Monthly Archive for March, 2009

FreeBSD and Google Summer of Code 2009

Published on March 28, 2009 in FreeBSD and Google. 0 Comments

Google is now hosting the Google Summer of Code for the 5th year running, and FreeBSD has been selected again as eligible for the mentoring organisation.

If you or any other student is interested in contributing to the development of FreeBSD and get paid for doing so, have a look at the FreeBSD Summer of Code 2009 page. You can find here general information, info on past projects, sample project ideas, guidelines etc etc.

Key dates to note:

March 23 - Student application period opens
April 3 - Student application deadline.
April 15 – The End of applications
April 20 - ccepted student proposals announced on the Google Summer of Code 2009 site
May 23 – Project officially began
July 6 - Mentors and students can begin submitting mid-term evaluations
July 13 - Mid-term evaluations deadline
August 10 – Suggested ’pencils down’ date. Take a week to scrub code, write tests, improve documentation, etc.
August 17 - Firm ‘pencils down’ date. Mentors, students and organization administrators can begin submitting final evaluations to Google
August 24 – final assessment deadline
August 25 - Final results of GSoC 2009 announced
September 3 - Students can begin submitting required code samples to Google

PC-BSD 7.1-RC1 released

Published on March 28, 2009 in PC-BSD. 0 Comments

The PC-BSD Team has announced the availability of PC-BSD 7.1-RC1, running FreeBSD 7.2-Pre, and KDE 4.2.1

Version 7.1RC1 contains a number of enhancements and bugfixes from beta1. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog.

Version 7.1-RC1 of PC-BSD is available for download from the mirrors, as well as bittorrent from www.gotbsd.net. Also, translators are encouraged to check the Pootle Translation page to confirm that their language is fully translated in preparation for 7.1-Release. As with the beta, please report any and all bugs to the Testing mailinglist!

Links:
Website | Changelog | Download | Release Notes

Cisco meets its match (pfSense)

Published on March 27, 2009 in pfSense. 1 Comment

Cisco products are generally good and reliable, but often expensive. RickC had some issues with a Cisco firewall and takes the free pfSense for a spin, and he loves it… Is that surprising?

…

Enter PFSense - the BSD-based firewall distro closely related to the m0n0wall project. Having used several host-based firewalls like Smoothwall and m0n0wall over the years, I figured I’d give PFSense a shot. I threw together a PIII 550 with 256MB RAM and a pair of Intel NICs – and installed pfsense, which is actually a LiveCD that you can then install to disk or usb drive. The most basic setup is done from a menu-driven CLI, but once the Interfaces are assigned and the LAN side has an IP, you can access the web UI. Better yet – it’s a web UI that works! From their I was able to config PPPoE and all the NAT settings I needed in minutes. From there is was just a matter of moving a few cables and I was switched over with an absolute minimum of downtime.

The feature set of pfsense is rich, easily on par with commercial appliances. IPSEC, 1:1 NAT, inbound and outbound load balancing, fail-over, good logging options, lots of built-in graphing and monitoring and an excellent UI. It’s built on BSD 7.0 and costs you absolutely nothing. The distro is under constant development and it’s current status as per Secunia is zero unpatched vulnerabilities. The PFsense community is strong and development of utils and add-ons offers many options to the operator. The nice thing about having such a reasonable solution – you can easily afford to build a backup to either run in failover mode or use to swap out should your pfsense hardware fail.

I will likely continue to use PFSense going forward as my main firewall. I guess I will still play with the 851 I can use it to learn more IOS and become a 1337 Cisco zealot like those I so admire.

Full story on parallel42.ca (23/03/2008)

pfSense 2.0 dashboard sneak peek

Published on March 27, 2009 in pfSense. 0 Comments

The pfSense Team had their ‘09 hackaton recently with 7 developers working hard on v2.0. Judging from feedback, changelog and the 2.0 dashboard sneak peek, this was a successful get-together.

FreeBSD and Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC)

Published on March 27, 2009 in FreeBSD and Google. 0 Comments

The FreeBSD Project is pleased that Google has once again invited the FreeBSD Project to participate in their Summer of Code program, which pays student developers to work on Open Source projects.

Over the last four years, over 70 Summer of Code projects have generated improvements to almost every part of FreeBSD; many of the students have gone on to become permanent members of FreeBSD’s international development team.

