FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD Security Survey

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-22 FreeBSD 25 Comments

"The Security Team has been concerned for some time by anecdotal reports concerning the number of FreeBSD systems which are not being promptly updated or are running FreeBSD releases which have passed their End of Life dates and are no longer supported. In order to better understand which FreeBSD versions are in use, how people are (or aren't) keeping them updated, and why it seems so many systems are not being updated, I have put together a short survey of 12 questions. The information gathered will inform the work done by the Security Team, as well as my own personal work on FreeBSD this summer."

FreeBSD Self-Hosting on Sun Niagara UltraSPARC T1

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-21 FreeBSD 11 Comments

FreeBSD now both boots and survives a complete 'make buildworld' on the Sun Niagara UltraSPARC T1 CPU. "I'm proud to announce that FreeBSD on the T1 is now stable enough that it can 'make buildworld' natively. The source is currently available in perforce under the view //depot/projects/kmacy_sun4v/... I probably won't roll it back into CVS until the logical domaining support is done. I'm looking forward to receiving input from individuals who plan to deploy it to find out what workloads to target in performance tuning."

FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-16 FreeBSD 13 Comments

"FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 is now available for testing. Things had been going well with the 5.5 BETAs up to the point we suspended making them so we could focus on the balance of the 6.1 release so we think 5.5 is pretty much ready to go. Unless big problems are reported with this RC we will start the 5.5 release builds this coming weekend and do the release early next week."

Submitted by Valour 2006-05-13 FreeBSD 27 Comments

SoftwareInReview, well, reviews FreeBSD 6.1, and concludes: "Overall I found FreeBSD 6.1 to be another step in the right direction, and I think it's encouraging that there weren't any revolutionary base system changes in this release. Sometimes big changes are unavoidable, but historically the FreeBSD team has bungled such leaps as the switch to the ULE scheduler, the introduction of SMP, and the liberation of the base system from the big giant lock. Sometimes you have to stop and make sure that what you presently have is working properly, and it looks like now is that time for FreeBSD. I applaud their efforts with 6.1 and look forward to testing 6.2."

FreeBSD Vows to Compete with Desktop Linux

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-12 FreeBSD 127 Comments

Linux may soon have a stronger open-source competitor on the desktop if FreeBSD's plans come to fruition. FreeBSD developer Scott Long told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the operating system, descended from the Unix derivative BSD, is "quickly approaching" feature parity with Linux. "Lots of work is going on to make FreeBSD more friendly on the desktop," Long said. "Within the year, we expect to have, or be near, parity with Linux."

Submitted by kaiwai 2006-05-09 FreeBSD 46 Comments

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include: Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot. Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process. Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points. Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers."

FreeBSD 6.1-RC2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-03 FreeBSD 18 Comments

"FreeBSD 6.1-RC2 is available for download. This is the last RC before the release. Please test it to make sure that there have been no regressions since the last RC, and to make sure that it there are no new problems with installation. Other than a few cosmetic tweaks, there will be no more changes."

Interview: John Baldwin on FreeBSD

Submitted by Nix_User 2006-04-26 FreeBSD 9 Comments

"One of the main reasons that I'm so involved with open source is that I've always been fascinated by figuring out how things work. In this interview, John Baldwin of the FreeBSD project gives some insight on what it is like to be a FreeBSD developer and some of the things that happen behind the scenes of a large open source project."

FreeBSD Status Report: 1st Quarter 2006

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-04-14 FreeBSD 3 Comments

The latest FreeBSD status report has been released. "The highlights of this quarters report certainly include the availability of native Java binaries thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, as well as progress has been made with Xen support and Sun's Ultrasparc T1. Futhermore we are looking forward to FreeBSD 6.1 and TrustedBSD audit support has been imported into FreeBSD 7-CURRENT. All in all, a very exiting start to 2006." And on a related note, FreeBSD now boots on the Intel Macs.

