jueves, 24 de enero de 2008

A fresh look at all things BSD

In the new year the Berkeley Software Distribution family of Unix-like operating systems is growing at a phenomenal rate and excitement over the possibilities for this operating system family is in the air. After unprecedented development and adoption as well as major shifts in the marketplace, it's time to take a look at what's new with this demonic family of operating systems. Don't fear, the word demon means Unix goodness at just the right price.

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Simple Home File Server

This tutorial explains how to turn an old PC with additional hard disks into a simple home file server. The file server is intended for home use. The home file server is accessible by Windows and Linux computers in the home network.

This Home File Server can work with hard disks formatted in NTFS. So when you need or want to move the hard disk into a new computer, they are accessible by Windows and most Linux operating systems.

KDE Goes Cross-Platform, Supports Windows and OS X

The KDE desktop environment is going cross-platform with support for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition to porting the core KDE libraries and applications, developers are also porting popular KDE-based software like the Amarok audio player and the KOffice productivity suite.

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FreeBSD and the Xbox (360)

In this post I want to have a look at how the Microsoft Xbox (360) can be used in combination with FreeBSD

1. Xbox running FreeBSD
2. Xbox 360 as media streaming device
3. Using FreeNAS with the Xbox 360

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PC-BSD vs DesktopBSD; similarities & differences

A common misconception about DesktopBSD is that it is intended as a rival to PC-BSD as a BSD-based desktop distribution. Neither the DesktopBSD nor the PC-BSD project intend to rival each other; the two projects are completely independent with distinctive features and goals. PC-BSD has introduced a new package management (PBI) that lets you easily install packages, whereas DesktopBSD has developed a graphical utility that makes installing standard FreeBSD packages and ports easy. Let’s have a look at the similarities and the differences.

Prevent Boss From Snooping On Your Google Search Queries

There are chances that someone is secretly spying on your Google search tracks for various reasons. For example, the employer may monitor your Google search habits to know if you are looking for jobs elsewhere while the local ISP may be collecting your Google queries with the purpose of selling that data to large analytics companies.

You cannot prevent these people from watching you because Google appends the search queries to the URL without encryption. So when you type "Jobs New York" in the Google search box, it returns a search page with the URL google.com/search?q=jobs+new+york and that makes data collection fairly simple.

There’s however a workaround - just use Google with a mask that comes indirectly from Google itself
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Review: DesktopBSD 1.6

DesktopBSD, a derivative of Freebsd designed for desktop use, has come a long way since its early inception back in late 2005. Originally created as a way to bring the power of Freebsd as a desktop OS to new users, it has now blossomed into a desktop experience even the most hardened geek, or greenest novice can love. Back in April of last year we reviewed version 1.3 and gave it great marks overall, but with some need for improvement. So how does version 1.6 stack up against its predecessor? Has it improved any? Let's find out.

miércoles, 23 de enero de 2008

How to Upgrade to FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE

I just upgraded my servers from FreeBSD 6.2 to 6.3 (even though FreeBSD 7.0 will be here any day). Here are the steps to upgrade, make sure to backup!

martes, 22 de enero de 2008

Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year?

A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010.

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Home Gateway Firewall With DHCP Server For Connection Sharing

If you're trying to set up a home network, you probably want to set up a permiter facing computer connected to your DSL/Cable modem, and then put all of your computers behind that firewall box to keep them safe. This tutorial will show you how to use a single external connection on the gateway computer (using Iptables firewall), and a second internal connection on the same box so you can connect the computers on the inside of your home/office to it, and automatically give them IP's when you hook them up (using DHCP server). Iptables can be very complicated, we will only configure a basic firewall, you can add more security later without breaking things. In Linux there are many ways to do this, this one is hopefully simple enough and will teach you the basics. I did this on a CentOS 5 box, though it would work on Debian variants with only slight modifications. During this tutorial I'm logged in as root, which you should generally NOT do, but it makes the tutorial simpler, but if you prefer to do it more securely, add "sudo" before each command and it will work.

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How To Install And Use The djbdns Name Server

djbdns is a very secure suite of DNS tools that consists out of multiple parts: dnscache, a DNS cache that can be used in /etc/resolv.conf instead of your ISP's name servers and that tries to sort out wrong (malicious) DNS answers; axfrdns, a service that runs on the master DNS server and to which the slaves connect for zone transfers; and tinydns, the actual DNS server, a very secure replacement for BIND.

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lunes, 21 de enero de 2008

Associate Email Addresses With Your Google Account

Google has just recently added an option to associate additional email addresses with your Google Account.

FreeBSD 7 will be revolutionary

A few weeks back, at the end of December, FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 was released. FreeBSD 7 will no doubt prove to be quite revolutionary. For one thing, this will be the first major FreeBSD release in a number of years. FreeBSD 6.0 was released in November of 2005, so there has been quite some time for the development of FreeBSD 7 to take place.

