Foundation End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive Final Plea!

Dear FreeBSD Community,

We want to extend a very sincere thank you to everyone who has made a donation this year. Right now in Boulder, Colorado at around 1:30 PM, December 30, we have logged $254,000 in donations from 833 donors! We are so grateful for all the support.

But, we wanted to make one last plea for donations this year. Our goal is $300,000. Please consider making a donation if you haven't already made one. Or, better yet, talk to your employer. Though we know most of you won't be working tomorrow.

Why make a donation? Right now we're putting together our 2010 budget.
Our goal for next year is to double our project development spending, continue sponsoring BSD-related conferences, sponsor more developers to travel to these conferences, and spend more on needed equipment for the project.

(more...)

FreeBSD Mall now shipping 8.0

Happy holidays, everyone!

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.0-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 latest release. Sit back and relax while each new release of FreeBSD is delivered straight to your door.

(more...)

FreeBSD: Changing ISO filenames

People who collect ISO images from more than just the FreeBSD Project have been mentioning it would be nice if "FreeBSD" was part of the filenames for a while now. I just committed a change to head that will add "FreeBSD-" to the beginning of the filenames. So for example

9.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso

becomes

FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso

(more...)

FreeBSD: Foundation End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive Update

Dear FreeBSD Community,

We would like to thank everyone who has donated to the FreeBSD Foundation this year. We have raised $183,888 towards our 2009 goal of $300,000! We are almost 2/3 of the way to reaching our goal! Oh, and BTW, we have had 671 donors this year. This is compared to just over 300 this time last year. This is important not only to help us keep our Public Charity Status, but it shows there are many users who are passionate about FreeBSD and want to show their support.

With the weakened economy we have been very conservative with our spending this year. But, like each previous year we have increased the amount we have spent on the FreeBSD Project and community. We were blown away with the number of project proposals we received this year. We were able to fund 7 projects this year. Unfortunately we didn't have the budget to fund all the proposals we received.

This coming year we want to double the amount we spend on project development. In order to accomplish this, we need to meet our fund-raising goal.

(more...)

FreeBSD: New version of mergemaster with type checking

I think the commit message explains this pretty well, but I wanted to give a heads up message because this is very likely to ring a few bells the first time through. I personally noticed it as result of the recent termcap change, and I'm sure I'm not the only one with stale stuff in /etc/ in particular.

Please make sure that you employ (what should be) the usual precaution of backing up /etc before running this version of mergemaster. I also encourage regular use of the -P option (or PRESERVE_FILES=yes in ~/.mergemasterrc or /etc/mergemaster.rc) however while I believe that this new code is -P safe backing up /etc first is preferred this time around.

(more...)

pfSense v1.2.3 Available!

pfSense, the open source firewall distribution that is based on FreeBSD has seen a new release. This new version brings with it a number of updates and fixes to security advisories.

This release of pfSense contains an update to the FreeBSD base system from the previous version of FreeBSD to version 7.0 to 7.2. This, in turn, implements a number of security advisory fixes that the FreeBSD team have taken care of between the two releases.

(more...)

GlassFish v3 is Now Available!

It has been 4 and a half years since we announced GlassFish during JavaOne 2005 (PR) and today we are making available our most important release: GlassFish v3 is now available for download!

Our first release was during JavaOne 2006, we released GlassFish v1, the first Java EE 5 compliant App Server (family overview) and the second generation of GlassFish came out in September 2007 (family overview). While still based on JavaEE 5, GFv2 leveraged on Sun's (too) long history of App Servers to add the benefits of an enterprise product (quality, performance, scalability) to those of an open source community (agility, ease of use, supportive teams, pricing).

While the transition between GlassFish v1 and v2 was evolutionary, the transition from v2 to v3 is a major change that includes a whole new set of JCP specifications, JavaEE 6, and a new modular, OSGi-based, architecture that expands significantly the applicability of GlassFish.

(more...)

Java EE 6 and NetBeans 6.8 Arrive Today

This morning Sun announced the release of the Java EE 6 SDK and the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, which is the first application server to support Java EE 6. Also announced was the general availability of NetBeans 6.8. The dual release makes sense for Sun since the public releases now give enterprise developers a new, more powerful standard to code with and a robust environment in which they can develop.

