FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 Available

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

FreeBSD-SA-09:12.bind

RANCID on FreeBSD

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

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

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...)