RevDobbs noted that a new site dedicated to OpenBSD on the Game Boy Advanced SP platform. Since the 4 Player Link Cable is supported, no doubt a variety of networking applications will soon follow.

JigSaw writes "FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform. Tony Bourke tests FreeBSD 5.2.1 on his SPARC machine."

Daniel Hartmeier writes "OpenBSD developer Ryan McBride explains the new firewall redundancy features in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.5 release in his article Firewall Failover with pfsync and CARP. CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) is a free alternative to the patent-encumbered VRRP, responsible for electing masters in a firewall cluster, while pfsync syncronizes packet filter state information among nodes. The combination allows to replace single-point-of-failure firewalls with clusters of two (or more) nodes, which continue to filter ongoing and new connections when nodes fail. Additional features like arpbalance allow one to share a single IP address for multiple servers, transparently balancing load among them, and adapting to servers failing. Pre-order for OpenBSD 3.5 has started, CDs will ship May 1st."

jschauma writes "On behalf of the pkgsrc team, Alistair Crooks announced today that a new pkgsrc-2004Q1 branch of the NetBSD Packages Collection was created last night, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes some 4518 actively-maintained and supported packages, introduces a self-hosted pkgsrc infrstructure as part of the ever growing support of even more operating systems as well as a number of other goodies. Please see Alistair's message to the netbsd-announce mailing list for details."

jschauma writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release has begun! At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end of May 2004. Please see James' message to the netbsd-announce mailinglist for details."

Some anonymous readers wrote in to let us know about a couple of different interviews in the OpenBSD and NetBSD communities. O'Reilly's ONLamp has an interview with OpenBSD's Marc Espie, who maintains a good share of OpenBSD's build tools, as well as having made numerous contributions to the project. OSDN's own NewsForge also has a interview with NetBSD's Luke Mewburn of the NetBSD Core Group.

Ash'aman writes "The OpenBSD crew have just posted lyrics and illustrations for the upcoming release of OpenBSD 3.5. Included is a hillarious parody of the Monty Python 'cat license' sketch with respect to their battle against software patents over redundancy protocols. Check it out here." The sketch is ready; the software is listed with a May 1st release date. As several Monty Python fans have pointed out, the original sketch is officially called the fish license sketch; the cat just comes earlier in the script.

JigSaw writes "NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on Tony Bourke's Sun Ultra 5. Here is his review."

Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."

JigSaw writes "Well-known FreeBSD/DragonFly/Linux/Amiga system hacker Matthew Dillon discusses a number of interesting points regarding where the BSDs are going, the status and goals of his latest project DragonFly BSD, the status of his innovative Backplane distributed database, his exciting plans to develop DragonFly into a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI (Single System Image) which is something that no other operating system can do today, and more."

jschauma writes "It appears that, unlike many other Open Source projects, NetBSD did not find any serious problems with the much-debated license change of XFree86 4.4.0: it was just imported into the tree."

Newtonian_p writes "Now the BSD world has an answer to Knoppix. The FreeSBIE project have released a live FreeBSD based system on CD. There are also plans to develop a suite of programs to be used to create a personalized disk." If it offers a painless BSD install (the way Knoppix makes it easy to install Debian to a hard drive), this should be a popular project. Reader Cronopios links to a related effort called LiveBSD which "has heavily modified FreeSBIE's scripts to allow for apache mysql and many other programs to run."

kairi writes "NetBSD 1.6.2 has just been released, supporting over 40 architectures. See the release announcement! Be sure to use one of the many mirrors when you grab your ISO!" MobyTurbo adds "A preliminary source of bittorrents has been announced on the NetBSD users mailing list."

jschauma writes "On February 7th, The NetBSD Foundation held it's annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what things are planned for the comming year. The Annual NetBSD Status Report summarizes this meeting and provides an overview of past, present and future of the NetBSD Project, the NetBSD operating system, pkgsrc and the NetBSD Foundation both in general and from the perspective of each group, to give users and people interested in NetBSD insight into the project. Please join our mailing lists for participating in ongoing discussion, and see our web site for more information about the NetBSD project, http://www.NetBSD.org."

Kalev writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. This is intended to address several bugs and vulnerabilities discovered in the FreeBSD 5.2 release. See the Release Notes. The release is now available for downloading. If you are currently running FreeBSD 5.x, you can easily cvsup to it or use binary upgrade feature of sysinstall."

fredrikr writes "UK-based security firm mi2g has analyzed 17,074 successful digital attacks against servers and networks. The results are a bit surprising. The BSD OSes (including FreeBSD and Mac OS X) proved to be the systems least likely to be successfully cracked, while Linux servers were the most vulnerable. Linux machines suffered 13,654 successful attacks, or 80 percent of the survey total. Windows based servers enjoyed a sharp decline in successful breaches, with only 2,005 attacks."

Dan writes "The NetBSD project has announced four new security advisories. NetBSD ships with the racoon(8) IKE (Internet Key Exchange) daemon, a vulnerability was found in the code for packet validation of "informational exchange" messages. Inconsistent IPv6 path MTU discovery handling vulnerability states that a malicious party can cause a remote kernel panic by using ICMPv6 "too big" messages. The OpenSSL 0.9.6 ASN.1 parser vulnerability could lead to a possible denial-of-service. Finally, shmat reference counting bug - programming error in the shmat(2) system call can result in a shared memory segment's reference count being erroneously incremented."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Scott Long has announced the second release candidate of FreeBSD 5.2.1. The release is now available for downloading. Please test and provide feedback. Changes since the RC1 include more bug fixes for ATA, working kernel modules on the install floppies, and numerous security fixes to the src and XFree86 packages. Note that the sparc64 XFree86-4-Server package in this set does not have the latest updates, Scott says that this will be fixed in the final release."

ap writes "The NetBSD Project announced today that The NetBSD Foundation Inc. is now classified as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) publicly-funded non-profit organization. Donations to the Foundation by U.S. taxable entities are now fully tax-deductible. More information can be found at netbsd.org/donations."

asdren writes " Steven Garrity has written a short article highlighting some 'user interface niceties' found in Gnome with regards to file renaming, screen captures, fonts and file zooming." Garrity points out that "... tiny details can have a significant impact on the user experience on operating systems. Inconsistencies that seem insignificant when considering individually, but together they degrade the overall polish and sense of stability in the system," and points out a few places where Gnome manages to avoid such inconsistency.