FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD

Get Linux and FreeBSD hardware info with guide to commands

2011-01-06T18:09:00.002-03:00

Switching between open source OSs can sometimes be confusing, since they may have different ways of doing things. A common task that may confuse some users when switching systems is getting hardware information. In the case of Linux-based OSs and FreeBSD, the following cheat sheet for figuring out how to do the same things on two different systems can ease some of the pain.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.2 Beta 1 arrives for testing

2010-12-21T23:43:00.000-03:00

The PC-BSD development team has announced the arrival of the first beta for version 8.2 of its BSD open source operating system aimed at desktop computers. This first beta for the second point update to PC-BSD 8.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.2 Beta 1 from earlier this month.

PC-BSD 8.2 Beta 2 features version 4.5.4 of the KDE desktop environment, as well as fixes and improvements to the Network Manager, such as 3G support and the option to enable / disable the lagg interface. The developers also note the addition of file system type selection during auto-partitioning and the option to encrypt partitions during installation – the hostname can now also be changed from the installer.

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.2-BETA1 and 7.4-BETA1 Available

2010-12-12T00:53:00.002-03:00

The first of the test builds for the 8.2/7.4 Release Cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. MD5/SHA256 checksums of the images are at the bottom of this message.

(more...)

HEADS UP: FreeBSD 6.4 and 8.0 EoLs coming soon

2010-09-02T11:10:00.002-04:00

Hello Everyone,

On November 30th, FreeBSD 6.4 and FreeBSD 8.0 will have reached their End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team.
Since FreeBSD 6.4 is the last remaining supported release from the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch, support for the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch will also cease at the same point. Users of either of these FreeBSD releases are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.1 before that date.

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.1 CDs/DVDs Now Shipping from FreeBSDMall

2010-08-26T23:16:00.001-04:00

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-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.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.1 review

2010-08-26T19:50:00.001-04:00

PC-BSD 8.1 was released on July 20, 2010, roughly five months after version 8.0 was released. Some of the suggestions made in the review of PC-BSD 8.0 have been carried out in this latest release. In fact, the changes were made within one month of that review being published. It is an encouraging example of how some distro developers respond to suggestions (or critical reviews).

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.1 Provides Evolutionary Open Source Software Upgrade

2010-07-24T01:22:00.001-04:00

Putting out new releases of OS software isn't always about adding major new features -- sometimes it's just about making existing features usable and stable. In the case of the open source software FreeBSD, that's certainly the case with the newly hatched 8.1 release.

FreeBSD 8.1 is the latest version of the popular BSD server operating system, an update that provides some incremental improvements over the 8.0 release, which debuted in 2009. The FreeBSD 8.1 release might also spur users of older versions of FreeBSD to migrate to the new platform.

(more...)

Stopping SSH Brute Force attacks with PF on FreeBSD

2010-07-24T01:13:00.003-04:00

Most people know that port 22 is used for SSH communication and due to this common knowledge, you get people using scripts to test for weak passwords. If you look into your /var/log/auth.log and you see tons of fails/errors from users not on your system or from invalid passwords for root, it means you have people trying to break into your system. Truthfully, anyone that puts a system online with port 22 open will see this happen to them. It’s quite common and not direct attack against you, just scripts looking for IPs with port 22 open.

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.1 RELEASED

2010-07-24T01:08:00.003-04:00

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

- zfsloader added

- zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14

- NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities

- UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support

- SMP support in PowerPC G5

- BIND 9.6.2-P2

- sendmail updated to 8.14.4

- OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1

- GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.1 "Hubble Edition" released

2010-07-21T23:15:00.001-04:00

The PC-BSD development team have announced the release of version 8.1, the "Hubble Edition", of their open source operating system. According to the developers, the first point update to the 8.0 branch of PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD 8.1 and includes a number of enhancements and improvements over the previous release.

