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.

*no comment* writes "If you are running OpenBSD on your IPv6 install, it might be time to upgrade to -current. (just kidding) There is, however, a way to crash OpenBSD 3.4 with a couple of simple IPv6 commands. Georgi Guninski, found the problem. To quote Theo, 'it is just a crash.'" It is unknown if the bug could be used to execute arbitrary code, but it does require patching a Linux kernel (or rolling your own network stack) to exploit.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has posted the 2003 FreeBSD year-end edition status report. He says many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including SGI XFS port, MIPS, PowerPC on PPCBug-based embedded boards, and networking locking and multithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004."

Dan writes "Daniel Eischen says that libkse has been renamed back to libpthread and is now the default threads library. The gcc-pthread option has also been changed to link to libpthread instead of libc_r. For alpha and sparc64 machines, libkse has not been renamed and links are installed so that libpthread points to libc_r. FreeBSD GNOME team's Joe Marcus Clarke confirmed that the ports system will switch to using libpthread as the default for PTHREAD_LIBS shortly. A patch set is currently being tested, once that completes, the necessary port hooks will be in place to easily build applications linked to libpthread."

MobyTurbo writes "FreeBSD 5.2.1 RC is now available, and now can be downloaded from the FreeBSD site and mirrors, or if you are currently running FreeBSD 5.2 (or for that matter some earlier versions) you can simply cvsup to it. The upcoming 5.2.1 release should fix a number of outstanding bugs in the 5.2 release, and this is a chance to make sure those bugs get fixed!"

JigSaw writes "OSNews published a review of FreeBSD 5.2. They found the OS very solid as a server but pretty lacking as a desktop. The author finds FreeBSD very fast overall, easy to configure and that it feels integrated and mature. On the other hand, it has limited modern hardware support, small annoyances at places and that not many binary packages are available and so compilations from ports may take long time."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Jeff Roberson says that the ULE scheduler has entered into its probationary period as the default scheduler on FreeBSD. He says that if all goes well, it will remain the default through the rest of FreeBSD 5.* releases. He is requesting you to switch over and test it. The ULE scheduler was designed to address the growing needs of FreeBSD on SMP/SMT platforms and under heavy workloads. It supports CPU affinity and has constant execution time regardless of the number of threads."

MRE writes "Well it's been out for a week an a half, but here's the first review of FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. Or if you want to download the new release and try it for yourself, it's only one ISO image away."

noackjr writes "Matt Fuller posted among his rants a great introduction and explanation of BSD For Linux Users: 'It's been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that's not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don't really understand how and why it's put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.'"

In a recent email, Theo de Raadt announced support in -current for power management on the Pentium M series of processors. This allows the CPU to be throttled and therefore power saved. Additionally, dhclient was modified so that it is not necessary to find the process of the already-running dhclient and kill it before running dhclient again. This is useful for laptops that spend time roaming between different wireless networks, when dhclient is used fairly often.

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project has announced that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. There is a cash prize of US $100.00 for the winning entry. The successful logo will also have wide exposure, featuring in all NetBSD material including, but not limited to; the NetBSD.org web site, software media, apparel, and business systems. The competition will close on February 29, 2004. The rules of the competition, submission information and the design brief can be found in the official announcement, which has already spawned some discussion on the netbsd-advocacy and current-users MailingLists." The announcement notes that the current logo is "too complicated... hard to reproduce... [and] has negative cultural, and religious ramifications."

James writes "Freebsd 5.2 is released. FTP mirrors. Release notes This is another step towards 5-STABLE. Many improvements in this release, including ATA and networking enhancements." Patrick Jensen also points out that this is the first stable release with AMD64 support. You can also see the official announcement if you so desire.

An anonymous reader writes "BSDVault has interviewed Rick Collette of the EkkoBSD project. Among other things they discuss project goals and roadmap for this new distro."

jschauma writes "NetBSD's Packages Collection aka pkgsrc now has support for an experimental new framework called ``pkgviews''. This framework, finally allowing multiple versions of one package to co-exist without conflicts (among other great features), was first proposed by Alistair Crooks at EuroBSDCon 2002 and has been integrated into pkgsrc by Johnny C. Lam, who just posted a User's guide to the tech-pkg MailingList."

sremick writes "After breaking the 9,000 mark in July, the FreeBSD ports collection was well on its way of crossing 10,000 by the end of 2003. Sure enough, we made it! According to freshports, the number of ports in the FreeBSD ports tree currently stands at 10,015. This little graph is also nice, though not completely current. Way to go, FreeBSD!"

cperciva writes "Many systems around the world have been possessed by penguins and dead rats. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult without physical access to the machines in question. Thanks to a new depenguinator, it is now possible to upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x without requiring anything more than an SSH connection." Clever idea.

Dan writes "Roland van Laar has a new, significant wi-fi patch for FreeBSD 5.1 and higher. The patch, available for download and testing, blocks clients with an empty or 'ANY' ssid and disables ssid broadcasting using the underlying firmware feature. SSID (Service Set ID) is used to identify wireless clients to a wireless / wired gateway. Wireless devices from the same manufacturer generally ship with the same default SSID. A beacon is a type of packet/frame that contains the SSID of a network. It is used to sync clocks on client devices and to make it easy for new network clients to see what networks are available. Preventing others from using your ssid is a means (although not foolproof!) of securing your wireless network."