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jschauma writes "Many sites are reporting that the next Sidekick LX 2009/Blade, from Danger (acquired by Microsoft early in 2008), is going to run NetBSD as their operating system, causing Microsoft's recruiters to look for NetBSD developers."

hubertf writes, "The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 releases are now available. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bugfixes, security updates, new drivers, and new features like support for Xen3 DomU. NetBSD 3.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 3.0 release branch which includes a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. See the NetBSD 3.1 Release Announcement and the NetBSD 3.0.2 Release Announcement for more information."

diegocgteleline.es writes "According to OSnews, Gregory McGarry benchmarked NetBSD 2.0 against FreeBSD 5.3 and found that NetBSD 2.0 surpasses FreeBSD 5.3 in most of benchmarks. The machine used for benchmarks is a 3 Ghz P4 so it doesn't reflect the improvements of FreeBSD 5.3 in the SMP arena, which is where their developers have put their efforts in the last years and where NetBSD is still using a "big-lock" model. Newsforge is also carrying a interview with some NetBSD developers about the technology behind NetBSD 2.0."

An anonymous reader writes "The NetBSD-PT User Group did an interview via e-mail with Hubert Feyrer. He has been a NetBSD developer for years and we wanted to know his views on NetBSD, his projects and some personal questions. He talks about the origin of pkgsrc and the g4u - g4l issue."

GMan00 writes "A flurry of BSD UNIX-related (Berkeley Software Distribution) books have hit the bookstores during the recent past, and more are on the way. From books specific to Secure Architectures with OpenBSD in April 2004 and the reissue of The Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating System for FreeBSD 5.x (expected in August 2004), to Michael Lucas' series of BSD Books from NoStarch Press, print documentation is certainly available for those interested in learning about the free, open source UNIX system which powers operations such as Yahoo! portal and Sendmail.org website, Verio and Pair hosting, not to mention web server survey site Netcraft. Dru Lavigne's BSD Hacks (O'Reilly and Associates, May 2004), is the latest book in these releases, and is an enormously useful resource for system administrators and end-users alike." Read on for the rest of George's review. BSD Hacks author Dru Lavigne pages 427 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 10 reviewer George ISBN 0596006799 summary A great array of hacks you can perform on your BSD box, many applicable to all the BSDs, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Darwin/OS X.

Dru writes the BSD Basics column on O'Reilly & Associates' OnLamp. Her clarity and fluid style are perfect for those looking to understand aspects of the BSD operating systems. I have had some email communications with Dru about various New York City *BSD User Group-related activities, and managed to speak with her several times at BSDCan this past May.

Like most computer nerds, Dru has a sense of humor. Unlike most, however, she's actually funny.

BSD Hacks is the first book that is almost solely focused on hacks for sysadmins, without boring you with the details for basic operating system installation and configuration that has been so well documented elsewhere. BSD Hacks is not just for sysadmins, though. Intermediate and advanced BSD users will also find the book an excellent tool. For those who find difficulty in BSD installs and other fundamentals, on the other hand, it's best to start with the FreeBSD Handbook, the NetBSD Guide or the OpenBSD FAQ.

There's lots of good hacks buried in the various BSD books, around the internet in different HOWTOs and tutorials. But BSD hacking is the sole purpose of BSD Hacks; there's no need to browse through install screens and overviews of TCP/IP before getting to the heart of the matter.

With 100 listed hacks, multiplied by an impressive level of detailed angles for each, Dru provides an array that demands the placement of this book right in your server room, not in a pile of "must-read-at-some-distant-point-in-the-future" texts.

The majority of hacks are applicable to all the BSDs, including Darwin and OS X, although some are specific to one BSD or another.

This review obviously can't list every hack, although you would be smart to sit and work through the book yourself over a weekend or two. But it is possible to provide a good flavor of BSD Hacks in brief. O'Reilly and Associates does give a good glimpse on their Sample Hacks page, but let's do a quick work through ourselves.

The first chapter is called "Customizing the User Environment," and is probably best for end-users looking to go beyond their first steps. But it does include some useful hacks, such as "Use an Interactive Shell" that certainly fit well into the arsenal of any sysadmin, not to mention Hack #12 "Use Multiple Screens on One Terminal."

The second chapter, "Dealing with Files and Filesystems" also contains gems for both end-users and sysadmins. The use of mtree, which maps a directory hierarchy, is mentioned as a tool for recovery. Later on in chapter 6, Dru details its use for making a hacked data integrity checker, thus filling the role often played by products such as Tripwire.

Another great tool Dru covers in the second chapter is g4u, a free ghosting program that gives you the ability to perform quick restores over ftp. Ghosting a drive image is an incredibly useful tool, whether it's about replicating servers or doing a quick reinstall and configuration when a server fails in an emergency.

Chapter 3 is entitled "Boot and Login Environments." It gives some hacks that aren't just for basic system administration, but also some useful security ones including changing your /etc/passwd file to Blowfish encryption and utilizing OPIE for one-time passwords, which is built into FreeBSD.

