|
[20121227]
|
NetBSD End-of-2012 Fundraiser: 60.0000 USD by the end of 2012
NetBSD is an volunteer-driven open source project
with no funding company behind its back.
The project is governed by the NetBSD Foundation as legal
entity.
Your donation to the NetBSD Foundation allows the project to make major improvements to the code base. With the release of NetBSD 6.0.1, the Fund Drive targets raising 60,000 USD by the end of 2012. We would like to continue funded development in various areas, including:
- Improving network stack concurrency and performance.
- Development of modern file systems and improvement of existing ones.
- Features which are useful in embedded environments, such as high resolution timers and execute in place (XIP) support.
- Automatic testing and quality assurance.
We have recently made some changes to the way we accept and honor your donations. For more information about donating, visit
http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/.
The NetBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization in the US, and donations may be tax deductible.
[Tags: fundraising]
|
|
[20121227]
|
NetBSD 6.0.1 security/bugfix released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.0.1, the first security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons.
To save you from searching, here is the list of relevant changes
from the release notes:
-
expat: Fix CVE-2012-1147, CVE-2012-1148 and CVE-2012-0876.
-
BIND: Address CVE-2012-5688: Named could die on specific queries
with dns64 enabled.
-
posix_spawn(): Fix processes with attributes.
-
Resolve races between vget() and vrele() resulting in vget()
returning dead vnodes.
-
Prevent crash when unsupported fd's are used with kevent.
-
Fix "atomic fragments" for IPv6.
-
ipf: Fix alignment issues in ipmon.
(PR#47101)
-
npf: handle delayed checksums in the network stack.
(PR#47235)
-
smbfs: Make smbfs actually work on big-endian ports.
-
ciss(4): don't try to handle sensors if there aren't any.
-
x86 (i386,
amd64):
-
Work around a possible gcc bug generating bad assembler code.
(PR#45673)
-
Disable C1E on AMD K8 CPUs, to prevent freeze during boot.
-
xen:
-
Prevent a memory corruption issue that locks up a Xen DomU,
and can potentially cause file system corruption.
(PR#47056,
PR#47057)
-
Fix: Xen Dom0 NetBSD kernel could crash by adding duplicate
xenwatches.
-
Update to tzdata2012j.
-
cdb: don't refuse to open databases without entries or keys.
-
Address graphics corruption in recent Cairo, manifested most
commonly by certain rendered text sections appearing as solid
rectangular blocks of color.
The complete list of changes can be found in the
CHANGES-6.0.1
file in the top level directory of the NetBSD 6.0.1 release tree.
Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 6.0.1 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at
http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.
P.S.: Don't miss out on the
end of NetBSD 2012 fundraise!
[Tags: Release, Security]
|
|
[20121227]
|
Blog news: software updated
Just FYI, I've upgraded the blog software to
blosxom 2.1.2. No bits were harmed in the upgrade
process, if you find anything that doesn't work as
expected please let me know!
P.S.: Any volunteers to put blosxom into pkgsrc?
[Tags: blosxom, hubertf]
|
|
[20121017]
|
Introducing NPF in NetBSD 6.0
NetBSD's development version had npf as another packet filter
available for quite some time. With the release of NetBSD
6.0, this is now available more widely, and
npf author Mindaugas Rasiukevicius has
pointed out
that there are two PDFs available that explain more
about NPF:
- a presentation
- an article
[Tags: npf]
|
|
[20121017]
|
NetBSD 6.0 Fund Drive
Hidden in the
NetBSD 6.0 release notes
is a call for funds:
``Your donation to the NetBSD Foundation allows the project to make major
improvements to the code base. With the release of NetBSD 6.0,
the 6.0 Fund Drive targets raising 60,000 USD by the end of
2012. We would like to continue funded development in various
areas, including:
- Improving network stack concurrency and performance.
- Development of modern file systems and improvement of
existing ones.
- Features which are useful in embedded environments,
such as high resolution timers and execute in place (XIP) support.
- Automatic testing and quality assurance.
We have recently made some changes to the way we accept and honor
your donations. For more information about donating, visit
http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/. The NetBSD Foundation
is a 501(c)(3) organization in the US, and donations may be tax deductible. ''
Very well seconded!
[Tags: Release]
|
|
[20121017]
|
NetBSD 6.0 is here
Quoting shamelessly from the
release announcement:
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.0, the fourteenth
major release of the NetBSD operating system. Changes from the
previous release include scalability improvements on multi-core
systems, many new and updated device drivers, Xen and MIPS port
improvements, and brand new features such as a new packet filter.
Some NetBSD 6.0 highlights are: support for thread-local storage
(TLS), Logical Volume Manager (LVM) functionality, rewritten disk
quota subsystem, new subsystems to handle flash devices and NAND
controllers, an experimental CHFS file system designed for flash
devices, support for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol,
and more. This release also introduces NPF - a new packet filter,
designed with multi-core systems in mind, which can do TCP/IP traffic
filtering, stateful inspection, and network address translation (NAT).
In addition to many other features, NetBSD 6.0 includes significant
developments in various ports. Some highlights:
o SMP support for Xen domU kernels, initial suspend/resume support for
Xen domU, PCI pass-through support for Xen3, and addition of the
balloon driver.
o Major rework of MIPS port adding support for SMP and 64-bit (O32,
N32, N64 ABIs are supported) processors, DSP v2 ASE extension, various
NetLogic/RMI processor models, Loongson family processors, and new SoC
boards.
o Improved SMP on PowerPC port and added support for Book E Freescale
MPC85xx (e500 core) processors.
o ARM has gained support for Cortex-A8 processors, various new SoCs,
and initial support for Raspberry Pi. Full support for Raspberry Pi
and major ARM improvements to come in a future NetBSD release.
o time_t is now a 64-bit quantity on all NetBSD ports. This means that
the NetBSD world no longer ends in 2037.
