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.

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has committed an update to the gettext port to 0.12.1 on FreeBSD. GNU `gettext' is an important step for the GNU Translation Project, as it is an asset on which we may build many other steps. This package offers to programmers, translators, and even users, a well integrated set of tools and documentation. Specifically, the GNU `gettext' utilities are a set of tools that provides a framework to help other GNU packages produce multi-lingual messages."

basilpronoun writes "The PF packet filter / firewall that comes with OpenBSD has just been improved to allow firewalling decisions to take place based not only on the source of a connection, but the operating system of that source. There are both good and evil applications, not the least of which is blocking the spam from infected Windows machines."

lewiz writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering have announced that the code freeze in preparation for 4.9-RELEASE (scheduled for 29th September) will begin on 25th August. Also 4.9-RC is tentatively scheduled for 12th September. A full list of dates can be found on the Release Process page."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Gordon Tetlow has committed his enhancements to enable users to build /bin and /sbin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. His reason to do this is two-fold. One is to give better support for PAM and NSS in the base system. The second is to save some disk space. Currently (on his x86 box), /bin and /sbin are 32 MB. With a dynamically linked root (and some pruning of some binaries), the /bin, /lib, and /sbin come out to 6.1 MB. This should be great for people with 2.x and 3.x era root partitions that are only about 50 MB. Gordon says that there will be a performance hit associated with this. He did a quick measurement at boot and his boot time (from invocation of /etc/rc to the login prompt) went from 12 seconds with a static root to 15 seconds with a dynamic root."

BSD Forums writes "KGI, or Kernel Graphics Interface, provides a framework that allows full 3D accellerated video card drivers to compile on different platforms without any modification to the drivers themselves. At the moment of writing, the Linux target is rather stable, and the core is being ported to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. In (Free)BSD implementation, the board entity is a full FreeBSD device driver, respecting the newbus interfaces, connected to the PCI core and responsible for dispatching the resources to the KGI underlying clock, ramdac and chipset drivers (as they exist in the Linux implementation). The board driver probe/attach routines detect the chipset, prepare the kgi display information and call the kgim functions to powerup the KGI drivers."

BSD Forums writes "The Unix permissions model has worked for decades due to its flexible simplicity. It's not the only approach, though. FreeBSD 5.0 supports Access Control Lists, which allow for more flexible permissions. Daniel Harris explains what ACLs can make easier."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Kris Kennaway says that the following FreeBSD ports are scheduled for removal on November 7 if they are still broken at that time and no PRs have been submitted to fix them. If you are interested in saving these ports, please send your patches to the maintainer. If the maintainer is unresponsive or the port has no maintainer, then please submit them via send-pr."

DrCarbonite (Jeff Martin) writes "I've used OpenBSD in the past, and benefitted from its extensive online documentation. Sometimes an off-line reference is useful (i.e. required), and Absolute OpenBSD fills this void." Read on for the rest of Martin's review, as well as a more critical one from Marius Aamodt Eriksen.

Dan writes "FreeBSD security team has released two new advisories. The first advisory entitled "Insufficient range checking of signal numbers" could allow a malicious local user to use this vulnerability as a local denial-of-service attack. The second advisory "Kernel memory disclosure via ibcs2" could allow a malicious user to call the iBCS2 version of statfs(2) with an arbitrarily large length parameter, causing the kernel to return a large portion of kernel memory containing sensitive information."

BSD Forums writes "One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. You can go years without learning more than just make install clean, but there are dozens of features built into the ports tools. OnLamp's Dru Lavigne demonstrates several of these tricks to simplify your life."

Dan writes "Matthew Green says that the gcc3 update on NetBSD is going well. They are almost ready to switch several platforms including i386, sparc, sparc64, arm, mipsel, alpha. Mipseb and m68k are almost done. Sets lists need to be updated and building more kernels with gcc3.3 are the things still pending."

Dan writes "Soeren Schmidt announces the availability of the first preview release of ATAng drivers for FreeBSD. Before these rather radical changes to the ATA driver hits the tree, here is the opportunity to test them out, give useful feedback and for the depending subsytems to adjust to the new ways of things (burncd & atapicam are good examples). These drivers provide the framework for supporting new ATA controllers that have facilities for chaining commands and HW XOR's etc. These changes also facilitate merge of ATA and ATAPI code, as well make full use of fx Promise's new chips."

flynn_nrg writes "WifiBSD is a minimalistic version of FreeBSD based on the 5.x branch. WifiBSD is aimed for wireless routers running on embedded devices such as boards from soekris.com. In addition to the wi driver WifiBSD includes support for Atheros's 802.11b/g and 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Chipsets. The latest version of WifiBSD can be found here."