FreeBSD 6.1-RC1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-04-13 FreeBSD 22 Comments

FreeBSD 6.1-RC1 has been released. "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RC1. It is meant to be a refinement of the 6-STABLE, branch with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc., but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture."

FreeBSD Announces Java JDK, JRE 1.5 Binaries for FreeBSD

Thom Holwerda 2006-04-05 FreeBSD 39 Comments

"The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the official Java Runtime Environment and Java Development Kit for FreeBSD. The Foundation negotiated a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute these FreeBSD binaries. The binaries are based on JDK 1.5 and work with the official FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 6.0 releases on the i386 platform."

Fundraiser for FreeBSD Security Development

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-03-30 FreeBSD 44 Comments

FreeBSD's Security officer Colin Percival seeks sponsorship. This has happened before with other FreeBSD contributors. "I'm hoping to raise $15000 Canadian (about US$13000) to pay me to work full-time on FreeBSD for 16 weeks over the summer. This will allow me to devote more time to my role as FreeBSD Security Officer, perform a complete overhaul of FreeBSD Update, and make some significant improvements to Portsnap."

FreeBSD 6.1-BETA-4, 5.5-BETA-4 Released

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-15 FreeBSD 7 Comments

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA4 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA4. A couple of significant changes were made to 6.1-BETA4. First is a large set of fixes to the VFS layer and various filesystems that should significantly help performance under heavy load and also fix problems with forcefully unmounting these filesystems. The second large change is that sysinstall will now install both the GENERIC and SMP kernels and automatically select the appropriate one based on whether it detects one CPU in the system or multiple CPUs.

Virtualization with FreeBSD Jails

Submitted by JustMeAgain 2006-03-10 FreeBSD 3 Comments

"This article shows how I created a jail under FreeBSD 5. Though FreeBSD 6.0 has come out since I wrote this article, the strategy should remain the same. I'll update the article with any changes should anything be different."

Backups with Bacula

Submitted by Nix_User 2006-02-26 FreeBSD 9 Comments

"For backups, especially network backups, I have been using, developing, and advocating Bacula, the Network Backup Tool for Unix and Windows. Bacula backs up to tape, disk, DVD, CD, etc. The server runs on Unix operating systems, yes, including Mac OS/X. The client runs on Unix, and on Windows, and has support for VSS which allows you to backup files that are in use (if the application using the file has VSS support)."

Submitted by quique 2006-02-25 FreeBSD 16 Comments

Ten years ago, on 24 February 1996, Greg Lehey submitted for publication the final version of the first ever book on the FreeBSD operating system, "Installing and Using FreeBSD". It was later renamed to "The Complete FreeBSD", as is now known and appreciated by the users of this OS. Grog have always retained full rights to the book, and for today he has decided to release it for download under a Creative Commons license. Besides, he doesn't have the time to keep updating it, so he is asking for help. He can't guarantee money, "just" recognition in the preface.

FreeBSD 6.1-Beta2, 5.5-Beta2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-21 FreeBSD 17 Comments

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Download from one of the mirrors.

Network Filtering by Operating System

Submitted by Nix_User 2006-02-19 FreeBSD 4 Comments

"You manage a heterogeneous network and want to provide different Quality of Service agreements and network restrictions based on the client operating system. With pf and altq, you can now limit the amount of bandwidth available to users of different operating systems, or force outbound web traffic through a transparent filtering proxy. This article describes how to install pf, altq, and Squid on your FreeBSD router and web proxy to achieve these goals."

FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 and 5.5-BETA1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-10 FreeBSD 19 Comments

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the beginning of both the FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 release cycles with the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA1. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Please select a download mirror for downloading.

Gentoo GNU/kFreeBSD Gets Installer

Submitted by Robert 2006-02-06 FreeBSD 5 Comments

An update of the Gentoo GNU/kFreeBSD proof-of-concept tarball has been rolled out. Improvements include an up-to-date toolchain (gcc 4.0, glibc 2.3.5, etc.), and the system being bootable and usable as a standalone system. It is now provided as a CD installer for anyone with minimal Gentoo experience to try it out.