 de octubre de 2008

BSDanywhere 4.3 Final Release

"After eight months of work we've now released the final version of BSDanywhere 4.3 - Enlightenment at your fingertips, the OpenBSD Live CD."

(more...)

domingo, 12 de octubre de 2008

FreeBSD 6.4-RC1 available

"As the next step in the release of FreeBSD 6.4 the FreeBSD 6.4-RC1 builds are now available for testing. This is the first of an expected two Release Candidates. We encourage you to test out the Release Candidates, reporting any problems by submitting PRs or via email to the freebsd-stable list.

The ISO images and FTP install trees are available on the FreeBSD Mirror sites. Using the primary site as an example:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/${arch}/ISO-IMAGES/6.4/

where ${arch} is one of alpha, amd64, i386, pc98, or sparc64. Checksums for the ISO images are at the bottom of this messate. The amd64 and i386 sets include a *preliminary* set of packages, not what is expected to be included with the release itself. Notably missing is KDE due to some confusion on my part about exactly what to include. The package sets included with 6.4-RC2 will be closer to what will be included with the release."

(more...)

sábado, 11 de octubre de 2008

Linux 2 6 27 is Out!

Summary: 2.6.27 add a new filesystem (UBIFS) optimized for "pure" flash-based storage devices, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation for ext4, multiqueue networking, an alternative hibernation implementation based on kexec/kdump, data integrity support in the block layer for devices that support it, a simple tracer called ftrace, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, extraction of all the in-kernel's firmware to /lib/firmware, XEN support for saving/restorig VMs, improved video camera support, support for the Intel wireless 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 family of chipsets, more new drivers, improved support for others and many other improvements and fixes.

(more...)

A baby named Linux

"Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system, and attached this darling photo.

Nielsen says he and his girlfriend Veronica considered a few names during the pregnancy, "but when he finally arrived none of them seemed right. We both thought that he looked like a little Linux as soon as we saw him and decided to go for that name.""

(more...)

sábado, 4 de octubre de 2008

Win4BSD now free for non-commercial use

"Virtual Bridges is has announced that Win4BSD for Desktops will be offered at no charge for non-commercial use.

Win4BSD is a PC emulator that runs Windows as a guest at nearly native speed under FreeBSD/PC-BSD. It is based on QEMU. However, Win4BSD offers many advantages, including improved speed, ease of use, more seamless integration with the host OS, and “grabless” mouse transition between the host and Windows
guest."

(more...)

miércoles, 1 de octubre de 2008

FreeBSD-SA-08:10.nd6

Topic: IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol routing vulnerability

Category: core
Module: sys_netinet6
Announced: 2008-10-01
Credits: David Miles
Affects: All supported versions of FreeBSD.
Corrected: 2008-10-01 00:32:59 UTC (RELENG_7, 7.1-PRERELEASE)
2008-10-01 00:32:59 UTC (RELENG_7_0, 7.0-RELEASE-p5)
2008-10-01 00:32:59 UTC (RELENG_6, 6.4-PRERELEASE)
2008-10-01 00:32:59 UTC (RELENG_6_3, 6.3-RELEASE-p5)
CVE Name: CVE-2008-2476

For general information regarding FreeBSD Security Advisories, including descriptions of the fields above, security branches, and the following sections, please visit http://security.FreeBSD.org/

(more...)

viernes, 26 de septiembre de 2008

10 Best Security Live CD Distros (Pen-Test, Forensics & Recovery)

Here's a great list.

FreeBSD 7.0 Build Document

"This document contains basic instructions on building a system using FreeBSD 7.0. This covers security standards, configuration options, networking configuration, etc. The information used in this example probably doesn't match your environment or hardware exactly. Verify your network, hardware and other internal system build standards before using the information contained here."

martes, 23 de septiembre de 2008

Building Your Own Desktop Notepad Application Using PHP-GTK

If you think building a desktop application such as Notepad is difficult, think again. If you use PHP-GTK, it's almost ridiculously easy. This article will show you how. By the time you're done, you'll have a full cross-platform application in about 100 lines.

X.Org 7.4 Finally Released

"It's been a hell of a time getting X.Org 7.4 out the door, but this afternoon Adam Jackson has released this long-delayed update to this X system. X.Org 7.4 is arriving after the release of X Server 1.5.1 earlier in the day. Yes, it's finally here! In this article we have information on the features that make up this release along with what it's taken to get X.Org 7.4 primed for release."

(more...)

domingo, 21 de septiembre de 2008

PCBSD 7.0 Review

"PCBSD is one of the first distributions that has taken a different path when it released its user friendly distribution by choosing to base itself on FreeBSD instead of Linux.

BSD is well known amongst server users and advanced users, but PCBSD decided to make it an option for its user-friendly distribution. PC-BSD 7 is based on the recently released FreeBSD 7 stable and for its desktop environment, KDE 4.1.1 was chosen. PCBSD, unlike most major linux distributions is only available in 32 bit mode giving 64 bit users something to want."

(more...)

sábado, 20 de septiembre de 2008

Another successful Summer of Code

"Congratulations to the successful students and their FreeBSD Project mentors for participating in another productive Google Summer of Code. This program encourages students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break with generous funding from Google. We have had a total of over 70 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program from 2005 through 2008. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, filesystems work, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We have gained nearly a dozen new FreeBSD committers from previous summer of code projects already, and more are in the process of formally joining the project."

(more...)


lunes, 15 de septiembre de 2008

Build up a powerful network analyzer ( Cacti ) on FreeBSD

Sometimes you need to use powerful analyzer to detect network traffic.
Cacti is a best choice for you.

