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

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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."

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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."

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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

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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.

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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.

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