An Anonymous Coward writes: "A new facility called 'systrace' has been developed by one of the OpenBSD developers. It allows enforcement of system call policies on untrusted binaries. For now it is only available OpenBSD-current, but the author claims it is highly portable and can easily be integrated into GNU/Linux systems. Eventually binary-only software is going to become more and more common in Linux, so this could be a another 'Good Thing(TM)' from the paranoids that brought us OpenSSH."

jschauma writes "Following Todd Vierlings announcement to the current-users Mailinglist, the NetBSD 1.6 Release Process has begun. This means not only that 1.6 has been branched off the cvs-tree, but also that daily snapshots will soon be available. Changes from 1.5 to 1.6 are listed here. A brief announcement including a best-case scenario release timetable is available from here. Whooot."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The FreeBSD ports collection has just had the 7000th port committed. The original message can be read in Kris Kennaway's post to freebsd-ports."

joeyslopp writes: "Finding documentation on an open source project such as FreeBSD is usually quite easy. In fact, the project relies heavily upon user support. However, tracking down a good article that illustrates how to setup a .jsp (java server pages) environment using Tomcat has been difficult. Devshed came close with their article Slapping Together A JSP Development Environment , but lacked specifics on JDK for FreeBSD -- their article was more specific to Linux. The studs in #freebsd on undernet enlightened me a bit more, but still I lacked concrete documenation. Where can one find descriptive help in setting up Tomcat for FreeBSD? Dun dun dun dun *cheesy superhero theme* Enter Victoria Chan's article seemingly tailor-made for my Tomcat woes. The article, also located here, actually appears on www.freebsd.org as well...imagine that :) Hopefully other newbies to FreeBSD will read this and shorten their search time for a good article on the setup of Tomcat."

jorhan writes "The FreeBSD Development Status Report covering February to April 2002 came out yesterday (May 18th). Finding it from the FreeBSD home page takes a few clicks, but here is a shortcut. With all of the noise about resigning core members and the upcoming core election, it's nice to see the real work just chugs along."

Telent writes "OpenBSD 3.1 is out. I've been using a -current snapshot from April as my desktop, and this is truly an amazing release with lots of new PF tricks, improved driver support, and many other cool things. Get it from the master site at ftp.openbsd.org, or use a mirror when possible. Even the release art kicks butt. Enjoy!"

Maxim Sobolev writes "In accordance with the FreeBSD Core Bylaws, a new FreeBSD coreteam will be elected soon. For this purpose, a 2002 FreeBSD coreteam election site is now online. There you can find up-to-date list of candidates for the election as well as their statements."

moonboy writes: "This post over at OpenBSD Journal tells of the r* programs (rsh, rlogin, rcopy, etc) being removed from the -current tree. Can Telnet and FTP be far behind? I say good riddance."

zmcgrew writes "From Daemon News:
"The decision was made to remove Perl from the FreeBSD -current base system [earlier story ]. Perl will be supported as a port that the user can install after the base installation, however it will no longer be required. Mark Murray put out a call to the -current mailing list asking for volunteers to port all Perl scripts in the base system to another language, such as sh or C. All critical programs are already being ported, with only a few minor ones left to be claimed." Wow..."

Donald Burr of Borg writes "Following in the footsteps of Jordan Hubbard, Michael Smith leaves the FreeBSD core team. Reasons cited are similar to those that jkh gave, including displeasure at the bureacracy and politicking, and FreeBSD not being "fun" anymore."

-is writes "Jason R. Thorpe has recently added experimental code to NetBSD-current, that enables zero-copy for TCP and UDP on the transmit-side. These changes could mean significant performance improvements for FTP, WWW, and Samba servers. See Jason's announcement to the current-users mailing list for details." From the text: " On tests on an embedded system with limited memory bandwith, TCP transmit performance on 100baseTX-FDX went from ~6500KB/s to ~11100KB/s, a significant improvement." Excellent!

bootc writes "Last week we heard the news that Jordan Hubbard was leaving the FreeBSD Core Team. I received an email about the new OpenDarwin.org web site and had a look around, just to find that our friend Jordan was member of the OpenDarwin Core Team!" Apple has consolidated its Open Source web site, including Darwin, under its developer site, while the Internet Software Consortium is hosting the independent OpenDarwin.org, which will develop OpenDarwin with the developer community and collaborate with Apple to merge OpenDarwin technologies into Darwin and Mac OS X.

flynn_nrg writes: "O'Reilly has an interesting article about vulnerabilities in common programs found on most FreeBSD boxes. From the article: "Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at buffer overflows in OpenSSH, Squid, Listar/Ecartis, slrnpull, and IRIX's syslogd; problems in Sudo, MHonArc, and Mosix; and a local root hole and denial-of-service attack vulnerability in FreeBSD.""

SteelX was one of many readers to cite this story in the Daily Daemon News which reports that "Jordan Hubbard is resigning from the FreeBSD core. Jordan is a founding member of the FreeBSD project." Note: According to this email, Hubbard is definitely not quitting FreeBSD; he's just changing the nature of his involvement with it.

GoldenScrewdriver writes: "A colleague of mine has written an excellent article on how to secure your wireless network using an IPSEC VPN tunnel, NAT, and a FreeBSD firewall. With the inherent weaknesses of WEP, I thought this article might be interesting to those who prefer some privacy on their wireless link." If this might fit your situation, you might also find this earlier article interesting as well.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember ClosedBSD? Guess what? Now there is a bootable CDROM version available. Check it out here. In case you forgot, ClosedBSD is powerful firewall distribution based on the FreeBSD kernel. Best of all: It is free software that can be distributed under the terms of the BSD license. Definately worth checking out."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

LiquidPC writes: "Lance M. Westerhoff from AppleLust has written a superb article on the history of BSD. The article talks about the first versions of BSD and continues with the stories of NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSDi, and it finishes off with Darwin/MacOSX."

LiquidPC writes: "This is Part 2 in a two-part series on system panics. In his first column, Michael Lucas talked about how to prepare a FreeBSD system in case of a panic. In this column, he talks about what to do when the worst happens."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "ONLamp has another article on securing small networks, this time with the current version of OpenBSD and pf. Quite good."