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisory

FreeBSD-SA-09:16.rtld
FreeBSD-SA-09:17.freebsd-update
FreeBSD-SA-09:15.ssl

m0n0wall 1.3 final released

Manuel Kasper has announced that m0n0wall 1.3 is "now good enough for production" after three years in beta. m0n0wall 1.3 is now based on a "bare-bones version" of FreeBSD 6.4 and incorporates a web server and PHP to provide web access to the firewall functionality, keeping it's entire system configuration in a single XML text file for transparency. m0n0wall 1.3 includes support for IPv6, IPsec traffic support in the firewall, IPsec NAT-T, DPD and dynamic tunnels and "countless bug fixes and other improvements".

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisory

A short time ago a "local root" exploit was posted to the full-disclosure mailing list; as the name suggests, this allows a local user to execute arbitrary code as root.

Normally it is the policy of the FreeBSD Security Team to not publicly discuss security issues until an advisory is ready, but in this case since exploit code is already widely available I want to make a patch available ASAP. Due to the short timeline, it is possible that this patch will not be the final version which is provided when an advisory is sent out; it is even possible (although highly doubtful) that this patch does not fully fix the issue or introduces new issues -- in short,
use at your own risk (even more than usual).

(more...)

Welcome to FreeBSD 8!

In this article I will write about the latest release from FreeBSD, 8.0. This is a major version that offers new functionality and much improved parts of the code.

FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. This release starts off the new 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.X and introduces many new features. Some of the highlights:

- Xen Dom-U, VirtualBox guest and host, hierarchal jails

- NFSv3 GSSAPI support, experimental NFSv4 client and server

- 802.11s D3.03 wireless mesh networking and Virtual Access Point support
- ZFS no longer in experimental status

- ground-up rewrite of USB, including USB target support

- continued SMP scalability improvements in many areas, especially VFS

- revised network link layer subsystem

- experimental MIPS architecture support

(more...)

Securing Network Services with FreeBSD Jails

In this article by Christer Edwards, we will explore FreeBSD Jails. FreeBSD Jails are a kernel-level security mechanism which allows you to safely segregate processes within a sandbox environment. Jails are commonly used to secure production network services like DNS or Email by restricting what a process can access. In the case of a malicious attack on one service, all other Jailed processes would remain secure. FreeBSD Jails securely limits, in an administratively simple way, the amount of damage an attacker can do to a server.

Creating A Jail With VNC Server On FreeBSD

This article explains how you can run a VNC server from within a jail on FreeBSD.

FreeNAS 0.7 adds ZFS support

The FreeNAS developers have announced the availability of version 0.7 of FreeNAS (code named Khasadar), a FreeBSD-based Network-attached storage (NAS) UNIX-like server operating system. FreeNAS includes a full Web configuration graphical user interface (GUI) and supports the FTP, NFS, CIFS (Samba), AFP, rsync and iSCSI protocols and software RAID (0,1,5).

FreeBSD 8.0-RC3 Available

The third and hopefully last of the Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 8.0 release cycle is now available. Unless something catastrophic comes up within the next couple of days we will begin the final builds for 8.0-RELEASE.

There is one known issue with the igb(4) driver we are still deciding whether or not to fix as part of 8.0-RELEASE versus doing an Errata Notice for it some time after the release is out. It has been patched in head, and the SVN commit for it is r199192. If any of you are able to give that patch a try on a machine with the igb(4) NIC it would be appreciated.

FreeBSD: How to use Meta Ports to install group of ports

Often, after a fresh new installation of FreeBSD, we have a set of programs we want to install. The conventional method would be installing it one by one in /usr/ports. Today, we will use meta ports to install the set of applications by just one “make install clean” rather then “cd” into individual directories and do “make install clean” for every ports.

Meta ports are, as the name implies, ports file that describe about the program we are installing. The ports file describe where & what to install for this ports to work. A sample of “where” would be “where to download the source“, “where to install it” and so on. As for “what“, it would be “what to install to fulfill the dependencies“. In this post, we will take advantage of this “what“. We will define the dependencies as the list of programs we want to install so that the ports will install it.

pfSense book now available for purchase!

