my BSD Planet

url updates, remove unmaintained ports from list

The FreeBSD 7-STABLE branch saw its first point release today. Don't let the point release moniker fool you, though, as FreeBSD 7.1 comes packed with a number of pretty significant changes, such as support for OpenSolaris' DTrace, as well as a new, more efficient scheduler.

Visit the O'Reilly booth (#2210) at Macworld in San Francisco, January 5-9! We'll have a dynamic lineup of entertaining talks and will be offering a 30% discount on timely new Mac and digital media titles during the conference. We'll also have goodies, and a raffle drawing. View the complete schedule of author presentations.

Can Digg increase your overall audience growth? It could, but it's usually a long and painful process.

I'll be speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York (Jan 5 - 9).

The bz2 module is an interface for the bzip2 library, used to compress data for storage or transmission.

In which the author recounts his adventures getting an IPv6 tunnel hooked up to his home network.

Is Digg Sexist? No. Is the community it attracts "sexist"? Likely. This post is a response to the recent criticism, a diagnosis, and a prescription for future collaborative filtering evolution. The problem with the current iteration of collaborative filters is that they don't account for more than one dominant preference cluster.

meaningless update

CLI for Web Based Enterprise Management by SBLIM

Update.

pcc appears to have had some significant updates due to funding; has anyone tried it on DragonFly recently?

The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (client)

The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (server)

The newest @Play column talks about yet another roguelike I’ve never heard of: Incursion.  (Too much Zangband on my part.)  Apparently it follows 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules quite carefully, which is different than the usual vague Tolkienish/D&Dish look that most roguelikes keep.  Check the supplement at the bottom for some literary history.

Drawing physics-based puzzle game

Are you using any ISA-based network cards?  Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to remove support very soon after the 2.2 release; speak up if this is a problem.   Or, spend a few dollars and buy a card made in the last 10 years.

You get to hear me blather on for 22 minutes about this Digest and how important/easy it is to contribute to BSD projects, in BSDTalk 169.

Don't forget to visit DCBSDCon.org and register for the conference. Registration has been open for a while, and speakers are being announced on the blog. Interview with Justin Sherrill of the DragonFlyBSD Digest, which can be found at http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/ File Info: 22Min, 10MB Ogg Link: http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk169.ogg

Apache2 module to wrap served pages with a header and/or footer

An Apache module for authenticating users with Kerberos v5

FreeBSD News Flash says:

The FreeBSD Foundation has published their Semi-Annual December 2008 newsletter which summarizes what they have done to help the FreeBSD Project and community.

More: continued here

The BIND DNS suite with updated DNSSEC and threads

If you feel frustrated that big (>100G) solid state disk drives are still relatively expensive, well… It has been much worse.  (via)

Fix valgrind link

What does security mean for NetBSD?:

Anders Magnusson (ragge@) wrote in,

The first step of the development of PCC made possible by donations via BSD Fund is complete and I would like to invite people to start testing PCC more heavily. Some of the changes have been quite substantial and I may have introduced some new bugs.

I think the support for GCC-specific extensions should be quite good now, even though most attributes are simply parsed and ignored. The only useful target to currently test is i386. Others are coming but not yet complete.

To test PCC under OpenBSD you probably need some patches to the system headers to run it. To apply them, fetch ftp://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/pub/patches/openbsd-include-sys-081220.diff and go to /usr/include/sys and apply them.

To compile PCC, it is best to fetch it out of cvs via pserver: "cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@pcc.ludd.ltu.se:/cvsroot co pcc" and then just run ./configure, make and make install

There are also daily tarballs generated if you don't want to use cvs by some reason.

Please register bug reports in the pcc bug database. The best bug reports is of the form "this particular code snippet doesn't compile" or "this expression generates wrong assembler".

Good luck with it and thank you for your support!

Alright, ragge@ has worked hard on this, let's help him make pcc awesome!

Vincent Stemen posted a note about his homemade tool, called ‘partition’.  It has some interesting features, though it would require some documentation and cleanup to use in DragonFly, where it could serve as a replacement for fdisk.  If anyone’s interested in making that happen, contact Vincent.

Link to BenchmarkMatrix

Sepherosa Ziehau has also added age(4) support, a network chip common to Asus systems.  Load the kernel module and report your results.