PC BSD 7 (Fibonacci) Released

PC BSD 7 Fibonacci stable release is now available! This release marks a milestone for PC-BSD, by moving to the latest FreeBSD 7-Stable and also incorporating the KDE 4.1.1 desktop. Users will immediately notice the improved visual interface that KDE 4.1.1 offers, as well as a large improvement in hardware support and speed from the update to FreeBSD 7-Stable. PC-BSD 7 also offers a large and growing library of self-contained PBI files available for installation, and improvments for other locales on our PBI Directory website. This release also offers new methods of installation, including a DVD, USB and Internet / Network install.

sábado, 13 de septiembre de 2008

Getting Started with Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT)

"Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor, without transferring files to the server or opening a browser? If so, then you're ready to jump into the world of the IDE — Integrated Development Environment. I'll compare the free, open source Eclipse IDE to a few of its commercial competitors Then we'll go through the steps to install Eclipse PDT All-In-One, the Zend Debugger, JSEclipse, and Subclipse."

(more...)

Port-Forwarding With rinetd On Debian Etch

"This article shows how you can do port-forwarding with rinetd on Debian Etch. rinetd allows you to forward ports from one system to another. This useful if you have moved your web sites to a new server with a different IP address. Of course, you have modified your DNS records, but it can take a few days until DNS changes become effective, and that is where rinetd comes into play. If clients still use the old DNS records, rinetd can redirect them to the new server. With rinetd, you do not have to fiddle with iptables rules."

(more...)

FreeBSD: 7.1-BETA & 6.4-BETA Availables

"The FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and 6.4-BETA builds are now available on the FreeBSD FTP mirror sites. This is the first step in the release process for FreeBSD-7.1 and FreeBSD-6.4. This set of builds do not include pre-built packages. The ISOs are available from:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/${arch}/ISO-IMAGES/7.1/
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/${arch}/ISO-IMAGES/6.4/

where $arch is one of alpha, amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, or sparc64. For the Tier-2 architectures ia64 and powerpc only the 7.1-BETA builds are available. For the Tier-2 architecture alpha only the 6.4-BETA builds are available.

We encourage people to help out with the testing. Problems can be reported through Gnats or on the freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list. At this point we expect the 6.4-RC1 builds to start in about two weeks, and the 7.1-RC1 builds a week after that."

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Setup a NFS server on FreeBSD

"On a previous post I went through the needed steps to enable NFS client operations on FreeBSD 7.0 so now lets wrap up with the need steps to setup a NFS server."

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The 10 unknown features about PHP

Here’s a short list of cool features that might have slipped under your radar as well.

FreeBSD: Apache + MySQL + PHP

"Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. You can swap out the L in LAMP with F for FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server..."

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5 Most Popular Firefox Web Development Extension

My primary reason of using Firefox, besides that it is a great browser, is the extensions. I’m so dependent on these extensions that I can’t even imagine developing and designing a website without it.

Here’s my Top 5 extension list.

viernes, 12 de septiembre de 2008

How to run chrome on FreeBSD 7.0

"So as i promised you in my last post (actually posted from chrome!) here is how i managed to get chrome running on FreeBSD. Actually this time around it was simple… The secret key lies in the new 1.1.4 version of wine released today."

How To Upgrade FreeBSD Jail ( OS Level Virtualization )

I've FreeBSD jail configured as explained in man pages using make world options. Now I've upgrade my base FreeBSD 7.0 system to FreeBSD 7 patch level 4. How do I upgrade my Jail (FreeBSD VPS) so that everything get updated inside jail?


Simple Easy Parallel Processing in PHP

The proliferation of multicore CPUs and the inability of our learned CPU vendors to squeeze many more GHz into their designs means that often the only way to get additional performance is by writing clever parallel software.

One problem we were having is that some of our batch processing jobs were taking too long to run. In order to speed the processing, we tried to split the processing file into half, and let a separate PHP process run each job. Given that we were using a dual core server, each process would be able to run close to full speed (subject to I/O constraints).

Here is our technique for running multiple parallel jobs in PHP.

pfsense and Smoothwall

So heres my dilemna for a project I'm working on.
I need a rather broad solution covering DNS, proxying, firewalling, VPN (both site to site and LDAP integrated user access), DHCP, supporting multiple DMZ servers along with routing support. This will act as the centre point for a 40 person network. Clearly hardware wise this will have to be quite a strong system, with load balancing being a possibility, at minimum hardware failover.

For the network security class we got asked to take a look at two firewall solutions, so whilst comparing them I also tried to see how well they would fit into the above requirements.

The firewalls looked at were pfsense and Smoothwall Express 3.0.


(more...)

sábado, 6 de septiembre de 2008

OpenBSD 4.4 is available for Preorder!

"Pre-orders are now being accepted (also in Switzerl and) for Op enBSD 4.4, which is scheduled for release on November 1st, 2008."

(more...)

jueves, 4 de septiembre de 2008

Quick Guide to FreeBSD hostap for FreeBSD 8

"I have a need to setup an access point. Many of the discussions on the web include all kinds of extra goodies that one normally sets up with the access point. But I just needed an access point: no dhcp, bridging, etc. Here's how I did it."


PHP 5.3.0alpha2 is released

"If you check the qa website you will see that there is a new alpha release of our next minor version PHP 5.3.0 out that is awaiting your testing (remember no whining about BC breaks if you did not test the pre-release versions)."

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisories

FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:07.amd64


FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:08.nmount


FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:09.icmp6

martes, 2 de septiembre de 2008

MidnightBSD 0.2.1 Released!

"MidnightBSD 0.2.1 has been released. This version focused on adding hardware for newer devices including ATI, NVIDIA and Intel SATA controllers, and wireless support standard."

(more...)

lunes, 1 de septiembre de 2008

NetBSD 5.0 preview: User visible changes in NetBSD-current

"I've found a bit of spare time upgrade a NetBSD 4.0 system to NetBSD-current (4.99.69), and during the usual update procedure (boot new kernel; build.sh install=/; etcupdate) I found a number of user-visible changes over NetBSD 4.0 that I'd like to spotlight here."

sábado, 30 de agosto de 2008

Firefox Gets Massive JavaScript Performance Boost

"Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts."

(more...)