Please read the release notes for a full list of changes in NetBSD 6.0:
http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.0.html
The generous donations of companies and individuals to the NetBSD
Foundation in previous years has enabled TNF to sponsor some exciting
developments in NetBSD 6.0, including the Xen DOMU multiprocessor
support. See our donations page for information about how you or your
company can donate to help sponsor future projects! Complete source
and binaries for NetBSD 6.0 are available for download at many sites
around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS,
SUP, and other services may be found at:
http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/
We encourage users who wish to install via ISO or USB disk images to
download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the
images area. A list of hashes for the NetBSD 6.0 distribution has been
signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security
Officer:
ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-6.0_hashes.asc
NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and
may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services
are available via our mailing lists and website. Commercial support is
available from a variety of sources. More extensive information on
NetBSD is available from our website:
http://www.NetBSD.org/
Dedication
----------
NetBSD 6.0 is dedicated to the memory of Allen Briggs, who
passed away in March of 2012.
Allen's technical contributions to NetBSD were significant, and
many. He was a NetBSD developer from the very beginning of the
project, and was the main driving force behind the initial import of
some of our hardware ports. He also served on NetBSD's core team from
2003 until 2006. More than that, however, he was a mentor to many on
the project, and always willing to help when he could. Even for those
he didn't mentor, his civilized example was often a guiding
influence. He worked with many of us on the project, and in a field
where prickly personalities are common, he was always pleasant and
kind regardless of your status or technical expertise. He will be
sorely missed.
Acknowledgments
---------------
The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have
contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our
servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and
other resources over the years. More information on the people who
make NetBSD happen is available at:
http://www.NetBSD.org/people/
We would like to especially thank the University of California at
Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code
that we use. We would also like to thank the Internet Systems
Consortium Inc., the Network Security Lab at Columbia University's
Computer Science Department, and Ludd (Lulea Academic Computer
Society) computer society at Lulea University of Technology for
current colocation services.
[Tags: Release]
|
|
[20120925]
|
MaheshaNetBSD Live USB
I haven't seen too much progress on the NetBSD-Live-CD
front recently, but who uses CDs these days, anyways?
Right, a Live USB-stick image is much cooler, and
MaheshaNetBSD Live USB
is just that!
Juraj Sipos started his project originally on FreeBSD
(and still continues that), but there's a
variant based on NetBSD 5.1.2 now, too.
The system comes up read-write, so you can make
changes to it - as Juraj writes on the webpage:
``With this USB image I can now use NetBSD the same way as if it was installed on a hard drive.''
Oh, and for those impatient to
try, the root password is "netbsd5".
[Tags: live-cd, mahesha, usb]
|
|
[20120716]
|
Announcing g4u v2.5
After an extended time for beta testing, I'm pushing out g4u V2.5 now, with
no functional changes between 2.5beta1 and the final release. Of course full
release testing was done on the final release. G4u 2.5 is mainly a
maintenance release that brings in commands to upload and restore partition
tables with the MBR, has driver updates from NetBSD, and some minor
enhancements like (finally!) enabling command line history.
See the
g4u homepage
for more details.
[Tags: g4u]
|
|
[20120714]
|
NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi
The
Raspberry Pi
is a pretty recent, cheap ARM-based board, or as the
webpage
says: ``An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25''.
Shipping with today's Windows-for-embedde-boards
operating system (AKA Linux), there's also a port of
NetBSD on its way.
Nick Hudson is at it, and he has posted first
dmesg output
now, showing the machine going to multiuser mode.
The code's not integrated into mainline NetBSD-current yet,
but rest assured that that will happen when the code is ripe.
Good work, Nick!
[Tags: arm, dmesg, raspberrypi]
|
|
[20120603]
|
SMP-ready USB stack on its way for NetBSD - testers welcome!
Matt Green has picked up Jared McNeill's work on
making the NetBSD USB stack SMP-ready.
Besides the USB framework itself, this is also relevant
for all the various drivers that can attach to USB -
starting form audio drivers over SCSI to serial (ucom) drivers.
While the work is far from complete, it is in a shape where
users are welcome to start testing, and where developers
are also welcome to help in converting more drivers!
Please join in and help test the code, and send your
feedback to the lists. If no serious issues come up,
the code will be merged within a week.
See
Matt's posting to tech-kern
for more details, inclusing diffs and links for
amd64 and i386 GENERIC (+usbmp) kernels.
Further information on the state of the code - what is and what is not
converted yet - can be found
in the TODO.usbmp file.
[Tags: smp, usb]
|
|
[20120420]
|
More dmesg pr0n: NetBDS/Xen with 128 (virtual) CPUs
There was discussion about raising the number of
CPU(core)s supported by NetBSD the other day,
as the current limit of 32 isn't the sky any more
in 2012. In the process, Xen-hacker Manuel Bouyer
suggested using booting NetBSD ins a Xen DomU,
as you can assign up to 128 (virtual) cores to
a DomU.
Here's the dmesg output,
and I'm sure this is a lot faster than
simulating 128 CPUs in qemu.
So, how to go beyone 128 CPUs for testing?
Anyone played with Qemu recently, or even have some decent
hardware at hand? If so, be sure to post dmesg output
(and CC: me)!
