BSD Forums writes "FreeBSD operating system is making progress towards support for several 64bit platforms. FreeBSD 5.0 introduced SPARC64 and IA64 (Itanium) to its list of platforms and AMD64 is likely to be added in version 5.2."

Jonatan Wallmander writes "We've written a small howto as well as produced a simple patch for OpenSSH that improves tunneling functionality in the ssh client on the OpenBSD platform (this should be OK on other platforms with some tweaking). It's a simple hack but works very good for us. We can have different IPs on the same BSD machine tunnel different hosts ... Without the patch you can only have one tunnel per BSD machine since it listens on INADDR_ANY.. Now all my computers on the LAN can access remote servers securely as if they were in the same room provided by a single BSD server. :)"

Axel Gruner writes "A german BSD-Community, namely BSDForen.de, has officially anounced their new project "lBSD_de". "lBSD_de" is a modification of the FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE Operating System to better fit the needs of German speaking users.
Another goal of the project is developing new features. Of course, whatever new there is will be passed to the FreeBSD-Developers to either implement it or drop it. That way, avoiding two FreeBSDs each with different features is guaranteed.
For further information, visit the project's homepage at http://www.lbsdde.de."

BSDForums writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has posted the schedule for the Release of FreeBSD 5.1 late spring. FreeBSD-5 stable roadmap, announced earlier, outlines the future of FreeBSD-5 stable releases, specifically 5.1 and 5.2."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenBSD 3.3 was released today, with many new features, including integration of the ProPolice stack protection technology, W^X ('write xor X') on sparc, alpha and hppa, privilege separated XFree86 and an incredible number of enhancements and stability improvements to the packet filter, pf, including address pools for reverse NAT/load balancing, ALTQ integration for network conditioning, and anchors/tables/spamd for spam tar-pitting. Information on the release can be found here and download sites are listed here. (Also, here's a handy way to speed up your DSL connection - prioritizing empty TCP ACKs and ToS low-delay traffic with OpenBSD 3.3's pf.)"

Dan writes "Matthew Garrett has demonstrated his success in building a Debian operating system on the Sparc architecture on top of the NetBSD kernel. Additionally Joel Baker reported about significant work for the NetBSD/x86 port, such as dpkg and APT, that will work without additional patches. NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux. Folks working on the project say that porting Debian to the NetBSD kernel increases the number of platforms that can run a Debian-based operating system."

Gentu writes "OSNews features an ultra interesting and in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core team (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). They discuss issues from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even... re-unification of the BSDs."

Dan writes "Jason Ish has updated the redhat/base OpenBSD port from Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 8.0. The email note is a few days old, but the port seems to have been committed yesterday. So far he has tested with Opera and Netscape. If you run any Linux apps on OpenBSD, you are encouraged to test these commits and provide feedback. (Several people have reported success running Opera 6.12, Opera7 with some tweaks, and Netscape)."

Dan writes "Pyun YongHyeon and Max Laier announce a new release of PF for FreeBSD, which is available for download. Since the first release of PF at the end of March 2003, PF has undergone several major updates such as -current and ALTQ support. They have also removed bugs in IPv6, module handling and table support code and believe the current version 0.61 is very close to production use."

Mortimer.CA writes "The OpenBSD Journal has an article with more info on cutting of the OpenBSD funding. It seems that the funding was partially cut due to worries about "capable nation-states". Also Mark West asked the hotel to cancel all reservations for the upcoming "hackathon" -- even though many of the arriving developers have non-refundable tickets, and would have no place to stay. Jonathan Smith also probably had something to do with the decision. If you would like to voice your opinion to these individuals, please be clear, extremely professional and courteous. Flaming and being childish will only hurt OSS. Also, please think about donating or ordering something to help the project along." DARPA, which initially denied that it was cancelling the grant, has now admitted it. Although de Raadt seems to be upset with how his UPenn contacts are handling the cancellation, it's DARPA that is ultimately at fault, not the UPenn people.

chill writes "Where to begin? OpenBSD Journal has a couple of update articles on the business of DARPA cancelling POSSE and OpenBSD's grant. And here is a message from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD big cheese, with a quote from a military spokesman. How does '...due to world events and the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation-states...' grab you? Does open source and freely available security support terrorism by its very nature?"

Dan writes "OpenBSD team's Miod Vallat says that due to the upcoming release of OpenBSD 3.3, the 3.1-STABLE branch will have no more fixes committed to its branch after June 1, 2003 and should therefore be considered out of regular maintenance."

Dan writes "OpenBSD's Theo De Raadt provides an update on his team's efforts to remove potential buffer overflows within OpenBSD code by always calculating what the bounds of an operation are. They have been going through the source tree cleaning out all calls to sprintf(), strcpy(), and strcat(). Theo says that they have removed (replaced) approximately 2000 occurences of these functions." (The same buffer overrun-squashing effort was mentioned earlier this month.)

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Robert Watson says that effective today, newfs(8) and sysinstall(8) will create UFS2 file systems by default, unless explicitly specified. Users wanting to create UFS1 file systems for whatever reason (interoperability with earlier versions, etc) should be sure to employ the -O1 flag to newfs(8), or hit '1' in the label editor in sysinstall(8) to select UFS1."

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available . NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6 and earlier, with binary releases for 40 ports, and of course also including NetBSD's Packages Collection. A complete list of changes can be found in CHANGES-1.6.1. Please use a mirror close to you."

BSDForums writes "On all but the smallest TCP/IP network, it's handy to configure network information for computers automatically. That's what DHCP does. It's easy to act as a DHCP client, but configuring a server is a little trickier. Dru Lavigne introduces DHCP and explains what you need to know to setup a simple DHCP server."

Starrider writes "It seems the DARPA grant for OpenBSD and for University of Pennsylvania has been cancelled (?) immediately and without warning. See the full story in Theo's email and on deadly.org." Theo is left to only speculate why funding was suddenly pulled. One also has to wonder what this means for the University of Pennsylvania, since they were also in for a piece of the pie.

Dan writes "Julien Bordet announces that Packet Filter (PF) now has "pfsyncd" - the ability to synchronize states across multiple firewalls. Kernel patches and alpha source code to the userland daemon can be found here. This is an alpha release meant for testing and should not be used in production. Testing, patches, and feedback is greatly appreciated."

flynn_nrg writes "Even although version 3.3 is not out yet, users can already enjoy the new 3.3 song: "Puff the Barbarian". Like other Barbarians before him, Puff has had to face some pretty crazy challenges. This song is an allegory of the recent difficulties we went through dealing with Sun, who refused our request for documentation about their UltraSPARC III processors. We want documentation, because these are the fastest processors with a per-page eXecute bit in the MMU, needed to fully support our new W^X security feature. In the meantime, the AMD Hammer has come onto the scene, and this processor supports an eXecute bit in 64-bit mode. And it is going to be faster... Both mp3 and ogg versions available."

A reader writes:"There's a story on ZDNet that describes how Theo de Raadt & co. are hoping to eliminate buffer-overrun exploits for good. On closer inspection, it's a scheme to stop a buffer-overrun leading to executable code. It doesn't stop the buffer-overrun itself."