FreeBSD: How To Add A Second Hard Disk

"There are two ways to install a new hard disk under FreeBSD system. You can use all command line utilities such as fdisk,bsdlabel and newfs to create partitions, label and format it. This method requires complete understanding of BSD partitions and other stuff."

(more...)

gmirror - recovering from a failed HDD

I like RAID. On my development server, I use both hardware and software RAID. For hardware RAID on FreeBSD, I like 3Ware. For software RAID, I tend to use gmirror, because I don't need more than RAID-1.

Some time ago I added two 120GB HDD to this system. One was SATA, one was PATA. They were joined together via gmirror. Tonight I received some errors that one of the drives was failing. I replaced the drive, and recovered the mirror. I'll show you what I did, mostly so I know what to do the next time it happens, but also so you can see what to do as well.

(more...)

Firebug 1.2 Released

Firebug, the latest version of the indispensable debugging utility for Firefox, has released version 1.2 of the plugin for Firefox 3.0.

(more...)

PC-BSD 7 Beta 1 Available for Download

"The PC BSD has declared the new first beta version PC BSD-7 with the advance features, is now available to you. PC BSD is a operating system lined up with additional features based on freeBSD, popular KDE 4.1 environment ,easy to use for new users, can install your favorite application with setup wizard from CD and DVD media and also support the audio, video and office documents."

(more...)

miércoles, 27 de agosto de 2008

Network-Attached Storage on the Cheap

I discussed in an earlier column using Microsoft's $180 Windows Home Server to turn an old PC into a media-streaming, backup-friendly server. "Great idea," wrote many a reader, "but too pricey." For those penny-pinchers, I suggest FreeNAS.

Based on the FreeBSD operating system (a Unix derivative), FreeNAS is a server operating system that offers lots of features, a very small footprint, and a can't-beat-it price (it's free). Developed by an open-source community, it is constantly evolving (with even nightly builds).

FreeNAS is more complicated to install and use than Microsoft's more feature-rich product, but people willing to navigate the sometimes confusing installation routine are rewarded with a robust network-attached storage device.

(more...)

Java Installable Packages Now Available

"The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the Java JDK and JRE 6.0 binary installable packages for FreeBSD 6.x and 7.x on the i386 and amd64 architectures! The binaries are available at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml.

We would like to thank Kurt Miller for his hard work on this project. We would also like to thank Greg Lewis and Jung-uk Kim from the FreeBSD Java Project for their help and support."

(more...)

lunes, 25 de agosto de 2008

Interview with Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer

The so-called "distribution for the average Joe" market has been expanding at a rapid pace in recent years. While the vast majority of these projects is invariably based on Linux, we have also witnessed a few attempts to create a user-friendly "distribution" based on operating systems that traditionally belonged to the hacker's domain, notably FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. One of them is PC-BSD, a project launched in 2005. Its main goal? To hide the complexity of FreeBSD and to deliver an alternative to Linux on the desktop. Its main claim to fame? The web-based software installation infrastructure called PBI. Its community? Over 8,000 registered forum members and a growing network of world-wide community sites. All this thanks to the original vision and undying conviction of Kris Moore, the founder and lead developer of PC-BSD.

Kris was kind enough to answer a few questions about his beginnings with FreeBSD and the forthcoming release of PC-BSD 7.0.

sábado, 23 de agosto de 2008

BSD Magazine - Issue 2

The second issue of the BSD Magazine (September 2008) is out now.

More than 60 pages full of news, great articles, tutorials, how-tos and extras.

Call for proposals of requirements for a complete support of Phar archives in Eclipse PDT

As PHP 5.3 is marching towards the final release, Eclipse PDT's next version needs to support its new features. Two major additions to PHP 5.3 are namespaces and bundling the Phar extension. Especially used in combination, libraries could/should be distributed like Jars in the Java world.

The Phar extension provides a way to put entire PHP libraries or applications into a single file called a "Phar" (PHP Archive) for easy distribution and installation. Phar archives are best characterized as a convenient way to group several files into a single file. As such, a Phar archive provides a way to distribute a complete PHP library or application in a single file and run it from that file without the need to extract it to disk. Additionally, Phar archives can be executed by PHP as easily as any other file, both on the command line and from a web server. Phar is kind of like a thumb drive for PHP applications.

(more...)

FreeBSD flash player

"According to Alex Bustin, an engineer of Flash development at Sony, there’s a 32-bit Flash player for FreeBSD.

I know that iXsystems, the corporate sponsor behind the PC-BSD project, is talking to/collaborating with Adobe on a FreeBSD version of Flash, but it would be great if this report is true."

(more...)

Bordeaux for FreeBSD coming soon

Over the last couple day's I have been working on the Bordeaux for FreeBSD 7 port. We now have everything compiling and running but a lot more testing needs to be done before it's ready for a final release. Internet Explorer, Steam and Office 2003 are the only applications ive gotten around to testing thus far. The good news is everything that I have tested works fairly well on FreeBSD.

If you're a FreeBSD user and need to run any of the software that we currently support on the Linux client you might be interested in helping beta test this build and future builds up to the final stable release.


Setting Up Squid on FreeBSD

Squid is web caching and conserving badwidth application. With Squid, we will reduce the traffic 30% or more from normal usage (without squid) and enhance respone time. In here, i will use squid 2.7.STABLE3.

(more...)

How to install Ruby on Rails on FreeBSD

One of the development frameworks that grows most these days is Ruby on Rails, a framework to develop agile applications on the web using the object-oriented Ruby language.


In this tutorial you'll learn how to install Ruby on Rails with MySQL on FreeBSD. You need to have your ports up-to-date.

FreeBSD: Upcoming Releases Schedule...

We're about to start the release cycle for FreeBSD-7.1 and FreeBSD-6.4. The proposed schedule for the "major events" of the cycle is:

Freeze         August 29
BETA          September 1
Branch        September 6
6.4-RC1       September 8
7.1-RC1       September 15
6.4-RC2       September 22
7.1-RC2       September 29
6.4-REL       October 6
7.1-REL       October 13


I haven't posted the schedule on the Web site yet, I'll try to get that done over the weekend.

