This security advisory and associated patch documents and fixes a security hole in Berkeley Make, relating to the "-j" option and temporary file name handling. The advisory was issued by the FreeBSD security team, but it is believed that NetBSD and OpenBSD are affected as well. Obviously, if you have downloaded Berkeley Make to a non-BSD system then you should investigate as well.

Over at DaemonNews is an excellent explanation of the FreeBSD VM design, from Matt Dillon, who's been doing a great deal of work on it recently. It's rare to see good descriptions of the internals (or parts of the internals) of any OS OS (that's "Open Source Operating System") so this is particularly welcome. As is customary, there are a number of other excellent articles over at DaemonNews, including a new Darby Daemon adventure.

[Courtesy of the NetBSD Newsletter] Continuing their quest to have NetBSD run on every platform in existence, the NetBSD/Luna68k port is now stable enough to run multiuser. The Luna is a Japanese machine, with a 68030 processor running at 20Mhz, about equal to a sun3/60. The port's the result of hard work put in by Toru Nishimura. The port's announcement is available.

Continuing it's reputation for security, the OpenBSD kernel can now encrypt the contents of swap space, so that sensitive data can no longer be swapped to disk 'in clear', where it could survive reboots. The Blowfish cypher is used, as it is strong, fast, with a big key space. Obviously, there's a small speed penalty for this option. Note: The BSD section has been a little empty recently, due to illness. Thanks to all who enquired after me, I appreciate it :-)

FreeBSD has now entered code freeze for the up and coming 4.0 release. In the words of Jordan Hubbard, the release engineer; The code freeze will last for 15 days, during which time the 4.0 snapshot server (current.freebsd.org) will be cranking out its daily snapshots (and, in the last half of the release cycle, ISO images as well). 4.0 is the first release from the latest FreeBSD -current development branch. Work also continues on the 3.x -stable branch.

jay_rf writes "Found this by way of Linux Today: BSD vs. GPL posted at OS Opinion. " Its an ongoing debate, but what do you think about it?

Data.com has got an interesting article about FreeBSD. Very nice coverage of FreeBSD 3.3, essentially calling it a very robust and ready OS for Internet/Intranet deployment.

hill writes "An article over on Economic Times explains why BSD is as not as popular as Linux. Both use an open-source model, but Linux demands the user community to disclose modifications on its source code, while BSD allows its users to make proprietary changes. The current size of the BSD community is estimated at 2 million, with Linux being around 10 million. This is definately worth the read for anyone interested in comparing the two operating systems. " I'm sure we have a few opinions on the subject.

By the time you read this, FreeBSD 3.4 will have been released. Being a 3.x release, this primarily contains fixes and enhancements to existing parts of the system, rather than complete new functionality and subsystems. Those will come with the 4.0 release, later next year. That said, there are a few new developments that have been shaken out in the -current branch, and have been backported. Read on for more.

From Wes Peters, via DaemonNews. Intel's InBusiness Storage Station is a network file server in-a-box. Intel, despite their investment in Linux companies, is using FreeBSD as their OS of choice, as they are now stating. Of particular interest is their Mean Time Between Failure, 77,244 hours, or a shade under 9 years. That's probably a little on the low side, but quite respectable nonetheless.

After last Sunday's story about Microsoft looking for Linux skills, Alfred Perlstein wrote in with the news that talented FreeBSD admins can also find themselves positions with Microsoft, in particular, at Hotmail. The Hotmail guys do seem to have a sense of humour though; witness hostnames like rotate-the-shield-harmonics.hotmail.com.

hideki writes "I am a long-time linux user, having used it exclusively for nearly two years now. However, I would like to expand my horizons, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD came to mind. (I like Theo de Raadt's puns, so I might try OpenBSD first. :) My question -- does anyone know of good "So, you would like to try *BSD after using Linux?" documents? What is the easiest way to learn a BSD, specifically the differences. :) "

Laz writes "I just checked this out on daily.daemonnews.org. Apparently Linus Torvalds has written a patch to the FreeBSD kernel that has been submitted. "

Python writes "OpenBSD have issued a security advisory describing a buffer overflow problem in the RSA crypto reference implementation. RSA crypto is patented in the US (expiring Sept 20, 2000), and for non-commercial use, RSA Inc. requires the use of their reference implementation (called RSAREF2). So not only are software patents a bad thing - they can even force you into using a crypro reference implementation with known security bugs..." It's worth noting that this is not just an OpenBSD issue. Anything that uses the RSA reference implementation will have the problem.

Daemon News, the Adventures of Darby Daemon are now in their final episode. Given the content, a lesser man than I might try and make a "horn" joke about now.