Review: Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition The Complete Guide to FreeBSD by Michael W. Lucas

The Book of PF (Silva, Chris) 200801

Chris Silva reviews The Book of PF A No-Nonsense Guide to the OpenBSD Firewall by Peter N.M. Hansteen (No Starch Press ISBN-10 1-59327-165-4, ISBN-13 978-1-59327-165-7).

Practical Packet Analysis (Silva, Chris) 200712

Practical Packet Analysis Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems by Chris Sanders I found this an easy read and it does a great job of taking you into the world of packet sniffing using Wireshark.

VIRTUALLY SERVING VIRTUAL SERVERS (King, Mikel) 200711

While just about every major vendor has developed a server virtualization product, often the open source varieties are treated like heirloom tomatoes; overlooked for whatever reason that may be. That is until you accidentally have one and wonder how you could have been living without it for so long. Since I have already covered how to run FreeBSD as a guest operating system under VMWare I thought it was worth an analysis of the virtualization technology built into FreeBSD.

I have written the subsequent article discussing FreeBSD Jails, which I hope to be both informative as well as entertaining. Additionally, I intend to utilize the article as a reference for future articles and discussions.

Now without further ado, please follow the URL to the article.

BSD Certification Beta Exam (Lavigne, Dru) 200707

Public service announcement: Time and location of the BSD Certification Beta Exam.

Also included is all of the background information on the BSD Certification Exam Beta, including registration requirements, and benefits for participating in the beta exam.

Review: The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book (King, Mikel) 200705

Review of The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book which includes PF for NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly, and of course OpenBSD. If you are only familiar with a single firewall system, FreeBSD's IPFW for instance this is a very handy book to read.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9790342-0-6
ISBN-10: 0-9790342-0-5
Editor: Jeremy C. Reed

Review: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS (2nd Edition) (King, Mikel) 200705

This article is an in depth review of HTML Utopia. If you have ever desired to truly understand Cascading Style Sheets then take a few moment to check this article out.

• Title: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS (2nd Edition)
• Co-Author: Rachel Andrew
• Co-Author: Dan Shafer
• ISBN: 0975240277
• Publisher: Siteoint
• url: www.sitepoint.com

Review: Designing BSD Root Kits (Hernandez, Michael) 200704

Review of:

Designing BSD Rootkits
An Introduction to Kernel Hacking
by Joseph Kong
ISBN-10 1-59327-142-5
ISBN-13 978-1-59327-142-8

This book seemingly overwhelming at first, as the reviewer Michael Hernandez admitted, is an intense trip through the land of kernel hacking. This is a handy lead by example and certainly well worth your time if you've ever been remotely interested in delving deeper under the hood of the BSD kernel.

Installing FreeBSD 6.x under VMWare Server (King, Mikel) 200702

The original title was 'The Care And Feeding Of Your New FreeBSD 6.x Instance' but it was determined that that would be a bit misleading. Especially since the article really only covers the installation of FreeBSD 6.x into a virtual machine, using VMWare Server. The VMWare Server is deployed in a lab environment on an HP Proliant DL380 running Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 5: OS/2 Installation (Durdevich, Micho) 200701

Part 5: Installing BSD on an IBM Netvista s40.

In this article the author faced several initial setbacks attempting the install. Finally resolved the installation CD driver incompatibilities by PXE booting the system off of a similar machine.

Stupid Launchd Tricks (King, Mikel) 200701

This article covers some background on the new startup mechanism from Apple called launchd. It includes a simple demonstration of how to work with it and how the author overcame difficulties as a result of limited documentation.

Launchd is the default daemon startup mechanism as of Mac OS X Tiger, and there is currently a port underway for FreeBSD.

Working with gmirror and a Sun Fire X2100 (part 1) (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200608

The first in a two part series start to finish building up and tearing down of a gmirror system. The system is built upon the new Sun Fire X2100 series server with two 250GB SATA disks.

Open Source Initiatives and You... (king, mikel) 200608

An Editorial regarding the state of dn and what you the casual reader can do to help you favorite open source project grow.

Review: Nagios System and Network Monitoring (king, mikel) 200608

Review of the book 'Nagios' written by Wollfgang Barth of No Starch Press.

Working with gmirror and a Sun Fire X2100 (part 2) (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200608

The follow up to Gregory's article on gmirror. In part one we learned how to build a mirror and in this part we will learn how to tare down a mirror as well as rebuild one. This should give enough background if you encounter a disk failure.

Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 4: NetBSD Installation (Durdevich, Micho) 200607

This article covers step by step how to create a live NetBSD install CD, and using GRUB as the bootloader. The CD should be a complete, working, text-mode NetBSD system. It should contain all NetBSD distribution sets, a complete GRUB install, and the full kernel sources.

Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 3: DragonFly Installation (Durdevich, Micho) 200605

Let us take an overview of a manual installation of DragonFly, which will use the whole hard disk space. More detailed explanations on installing DragonFly can be found in the DragonFly Handbook. We first initialize the MBR for a dedicated disk, and create the BSD slice with the appropriate disk label. As in the case of FreeBSD, we use the custom-prepared bootstraps, without any A20 subroutine.

BSDCan 2006 Photos (Bruce, Diane) 200605

Photos of people from BSDCan 2006. Please drop us an e-mail to help us fill in captions.

Book Review: Open Source Pen Testers Toolkit (Kohl, Florian) 200605

Review: "Penetration Tester's Open Source" Toolkit (ISBN: 1597490210, available from Syngress Publishing). Approaching the art of penetration testing from an analytical viewpoint it contains many examples, with actual hands on sessions.

BSDCan 2006 Friday Photos (Bruce, Diane) 200605

More BSDCan Photos!

Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 1: FreeBSD Installation (Durdevich, Micho) 200604

Micho Durdevich presents several ways of installing BSD on the IBM Netvista S40, a so-called legacy free computer. Difficulties arise because the machine has no standard AT keyboard controller. He also deals with bad assumptions made by the subroutines controlling gate A20.

Installing BSD on IBM Netvista S40 - Part 2: FreeBSD Installation (Durdevich, Micho) 200604

We discuss a manual method for preparing a bootable installation CD, suitable for both Netvista and all standard configurations, is examined.

Interview with Diego Petteno, Gentoo/*BSD developer (Stanford, David) 200604

Many people havn't heard of Gentoo/*BSD and so I thought I would try and interview with one of their devlopers and find out more about the project. Fortunately, I was able to. This is an interview with Diego Petteno, a lead Gentoo/*BSD developer, primarily working on Gentoo/FreeBSD.

Interview with der Mouse (Dreyfus, Emmanuel) 200603

Hard disk tends to be one of the weakest points in today's machines. This is a shame because this is the piece of hardware that holds your data.

If you can afford it, RAID setups will address that problem. But they require duplicate hard disks. If you have a lot of machines, this gets expensive. And if you cannot afford it, you probably cannot afford a NAS or a SAN either. The poor man's solution is to regularly back up the information from one disk to another. Of course if your disk dies between two backups, you lose.

der Mouse is a Canadian open source developer who produced a bunch of valuable software ranging from anti-spam tools to a PPPoE implementation. At the BSDCan 2005 conference, he presented an innovative solution to hard disk replication. In this interview, der Mouse explains his idea and how he implemented it to us.

The Design of OpenBGPd (Brauer, Henning) 200603

I started OpenBGP two years ago, after getting completely fed up with Zebra, which we were running before. There were lots of bugs, bad configuration language, performance problems, and since I don't speak Japanese - I had problems understanding the documentation. Zebra makes heavy use of cooperative threads, which leads to it's main problem: Combined with the central event queue, Zebra can lose sessions while busy. This is because the keepalive events can be way down in the queue, so if something else simultaneously consumes all the CPU power - Zebra just doesn't process the keepalives until the peer resets the session. Zebra successor, Quagga, caught up and apparently fixed many of the bugs. However, they still used the Zebra's design, which I think is wrong. So, the issues are kind of unfixable.

Letter to Steve Jobs (King, Mikel) 200602

A letter to Mr. Jobs thanking him for the use of the Apple store in SOHO, NYC. With a brief synopsis of Johnny Lam's excellent discussion on XEN, an open source server virtualization product similar to the comercially produced VMWare from EMC.

Interview with Manuel Bouyer on Xen (Dreyfus, Emmanuel) 200602

Manuel Bouyer is a NetBSD developper who has been involved in kernel hacking for many years. He recently added support for Xen to NetBSD, based on Christian Limpback's work for the Xen team

In this interview, Manuel will tell us what is so good with Xen, and what was the work required to have it working on NetBSD.

Apple and Open Source (Braun, Rob) 200602

My experience with Apple's Open Source efforts began in 2000 when Darwin 1.0 was released, and I've been involved in Apple's Open Source efforts in various roles ever since then. Apple had several Open Source efforts going at the time, with Darwin being the flagship product, accompanied by Darwin Streaming Server, OpenPlay & NetSprocket, and HeaderDoc. Six years later, all of these projects are still available. I will focus on the Darwin project, starting in 2000, since that is where my experience lies.

BSDCan 2006 (Coleman, Chris) 200601

Are you ready to go to BSDCan 2006? Its still a few months away, but you might want to start getting ready now. Chris Coleman explains why.

BSD Certification Survey Results (Lavigne, Dru) 200507

July 20, 2005 -- The BSD Certification Group announced today that the report of the results of their recent Task Analysis Survey is publicly available. The survey was initiated in late April and was offered in several languages. Approximately 60 countries had at least one responder and 637 people participated in the survey.

The report covers the purpose and methodology of the survey and includes evaluations of over 200 system administration tasks, proposed testing methods, and certification types and levels.

Lab in a Box (Corbesero, Stephen G.) 200506

In a small college setting, computing and faculty resources are often quite limited. Exploiting FreeBSD and its ports system is a way to provide fast access to a large array of applications that can be instantly deployed and maintained with a minimum impact on existing resources. Essentially, the non-assuming FreeBSD four-disc CD set is a "Lab-in-a-Box"!

Ike Notes on BSDCan 2005 (Levy, Isaac) 200505

I had the pleasure of attending Greg Lehey's 'Kernel Debugging Workshop', which happened on the Wednesday preceding the regular conference schedule- and it was great. I live in user-space for most of my development work and hacking life, so it was a real eye-opener to dive into the Kernel for an entire day... a lot of heavy information to take in all at once :) One of the most striking things about this lecture was that Greg uses Firewire for debugging, insomuch as firewire PCI cards are cheaper than serial, and MUCH faster. Firewire gives direct access to system memory, so it's great for debugging. Mr. Lehey's 'most correct' lecture notes are available online, and are currently the most definitive documentation available on debugging BSD kernels:

BSDCan 2005 Photos (Bruce, Diane) 200505

Photos taken at BSDCan 2005. Includes pictures of Kris Kenneway, Michael Lucas, David Maxwell, Dan Langille, Greg Lehey, Kirk McKusick, Dru Lavigne and many others.

FreeBSD Developer Summit Pictures (McKusick, Kirk) 200505

Pictures taken at the FreeBSD Developer Summit which occurred just prior to the BSDCan 2005 Conference. These pictures were taken by Marshall Kirk McKusick and include most of the FreeBSD developer team.