(more...)

Software RAID1 on FreeBSD

Since 5.3-Release, FreeBSD has gmirror utility, which allows you create software RAID1. So if you have some low-end server and you need some redundancy - gmirror is right choice.


RAID1 creation process is _very simple_ and completely described in gmirror(8) man page, but i will post small how-to here.

jueves, 21 de agosto de 2008

Take a closer look at OpenBSD 4.3

OpenBSD provides a UNIX® distribution with a primary emphasis on security and cryptography. If you're looking for a UNIX distribution to deploy in the most critical nexus in your network infrastructure, look no further than OpenBSD. The recent release of OpenBSD—version 4.3—includes several new features and bug fixes that this article reviews.

How to resize ZFS in FreeNAS

One of the frequently asked questions regarding ZFS. Is it possible to resize a RAIDZ, RAIDZ2 or MIRRORED ZPOOL?

The answer is a littlebit complicated...
If you want to change the 'geometry' of the ZPOOL (for example: change from a mirrored pool to a raidz, or simply add a disk to a raidz, or change from raidz to raidz2) then the answer is no.

But it is possible to change the disks of a pool with bigger ones and use the space.

Here is what I've tested with a FreeNAS 0.7 (rev 3514) installed as a Virtual Machine.


viernes, 15 de agosto de 2008

VNStat On FreeBSD 7 With A PHP GUI

I installed VNStat and the PHP GUI to be able to view basic information regarding incoming and outgoing traffic per interface. I am using FreeBSD 7 with PHP4, as I had problems setting the GUI up with PHP5.


(more...)

Preview of ZFS on FreeNAS 0.7 Server Video on YouTube

I have created a new FreeNAS tutorial video previewing ZFS on FreeNAS 0.7. It has been uploaded to YouTube.


(more...)

PartedMagic: An Open Source Alternative for Partition Editing

"If you want to add space to a drive, store personal data on a separate partition from your operating system, or run multiple operating systems from the same hard drive, then you need a partition editor.

Traditionally, this is a field where alternative operating systems have always lead in the available tools. PartitionMagic, the first partition editor, started life as an OS/2 program for users who wanted to dual boot, and GNU Parted brought partition editing to the GNU/Linux command line in 1999. Since then, various interfaces -- most notably, GParted -- have tried to bring GNU Parted's functionality to the desktop.

However, from what I've seen, by far the most successful of these efforts is the newly released PartedMagic version 3.0. The name suggests that PartedMagic is meant as a free alternative to proprietary tools like PartitionMagic -- a goal in which it easily succeeds, despite a mildly eccentric desktop."

(more...)

jueves, 14 de agosto de 2008

FreeBSD KDE 4.1 packages available

"The FreeBSD packages for KDE4.1 are now available on the FreeBSD FTP servers. If you don’t want to build from source you can now use these packages to quickly install a KDE 4.1.0 desktop."

(more...)

lunes, 11 de agosto de 2008

Home Adding Greylisting To A FreeBSD Postfix Mail Server

This article is based around FreeBSD, it is not much different to get greylisting working on other systems with minimal of changes.

Accessing IPhone 3G with FreeBSD

This post show you how to make FreeBSD recognize your iPhone as a camera device, so that you can download the photos taken with your iPhone to a FreeBSD host.

domingo, 3 de agosto de 2008

List of Firebug Extensions

"Have you ever been interested in what extensions are available for Firebug? If yes, take a look at what I have found".

Upcoming features in PHP 5.3

"PHP 5.3 alpha1 just got released yesterday, and I thought this might be a good time to list some of the new things that are coming, and how it could benefit you. Even though its a minor release, a lot of new features made it in and from a marketing standpoint it should have really been 6.0, if you'd ask me."

(more...)


viernes, 1 de agosto de 2008

Adobe AMF Support in Zend Framework

"This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side."

(more...)

Setting up FAMP on FreeBSD

Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. You can swap out the L in LAMP with F for FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server.

(more...)

PHP 5.3 alpha1 released!

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

There have been a great number of other additions and improvements, but here is a short overview of the most important changes:

* Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)

* Late static binding and __callStatic

* Lambda functions and closures

* Addition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of
alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensions

* Optional cyclic garbage collection

* Optional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysql

* Windows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore
(details)

* New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:"

(more...)

NetBSD adds metadata journaling support to FFS

Simon Burge has just added metadata journaling to the FFS (fast file system) code to NetBSD-current.

(more...)

martes, 29 de julio de 2008

KDE 4.1 Released

"6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases."

(more...)

OpenDNS Offers DNS Vulnerability Protection

"Tech site Webmonkey advises users not sure whether or not their DNS servers are patched against a recently discovered vulnerability to switch to the excellent, free DNS service, OpenDNS."

(more...)

lunes, 28 de julio de 2008

FreeBSD Single Sign on with Active Directory and Access Control

This document describes how to join a FreeBSD box to a Windows domain controller and to control access to the FreeBSD box. We will be using Samba’s WinBind and Kerberos for authentication.

This document
assumes that you have a functioning FreeBSD sever on a network with internet access.

viernes, 25 de julio de 2008

Installing A FreeBSD 7.0 DNS Server With BIND

As FreeBSD is known as one of the most stable and reliable operating systems, I decided to publish some useful articles for it, mixing it with services we need on daily bases.

This tutorial
shows how to set up a FreeBSD based server that offers DNS services. This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of FreeBSD, but should apply to the 32-bit version.

Set Up Eclipse PDT 2.0 On Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede)

This is a howto about setting up a proffessional PHP IDE using Eclipse by hand. I'll be using Eclipse PDT for PHP support. The PDT project provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project encompasses all development components necessary to develop PHP and facilitate extensibility. It leverages the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities. We will have in the end features like subversion support, edit remote files, database development, debugging and more.