Students interested in working with the FreeBSD Project should start preparing now by visiting the Google Summer of Code website and the FreeBSD Summer of Code site and discussing their ideas on one of the FreeBSD public mailing lists or on the #freebsd-soc IRC channel on EFNet. P.S. Please pass along this post or one of these posters to anyone who might be interested.

Source: FreeBSD Announce Mailinglist

BSD Magazine – Q2 2009 (PC-BSD Uncovered)

Published on March 25, 2009 in BSD Magazine. 0 Comments

A new issue of the BSD Magazine is now available (Q2 2009).

The following is the table of contents:

Installing PC-BSD Fibonacci Edition – Jerry Dixon
Man pages? We don’t need no stinkin’ man pages. I don’t need to show you any man pages. Well, that being said, at least review the hardware requirements prior to selecting your computer platform.

Software management simplfied: PC-BSD and the PBI system – Jan Stedehouder
What is the best way of installing software on a FreeBSD-based system? The FreeBSD handbook doesn’t provide a single answer as both packages and ports have their benefi ts. All you have to do is open a terminal and…

Personalizing Your PC-BSD Desktop – James T. Nixon III
What is the point of having a personal computer if it isn’t personal? The vast amount of possibilities when customizing your PC-BSD desktop can be overwhelming. There are several aspects of PC-BSD that need to be understood before moving forward.

Using FreeBSD for Off-Site Backups – Eric Vintimilla
It is becoming increasingly important for people to have backup systems in place. This is especially true for people who hoard multimedia content. What would happen if someone’s hard drive failed and it contained their entire music library?

Building NetBSD for Embedded Systems Using Cygwin – Donald T. Hayford
You might think it is unusual that a magazine devoted to the *BSD operating systems would have an article about Cygwin, a Linux-like environment that runs on Windows.

ABC’s of ZFS - Amjith Ramanujam
ZFS is a state of the art fi lesystem developed by Sun Microsystems. ZFS was first introduced in the OpenSolaris operating system and was later ported to FreeBSD 7.

Django on FreeBSD – Dan Fairs
Dan Fairs, Director of Fez Consulting Ltd., a UK-based software development consultancy, introduces Django: a web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Open Source Studio to Transmitter Link (OSSTL) – Jason Ellison
A local nonprofi t radio station owns a studio that provides feeds for two AM radio stations and one FM radio station. The content provided for the two AM station’s is mostly syndicated talk radio with a very little music content.

PC-BSD – Making Your Life Easier – Matt Olander
Accomplishing common tasks on PC-BSD may be executed effectively and efficiently by using built-in configuration tools and locating system settings that may increase overall usability and performance.

Interview with PC-BSD – Federico Biancuzzi , BSD Team
To celebrate this issue of the magazine fully dedicated to PC-BSD, I had the opportunity to do a quick question and answer session with Kris Moore and Matt Olander.

Green Eggs & BSD… – Mikel King
BSD is here BSD is there, BSD is everywhere. Well not exactly, but there certainly is a proliferation of BSD throughout the Internet. The problem is and quite honestly has been quantifying the impact of BSD on the corporate LAN.

LINKS: Website | Subscription details | Previous Issues

FreeBSD Security Advisory (ktimer)

Published on March 24, 2009 in FreeBSD Security Advisories. 0 Comments

The FreeBSD Security Team has issued the following security warning:

FreeBSD-SA-09:06.ktimer – Local privilege escalation

I. Background

In FreeBSD 7.0, support was introduced for per-process timers as defined in the POSIX realtime extensions. This allows a process to have a limited number of timers running at once, with various actions taken when each timer reaches zero.

II. Problem Description

An integer which specifies which timer a process wishes to operate upon is not properly bounds-checked.

III. Impact

An unprivileged process can overwrite an arbitrary location in kernel memory. This could be used to change the user ID of the process (in order to “become root”), to escape from a jail, or to bypass security mechanisms
in other ways.

IV. Workaround

No workaround is available, but systems without untrusted local users are not vulnerable.

V. Solution

Perform one of the following:

1) Upgrade your vulnerable system to 7-STABLE, or to the RELENG_7_1 or RELENG_7_0 security branch dated after the correction date.

For instructions on how to patch your system click here.