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BSD Forums writes "FreeBSD's Dag-Erling Smorgrav reports the successful cross-world build of the amd64 tree (A tinderbox is system designed to test builds and report failure. In the FreeBSD case, tinderboxes build world [the base system], GENERIC, and if applicable LINT kernels. Dag-Erling Smorgrav currently runs all the tinderboxes by cross-building from i386)."

BSD Forums writes "FreeBSD's Dag-Erling Smorgrav reports the successful cross-world build of the amd64 tree (A tinderbox is system designed to test builds and report failure. In the FreeBSD case, tinderboxes build world [the base system], GENERIC, and if applicable LINT kernels. Dag-Erling Smorgrav currently runs all the tinderboxes by cross-building from i386)."

Dan writes "The GNOME Development Series Desktop 2.3.2 "Little Hero" has been released and ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors. This release is an UNSTABLE development series snapshot. It is intended for testing and hacking purposes ONLY. On FreeBSD, featuring gnopernicus, the FreeBSD GNOME team presents this development snapshot as GNOME 2.3. Testers should checkout the ports module per these instructions and download the new marcusmerge script to aid in the upgrade."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Downloads for i386 are available here."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Downloads for i386 are available here."

BSD Forums writes "The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.1 "Daddy Walrus", is now available. FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has ported this release (2.3) on FreeBSD and is looking for your testing help. Also, the KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1.2, a maintenance release for the third generation of this UNIX desktop."

Dan writes "Stacy Olivas has put together a hack of PicoBSD .500 using the FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE-p7 source tree. After seeing WarLinux and how it used an embedded version of Linux to get the job done, he started wondering if PicoBSD could be used for the same thing. He calls it WarBSD. Its main intended use is for systems administrators that want to audit and evaluate thier wireless network installations."

Just Some Guy writes "I recently received a promotional copy of Roderick W. Smith's "FreeBSD: The Complete Reference". I was pretty skeptical at first - it's my nature - but was pleasantly surprised at the range and depth of information presented in a very accessible format. While not ready to supplant Greg Lehey's "The Complete FreeBSD", it's certainly a worthwhile read for new and moderately-experienced users." Read on for Just Some Guy's full review. FreeBSD: The Complete Reference author Roderick W. Smith pages 869 publisher The McGraw-Hill Companies rating 9 out of 10 reviewer Kirk Strauser (Just Some Guy) ISBN 0072224096 summary (Most) everything you need to know about FreeBSD

Overview

This is a large book. At 869 pages, not including copies of the GPL and BSD License, it packs some serious heft (it weighs slightly more than three pounds).

It is divided into six main parts, which are further divided into 32 (!) chapters. The sections are:

1. FreeBSD Installation: Hardware requirements, installation instructions, and a general overview.

2. Basic System Administration: Partitioning, startup procedure, file management, printer setup, user management, software installation, kernel configuration, and X.

3. Network Configuration: Introduction to networking, dial-ups, client/server principles, basic firewalling.

4. Servers: In-depth explanation of file, mail, web, and shell servers, plus an overview of DNS, NTP, DHCP, and other random services.

5. Common User Programs: Introduction to KDE and GNOME. An overview of various network clients and office software. A short tutorial on The GIMP. The state of multimedia and games on FreeBSD.

6. System Maintenance: The basics of system monitoring. How to upgrade the OS and installed software. An overview of system security. How to compile software. Basic scripting. Troubleshooting and how to get help.

The Good

This book is an excellent starting point for people new to FreeBSD, or even to Unix-like systems in general. Each of the wide range of topics is covered in a reasonable amount of detail. Mr. Smith claims to have been working in the field for quite a few years, and it shows in the way each part of the OS is presented as a component of the whole. This isn't a "cookbook"; readers are introduced to each subject in a way that encourages them to make their own configuration decisions.

I was unable to find any factual errors, and I certainly looked for them. The author and proofreaders did a good job of checking their information before going to print. Since my copy was from the first printing, I'm especially impressed.

