BSDForums writes "OpenBSD has a well-deserved reputation for fanatical security. Why is the U.S. military funding it? What do you get out of it? Cameron Laird and George Peter Staplin investigate and talk to Theo de Raadt, the creator, overseer, and taskmaster of the OpenBSD project!"

*no comment* writes "Well with all the advancements in PF and secure code wouldn't it be nice if someone would write a book on OpenBSD??? Oh wait, someone is. A guy named Jacek Artymiak is doing just that. The OpenBSD Gazetteer is scheduled for release shortly after the release of what may be the best release ever of OpenBSD (IMHO). Vastly improved PF, ALTQ, and BIND 9 is now default, not to mention procop stack protection. Out of the box it's ready to go as a firewalling packet-filtering bandwidth-throttling machine. A thread had started to pick up over at deadly.org."

Dan writes "Eric Anholt has committed the long awaited XFree86 4.3.0 to the FreeBSD ports tree. Please report any issues, bugs, etc. directly to him. The port appears to have support for popular cards such as NVidia, ATI, etc. Eric suggests that you use portupgrade to ensure you update fully from an earlier version of XFree86."

Mock asks: "I work for a web services company, and so part of our business process involves setting up web servers for our customers that include a JVM for running our software. Although I've found FreeBSD to be rock-solid for server applications and the quickest to fix security issues, the JVM support has been lagging behind other systems, for some time now. I would like to know if it is wise, or even possible, to run the Linux JVM under BSD? Are there other alternatives I'd be better off considering (besides using a different operating system)?"

Dan writes "OpenBSD's Markus Friedl is requesting everyone to test the latest OpenSSH 3.6 nightly snapshots to help ensure a quality final release. The OpenSSH Portability Team takes the pure OpenSSH version and adds portability code so that OpenSSH can run on many other operating systems. Folks, download snapshots for your OS from one of these mirrors."

drdink writes "The long awaited FreeBSD/Java port has hit beta. The port was committed yesterday afternoon by Alexey Zelkin. 'This is complete and close to production quality native JDK with both working client and server native JVMs. Local micro benchmarks shown very little difference between Linux and FreeBSD JVMs in speed.' And more importantly, 'we are very close to passing of Sun TCK tests. Currently about 20 of >27000 tests are known to be broken (tests were run at -STABLE).'"

jtorin writes "Daniel Hartmeier (of OpenBSD fame) has written a short but interesting article which explains how to better utilize available bandwidth. In short it gives priority to TCP ACKs over other types of traffic, thereby making it possible to max both upload and download bandwidth simultaenously. Be sure to check ot the nice graphs! Also note the article on OpenBSD Journal. OpenBSD 3.3 beta is now stable enough for daily use, so why not download a snapshot from one of the mirrors and try it out?"

Dan writes "Matthias Scheler has imported XFree86 4.3.0 into NetBSD current, it is only tested under NetBSD-i386 at the moment. Also, as part of updating the toolchain, Matthew Green has imported the latest GNU binutils (2.13.2.1) into NetBSD-current. The new GNU binutils adds support for hppa and x86_64, improved support for existing architectures and is known to work for almost all CPU types NetBSD currently supports. Updates of gdb and gcc will follow."

TrumpetPower! writes "Recently there's been quite a row in the OpenBSD community over copyright infringement by the OpenBSD spinoff, MicroBSD. Many parts of MicroBSD would seem to be a wholesale search-n-replace of the two names...including copyright notices. As a result, MicroBSD has shut down. It's worth noting that, as of this story submission, the MicroBSD Web site is still up and running with no special notices."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenDarwin released a 'fixed' version of the Darwin 6.0.2 ISO (the OpenDarwin-20030213 Binary Release) for both x86 and PPC. It is currently installing, so I can't tell you all what works now, etc. Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this..." Apparently, it is mostly a recompile, without local OpenDarwin modifications. It doesn't include perl, pending integration of perl 5.8 ... could this mean Mac OS X will finally have a current perl in the next Mac OS X release?

Dan writes "The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD."

Dan writes "Hidetoshi Shimokawa has added new functionality to Firewire scheduled for FreeBSD 4.8 release. New features include built-in DV support, improved recovery process & timeout stability and Write/ioctl support for /dev/fwmem0. He has not tested this on PAL and is looking for volunteers."

Dan writes "Usenix's Alex Walker announces that BSDCon 2003 Program Committee invites you to contribute original and innovative material on BSD and Open Source topics ranging from embedded BSD application development & deployment, BSD kernels & desktop, internet, security and network services, systems administration and much more. You can check here for more information and submission guidelines."

SlashChick writes "From a discussion on the freebsd-chat mailing list, it appears that one of the FreeBSD core developers, Matt Dillon, has been barred from committing any changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Dillon was one of the developers 'responsible for making FreeBSD 4.x the most rugged and stress-proof free operating system in existence,' and also contributed to fixing the Linux VM. Unfortunately, there has been little explanation from the FreeBSD core team about why Dillon was thrown out, leading to speculation and worries about the future of the FreeBSD kernel. Does the Slashdot community have any more insight into this situation? Would someone from the FreeBSD team care to elaborate and assuage our worries?" CD Update: Greg Lehey from the core team has infact elaborated in this comment.

bullshizzle writes "The longest running Public Access UNIX System (SDF, running BSD) est. 1989 had their services terminated abruptly by NWLink because of a DDoS attack. Termination was carried out immediately without prior notification, which violates their contract (page1, page2). Complaints can be filed to the Washington State Attorney General's Office by filling out this simple form conveniently located online. You can follow the story at lonestar.org." While still bad, I've been corrected - SDF was *not* the longest running public access Unix - ArborNet (Located right here in my town) has been around for at least a number more years.

Telent writes "As seen in this post by Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD is getting even more secure, working on smashing script kiddies running buffer overflow exploits dead. Tightening PROT_* according to the POSIX standards and creating a non-executable stack on most architectures are just two of the recent enhancements, most of which are in -current now."

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been branched and the release engineering process has begun. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance (or patch) release for users of NetBSD 1.6, not to be confused with NetBSD-current (which will become the next major release). As a patch release, it is not branched off the head of the CVS source tree, but instead includes all security fixes and patches applied to the 1.6 branch. A complete list of changes since 1.6 is available in src/doc/CHANGES-1.6.1 of the branch, which can be checked out by passing the -rnetbsd-1-6-PATCH001-RC1 flag to the cvs command: cvs -rnetbsd-1-6-PATCH001-RC1 co src. Details on the release cycle and status information is available from www.netbsd.org/releng/releng-1.6.html."

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD developer Terry Lambert, in a recent posting to the 'freebsd-hackers' mailing list, mentioned that he'd tuned a FreeBSD 4.4 box with 4GB of RAM to achieve 1,603,127 simultaneous IP connections, and goes on to say: 'As far as I know, I hold the single machine connection record for an x86 box.' This is an impressive achievement any way you look at it (though it begs the question of whether or not the box had any resources left to actually do anything with those connections...), and it speaks well of both FreeBSD's capabilities and Terry's skills and knowledge. I'm curious, though, if anyone has approached, matched, or exceeded that number elsewhere?"

An anonymous reader writes "There is a very interesting article on kerneltrap regarding OpenBSD's lingering battle with Sun over UltraSparc III documentation (that's right ... it still hasn't been resolved). Jeremy Andrews relates his efforts to get a position from Sun on the matter. In summary, he was completely stonewalled ... and that is exactly what makes the article so noteworthy."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 Bi-Monthly status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release, Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"