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[20170503] Adventures in Time, part 1: Interfacing an Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator to a Computer Running NetBSD
I've stumbled across this article via the Dragonfly BSD Digest: Tobias 'tnn' Nygren wrote about his aventurs in time, with part one on Interfacing an Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator to a Computer Running NetBSD.

This first article in a blog series starts by describing regular and oven ontrolled crystal oscillators, then goes on in describing the hardware setup and how it is connected to a computer. In this case, a Banana Pi running NetBSD/evbarm is used which (of course) also has its own clock. Oscilloscope measurements show differences in quality of signals and why an adapter is needed to adjust the system's clock frequency (including changes to the NetBSD kernel).

In the next post Tobias will describe how to calibrate the clock with NTP. Stay tuned and have an eye on his blog!

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[20161030] NetBSD 7.0.2 released
Why 7.0.2? Following NetBSD's release scheme, there are major releases (e.g. 7.0) with subsequent updates (e.g. 7.1). Those "major" release and their updates include both new features as well as bug fixes - the latter one again with and without security relevance. New code, new risks - as a result for getting updates, existing interfaces may change and lead to incompatibiltites. This may affect either binary compatibility between programs and their required shared libraries, as well - though rare - incompatible chances on the source code level.

NetBSD takes quite some effort to keep such incompatibilites low, yet they happen. The only real solutions is: no updates. "Never change a running system" is nice for availability, but it poses security risks. The time when a big server uptime was considered a sign of good system administration are gone. Today, a long update means the system (probably) runs outdated and as such vulnerable code.

So to solve the problem a compromise is needed: little updates, but crucial security updates do get done. Which is where NetBSD's "minor" release like NetBSD 7.0.2 come into play. With its set of changes, a number of external software packages got security-related updates (e.g. OpenSSL, NTP, BIND, X), and a smaller number of security related changes were also added, e.g. a race condition in mail.local(8), crashes in the Networking File System (NFS) and the native Fast File System (FFS) plus some platform-specific crashes on MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC64.

For more information on downloading and installation see the release announcement as well as the platform-specific install documentation, e.g. for NetBSD 7.0.2/arm64's INSTALL.html file.

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[20160416] NetBSD Security Advisories: ntp, libXfont, calendar
NetBSD has released a number of security advisories:
  • 2016-001: Multiple vulnerabilities in ntp daemon
  • 2016-002: BDF file parsing issues in libXfont
  • 2016-003: Privilege escalation in calendar(1)
See the advisories for more information on NetBSD releases that are and are not affected, the severity of the vulnerability as well as the date by which which NetBSD release branch was fixed.

The advisories also contain an abstract of the problem as well as in-depth technicals with solutions and workarounds. Go and have a look!

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[20140108] Two new NetBSD security advisories: ntpd, libXfont
Two new NetBSD security advisories have been published:
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2014-001: Stack buffer overflow in libXfont:

    ``A stack buffer overflow in parsing of BDF font files in libXfont was found that can easily be used to crash X programs using libXfont, and likely could be exploited to run code with the privileges of the X program (most nostably, the X server, commonly running as root).

    This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2013-6462.''

  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2014-002: ntpd used as DDoS amplifier:

    ``An administrative query function is getting used by attackers to use ntp servers as traffic amplifiers. The new version no longer offers this query option.''

See the advisories for technical details, workarounds and proper solutions to fix the problems. All this is fixed in NetBSD-current, patches are available for the NetBSD 5 and 6 releases with their corresponding development branches.

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Disclaimer: All opinion expressed here is purely my own. No responsibility is taken for anything.

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