More BSDCan 2005 Photos (Bernier, Robert) 200505

Even more photos of the BSDCan 2005 Conference in Ottawa, Ontario Canada. These pictures were taken by Robert Bernier and republished here by permission. Includes photos of Dan Langille, Tom Rhodes, all the authors from the book signing and many more. All photos have good captions.

Chan_CAPI on your Asterisk PABX (Stocker, Jan) 200503

While porting some facsimile software to FreeBSD, I received a request about a CAPI channel implementation for Asterisk. All I knew was Asterisk is a telephony service for VoIP, but last time I had a look at VoIP it was a mess. Meanwhile it has grown into a good replacement for most PBXs.

Mr. Junghanns created chan_capi for Asterisk on Linux. I ported this application to FreeBSD . I try to explain my configuration files in this paper.

SCALE Review (Wright, Peter) 200503

The Southern California Linux Expo (http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/) was hosted this weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Due to the great generosity of Kevin Lahey, I was able to stay at the NetBSD table and talked to people about NetBSD as well as BSD in general. The turnout was pretty great, with vendors ranging from IBM and Novel to representatives from local user groups and projects. Unfortunately I was only able to attend for one day and was not able to go to any of the lectures, but from what I saw there is indeed a quite strong Open-source community in So-Cal.

BSD Updates (Coleman, Chris) 200502

BSD Updates provides online security and operating system upgrades for BSD systems in binary format. No messy source patches. No waiting for system rebuilds. Just an easy to navigate web interface which securely applies the latest patches in just minutes.

FreeBSD System Disk Mirroring (Engelschall, Ralf S.) 200502

RAID-1 (mirroring) is a popular approach to protect systems from a hard disk failure. It is done either in hardware or software. Using a hardware solution is common, and involves buying a RAID disk controller like one of the popular 3ware ATA RAID controllers. This avoids complications from software incompatibilities because the RAID array is presented to the system as one large physical disk.

The software solution is less expensive and more flexible, but it is important to be sure that booting directly from the resulting mirror setup is possible without ugly BIOS or boot loader tricks. Additionally, in the case of a major problem with the RAID-1 software driver, it is important to be able to rescue-boot from the mirror setup by treating it like a plain-disk setup again.

The FreeBSD 5 geom(4) framework is an excellent abstraction layer for disk I/O.The GEOM mirror class is a software RAID-1 implementation which can be used even to establish a mirror for the system disk partitions. It can be established for any GEOM "providers", including whole disks or just particular slices on a disk.

FreeBSD IPSEC: Racoon + X.509 Certificates (Jokela, Alex C.) 200502

This document provides a simple guide to quickly get racoon using X.509 certificates instead of shared keys.

Rebuilding the OpenBSD Kernel (Schonhorst, Brad) 200501

The kernel is the core of the operating system. It is the binary file that the computer loads first and stores in memory. Because it is stored in memory, the kernel needs to be as small as possible. The kernel usually lives in the root directory ('/') and by default is called 'bsd'.

Users who want their OpenBSD machine to perform specific functions or need additional device drivers might want to customize their kernel. In other OS's, like some types of Linux, it is very popular to rebuild the kernel because the default is so bloated. For most users, the default OpenBSD kernel is sufficient; however, you should still apply kernel patches, which will require rebuilding and installing a fresh kernel.

NetBSD Logo Contest (Kleist, Christian von) 200501

The old NetBSD logo was well-known in the BSD world and pretty well-loved. I liked it a lot. The symbolism in the old logo was unmistakable: A bunch of little daemon processes doing something significant on a hodgepodge of old, broken, and diverse hardware. The problems with the logo are obvious too: the pen sketch is hard to reproduce, doesn't scale well, and its ragged edges don't look professional; there's way too much going on at once; and most people assume that d(a)emons are evil.

UFS2 Filesystem Snapshots (Engelschall, Ralf S.) 200501

The FreeBSD 5 UFS2 filesystem provides the possibility to create snapshots of live filesystems. It is already best known (and can be easily used) for allowing fsck(8) to run in the background (see rc.conf variable background_fsck) and to create consistent filesystem dumps (see dump(8) option -L).

Additionally, with the help of md(4) and mdconfig(8) you can mount snapshots as read-only filesystems, too.

Installing OpenBSD: A Beginner's Guide (Mac PPC) (Schonhorst, Brad) 200412

The OpenBSD website is contains an extermely thorough FAQ and manual that should be any OpenBSD user's primary resource. Below I will go through a basic installation of OpenBSD 3.5 to clarify some points that might be confusing to a new OpenBSD user.

There are many ways you can get OpenBSD up and running on your machine. I will assume you are using the official OpenBSD CD set because if you aren't, you should be. The official CD's are one of the few ways to support the OpenBSD community financially.

A few things you should consider before beginning:

FreeBSD 5.x and the Future (Long, Scott) 200412

The release of FreeBSD 5.3 signals the true kick-off of the 5-STABLE and 6-CURRENT series. We are very excited about this, both because 5.3 is a good release, and because 6.0 will give us a chance to, erm, redeem ourselves and our development process.

5.x was a tremendous undertaking. SMPng, KSE, UFS2, background fsck, ULE, ACPI, etc., etc., etc. were all incredible tasks. Given that many of these things were developed and managed by unpaid volunteers, the fact that we made it to 5-STABLE at all is quite impressive and says a lot about the quality and determination of all of our developers and users. However, four years was quite a long time to work on it. While 4.x remained a good workhorse, it suffered from not having needed features and hardware support. 5.x suffered at the same time from having too much ambition but not enough developers to efficiently carry it through.

Interview with Hubert Feyrer (Group, NetBSD-PT) 200412

The NetBSD-PT Group did an interview via e-mail with a NetBSD developer. You can find more information about him at http://www.feyrer.de.

Hubert lives in Regensburg, which is located in Bavaria, southern Germany. He studied computer science at the University of Applied Scienced (Fachhochschule) Regensburg, then continued working there, first in a project about electronic libraries, later on as system administrator maintaining a cluster of Sun workstations with some additional work on machines running Irix, NetBSD and Windows. Besides doing system administration, he started giving lectures on "System Administration" and "Open Source".

Advanced OpenSSH usage: operation and access control (Kadhi, Saad) 200411

OpenSSH offers powerful features that allow fine grained operation and access control when using RSA or DSA key pairs such as: - controlling port-forwarding (TCP or X11): denying port-forwarding for some specific keys while permitting only specific ports to specific hosts to be forwarded - associating a command to a key - tying keys to specific hosts: a user is only allowed to authenticate with a given key when coming from specific hosts

Patching OpenBSD (Schonhorst, Brad) 200411

Updating your machine to the latest secure version should be done as soon as you finish installation. The patches fix any possible security holes that have been discovered since the release of the OS. It is a good idea to subscribe to the security-announce mailing list so you can be notified when a new patch is released.

The official list of patches released for your version of OpenBSD can be found at the Errata website. The latest point release will be displayed along with the patch list for previous versions. You will need to install the patches listed for all architectures as well as any listed for your platform.

To update your system you will need two things.

Would Be CMS (Stocker, Jan) 200411

My web site is made of static web pages, but on all pages you can see the same title, menu and footer. You will say, pah, why don't you use PHP and here you go. But my provider does not give me access for server scripting for the money I have paid.

The only solution is to use frames, I would not, or to copy the main framework to each of the pages. I have made a would-be-cms PERL script doing this in a dynamic way.

NYC*BUG Hosts Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick Meeting in Manhattan (Rosamond, George) 200410

NYC*BUG Hosts Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick Meeting in Manhattan

The NYC *BSD User Group held a special meeting on Saturday, October 16th with Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick speaking at Columbia University.

Eric Allman , the creator of Sendmail, has been a critical component in the open source community for decades. Kirk McKusick is an original BSD Unix developer from the 1970's, and continues to play a leading role in the FreeBSD project to this day. Both Eric and Kirk are also heavily involved in USENIX.

Fetching Yahoo! Mail (King, Mikel) 200410

I thought it might be nice to start off with a simple little article about a simple app in the ports tree that I find perticularly useful. It is called fetchyahoo, basically what it does is fetch your email out of your mail.yahoo.com account via the http interface and download it into a mailbox. Of course that may not seem all that special or important, but what is really cool about this app is where it can put the messages, and some of the advanced features, like dump the bulk messages, and automatic expunging of the deleted messages.

Lowest Common Denominator (Bogen, David) 200410

In most contexts, titling something the "lowest common denominator" is faint praise, if not an outright insult. Most people consider the lowest common denominator in social groups to be those traits and urges most closely associated with our base instincts: food, shelter, warmth, safety, procreation, etc. Some examples that social and technology critics might offer:

IMAP server for home use (Stocker, Jan) 200409

Here you'll find a short instruction how to install an IMAP server and configure procmail with fetchmail to receive mails from an external mail server and distribute them automatically to different mail fiolders.

Open-Source based access to Cisco VPNs (Feyrer, Hubert) 200409

Using vpnc on NetBSD and Linux

Qmail Howto (Jessa, Martin) 200409

This article describes how to quickly setup an email gateway for your domain(s) and/or IP ranges with antivirus and antispam scanning running Qmail, qmailscanner and SpamAssassin.

Matt Dillon Interview (Rosamond, George) 200409

A video interview of Matt Dillon of the DragonFly BSD project taked at USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

Asterisk PBX on BSD (Coleman, Chris) 200409

Asterisk is an open source PBX (Personal Branch Exchange). A PBX is a phone system commonly found in office settings that allows you to make calls between cubicals just by dialing that extension. A PBX also allows things like Automated Attendant, which creates those annoying messages that say "Press 1 to talk to a human" or "Press 2 if you are willing to pay to talk to a human".

Asterisk however takes this to a new level by integrating the Internet into your office and allowing you to do Voice Over IP (VOIP). The big benefit of VOIP is now your office doesn't have to be located in one place. You can have phones ring is several places at the same time and who ever picks it up first gets the call. You are not even confined to the same country. For instance, you can get a US based phone number and have it ring in Australia. As long as your phone can plug into the internet, you can make and receive phone calls as though you were in your office. If you are extension 1234 at work, just take your phone with you and when you plug it in to the Internet, you will still be extension 1234.

DHCP server with Dynamic DNS (Stocker, Jan) 200408

Everyone using mobile machines, like notebooks and PDAs, knows the problem of changing network configuration for each network (s)he wants to connect to. DHCP gives you the ability to receive the needed IP address, network mask, DNS server addresses and so on in a dynamic way.

You can use a local DNS server for name resolving of your internal servers and desktop clients. But what about connecting from a client to your notebook, which has now a dynamic IP and therefore no DNS entry?

You have to make DHCP add an entry for each leased IP in your local DNS server automatically. This is what we call Dynamic DNS (DDNS). With this solution you have a complete map of all connected computers, and it's quite easy to setup.

FreeBSD Documentation: An Interview with Tom Rhodes (Rosamond, George) 200408

An interview with FreeBSD's Tom Rhodes and maintaining FreeBSD documentation

SSH - The Secure Shell: An overview (Vasista, Harish) 200408

SSH - The Secure Shell: An overview Author: Harish N Vasista Key words: Telnet, ftp, rlogin, Cryptography, DSA, RSA, TCP/IP Target audience: Internet family Abstract: This memo is an attempt to introduce you to the security loop-holes of clear text protocols like telnet, rlogin, ftp, etc. and how your sessions can be made more secure by the use of SSH (Secure Shell).

