4.2 Release Song - 100001 1010101

Theo de Raadt announces the song for OpenBSD 4.2:

Just back from my (hiking) trip, I am happy to announce the 4.2 song has been added to the lyrics page at

http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

Yes, it is designed to sound like a mid-era Rush song, ie. something from Grace Under Pressure or such. And there's a few easter eggs hidden in the song as well. It also explains the inside sleeve image...

(more...)

Minimal FreeBSD Installation

This article shows you how to install one of the most stable OS in a virtual environment using the VMWare virtualization server. This however should not frighten or disappoint you, as the technique is pretty much the same for non-virtual environment.

Secure remote access to your desktop

Accessing your home server safely can be problematic, especially if you don't have a fixed IP address, but with Linux, DynDNS, PAM, and NX Free you can create a safe remote access path to your machine.

(more...)

PostgreSQL Replication with Slony-I

"In this post, we look at another replication mechanism available for PostgreSQL, Slony-I. Slony-I is an asynchronous, master-slave replication system. With PGCluster, we had the ability to load balance connections to the PostgreSQL database, knowing that data that is modified in one server will be replicated across to the other server. Additionally, its synchronous nature gave us confidence that, in the event of a failure, all completed transactions will be accounted for. With Slony-I, we run into a very different type of replication. Slony-I is a master-slave system, designed to utilize one master database, and one or more slaves. Data is replicated in a one-way fashion, from the master to the slave(s). It does not include a built-in load balancing feature like PGCluster, and there is no automatic failover from a failed master to one of the slaves. Failover must be manually configured using a third-party utility, such as heartbeat. Slony-I's asynchronous nature means that, in the event of a database failure, there may be uncommitted transactions that have not been replicated across. Slony-I performs batching of transaction replication in order to improve performance. However, if the master fails prior to a batch of transactions being replicated, those transactions are lost."

PostgreSQL Replication with PGCluster

"In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned the PGCluster project. PGCluster is an extension of the PostgreSQL database, designed to give it synchronous, multi-master replication. Replication is one of the areas in which PostgreSQL is lacking in comparison to other proprietary databases, such as Oracle or MS SQL Server. However, after playing around with PGCluster, I have become very impressed with its capabilities. If development continues, PGCluster could offer a sound solution to a very important problem that large enterprises will encounter if they wish to role out PostgreSQL in a high-availability situation."

(more...)

Install SNMP on Debian

In this tutorial I’m going to teach you how to install SNMP on Debian and configure it for local or remote use. Simple Network Management Protocol is a widely used protocol for monitoring the health and welfare of network equipment, computer equipment and even devices like UPS’s. Net-SNMP is a suite of applications used to implement SNMP v1, SNMP v2c and SNMP v3 using both IPv4 and IPv6. In my case I’m using snmp to monitor the status of my servers, both linux and windows. I use Cacti to graph all this information. (I will cover cacti installation on Debian in a future post).

NetBSD 4.0 Release Candidate 2 available for download

on behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am happy to announce the availability of NetBSD 4.0 Release Candidate 2.

Binaries and ISOs are available from

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-4.0_RC2

The list of changes from the 3.0 release is available in the release
notes, online at
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-4.0_RC2/i386/INSTALL.html#Changes%20Between%20T...

There have been many fixes since the previous release candidate, RC1.

The most important ones are:

- ICH9 support in wm(4).
- Enhanced Speedstep support for VIA C7/Eden and amd64.
- many bugfixes for IPF.
- FAST_IPSEC fixes.
- wpi(4) bugfix.
- proplib local DoS fix.
- fix procfs exposing the real path of an executable inside chroot.
- msdosfs bugfix.
- fix of crash dumps on sparc64.
- ACPI SCI (system control interrupt) bug fix, addresses interrupt storms seen on some machines.

(more...)

Flash on FreeBSD/PC-BSD/DBSD

"Previously we reported Matteo’s suggestion on how to get Flash and YouTube/Google Video to work on FreeBSD, but now that gnash-0.8.1 is in the ports tree (and hence avilable for FreeBSD, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD), the greasemonkey+mplayer hack is no longer needed to watch these videos."

(more...)

ComixWall ISG 4.1b released

The first public release of ComixWall ISG 4.1b is ready for download.

ComixWall is developed on OpenBSD using ports/packages and other software, and uses only free/open source software licensed under either BSD or GPL. ComixWall is freely available for all. The project goal is to have all the advanced features of many commercial and closed-source (some half open source) ISGs. This is a very serious undertaking, because most of the free and open source firewalls available on the Internet fail to support many of the features available on those commercial and closed-source ISGs.

(more...)

FreeBSD-SA-07:08.openssl

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/

Open Journal Systems on FreeBSD

As the name suggests, Open Journal Systems is an open source system for publishing and managing online journals. I'm currently evaluating its indexing, email notification, and reader comment features to see if they are suited to the collaborative features we wish to add to the OSBR.

(more...)

PC-BSD 1.4

Two reviews of PC-BSD 1.4.

Resize Images without Sacrificing Content with GIMP

Ever have to crop or resize a picture to fit it better on a web site but end up disappointed with the content you have to lose from the photo? Using a method called liquid rescaling, your pics can be rescaled while retaining almost all of the pertinent content, so you can get the best of both worlds—a smaller image that retains everything you want. If it still sounds a little unclear, check out the video to see this brilliant idea in action.

If you're a fan of the open source image editor GIMP, you can download and install the Liquid Rescale GIMP plug-in to get liquid rescaling results (after you install it by moving the downloaded files into your GIMP directory, you'll see the Liquid Rescale option under the Layer menu).

(more...)

First look at PC-BSD 1.4

PC-BSD 1.4 was released last week and I was quite anxious to test it. I had looked at a couple of earlier versions and I was always quite impressed at the work this small development team was doing. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD and this release is built using 6.2-STABLE. FreeBSD can still be a bit intimidating to some users, but PC-BSD works to eliminate that. In fact, PC-BSD is so user-friendly it might be considered the Ubuntu of free BSDs.

serving more UNIX GUIs with VNC at the same time

There is an easy way to access your Linux's GUI: VNC.

Flash Player 9 Update

This update, codenamed “Moviestar,” includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux versions of Flash Player 9, including:

* Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs.
* Multi-core support for vector rendering.
* Full screen mode with hardware scaling.
* Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework.
* Support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) in the Windows plug-in.