PC-BSD 8.1 features version 4.4.5 of the KDE desktop environment, several package updates and improved ZFS file system support. Other changes include support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning, various fixes to the installation back end, such as encryption pass-phrase support, and bug fixes for the desktop tools and utilities. The developers advise all users to upgrade to the latest release.

(more...)

FreeBSD: Foundation Announces Resource Containers Project

2010-07-17T00:23:00.003-04:00

Dear FreeBSD Community,

We are pleased to announce that Edward Tomasz Napierala has been awarded a grant to implement resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism.

Unlike Solaris zones, the current implementation of FreeBSD Jails does not provide per-jail resource limits. As a result, users are often forced to replace jails with other virtualization mechanisms. The goal of this project is to create a single, unified framework for controlling resource utilisation, and to use that framework to implement per-jail resource limits. In the future, the same framework might be used to implement more sophisticated resource controls, such as Hierarchical Resource Limits, or to implement mechanisms similar to AIX WLM. It could also be used to provide precise resource usage accounting for administrative or billing purposes.

(more...)

New FreeBSD core team elected

2010-07-17T00:19:00.003-04:00

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the completion of the 2010 core team election. The FreeBSD core team acts as the project's "board of directors" and is responsible for approving new src committers, resolving disputes between developers, appointing sub-committees for specific purposes (security officer, release engineering, port managers, webmaster, et cetera), and making any other administrative or policy decisions as needed. The core team has been elected by FreeBSD developers every 2 years since 2000.

The newly elected core team is:
-------------------------------
John Baldwin
Konstantin Belousov
Wilko Bulte
Brooks Davis
Warner Losh
Pav Lucistnik
Colin Percival
Hiroki Sato
Robert Watson

(more...)

ZFS version 15 committed to head

2010-07-17T00:14:00.003-04:00

Dear community,

as you may have noticed, ZFS v15 support with many bugfixes was committed to head in revision 209962.
The commit was tagged for MFC, so if there are no stopper issues I am going to commit it to stable/8 in 2 months from today.

Here is a short summary of what we gained with this update:

1. Stability - more mature ZFS code, comparable to Solaris 10 update 8 with latest bugfixes

2. Compatibility - Solaris 10 update 8 default ZFS pools can now be imported into FreeBSD

3. Features - user and group quotas (ZFS-internal) are very useful for intranet fileservers that want to use ZFS

4. Speed - my real-world benchmarks give a 15-20% RPS yield in PHP webserver workloads with codebase on ZFS

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisory

2010-07-17T00:08:00.002-04:00

FreeBSD-SA-10:07.mbuf

FreeBSD 8.1-RC2 Available

2010-07-03T23:58:00.002-04:00

The second and most likely final Release Candidate for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. Checksums for the images are at the bottom of this message.

There was a recent regression fix related to Atheros AR9280 cards being detected incorrectly, making them unusable. If you were having problems with a wireless card that had worked before not working with the earlier test builds hopefully this will fix the problem. Testing of this fix would be appreciated.

At this time DVD images are not available. There was a fairly serious security issue with the png graphics package. We will generate DVD images when the rebuilt packages become available, that will be announced then the images are ready.

The target schedule for the release is available here:

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/schedule.html

and the wiki page tracking the current status is here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/8.1TODO

If you find problems you can report them through the normal Gnats based PR system or here on this mailing list.

(more...)

FreeBSD supported branches update

2010-07-01T22:12:00.001-04:00

Hello Everyone,

The branches supported by the FreeBSD Security Officer have been updated to reflect the EoL (end-of-life) of FreeBSD 7.2. The new list is below and at http://security.freebsd.org.

Users of FreeBSD 7.2 are advised to upgrade promptly to a newer release, 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 relevant release announcement.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.1-RC1 Now Available

2010-06-21T19:52:00.001-04:00

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1-RC1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RC1, and KDE 4.4.4

Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

* FreeBSD 8.1-RC1
* KDE 4.4.4
* Numerous fixes to the installation backend
* Support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning
* Improved ZFS support
* Bugfixes to desktop tools / utilities

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.1-RC1 Available

2010-06-17T23:33:00.001-04:00

The first Release Candidate for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures.

Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. Checksums for the images are at the bottom of this message.

For the amd64 and i386 architectures the DVD images have a preliminary set of packages in the ISO files. Unfortunately due to some limitations of the FTP mirroring system we are limited to images no larger than 2Gb so the packages available on the installation media is limited (almost down to just gnome/kde). We will work to remove that limitation but that won't happen before 8.1 is to become available.

(more...)

FreeBSD: Foundation Announces Jail Based Virtualization

2010-06-10T22:46:00.001-04:00

We are pleased to announce that Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.

FreeBSD has been well known for its jail based virtualization during the last decade. With the import of the virtual network stack, FreeBSD's operating system level virtualization has reached a new level.

This project includes cleanup of two years of import work and development and, more notably, brings the infrastructure for a network stack teardown. Cleanly shutting down a network stack in FreeBSD will be the major challenge in the virtualization area to get the new feature to production ready quality for the 9.x release
lifecycle.

Further, the project includes generalization of the virtual network stack framework, factoring out common code. This will provide an infrastructure and will ease virtualization of further subsystems like SYSV/Posix IPC with minimal overhead. All further virtualized subsystems will immediately benefit from shared debugging facilities, an essential feature for early adopters of the new technology.

(more..)

FreeBSD: ports feature freeze starts soon

2010-06-08T21:27:00.002-04:00

In preparation for 8.1-RELEASE, the ports tree will be in feature freeze after release candidate 1 (RC1) is released, currently planned for June 11.

If you have any commits with high impact planned, get them in the tree before then and if they require an experimental build, have a request for one in portmgr@ hands within the next few days.

(more...)

FreeBSD 7.2 EoL coming soon

2010-06-07T00:12:00.002-04:00

Hello Everyone,

On June 30th, FreeBSD 7.2 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 FreeBSD 7.3 before that date; FreeBSD 7.3 will be supported until the end of March 2012. Please note that since FreeBSD 7.1 has been designated for 'Extended' support, it will continue to be supported until the end of January 2011, i.e., FreeBSD 7.1 will be supported longer than FreeBSD 7.2.

The End of Life date for FreeBSD 7.2 was originally announced as May 31, but was delayed by one month in accordance with Security Team policy in order to allow a 3 month window between the release of FreeBSD 7.3 and the End of Life of FreeBSD 7.2 to allow time for systems to be upgraded.

The freebsd-update(8) utility can be used to upgrade i386 and amd64 systems from 7.2-RELEASE (or 7.2-RELEASE-pX for some X) to 7.3-RELEASE using binary updates (i.e., without compiling from source) as described in the 7.3-RELEASE announcement; given an adequate internet connection, this process usually takes 15 minutes or less.

(more...)

DesktopBSD lives on under new leadership

2010-06-06T21:19:00.003-04:00

Following the September 2009 announcement that version 1.7 of DesktopBSD would be the "last and final release", a small group of German developers have signed on to continue the distributions development. DesktopBSD is based on FreeBSD using the KDE desktop environment and is similar to PC-BSD which also focuses on a desktop version of the BSD variant.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.1-BETA1 - Now available!

2010-06-06T21:02:00.005-04:00

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1-BETA1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-PRERELEASE, and KDE 4.4.4

Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/161/11/. Some of the notable changes are:

* FreeBSD 8.1-PreRelease
* KDE 4.4.4
* Numerous fixes to the installation backend
* Support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning
* Improved ZFS support
* Bugfixes to desktop tools / utilities

(more...)

FreeBSD 8.1-BETA1 Available...

2010-05-29T21:56:00.002-04:00

The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites by now. MD5/SHA256 checksums of the images are at the bottom of this message.

