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."

Dan writes "A few weeks ago Xavier Humbert succesfully compiled NetBSD-current on a MacOSX 10.3 with an i386 target. He has provided a summary of his crossbuild execution as well as his build script. But why bother crossbuilding ? Erik Berls's article explains the process of cross compilation on NetBSD. He says that NetBSD's crossbuild framework allows a host to build a version of NetBSD 1.6 or later regardless of the version of the host. Crossbuilding has several major benefits, if you have production servers, you can build the OS without needing to load down the machine that is actively surviving as a production host."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long announces the availability of FreeBSD 5.2 RC2 which fixes a number of bugs, specifically the one in which users experienced system panics during install and dynamic library problems in the 'fixit' environment. Scott is asking everyone to test this release over the holidays. You can download it from one of your preferred mirror sites." Update: 12/24 23:01 GMT by T : Dan writes with more info: "Scott Long has also laid out a roadmap for future FreeBSD 5.3 releases now that FreeBSD 5.2-RC2 is getting close to release quality."

A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Someone has suggested to make a UserBSD instead of a UserLinux. From what Bruce Perens' anonymous 1-million-$ backers seem to want (no GPL-/Commercial dual-licensed development toolkit like Qt in any library, but only gratis LPGL stuff), this seems to make a lot of sense. After all, only the kernel would be different, the rest of the stuff (including the KDE or GNOME desktops) runs pretty much the same on BSD as it does on Linux. Is it possible to get the legal problems solved with licenses and still create a usable enterprise Unix desktop system on *BSD?" The idea, in and of itself, sounds fine, but does the choice of kernel really matter? What advantages would BSD have over Linux in such a project, and vice-versa?

jschauma writes "While it's no Indigo Espresso or a VAX Bar (though, of course, there is NetBSD/sgimips and NetBSD/vax), at least you can log in on a Mr. Coffee. And while the JavaStation has been running NetBSD for a while, full support is now completely in-tree: NetBSD's Martin Husemann announced today that he has fixed all outstanding issues with JavaStation support. This means, that you can now run your JavaStation with a stock distribution of NetBSD/sparc. The JavaStation-NC is a network computer class machine built on the microSPARC-IIep processor. More information about the JavaStation can be found in the JavaStation HOWTO, Martin's email to the port-sparc mailing list and Valeriy E. Ushakov's paper 'Porting NetBSD to JavaStation-NC.'"

Slashback tonight with another round of updates and corrections to recent stories, including transgenic fish, Hilbert's 16th problem, Microsoft's FAT patent plans, Utah's hyped public fiber network, and more. Read on for the details.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Please test this as much as possible so that the FreeBSD Team can release a good 5.2-RELEASE next week. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures."

NaveWeiss writes "According to the OpenBSD Journal, major work has been done on an innovative new OpenBSD feature termed 'fuzzy user profile' intrusion detection system' - or 'fupids.' According to Steffen Wendzel, the code 'creates profiles for every user who does an execve() syscall on obsd systems.'"

BSD Forums writes "Bad guys in the movies all keep their wall safes hidden behind paintings. Is there a metaphor in there for your sensitive files? OnLamp's Dru Lavigne explores steganography, or hiding secret messages in images or sounds, with the outguess and steghide utilities on FreeBSD."

avleenvig writes "Finally I have completed my paper on tuning the FreeBSD system for various common tasks, to compliment the paper on compiling and tuning the FreeBSD kernel. These papers were written against FreeBSD 4.x systems but should be equally applicable to 5.x systems on almost all counts. Compiling and tuning the FreeBSD kernel: http://silverwraith.com/papers/freebsd-kernel.php Performance tuning FreeBSD for different applications: http://silverwraith.com/papers/freebsd-tuning.php. You will find within, details on tuning your network, disks, sysctls and kernel for maximum performance under various conditions. "

jschauma writes "NetBSD's Andrew Brown has committed a complete rewrite of the kernel's sysctl infrastructure. To test these changes, he cross compiled 150 kernels for 30 architecures to see where some problems might come up. Additional information can be found in Andrew's email to current-users."

jschauma writes "As many users will probably have noticed by the increase in recent pkgsrc commits, the NetBSD Packages Collection freeze is now officially over. Starting October 6th, 2003 and lasting almost two months, the NetBSD Packages team concentrated upon stabilizing the over 4,000 software packages and the pkgsrc infrastructure to prepare for a stable pkgsrc branch. During that time, the number of broken packages during a i386 bulk build was brought down to a mere 15, and a large number of PRs was closed. A new branch with the tag ``pkgsrc-2003Q4'' was created, allowing our users to maintain a highly stabilized third-party software package managment environment, as only pullups of significant importance (such as security issues) are applied to this branch."

Dan writes "Based on Sam Leffer's suggestion, Bruce Simpson has been working on refactoring ifconfig(8). ifconfig is a FreeBSD unix utility used to assign an address to a network interface and/or configure network interface parameters. Bruce says that ifconfig has grown increasingly large and become unwieldy. Part of the effort has been to get a handle on all of the options that are currently supported so he has written a YACC grammar for it. He has uploaded some grammer, created a design document and also generated a PDF file you can view which shows you syntax diagrams for each part of the parse tree."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke announces that GNOME 2.5.0 desktop, the "Obviously you're not a golfer" release, is now available for FreeBSD. You can check out this release from the MarcusCom CVS repository. Be sure to get the latest copy of the "marcusmerge" script while you're there to help with the upgrade. Thanks to FreeBSD GNOME users, there is also a man page to go with this script. NOTE: this is a developers release, and bugs will exist. If you're not into bug-hunting, you should probably steer clear until 2.6.0 is released."

ocipio writes "FreeBSD 5.2 is scheduled to be released by Christmas. Recently marked 5.2-BETA, the ports tree is in a freeze and developers are asking for testing. A TODO list is available for those interested."