An anonymous reader writes "ONLamp.com has published a very long interview with 6 OpenBSD's PF developers: Cedric Berger (cedric@), Can Erkin Acar (canacar@), Daniel Hartmeier (dharmei@), Henning Brauer (henning@), Mike Frantzen (frantzen@) and Ryan McBride (mcbride@). Start reading from the first half and continue with the second part."

Daniel de Kok writes "Researchers of the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have beaten the Internet2 Land Speed Record using two Dell 2650 machines with single 2GHz CPUs running NetBSD 2.0 Beta. SUNET has transferred around 840 GigaBytes of data in less than 30 minutes, using a single IPv4 TCP stream, between a host at the Luleå University of Technology and a host connected to a Sprint PoP in San Jose, CA, USA. The achieved speed was 69.073 Petabit-meters/second. According to the research team, NetBSD was chosen 'due to the scalability of the TCP code.'"

pgilman writes "The word just hit the announce@openbsd.org mailing list: "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 3.5. We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As in our previous releases, 3.5 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system" including security, hardware support, software ports, and lots more. Support the project if you can by ordering the cds, or grab it from the net (use a mirror!). Thanks to Theo and the whole team!"

'It's me' writes "Tony Bourke is reviewing OpenBSD 3.4 for SPARC-64. He discusses installation, the feel of the OS, its desktop, its performance, a MySQL problem he stumbled on, development tools and hardware support, firewalling and more."

Daniel de Kok writes "The NetBSD Foundation is proud to announce that it has registered the ``NetBSD®'' trademark. The foundation would like to thank Jay Michaelson (Wasabi Systems) for filing the application and providing answers to the US Patent Office, and Carl Oppedahl (Oppedahl & Larson) for giving advice and keeping the Foundation informed about the process. An official policy on the use of the NetBSD® trademark is currently being drafted and will be made public soon."

boarder8925 writes "Over at BSDnews, Steve Wingate has written an article on how to easily update FreeBSD. Wingate begins his article by saying, "One of the greatest advantages that *BSD has over other Unix variants is the cvsup/make world process. Unlike most Linux distributions it isn't necessary to wait months for a new version to be released for you to upgrade your system. The cvsup/make world process allows you to update your system at any time. I'm going to show you how to make the process as painless as possible." The article discusses the following: installing CVSup, choosing a cvsup server, configuring make.conf, and, finally, performing the upgrade. The piece is also available as a .pdf file."

hext0r writes "Open Hosting provider metawire.org administrator Daniel Selans recently wrote an informative article for the OpenBSD Journal about the difficulties and successes in running a free hosting provider using OpenBSD. It's an informative read for anyone considering starting any type of hosting company using free technologies."

PuceBaboon writes "Poul-Henning Kamp,a committed FreeBSD developer (the main contributor to "jails", one of my favourite features) has lost his main contract and is appealing for funding to enable him to work on FreeBSD exclusively for the rest of the year."

An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD's Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online."

veliath writes "Came by a comparison from about three weeks ago, between two systems running FreeBSD. One is an Athlon64 running FreeBSD in 64bit mode and the other a Pentium4 3.2E running FreeBSD in 32bit mode."

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."