rasyid.net has posted some interesting and useful links regarding the use and setting up FreeBSD IPFW (firewall).
iXsystems has announced a distribution agreement with Fry’s Electronics whereby all Fry’s stores nationwide will carry PC-BSD Version 1.4, Da Vinci Edition. The agreement marks the first time that the PC-BSD operating system is made available for purchase at Fry’s Electronics.
PC-BSD is a fully functional desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world. It is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system.
We are confident that the availability of PC-BSD at Fry’s Electronics will increase the familiarity and adoption of PC-BSD
FreeBSD is already the server operating system of choice for many system administrators. This historic agreement will ensure that PC-BSD, the open source desktop operating system running FreeBSD under the hood, becomes available to a mainstream market
said Theresa Garner, General Manager of FreeBSD Mall.
We are confident that the availability of PC-BSD at Fry’s Electronics will increase the familiarity and adoption of PC-BSD”, said Michael Lauth, CEO of iXsystems. “Once users try PC-BSD they will be impressed by the wide array of features characterizing this open source operating system, including out-of-the-box support for Flash 7 in native BSD browsers, official NVIDIA drivers to simplify activating hardware acceleration, optional 3D desktop using Compiz Fusion, and a new graphical wireless configuration tool to easily establish a wireless connection with supported network adapters.
PC-BSD is expected to become available in all Fry’s stores nationwide by Monday, November 19. Fry’s has stores in Northern California, Southern California, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
PC-BSD 1.4.1 has been released. These are the major changes:
The 1.4.1 ISO can be downloaded here and users of PC-BSD 1.4 can easily upgrade via “system update” or by downloading and installing this PBI.
Currently the LISA ’07 Conference (Texas) is on where PC-BSD is represented by Matt Olander. 2 pictures here.
If you know any more pictures please let me know.
When it comes to firewalls, most people are fine with a consumer grade solution like a Linksys, Netgear or D-Link “router,” but these devices lack in features. With a Pentium II 200MHz processor and 1GB of RAM, you can create a firewall that’s way more powerful than the standard cable/DSL router you get from a computer shop, and thanks to free software it has features those other devices can only dream about. Here, is a quick and small comparison between Smoothwall Express 3.0 (based on Linux) and M0n0wall 1.231 (based on FreeBSD).
Hardware
Both Smoothwall and M0n0wall run on low end hardware just fine. For both systems, you’ll want at least a Pentium 2 and 128MB of RAM. Smoothwall requires more hard drive space than M0n0wall, which only needs about 8MB! Machines like this are available at auction sites, flea markets and garage sales for next to nothing. Keep in mind that these machines will use more power than a consumer “router,” but M0n0wall does have an option to turn off the hard drive after a few minutes of being idle. Now, on to the feature comparison.
Features
Smoothwall offers many more features than M0n0wall, including a caching web proxy server, DNS server, intrusion detection system, instant messenger logging, NTP server and email virus scanning.
By design, M0n0wall is only a firewall. It keeps to the Unix programming concept of doing one thing very well. If you want things like a proxy server, IDS or DNS, you’ll want to use Smoothwall. If you want things like 1:1 NAT, M0n0wall is your best choice. Both systems offer web based management and traffic shaping.
Final Word
The bottom line is that both of these systems are excellent firewalls. Smoothwall has more features, but requires higher-end hardware, while M0n0wall’s web management of firewall rules and traffic shaping seemed to be easier to use.
This is a summary of a post found on Linux Brain Dump
The pfSense team have now released version 1.2-RC3. A lot of new improvements and features have been added to this version, a list of which can be found here. Here’s an upgrade note.
The DesktopBSD project is now also providing weekly snapshots for i386 computers, in addition to the AMD64 snapshots.
Like AMD64 snapshots, they are built every Saturday from the latest DesktopBSD Tools, the most recent FreeBSD 6-STABLE sources and an up-to-date ports collection. Additionally, the i386 snapshots include the Nvidia video driver.
Recently I came across a fairly new project called TrueBSD, a FreeBSD LiveCD based on XFCE.
There’s not a great deal of information on the TrueBSD website as to what the goals of the project are, how their project differs from FreeSBIE (another FreeSBIE Live CD based on XFCE), if they’re planning to branch off etc etc etc. This is all the info on the frontpage:
“TrueBSD is a LiveCD operating system based on FreeBSD with many useful applications. All oen programs will keep working even when you eject LiveCD (using command cdcontrol eject) in order to get some data from your own CDs. Just don’t forget to insert the LiveCD again before starting any other programs. TrueBSD is distributed under BSD license, but some of the included software can be covered by some other license..
I have emailed the lead developer about a month ago for more information and background regarding TrueBSD, but all I received back was an email saying he doesn’t speak English. I’ve also tried to contact other members of the team, but, unfortunately, no reply (as yet).
So, the main reason for trying to contact members of the TrueBSD team was to find out some more background info and to see if I should track them on this blog etc.
Does any of you guys you know anything about this project? If, so it would be great if you could drop me a line.
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