[Tags: dmesg, xen]
|
|
[20120420]
|
tetris rewrite in sed(1)
tetris rewrite in sed(1),
includes a bash(:-()script to start. Very impressive!
[Tags: bash, sed, tetris]
|
|
[20120414]
|
Playing with Amazon's EC2 and NetBSD - top(1) pr0n
I've played with NetBSD on Amazon's EC2 service recently,
and here's a small teaser for ressources that one can get
with a few mouse clicks - operating system is NetBSD 6.0_BETA/amd64,
note number of CPU cores and RAM:
[Tags: amazon, ec2, top]
|
|
[20120307]
|
NetBSD/xen available for Multi-Processor machines
Manuel Bouyer
announces
that NetBSD/xen is now available for Multi-Processor machines.
Citing from the release announcement:
``The NetBSD Foundation is pleased to announce completion of
Multiprocessing Support for the port of its Open Source Operating
System to the Xen hypervisor.
The NetBSD Fundation started the Xen MP project 8 month ago; the goal
was to add SMP support to NetBSD/Xen domU kernels. This project has
officially completed, and after a few bug fixes in the pmap(9) code it
is now considered stable on both i386 and amd64. NetBSD 6.0 will ship
with option MULTIPROCESSOR enabled by default for Xen domU kernels.
The availability of Xen MP support in NetBSD allows to run the NetBSD
Open Source Operating Systems on a range of available infrastructure
providers' systems. Amazon's Web Services with their Elastic Cloud
Computing is a prominent examples here.
Xen is a virtualization software that enables several independent
operating system instances ("domains") to run concurrently on the same
computer hardware. The hardware is managed by the first domain (dom0),
and further guest/user domains (domU) are spawned and managed by dom0.
Operating systems available for running as dom0 and domU guests
include Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux besides NetBSD.
NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open
Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of
platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to
handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features
make it excellent for use in both production and research
environments, and the source code is freely available under a
business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a
large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily
available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.
NetBSD has been available for the Xen hypervisor since Xen 1 and
NetBSD 2.0, released in 2004 , but until now only a single
processor was supported in each NetBSD/xen domain.''
[Tags: amazon, ec2, smp, xen]
|
|
[20120229]
|
Minix 3.2.0 released... with lots of NetBSD code added
Version 3.2.0 of Minix,
the operating system started by Andrew Tanenbaum,
has been released.
Started quite some time after BSD and before Linux,
its userland grew somewhat outdated. To remedy this,
Minix' userland was now updated to large extents
with components from NetBSD as result of
Minix' 2011 Google Summer of Code project,
which was done by
student Vivek Prakash and
mentored by Gianluca Guida.
Components merged from NetBSD include:
- NetBSD C library
- NetBSD password file format
- NetBSD bootloader
- New NetBSD userland utilities: ext2 fsck&mkfs, gzip, m4, man&tools, mkdep, mkdir, mkfifo, mktemp, rm, rmdir, tic, uniq, libcurses, libcrypt, libprop, libterminfo, libutil, bzip2, date, indent, mdocml (mandoc), sed, zoneinfo ports
See
the Minix release notes
for more details,
[Tags: minix]
|
|
[20120212]
|
NetBSD on the FriendlyARM Mini2440
Paul Fleischer has ported NetBSD to the FrienldyARM Mini2440 board.
He writes on NetBSD's current-users mailing list:
``The FriendlyARM
Mini2440 is an evaluation board based on the
Samsung S3C2440 ARM SoC. It comes with a DM9000 Ethernet chip and an
UDA1341 audio DAC, on-board NAND and NOR flash, a SD-card slot, and
optionally a 3.5" or 7" touch display.''
See
the link for dmesg-pr0n.
Detailled setup instructions are available
on the port-arm mailing list
and
Paul's homepage.
Paul is also looking for feedback on the port, so if
you have a Mini2440 board, give it a spin and report back to Paul!
[Tags: arm, dmesg, friendlyarm, Hardware, mini2440]
|
|
[20120212]
|
Cobalt RestoreCD/RestoreUSB based on NetBSD 5.1.2
Right after
NetBSD 5.1.2 is out, Izumi Tsutsui
has updated his NetBSD-based Restore CD/USB-image
for the Cobalt machines.
The files are available at http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/cobalt/restore-cd/5.1.2/. Citing from the announcement:
``The only changes from 5.1.1 version are CHANGES file and 5.1.2 binaries,
so the following instructions are same as 5.1.1 ones:
restorecd-5.1.2-20120205.iso.gz is a gzipped RestoreCD ISO9660 image
as prior releases.
restoreusb-5.1.2-20120205.img.gz is a new "RestoreUSB" image
which has almost identical functions with RestoreCD but is
intended to be burned into USB memory sticks for USB bootable PCs.
You can write the image using gzip(1) + dd(1) on Unix like OSes,
or you can also use "Rawrite32" utility on MS Windows:
http://www.NetBSD.org/~martin/rawrite32/index.html
To use the RestoreUSB for cobalt installation, write the image
into >=512MB USB memory stick (or USB HDD etc.) and boot your PC
from it, then all other procedures are same as RestoreCD.
You no longer have to burn a coaster for every installation ;-)
See also "Restore CD Howto" for actual installation procedures:
http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/cobalt/restorecd-howto.html:
(though RestoreUSB is not mentioned yet)
and see files in .tar.gz archive for more details.''
[Tags: cobalt, usb]
|
|
[20120211]
|
NetBSD 5.1.2 released
Soren Jacobsen from NetBSD's release engineering team
announced on the NetBSD blog:
``On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.1.2 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.1.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade.