Authored by pfSense co-founder Chris Buechler and pfSense developer Jim Pingle, The Definitive Guide to pfSense covers installation and basic configuration through advanced networking and firewalling of the popular open source firewall and router distribution.
This book is designed to be a friendly step-by-step guide to common networking and security tasks, plus a thorough reference of pfSense’s capabilities.

Portmaster funding proposal

Doug Barton wrote in the @announce mailing list,

I have launched an initiative to give the community the opportunity to fund further development work on portmaster. As much as I love doing this work I need to be able to support myself and my family and the kinds of features that users have requested (such as package support) will take a lot of time to implement correctly.

The URL is here: http://dougbarton.us/portmaster-proposal.html

Several users have been kind enough to send donations and I have updated the web page to indicate the work that has been completed, and that which is in progress.

If you have any interest in funding this project take a look at that web page. Of course additional ideas for features are also welcome.

FreeBSD 8.0 RC2 available.

The second of the Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 8.0 release cycle is now available. At this point we feel most of what has been discovered during public testing that is feasible to fix as part of the release process has been addressed. So the current plan is to have 8.0-RC3 in about two weeks.

Details about the current target schedule along with much more detail about the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/8.0TODO

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-current mailing list. I do cross-post announcements to freebsd-stable because this particular release is "about to become a stable branch" but when it comes to watching for issues related to the release most of the developers pay more attention to the freebsd-current list.

ISO images for all supported architectures are available on the FTP sites, and a "memory stick" image is available for amd64/i386 architectures. For amd64/i386 architectures the cdrom and memstick images include the documentation packages but no other packages. The DVD image includes the packages that will probably be available on the official release media but is subject to change between now and release. For sparc64 there is now a livefs cdrom, disc1 includes the documentation packages, and the DVD image has the set of packages that currently build for sparc64 (which is a sub-set of the set provided for amd64/i386).

The night of 1000 jails

As FreeBSD 8.0 is right around the corner it's the right time to get it some more exposure. Just for kicks I got the idea to stress the Jails subsystem - the cheap (both in $$$ and resource requirements) OS-level virtualization technology present in FreeBSD for nearly 10 years now. Behold... the bootup of 1,000, count them - 1,000 virtual machines on a single host with 4 GB of RAM.

Flattened Device Tree Project Announcement

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce another funded project!

Rafal Jaworowski and Semihalf has been awarded a grant to provide FreeBSD with support for the flattened device tree (FDT) technology. This project allows for describing hardware resources of a computer system and their dependencies in a platform-neutral and portable way.

The main consumers of this functionality are embedded systems whose hardware resources assignment cannot be probed or self-discovered.

The FDT idea is inherited from Open Firmware IEEE 1275 device-tree notion (part of the regular Open Firmware implementation), and among other deployments is used as a basis for Power.org's embedded platform reference specification (ePAPR).

"Thanks to this project, embedded FreeBSD platforms will grow in a uniform and extensible way of representing hardware devices, compliant with industry standards (ePAPR, Open Firmware), independent of architecture and platform (portable across ARM, MIPS, PowerPC etc.)," said Rafal Jaworoski, FreeBSD Developer.

HAST Project Announcement

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a new funded project!

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes. The project is partly being funded by OMCnet Internet Service (GmbH www.omc.net) and TransIP BV (www.transip.nl).

The software will allow for synchronous block-level replication of any storage media (GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over the TCP/IP network and for fast failure recovery. HAST will provide storage using GEOM infrastructure, which means it will be file system and application independent and could be combined with any existing GEOM class. In case of a master node failure, the cluster will be able to switch to the slave node, check and mount UFS file system or import ZFS pool and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.

FreeBSD 6.3 EoL coming soon

Hi all,

On January 31st, FreeBSD 6.3 will reach its End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of this release are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release before that date -- more conservative users will probably wish to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.4 or FreeBSD 7.1 (which are both extended-support branches), while others will probably wish to upgrade to FreeBSD 7.2 or the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0.

(more...)

OpenBSD 4.6 Released

Many people have received their 4.6 CDs in the mail by now, and we really don't want them to be without the full package repository.

Oct 18, 2009.

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.6. This is our 26th release on CD-ROM (and 27th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install.

As in our previous releases, 4.6 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system...

Installing MySQL on FreeBSD

In This article I’ll describes how to install very famous and popular relational database, especially using as a back-end database for most web servers.

This article will not teach you how to use SQL. Our consideration go trough only for Installation.