"Backup Up" is the focus of Chapter 4. It includes some very creative methods of dealing with maintaining that necessity, and also includes an excellent primer on Bacula, which is increasingly gaining prominence as a cross-platform backup system.

Chapter 5 covers "Network Hacks," and continues on educating a sysadmin. Included in this chapter is the tcpdump program, a vital tool for watching traffic flowing by your network interfaces.

There's a strong security focus in Chapter 6, entitled "Securing the System." While security hacks are sprinkled generously throughout the book, this chapter works with firewalling with IPF and PF, in addition to covering SSH and Snort. It also includes the earlier mentioned 'intrusion detection-lite' approach with mtree.

Chapter 7, "Going Beyond the Basics" explores scripting, analyzing dreaded buffer overflows and more. Dru also includes a bit on "Creating a Trade Show Demo," not something you'd expect documented in print anywhere, but nevertheless quite useful for anyone working for the BSDs at a conference.

Dru continues with "Keeping Up-to-Date" in Chapter 8, which includes useful details on upgrading and downgrading your installed ports.

The final chapter is "Grokking BSD." "Grok," as Dru comments, refers to the science fiction writer Heinlein's Martian phrase for having a "thorough understanding." Dru covers creating your own manual pages, dealing with custom patches, playing with dictionaries and more.

Certainly there are no walls between each chapter, as many of the hacks could be shifted around. All the more reason to work your way through the book from beginning to end.

One useful addition for this book could have been somehow denoting which of the BSDs (in some cases, it's all of them) to which each listed hack can be applied. Certainly not all are available to Darwin and Apple's OS X. And certainly there's no point in making the OpenBSD /etc/passwd file encrypted in Blowfish, since that is its default.

While many of the hacks are found somewhere in the manual pages, on some useful website, buried in another book or in the minds of some developer somewhere, they're not necessarily in the annals of official documentation. But there's no single book or site that provides the depth and breadth that Dru provides. She managed to tap into the thoughts of dozens of developers and sysadmins around the world, greatly enhancing the variety of hacks in this book.

As a side note, the scope of BSD Hacks isn't limited to just the BSD family. Many of these are likely applicable to Linux and the other UNIX systems. But with recent, impressive increases in the BSD install base, there's a good chance that you can access a BSD box somewhere.

Whether you're a sysadmin managing hundreds of servers, or a power user ready to go beyond the obvious, BSD Hacks belongs next to your CRT.

You can purchase BSD Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Futurepower(R) asks: "Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems. The file system cannot copy some of the files that are necessary to the operating system. If you don't have experience with Microsoft operating systems, you may find this amazing, but it is true; Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Microsoft's advice is to reinstall the operating system and all programs every time you want to move to a new or backup computer. For confirmation of this, see the 'Microsoft Policy Statement' in the article, The Microsoft Policy Concerning Disk Duplication of Windows XP Installations. Many industries use numerous programs; installing them all may take a week or even more. All of the disk image duplication programs I've used have problems, in my experience. What program do you use? What has been your experience with it? Can you recommend a program, or recommend staying away from one?"

"This policy of providing no way to backup and restore a fully installed system is impossible for corporations, of course. So Microsoft technical support representatives recommend sector-by-sector disk image duplication, even though it is against Microsoft policy. Copying each sector of a hard drive bypasses Microsoft's copy protection by which Microsoft punishes all users, even if they are honest.

Sometimes Microsoft technical support recommends using 'third-party' disk image programs. For example, sometimes support representatives recommend using Symantec Ghost.

All of the disk image duplication programs I've used have problems, in my experience. So, here's a question: What program do you use? What has been your experience with it? Can you recommend a program, or recommend staying away from one?

Here are my experiences:

Symantec Ghost sometimes fails with non-specific error messages. Uninstalling Ghost does not uninstall all the Ghost software. Symantec is one of the companies using copy protection, so using Symantec products may be a case of jumping from the Microsoft frying pan to the Symantec copy protection fire; also, you have no assurance that the copy protection will not become worse in the future.

PowerQuest DriveImage and DeployCenter have an uncertain future. PowerQuest was bought by Symantec. This was after PowerQuest released DriveImage 7 with problems. The sale cannot be a happy event for those who spent hundreds of dollars on DeployCenter.

I've tried Acronis True Image. I've had better luck with it than with Symantec or PowerQuest products. However, like the others, it sometime gives non-specific error messages that say something like, 'I've failed, and I'm not going to tell you how to troubleshoot the problem.'

Fred Langa, publisher of LangaList, recommends BootIt. I have no experience with it.

I haven't tried g4u, free, open source software provided under the BSD license g4u has the drawback that it writes only through FTP. There is no way to write to a network drive or a CD-R.