For full details, please see the 5.1.2 release notes.
To download 5.1.2, see http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/''
Among the changes are:
- Fixes from ten Security Advisories: openssl, bind, kernel memory exhaustion, IPCOMP, dhclient, LZW, openpan
- More security fixes for 3rd party Products: libtelnet, openssl, postfix, dhcpcd, xrdb, glob(3), openssh
- Improvements of logging in wapbl(4)
- Improved handling of ECN, NFS
- Various minor updates and bugfixes
Note that the NetBSD x.x.x releases only contain security
and critical bug fixes over the last full release (5.0).
The number is kept down to improve stability.
More updates and changes are available on the NetBSD x.x
releases and their related branches, e.g. netbsd-5.
(see also)
[Tags: releases]
|
|
[20120208]
|
FOSDEM talks/slides: pkgsrc on MirBSD, pkgin (Updated)
Last weekend the Free and Open Software Developer Meeting (FOSDEM)
happened. As in previous years, there was a booth manned by
people from various BSD-projects, and there were also
two(?) talks related to NetBSD and its related project pkgsrc:
- NetBSD and MirBSD developer Benny Siegert gave a talk titled
"pkgsrc on MirBSD" -
see his slides! pkgsrc is a framework for packaging and building 3rd party applications from source. Besides MirBSD, it runs on many
other platforms like Linux and Mac OS X.
- While building from source is fine, it costs a lot of time.
pkgsrc can also create binary packages, and to manage those,
there is "pkgin", a binary package manager.
Its developer, Emile 'iMil' Heitor
introduced it in a talk -
see the slides (PDF)!
Update:
Thomas 'wiz' Klausner pointed out that there was
actually a whole "BSD Devroom", and there were
many BSD-talks there, including:
- MINIX3 and BSD, by Arun Thomas
- The Lua Scripting Language in the NetBSD Kernel, by Marc Balmer
- Touch your NetBSD - towards tablet integration, by Pierre Pronchery
- pkgsrc on MirBSD, by Benny Siegert
(slides)
- Introduction to pkgsrc, and to package creation in NetBSD, by Noud de Brouwer
- pkgin, a binary package manager for pkgsrc, also by Emile Heitor
(slides)
- Automated package building, by Nicolas Thauvin
Besides other talks that were less focused on NetBSD/pkgsrc,
this event shows that there's a pretty active group of
BSD advocates in Europe that manage to advocate "BSD"
in its entirety pretty well. Well done, guys!
[Tags: Events, fosdem, mirbsd, pkgin, pkgsrc]
|
|
[20120205]
|
Automatic building of Amazon EC2 images from NetBSD
NetBSD/xen is available for some time now to work on
Amazon's Xen-based Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform,
as previously announced in
the NetBSD blog, and
the NetBSD wiki
has instructions on how to subscribe to Amazon, launching and
rebuilding the "AMI" images.
This work is continued by Jean-Yves Migeon, who is working on
build scripts for Amazon EC2, so
the "AMI" images can be provided easily,
with the eventual goal to
include them into the NetBSD build process by Jeff Rizzo,
so EC2 images can be automatically generated easily,
e.g. by NetBSD's build cluster.
[Tags: amazon, ec2, xen]
|
|
[20120204]
|
Google Summer of Code 2012 will happen - first NetBSD directions
Google announced at Fosdem that
there will be Google Sommer of Code 2012,
the 8th time in a row.
Ot can be expected that NetBSD will strive to participate
again this year, and as such, now is a good time to
Let's look forward to NetBSD and the Goole Summer of Code 2012,
and the exciting new projects to come!
[Tags: google-soc]
|
|
[20120203]
|
NetBSD Hackathon - February 10th to 12th, 2012
Matthias 'tron' Scheler
announced per mail
and on the NetBSD blog
``The 16th NetBSD hackathon will be run from February 10th to February
12th. Our goal is fixing all the bugs that need fixing to get
NetBSD-current ready for the creation of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch.
Everybody that has an interest in NetBSD, from developers, documentation
writers, translators, to advanced users are invited to attend. To make sure
that NetBSD users get the best possible experience of the new release we
would like to fix as many bugs as possible. For a list of bugs and more
information look at the Wiki Page under
<https://wiki.netbsd.org/hackathon/>
please.
If you are able to help us fixing these bugs by supplying patches or
testing fixes please consider to participate. We are also in need of
people to supply documentation fixes, preferably in the form of
patches. Release notes and/or manual pages!
Join us on the IRC channel #netbsd-code on freenode (irc.freenode.net).
Just join, have a look around and ask your questions or what work needs
to be done.
We are looking forward to seeing you!''
Indeed! :-)
[Tags: Events, hackathon]
|
|
[20120201]
|
EuroBSDCon 2012: Warsaw, Poland
Quoting from
the website:
``EuroBSDcon2012
18 - 21 October 2012, Warsaw, Poland
EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for people working on and with BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDcon 2012 is the 11th EuroBSDcon and will take place in Poland, 18-21 October 2012 in Warsaw. EuroBSDcon is a great and unique time to learn more about the powerful BSD systems we use everyday and to connect with other developers around the world. ''
[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]
|
|
[20120131]
|
IPv4 address change for {many}.NetBSD.org
spz@ announces:
``{mail, www, anoncvs, blog, wiki, releng}.NetBSD.org are
changing IPv4 address from something in 204.152.190 to
something in 149.20.53. Do not be alarmed. :)
There may be some glitches due to IP addresses hiding in
unexpected corners; we apologize in advance for any issues
caused by the renumbering.