FreeBSD Security Advisories

FreeBSD-SA-09:14.devfs
FreeBSD-SA-09:13.pipe
FreeBSD-EN-09:05.null

FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 Available

The first of the Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 8.0 release cycle is now available. How many RC's we have will depend on how well 8.0-RC1 does. At the moment only one more RC is on the schedule but odds are fairly high we will wind up inserting at least one more RC. Between BETA4 and RC1 a lot of work has gone into IPv6 issues as well as many other issues that have been brought up from the public testing. And a patch set was committed by the people who handle porting ZFS to FreeBSD that they felt makes ZFS production-ready.

Details about the current target schedule along with much more detail about the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/8.0TODO

There are two known problems with 8.0-RC1. One known issue with the 8.0-RC1 build was discovered after the builds got started so is not part of the ISO images or FreeBSD-Update builds. The issue is that local IPv6 link-local addresses are not reachable. A fix for it has been committed to RELENG_8 so if you install from the 8.0-RC1 media or update using FreeBSD-Update you will then need to update using csup/cvsup mechanisms if you need that fix for your environment. It should only
impact people using IPv6.

The other known issue is that the flowtable may direct packets to the wrong interface under certain routing conditions. We feel confident that this bug will be fixed so the flowtable is enabled in RC1 to maximize testing. If you experience routing problems, please temporarily disable the flowtable using the sysctl =0 and report the results to the freebsd-current@ mailing list. If we are unable to resolve this issue by RC2, we will disable the flowtable in 8.0-RELEASE.

DragonFlyBSD 2.4 Released!

Three release options are now available: Our bare-bones CD ISO, a DVD ISO which includes a fully operational X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB disk-key image (1G disk keys recommended).

In addition we will for the first time be shipping a 64-bit ISO. 64-bit support is stable but there will only be limited pkgsrc support in this release.

DesktopBSD 1.7 Review

Although the official name of this blog is Desktop Linux Reviews, we will occasionally be looking at non-Linux operating systems too. Such is the case with DesktopBSD 1.7 which is a version of the FreeBSD operating system. DesktopBSD is, as you can tell from its name, geared toward desktop users.

Linux: Keep track of packages you have installed

During development on a linux system, you probably install many packages using your favorite package manager. When you have to use a new system, or reimage your current one, it can be a pain to remember all the packages you had setup. One solution is to keep a list of the packages installed after the OS load, and then periodically generate a list of what has been added since.

(more...)

8.0-BETA4 Now Available

The fourth and most likely final BETA build for the FreeBSD 8.0 release cycle is now available. We expect the next test build to be the first if the Release Candidates, RC1. Since BETA3 many bugs that were identified from testing done so far were addressed. Some of the bigger issues were an mbuf leak along with work done in the general IPv6, jail, and usb subsystems. Issues in other areas have been addressed as well.

Due to the issues identified in this early phase of testing the schedule
for release has been pushed back. The current target for the release
itself is September 29th, with two RC builds between now and then.
Details about the current target schedule along with much more detail
about the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/8.0TODO

(more...)

FreeBSD 8 Getting New Routing Architecture

Though the open source FreeBSD operating system has changed in many aspects over the last 16 years of its life, one item that has remained relatively static is its underlying network routing architecture.

No more: It's getting an overhaul with the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0 release.

FreeBSD 8.0, due out next month, will include a new routing architecture that takes advantage of parallel processing capabilities. According to its developers, the update will provide FreeBSD 8.0 with a faster more advanced routing architecture than the legacy architecture.

(more...)

Accelerating Secure Storage on FreeBSD

It goes without saying that Information Security is extremely important in today’s connected world. Protecting the vast quantities of digital information stored by companies is critical to maintaining business integrity and reducing the risk related to the unintentional disclosure of private information. Storing data securely is one mechanism that can help reduce the risk of attackers gaining access to sensitive information. This paper examines some of the secure storage solutions that are available on the FreeBSD operating system and discusses options for the acceleration of processor-intense cryptographic operations.

(source)

Broadcom 43xx wireless on FreeBSD 7

FreeBSD is one of the most awesome UNIX-like operating systems available. It even works on laptops, just not very well on mine. I own an Acer Extensa 5220, a major el-cheapo piece of kit containing a Broadcom 4311 wireless LAN card. These same cards are known to appear in Dell laptops as 1390 cards. Finally, after a week of fiddling, I got this card to work natively on FreeBSD 7.