How To Build a SqueezeCenter Server with FreeNAS and a T5700

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/

Install Wordpress Multiuser (WPMU) On FreeBSD 7

Wordpress is one of my favourite blog engines because it's easy and supports many plugins. Wordpress also available in multi-user mode which means a single Wordpress installation will cover many users with their own subdomain. This howto will show the steps taken to install Wordpress wpmu on a server running FreeBSD 7 stable.

Software mirror in FreeBSD

If you want to make a low-cost server with a RAID capabilities and don’t want to invest in a hardware RAID solution, gmirror is a good choice. You can use it to add a disk and create a mirror even on your existing server running FreeBSD 6 or 7.

In my example I have at start an 8 GB hard disk where I installed FreeBSD 7.

How FreeBSD makes vulnerability auditing easy: portaudit

Find out how FreeBSD’s portaudit tool goes a long way toward helping you maintain a secure system, simply and easily.

Building a Router With pfSense (Video)

Do you have extra computers lying around the house? In this episode, Matt shows us how to convert an old computer into a home network router.

jueves, 24 de julio de 2008

Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL

"We are happy to announce the release of a new set of Infrastructure Stacks: LAPPStack, MAPPStack and WAPPStack. These stacks provide an easy to install distribution of Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP and supporting libraries. The user-friendly installer allows users to quickly install and configure a PHP-PostgreSQL platform on Linux, Windows and OS X."

(more...)

Build your own NAS with FreeNAS (video)

"This video from Revison3 explains the theory behind NAS and shows how to set up a FreeNAS server."

(more...)

FreeBSD on the Openmoko

"For the latest information and FreeBSD installation instructions visit the Openmoko FreeBSD page."

(more...)

Quick Guide to FreeBSD hostap for FreeBSD 8

"I have a need to setup an access point. Many of the discussions on the web include all kinds of extra goodies that one normally sets up with the
access point. But I just needed an access point: no dhcp, bridging, etc. Here's how I did it."

iXsystems offers professional FreeBSD and PC-BSD support

iXsystems announced on 08/07/08 the launch of its Professional Services Division for FreeBSD and PC-BSD. The new Professional Services Division will provide Professional Enterprise Grade support, consulting, and development for FreeBSD and PC-BSD.

(more...)

martes, 22 de julio de 2008

Video for BSD Project

"The Video4Linux (V4L) project has produced a large number of device drivers available for multimedia cards, digital cameras, and USB devices. FreeBSD doesn’t support V4L, so much work will have to be repeated in re-writing new hardware drivers to make them run on FreeBSD. Most hardware which just ‘plugs-n-plays’ on Linux will never work on FreeBSD.

On 10 July 2008 the Video for BSD project was created on SourceForge. This project will implement a V4L compatible API and device drivers for the BSD systems, enabling FreeBSD users to run Linux video applications. The project’s goal is to provide an emulation layer that would let you recompile the Linux source code on FreeBSD, and provide a sufficiently complete emulation of the Linux kernel APIs so that device drivers can be used without significant modifications to their source code."

(more...)

OpenSSH 5.1 released

OpenSSH 5.1 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

DragonFly BSD 2.0

Matthew Dillon announced the availability of DragonFlyBSD 2.0.

sábado, 19 de julio de 2008

15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch

In this industry - now more than ever - designers are becoming coders, and coders are becoming designers. The idea of a developer ONLY performing frontend or backend work is quickly becoming a dated concept. jQuery will help to bridge the gap. Javascript is not an unattainable skill. In this article, we'll detail fifteen resources to get you started with jQuery from the absolute beginning. If you've been avoiding this library out of some silly sense of fear, now is the time to dive in. You'll be amazed at how simple it can be.

miércoles, 16 de julio de 2008

Build Web services with PHP in Eclipse

Learn how to build Web services in PHP using the PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in in Eclipse in three easy steps. First, become familiar with the PDT project, and learn how to create and deploy useful PHP projects. Second, learn the philosophy behind contract-first development. Finally, get an informative overview of the basic parts that make up a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file.


martes, 15 de julio de 2008

TrueCrypt 6.0 Released

"The new version touts two major upgrades. 'First, TrueCrypt now performs parallel encryption and decryption operations on multi-core systems, giving you a phenomenal speedup if you have more than one processor available. Second, it now has the ability to hide an entire operating system, so even if you're forced to reveal your pre-boot password to an adversary, you can give them one that boots into a plausible decoy operating system, with your hidden operating system remaining completely undetectable.'"

(more...)

domingo, 13 de julio de 2008

ezjail - A jail administration framework

I want to set up some jails. They will each be very similar. They will each be used to test a slightly different configuration of Bacula. My tool of choice is ezjail, available in the ports tree.

With ezjail, I can:

* create a jail flavour, upon which the creation of other jails can be based
* centrally update the jail's ports tree

The above does not fully describe the neat things you can do with ezjail. Read below to discover more fun and interesting things.

(more...)

FreeBSD-SA-08:06.bind


Topic: DNS cache poisoning

Category: contrib
Module: bind
Announced: 2008-07-13
Credits: Dan Kaminsky
Affects: All supported FreeBSD versions.
Corrected: 2008-07-12 10:07:33 UTC (RELENG_6, 6.3-STABLE)
2008-07-13 18:42:38 UTC (RELENG_6_3, 6.3-RELEASE-p3)
2008-07-13 18:42:38 UTC (RELENG_7, 7.0-STABLE)
2008-07-13 18:42:38 UTC (RELENG_7_0, 7.0-RELEASE-p3)
CVE Name: CVE-2008-1447

For general information regarding FreeBSD Security Advisories,
including descriptions of the fields above, security branches,
and the following sections, please visit
http://security.FreeBSD.org/.