The ISOs for this build do not include packages other than the docs.
For amd64 and i386 "memstick" images are also available that can be copied to a USB "memory stick" (also called "thumb drive") and used for installs on machines that support booting from that type of media.

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisories

2010-05-27T19:54:00.002-04:00

FreeBSD-SA-10:04.jail
FreeBSD-SA-10:06.nfsclient
FreeBSD-SA-10:05.opie

OpenBSD 4.7 Released!

2010-05-19T21:34:00.002-04:00

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.7.
This is our 27th release on CD-ROM (and 28th 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, 4.7 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.

(more...)

FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE Available

2010-03-24T21:17:00.002-03:00

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.2 and introduces a few
new features. There will be one more release from this branch to allow future improvements to be made available in the 7-STABLE branch but at this point most developers are focused on 8-STABLE.

Some of the highlights:

ZFS updated to version 13
new boot loader gptzfsboot supports GPT and ZFS
hwpmc(4) enhancements including support for core2/i7 processor and pmcannotate(8)
new mfiutil and mptutil tools for widely used RAID controllers
NULL pointer vulnerability mitigation
bind updated to 9.4-ESV
Gnome updated to 2.28.2
KDE updated to 4.3.5
Perl updated to 5.10

(more...)

Taking a look at PC-BSD 8.0

2010-03-13T00:02:00.001-03:00

Toward the end of 2009 I took FreeBSD 8.0 for a test drive on an old PC. The experiment went so well that I was immediately looking forward to trying out PC-BSD, a desktop variant of the popular FreeBSD operating system. Unfortunately for me, the new version of PC-BSD wasn't to arrive for several weeks. Like a penniless child with his nose pressed up against the window of a candy store, I went over to the project's website.

The PC-BSD site maintains a very similar look and feel to its FreeBSD counterpart. That is to say, it's well crafted, easy to read, painless to navigate and filled with lots of useful information. The installation documentation especially is a well-done piece of work. Open source projects, and their developers, often take flak for putting so little effort into the user manual. This is not the case with PC-BSD. While browsing, I read the teaser for the upcoming release - and good things were planned. New features include better ZFS support, a live DVD, improvements to the package updating system, the ability to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit system and better binary support for Linux programs.

It felt like a long wait, but in February the PC-BSD team released their latest offering, version 8.0, and I downloaded their live DVD. It's a hefty image, weighing in at just over 3 GB. There's also a USB image file for people who like to carry their operating system in their pocket. For my PC-BSD test drive I used a desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM), my HP notebook (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM) and a virtual environment, provided by VirtualBox.

(more...)

FreeBSD 7.3-RC2 Available!

2010-03-06T13:51:00.002-03:00

The third and what should be last of the test builds for the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, 7.3-RC2, is available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. The target schedule as well as the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.3TODO

The schedule has slipped by a bit over a week so the actual target for the release announcement is really about a week and a half from now. If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-stable mailing list.

There are known issues with the Radeon video driver that have caused some people problems. The problems have been nebulous enough that we have decided to not hold up the release due to that specific issue. At the point that driver has stabilized it will be handled as an Errata Notice. So far that is the only big problem we've been tracking as part of the release that has not been resolved in one way or another.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.0 Released

2010-02-22T18:59:00.003-03:00

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.5

PC-BSD 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements over the 7.x series. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2
KDE 4.3.5
Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD
Run in Live mode directly from DVD
Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly
Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

(more...)

XHP: Inline XML For PHP

2010-02-22T15:29:00.001-03:00

Anyone developing with PHP quickly learns that PHP’s ability to generate HTML is both a blessing and a curse. While PHP supports the ability to generate dynamic websites and HTML, it often creates kludgy and difficult code. Facebook, one of the world’s largest consumers of PHP and fresh off their announcement of HipHop, has noted this problem as well, and decided to try and solve it by introducing XHP.

