1428181
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shking writes
"Theo has pre-released the OpenBSD 3.4 song. It was written, arranged & recorded by Ty Semaka and Jonathan Lewis of the Plaid Tongued Devils.
You can find the new song at www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html. Enjoy."
1428177
story
wumpus188 writes
"FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). He is requesting everyone to download and test, including helping with finding bugs. As indicated in the Release Engineering Team's testing agenda, more testing should be done with PAE systems to test device compatibility and performance. In particular, active systems with 12 gigs of RAM or more should be thoroughly tested to make sure the various memory allocation algorithms in the kernel still scale properly."
1428145
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Dan writes
"Quinton Dolan is in the final stages of porting the NVidia Linux nForce MCP network driver to FreeBSD-5.1. He is looking for users/developers with access to this hardware for testing help. The driver currently appears to be stable on his hardware (an MSI K7N420 Pro), although he hasn't done much stress testing, nor does he have access to an nForce2 based motherboard to test."
1427993
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Dan writes
"FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp is in the process of adding ref-counting and locking to dev_t, and would very much prefer if this step is completed soon before 5-STABLE gets branched. He says that all this will be transparent to the majority of device drivers, as the refcounting will happen in the make_dev() and destroy_dev() family of calls and normal drivers need not know more about it."
1427943
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BSD Forums writes
"The ever increasing mobility of computers has made protection of data on digital storage media an important requirement in a number of applications and situations. GBDE is a strong cryptographic facility for denying unauthorised access to data stored on a 'cold' disk for decades and longer. GBDE operates on the disk(-partition) level allowing any type of file system or database to be protected. A significant focus has been put on the practical aspects in order to make it possible to deploy GBDE in the real world. FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp says in an email to freebsd-current that he has uploaded this paper and slides which he presented at BSDcon 2003, California, USA."
1427805
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BSD Forums writes
"Anyone who has worked with any BSD knows that the base operating system doesn't include many programs that most people use in day-to-day work. Unless you only need vi and ssh, you must install additional software to make your palmtop useful and comfortable. OnLamp's Michael Lucas says that if you're running a palmtop -- or, indeed, any sort of small hardware with NetBSD installed -- you'll probably want to expand the system."
1427699
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PowerMacDaddy writes
"In an ongoing effort to keep the FreeBSD core of OS X open source, Apple has updated Darwin to 6.7 and 6.8, which corresponds to the OS X 10.2.7 and 10.2.8 updates, respectively. Source code is available."
1427685
story
Dan writes
"FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely has put together a FreeBSD 4.9-BETA ISO image for i386 with the latest package build provided by portmgr@. If you haven't yet given 4.9PRE a try, hopefully this will encourage you to do so!"
1427575
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ltwally writes
"The guys over at LittleWhiteDog have a how-to on securing FreeBSD. Topics range from the basics to custom kernels, blowfish encryption, smtp, and custom firewall scripts. Definitely worth a look if you're running a FreeBSD box, or are interested in *nix security in general."
1427529
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Dan writes
"On September 16th 2003, the KDE Project released KDE 3.1.4. KDE 3.1.4 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and two vulnerabilities in KDM. Ports have been committed, binary packages for FreeBSD are available, including 4-STABLE, 5-RELEASE, check KDE on FreeBSD or your favorite mirror."
1427527
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Dan writes
"The anticipated GCC3.3.1 switch on NetBSD has happened for some of the popular platforms. NetBSD's Matthew Green announced that he has switched the alpha, i386, sparc and sparc64 ports to use GCC 3.3.1 as the default system compiler. At the same time, NetBSD's Matt Thomas announced that the arm ports(acorn26, acorn32, cats, and shark) have been switched over as well."
1427383
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Dan writes
"FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long would like to get a new poll on the stability and readiness of 4.9. The belief is that the last of the PAE-induced instability was resolved on August 31. Is anyone still experiencing unusual crashes, corruption, etc, on a system that is running with up-to-date sources? Now is the time to speak up and get the problems resolved. Scott is also requesting help with testing. In response to this, we are adding our own poll. Please vote and add comments as appropriate to help Scott."
1427369
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BSD Forums writes
"One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. It seems like magic, but a little maintenance can make it work even better for your system. Dru Lavigne explains how to keep your ports collection clean and how to customize individual ports."
1427243
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Dan writes
"FreeBSD has formally announced a security advisory entitled "OpenSSH buffer management error" for the now famous OpenSSH advisory (OpenSSH has released a new version 3.7.1 to address this issue). NetBSD has issued a similar advisory and fix for this issue. NetBSD has released two additional security advisories entitled "Kernel memory disclosure via ibcs2" and "Insufficient argument checking in sysctl(2)"."
1427085
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Dan writes
"Network stack cloning patches on FreeBSD allow for multiple fully independent network stacks to simultaneously coexist in a single FreeBSD kernel. Marko Zec has prepared a latest snapshot of the patches (against 4.8-RELEASE). The latest snapshot includes (a) internal restructuring - - struct vimage is now separated in resource-specific containers, and (b) Kernel message buffers - each vimage / vprocg now has a private kernel message buffer instance. Julian Elischer gave a talk on this subject at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (FreeNIX track) in San Antonio, TX, June 2003. Marko's slides were presented at BSDCon Europe 2002 in Amsterdam."