It's disgusting; people just want to make functional backups, but to do it they are dragged over the coals."

junyoung writes "Hubert Feyrer released the latest version of g4u ("ghost for unix"), a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM image that allows one to easily clone PC harddisks by using FTP. Since it reads the disk bit by bit, it can create an image of any operating system and any file system. Besides, it's free (under BSD style license)."

hubertf writes: "Last weekend, R-KOM and the University of Applied Science (Fachhochschule, FH) Regensburg, Germany, took their share of the Regensburg city marathon by putting a video and image of each runner reaching the goal on the Internet. A cluster of 45 machines from the Fachhochschule Regensburg, each running the NetBSD operating system computed over five thousand films. The cluster machines were operating on a common NFS storage, performing two steps. First, the video stream provided in MPEG format was split into single pictures, then a six seconds long movie was assembled for each runner reaching the goal, showing his personal run through the goal. Overall computing time was about 20h in which the five hours of video material was split into 670.000 images, that were then re-assembled into 5500 MPEG streams of about 1 megabyte each. A short english-language description of the Marathon Cluster is available, and there's also a german language version which has many details on the setup and operation of the cluster."

hubertf writes: "Last weekend, R-KOM and the University of Applied Science (Fachhochschule, FH) Regensburg, Germany, took their share of the Regensburg city marathon by putting a video and image of each runner reaching the goal on the Internet. A cluster of 45 machines from the Fachhochschule Regensburg, each running the NetBSD operating system computed over five thousand films. The cluster machines were operating on a common NFS storage, performing two steps. First, the video stream provided in MPEG format was split into single pictures, then a six seconds long movie was assembled for each runner reaching the goal, showing his personal run through the goal. Overall computing time was about 20h in which the five hours of video material was split into 670.000 images, that were then re-assembled into 5500 MPEG streams of about 1 megabyte each. A short english-language description of the Marathon Cluster is available, and there's also a german language version which has many details on the setup and operation of the cluster."

hubertf writes: "Last weekend, R-KOM and the University of Applied Science (Fachhochschule, FH) Regensburg, Germany, took their share of the Regensburg city marathon by putting a video and image of each runner reaching the goal on the Internet. A cluster of 45 machines from the Fachhochschule Regensburg, each running the NetBSD operating system computed over five thousand films. The cluster machines were operating on a common NFS storage, performing two steps. First, the video stream provided in MPEG format was split into single pictures, then a six seconds long movie was assembled for each runner reaching the goal, showing his personal run through the goal. Overall computing time was about 20h in which the five hours of video material was split into 670.000 images, that were then re-assembled into 5500 MPEG streams of about 1 megabyte each. A short english-language description of the Marathon Cluster is available, and there's also a german language version which has many details on the setup and operation of the cluster."

hubertf writes "plex86 is now works on a second Open Source operating system. So far plex86 only supported Linux as host platform, and thanks to Frank van der Linden of Wasabi Systems, it now also works on the i386 port of the NetBSD multi-platform operating system. Tested operating systems include FreeDOS beta 4, MS-DOS 6.22, Red Hat 6 Linux and NetBSD 1.5. See the NetBSD site for more information.

Nearly a year ago, hemos posted the news that the indefatigable NetBSD project had ported NetBSD to the Hitachi Super-H microprocessor which powers the Dreamcast. Now, hubertf writes: "The port of the NetBSD operating system to Sega's Dreamcast game console is reaching a state where it's near to single user mode. Utilizing the NetBSD/evbsh3 port's simple structure and the fact that it supports both big and little endian architectures as well as the general clean design of the NetBSD operating system helped for this port. Device drivers for the game pad, keyboard, etc. are next on the to-do list of Saitoh Masanobu, who works on this port.

See below for a sample dmesg output,

Please stay tuned for more information!

- Hubert Feyrer, The NetBSD Project

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000
The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.5_ALPHA (DREAMCAST) #8: Fri Jul 14 01:42:14 JST 2000

msaitoh@vslock.xxx.yyy:/var/sources/src/sys/arch/evbsh3/compile/DREAMCAST
total memory = 16384 KB
avail memory = 12988 KB
using 230 buffers containing 920 KB of memory
mainbus0 (root)
shb0 at mainbus0
scif0 at shb0 port 0xffe80000-0xffe8000f irq 12
scif0: console
biomask c0000000 netmask c0000000 ttymask e0000000
md0: internal 1440K image area
rn_init: radix functions require max_keylen be set
boot device: root on md0a dumps on md0b
cannot mount root, error = 22
root device (default md0a):"

Of course, what you do with a Dreamcast running NetBSD is up to you. Errr ... just what could you do with a Dreamcast running NetBSD?

After our earlier story about this, hubertf writes: "Soren S. Jorvang has done a port of NetBSD to the Cobalt Networks MIPS-based Qube and RaQ Microservers which is now available. Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux, and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system on it." More information from the NetBSD/cobalt ports page.

hubertf writes, "Two new channels have been created using Rich Site Summary files, an XML dialect, to provide NetBSD-related news to content providers and their users. The files are parsed by news services today to retrieve information, and re-distribute it in their reader forums and/or sent out via mail directly to your cell phone, if you decide so. Both general NetBSD news and news related to the NetBSD Packages Collection are now available not only from the NetBSD Web site, but also from the sites listed at http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/rss.html. Now all you Slashdot fans can get the latest NetBSD news without leaving /. for a second. 8-) "