The old addresses are going to be available at least another
week.''
Background of this change that the ISP of most of the NetBSD
services requires renumbering.
Of course this only affects IPv4, not IPv6 :-)
[Tags: ]
|
|
[20120130]
|
Latest IPfilter merged into NetBSD-current
Darren Reed is the author if IPfilter and also a NetBSD developer.
IPfilter is one of the packet filters available in NetBSD,
and the latest version (5.1.1) was imported into NetBSD-current
by darren. Citing from
his mail to tech-net,
there are a few interesting changes and new features:
``To start with, the man pages for ipf(5) and ipnat(5) have been
rewritten from scratch to make them easier to understand and
thus easier to use the various features in IPFilter. In addition
there is now an ipmon(5) that supports delivery of log messages to
different destinations - including generating SNMP traps messages.
There are a few new actions that can be used with ipnat.conf. The
one that will be of most interest to people is "rewrite" which
supports translation of both the source and destination address
with a single rule. Use of an rdr/map combination is no longer
required. There are also some others that are more experimental.
One of those is a "divert" action that takes a packet and puts an
IP + UDP header on the front, allowing "raw packets" to be delivered
to any socket. Similarly, replies from that socket have the relevant
header data removed.
There are a few extras for ipf.conf, most notably it now allows
for defining limits on how many different hosts/networks can have
a state entry in the state table for each rule. IPFilter 5.1.1 also
supports specifying a filter rule group for the filtering of ICMP
packets that match an entry in the state table. Additionally, there
is a new rule - "decapsulate". This has been designed to allow
filtering on "inner headers" of packets that have been encapsulated
in clear text. It will, for example, allow filtering on IPv4 headers
inside of IPv6 packets (or vice versa.)
It is no longer required to have a separate ipf6.conf file. Both
IPv4 and IPv6 packets can be used in the same file. For those that
have separate files today, they should not interfere with each other
unless you have "block in all" for IPv4 and "pass in all" for IPv6
or similar. In that case, the "block in all" will affect IPv6 traffic.
This is a reflection of the internal design where there is now only
a single list of filter rules, not one for each protocol. Check the
man page for ipf.conf for more details.''
[Tags: ipfilter, Security]
|
|
[20120130]
|
EuroBSDcon 2011 NetBSD Presentation
spz@ gave a presentation with a status report of NetBSD
during last EuroBSDCon.
Slides in HTML format
are available now - enjoy!
[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events, presentations]
|
|
[20120129]
|
NetBSD vs. disk transfer speeds vs. BIOS settings
A few days ago, Brian Hoard made
an interesting finding about performance
of
g4u,
a NetBSD/i386-based disk cloning system.
Citing from
Brians mail:
``First, my problem was I had just replaced my motherboard on my custom
build PC.
Once I got Windows 7 64-bit loaded and everything working, I sat up to
clone my system drive. The drive is a 500GB Seagate Barracude, SATA 2
drive.
Cloning locally to an identical drive.
When booting into g4u, my transfer speeds were extremely slow.
Normally, my 500 Gb clones take only about 90 minutes.
But this was still working after over 6 hours.
The g4u transfer speed was reporting only 1.5 Mb/sec.
I shut things down, and went into my system BIOS. I noticed that the
SATA mode was set to "IDE Mode" for my drives.
I changed this to "AHCI Mode" and continued to boot into g4u.
This worked to fix the transfer speeds, and my clone finished normally.
Getting 83 Mb/sec.
Once the drive was finished, I attempted to boot into Windows, but it
would not boot.
I had to change my BIOS back to "IDE Mode", then Windows behaved normally.
Upon researching this, I am now learning that you should enable AHCI
Mode BEFORE installing Windows for it to work.
Apparently, if Windows is not installed while using AHCI Mode, it
disables the drivers for AHCI on the system drive. So if you later
enable AHCI in your BIOS as I did, Windows will not have the driver loaded.
I saw there is a fix on the Microsoft web site, but I haven't attempted
to try it yet.
If someone else runs into a similar problem, hopefully this will help you.''
FWIW, g4u-2.5beta1 is based on NetBSD-current from January 2012,
so checking your BIOS may help anyone seeing bad disk performance out there.
(Emphasizes in the text added by me)
[Tags: g4u, performance]
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[20120128]
|
BSD Certification and the lack of training material - a call for participation! (Updated)
As you are aware, there's a BSD Associate Certification
available from the BSD Certification group (that I'm a member of,
working as subject matter expert for NetBSD). That's good!
There's also is a
PDF
which lists the BSD Associate (BSDA) examn objectives on 57 pages.
That's neccessary!
There is currently no training material available
that covers all the examn objectives, and that allows
people interested in the certification to start learning.
That sucks!
Now that's where I'd like to ask the NetBSD (and actually the
whole BSD community) for support: This is not a small task,
but I think it would be worthwhile for the whole community
to have that available, either in closed (paper/book) or in
public (electronic) form.
Any takers?
Update:
Jeremy Reed reminds me that he has startet
a Wiki-based approach
to cover
all topics of the BSDA, with the eventual goal to publish
the result in book form. There is a Wiki-to-PDF transformation
engine already in place, and the primary focus can be put
on the contents at this point. So, this is the point
where YOU come in.
Have a look, get involved, participate in a novel project!
[Tags: bsdca, bsdcertification]
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[20120127]
|
BSDCan 2012 - call for papers (Updated)
Watching conference proceedings and publications like magazines,
I feel a certain lack of NetBSD presence. Even in events that
are BSD-friendly (EuroBSDcon, BSD Magazine come to mind).