Cross compiling from FreeBSD to Windows (Yeske, David) 200408

This article explains how to cross compile from FreeBSD to Windows. This is possible because of the MinGW compiler which is a FreeBSD port. The PuTTY program is a gui ssh suite of utilities that will be cross compiled for this example. A specially modified FreeBSD port has been made so that putty can be cross compiling using the existing FreeBSD ports framework.

Ripping Audio CDs to the Ogg Vorbis Format (Hoadley, Paul) 200407

In this article we will look at a partially automated process for "ripping" an audio compact disc (CD) to the Ogg Vorbis compressed audio format under FreeBSD. (I chose the Ogg Vorbis format because it is open and patent-free. You may like to use the more popular MP3 format, it should be fairly obvious where to substitute the command for your favourite MP3 encoder.)

The main goal here is to develop a non-GUI-dependent process: the instructions in this article do not rely on any desktop environment. The only prerequisite, of course, is physical access to the machine's CD-ROM drive. There should be no other constraints on the system (for example, the X Windows System is not required). This is to maximise how far we might be able to automate the process with future enhancements.

IPFILTER (IPF) Firewall (Barbish, Joseph J.) 200407

The author of IPFILTER is Darren Reed. IPFILTER is not FreeBSD operating system dependant. IPFILTER is a open source application and has been ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Sun, HP, and Solaris operating systems. IPFILTER is actively being supported and maintained, with updated versions being released regularly.

The IPFILTER program runs in the kernel and consists of the firewall and separate NAT facilities. IPFILTER also has user-land front-end interactive interfaces for controlling the firewall rules, NAT, packet accounting, and the logging facility. Program IPF is used to load the firewall rules. Program IPNAT is used to load the firewall NAT rules. Program IPFSTAT reports on packet filter statistics and lists active rules sets. Program IPMON monitors IPFILTER for logged packets.

Tunneling your traffic for fun and profit (Sobiecki, Zbyszek) 200407

Some time ago, when I dropped managing network in company I worked for, and I lost control over it, I started wondering what is my new admin doing in his spare time. Is he sniffing my traffic? Or maybe he enjoys reading proxy logs? Few days later, during my morning coffee, digging through websites I checked daily, I got a message from squid. It said that resource I'm trying to see is forbidden because of my company's access policy. Bottom of the message looked like IT Staff Hall Of Fame, so I suspected rather their emotional problems than some management decision.

I don't like to waste my time on political fights, so I've decided to setup a simple tunnel connection between my laptop and a host outside local network. I planned to transfer all my traffic through this connection except that related to my job - accessing local hosts, VPN sites, etc. I wanted to put all tunneled traffic into one encrypted, and possibly compressed channel. It would look like single, persistent connection to some remote host. And of course many work-related connections ;).

USENIX ATC 2004 (Rosamond, George) 200407

While I didn't attend too many meetings, I found USENIX to be an amazing experience.

I did attend Kirk McKusick and Peter Salus' meeting on UNIX history, which provided a fascinating perspective on a standard topic.

So often people think that "open source" is an invention of the 1990's, when it was actually the modus operandi of the first decades of UNIX. Collaboration and passing application development between developers at different sites and on different continents was the norm, and not the exception.

Ports: What To Do When Things Go Wrong (Bogen, David) 200406

Any trained monkey can administer a system that is working correctly. Such systems rarely, if ever, need external human (or simian) guidance. The system gets some sort of stimulus or input, makes decisions, takes actions, and most likely emits some sort of product or information. Easy enough. Watch the big wheels go round.

Good system and network administrators earn their salaries when systems are not working correctly. It is when nothing seems to work correctly, debugging data are scarce, and managerial or client pressure is the highest that time spent preparing for disaster pays off tenfold.

DSL Router for FreeBSD with MPD and PF (Stocker, Jan) 200406

This arcticle gives you a short overview how to setup a DSL router with FreeBSD 5 using MPD and PF.

At home I am using some computers sharing one internet line, like many other people. Starting with FreeBSD and ISDN I used I4B directly over sppp device. Some years later I switched to DSL using ppp. I was not very happy with the firewall capabilities implemented in userland ppp. You can only have 20 rules, you must order your rules by numbering them.This makes it difficult to add a rule at a specific position.

Traffic shaping with trickle (Hemel, Armijn) 200405

I share my Internet connection (ADSL with 1 MBit downstream) with several people. Sometimes it happens that we have some conflicting interests. I do quite a few bulk transfers, mainly ISO files to test new Linux and BSD releases inside VMWare. These bulk transfers tend to clog the line, which the other users don't really appreciate (interactive sessions such as SSH and IRC become nearly unusable). So, recently I started looking at traffic shaping so I could be a bit nicer to the other users.

I usually do FTP transfers with the built in FTP client in Mozilla (I happen to like the clicketyclick interface). But, Mozilla lacks traffic shaping. So I started looking at other FTP clients and ended up with gFTP, which can do traffic shaping. gFTP works nice but, of course, it does not help much if you use other methods for bulk transfer, such as tar over SSH, CVS or rsync. Since some of the machine where I have to get my data off don't run an FTP server I had to look at other ways of doing traffic shaping.

Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004 (Feyrer, Hubert) 200405

Over the last couple of months, the infrastructure of pkgsrc, the NetBSD (and others :-) packages system underwent quite some changes. To not only communicate via email and chat, a call was made to all people interested in pkgsrc development to join in for a pkgsrcCon, where things were presentations on details were given and discussed face to face.

The meeting happened at the weekend of May 1st (April 30th to May 2nd) at the Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Geometry at Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, Austria's capital city. The place was choosen because many pkgsrc developers are located in Europe, and Vienna is fairly central to Europe and also has good medium and long distance infrastructure for travelers from abroad.

NYCBUG Goes to BSDCan (Rosamond, George) 200405

our of us left Brooklyn at 7:30 am on Thursday morning to avoid the traffic on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan. Well, there's no way to totally avoid it; but there's a better chance of getting through Manhattan at that hour to the Holland Tunnel than 30 minutes later. Remember, we're leaving from a city where you can be stuck in traffic at 2 am early on a Tuesday on the Brooklyn Bridge.

We know that there will be two additional NYCBUG members in Ottawa who arrive by plane. But since we only started up the group in January, we are all basically strangers to each other, especially in the context of a long drive to the Great White North.

BSDCan 2004 (Moran, Bill) 200405

This is a description of my trip to BSDCan 2004 in Ottawa, Canada. If you're interested in BSD or computers in general and did not go to BSDCan, then you made a huge mistake. The conference was tremendiously educational, and the trip was a great opportunity to meet a number of great people, and visit a beatiful city. The conference was also very affordable, and there were more than a few who attended on a shoestring budget (I tried to do this, but ended up drinking far too much beer). A number of people also visited from tremendious distances ... attendees arrived from all over the world, so anyone who didn't make it really has no excuse.

Bosko's Adventures at BSDCan 2004 (Milekic, Bosko) 200405

It's Sunday, May 16, 2004. 5:30PM. BSDCan has come to a formal close late last night at around 2:00AM, when George, other NYCBUGers, myself, and a friend decided to finally give the poor waitresses tending on us a break, and leave the pub once and for all. But I'm still in Ottawa, and will only get to go home to Montreal tomorrow night.

There are still a few conference attendees in town; some flying out early tomorrow. Christian S.J. Peron, a new FreeBSD Committer is still in town with his collegue and friend Yvan and they're planning to drop by a little later, at which point we'll probably go out somewhere for dinner and drinks.

Changing User Information (Benedict, Chris) 200404

For the past few years, I've been a home Linux user with a single user machine. Recently, I've been introduced into a well-established BSD environment with quite a bit more than just one user. Shortly after getting my account, I was asked to edit my user information -- the info that shows up with the finger command.

After a bit of looking, I came across the command chpass(1). According to the man page, it is the same program as chfn, chsh, ypchfn and ypchsh just under different links. It can be used to change the current user's home/office phone number, office location, shell, etc.

Introducing CAPI 4 BSD (Stocker, Jan) 200404

This article describes what CAPI is and how it is integrated in the FreeBSD system. Furthermore, it will show you how to setup an ISDN FAX server using CAPI 4 BSD and HylaFax.

CAPI is a shortcut for Common-ISDN-API and defines an abstraction layer for different ISDN protocols, so an application can be coded independent of the used hardware. The interface, created by three ISDN hardware companies (AVM, Stollmann, Systec) in the year 1989, supported German ISDN (1TR6) and was called CAPI 1.1.

EuroBSDCon Call for Papers (Staff, EuroBSDCon) 200404

The 3rd European BSD Conference will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany, from Friday 29th - Sunday 21 October 2004.

We are inviting contributions on all areas relating to the *BSD systems. The programme will cover a variety of subjects, including Networking, System Internal Development, Tools and Applications. Any topic likely to be of interest to BSD hackers, users, admins or enthusiasts will be considered. Timely papers discussing work in progress or recently completed work are especially welcomed; as are new and interesting uses of existing work. Topics should have relevance to BSD, but need not be exclusive.

BSD Support Forum (Coleman, Chris) 200403

Quite some time ago, we launched a BSD support forum as an extension of the BSD News site. It actually was part of the same code. We used it mostly as an open forum for supporting products sold through BSDmall.com. This worked for a while.

However, since the site was designed to be a news forum not a support forum, it was not flexible enough to accomplish what we really wanted to do. So, recently we started looking around for another solution.

New York City BSD User Group (NYCBUG) (Rosamond, George) 200403

Early this past December, a few of us got together in one of the few remaining smokey bars in Manhattan and formed the New York City BSD User Group (NYCBUG).

The six of us that night included the founder of the New York PHP user group Hans Zaunere, author Wes Sonnenreich, a security consultant Marc Spitzer, a developer Aron Roberts, a newbie BSD user Michael Welsh, and myself, an independent consultant who has worked as the East Coast representative for BSD Mall for several years.

We spent the night talking out our conceptions of a BSD user group.

FreeBSD Ports - RFC (Bogen, David) 200403

Unix and its derivatives have a wonderful history of brevity. Why use four characters for a command (list) when two do just as well (ls)? Most people grow to appreciate this brevity once they acquire their own Rosetta Stone to translate human desires (display the contents of this text file one page at a time in my terminal window) into shell-friendly language (more README.txt).

Unfortunately, this brevity often leads many less well-known applications to gather virtual dust because busy admins and users do not have the time to decode every application name in /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, and /bin. Over ten thousand applications currently comprise the FreeBSD ports collection, some wearing brief but opaque names like ncp, wol, tlb, and pp3.

As such, many applications that happily fill digital niches fall through the mental cracks.

Understanding Filesystems and fstabs (Coleman, Chris) 200402

A helpful beginner's guide to managing BSD filesystems. The author outlines what filesystems are, the format of /etc/fstab including some of the more commonly-used options, mounting media such as CDs, and using df to monitor partition space.