XHP, in a nutshell, is designed to augment the syntax of PHP to allow for inline XML to be included in PHP code. More simply put, XHP permits PHP to understand HTML syntax, eliminating the need for quotation marks, concatenation, escaping and all of the other headaches associated with including HTML directly into PHP code.

(more...)

Compiling HipHop-PHP on Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

2010-02-22T14:51:00.001-03:00

Facebook recently open-sourced their new software, HipHop-PHP. HPHP compiles PHP source to very efficient C++, which is then compiled to an executable binary. After a few hiccups, building HPHP is surprisingly easy. HPHP must be compiled on a 64bit platform. If you only have a 32bit platform and you really want to play with it, set up a VM at Slicehost or Linode and compile it there (if you have a 32bit platform, you can’t install a 64bit VM). I eventually used my Linode account and built it there.

(more...)

HipHop for PHP finally released

2010-02-22T14:47:00.000-03:00

An initial release of HipHop for PHP, Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ transformer, is finally available for download from Github.

HipHop comes with a number of rather specific requirements, including cmake 2.6 or higher, and several patches that need to be applied to libcurl and libevent in order for the project to compile against them.

Facebook employee (and core PHP contributor) Scott MacVicar announced the availability of the package through a post on the project’s Google group, adding that “while we’re running HipHop in production it might not yet be stable for you.”

(more...)

HipHop for PHP: First look

2010-02-06T19:44:00.001-03:00

Just this tuesday Facebook announced a ambitious project called “HipHop for PHP”, if you missed it general opinion says you have been coding PHP in a cave. As I write this review no code has been posted yet, but Facebook has made a great move to open source the project so we can all get our hands on it, use it and contribute to it. So since the code is not out there yet, this is literally a first impression article based on the presentation made by Facebook and various posts from core PHP developers who got a first look at the technology before the release.

(more...)

FreeBSD - "The unknown giant"

2010-02-06T17:42:00.002-03:00

FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple's OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!, which before the rise of Google was the busiest site on the internet.

FreeBSD rose from the ashes of 386BSD, the original effort to port BSD to the Intel chip, and claims a code lineage that reaches back to Bill Joy's Berkeley Software Distribution of the late seventies. The 386BSD port was begun in 1989 by Bill and Lynne Jolitz, and was destined to be the original free Unix-like operating system for the IBM PC. The first public release of 386BSD (Version 0.0) was on St. Patrick's Day, 1991, accompanied by a series of articles in Dr Dobbs journal, which documented the process.

The first functional release of 386BSD was Version 0.1, which was released on Bastille Day, 1992.

FreeBSD emerged in 1993, after the self-imposed task of supporting 386BSD on their own had proved too much for Bill and Lynne Jolitz. The patchkit which had been the underpinning for the BSD port to the 386 was revived and became the basis for the first FreeBSD release.

(more...)

7.3-BETA1 Available...

2010-01-30T23:48:00.004-03:00

7.3-BETA1, the first test build of the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, is now available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. The target schedule along with the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.3TODO

For now we plan on BETA1 being followed by two Release Candidates, then the release itself. If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-stable mailing list.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.0-RC Released

2010-01-30T23:41:00.003-03:00

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-RC (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.4

PC-BSD 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements over the 7.x series. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

* FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2

* KDE 4.3.4

* Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD

* Run in Live mode directly from DVD

* Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly

* Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

(more...)

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2010

2010-01-08T23:00:00.000-03:00

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2010.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf by
January 29, 2010 to apply for this grant.

(more...)

BSD Magazine goes free!

2010-01-08T22:55:00.000-03:00

Hello everyone!

We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form. It will look like the BSD magazine one is familiar and comfortable with. Please sign up to our newsletter at www.bsdmag.org and get every issue straight to your inbox.

(more...)

FreeBSD Security Advisories

2010-01-08T22:52:00.001-03:00

FreeBSD-SA-10:01.bind
FreeBSD-SA-10:02.ntpd
FreeBSD-SA-10:03.zfs

FreeBSD Errata Notice

2010-01-08T22:47:00.002-03:00

Since FreeBSD 8.0 was released, several stability and performance problems have been identified. This Errata Notice describes several fixes judged to be of particular importance, but low risk, to users with specific workloads or using specific features that trigger these problems.