(more...)

jueves, 10 de julio de 2008

Managing Jails

This document is an introduction to basic FreeBSD jails also called ‘fat jails’. We discuss an easy jail installation process. We will do some basic jail configuration and show you how to manage the jail environment. This document wil not cover building ‘chroot jails’ in a jail.

miércoles, 2 de julio de 2008

Tips for MySQL to PostgreSQL Switch

If you’ve decided to move a few tables from MySQL to PostgreSQL, these few tips might help.

A slightly advanced Introduction to Vim

This introduction is about the little things. Things that help ease everyday tasks but go a long way into making you a better user, editor, programmer - a better computer user.


Firefox 3 available for FreeBSD

Firefox 3 is now available for FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Technologies in New Firefox 3 Browser

The FreeBSD Project congratulates the Mozilla project on a multi-year effort that culminated in a product that is both faster and more secure than its predecessors, with innovative new features. Several important features of the Firefox browser were incorporated from technologies adopted from the FreeBSD project. Technology from the FreeBSD project has a long history of being used inside other open source projects such as Firefox.

(more...)

Anatomy of an Ajax Application

This chapter covers the shortcomings of the traditional web interface, identifying specific problems to be overcome. It also introduces the various building blocks of an Ajax application and discusses how they work together.

What You'll Learn in This Chapter:

* The Need for Ajax
* Introducing Ajax
* The Constituent Parts of Ajax
* Putting It All Together

In this chapter you will learn about the individual building blocks of Ajax and how they fit together to form the architecture of an Ajax application. Subsequent chapters will examine these components in more detail, finally assembling them into a working Ajax application.

martes, 1 de julio de 2008

Manipulate Excel Spreadsheets with PHP on Linux

Have you ever faced a situation when you need to manipulate Excel spreadsheets with PHP on the server that is running Linux? If you had a Windows Server you could use PHP COM extensions. However they are unavailable on Linux.

Hopefully, there is a solution. It is called Open XML. It’s a new format of Microsoft Office documents introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. Basically, an Open XML file is a ZIP archive that contains XML files that represent the document mark-up. You can view it yourself or read some documentation, my article isn’t about Open XML, but about the PHP library for working with Excel 2007 files. It also supports Excel 97 format by incorporating a PEAR library.

The library is called PHPExcel. It allows you to read/write Excel spreadsheets, save them in many formats including PDF and HTML. It supports formulas,styles and etc.

It requires:

  • PHP 5.2+
  • GD extension
  • XML extension
  • ZIP extension

I have these two simple examples that show you how to create an Excel spreadsheet and save it in several formats and how to read a spreadsheet and display it on the HTML page.



Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable

"Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats."

(more...)

Samba 3.2 Has Been Released!

The Samba Team is proud to announce the release of Samba 3.2, a major new release of the award-winning Free Software file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows ® clients.


lunes, 30 de junio de 2008

FreeBSD: new wiki page to collect information about the ATA subsystem

Jeremy Chadwick (koitsu@) has been gathering together information on the wiki about commonly seen problems with FreeBSD:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues
http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/ATA_issues_and_troubleshooting

Based on a discussion on #freebsd-bugbusters, I've gone ahead and added a signup page for people that are interested in volunteering to do ATA regression testing (either for patches that are included in the various PRs, or for isolating regressions that have already happened):

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ATA/ATA_Volunteers

(more...)

Build your own ultimate boot disc

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own.

OpenBSD-based BSDAnywhere Live CD Released (Beta 1)

An often heard complaint on misc@ is that we don't have a Live CD. Now our friends at BSDanywhere are trying to fill that void. The first beta release of the OpenBSD-based BSDanywhere - "enlightenment at your fingertips" is available.

Create Your Own Web Server With BIND And Apache On CentOS 5

This tutorial explains how you can run your own web server on CentOS 5 with the help of Apache and the BIND name server.

100 Vim commands every programmer should know

Since the 70’s, Vi is one of the programmer’s best friend. Nevermind you’re new to Vi or not, here’s a big list of 100 useful commands, organized by topic, which will make your coder life better.

9 PHP Debugging Techniques You Should Be Using

Save yourself time, effort and headaches by employing the debugging techniques discussed in this article. I cover topics from enabling notices to writing Unit Tests, as well as some ideas you may not have thought of...

Encrypted Traffic No Longer Safe From Throttling

"New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself."

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Three reasons why GNU/Linux is better for Web servers than OS X

Apple's OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I've worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better.

domingo, 29 de junio de 2008

Understand the benefits of using a native XML database

Native XML databases have grown in popularity along with XML, because data is stored as native XML, rather than through tables in a traditional database. Using a native XML database means that a change to the schema requires minimal changes to your code and no change to the database. PHP and Java™ developers can benefit greatly from using native XML databases. In this tutorial, you will get quickly up to speed using a native XML database and see how to use it to benefit XML development.

This tutorial
shows you how to reduce development time with a native XML database. As an illustration, you will change an existing XML schema, and see these changes in the code also. Developers will learn the common necessities for working with a native XML database in both PHP and Java technologies.

Top 10 Linux financial tools

Many people don’t realize the wealth of applications available for Linux — and that includes financial software. Jack Wallen introduces 10 Linux apps that will meet your financial needs, whether you just want a digital replacement for your checkbook or you’re looking for a full-blown accounting package for your organization.

AjaxCRUD

AjaxCRUD is an open-source PHP API which allows you to connect to a mySQL database and easily perform the necessary CRUD operations (create, read, update, & delete rows).

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Prevent form post request from another domain in PHP

HTTP POST request from outside domain is one of the way of attacking your website. A intruder can use JavaScript in other domain or localhost to send the repetitive POST request to your web page containing PHP script. We must prevent this kind of cross domain form posting which might be harmful of our website.

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sábado, 28 de junio de 2008

Configure a professional firewall using pfSense

The guide will take you through the setup of the pfSense firewall with one WAN interface, one LAN interface and one Opt1-WiFi Interface.

This guide was written for Linksys, Netgear, and D-link users with no firewall or router experience. No experience is needed with FreeBSD or GNU/Linux to install and run pfSense. When you are finished, management of pfSense will be from a web interface just like any of the SOHO firewall/router appliances.