A combine of Kai and Sung with CNS11643 TrueType Fonts

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/BREAKING_FreeBSD_7_1_Released';This is an early bird announcement: The FreeBSD team has uploaded the latest stable version: FreeBSD 7.1 The files are still being synced and no formal announcement made yet. When this comes out, I’ll let you know. 7.1 can be upgraded to in FreeBSD or downloaded from here: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/7.1/ Many thanks to Gon (penguinpower.com) for emailing this.

Welcome to 2009! I’m wishing all my readers a happy and prosperous 2009, at home and at work. Hopefully, we’ll see the birth of FreeBSD 8.0 Stable sometime this year, newer versions of FreeBSD-based operating systems and further progress of free / open source software in general. With the start of the new year I’ve also decided to [...]

Two UNIX-centric items for end-of-week reading: “The History of Unix *dump programs” and “Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS“.  (via)

Thanks to Matthias Schmidt, the installer now supports Hammer, meaning you can install an all-Hammer DragonFly system.  Well, almost.

After eight years in business California-based MadTux, an online retailer specializing in systems preloaded with Linux, has closed.

Other hints:

Tom Wickline writes "Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 1.6 comes with added support for Google's Chrome Web Browser, Google Earth, and Google Picasa. In addition, Cellar support has improved; you can now delete and install into an existing Cellar. There have also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliability of all the supported applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 1.6 comes with added support for Google’s Chrome Web Browser, Google Earth, Google Picasa. Additionally, Cellar support has improved; you can now delete and install into an existing Cellar. There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on [...]

Update the translation progress

Add a statement of mine, and provide an update for anholt's second item.

Provide the -O2 version of the assembly program, then discuss bl and blr and the Procedure Linkage Table. I wish that everything was shorter and simpler.

handbook is now fully up-to-date

My New Year's Resolution for this year is simple: practice. You don't have to achieve (or even aim for) total mastery for the practice to be worthwhile.

The Internet is still broken, but no more broken than normal. The risk level is acceptable for the average user, even though if a single user were being targeted, there's a good chance an attack would be successful. This is how it's always been. Let's go back to our lives.

When I was in Boston this last September I was fortunate enough to be introduced to John Werner, one of the founders of http://citizenschools.org/, by John Palfrey who thought I could be helpful in helping John achieve success with Citizen Schools on the Web 2.0 front. John has a chance to make it in front of President-elect Barack Obama and Congress, but he needs your help. Please take a moment to learn more.

Michael Neumann has replaced suser(9) with priv(9), taken from FreeBSD, for fine-grained priviledge control.

Sepherosa Ziehau has added OpenBSD’s in_addprefix() and in_scrubprefix() from OpenBSD, which makes it possible to add two addresses within the same subnet to two separate network interfaces.  Read his post for a more descriptive synopsis.  Hes also made some original fixes.

He’s also added support (from FreeBSD) for the Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe ethernet controller, via ale(4), prompted by some Eee PC 1000H issues that were highlighted here before.

Link to ELF Executables for PowerPC now.

New page: == wip/jdk* == ...the browserplugin of wip/jdk15 passes the elster-test at https://www.elsteronline.de/eportal/KonfigurationsAssistentI.tax?requestaction=KonfigurationsAssistentI.tax ... ...

The Winter version of the BSDA courseware DVD is now available.  Everything on there is available (in parts) for free over the Internet, but paying the USD$40 for the DVD gets you convenience and a way to support bsdcertification.org.  (via)

I need to note these faster; they’re piling up: the DCBSDCon blog has announced two more speakers for the convention: Richard Bejtlich (of Tao of Security), who will talking about network security monitoring with FreeBSD, and Marco Peereboom, of OpenBSD, who will be talking about epitome.

Write and save this page, stopping at the part where I insert my commented version of greeting.s

In my last post I talked about how anybody with enough money (a small 6-figure sum) could create a rogue certification authority (CA). This would allow them to generate certificates for any web site that seem to be genuine. That...

add link to tips + status updates (handbook almost done)

Library for playing SPC (SNES audio) files

Library for machine-independent, array-oriented data access

"After years of encouragement from the OpenBSD community for others to use Reyk Floeter's free atheros wireless driver, it seems that the Linux world is finally listening.

A web interface for anyRemote

Add some intro text and some information about PowerPC. Please edit to fix my errors.

Navigate a mech through a 3D world and fire at enemies

Add an example rc.d/ script for rsync ~BAS

OpenLogic Exchange recently launched Wazi. From it's description:

An automatic 3D finite element mesh generator

From the announcement: The newest version of the BSDA Study DVD is finally ready and available for sale from the BSD Certification website.