KDE 4.3.0 for FreeBSD available in ports!

We’re happy to announce that following was updated:

- Update py-qt4 to py-qt4.5.4
- Update qscintilla-2* to 2.4
- Update py-sip to 4.8.2
- Update py-kde to 1.16.3
- Update py-qt to 1.18.1
- Update Qt4 to 4.5.2
- Update KDE to KDE-4.3.0

and is now available in the FreeBSD ports tree.

(more...)

Bordeaux 1.8.2 for FreeBSD/PC-BSD Released!

Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.

(Bordeaux 1.8.2 for FreeBSD Released)
(Bordeaux 1.8.2 for PC-BSD Released)

Attack on audio and video conferencing made easy

At the DEFCON conference, which drew to a close yesterday, the developers behind UCSniff presented version 3.0 of the VoIP sniffer, which includes two major new features. Firstly UCSniff, which is coded by Jason Ostrom and Arjun Sambamoorthy, now automatically detects video data transferred by VoIP telephones on the network, even when mixed with audio data. This allows the tool to record those audio and video components which occur in a typical 'unified communication environment'. Secondly, the software will in future also run on Windows – previously it was intended for use only in conjunction with the Linux-based BackTrack 3 penetration testing distribution. The developers plan to make the new version available for download shortly.

(more...)

NetBSD 5.0.1 released

The developers of NetBSD have announced the availability of NetBSD 5.0.1, the first "security/critical" update of the NetBSD 5.0 operating system. The update includes fixes for eleven security issues, including Denial of Service (DoS) problems with BIND and DHCP, buffer overflows in SHA2, ntp and hack, and signature verification bugs in OpenSSL. NetBSD 5.0 was released in April and featured improvements to threading and a rewritten scheduler.

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisory

FreeBSD-SA-09:12.bind

RANCID on FreeBSD

RANCID is an application that allows you to track changes to network devices using a CVS tree. It will email you any changes made at scheduled intervals.

I’m going to implement RANCID on a FreeBSD box at work to track changes to my Cisco network devices. I’ve tested these directions on FreeBSD 6.3 and 7.2 and they should work on FreeBSD in general.

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2 Available

The second of the BETA builds for the FreeBSD-8.0 release cycle is now available. There are still a few things being finished up so a couple more moderately large commits are coming but we seem to be making good progress. The target date for the last of the things still being worked on is BETA3. In the meantime we appreciate the feedback we have received from people who have started testing and some of those problems have been fixed as well.

(more...)

FreeBSD: Foundation Project Announcement

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce another funded project!

Ed Schouten has been awarded a grant to write a new console driver for the FreeBSD project. We are excited to support Ed in providing a more efficient and user friendly console driver.

This project will allow Ed to add an additional abstraction layer to the kernel. This new layer, the terminal layer will be a layer that sits between the TTY layer, the kernel console (cngetc, cnputc) and the actual console driver. Right now we have a terminal emulator (libteken) that is part of Syscons. This terminal emulator will be moved into this terminal layer.

The advantage of having such a layer, is that the console driver itself does not have to care about any TTY semantics, streams of bytes, processing escape sequences, etc. It will just receive a set of character drawing, filling and copying actions. This should also make it easier to implement Unicode.

(more...)

Install Asterisk with GUI in 5 easy Steps: The FreeBSD Way

It is beyond the scope of this guide to teach you how to install the FreeBSD OS.
To make this tutorial even simpler, I remove the Digium PCI Card with 4 FX0.

Requirements:

* Running FreeBSD OS (I’m currently using FreeBSD 7.2)
* Root Access to install from ports
* Basic Unix Commands
* Win32 X-lite SIP Phone

FreeBSD 8.0-BETA1 available via FreeBSD Update

In the early days of the FreeBSD 7.0 release cycle I posted here with some instructions on performing a major version upgrade of FreeBSD using FreeBSD Update; now that we're in to the 8.0 release cycle, I think it's time to post some updated instructions. For a number of reasons this post is coming almost a week late -- Ken Smith announced 8.0-BETA1 on Monday -- but I expect that I'll have FreeBSD Update bits in place when future BETAs and RCs are announced.

