Anonymous Coward writes "Onlamp.com publishes the sixth paper of Emmanuel Dreyfus's series on NetBSD's IRIX binary compatibility implementation. This time, this is about reverse engineering IRIX multithreading and the odd virtual memory features involved with it. It's an adventure at kernel and userland boundaries, with a debugger as the sole weapon. A must read!"

An anonymous reader writes "Canada's National Post is reporting today that DARPA is (indirectly) funding $2-million (US) to Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. The article is available here." Update: 04/07 21:01 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this blurb should credit instead The Globe and Mail rather than the National Post.

BSD Forums writes "OpenBSD recently changed the mode of operation for the Apache webserver from the normal non-chrooted operation to chrooted operation. This enhances the security of the server on which Apache is run but it imposes a few challenges to the system administrator. In this article Marc Balmer discusses selected aspects of running a chrooted HTTP daemon and present strategies on how to set up a chrooted environment for more complex applications like database access or using CGI-scripts."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information."

Gentu writes "The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. OSNews talked to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson. Linux in the embedded market is also discussed."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."

An anonymous reader writes "As seen on this article on the OpenBSDJournal, Henning, one of PF main contribuitors writes: 'After much discussion we made a hard decision: we will change pf syntax from English to German.' So, what are the implications of this? And why the change? Read on."

A dæmon writes "According to Daily Daemon News and The FreeBSD Diary, NetBSD, FreeBSD and GNU/OpenBSD are to be merged. Read the full story here." This is a good thing since one of the two BSDs clearly sucked, and the other was clearly superior.

geekmedia writes "Daemon News has an excellent article which describes a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, FreeBSD From Scratch extends it to make universe."

Barrett Lyon writes "The FreeBSD Project just submitted this security advisory out to the masses: "FreeBSD-SA-03:07.sendmail, a second sendmail header parsing buffer overflow." It seems that the overflow is not limited to FreeBSD and that there is currently no workaround "other than not using sendmail." Yet another good reason to run Qmail!"

Dan writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks says that by his calculations, at the end of February 2003, there were 3525 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 3461 the previous month, a rise of 64. The Package of the Month award goes to pkgdepgraph (yet again), nominated by Andrew Brown (yet again)."

Dan writes "The NetBSD security team has issued Four NetBSD Security Advisories. (1) Format string vulnerability in zlib gzprintf(): a buffer overflow can result in arbitrary code execution. (2) RSA timing attack in OpenSSL code can enable remote recovery of private keys, from a host with low-latency access to the server - such as the local host, or a host on the LAN. (3) Encryption weakness in OpenSSL code enables an attacker to perform crypto operations using server's private keys. Finally (4), faulty length checks in xdrmem_getbytes (within libc) are susceptible to integer overflows that affect memory allocation in their local buffers."

CoryBenny writes "The OpenBSD project has just started taking pre-orders for its 3.3 release. This release contains the new pro-police stack protection and lots of other new features! The OpenBSD Journal are running a story here. Pre-orders can be made here and just check out their cool new t-shirts!!"

honold writes "just read this on deadly.org (from Pyun YongHyeon): "Hello there. I have ported pf to FreeBSD 5.0 Currently it works well, though many nice features of pf not tested. I have ported to make FreeBSD users know there is an another excellent stateful packet filter with BSD license. URL is the following. ftp://ftp.kr.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-kr/misc/pf_fr eebsd_0.3.tar.bz2 Thanks." netbsd has a port as well Where are you, Linux?"

Dan writes "Joe Marcus Clarke announces the availability of Mozilla 1.3 port for FreeBSD. Windows, MacOSX and Linux versions of Mozilla 1.3 were originally released on March 13. Although the port is scheduled to be committed as part of FreeBSD 4.8 Release, diffs for 1.3 are readily available. Galeon2 diff has also been updated for the Mozilla port. Key enhancements include junk mail filtering and API for rich text editing."