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domingo, 20 de enero de 2008

Using The Bazaar Version Control System (VCS)

Bazaar is a distributed version control system (VCS) available under the GPL; it's similar to Subversion (svn). Bazaar is sponsored by Canonical, Ltd., the company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and therefore the Ubuntu project is the most prominent user of Bazaar. This article explains how to set up and use Bazaar on a Debian Etch system, and how to configure an SFTP-/HTTP server to host your Bazaar repository.

viernes, 18 de enero de 2008

FreeBSD: The rock

FreeBSD is a UNIX-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating system. It runs on almost all known hardware architecture, including Microsoft Xbox, and has been called “the unknown giant among free operating systems.” It is generally regarded as being robust, which is why it is often called “the rock.” But what exactly makes this OS rock solid?

How to fix your Windows MBR with an Ubuntu liveCD

Something happen to a windows Master Boot Record (MBR) that you’re responsible for? Want a very quick, very easy way to restore it with nothing but your craft, native intelligence and a liveCD?

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.NET Framework Library Source Code now available

Last October I blogged about our plan to release the source code to the .NET Framework libraries, and enable debugging support of them with Visual Studio 2008. Today I'm happy to announce that this is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries:

* .NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).

* ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)

* Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)

* Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)

* ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

We are in the process of adding additional framework libraries (including LINQ, WCF and Workflow) to the above list. I'll blog details on them as they become available in the weeks and months ahead.

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FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE. This release continues the development of the 6-STABLE branch providing performance and stability improvements, many bug fixes and new features. Some of the highlights:

- KDE updated to 3.5.8, GNOME updated to 2.20.1, Xorg updated to 7.3
- BIND updated to 9.3.4
- sendmail updated to 8.14.2
- lagg(4) driver ported from OpenBSD/NetBSD
- unionfs file system re-implemented
- freebsd-update(8) now supports an upgrade comman

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jueves, 17 de enero de 2008

SSH: Best Practices

Are you using SSH in the best way possible? Have you configured it to be as limited and secure as possible? The goal of this document is to kick in the new year with some best practices for SSH: why you should use them, how to set them up, and how to verify that they are in place.

All of the examples below assume that you are using EnGarde Secure Linux but any modern Linux distribution will do just fine since, as far as I know, everybody ships OpenSSH.

Create your own Secure Email Server

So let’s say you have registered your domain, set up your own nameserver, and set up a webserver for your domain. Now you would like to set up an email server so you can have email addresses for your domain? Well here’s how you do just that on Redhat based Linux distributions (CentOS, Fedora, etc).

pfSense 1.2 RC 4 Development Release

pfSense firewall 1.2 is a FreeBSD Based operating system designed to be a secure and easy to setup firewall server appliance. Now on its fourth release candidate, pfSense 1.2 promises a slew of great futures designed to make setting up a firewall easier and faster.

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miércoles, 16 de enero de 2008

Sun to Acquire MySQL

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL, Developer of the World's Most Popular Open Source Database.

martes, 15 de enero de 2008

PC-BSD PBI Creator 4.0 released

PBI is the popular Installer used by the PCBSD FreeBSD-based operating system to install common applications has reached its 4th incarnation. It provides the operating system a significant amount of improvements which includes:

* New wizard screen during installation, allows user to select a custom installation directory.

* Installer now displays disk space required for program, and available space on drive.

* Internal integrity checker confirms that program data hasn't been corrupted in transit

* Installer now displays the application specific icon in toolbar during install.

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lunes, 14 de enero de 2008

FreeBSD Security Advisory

FreeBSD-SA-08:01.pty

FreeBSD-SA-08:02.libc

Why PHP Rocks

An interview with a panel of experts discusses the upside of PHP programming.

domingo, 13 de enero de 2008

Lenovo Delivers SuSE Linux-Based ThinkPads

The starting price for this system will be $949, $20 less than the same laptop with Vista Home Premium.

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sábado, 12 de enero de 2008

FreeBSD in 2007 - a review

2007 is over. It was a very successful year for open source software and another 12 interesting months have passed for FreeBSD. In this post I want to look back at 2007 and see how FreeBSD faired, what happened in “FreeBSD land” and how FreeBSD based operating systems have developed. This post will be a sort of summary of the messages I posted during 2007.

viernes, 11 de enero de 2008

KDE 4.0.0 Released

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

Create personal mailing lists through contact manager

"You can create custom "groups" of contacts so you don't have to remember individual names or email addresses. You don't create a true mailing list, per se -- it's just a simple way to email a handful of people at once."

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miércoles, 9 de enero de 2008

DesktopBSD 1.6 Released

DesktopBSD 1.6 has been released.

lunes, 7 de enero de 2008

FreeBSD: OpenVPN Guide

This guide will help you set up OpenVPN to allow remote users to securely connect to the internal LAN or use the VPN tunnel as an endpoint when on insecure wireless access points, allowing safe transmission of data without worries of being sniffed or intercepted.

Nmap for Beginners - Network & Port Scanning made easy

Nmap is a very powerful tool with LOTS of options and features to visualize your network. Check which services are running on various hosts and find suspicious malicious programs running in your network. Even though Nmap is the swiss-army knife for network scanning, most of its benefits can be gained by the average Network Administrator without diving deep in to its complications. Chances are, most of the time you will find yourself using common switches even if you know all of them.

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