Setting up Virtual Hosting in Apache 2

Virtual hosting allows you to host multiple websites, accessed by unique domain names, from the same IP address (same server).

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Add multiple IP’s to a server

I will try to explain in here an easy way to add a lot of IP’s to a server without having to add every one of them manually but of course this works if IP’s are part of same classes.

How to sync data between 2 servers automatically

Have you ever wanted to know how to easily synchronize the data between multiple servers automatically?

In this article I’ll explain how to setup 2 Linux servers to automatically synchronize data between a specific directory on each server. To do this we will use rsync, ssh key authentication, and a cron job.

OpenSSL 0.9.8h is now available, including security and bug fixes

The OpenSSL Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library.

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How to dual boot Linux and Windows XP (Linux installed first)

Scenario: You want to install XP on your machine alongside your existing Linux installation on the same physical drive which already has Ubuntu 8.04 installed.

Tutorial Summary: We'll create space on the Linux partition to install Windows XP. XP bootloader is fairly clumsy when it comes to dualbooting and will overwrite GRUB completely. We'll reinstall GRUB to the MBR and configure it to dualboot both Ubuntu and XP.

This tutorial has been tested on a VMWare Workstation 6.0.3 virtual machine.

Linux clusters vs. grids

When most people think of Linux clusters, they think they are used for load-balancing purposes only. Yet, that's not the only functionality that makes Linux clusters on par with mainframes or high-end, mid-range Unix servers for many jobs. In this tip, I'll examine Linux cluster options and similar server approaches, like grid computing.

Wine 1.1.0 Released

Resuming regular bi-monthly releases, the Wine development team released 1.1.0 and is now available.

Step by step install wpmu in FreeBSD

Here’s step by step install wpmu in FreeBSD, might be useful for someone.

Adding gmirror to an existing installation

This article describes how I created a RAID-1 cluster on my FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE box using gmirror.

viernes, 27 de junio de 2008

Major Update for Google's Blogger

It's raining with features in the experimental version of Blogger, available at http://draft.blogger.com. To try these new features, it's a good idea to visit Draft Blogger and temporarily enable "Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard" at the top of the page.

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Monitor your Network for Free with Nagios

I recently met with an international telephone company who is using an open source monitoring tool called Nagios to keep tabs on their international VoIP network. Having reviewed several small network monitoring options, including Servers Alive and Jumpnode's Pulse product, I decided to dive into Nagios to see how feasible it is to deploy this full featured network monitoring tool for the small network environment.

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Nipper - The Network Infrastructure Parser

Nipper enables network administrators, security professionals and auditors to quickly produce reports on key network infrastructure devices.

The report can include a detailed security audit of the device settings or be a configuration report, the output is customisable. Nipper supports a wide variety of devices from different manufacturers such as Cisco, Nokia, Juniper, CheckPoint and Nortel.

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Security Audit Tool for Linux (must have) - Lynis

Lynis is an auditing tool for Unix (specialists). It scans the system configuration and creates an overview of system information and security issues usable by professional auditors.

This software aims in assisting automated auditing of Unix based systems and can be used in addition to other software, like security scanners, system benchmarking and fine tuning tools.

Examples of audit tests:

- Available authentication methods
- Expired SSL certificates
- Outdated software
- User accounts without password
- Incorrect file permissions
- Firewall auditing


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OpenBSD: an untapped resource for tight security

Nick Humphreys can't see why more security professionals don't use the OpenBSD operating system. He has been working in security for a decade and has implemented the free software in a range of applications, and says its security features are top class.

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Internet Devices Get Their Own Ubuntu Version

A version of Ubuntu targeted specifically towards mobile internet devices (MIDs) has been released by Canonical, although there is presently only one product on the market which can use it. According to the company, the pithily titled Mobile Internet Device Edition 8.04 has been optimized for use with handheld internet platforms, and designed to run smoothly on Intel's Atom chips as well as with small touchscreen displays.

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Linux Security: Easy as 1-2-3

"Linux is a secure OS."


You've probably heard this statement from time to time, and compared to Windows you could argue that it is. But really it's kind of a meaningless statement: no system which is connected to a network or used by human beings is completely secure, and if it was it would probably be useless.

But you can certainly beef up the security of a given Linux system to make it more secure than it would otherwise be - while still enabling it to do its job - and it's that process, known as hardening, that is the subject of this article. Without going in to the finer details, we'll be looking at the general steps you should take to harden any system under your control that warrants extra security beyond what you believe is necessary for your "normal" systems.

Before you can start the process of hardening a given system you need to have a clear idea of what they system is to be used for, what software it will therefore need to run, and the sorts of threats or vulnerabilities you want to protect against.

Book: Network Administration with FreeBSD

A new book has been added to the "FreeBSD library": "Network Administration with FreeBSD" by Babak Farrokhi.

This 280 page book is about the building, securing, and maintaining of networks with the FreeBSD operating system, and deals with the following topics

1. Set up and manage networking on FreeBSD
2. Virtualization with FreeBSD Jails, IPFW and PF
3. Configure interfaces, protocols, and routing


Network Administrators looking for skills beyond installation and configuration of FreeBSD may find this book useful.

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Humyo Provides 30GB of Free Online Storage

Web site Humyo offers 30GB of free online storage with a small and inconsequential catch: 25 of the 30GB must be media files, like music and videos. The remaining 5GB are reserved for non-media files and documents.

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miércoles, 25 de junio de 2008

Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH

I have been tunneling all of my web traffic over an encrypted SSH connection for some time now. Considering the fact that I travel a lot, I’m very regularly on untrusted, insecure networks. I prefer to secure those connections (web, IM, email, etc) by creating an encrypted SSH connection and pushing the traffic through it. Today I also found a method for also pushing DNS requests through the same tunnel. This ensures total privacy between yourself and the SSH Server.