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.0-BETA1 Available

The first public test build of the FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE test cycle is now available, 8.0-BETA1. Through the next week or so more information about the release will be posted but here is the current target schedule for the other 'major events':

BETA2: July 13, 2009
BETA3: July 20, 2009
RC1: July 27, 2009
RC2: August 17, 2009
RELEASE:August 31, 2009

PC-BSD 7.1.1 Released

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD 7.1.1

Version 7.1.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements from PC-BSD 7.1, including KDE 4.2.4, improvements to printing support, Xorg Server 1.6.1, and much more.

BSD Router Project

Olivier Cochard-Labbé, founder of FreeNAS, has released the first alpha (0.1) image of his new project: BSD Router Project - http://bsdrp.net

bsdrp is an open source, customised distribution of FreeBSD dedicated to offering IP routing services for small ISP's.

(more...)

Mercurial 1.3 released

The new version 1.3 of distributed version control system Mercurial has added experimental support for subrepositories. The new feature will allow developers to take a set of repositories and treat them as a group. Other changes include a share extension to make creating working directories faster and less expensive.

(more...)

FreeNAS 0.7 RC1 adds ZFS support

"The development release is based on FreeBSD 7.2 and now includes the addition of ZFS (Zettabyte File System) file system support. The first RC also includes several upgrades to the iSCSI initiator driver, the E2fsprogs file system utilities for Ext2 and the rsync file transfer utility. The Transmission BitTorrent client has been updated to version 1.61 and the 'Watch directory' and 'Extra options' fields have been added to the 'Services|BitTorrent' WebGUI. The WebGUI has also been hardened to prevent cross-site request forgery attacks."

(more...)

Linux VS BSD

Interesting article about the differences between Linux and BSD.

FreeBSD 8.0: What's cooking?

What’s cooking for FreeBSD 8? Plenty. Jails v2, Xen dom-U support, ULE 3.0, and DTrace will all likely make it into the release, not to mention all the other new features, stability and code improvements. What else is cooking in FreeBSD 8?

Finding out what httpd a website uses

Have you ever wanted to know what httpd a website is using but didn’t know how? this tutorial will be able to show you.

FreeBSD Errata Notices

FreeBSD-EN-09:02.bce
FreeBSD-EN-09:03.fxp
FreeBSD-EN-09:04.fork

Create better namespaces in PHP

PHP V5.3 introduces the ability to provide namespaces to your PHP classes, constants, and functions. Using namespaces allows you to avoid naming collisions and provide context for your PHP code. These tips provide a few guidelines for building your namespaces so that you get the most out of them.

(more...)

Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features

Firefox 3.5 is a pretty substantial update to the popular open-source browser, and it's just around the corner. See what features, fixes, and clever new tools are worth getting excited about in the next big release.

(more...)

OpenBSD Enters "I'm a Mac/PC" Ad Campaign War

Theo De Raadt, founder of the security-minded OpenBSD operating system, has announced plans to launch a series of television commercials to battle software giants Microsoft and Apple.

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisory

FreeBSD-SA-09:11.ntpd
FreeBSD-SA-09:10.ipv6
FreeBSD-SA-09:09.pipe

FreeBSD: PmcTools merged to RELENG_7

The PmcTools is merged to RELENG_7.

You can now enjoy the same level of features / hw supported as in head:
- Callchain in capture
- Core 2 support
- Core i7 support
- pmcannotate: source code annotation using pmc capture
- bug fixes

(more...)

Easy Jailing with The (PC-BSD) Warden

I've been looking at a neat little program that is part of PC-BSD called The Warden. With this program is very easy to setup and manage FreeBSD jails. The Warden supports pre packaged software that can be installed into jails called Inmates. In this example I will be using the Joomla Inmate package that installs Joomla, Apache, MySQL and PHP in a short space of time.

(more...)

Linux: What's coming in 2.6.30

The next kernel version is to provide all that's necessary to convert, for example, a RAID 5 into a RAID 6 and vice versa. There are changes to the block layer designed to speed up the system, and new and improved drivers will offer better SAS support.

(more...)

FreeBSD custom build iso available

I believe this list (and probably the forums) would be the best place
to announce one of my little projects, namely the building of custom
FreeBSD install discs (DVD sized for desktops, CD sized for servers)
with the latest release and updated packages.