So here's a friendly reminder to go out on the street
and preach the truth, as
posted by Dan Langille on netbsd-advocacy@:
You have two days left before the deadline!
Dan continues:
``BSDCan 2012 will be held 11-12 May, 2012 in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 9-10 May.
NOTE: This will be Fri/Sat with tutorials on Wed/Thu.
We are now accepting proposals for talks.
The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias.
Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not
appropriate for this venue.
If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system,
please submit a proposal. Whether you are developing a very complex
system using BSD as the foundation, or helping others and have a story
to tell about how BSD played a role, we want to hear about your
experience. People using BSD as a platform for research are also
encouraged to submit a proposal. Possible topics include:
- How we manage a giant installation with respect to handling spam.
- and/or sysadmin.
- and/or networking.
From the BSDCan website, the Archives section will allow you to review
the wide variety of past BSDCan presentations as further examples.
Both users and developers are encouraged to share their experiences.
The schedule is:
8 Jan 2012 Proposal acceptance begins
29 Jan 2012 Proposal acceptance ends
19 Feb 2012 Confirmation of accepted proposals
See also
http://www.bsdcan.org/2012/papers.php
Instructions for submitting a proposal to BSDCan 2012 are available
from:
http://www.bsdcan.org/2012/submissions.php
Update:
The deadline for submissions has been extended to Tuesday 31 January.
[Tags: bsdcan, Events]
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[20120125]
|
Cobalt RestoreCD/RestoreUSB Beta based on NetBSD 5.1.1
Izumi Tsutsui
writes on port-cobalt:
``It seems NetBSD 5.1.1 release is pending, but binaries are there
and it also contains telnetd vulnerability fix (which is rather
important for restorecd), so I'd announce 5.1.1 based NetBSD/cobalt
RestoreCD and brandnew RestoreUSB as Beta test for future 5.1.x release:
http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/cobalt/restore-cd/5.1.1/
restorecd-5.1.1-20120112.iso.gz is a gzipped RestoreCD ISO9660 image
as prior releases.
restoreusb-5.1.1-20120112.img.gz is a new "RestoreUSB" image
which has almost identical functions with RestoreCD but is
intended to be burned into USB memory sticks for USB bootable PCs.
You can write the image using gzip(1) + dd(1) on Unix like OSes,
or you can also use "Rawrite32" utility on MS Windows:
http://www.NetBSD.org/~martin/rawrite32/index.html
To use the RestoreUSB for cobalt installation, write the image
into >=512MB USB memory stick (or USB HDD etc.) and boot your PC
from it, then all other procedures are same as RestoreCD.
You no longer have to burn a coaster for every installation ;-)
See also "Restore CD Howto" for actual installation procedures:
http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/cobalt/restorecd-howto.html:
(though RestoreUSB is not mentioned yet)
and see files in .tar.gz archive for more details. ''
Time to get out the good old Cobalt cube :)
[Tags: cobalt]
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[20120114]
|
g4u 2.5beta1 supports handling of partition tables and bad disk sectors
After some absence (job-related) and technical problems
(building of NetBSD failing for me from Mac OS X),
I'm very happy to release a beta version of g4u
with some long-overdue changes. Those include being
able to backup/restore the MBR, which includes the
partition table - needed when recovering single partitions
to a new disk. Also, the various commands reading disks
are now adjusted to not abort when a disk sector cannot
be used. Instead, the bad bytes are skipped and the
rest of the disk is recovered. Please give me feedback on
this feature as I didn't have a bad disk to test this!
Other news include a command to wipe a disk by completely
overwriting it with 0-bytes (once).
Last, command line editing was enabled - finally!
Remember that this is a test release, so your feedback
is wanted - either to me in person, or to the
g4u-help mailing list. Thanks!
Here's a full list of changes:
- New commands "uploadmbr" and "slurpmbr" to backup and restore the master
boot record, which includes the partition table. Required to restore a
partition to an empty disk.
- New command "copymbr" to copy the MBR from one disk to another, similar
to "copydisk"
- New command "wipedisk" to write the disk full with 0-bytes once from
start (sector 0) to end (last sector)
- Enable command line history/editing by forcing /bin/sh to be built
without -DSMALL (ugly hack... there be lots of dragons!)
- When setting up a fresh compile tree, g4u patches are now applied
automagically without aborting the build
- Error detection was now enabled in the dd(1) command, which is the core
of g4u (surprise!). With that, disks with broken/unreadable sectors
should now be copied, skipping the unreadable sectors and copying the
rest. This affects a number of programs: copydisk, copypart, uploaddisk,
uploadpart. BEWARE: I wasn't able to actually test this as I do not have
a disk with bad sectors here. Please report back your experiences!!!
- Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2012-01-12
- New drivers added to the kernel:
- RDC PMX-1000 IDE controllers
- Intel SCH IDE controllers
- TOSHIBA PICCOLO controllers
- Attansic/Atheros L1C/L2C Ethernet
- Broadcom BCM43xx wireless
- Agere/LSI ET1310/ET1301 Gigabit Ethernet
- RDC R6040 10/100 Ethernet
- USB LCDs and USB-VGA adaptors, e.g.:
- DisplayLink DL-1x0/1x5
- Option N.V. Wireless USB WAN modems
- Microsoft RNDIS specifications USB ethernet
- Atheros AR9001U USB Wifi
- Intersil PrismGT USB Wifi
- Virtio PCI, memory balloon, disk & network devices
- ... and many more that slipped past QA
- ... and any driver updates, optimizations and bug fixes and other
enhancements from NetBSD-current
Get g4u 2.5beta1:
[Tags: g4u]
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[20111226]
|
On the continuing decline of the GPL
Pointed out by Mishka, who found this 451 group's
blog posting, I'll let the image speak on itself,
even if it does not target NetBSD in particular:
[Tags: gpl, licensing]
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[20111224]
|
The timing of security advisories
It's an old debate on when to release a security advisory:
It should be released as early as possible to give people a
chance to fix, but at the same time the fixing should be in
a coordinated way. "Coordinated" means a fair chance for
professional sysadmins to deploy a fix during working hours,
and not in the middle of the night on a weekend. Or on the
day before chistmas eve. But what if there's a pressing reason,
maybe an exploit in the wild?