The sane-epkowa driver for FreeBSD

Syslinux for FreeBSD

Patches inside pkgsrc:

AWFFull is a webserver log analysis tool forked from Webalizer

With unique, online, hands-on courses leading to certification from the world-famous University of Illinois, O'Reilly School of Technology will help you gain an edge in your career -- on your own time, at your own pace. Final Day to SAVE 25%!

The first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects, MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. You won't find a better offer on MAKE magazine anywhere! It's special holiday offer for O'Reilly readers good through December only. Subscribe now and save!

The most recent item on the DCBSDCon blog announces Kristaps Džonsons as a speaker; he will talk about his process isolation work on mult.

P.S. Who else thinks that it would be good to have man pages look as pretty as the web page for mult?

This recent Coding Horror column by Jeff Atwood expands on a Joel Spolsky discussion, where it’s pointed out good programmers program cause they love it, not because of the pay or anything else.  I’d take that discussion a step farther and use open source programming as an example; people do it because they want to; because they don’t want to stop thinking about solving problems even when they aren’t at work.

There’s a parallel here that I’ll make between programming and ‘normal’ art; artists and designers do the same thing when they get home too.

Een historisch overzicht van BSD - Hans van de Looy - PDF version
From: Nederlandse Linux Gebruikers Group
Tags: nllgg, bsd, history, hans van de looy, pdf

Hans zal een historisch overzicht geven van het ontstaan van *BSD vanaf de oorsprong van UNIX tot aan de nu bekende *BSD varianten. Hij zal daarbij met name ingaan wat de oorsprong en het ontstaan van een aantal *BSD-projecten zijn. Hierbij zal hij zeer kort ingaan op de verschillende licentieproblemen die we in het verleden gezien hebben en worden een aantal bekende personen en data weer eens even op de kaart geplaatst.

Hans van de Looy is oprichter van Madison Gurkha. Een bedrijf dat gespecialiseerd is op het gebied van het uitvoeren van technische ICT-beveiligingsonderzoeken, in de media ook wel aangeduid met Etisch Hacken. Tijdens dergelijke onderzoeken maakt hij ook regelmatig gebruik van op BSD* gebaseerde systemen.

Van FreeBSD Documentatie projectleider tot FreeBSD Developer - Remko Lodder - PDF version
From: Nederlandse Linux Gebruikers Group
Tags: nllgg, freebsd, documentation, nederlands, remko lodder, pdf

In 2004 ben ik begonnen met het FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project, een project dat inmiddels bijna het complete handboek vertaald heeft. Sinds die tijd zijn er vele wegen geweest die ik behandeld heb, van documentatie projectleider naar Security Team-lid tot aan FreeBSD Developer.

Remko Lodder is momenteel 25 jaar en werkt als Unix Engineer voor het bedrijf Snow B.V. waar hij zich momenteel met name bezig houd met security (firewalls etc). Hij is sinds 2004 lid van het FreeBSD Development team en is momenteel 1 van de meest actieve developers binnen het team.

Michael Lauth from iXsystems - MP3 version
From: bsdtalk
Tags: bsdtalk, interview, ixsystems, michael lauth, mp3
Interview with Michael Lauth, CEO of iXsystems. We talk about his experiences with running a business using BSD.

Michael Lauth from iXsystems - Ogg version
From: bsdtalk
Tags: bsdtalk, interview, ixsystems, michael lauth, ogg
Interview with Michael Lauth, CEO of iXsystems. We talk about his experiences with running a business using BSD.

May 2008 developer Vimage report - Flash
From: YouTube bsdconferences channel
Tags: youtube, freebsd, vimage, marko zec, julian elischer, flash
A sneak peak into the FreeBSD development process.
Warning 2 hours! filmed over 2 days. (The schedule worked out was optimistic to say the least but it's still looking ok...)
Marko Zec and Julian Elischer report back to the developers at BSDCan on the progress on virtualizing the network stack in FreeBSD. This has been a long term project but at the time of this recording was just reaching the point of feasibility. In this video you can see some of the dynamics of the group as developers become familiar with the project and discussions take place regarding such things as maintainability, ABI compatibility, and even what to call the feature. In this video you can see the decision being made by a "quorum" of developers to take this project mainstream.
The sound is less that perfect, but it's what we have.
This is a montage of 3 video sources, one of which is a lower resolution, but at times it was the only camera capturing the action. (the other ran out of tape for a while)
Thanks to Ed Maste for the added footage.
I will be doing more editing later and will be substituting in better footage in some places.
clive URL: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Px-pSXm32dE

