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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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).

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