FreeBSD: Foundation Fundraising Update

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce we are only $38,000 away from our 2008 fundraising goal of $300,000! We have received so many donations in the last few weeks. We want to thank everyone who has made a donation. By donating to the foundation, you are helping to support the FreeBSD Project and community.

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FreeBSD 6.4 CDs/DVDs Now Shipping from FreeBSDMall

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.4-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 upcoming 7.1 release.

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Jemdoc - A Tool For Creating Static HTML Pages

Jemdoc is a python script, which processes files written in jemdoc’s syntax (which is far much easier than html) to generate clean XHTML 1.1 compliant static html webpages. Ah, and the most important fact about Jemdoc: It’s free (as in free speech).

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FreeBSD 7.1-RC2 Available

FreeBSD 7.1-RC2 is now available, the second of the Release Candidates. Unless an as yet undiscovered show-stopper comes along the release itself will be anywhere from a week to two weeks from now. We *might* be doing it next week since the release test cycle has gone on for quite a while now and the latest thing that delayed the release was a Security Advisory (SAs don't typically get or need much in the way of public
testing). The traffic we're seeing on the lists and in Gnats is certainly stuff we'll pay attention to and deal with but isn't quite severe enough to warrant further delaying an already severely delayed release.

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5 Ways To Create Custom Multiple Signatures In GMail

Has Google missed the tree because of the forest? Gmail has done a lot for unwrapping email from the staid “click and send”. It enables us to do many things such as collect our mails from several POP3 accounts, configure some custom addresses with a dot here and there…but it just plain ‘forgot’ to put in a box to add multiple HTML Gmail signatures...

Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux released

Adobe Systems has released Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux. Adobe Air 1.5 is main component in Adobe Flash platform and it enables framework and support for web developers (HTML, JavaScript, Flex) for running Web applications without browser.

Now, web developers can use Adobe Air 1.5 framework for developing applications that will work as native on Linux, Windows and MacOS.

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NVIDIA on PcBSD

"PcBSD has full support from NVIDIA, so if you are using NVIDIA graphic card you souldn't have problem with that. But, usually if you just buy a new NVIDIA graphic card its no driver avalaible on the installation DVD. To get the newest driver you can go to NVIDIA download page.

Just download the suitable driver for your graphic card, and install it. Its little different with Linux systems, on Linux systems you have to use run level 3 to install NVIDIA driver. But on PcBSD systems, just open your konsole, extract the compressed file, and install it."

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NetBSD feature end-of-life announcement: soft dependencies

Soft dependencies, also known as soft updates or softdep, is a method of maintaining file system integrity across an unscheduled system shutdown. It improves file system performance by allowing metadata writes to the file system to take place asynchronously. Soft dependencies was introduced with NetBSD 1.5.

The upcoming 5.0 release of NetBSD will include an alternative technology contributed by Wasabi Systems Inc.: Write Ahead Physical Block Logging, or logging. Logging will provide a feature set and performance profile superior to soft dependencies. One compelling advantage is that file systems using it need not be checked with the fsck utility after an unscheduled system shutdown.

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Stopping SSH & FTP brute force attacks with IPFW

Brute force attacks are becoming more and more common in todays security landscape; if you receive security cron logs from your FreeBSD server you will know exactly what I mean. These attacks usually use automated software to try thousands of username and password combinations on SSH and FTP, continually aiming to find a weak account on your system and exploit it.

If an attacker can get access to one system account, that is the first step to doing some very bad things on your system, a nightmare for users and administrators. Luckily, there is a way to stop these attacks, and they’re freely available in the ports collection.

IPTables on Linux has the ability to dynamically add rules to block brute force attacks, however IPFW, a widely used firewall and packet filter, does not have an ability. We are forced to turn to look for 3rd party apps, lucky for us there are some very good ones out there, and we will look at 2 here.

3 reasons why you should let Google host jQuery for you

http://encosia.com

Best Backup Solutions for Desktop Linux

Despite common misconceptions, there are more solid backup solutions for desktop Linux than most people might suspect. Best of all, many of them are completely free with the code being open source. Some of them however, are not.

In this piece, I will give you a break down of each of them. How they can work in your specific situation, where you will find the applications, and I'll provide the needed details so that you can better decide what option is best for you.

Move Over Eclipse. NetBeans 6 Rocks!

Ok, I admit the title is a bit inflammatory to Eclipse fans. But after working with NetBeans 6 over the last week, I have to say I am very impressed. This is not simply a minor upgrade, as is so common in IDEs these days even when they are given a new major version number. Quite the contrary, NetBeans 6 is a major new release, and a major improvement over NetBeans 5.5.

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NetBeans 6.5 review

During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio.

What features does NetBeans 6.5 have for PHP developers? How does it compare against Zend Studio for Eclipse?

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10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming

PHP programming has climbed rapidly since its humble beginnings in 1995. Since then, PHP has become the most popular programming language for Web applications. Many popular websites are powered by PHP, and an overwhelming majority of scripts and Web projects are built with the popular language.

Because of PHP’s huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.

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Tripwire: Linux Host Based Intrusion Detection System

Tripwire is a host based Intrusion detection system for Linux. Tripwire monitors Linux system to detect and report any unauthorized changes to the files and directories. Once a baseline is created, tripwire monitors and detects, which file is added, which file is changed, what is changed, who changed it, and when it was changed. If the changes are legitimate, you can update the tripwire database to accept these changes.

This step by step instruction guide explains how to install and configure open source version of tripwire.

Software RAID in FreeBSD

FreeBSD provides a helpful tool to manage software RAID with ATA deivces. This tool provides features such as hot swapping ATA RAID devices, which was previously unheard of. This functionality and features will be elaborated here.

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