Using NFS Via an IPsec Tunnel (McGarvey, Peter) 200402

Personally speaking, there are only two machines which I regard as mission-critical. The first is my home gateway, Green, which sits in my cellar. The second, Crisp, is my desktop at work. Both have stuff on them which I could need at any time, and SSH works fine for little things. The only thing about NFS that anyone can agree on is that it's woefully insecure.

What I wanted was some way for Crisp to access my private network securely. So, one day I worked out just how to do it.

Installing Oracle9i on FreeBSD (Ledbetter, Brian) 200402

In the process of poking and prodding Oracle, I have devised a somewhat straight-forward (or, as close as I could get) installation procedure for running Oracle on Intel-based FreeBSD systems. By following these steps, you will end up with a working Oracle database installation, which should be safe for you to use for any kind of development purposes.

I tested my database by installing the Oracle Marvel product (now called HTMLDB) into the instance - everything worked fine. Many people on the freebsd-database mailing list have accomplished this task before I did. My goal here is simply to consolidate all of the excellent advice passed to me from the list into an easy-to-follow guide.

BSD Advocacy (Wilde, Don) 200401

For the last three years, the author and other members of the New Mexico BSD and Linux User's Group (www.NMLUG.org) have been working with the children of Truman Middle School in a unique program that blends open source computing with challenging questions. Their goals are to expose the students to computing and electronics, and to help them realize that they are in charge of their own success or failure.

FreeBSD Wi-Fi IPsec Easy-Setup Guide (Harn, Timothy) 200401

The author shows how setting up an IPsec tunneling connection between a MS-Windows host with wireless Ethernet and a FreeBSD NAT gateway allows a mobile host to have a secure and encrypted connection over an inherently insecure wi-fi radio network. Anyone sniffing the access point on the secure wi-fi connection between your laptop and your gateway should only see packets going to and from the host and the gateway in encrypted form.

FreeBSD Ports Monitoring (Linimon, Mark) 200312

Among the least-publicized strengths of the FreeBSD development model are users' access to the CVS source tree and the continual QA work being done via ongoing build processes. The work described in this article attempts to leverage these strengths to help ease the process of porting and maintaining applications for FreeBSD.

Book Review: BSD Socket Programming (Wilde, Don) 200312

BSD Sockets Programming from a Multi-Language Perspective, a new must-have for your programming library.

Creating an OpenBSD Application Port (Baldi, Nicolas) 200312

This tutorial on the ports system is good for all those new to this great BSD feature.

Cross Platform Compiling on NetBSD (Berls, Erik) 200312

The benefits of the NetBSD cross build system, as well as challenges and future work.

UKUUG at the Garden of Eden? (Curran, Charles) 200312

Event Report: UK Unix Users Group and the Mac OS X technology briefing.

A Small Exercise in Java Authentication (Jenkins, Graham) 200311

A Java print server is extended with a server and signed object recognition to demonstrate authentication in Java.

Newbies Corner: Command Line Too Long (Coleman, Chris) 200311

This introduction to the 'xargs' command shows how to deal with large lists in your shell.

Working With ACLs in FreeBSD 5.x (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200310

How to create and configure unique access permissions on files and directories using Access Control Lists.

Enchancing Mutt (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200309

In this article, Grzegorz Czaplinski describes how to use the Mutt MUA, starting with reading mail from mboxes and Maildirs, then introducing some advanced options including the GPG feature set.

Postfix and SpamAssassin (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200309

Grzegorz Czaplinski demonstrates how to set up Postfix with Sophos anti-virus, Amavisd, and SpamAssassin to create a virus- and spam-free email system.

Doing Java on NetBSD (Jenkins, Graham) 200308

Graham Jenkins describes his experiences with running various Java programs on NetBSD.

Courier-IMAP on FreeBSD (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200308

You make your system as secure as you can. You disable Telnet and enable OpenSSH as the only way for your users to reach a shell on your systems. What about other services? Do you secure your SMTP server? What about POP3 and IMAP? In this article I will show how to install and securely configure Courier-IMAP on your mail server.

O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2003 Coverage (Pham, Linh) 200308

Although I normally read up on some of the conferences and conventions in the tech world, I generally cruise past the location and cost knowing that it would be too expensive for my budget and would deal with traveling (or even worse, flying). This year, my luck changed for the better when I heard that this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) would be held in Portland, Oregon and I would be able to get in with a press pass. To say the least, I was really trilled and immediately put a request in to take that week off from work.

Postfix Aliases (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200307

Postfix aliases are a way to set up global aliasing for your users. Grzegorz Czaplinski shares his concepts and implementation and demonstrates how to set up aliases for users and groups.

OpenBSD in the Classroom (Aycock, John) 200306

"How do you get a hundred students in an operating systems class to work on real kernel code, using outdated machines and a lab barely big enough for a quarter of them?" John Aycock answers the question and writes on his personal experiences of setting up OpenBSD in a classroom lab environment.

Postfix with SASL Authentication over TLS (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200306

In today's internet there is a lot of spam, forged mails and people who make use of this. It is importatnt to be secure, secure your users and the rest of the community from your users as well. It's better to be secure than to be sorry if an accident happens. You may not know that your users send spam until you get on the spamming list. In this article I will show you how to force users to authenticate before sending mail through Postfix.

Programming With Qt (Johnson, David) 200305

In this article I will explain some key Qt concepts, create an example Qt program, and demonstrate how easy it is to program with Qt. This article is from the perspective of a FreeBSD developer, but the majority of it is suitable for those on any platform.

Mounting Compact Flash under FreeBSD (Pelleg, Dan) 200305

In this article we will explore the ways to use Compact Flash (CF) cards under FreeBSD. Our goal is to minimize the administrative overhead for the user - eliminating the need for root access or manual mounts. For simple tasks such as uploading files from the CF card we can even come up with a completely hands-off operation - the user doesn't have to do anything but insert the card in, wait, and then pull it back out.

FreeBSD Kernel Blueprints: Userland/kernel interfaces (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200305

Back when Daemon News started, a couple of us came up with the idea of a series of "blueprint" articles, intended to shine some light on the actual construction details of the kernel. This is my attempt to make good on that idea. This first article is a tour of userland/kernel interfaces: what happens whenever a userland program requests services from the kernel.

Point-to-point Encryption for Preserving Privacy (Sutter, Gregory) 200304

An overview of encrypting LAN traffic by proxying through an external host

Updating your Real-Time Clock Offset without Recompiling (Studenmund, Bill) 200304

If you dual-boot BSD and Windows, you'll need to correct your RTC to account for Daylight Savings Time. Bill shows how you can do it without recompiling your kernel.

Choosing and Using OpenBSD As A Firewall Platform (Newport, Brandon) 200303

A Carolina-based hosting and web design company decides to use OpenBSD as their firewall.

Replacing FreeBSD Base System's BIND with BIND 9 (Pham, Linh) 200303

In this article, I will cover upgrading the FreeBSD base system's BIND from 8.x to version 9.2.2 using Ports as well as building from source, as well as cover some of the changes and new features in BIND 9.

BSDcon 2003 Needs Your Papers (Sutter, Greg) 200303

Submit a paper to be presented at BSDcon 2003!

FreeBSD From Scratch (Schweikhardt, Jens) 200302

This article describes my efforts at FreeBSD From Scratch: 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.

Getting RANCID on FreeBSD (Boyd, Chris) 200302

Chris Boyd provides an overview of getting RANCID, a network configuration management tool, running on FreeBSD along with a test Cisco 2600 router.

The Visions in BSD Security Features, Building a Secure OS (Kamp, Scott) 200302

Scott Kamp, the founder of MicroBSD, goes into the past, present and future of one of the newest member of the BSD family.

Booting FreeBSD 5.0 on a Sun Machine Over The Network (Volodkin, Anthony) 200301

Anthony Volodkin writes an article on booting FreeBSD 5.0 on a Sun sparc64 machine over the network utilizing DHCP, BOOTP, TFTP and NFS.

Getting into NetBSD - How to Help (Fink, Jason) 200301

This article discusses the different groups within the NetBSD Project and the variety of ways virtually any user can help the project out.

Symbolic Links (Coleman, Chris) 200212

There comes a time when it's handy to have a file exist in more than one place on your file system; however, its not practical to copy it to each place. Aside from the added disk space, you would quickly lose track of which file was the latest copy. Under certain circumstances you could use CVS or RCS to maintain the several copies, but that would still require updating each copy every time a change was committed. Symbolic links might just fit the bill.

Lightweight FTP jail with NAT (Pelleg, Dan) 200212

In this article, Dan Pelleg provides steps on how to setup ProFTPd in a jailed environment with NAT to limit not only access to the FTP server but also to limit what a user could do.

Setting Up Sophos + Amavis For Postfix (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200212

Protecting a system against viruses is an important thing for every system administrator. Although there is no real threat from viruses on UNIX, some users may use Windows OS on their home PCs. What I am going to offer you in this article is a somewhat tricky installation of Postfix, Amavis and Sophos.

Getting More NetInfo Backups (Goodson, Troy) 200212

The NetInfo directory system is used by Darwin and, therefore, Mac OS X to store information about users and resources. NetInfo is used to store data that on many other Unices store under /etc in files like group, hosts, passwd, and printcap. Obviously, this is something you'll want backup copies of.

Building Monolithic Kernels and Root Filesystems for FreeBSD (Yeske, David) 200211

This article explains an alternative method of creating a kernel that contains a root file system image within it. This single-file kernel and file system can be used in many ways beyond what usual FreeBSD kernels allow, just as having the root file system loaded along with the kernel enables you to have more flexibility in the boot process.

Filtering Bridge with IPFilter on FreeBSD (Hemel, Armijn) 200211

A bridge connects two network segments and makes it look like it's one network. So basically you're copying packets from one interface to another. And why not put a filter in between and create a filtering bridge? A filtering bridge makes it possible to filter packets without a change to the network setup, apart from rewiring some cables.

Cross-Development with NetBSD (Feyrer, Hubert) 200211

When targeting a product for an embedded platform, it's not feasible to have all the development tools available on that same platform. Instead, some method of cross-compiling is usually used today. NetBSD 1.6 will contain (and NetBSD-current has today) a new framework to build both the operating system's kernel and the whole userland for either the same platform that the compiler runs on, or for a different platform, using cross-compiling.

DNS and "The djb Way" (Marshall, Wayne) 200210

This article will consider a few scenarios that would benefit from running djbdns, demonstrating the easy set up and configuration of djbdns on FreeBSD. We will also open the door a crack for a peek at "the djb way", an alternate parallel universe of doing things Un*x. The first look is weird and scary, but after a while "the djb way" may even begin to make sense (and that can be scary, too!)

Introduction to the DarwinPorts Project (Fuller, Landon) 200210

The DarwinPorts Project is a BSD licensed software build, install, and packaging infrastructure conceived as a part of the OpenDarwin Project. DarwinPorts is designed to be easily extended, embedded in other applications, and ported to a wide variety of architectures. DarwinPorts is in active development and is currently supported on Mac OS X 10.2 and Darwin 6.0.2, with support for Mac OS X 10.1 and FreeBSD forthcoming.

Setting Up Squid on FreeBSD (Salimun, Andi) 200209

This article will explain how to configure squid and tweak a FreeBSD box for web caching and conserve bandwith. Usually with squid, It will reduce the traffic 30% or more from normal usage without squid. With squid will also give users feelings the internet is faster.