Apparently
FreeBSD's telnetd
currently has such a problem, and I think it's fair that
Colin Percival as the FreeBSD Security Officer did release
the advisory, even if it's in a sub-optimal timeframe.
For those NetBSD uses wondering if there's a similar problem
in NetBSD's telnetd: Apparenly an unchecked argument can cause
memory corruption by a memcpy length parameter overflow in sub-option processing (for terminal type, size etc.).
This was fixed in NetBSD thanks to a hints from Colin.
There's no NetBSD Security Advisory yet,
but people still using telnetd in production networks may
consider rebuilding libtelnet and telnetd.
So, to those of you who have moved to SSH: Happy Holidays!
To the rest: Happy Updating! :-)
[Tags: Security]
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[20111216]
|
Two new NetBSD Security Advisories: OpenPAM and BIND resolver
The NetBSD Security Officers have released two new
security advisories about problems found in 3rd
party software that comes bundled with NetBSD's base system,
OpenPAM and the BIND resolver.
- NetBSD Security Advisory 2011-008: OpenPAM privilege escalation
Affects pkgsrc, all release branches and -current before 2011-11-09,
it's fixed in all branches (current, netbsd-4 and -5)
after that date.
Details from the advisory:
``The pam_start() function of OpenPAM doesn't check the "service"
argument. With a relative path it can be tricked into reading
a config file from an arbitrary location.
NetBSD base utilities pass fixed constant strings. 3rd party
programs which run with elevated privileges and allow user chosen
strings open an attack vector.''
- NetBSD Security Advisory 2011-009: BIND resolver DoS:
Affects pkgsrc, all release branches and -current from before
2011-11-20, it's fixed in the CVS branches after 2011-11-20.
Details from the advisory:
``Unpatched BIND 9 resolvers may cache an invalid record, subsequent
queries for which could crash the resolvers with an assertion failure.
ISC provided a patch which makes named recover gracefully from the
inconsistency, preventing the abnormal exit.
The patch has two components. When a client query is handled, the code
which processes the response to the client has to ask the cache for
the records for the name that is being queried. The first component
of the patch prevents the cache from returning the inconsistent data.
The second component prevents named from crashing if it detects
that it has been given an inconsistent answer of this nature.''
Happy updating!
[Tags: bind, openpam, pam, Security]
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[20111208]
|
BSDTalk Interview: Jim Brown on BSD Certification
Dru mentioned on Facebook that
BSD Talk #209
is out, this time with Jim Brown, one of the key people
behind the BSD certification.
BSD Certification
covers NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, and
has the goal to offer certification about BSD specific tasks in
both Associate and Professional levels.
Based on my personal, most recent experience, certification
is a good thing as you can show that you have a full grasp
on a topic with all the relevant topics, and that you
didn't only learn the few things that are relevant for your
current job. Get certified!
[Tags: bsdcertification]
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[20111124]
|
Netbooting g4u via PXE
Doing a network based boot with PXE is not exactly hard,
but you need some debugging and the right tools in place.
If you want to netboot g4u, the NetBSD-based tool for harddisk
image cloning via FTP, via PXE, there's a description
on how to do
Netbooting of g4u via PXE
by Mariusz Zynel.
Details include setting up a TFTP server for loading
the bootloader and getting DHCP sending out the right files.
[Tags: g4u, pxe]
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[20111118]
|
Tanenbaum: Minix to become NetBSD-compatible
I've found this one via (german language)
heise online:
Andrew Tanenbaum, operating system researcher and father of
the Minix operating system gave an
interview to the french LinuxFr.org site.
Topics include where Minix is today, and where it will move to in the future.
The latter one is worth quoting in this blog's NetBSD context:
``We are now focused on three things: NetBSD compatibility, embedded systems, and reliability.
3.2.0 will have a lot of headers, libraries, and userland programs take from NetBSD, which is a very stable, mature system. The BSDs are quite popular as you may know. One of them is sold under the brand name "Macintosh" by Apple. [...]
We think NetBSD is a mature stable system. Linux is not nearly as well written and is changing all the time. NetBSD has something like 8000 packages. That is enough for us.''
Further topics include multicore and microkernel architectures, grants from
Google and the European Research Council, software licensing,
the GPL and Linux.
Have a look!
[Tags: minix, tanenbaum]
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[20111022]
|
Enlarging a (virtual) disk
I've tried to build NetBSD-current at various points in the past few
months, and always hit one of two bugs: -current blows up with
a gcc Internal Compiler Error when crossbuilding on Mac OS X,
and kernel panics with native NetBSD builds with sources on NFS.
This stinks, and I've successfully managed to do a successful
-current build with sources on (local) disk. With NetBSD
running within VMware Fusion on Mac OS X.
To go on from there, I found that my NetBSD VM's only disk
was too small to do anything useful. Options for enlarging
that came to mind:
- NFS - see 'panic' above, no go.
