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."

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."

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)"."

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."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says that GNOME 2.4.0 is now available for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, due to timing issues with FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, it will not make it into the official ports tree until after 4.9 is released (looks like early October right now). In the meantime, you can get to it from his CVS tree. For those without CVS access, he has periodic tarballs made, and are downloadable from the same URL. You should also download the marcusmerge script to aid in merging his ports tree with the official tree. If you already have a copy of the script, download it again because things have changed." Update: 09/18 15:25 GMT by M : FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says due to popular demand, but more importantly to the fact that 4.9-RELEASE has been pushed back at least two weeks, GNOME 2.40 has been merged into the ports tree.

David writes "According to an article on Bsdnewsletter.com, OS company Wind River has said it will be stopping sales of BSD/OS on this December 31st, and product support exactly one year thereafter. Only 15 more weeks to grab the final 5.1 update before this piece of history might be gone forever..."

robotdreams writes "Once again BSDCon showcases the BSD community's long history of innovative research, open exchange of ideas, and collaborative work. Tutorials this year feature: an intensive code walkthrough of the new FreeBSD 5.x release, debugging kernel problems on live systems, advanced BSD system and network security, and FreeBSD's new GEOM disk I/O subsystem." Since BSDCon runs from September 8th through 12th, you're probably either already going or out of luck ;) On the other hand, you're still early for OpenBSD 3.4, now taking pre-orders -- details below.

Dan writes "Matthew Green says he is ready to switch sparc, sparc64, i386 & alpha ports to using GCC3.3.1 by default on NetBSD. He's uploaded 4 snapshots (one per port ;-), all cross compiled from i386-netbsd. However, there appears to be work involved with fixing approximately 193 broken packages, as reported by NetBSD's Jan Schaumann."

BSD Forums writes "A common security breach involves exploiting one application to gain access to another. Keeping separate applications separate can limit the potential damage. OnLamp's Mike DeGraw-Bertsch explains how FreeBSD's jails can help secure necessary applications."

Dan writes "Simon Schubert has offered to provide Daily Snapshots of DragonFly. The snapshots are available on FTP and HTTP. Simon says this is for users who want to give DragonFlyBSD a try and don't want to go through the FreeBSD4/cvsup/buildworld steps., and as a world tinderbox (logs are available for each run). DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. These operating systems belong in the same class as Linux in that they are based on UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly is a fork in the path, so to speak, giving the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."

eugene ts wong writes "Here is some good news for BSD users. Gentoo Weekly Newsletter has an article that says that there is a BSD version of portage. It's still in a developmental stage, but it's definitely making progress."

welloy writes "In a mail to freebsd-announce Robert Bruce writes that "during the week of September 7th to September 13th, all revenue from purchases at the FreeBSD Mall will be donated to the FreeBSD Foundation to support work being done to improve the fine grained threading in the FreeBSD Kernel, and other improvements needed to make the upcoming 5.2 release a success." The offer also applies to their table at BSDCon. This is a great way to support the FreeBSD project and ensure they have funding to keep up their great work."

BSD Forums writes "In her previous article, OnLamp's Dru Lavigne took a look at the built-in utilities that can be used to manage the FreeBSD ports collection. In this article, she'd like to continue in that vein. She takes a look at portupgrade, a feature-rich port designed to help you get the most out of the ports collection."

ap writes "Justin T. Gibbs, of the FreeBSD Foundation, announced today the availability of a native binary release of the Java JDK 1.3.1 for FreeBSD. He also mentioned that more attention will now be focused on providing a release of the 1.4.x JDK. Such developments should allow for FreeBSD to be better suited for enterprise uses."

Dan writes "Mike Frantzen has committed "Passive operating system fingerprinting" to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language. The goal of this work is to allow firewalling decisions to take place based not only on the source of a connection, but the operating system of that source. Powerful policy enforcement is now possible such as redirecting all older windows boxes to a web site telling them to upgrade. Or blocking all windows boxes from connecting to mail servers (damn worms). A writeup can be found here. Please help contribute to the OS fingerprint database by going to http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f-help/ and typing in your OS description if it does not recognize your OS." Sorry - my fault. It is a dupe.