Installing Intel Fortran 90 Compiler in FreeBSD (Ramos, Alberto) 200209

In this document I will try to explain how to install the Intel Fortran 90 Compiler v 6.0 in FreeBSD with Linux emulation. I hope that this document could be useful for people that are doing large numerical simulations, since the Intel Compiler works really fine, and has support for SSE, SSE2, etc...

How To Properly Partition a Disk For NetBSD (Wolf, Grey) 200209

How you partition your system is largely a matter of taste; however, it is recommended that you NOT fall into the laziness trap which has sprung up with the advent of Solaris (and HP/UX), which is the tendency to put everything in one big partition. In this article, the author covers how to partition a disk under NetBSD properly.

Review - Daemon News/BSD Mall NetBSD 1.5.3 CD Release (Davis, Sean) 200209

In this review, Sean Davis provides his thoughts and experiences on installing NetBSD 1.5.3 using the BSD Mall NetBSD CD set.

Life After RedHat (Bunt, T vd) 200208

This adventure starts at Christmas Eve about six or seven years ago... I got a nice box with four CD's containing Linux, one of the early Slackware distributions. Being bored by the limits and the instability of Windows 3.x/9x it was time for a new challenge.

VicFUG 2002 (Sutton, Joel) 200208

Joel Sutton takes us "Down Under" and reveals his experiences of organizing the VicFUG 2002 Annual User Group Event.

HOWTO - Backing up FreeBSD with SMBFS (Warner, Joe) 200208

Performing backups is one of the most important tasks a good administrator can perform. This applies not only to FreeBSD administrators but administrators of other operating systems as well. This article describes the procedure used to backup data on a FreeBSD system using the "tar/gzip" archiving utilities and the "smbutil/mount_smbfs" commands to transport that data to network shares.

HOWTO: Transparent Packet Filtering with OpenBSD (Underwood, Nate) 200207

Many of us would like a robust firewall to protect our network, but would rather not waste precious IP addresses. In this article we are going to build a robust, stateful packet filter that uses no IP addresses. Thankfully, OpenBSD provides built-in support for this "invisible firewall" via the bridge interface and the new packet filter, pf.

Setting Up ISC-DHCP 3.x Under FreeBSD (Pham, Linh) 200207

DHCP is one of the most common network services found in corporations, home networks, and Internet service providers which dynamically assign IP addresses from a specific pool to a device for a particular length of time to help use allocated IP addresses more efficiently. In this article, I will provide the basic steps on setting up a DHCP server on a FreeBSD machine using the Internet Software Consortium's DHCP software.

Thank You For Your Support (Karl, Randy) 200207

Recently we sent some DN magazines to a group in response to such a request. Their proposal was good, but their follow through was excellent. I liked it so much I am including the entire letter they sent us. (Transcribed from a typed letter we received in the mail, with photos included.)

Limiting Access to tcp wrapped Services With hosts.allow (Pham, Linh) 200206

In this HOWTO, I will go over the basic syntax of the file, the basic concepts, and some nuances that I have found with the hosts.allow file.

Datahives (Peters, Wes) 200206

The DataHive intrigues from the moment it is unpackaged. It is an unassuming 9 inch black cube with an orange hexagonal beehive motif on the front and no apparent controls, simply one red and one green status LED.

Communicating With Users Using ntalkd And ytalk (Pham, Linh) 200206

FreeBSD provides a service that fall in-between instant messaging services and chat rooms which provides a quick and simple solution for chatting called ntalk and using the talk or ytalk client. I will cover how to setup the ntalk d�mon, restrict access to the service, and a basic instructions on how to use both clients.

A Tour through the NetBSD Source Tree - Part III: Kernel (Feyrer, Hubert) 200205

This is the third part of our tour through the NetBSD source tree. After we have talked about the various components that build up the userland, we will concentrate on the kernel source now.

sysctl On NetBSD (Davis, Sean) 200205

The sysctl() call is more useful than many would think at first glance. When I first looked at it, I thought the only use one could get out of it was being able to do what /sbin/sysctl does from my own C code -but it can do so much more.

SSH Primer (Coleman, Chris) 200205

When you ask how you can make your BSD box more secure, the first thing people will tell you is to use SSH if you aren't already. If you are new to BSD or Unix in gereral, you might still be mastering the art of logging in to the console and not have given a thought to logging in remotely. If you are using Mac OS X, you may not have even realized that you can log in remotely.

DOSSIER and the Meta Project (Part 3) (Morin, Rich) 200204

Meta is an exploration into integrating system metadata and documentation. It can be described as a distributed mechanism to facilitate access to information on Free and Open Source software. Meta servers provide access to documentation, metadata, rules, and even source code, by extracting information from a variety of system file formats, making it available in a consistent, easily accessible manner.

A Tour Through The NetBSD Source Tree: Part II - Libraries (Feyrer, Hubert) 200204

In Unix(-like operating systems), commonly used routines that can be accessed from many programs are grouped within so-called libraries and that can be used from application programs. The src/lib directory contains the libraries that come with NetBSD, and there's quite a number of them. Let's have a look!

Review: FreeBSD Services Inc.'s 4.5-RELEASE DVD (Smith, Sam) 200204

If this was just a review of FreeBSD 4.5, and I just mentioned that it comes on DVD, then the review would have missed the point. There is a significant difference, when it comes to using the discs, between the CD and DVD distributions...

A Tour Through The NetBSD Source Tree: Part I - Userland (Feyrer, Hubert) 200203

In this article series we will give an overview of the userland parts of the NetBSD source tree, the second part will give an overview of libraries available for application programmers while the third part will give in-depth information on the kernel part.

Multi-Layered Security (Hoskins, Mike) 200203

There is a popular misconception floating around the corporate sector. Many individuals tout, UNIX is not as secure as other operating systems. They often specifically target free variants. The fact is, UNIX has one of the most-tested network stacks of any OS, and that's not just commercial UNIX... The same goes for the public domain versions like FreeBSD. In this article I discuss generalized ways to increase system and network trust. While my examples are somewhat FreeBSD-centric, they can be abstracted to almost any platform.

Jakarta-Tomcat on FreeBSD 4.4 (Thiele, Adrian) 200203

The Java platform is a great way to display dynamic web content. Java is becoming the most popular way to handle CGI tasks. Servlets and Java Server Pages are the power behind today's web applications and they do run on FreeBSD. In this article I will introduce you to Java Web applications on the FreeBSD platform.

Fun With Automounting on FreeBSD (Waldura, Renaud) 200202

Tired of having to login as root and type mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt everytime you want to read a CD-ROM? Automounting is for you! Once properly configured (the goal of this document), you will only have to insert the CD into your drive, cd to /cdrom and *wham* everything happens automagically!

Making Friends with tcsh - Part 3 (Heuer, Konrad) 200202

Konrad finishes his three part series with alias definitions, start-up files and hints concerning advanced csh and tcsh features.

RADIUS (Moran, Bill) 200202

RADIUS stands for Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service. It's purpose is to supply information and authentication for multiple dial-in servers. If you only have a single dial-in server then you probably don't need the complexity of RADIUS. However, if you want to provide dial-in services to clients in more than one area code, you'll probably have to rent "points of presence" from the phone company, and the phone company will expect you to have a RADIUS server.

Japanese Language Support in NetBSD (Snyder, Hal) 200202

The intent of this article is to introduce NetBSD's Japanese language support to the English-speaking user. The approach will be to demonstrate a few common activities with commentary on the progression of ideas involved. Japanese language processing on a computer is more complicated than English language processing, because Japanese orthography involves four different writing systems - hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji - and uses many thousands of distinct characters...

Multiple webservers behind one IP address (Sipke van der Veen, Jan) 200202

The article discusses a network setup where multiple webservers reside behind one IP address. Such a situation may arise when you need a specific webserver for one task and a different webserver for another task, running different operating systems or webserver software. With only one IP address available from the Internet, you could simply use Network Address Translation (NAT) with port forwarding. However, this forces you to give each webserver an ugly URL with a non-standard port number.

DOSSIER and the Meta Project (Part 2) (Morin, Rich) 200202

Last month, I discussed some problems with the current state of Free and Open Source documentation. I then sketched out how DOSSIER and the Meta Project hope to resolve some of these problems. This month, I will discuss the goals and design of an online Meta system.

Making Friends with tcsh (Heuer, Konrad) 200201

Today, csh and the more comfortable successor TC-Shell (tcsh) are still the default login shells on a BSD system. Despite their impressive functionality, they seem to lose popularity compared to the GNU Bourne-Again-Shell (bash) of the Free Software Foundation. This article, divided into three parts (this is part two) to be published in consecutive issues of the Daemon News, will show that csh and especially tcsh don't need to hide. The article is meant to be an introduction for readers new to BSD.

Test Driving NetBSD Current (Feyrer, Hubert) 200201

Often the latest and greatest (and most unstable :-) features of our favourite BSD release are only available in the -current (development) branch. But how when running a release version, how can you upgrade the system to -current to get a feature that is only present there? Depending on the feature you want, there is a way to get it without upgrading the whole machine to the latest development snapshot.

DOSSIER and the Meta Project (Part 1) (Morin, Rich) 200201

Unixish operating systems (BSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris etc.) are quite complex. Although a large amount of documentation exists for these systems, the coverage is incomplete in several fundamental ways. This article describes the problem, a proposed remedy, and a supporting business model!

NetBSD in 2001 (Feyrer, Hubert) 200201

2001 was an eventful year in many ways. In addition to the many political and economic changes that occurred, which influence all our lives, there were many changes in the technical sector showing interesting trends. One of these changes is the increasing popularity and awareness of Open Source software. While Linux has become a serious alternative to established server and desktop systems, BSD based systems are getting increasing attention due to their clearer internal structure, maturity and stability. This article intends to talk a bit about the highlights of the NetBSD project in the year 2001, with hope that this trend will continue in 2002.

Making friends with C-Shell and TC-Shell Part I (Heuer, Konrad) 200112

Today, csh and the more comfortable successor TC-Shell (tcsh) are still the default login shells on a BSD system. Despite their impressive functionality, they seem to lose popularity compared to the GNU Bourne-Again-Shell (bash) of the Free Software Foundation. This article, divided into three parts to be published in consecutive issues of the Daemon News, will show that csh and especially tcsh don't need to hide.

Do you Trust your System Logs? (Sanchez, Alejo) 200112

A commonly used technique among computer cracker, and experienced thieves as well is to erase their fingerprints from the crime scene. This usually means erasing or modifying the logs stored on the computer that will expose them if carefully examined. Unprotected logs, will make system security checks an impossible task in most cases. When crackers gain complete access to the system, they also gain the ability to read, modify or erase any logs.

SNMP Agent Development (Hampali, Girish) 200112

Simple Network Management Protocol is de-facto standard for network management. Every innovated network element in data network requires to support SNMP. This white paper lists down the present trends and proven techniques in making a network element manageable by adding SNMP agent to the network element. Scope of the paper is limited to comparison of available techniques so as to deploy the better solution in least possible time. This paper does neither provide nor dictate new techniques in the fields of network management and agent development.