New users, in particular, will appreciate the hand-holding approach of the earlier chapters on installation and basic configuration. More experience administrators should be able to find enough new information about rather routine subjects to keep them interested.

Of particular interest was the almost complete lack of FreeBSD advocacy in the book. The introduction features a remarkably even-handed discussion of its relative strengths and weaknesses compared to other Unix and non-Unix operating systems. I greatly respect the author's decision to weigh the alternatives fairly and let the reader form his own opinion.

The Bad

FreeBSD: The Complete Reference is, unsurprisingly, a new entry in Osborne's "Complete Reference" series. As such, it's fairly comparable in size, layout, and scope to other books in the series such as Herbert Schildt's C++: The Complete Reference (my favorite C++ text). That's a pretty high standard to live up to, and I began my first pass through the book with a very critical eye.

My only real complaint is that, despite the title, this is not a "complete reference." Although The GIMP enjoys its own sub-chapter, the book makes no mention of certain high-profile features such as Vinum (FreeBSD's logical volume manager) or jails (chroot on steroids). It's obviously not possible to document every single component of the entire OS, but the name would seem to claim exactly that. Of course, even though FreeBSD: The Desktop Reference or FreeBSD: Reference For Users might be more appropriate, those would violate the series' naming convention. Still, don't be fooled by the title.

Although less important, every user has their own idiosyncratic ways of accomplishing certain tasks, and I tend to get distracted by recommendations that are counter to my preferred methods. Having said that, Mr. Smith makes some strange recommendations, such as editing the passwd file and compiling the password database afterward by hand rather than using vipw. His system certainly works, but I can imagine a new user scratching their head in puzzlement at the amount of work necessary to change their name.

The Ugly

Any book of this size and scope will have a few minor quirks, and this is no exception. For instance, the author needed to use several domain names as examples throughout the book. Rather than using the traditional "example.com," he decided to use his own creations. That in itself is no problem, except that he and his publishers have not registered those domains for their own use. I can only imagine the surprise when a curious newbie tries to access one of the hostnames in a web browser and finds that a prankster has register the domain and used it to mirror goatse.cx.

A more serious lapse, in my opinion, was the decision to include an installable copy of FreeBSD 5.0 on the CD that comes with the book. Unfortunately, freebsd.org refers to that version as a "new technology release," and it suffers from a rather long list of installation and stability problems. Some day in the future, the 5.x series will be considered stable and ready for use on production systems, but that's still a while off. I sincerely hope that no would-be new users become disillusioned with their newly-installed systems and give up on FreeBSD as a slow and unstable OS. Despite the drawbacks, though, I can understand the author's desire to focus on the new 5.x series instead of the more stable but older 4.x line. This book was published in 2003, and I doubt that he wanted to have to publish a second edition detailing the new release less than one year after initial release.

Summary

This is a good book with a lot of solid information for new and experienced users. It may have a few minor problems, but it is a well-written and approachable reference that should make a valuable addition to any FreeBSD administrator's bookshelf. I would recommend it highly to anyone migrating from other Unix-like systems, finding themselves in charge of a small network, or wanting to see what the fuss is all about. If you're a new user, though, do yourself a favor: download and install FreeBSD version 4.8 from http://www.freebsd.org/ instead of installing the copy on the book's CD.

You can purchase FreeBSD: the Complete Reference from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

BSDForums writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has posted the schedule for the Release of FreeBSD 5.1 late spring. FreeBSD-5 stable roadmap, announced earlier, outlines the future of FreeBSD-5 stable releases, specifically 5.1 and 5.2."

BSDForums writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has posted the schedule for the Release of FreeBSD 5.1 late spring. FreeBSD-5 stable roadmap, announced earlier, outlines the future of FreeBSD-5 stable releases, specifically 5.1 and 5.2."

