It is possible but inconvenient to manually clone a hard disk drive remotely, using dd and netcat. der Mouse, a Montreal-based NetBSD developer, has developed tools that allow for automated, remote partition-level cloning to occur automatically on an opportunistic basis.
James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that update 2.0.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 2.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the
NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed
critical in nature for stability or security reasons. More details are
available in the NetBSD
2.0.2 Release Announcement.
The NetBSD Foundation published its first quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months January through March of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers the addition of TCP/SACK and PAM support, the
opening of the Foundations Online Store, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items.
NetBSD's Alistair Crooks has
announced the availability of the new stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q1 of the
NetBSD Packages
Collection (aka pkgsrc). This branch
includes all the updates to the thousands of existing and additions of hundreds of new applications since the hereby obsoleted pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch.
Some noteworthy infrastructure changes applicable to all 13 operating systems
for which pkgsrc is available include the support for multiple digests to
check the integrity of the distribution files as found on the Internet
(triggered by the recently-found problems with the SHA-1 algorithm) and the so-called alternates
framework.
Christos Zoulas announced recently that as of 2005-02-27, NetBSD has PAM enabled for all applications that perform authentication. Support
for PAM, which is specified in the X/Open Single Sign-On standard, was originally imported into NetBSD-current on December 12th, 2004. This means that NetBSD 3.0 will ship PAM-enabled per default; users following -current should take care to update their systems using etcupdate
and/or the '/etc/postinstall' script. See Christos'
email to the current-users mailinglist and the OpenPAM website for more details.
The NetBSD Foundation has published a press release reporting on the benefits of the NetBSD/xen port, initially committed by Christian Limpach as previously reported. Since then, much progress has been made, and the NetBSD Project is now using NetBSD/xen internally. See the press release for further details.
In December 2004, the NetBSD Project released the feature-rich NetBSD 2.0. Even after such a masterpiece, developers kept working on improvements, new features, and new ports following the new development roadmap. Federico Biancuzzi recently interviewed them to find out what they are working on and how they plan to promote their project in the near future.
An interesting summary from the 2004 Annual NetBSD Group Meeting was posted to the NetBSD -announce mailing list. The report discusses past achievements as well as future goals.
NewsForge has published an interview with several prominent NetBSD developers:
"NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports 52 system architectures . . . To celebrate the release, we've asked several well-known NetBSD developers to comment on some of NetBSD 2.0's new features." Read the interview here.
Tamura Kent formally unveils his plans to add new functionality to NetBSD's audio framework (audio(9) and audio(4)) - specifically, the addition of an audio converter pipeline and in-kernel mixing. These additions along with audio device cloning would make it possible to natively support hardware mixing without the use of a software based soundserver.
Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th
2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. Update: LiveCD/ISO instructions.
The NetBSD-PT Group did an interview via e-mail with Hubert Feyrer.
He has been a NetBSD developer for years and we wanted to know his views on NetBSD, his projects and some personal questions.
"In NetBSD's sweet spot are organizations looking for a slim, lightweight, highly stable, and capable operating system to run the latest server applications on modest or specialized hardware."Read the article at ServerWatch.
"I've always been comfortable using the command line interface to get specific tasks done. I already knew that I could do pretty much anything from the command line if I was willing to sit down, read manual pages, and learn -- or if I really had to. To prove it, recently I forced myself to use only the CLI for a week. I ended up learning a lot more than just a few command line arguments." Read the article at NewsForge. Jeff also writes: "I used Lynx as my browser; I don't really like Lynx, but what else is there?" May we suggest eLinks 0.10.x, Links and w3m? They all have way better rendering than Lynx!