I have been experimenting lately with 'make release' and ports'
building using ports-mgmt/tinderbox. I am using a dedicated system for
building the base system and packages. The purpose of this experiment
(besides the educational value of it) is to allow me to build FreeBSD
discs with custom and up to date packages. These will in turn reduce
significantly the amount of time required to install new systems (esp.
desktops which need hundred of packages).

Glen Barber, who is also frequenting this list, has once again offered
(as with the openoffice packages) lots of his webspace and bandwidth,
allowing me to host the images so others can also benefit from this
work. At this time, the first image is already uploaded and you can
obtain it from this directory:

http://freebsd.dev-urandom.com/iso/i386/xfce-desktop/

(more...)

Virtualbox on FreeBSD is ready for testing.

After the announcement from Alexander Eichner about Virtualbox on FreeBSD, we started the work on a port for FreeBSD. Now we think that we solved the most problems and are ready for the first Call for Testing.

Interview with Evoke developer Dylan Cochran

I sent an email to Dylan Cochran with some question regarding his Evoke BSD project. It’s been sitting in my email for a little while, so it’s time to post it.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Since the last Status Reports there has been interesting progress in FreeBSD Development. FreeBSD 7.2 was released just a few days ago. Some of the highlights include: Support for superpages in the FreeBSD Virtual Memory subsystem. The FreeBSD Kernel Virtual Address space has been increased to 6GB on amd64. An updated jail(8) subsystem that supports multi-IPv4/IPv6/noIP and much more. Lots of FreeBSD Developers are in Ottawa, Canada attending the FreeBSD Developer Summit that is before BSDCan. BSDCan officially starts tomorrow and should cover lots of interesting topics, see the BSDCan Website for more information.

(more...)

FreeBSD 7.2 Released!

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

- support for fully transparent use of superpages for
application memory
- support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails
- csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository
- Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2
- sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors

(more...)

FreeBSD supported branches update

The branches supported by the FreeBSD Security Officer have been updated to reflect the EoL (end-of-life) of FreeBSD 7.0. The new list is below and at . Please note that FreeBSD 7.0 was originally announced with an EoL date of February 28, 2009, but the EoL was delayed by two months in order to allow a 3 month window for systems to be upgraded to FreeBSD 7.1.

Users of FreeBSD 7.0 are advised to upgrade promptly to FreeBSD 7.1, either by downloading an updated source tree and building updates manually, or (for i386 and amd64 systems) using the FreeBSD Update utility as described in the FreeBSD 7.1 release announcement. Some users may wish to wait for the upcoming FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE; however, they should be aware that FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE will only receive "normal" support (i.e., support for 12 months) and consequently it will not be supported for as long as FreeBSD 7.1.

(more...)

OpenBSD 4.5 released

The OpenBSD team is pleased to announce the release of OpenBSD 4.5.

(more...)

NetBSD 5.0 Released!

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am proud to announce that NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth release of the NetBSD operating system, is now available.

NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems. Multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load.

PC-BSD: Thin Client Server update available

Version 0.9.1 of the PC-BSD Thin Client Server is now available for download!

This PBI package allows you to turn any PC-BSD 7.x system into a functional Thin Client Server, which allows network booting by clients and brings them directly to a XDMCP / KDM login prompt.

FreeBSD: Foundation Project Announcement

Dear FreeBSD Community,

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

Rui Paulo will be implementing the forthcoming IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard for FreeBSD. Wireless mesh networks are expected to become widespread as routers and network appliances deploy them, allowing wireless networks to be built and extended dynamically. Support for the standard will allow FreeBSD consumers to take advantage of this new technology.

FreeBSD Security Advisories

FreeBSD-SA-09:08.openssl
FreeBSD-SA-09:07.libc

SysInfo: a set of scripts which document your FreeBSD system

As part of my bachelor thesis, I am developing a script that automatically documents settings of particular FreeBSD box.

The point of this script is to provide some descriptive information about unknown system’s configuration (hardware and software) for administrator who has no idea about the given system.

I would greatly appreciate if you guys could test it in your environment and provide some feedback. I would also like to hear your opinions on what kind of information would you be interested in, in the above described situation. If your ideas happen to be reasonable, I will gladly implement them and include in the next release of SysInfo.