Gentu writes "OSNews features an ultra interesting and in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core team (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). They discuss issues from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even... re-unification of the BSDs."

Dan writes "The first of the GNOME 2.4 development releases is now available. Code named 'Mighty Atom,' this FreeBSD release includes quite a few new proposed modules. Those wanting to test this release should checkout the ``ports'' module per these instructions. Be sure to download the ``marcusmerge'' script from the same page. This script will help you merge the GNOME development ports tree into your main ports tree."

drdink writes "A few weeks ago, PAE (Physical Address Extension) support was added to FreeBSD 5-CURRENT. This allows memory above 4GB to be used normally by the kernel and userland on the x86 platform. Jake Burkholder, the man behind PAE, is now looking for users to help him test this new feature. In his message to the freebsd-current mailing list, Jake describes the current caveats to PAE and also says 'We'd like this feature to be solid for 5.1-RELEASE, so I'm hoping there are people out there with systems with more than 4G of ram that are willing to test it.' This, along with other features make FreeBSD 5-STABLE look very promising."

craig2787 writes "FreeBSD developer Peter Wemm has successfully booted FreeBSD on a real AMD ClawHammer CPU, in both 64- and 32-bit modes. Original posting to the -current mailing list is here."

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD's fast as is, but it appears that folks over there are going the extra mile to make sure that it continues to be the top dog according to this recent announcement. With 5.1 promising to have native threads and 5.1 only a few months out, it is really good to see performance being taken seriously."

numbski asks: "As a systems administrator, I find myself moving from machine to machine to machine on a daily basis. I happen to be a FreeBSD/MacOS X nut, so on a given day I move from my 17" iMac at home, to my 12" Powerbook at work, to any one of my 16 FreeBSD Servers. That's not to mention any of the Win2k Servers that have Cygwin loaded. All of that said, there is a longing in me to have a simple $HOME that all of my systems use and understand. I've considered the Knoppix way of dealing with this problem using a USB key device from this previous Slashdot article, however I don't know how many systems I could get away with consistently having my USB device picked up and used correctly without scripting changes to fstab, not to mention the issue of choosing a filesystem that just about every OS will recognize: FAT32. Windows is going to be unhappy no matter what I'm afraid, as it doesn't understand symlinking. c:\Documents and Settings\$USER can't just be moved off to another volume. The one glimmer of hope I have is this article on ftpfs and webdavfs. Using these one should be able to set up a single, persistent home that follows you from machine to machine over the internet. I guess I would like to know how others have gone about setting up a mobile $HOME. I look forward to having all of my preferences, dotfiles, and bookmarks follow me around."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."

Barrett Lyon writes "The FreeBSD Project just submitted this security advisory out to the masses: "FreeBSD-SA-03:07.sendmail, a second sendmail header parsing buffer overflow." It seems that the overflow is not limited to FreeBSD and that there is currently no workaround "other than not using sendmail." Yet another good reason to run Qmail!"

Barrett Lyon writes "The FreeBSD Project just submitted this security advisory out to the masses: "FreeBSD-SA-03:07.sendmail, a second sendmail header parsing buffer overflow." It seems that the overflow is not limited to FreeBSD and that there is currently no workaround "other than not using sendmail." Yet another good reason to run Qmail!"

honold writes "just read this on deadly.org (from Pyun YongHyeon): "Hello there. I have ported pf to FreeBSD 5.0 Currently it works well, though many nice features of pf not tested. I have ported to make FreeBSD users know there is an another excellent stateful packet filter with BSD license. URL is the following. ftp://ftp.kr.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-kr/misc/pf_fr eebsd_0.3.tar.bz2 Thanks." netbsd has a port as well Where are you, Linux?"