Isilon and FreeBSD - Flash
From: YouTube bsdconferences channel
Tags: youtube, freebsd, isilon, zach loafman, flash
Zach Loafman explains how Isilon uses FreeBSD and how the company adds to it and interacts with the FreeBSD community.
clive URL: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=OlMocIwM5QU

ZFS in FreeBSD, by Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Flash
From: YouTube bsdconferences channel
Tags: youtube, freebsd, zfs, pawel jakub, flash
Pawel goes over ZFS, and tells us the state of the FreeBSD port. Source: Julian
clive URL: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=5-CR3o-Q2CU

Multiplayer 3D economy/trade-based RTS

Dictionary for KDE4

FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit organisation supporting the FreeBSD Project by part-funding some BSD conferences, by giving traveling grants to FreeBSD developers so they can go to conferences, by paying some developers etc etc. The Foundation is some $33.000 off their 2008 goal ($300,000), so if you want to show your appreciation of the work the Foundation [...]

It’s been quiet around D*mnSmallBSD the last 12 months. Progress is slow as it’s only a small project and there has been a leadership change. The project has moved their website to Google Code and changed it’s name to Evoke on request of the D*mn Small Linux team who said there was confusion amongst their users who thought [...]

Programmers know the impact that design patterns have had on designing and coding. Could patterns have just as strong an impact on people taking action in their communities? That's the thrust of the patterns published at the Public Sphere Project. The most fleshed-out patters are now published in the book Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution by the initiator of the project, Douglas Schuler.

Scott Berkun, the bestselling author of The Myths of Innovation, discusses how innovators and inventors get their ideas in Guy Kawasaki's popular new book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

A high level MVC web framework written in Perl

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.

Damien Miller (djm@) recently committed some extra paranoia for malloc(3):

CVSROOT:        /cvs
Module name:    src
Changes by:     djm@     2008/12/29 15:25:50

Modified files:
       lib/libc/stdlib: malloc.3 malloc.c

Log message:
extra paranoia for malloc(3):

Move all runtime options into a structure that is made read-only
(via mprotect) after initialisation to protect against attacks that
overwrite options to turn off malloc protections (e.g. use-after-free)

Allocate the main bookkeeping data (struct dir_info) using mmap(),
thereby giving it an unpredictable address. Place a PROT_NONE guard
page on either side to further frustrate attacks on it.

Add a new 'L' option that maps struct dir_info PROT_NONE except when
in the allocator code itself. Makes attacks on it basically impossible.

feedback tedu deraadt otto canacar
ok otto

Thanks Damien for the hard work!

OldSkool Gravity Game

The zlib module provides a low-level interface to many of the functions in the zlib compression library from GNU.

Portupgrade Timesaver Every once in a while I run across a machine that is not as fast as I would like it to be. As you know upgrading ports by having portupgrade compile them from source can take quite a while. FreeBSD tries to compile as many of the ports as they can and then put the packages [...]

So much that I’m doing bullet points:

• Peter Avalos brought in nsswitch and replaced portmap with rpcbind.
• Aggelos Economopoulos brought in his NETMP branch, where he is removing the BGL from socket code.
• Sepherosa Ziehau added support (from FreeBSD) for Attansic network chips.
• Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert brought in the remainder of Jordan Gordeev’s AMD64 work.
• Simon and other DragonFly developers are at 25C3 this week - say hi!

status update + few nits

AsiaBSDCon 2009 (http://2009.asiabsdcon.org/), Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan 12 - 15 March, 2009. AsiaBSDCon is a conference for users and developers on BSD based systems. The conference is for anyone developing, deploying and using systems based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Darwin and MacOS X. AsiaBSDCon is a technical conference and aims to collect the best technical papers and presentations available to ensure that the latest developments in our open source community are shared with the widest possible audience.

Yet Another parser for binary structures

Add PhilipGollucci pgollucci@

Portupgrade Problems Recently I noticed a problem doing a portsdb -Uu. Portupgrade was complaining about a missing bsd.port.options.mk. I tried cvsuping the ports, a make fetchindex, deleting all the ports and re cvsuping, but nothing worked. I’m not sure what the problem was, but it seemed to fix itself by upgrading to FreeBSD 7 from 6.3.

updates part 2, preview mode in firefox3 is broken

policy + status updates, remove revision columns since they tend to be outdated

PNG image output support for vnStat

The geekest content helper management system

The ISC DHCP package in pkgsrc is changing as it moves from 4.0 to 4.1; the package names will be different, as will the rc flags.  Keep an eye out for this if you use it for your internal network.  (This may affect our install CD, too.)