FreeBSD 7.2-RC1 Available

The first of two planned Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of some of the recent work would be particularly appreciated. This includes:

- bce(4) updated (there is a report that lagg(4) does
not work after the update, fixing that may need to be
done as an Errata Notice after the release)

- testing of the threading libraries

- amr(4) should be fixed

(more...)

PC-BSD 7.1 Galileo Edition Review

"PC-BSD 7.1 is a desktop operating system aimed at the normal user and is based on FreeBSD. It enables fast installation of software and getting a working desktop running fast. It can be installed as a Desktop or as a server, however I fail to see the point of the server install for a desktop OS."

(more...)

Combining Debian and FreeBSD

The Debian project made a splash on Sunday with the announcement that two new “architectures” had been added to the Debian FTP archive. Debian has always supported a wide range of processors, though; these architectures are different and noteworthy because instead of providing Debian on different hardware, they build the OS on a completely different kernel: FreeBSD’s. So what exactly does that mean?

PC-BSD 7.1 Released!

The PC-BSD Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD 7.1 *- Galileo Edition*!

Version 7.1 contains a number of enhancements, improvements and bugfixes from the 7.0 series.

(more...)

How to create a system call for FreeBSD kernel

"This is a short note on how to create a system call for FreeBSD. First of all, assume that you already have a kernel function that you would like to call. Let gives a more complicate example than just hello world."

Introduction to FreeBSD for Newbies

"This makes no attempt to replace the most excellent FreeBSD Handbook and simply provides a quick overview of how things work with FreeBSD for new people."

FreeBSD 7.2-BETA1 Available

The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of two recent changes to the system would be particularly valuable. The bce(4) network driver was updated a few days ago. And some significant work was done on the threading libraries a short time ago that is known to fix several major issues but testing to see if it introduced any regressions would be appreciated.

The target schedule for the release is available here:

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.2R/schedule.html

So far we're just one day off target (BETA1 builds started Tuesday).

(more...)

IPsec VPN and NAT

At work we run a number of IPsec VPN tunnels to peers all over the world and we have always been concerned about possible RFC1918 address space collisions between our network and one of the other companies - it is surprising how often administrators keep the default 192.168.0.0/24 network! To the best of our knowledge on OpenBSD there was no good technical solution to the problem, and migrating the whole partner network to a unique address space is often politically unacceptable or too expensive.

(more...)

Linux VS Bsd - Which One Is Better

An interesting article about the differences between GNU\Linux and *BSD.

Open source Mono framework brings C# to iPhone and Wii

"Mono, an open source implementation of .NET runtime, is bringing Microsoft's development technologies to some unexpected places, including the iPhone, Android, and the Wii.

According to Novell's lead Mono developer, Miguel de Icaza, several applications in Apple's App Store are powered by Mono. This might come as a bit of a surprise to those familiar with Apple's highly restrictive application inclusion policies, because the company strictly prohibits developers from using interpreted languages and third-party runtime environments—a constraint that largely rules out technologies like .NET and Java."

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisory

FreeBSD-SA-09:01.lukemftpd
FreeBSD-SA-09:02.openssl

How to load content via AJAX in jQuery

This tutorial will show you How to load content via AJAX in jQuery.

FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.

• Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.

• A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.

• Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.

• The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.

• KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.

• DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

* http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.1R/relnotes.html
* http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.1R/errata.html

(more...)

Volunteers Needed to add Subtitles to Conference Videos

We now have over 23 videos uploaded to the BSD Conferences video channel from MeetBSD, NYCBSDCon, and other BSD conferences.

I'd really like to add subtitles to the YouTube metadata as this has been requested by several users. Once we have subtitles they will be autotmatically machine translated so that users can choose captions in the language they are most comfortable with.

(more...)

Minor heads up: OpenBSM parts updated

Just a minor heads up that I've done an import of OpenBSM 1.1 alpha 4 into head, with the intent of shaking out bugs so that we can ship OpenBSM 1.1 in 7.2-RELEASE in a few months. There are a number of changes in 1.1, including a libauditd so that launchd on Mac OS X can link parts of auditd into it directly, binary format changes (largely enhancements), etc. Please send feedback to trustedbsd-audit@TrustedBSD.org if you run into any issues.

(more...)