Generating MRTG graphs of qmail statistics under FreeBSD (Hoadley, Paul) 200112

This document describes how to configure qmail to generate separate logs for SMTP, POP3 and local delivery activity, so that Inter7's qmailmrtg7 package can generate statistics for use with MRTG.

The Case for Consistent Application of a Single Coding Style (Hearn, Sheldon) 200112

Humans issue instructions to computers using programming languages, not human languages. Many programming languages exist on various levels of abstraction from the native hardware language of the computers themselves. A set of instructions intended for a computer but written in one of these abstracted languages is called source code and the act of writing it is called coding.

Bootstrapping Vinum: A Foundation for Reliable Servers (Van Valzah, Robert A. ) 200111

Any machine that is going to provide reliable service needs to have either redundant components on-line or a pool of off-line spares that can be promptly swapped in. Commodity PC hardware makes it affordable for even small organizations to have some spare parts available that could be pressed into service following the failure of production equipment. These instructions show how to build a pair of disk drives where either one is adequate to keep your server running if the other fails. Life is better if they are both working, but your server will never die unless both disk drives die at once.

Configuring IPSec on OpenBSD 2.9 (Sigillito, Robert V.) 200111

We began working with OpenBSD v2.9 to implement a VPN solution for little cost in order to spare a handful of users a 35 mile drive to another facility. Why drive out of your way, when you can use a public network to pass your data in a fully encrypted private tunnel? Being new to OpenBSD, but not Unix, we made more than our share of mistakes. This guide is an attempt to document how we successfully configured IPsec on OpenBSD v2.9.

Growing FreeBSD filesystems (Fonvieille, Marc) 200111

Until today it was impossible to expand the size of a filesystem. FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE comes with a new utility: growfs(8). This program permits us to enlarge, in certains conditions, the size of an existing ufs filesystem.

Logging Syslog to a Database (Sobiecki , Zbyszek ) 200111

When there's a problem on your system, or in your network, the first thing you check are system logs. You identify which system you should check, then locate the logfile. Sometimes you even have to check your syslog configuration, only to discover that what you are looking for is not even logged, due to a misconfiguration. You may also run 'less', 'more' and 'grep', to start digging into it. It's nice when you find the answer to your problem in the last few lines of log, but what if you can't?

IPv6 Trends (Hampali, Girish B) 200111

Girish B. Hampali gives us a quick little article on IPv6. It explains a vew of the reasons why we need IPv6 and is a very good starting point for exploring IPv6. It also gives a fairly complete list of RFCs relating to IPv6.

Trusted BSD (Costello, Chris) 200110

The TrustedBSD Project was started in order to develop a set of trusted operating system security extensions to the FreeBSD operating system. These extensions include POSIX.1e-compatible ACLs, mandatory access control, event auditing and fine-grained system privileges. Developers are actively extending and refining these features.

Named Chroot (Feyrer, Hubert) 200110

The Berkeley Internet Name Domain software, AKA BIND, or "named", is one of the most important pieces in the mosaic that represents the structure of the Internet. Due to this importance, it is also a preferred target for hackers, who want to keep DNS from working, or worse, use security holes in the software to gain control over the machine. Such hacking of a DNS server can result in a break of confidentiality of the data returned from this server, and is, in general, a bad thing.

Backing up Windows from FreeBSD (Pham, Linh) 200110

Backing up data is one of the most crucial tasks that any company must face when dealing with networks and servers. Many large companies rely on backup packages from vendors like Veritas and Computer Associates, but not all of those packages are affordable for a company with a small network or will work with FreeBSD. Also, some companies will run into an interesting mix of Windows-based and FreeBSD-based file servers and system administrators must figure out a way to backup both platforms. FreeBSD includes a very powerful backup utility with any installation, called 'tar'.

Getting on the 6Bone (Paddon, Michael) 200110

By now, you've probably heard of the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6. While it provides many improvements and new capabilities, the driving force behind its adoption is likely to be the much larger (and more flexible) address space that it defines. Continuing growth in the population of IP enabled devices has already put severe stress on address allocation and the routing infrastructure. The roll out of new enabling technologies such as 3G wireless and broadband to the home will predictably create a new wave of demand. One way of dealing with these pressures is to use address translation technologies and accept the consequential degeneration and balkanisation of global connectivity. Another path is transition to a networking technology that can support the demands of today and tomorrow.

Multi-home Laptop Issues (Michaelis, Hellmuth) 200110

For several years now, I've been using FreeBSD on my laptop at work. Since I am often at different customer sites on any given day, I must adjust my laptop settings according to their network, which means a new IP address, new name server, new default gateway and so on. Editing rc.conf, resolv.conf and friends by hand was tedious. I needed something that was easy to set up, use, develop and maintain.

Help, I've Fallen: Who's Afraid of the CLI? (Kline, Gary)(Leonard, David)(Myers, Dirk) 200110

There are ways of solving problems that call for some serious C or C++ coding, or maybe just scripting with /bin/sh or perl; and then there are equally good solutions that use the strengths of the toolset included with Unix by default. In case you think solving a particular problem means having to write a script, we are going to show you how to use some of the power tools that come with your BSD operating system.

Book Review: FreeBSD an Open Source OS for your PC (Pham, Linh) 200109

Linh Pham gives us a review of the popular new book, FreeBSD: An Open-Source Operating System For Your Personal Computer by Annelise Anderson. A book written for those who have had little or no exposure to FreeBSD/UNIX but would like to try their hand at something other than Windows.

FTP server behind NAT gateway (Leledy, Philippe) 200109

The FTP protocol has strange peculiarities that make working behind a firewall somewhat difficult if not quite impossible. This document explains the problem and solutions for both client and server behind a gateway doing NAT. AFAIK, it's the first time a solution is proposed for the server. Details of this solution are given for OpenBSD.

A network setup with FreeBSD and OpenBSD (Sipke van der Veen, Jan ) 200109

This article discusses a network setup which might prove useful for people who like to put some extra effort into connecting their machines to the internet. The goal is to build a secure client and server farm on a single IP address.

Jail Internals (Sarmiento, Evan) 200109

On most UNIX systems, root has omnipotent power. This promotes insecurity. If an attacker were to gain root on a system, he would have every function at his fingertips. This article focuses on the internals (source code) of Jail and Jail NG. Jail is becoming the new security model. People are running potentially vulnerable servers such as Apache, BIND and Sendmail within jails, so that if an attacker gains root within the jail, it is only an annoyance, and not a devastation.

The Effects of Tuning a FreeBSD Box for High Performance (Gong, Gilbert) 200108

A stock FreeBSD installation delivers a system which is designed to meet the needs of most users, and strives to provide the best balance of safety, reliablity, and performance in a multi-user environment. It is therefore not optimized for use as a high performance dedicated network server. This article investigates the effect of tuning a FreeBSD for use as a dedicated network server.

Linux and BSD, Open Source Giants (Shearer, Dan) 200108

Anyone influencing information technology decisions should know something about the most widely-used operating systems. Two of these are Linux and BSD, relatively unknown to the world of corporate computing.

The rc.d system (Andrews, Will) 200108

There's been a lot of hubbub the last few months about NetBSD's new rc.d system being the successor of 4.4BSD's. At the USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2001 in Boston, MA, I had the pleasure of sitting down to listen to Luke Mewburn of Wasabi Systems discuss the new rc system NetBSD introduced in their operating system in the 1.5 release earlier this year.

Implementating Security in FreeBSD UNIX System, Part I (Dillon, Matt) 200108

This is part I of a two-part security series on DaemonNews. Part I describes security in general terms while Part II drills down into specific strategies for securing common services.

The FreeBSD Security Guide, Chapter 1 (Flux, Aeon) 200108

This chapter talks about the lockdown procedures of a freebsd machine. This article assumes the end user has a general level of familarity with FreeBSD, and unix, in particular, file permissions, kernel configuration, file editing, and basic ssh usage.

Das Blinken Lights (Wilde, Don) 200107

Controlling external hardware using /dev/io is much easier than writing a full-blown device driver. Don illustrates circuits and software to control three bi-color LEDs using an embedded PicoBSD system, without the involved trial and error of writing a device driver.

NetBSD Documentation System Part IV (Feyrer, Hubert) 200107

This is the last part of our tour though the NetBSD documentation. Besides the places mentioned in the previous parts of this series, there are a few other places that should not go unmentioned here, and that have docs on various things in NetBSD. This last part of the tour goes through a few of them.

Why OpenBSD can be Good for Middle Management (Mallett, Joseph) 200107

Recently Linux has been touted as a way to get middle management and department heads to use Unix. In reality, BSD is more like what they'd want to see. The founder of the xMach project and self-styled amateur Unix historian highlights the reasons OpenBSD can be the easier OS to sell to middle management.

What's New in NetBSD 1.5.1 (Feyrer, Hubert) 200107

The quick rundown of the new features and improvements in the June 2001 release of NetBSD. Binary compatibility with 1.5 is retained, so a full or partial upgrade from 1.5 to 1.5.1 is not a problem.

Monitoring a Number of FreeBSD Hosts (Heuer, Konrad) 200106

When running a number of servers it is at least interesting, but mostly yet important to be informed about the state of each system. Generally, it is desirable to get essential information with a quick look. Thus monitoring software should provide data permanently and concisely. Displaying system data by graphical means is nice, but often unsuitable when monitoring via a modem line or on a (perhaps wireless) PDA. Presenting data on a standard terminal display may seem to be a little bit old-fashioned, but is still the most generic approach. A remote host monitoring software doing so is rmonitor

A Tour through the NetBSD Documentation, Part III (Feyrer, Hubert) 200106

Hubert Feyrer gives an overview of the available documents and papers in troff or nroff format from the large collection of historic and current documentation available in NetBSD.

Web Security: Apache and mod_ssl Part II (Weinstein, Paul) 200106

As we covered in the last article, SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security) are the protocols used to add encryption and authentication to TCP/IP and HTTP. In this article we'll cover the most popular open source method of adding SSL/TLS to a web server. Adding mod_ssl to Apache.

A Read-Only Server on a Bootable CD (Midden, Marshall) 200106

In this article, the author describes the process for creating a customized bootable CD for both the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. The CD can then be used to run a secure server that can't be modified.

Adventures in Dialup (Moran, Bill ) 200105

how to setup a dial-in server (part 1)

It Takes a BSD Village (Witt, Don) 200105

Everyone in the BSD community needs support each other if we want to make progress. Don Witt explains how the BSD marketing channel works and what you can do to support it.

Remote Administration with Webmin (Pham , Linh ) 200105

Webmin was created to provide a fairly simple, but powerful, way to administer a UNIX-like system via a web-browser.

A Tour through the NetBSD Documentation, Part II (Feyrer, Hubert) 200105

Part one of this introduction to the NetBSD Documentation concentrated on the traditional Unix format, the online manual pages. There's more documentation available, and this part tells you more about the available online documentation.