HTML Markup as Ruby

Ruby metaprogramming helpers

Fast, thread-safe, object-relational mapper

Library for adding database/object validations

Dynamic Scripting for adaptive AI systems

On-demand, transcoding filesystem (using GStreamer pipeline)

Web Based Syslog Review

Python interface to GPGME library

A state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform

If you didn’t make it to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, there’s a number of ways it’s getting streamed via video and audio.  (via)

Michael Neumann reported success booting DragonFly on his Eee PC 1000H, though the wireless/wired network drivers don’t work yet.

A PHP-based bulletin board / discussion forum system

Guess what operating system the number 1 on Netcraft’s most reliable hosting companies (November 2008) runs. No, guess what operating system the number 1 and 2 use… Correct, FreeBSD ;-) … the top two by average connection time (DataPipe and Aplus.net) both use FreeBSD to run their main websites. In November, DataPipe was named among New Jersey’s fastest growing companies. In [...]

The pfSense project have announced the availability of version 1.2.1: This is a strictly a maintenance release, meaning it contains only bug fixes in the pfSense code, no new features. Though we also upgraded the base OS from FreeBSD 6.2 to 7.0, which necessitated numerous changes in how things are configured. The change to FreeBSD 7.0 [...]

Please find below the FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter for December 2008. In this Edition: Letter From the Vice President End-of-Year Fundraising Drive Safe Removal of Active Disk Devices Improvements to the FreeBSD TCP Stack Network Stack Virtualization Project FreeBSD Advocacy in Ticino 2008 NYCBSDCon 2008 EuroBSDCan 2008 meetBSD 2008 Foundation at meetBSD and Developer Recognition 2008 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients Travel Grant Recipient Spotlight FreeBSD Testimonial from Hobnob, Inc. Financials Full [...]

Ivan Voras writes he read the release notes of FreeBSD 1.1 and it struck him how many developers have joined the Core Team and then moved on, i.e. there’s a lot of fresh blood and no “tsar” heading up the project. Additionally there are also technical and organisational problems that in some way seem to be [...]

X.Org minimal distribution metaport

Will Backman from BSDTalk has a 17 minutes interview with Michael Lauth, CEO of iXsystems. They talk about how iXsystems has build its business model around open source software and how open source software is being used internally as much as possible. iXsystems offer PC-BSD laptops and desktops, FreeNAS base NAS servers etc As a sidenote, BSDTalk is celebrating its 3rd birthday. [...]

• Dru Lavigne mentioned that there are 2 different groups for BSD Certfication on LinkedIn, for those who use it.  (Don’t forget, there’s a LinkedIn DragonFly BSD group, too.)
• The DCBSDCon Blog has announced annother speaker: Brooks Davis.

RT is an industrial-grade ticketing system written in Perl

fix underscore

GNOME frontend for anyRemote

Perl bindings to the Clutter OpenGL canvas

Python modules for Clutter toolkit

Clutter Cairo integrarion library

Clutter Box2D integration library

Clutter GStreamer integration

GTK+ Integration library for Clutter

OpenGL based interactive canvas library

Wondering how to fully utilize that new iPhone, iPod or digital camera you got over the holiday? Check out the newly updated iPhone: The Missing Manual, iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, and any of our award winning digital photography books. And don't forget you can Buy 2 and Get 1 Free by using code OPC10 in our shopping cart.

The first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects, MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. You won't find a better offer on MAKE magazine anywhere! It's special holiday offer for O'Reilly readers good through December only. Subscribe now and save!

Mechanized Assault and Exploration Reloaded

GTK+ client for the Music Player Daemon (MPD)

Robert Watson has announced a test snapshot of OpenBSM 1.1 (alpha 4)  The following are the change notes from the OpenBSM NEWS file included with this release: With the addition of BSM error number mapping, we also need to map the local error number passed to audit_submit(3) to a BSM error number, rather than have the caller perform that [...]

Most of you will know that the underlying core set of components of Mac OS X and the iPhone operating system are released under the Apple Public Source License, an FSF-approved open source license. Few of you, however, will have actually used Darwin in any other form than Mac OS X or the iPhone OS. Despite numerous projects attempting so, Darwin has never gained any significant traction apart from Apple's own interest. The PureDarwin project tries to rise from the ashes of the OpenDarwin project, and has just released a Christmas developer preview.