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Kernel Builders Appeal For Open Source Drivers

The Linux kernel development community has released a statement emphasizing the need for open source drivers. The statement, signed by 135 developers, is aimed at preventing future vendors from following the closed source path.

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lunes, 23 de junio de 2008

Unable to Use mysqldump on a Shared Host? Here’s an Alternative

I have used many shared hosts throughout my years as a webmaster. Shared hosts have many great points, namely, price, and then they have their major drawbacks. For me, one of the major drawbacks is the limited use of the machine on which your site is hosted.

For instance, I love phpMyAdmin for maintaining and managing my databases, but I am not a fan of the need to log in to backup the databases. The easiest way around that of course would be to execute the mysqldump command that comes bundled with MySQL. Unfortunately, most shared hosts, all that I have dealt with, disable the ability to use exec() or system() with PHP to execute the MySQL native command.

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PHP namespaces become much better

Recently noted by Derick Rethans in an informative blog post, there is (now was) a problem in the implementation of namespaces in the soon-to-be-released PHP 5.3. I quote:

Take for example this code:





In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace) then the above code would suddenly stop working.


This morning, I realized that this would be very easy to fix, and posted a patch to internals@ with a brief explanation. Dmitry committed a fix to PHP_5_3 and HEAD very quickly. The issue raised by Derick is now obsolete, making namespaces not just more useful, but even more powerful than they were.

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domingo, 22 de junio de 2008

CSS Editors Reviewed

"We continue to review text and source editors for designers and web-developers. After a thorough consideration of WYSIWIG- and source code editors now it’s time to take a closer look at applications for advanced CSS-coding. Reason: while numerous HTML-editors offer more or less advanced CSS-support there are also allround-CSS-editors which offer a sophisticated integrated development environment for CSS-coding."

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BSDFund - supporting BSD related projects

The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project. This reasonably well-known foundation in the BSD world supports projects which further the development of the FreeBSD operating system (conferences, grants, hardware etc).

Also NetBSD and OpenBSD have their own foundation. These foundations tend to support bigger projects (although they do give travel grants), but there’s also a smaller, lesser known, US non-profit organisation whose mission is to assist and fund BSD-related open source projects, events and travel: BSD Fund.

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30 websites a Web developer should Know

Here's a great list.

Firefox 3 with FreeBSD technologies

Firefox 3 is released and got off to a fantastic start: more than 8 million downloads within 24 hours, peaking at 17.000 downloads a minute.

Everybody browsing the internet uses (unconsciously) FreeBSD technology, such as TCP/IP, and a few only know that Firefox 3 comes integrated with some exciting FreeBSD technologies.

NetBSD Moves to 2 Clause BSD License

Alistair Crooks, president of the NetBSD Foundation, announced recently that it "has changed its recommended license to be a 2 clause BSD license". This makes NetBSD more easily available to a number of organisations and individuals who may have been put off by the advertising or endorsement clauses.

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Firefox 3 for developers

Being a web developer, the browser is a key tool in the work I do every day. Along with Firefox 3, there are a bunch of useful extensions you can install to work on the web. The next few paragraphs highlight some of those.

Get the external IP of your router on the command line

Sometimes you want to write a script that needs the external IP of the router your client is connected to. Here are three possible solutions.

Opera 9.5 gives Firefox 3 a run for its money

Two of the most popular Linux browsers were unveiled this month after years of development -- the open source Firefox 3 and the proprietary Opera 9.5. Opera's launch a week before Firefox was like any other launch, unlike Firefox's much publicized world record attempt. But Opera 9.5 is no less revolutionary than Firefox, matching its open source rival feature for feature, from security-related enhancements to improved multilingual text rendering.

How to import csv file to mysql using PhpMyAdmin

Here's one way to get your Excel file into MySQL via phpMyAdmin.

UNIX Tutorial for Beginners

A beginners guide to the Unix and Linux operating system. Eight simple tutorials which cover the basics of UNIX / Linux commands.

SSL Encryption Coming To The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay, in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law, will start offering SSL encryption to its user base this week. Although copyright issues really have little to do with national security, The Pirate Bay knows its population is uneasy with the recent legal change. The encryption will mostly benefit Swedish users living under the current law.

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Beautiful CSS buttons with icon set

"I love clean design and in general simple solutions to design nice and attractive elements for my websites. This tutorial illustrates how to design nice clean buttons using some lines of HTML, CSS code and proxal icon set."

viernes, 20 de junio de 2008

InnoDB vs MyISAM

Most people who use MySQL know that MyISAM and InnoDB are the two most-common database engines available with the popular open-source database provider. I would bet that most of those people don't even take the time to select a storage-engine and just accept the database default. Those of you who are left probably heard from a friend who saw something online that said one of the two is better than the other. Those of you who are left will still probably learn a thing or two here.

Linux vs FreeBSD commands

These systems are really close each other. FreeBSD comes from Berkeley and Linux comes from Finland so it's pretty sure some differences need to be - and here they are.

Building a Unique Contact Form

I’m calling this Part 2, because last week I began this adventure over on Tutorial Blog where we first designed a unique contact form:

Photoshopping a Unique Contact Form

Here we are going to pick up where that left off and actually build this thing with HTML/CSS, as well as add some validation with jQuery, and make it tick with PHP. Here is what we are building.

Avoid allocation of bad ram blocks

"Recently I had problems with a bad ram module. This trick allows you to mark blocks as bad, so they are never used and you dont't have to deposit your memory in the trash, just because a few kb are faulty."

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Run Windows Apps in Linux with Wine 1.0

No matter how easy Linux distributions make it for newcomers to install and use a free, open-source operating system, nearly everyone has at least one program that only works in Windows. Wine, a free Windows compatibility tool for Linux (and other Intel-based systems), aims to make those programs run without too much cross-system trickery. If you can't get around needing to open true Microsoft Office files, Adobe Photoshop, or your addictive game of choice on your Linux desktop, Wine is for you.