- Adding another (virtual) disk - easily doable, but I felt like not adding one
- Extending the existing disk - adventure time!
Option #3 was it, and after removing all VMware snapshots, enlarging the
disk was easy with VMware Fusion, going from 10GB to 20GB.
After growing the disk itself, the next question was how to use the
newly gained disk. Of course some file system needs to use it,
and in theory there are the following options:
- Enlarge the last file system on disk
- Fix the partition table to add another partition for the new space
The disk was resized from 10GB to 20GB. The partition table
(disklabel) was created by a standard NetBSD install, and first
had the root file system, followed by the swap partition.
From that, adding 10GB more swap was not useful,
so I've decided to change the disklabel to add the new disk space
as a new partition behind the existing partitions.
This is also an excuse to not frob with
growfs and resize_ffs. (And of course I'm ignoring the option of backing up the full file system, doing a full rebuild of the filesystem
and then doing a restore :-)
For those in a similar situation, here are the steps to use
the newly gained space on an enlarged (virtual) disk:
- Prepare: save the old output of "dmesg" (/var/run/dmesg.boot is OK)
- Enlarge - VMware Fusion wants a shutdown for that, you cannot suspend
the machine
- After booting, run a diff on the saved "dmesg" output, to learn
what the old and new size of the disk is, in sectors. My diff looks
like this, note the size change in sectors:
-wd0: 10240 MB, 22192 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 20971520 sectors
+wd0: 20480 MB, 44384 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 41943040 sectors
- Backup the existing/old disklabel, just in case: disklabel wd0 >disklabel.BAK
- Edit the disklabel: disklabel -e wd0
- In the editor, adjust the disk size in sectors from 20971520 to 41943040:
total sectors: 41943040
- Partition 'd' is the full disk on i386/amd64, it starts at sector 0
and is 41943040 sectors big
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
d: 41943040 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 44384*)
- Partition 'c' is the NetBSD part of the disk. As this VM only has NetBSD, all the usable space is used. Note that "usable" space excludes the first 63 sectors of the disk (mbr etc.), i.e. it is 41943040 - 63 = 41942977 sectors:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
c: 41942977 63 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0*- 44384*)
- After this everything is in sync with the new disk again, and the remaining/new space can be used for new partition 'e'. As the new space starts where
the disk used to end, its offset is the old size, 20971520 sectors.
The size of the new partition expands from the offset sector 20971520
to the end of the disk at sector 41943040, i.e. the partition size is:
% expr 41943040 - 20971520
20971520
In total, this gives for the new partition:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
e: 20971520 20971520 4.2BSD 2048 16384 0 # (Cyl. 22192*- 44384*)
- Last, create file system, mount and populate:
# newfs /dev/rwd0e
# mkdir /disk2
# echo '/dev/wd0e /disk2 ffs rw,log 2 2' >>/etc/fstab
# mount /disk2
# cd /usr ; pax -rw -pe -v stuff /disk2
# rm -fr stuff ; ln -s /disk2/stuff .
Now let's see if I get things far enough to get a build
of g4u going... wish me luck!
P.S.: I'm offering choccolate to anyone fixing crossbuilding of
NetBSD-current from Mac OS X. Any takers?
[Tags: disklabel, fusion, g4u, vmware]
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[20110710]
|
Sudbury Star article: There's no need to buy an OS
Citing from yesterday's article
``There's no need to buy an OS''
in the Canadian newspaper
The Sudbury Star:
``There are also "lite" versions of the Linux operating system available, including NetBSD, which is at www.netbsd.org. One of the amazing things about NetBSD is the variety of hardware pieces it will run on.''
[Tags: linux, sudbury]
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[20110703]
|
WiMAX and LTE enabled Router: CradlePoint MBR95 (Updated)
Found via Google News and citing
the EVDOinfo article:
``The CradlePoint MBR95 is the successor to the popular MBR900, which was very popular amongst home users. The next generation NetBSD based MBR95 is designed to build onto what MBR900 users have enjoyed for years as well as add exciting new features. The NetBSD platform is the next generation platform and designed specifically to handle current and future Sprint WiMAX and Verizon LTE modem speeds. This is achieved through the new MIPS Processor, additional memory and RF engineering to reduce system noise. With the MBR900 system noise was a common problem with 4G LTE and WiMAX equipment and users must use a USB extension cable if they want the best performance out of their devices. After addressing these issues CradlePoint didn't stop and also decided to enhance the systems WiFi performance too. Also, the NetBSD interface offers a simplified user interfac, which allows users to easily configure their router via a basic mode and and an advanced mode for those that want to see all the features of their router.
The MBR95 features WiFi 'N' with a 2x2 internal antenna configuration, which allows it to be much more portable than the MBR900 that had two antennas the stuck up in the air. This also removes the concern of breaking your WiFi antenna and you still receive the same 100-150' (Real world tests) wireless range you'd receive with the MBR900. You'll also have the ability to do dual SSIDs (Wireless Network Name), which can allow you to create a business end for private users and a guest network for public users. This feature will also allow you to create multiple categories for different devices; in example: QoS (Quality of Service), VoIP and more. The new NetBSD is also the only platform that will allow users to use WiFi as WAN, which allows them to use another WiFi source as failover or connect their hotspot enabled smartphone. ''
See the
full article
for more information. The system is available
for about $110US in
the 3G Store,
there's also a longer list of features and techincal details.
Update:
Of course there's also
an official vendor page.
[Tags: cradlepoint, lte, mbr95, Products, wimax]
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