Areas where problems are addressed include NFS, ZFS, Multicast networking, SCTP as well as the rename(2) syscall.

(more...)

PC-BSD 8.0-BETA Released

2010-01-03T20:45:00.004-03:00

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-BETA (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, and KDE 4.3.4

Version 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:
 * FreeBSD 8.0-Release

 * KDE 4.3.4

 * Brand new System Installer, allows the install 
   of PC-BSD or FreeBSD

 * Run in Live mode directly from DVD

 * Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and 
   installing applications directly

 * Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA 
   drivers on amd64

(more...)

FreeBSD 6.3 EoL coming soon

2010-01-03T20:40:00.001-03:00

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 FreeBSD 8.0.

The freebsd-update(8) utility can be used to upgrade i386 and amd64 systems from 6.3-RELEASE (or 6.3-RELEASE-pX for some X) to 6.4-RELEASE using binary updates (i.e., without compiling from source) as described in the 6.4-RELEASE announcement; given an adequate internet connection, this process usually takes 15 minutes or less.

(more...)

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

2009-12-31T00:20:00.001-03:00

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

2009-12-23T22:36:00.000-03:00

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

2009-12-21T19:27:00.001-03:00

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

2009-12-20T21:38:00.002-03:00

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

2009-12-13T20:33:00.001-03:00

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!

2009-12-12T00:47:00.003-03:00

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!

2009-12-11T01:43:00.001-03:00

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

2009-12-11T01:29:00.002-03:00

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

2009-12-03T22:43:00.001-03:00

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

m0n0wall 1.3 final released

2009-12-03T00:34:00.001-03:00

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

2009-12-01T23:17:00.002-03:00

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!

2009-11-29T20:16:00.000-03:00

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

2009-11-26T23:24:00.003-03:00

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

2009-11-20T22:54:00.001-03:00

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

2009-11-17T23:28:00.002-03:00

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

FreeNAS 0.7 adds ZFS support

2009-11-17T23:21:00.000-03:00

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

2009-11-15T20:58:00.001-03:00

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

2009-11-14T21:24:00.001-03:00

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!

2009-11-07T01:12:00.000-03:00

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

2009-11-01T01:04:00.002-03:00

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.

2009-11-01T01:00:00.004-03:00

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

2009-10-25T01:41:00.002-03:00

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

2009-10-25T01:24:00.000-03:00

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

2009-10-25T01:21:00.002-03:00

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

2009-10-18T23:37:00.002-03:00

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

2009-10-18T17:10:00.003-03:00

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

2009-10-14T22:08:00.002-03:00

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

2009-10-04T00:49:00.003-04:00

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

FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 Available

2009-09-22T23:09:00.002-04:00

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!

2009-09-17T23:05:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-16T00:14:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-15T23:59:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-07T21:57:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-22T01:26:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-11T23:02:00.005-04:00

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

2009-08-11T22:59:00.001-04:00

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!

2009-08-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

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!

2009-08-07T22:43:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-03T22:16:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-03T22:11:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-28T23:54:00.000-04:00

FreeBSD-SA-09:12.bind

RANCID on FreeBSD

2009-07-23T22:29:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-19T15:06:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-19T14:56:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-19T14:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-11T22:37:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-06T21:42:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-06T21:39:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-06T21:34:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-02T23:51:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-01T21:01:00.000-04:00

"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

2009-07-01T20:51:00.001-04:00

Interesting article about the differences between Linux and BSD.

FreeBSD 8.0: What's cooking?

2009-06-27T23:59:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-27T23:54:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-24T19:45:00.002-04:00

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

Create better namespaces in PHP

2009-06-23T20:51:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-20T16:24:00.002-04:00

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...)