Corporate Networkers Guide (Mittelstaedt, Ted) 200103

The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide, Chapter 8

OpenBSD bridge without IPs using IPF Tutorial (Hogan, Doug)(Hinton, Bryan) 200103

OpenBSD bridge without IPs using IPF Tutorial

Review: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide (Pham, Linh) 200103

Although FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) have documentation available online or in the system manual, there aren't that many books published about BSD. You have the "The Complete FreeBSD" book by Greg Lehey and "The FreeBSD Handbook" by the FreeBSD documentation project, but other than that, there isn't a lot out there. The new book, "The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide", is a great addition to the small collection of books. The book in question covers quite a nice range of topics, from sharing the network with Windows machines to BSD advocacy, but the main focus is FreeBSD in a corporate environment. Beginners to FreeBSD might be left behind on some of the topics at first, but the author tries to keep a pace fast enough that most can keep up. Beware, there is a slight slant against Microsoft, which many people won't have a problem with. ;-)

Armoring FreeBSD (Delves, Markus "Fluid") 200102

With more and more script kiddies being born, we need to learn a few basic rules of protecting ourselves. This guide outlines the basics to FreeBSD security, and works best with FreeBSD 4.x.

Booting FreeBSD with grub (Wagner , Georg) 200102

grub is a bootloader which is compliant to the multiboot standard. It understands filesystems (FFS, FAT16, FAT32, minixfs, ext2fs), is able to boot a multitude of OSes, is able to boot from the net (RARP, BOOTP, DHCP)...

Transparent HTTP caching with Squid and BSD/OS 4.2 (Lidl, Kurt J.) 200102

In 2000, on the bsdi-users mailing list, a question was asked about how to do transparent HTTP caching/proxying using BSD/OS. At the time, I hinted at using the SO_BINDANY socket option in BSD/OS, along with the Squid cache (http://squid.nlanr.net) to implement this function. Recently, I was asked the specifics of how to do this, so I spent a little time making this technology go. What follows is a short writeup of the work I did to make transparent Web caching work.

6to4 IPv6 Explained, or: Flogging a Dead Horse (Feyrer, Hubert) 200101

6to4 is an easy way to get IPv6 connectivity for hosts that only have an IPv4 uplink. It can be used with static as well as dynamically assigned numbers, e.g. as found in modem dialup scenarios. When using dynamic v4 addresses, note that a dynamic change of IP numbers will be a problem for incoming traffic, i.e. you can't run persistent servers.

BSD Japan: A look back and a step forward (Nuwere, Ejovi) 200101

As the year changes so does the worlds attitude towards technology. Apple introduces Darwin to the mainstream. Linux gains a huge market share and ever more BSD books are written. These developments have not only affected America, it has also affected countries around the world, but Japan has been following right along side the USA. If not following, leading and taking bold steps that we in America just aren't prepared to do.

Insights on Open Source Release Engineering, or: How NetBSD 1.5 Was Born (Feyrer, Hubert) 200101

NetBSD 1.5 was released a few weeks ago, and after the dust has settled a bit now, we were able to get hold of Todd Vierling to tell us more about the 1.5 release engineering process. Todd was one of the release engineers who did most of the work in the "hot" phase of the 1.5 release cycle - here's an interview with him, and your chance to get some insight into the details of the release engineering process of a major Open Source project!

FreeBSD IPsec mini-HOWTO (Tiefenbach, Josh)(Köster, Boris) 200101

This document is intended to be a primer on how to get IPsec on FreeBSD up and running, interoperating both with another FreeBSD (or NetBSD or any other KAME-derived stack) machine, and a Windows 2000 machine.

Cheaper Broadband with FreeBSD on DSL (Waldura, Renaud) 200101

The FreeBSD ppp program has supported PPPoE since early 1999. The goal of this article is to walk you through the steps involved in setting up a complete configuration allowing you to connect your FreeBSD computer to the Internet via DSL. We will also discuss how to setup that same machine as a gateway providing Internet access to a small internal network.

TRAM: An Old Idea Forgotten (Nelson, Dru) 200012

Today, if your power supply fails, your computer may take a long time to fsck. What if that computer is the computer holding the main database for your website? What if that is a large database on a large 200 gigabyte raid? Clearly, this is a problem. More people would pay to have this solved if it was inexpensive.

Random Ramblings About BSD on MacOS X - Part 2 (Carl, Jeffrey)(Loschert, Matt) 200012

This month our Mac OS X authors respond to feedback from readers and look at some new material conerning the defaults and preferences that can be set under OS X.

How to turn HTML into PDF (Heuer, Konrad) 200012

Konrad Heuer shows us how he creates the PDF versions of Daemon News from HTML using Open Source tools.

Word Processors on FreeBSD (Meyer, Mike W.) 200012

This paper provides a short comparison and overview of six word processor programs which run on Unix, specifically FreeBSD: AbiWord, Applix Words, FrameMaker, KWord, StarWriter, and WordPerfect. The goal is to save time for others looking for a word processor by guiding them to the most likely preferred products first.

What's New and Exciting in NetBSD 1.5? (Feyrer, Hubert) 200012

See if this article tempts you to try upgrading to NetBSD 1.5. The author lists the newly supported platforms and other update information, such as the over 1600 available packages, the latest changes and improvements to the filesystem, and much more!

Stopping Spam and Trojan Horses with BSD (Glass, Brett) 200011

A properly configured BSD mail server can protect users from spam and Trojan horses while rejecting virtually no legitimate content. This tutorial describes how to configure BSD systems to use DNS blacklists, procmail, mail "sanitizing" scripts, daemons that watch logs for evidence of spamming and "mail bombing," and similar...

Using TrueType fonts with XFree86 (Stokely, Murray) 200011

After all of the attention that my laptop received at BSDCon it became clear to me that many users are still putting up with the horrible default fonts in XFree86. I'm sure most of you have encountered some of the symptoms; completely unintelligible small fonts in Netscape, large presentation fonts that look jagged and unprofessional, etc. Fortunately, setting up your system to take advantage of more esthetically pleasing TrueType fonts is a 5 minute task.

Ramblings About BSD on Mac OS X (Loschert, Matt)(Carl, Jeffrey) 200011

This is the first chapter in a series of observations, representing the adventures of a couple of BSD admins (one with a lot of prior MacOS experience, the other with more on the BSD side) poking around the command line on an iBook laptop running Apple's Mac OS X Public Beta. We'll attempt to provide a few notes and observations that may make a BSD admin's work with Mac OS X easier.

IPv6 Behind a NAT Response (Sayer, Nick) 200010

In response to the IPv6 over NAT article, I would like to encourage everyone who has even a single static IPv6 address to try setting up 6to4.

6to4 is an ad-hoc mechanism by which anyone can participate in IPv6 without having to make any arrangements to hook up to an existing IPv6 network

Introduction to Darwin (Braun, Rob) 200010

There has been a fair amount of hype over Darwin and MacOS X recently, but they have largely been treated as nothing more than a curiosity by the BSD community. Most people I talk to about Darwin either don't know what it is, or say "Oh yeah, that's the MacOS X thing, right"?

Daemons Everywhere at Linuxworld Expo 2000 (Sutter, Gregory) 200009

Greg gives us an entertaining peek at his visit to the Linuxworld Expo 2000 show way back in August. If you feel like looking at some snapshots and seeing what part BSD played in this large and exciting event, then you won't want to overlook this article.

IPv6 Behind a NAT (O'Gorman, Jim) 200009

If you've wondered about IPv6, or considered setting it up, this is an excellent introduction to riding the 6bone. The author leaves us with the must know resources, and gives us enough information to get started.

What Makes An Operating System Portable? (Feyrer, Hubert) 200008

Hubert gives us an answer to what a portable OS really is; if NetBSD comes to mind, then you're on the right track.

USENIX Technical Conference 2000 from the Exhibits Hall (Vinci, Kelleye)(Vinci, Len) 200008

Thinking about working a booth at a USENIX conference? Sounds like a lot of work, and a lot of fun too! BTW, what's with those horns?

Data Migration for NetBSD (Hunt, Matthew) 200008

USENIX report: William Studenmund of Veridian MRJ Technology Solutions and NASA/Ames Research Center presented a Data Migration File System (DMFS) for NetBSD, which he developed with collaborators at NASA/Ames. Its purpose is to automatically migrate files from disk to tape as they cease to be accessed, and to transparently restore them to disk when a program tries to open them.

Bill Joy delivers USENIX keynote (Hunt, Matthew) 200008

USENIX report: Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems delivered the keynote address on 21 June 2000 at the USENIX Technical Conference in San Diego. Joy's talk focused on his predictions of the future of computing, drawing on his extensive experience in the industry. Joy began by recalling the origins of Open Source UNIX, before that term had been coined.

Permanent Web Publishing (Hunt, Matthew) 200007

USENIX report: David S. H. Rosenthal of Sun Microsystems presented work conducted with Vicky Reich of Stanford University Laboratories, entitled "Permanent Web Publishing." Rosenthal began by noting that research librarians have a duty to make journal articles available to interested parties, but they also have a duty to ensure that the information in these articles cannot be suppressed. Their method for satisfying these objectives is to scatter lots of copies in many locations, so that it is easy to find some copies (to consult) but hard to find all copies (to destroy)....

Using the Linux version of the Citrix ICA Client on FreeBSD (Seals, Ray) 200007

In my ever-striving quest for making my FreeBSD 4.0 workstation more usable in my day to day adventures, I started working on getting the ICA Citrix client installed on it...

SAP R/3 meets FreeBSD (Reifenberger, Michael) 200007

Since I wanted to test FreeBSD in general and the Linuxulator (the Linux compatibility system) in particular, the worst application that came into my mind was SAP R/3. For those who do not know SAP R/3, it is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system which integrates most business applications in one product...

Heidemann Discusses Location-Aware Job Scheduling (Hunt, Matthew) 200007

USENIX report: John Heidemann of USC/ISI presented work performed with Dhaval Shah of Nokia entitled "Location-Aware Scheduling with Minimal Infrastructure." The authors noticed that UNIX provides facilities which can schedule jobs based on the time. They reasoned that laptop users would benefit if these facilities also permitted scheduling based on location...

Netscape Navigator 4.x and Fonts (Babkin, Sergey) 200007

I have had problems with fonts in Netscape for quite a while--ever since I downloaded Netscape for the first time. As time went on, some things got fixed, some things got broken, but one thing stayed broken very consistently: printing...

Introduction to UNIX Assembly Programming (Boldyshev, Konstantin) 200006

Written in tutorial form, this article is a great hands-on beginning to learning assembly.

Ext2fs rev 1 changes in NetBSD (Feyrer, Hubert)(Bouyer, Manuel) 200006

A general overview of ext2fs and an outline of the changes to the ext2fs code used in NetBSD.

Get your fingers off my /proc/getpid()/* (Feyrer, Hubert) 200005

Closing the procfs hole in NetBSD

Spring Comdex 2000 (Coleman, Chris) 200005

What did you miss at the Linux Business Expo?

Managing websites using Unix:Part 4 (Clayton, Nik) 200004

Managing websites using Unix Part Four. The long awaited continuation...

FreeBSD BOF at ApacheCon 2000 (Arnold, Rob) 200004

An on the spot report from ApacheCon2000.

Merger Interview (Coleman, Chris) 200004

Feedback from BSDI and NetBSD on the latest merger everyone's talking about.

Newbies (McKitrick, Jonathan) 200004

New User to FreeBSD? Perhaps these tips will help point you in the right direction.

BSD Merger Announcement (Sutter, Gregory) 200003

BSDI and Walnut Creek CDROM merge, and announce that the BSD/OS and FreeBSD code bases will be combined as well!

Building an ATM Firewall with BSD (Wellard, Martin) 200003

As a system administrator in a large academic institution, it is obvious to me that network security should be a high priority when planning a network strategy. However, it's not the system administrators that make the decisions...

FreeBSD 3.4 On Compaq Servers With the Smart RAID Controller (Duncan, Casey) 200003

Many of you out there are blessed with Compaq Pro-series server equipment. Many of these servers utilize the Compaq Smart drive array controller for hardware RAID support. This is a nice piece of hardware that has excellent fail-safe features...

What Can Linux Learn From FreeBSD? (Borowski, Matthew Karim) 200002

As a network consultant, my clients often ask me which operating system they should run on their servers. But after eliminating Windows NT from the choices, which Unix should I recommend?

Planning Your New Box (Stehling, Brennan) 200002

Recommended hardware and installation configurations for your next BSD machine, whatever its role may be.

BSDI's Internet Super Server Version 4.1 (Petterborg, Cary)(Urner, Doug) 200001

Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI) began shipping version 4.1 of its Internet Super Server product (also known as BSD/OS) on December 13.

XDM: High-End Workstation Goodies at Low, Low Prices (Richard, William) 200001

Have you ever seen a graphical login screen? In the movies, you say, on super high-end computers at major corporations and government agencies, and then only for dramatic effect. I mean, there couldn\'t be anything that cool-looking in the real world, could there?

Monitoring System Performance with MRTG (Buckholz, Zachary) 200001

Using monitoring tools to build a graphical history of your systems performance will help you better understand its ability to serve your future needs.

Applix as an End-User Productivity Environment (Wilde, Don) 200001

An update to the Applixware review.

Applixware for FreeBSD (Wilde, Donald) 199912

For years, we BSDers have been looking for ways to help our favorite OS penetrate the office and home marketplace. We have been ignored...

How SSH was freed (Bertrand, Louis) 199912

OpenSSH developers free the popular secure communications package and steer clear of legal landmines...

OpenBSD 2.6 integrates Secure Shell protocol (Bertrand, Louis) 199912

OpenBSD 2.6 is the first operating system to integrate the Secure Shell protocol...

Running your Single-Frequency Monitor (Robey, Chuck) 199912

I recently had a really good experience getting a single frequency monitor working, so I thought I'd write up my experiences, and...

Source Management with Perforce (Parise, Jon) 199912

About a year ago, a few of us here at RIT's Computer Science House began discussing solutions for source code management. The ...

Setting Up a FreeBSD Lab (Bonilla, Oscar) 199911

Say you need to set up a lot of workstations running FreeBSD that will have the same local software installed and have exactly the same hardware configuration. What would you do? Arm yourself with patience and install the OS and applications in each? What about configuration? Wouldn't that take a lot of your time? In the spirit of Unix, you don't want to do repetitive work, you want to automate everything as much as possible. This is what this article is about, how to clone the disk of a pre-set workstation into all of the others.

It's not just for breakfast anymore (Kline, Gary) 199911

If you have ever wondered: Hey, why doesn't some sharp corporation use BSD or Linux as one of their default operating systems, you can stop wondering. SGI is nearing completion of the development of its Merced-based multi-CPU box with Linux. How about BSD?

I\'ve been hacked! How OpenBSD saved our project. (Horn, John) 199910

Almost two years ago, our city library approached us with a resource utilization problem. They had a number of Wyse 60 terminals installed in the various library branches...

Performance Gain on Intel-based Dual-CPU Systems (Heuer, Konrad) 199910

A question of interest is to examine system speed-up on Intel-based dual-processor hardware with respect to single-CPU systems and to compare the results to those on more expensive traditional workstation...

The Very Long Night of FreeBSD (Sherman, Aaron) 199910

As a Slashdot reader/poster, BSD 4.2 user back in the mists of time, current Linux advocate and a previous contributor to Daemon News, I felt compelled to respond to James Howard\'s article \"The Real FreeBSD\"...

A Case for the Z Shell (Mitchell, Dominic) 199910

This article hopes to highlight some of the useful features of the Z Shell (referred to as just \"zsh\" for the rest of this document) to people who use other shells...

Kirk McKusick at USENIX (Lynch, Pat) 199909

The gods walk amongst us.

PCCards and FreeBSD (Anderson, Annelise) 199909

A quick how-to on using FreeBSD with PCCards.

Webmail with IMP (Parise, Jon) 199909

A webmail solution using IMP, an IMAP-based web mail system.

Why I Chose OpenBSD (Hopkins, Rodney) 199909

How OpenBSD helped one man use Unix.

The Real FreeBSD (Howard, James) 199909

Erasing misconceptions about FreeBSD.

Enteruser (Dannyman,) 199908

Enteruser: A Replacement for Adduser

Structuring and Funding Free Software Organizations (Giffuni, Pedro F.) 199908

Structuring and Funding Free Software Organizations.

The Penguin's Council (Sherman, Aaron) 199908

'Tale of Two Systems' rebuttal

Portability vs. Performance (Fair, Erik E.) 199908

Code Portability is More Important than Performance

USENIX Report (Josefsson, Michael) 199908

Summaries of two USENIX Conference 1999 talks

Managing Web Sites under Unix (Clayton, Nik) 199907

Part 3 - Continuing to use make

Development History of PostgreSQL (Momjian, Bruce) 199907

How PostgreSQL got started and continues today

FreeBSD in Korea (Junho, CHOI) 199907

FreeBSD at the Korean Linux Expo

An Interview with Kevin Lawton (Rezidew,) 199907

Questions and answers about Bochs

Understanding the IRC protocol (CKSS,) 199907

A review of RFC1459

The GPL vs Capitalism (Giffuni, Pedro F.) 199906

This article was motivated by the Restrictively Unrestrictive: The GPL License in Software Development article that appeared on the Daemon News previously. While this article clearly had a good intent and, as stated, reflected only the personal views of one BSD developer, it was clear to me that it didn't go far enough in explaining the evilness of the GPL license.

Advocating BSD in a Linux-centric Environment. (Rinaldi, Lou) 199906

FreeBSD Advocacy in a Linux-centric Environment.

How to add sysctl variables to your FreeBSD 3. Kernel (Honig, David) 199906

How to Add sysctl Variables to Your FreeBSD 3 Kernel.

An Interview with Herb Peyerl (Bertrand, Louis) 199906

On April 19, Herb Peyerl announced his resignation from the core team of the NetBSD project, citing personal reasons. Daemon News took the opportunity to "debrief" Herb in an email interview and ask him about the year he spent as a core member, and his views on the future of the project.

Restrictively Unrestrictive (Maxwell, Michael) 199905

The Gnu Public Licence in software development: An in-depth analysis.

Network Intrusion Detection (McMillan, Jeremy) 199905

Network Intrusion Detection: detecting and dealing with portscanners.

Chroot Jails (von Wunderhund, Ruffy) 199905

Safe and friendly read-only chroot jails for FTP and WWW.

Managing Websites using Unix (Part Two) (Clayton, Nik) 199905

Using 'make' for your website.

Intrusion Detection Systems (Astithas, Panagiotos) 199905

Theory of intrusion detection and implementations.

SMTP using telnet (Dru,) 199905

Mail without a mailer.

In Search of OpenBSD (Nuwere, Ejovi) 199905

In search of OpenBSD; three days, three locations, one operating system.

User Management (Dannyman,) 199905

The FreeBSD user management system.

Commit Privileges on the OpenBSD Tree (Leonard, David) 199904

Having write access to the OpenBSD tree

Supporting Free OS Development (Southworth, Paul) 199904

Are you part of the solution?

Choosing a Software License (Licia,) 199904

Licensing options for Open Source software.

Cross Development (Salzman, Philip) 199903

The theory of Cross Development

History of Unix (Darwin, Ian)(Collyer, Geoffrey) 199903

In the Beginning...

Open Source (Lea, Jeremy) 199903

There has recently been a lot of talk about the 'open source revolution', about Open Source changing forever the way that the world works and bringing peace, prosperity and good looks to all. I'm not convinced.

Websites (Clayton, Nik) 199903

Managing websites using Unix

The X-Pert (Ramalho, Glenn) 199903

The X Window System uses a network protocol to implement its internal communication mechanism, making remote connections occur transparently to the user.

Software Reuse (Cavalier, Forrest) 199902

Friends don't let friends reinvent the wheel.

Make Your X Look Like the Console (Babkin, Sergey) 199902

Retrograde GUI design

The Boss Problem (Wilde, Don) 199902

The Boss problem. Answers to the tough NT questions.

Serving NT Files From an OpenBSD Server (Booth, Dana) 199902

Serving NT filesystems from an OpenBSD server

A Remote Chance (Peters, Wes) 199901

An opportunity to introduce BSD is eagerly seized.

Micq (Aristotelis,) 199901

A BSD port of ICQ.

BSD Newsflash (Peters, Wes) 199812

Once again, the quality and reliability of the BSD networking stack has been recognized in a leading-edge research project.

The Future of BSD (Salzman, Philip) 199812

The Future in a Window.

A BSD Testimonial (Legare, Jaques) 199812

A testimonial from a FreeBSD user.

Shells - A Rather Confusing Topic? (Heuer, Konrad) 199811

How to choose and use the varied Unix shells.

BSD Newsflash 199811

Testing complicated network services can be a difficult and demanding task, especially when the servers under test differ wildly.Lan Times testing lab chooses FreeBSD.

FREENIX 1999 (Deno, Cynthia) 199811

USENIX 1999 Free Software Track information.

Security Tip O' the Month (Koum, Jan) 199811

Who do you trust? PicoBSD is just FreeBSD on a floppy. The good part about it is that you can customize it any way you want which means you can have an ssh client on the floppy you create.

All Things BSD (Lenzi, Sergio) 199811

A testimonial from a FreeBSD/OpenBSD user in Brazil.

The Promiscuous Text Editor (Blake, Sue) 199810

A grand treatise on standard Unix text editors.

BSD Newsflash 199810

Breaking News in the BSD World.The "Internet Operating Systems Counter" project.

The Ports Tree (Darwin, Ian) 199810

Why the ports tree is important to BSD, and recommendations from the tree.

Is It Trendy? (Stanley, Scott) 199810

Tried, True BSD Transcends Temporary Trends.

About the Daemon (Lehey, Greg) 199810

An explanation of the origins and history of the BSD Daemon.

BSD Security: Strengthening your system by removing unneeded services from inetd (Bieker, Gentry) 199809

Many administrators out there on the internet run services that they don't really need, don't know about, or just don't care about. I find it almost funny to see people out there with IMAP, Pop-2, and Pop-3 services running on a server that will probably never see a piece of mail. The bottom line is just this: If you don't use it, why do you have it running?

Under the Hood: The New Link-Level Independent ARP Subsystem of NetBSD. (Souvatzis, Ignatios) 199809

Traditional BSD kernels have only supported mapping IP addresses to Ethernet 6-byte MAC addresses (and the FDDI and Token-Ring lookalikes). However, when dealing with other types of addresses like ARCnet, AX25 packet radio, etc. with a different length, more general aspects of the ARP mapping have to be implemented. This paper reports on the one-to-N mapping developed for NetBSD.