Dan writes "Joe Marcus Clarke announces the availability of Mozilla 1.3 port for FreeBSD. Windows, MacOSX and Linux versions of Mozilla 1.3 were originally released on March 13. Although the port is scheduled to be committed as part of FreeBSD 4.8 Release, diffs for 1.3 are readily available. Galeon2 diff has also been updated for the Mozilla port. Key enhancements include junk mail filtering and API for rich text editing."

dnaumov writes "miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD is a great guide, which explains in great detail, how you can create a truly small installation of FreeBSD on your system, completely by yourself. There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many. The guide will walk you through things like creating the directory tree inside a chroot jail, rebuilding the bootloader and everything else needed to create a FreeBSD install that takes just around 20 MB of space."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 for i386, he says that the alpha build is in progress. You can download 4.8 RC2 mini iso, install iso's, etc. from FreeBSD ftp site or from one of the mirror sites."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 for i386, he says that the alpha build is in progress. You can download 4.8 RC2 mini iso, install iso's, etc. from FreeBSD ftp site or from one of the mirror sites."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 for i386, he says that the alpha build is in progress. You can download 4.8 RC2 mini iso, install iso's, etc. from FreeBSD ftp site or from one of the mirror sites."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Scott Long provides the Jan-Feb 2003 bi-monthly FreeBSD status report. Highlights include focus on making 5.0 faster via more fine-grained locking, adding high-end features like memort support for i386. FreeBSD 5.1 is expected to ship in late May, early June, with 5.2 following end of summer with significant speed and stability improvements over 5.0. FreeBSD 4.8 release due shortly adds XFree86 4.3.0 and intel hyperthreading support. Major FreeBSD project statuses are also provided in this report."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokley indicates in his email that the latest FreeBSD 4.8 release will need to be postponed until March 24 in order to include suggested fixes related to the XFree86 4.3.0 port. After a complete package rebuild, they plan to release FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 first. Murray requests everyone to continue testing the XFree86 4.3.0 port to ensure a quality release."

drdink writes "The long awaited FreeBSD/Java port has hit beta. The port was committed yesterday afternoon by Alexey Zelkin. 'This is complete and close to production quality native JDK with both working client and server native JVMs. Local micro benchmarks shown very little difference between Linux and FreeBSD JVMs in speed.' And more importantly, 'we are very close to passing of Sun TCK tests. Currently about 20 of >27000 tests are known to be broken (tests were run at -STABLE).'"

Dan writes "The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD."

Dan writes "Hidetoshi Shimokawa has added new functionality to Firewire scheduled for FreeBSD 4.8 release. New features include built-in DV support, improved recovery process & timeout stability and Write/ioctl support for /dev/fwmem0. He has not tested this on PAL and is looking for volunteers."

SlashChick writes "From a discussion on the freebsd-chat mailing list, it appears that one of the FreeBSD core developers, Matt Dillon, has been barred from committing any changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Dillon was one of the developers 'responsible for making FreeBSD 4.x the most rugged and stress-proof free operating system in existence,' and also contributed to fixing the Linux VM. Unfortunately, there has been little explanation from the FreeBSD core team about why Dillon was thrown out, leading to speculation and worries about the future of the FreeBSD kernel. Does the Slashdot community have any more insight into this situation? Would someone from the FreeBSD team care to elaborate and assuage our worries?" CD Update: Greg Lehey from the core team has infact elaborated in this comment.

SlashChick writes "From a discussion on the freebsd-chat mailing list, it appears that one of the FreeBSD core developers, Matt Dillon, has been barred from committing any changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Dillon was one of the developers 'responsible for making FreeBSD 4.x the most rugged and stress-proof free operating system in existence,' and also contributed to fixing the Linux VM. Unfortunately, there has been little explanation from the FreeBSD core team about why Dillon was thrown out, leading to speculation and worries about the future of the FreeBSD kernel. Does the Slashdot community have any more insight into this situation? Would someone from the FreeBSD team care to elaborate and assuage our worries?" CD Update: Greg Lehey from the core team has infact elaborated in this comment.

SlashChick writes "From a discussion on the freebsd-chat mailing list, it appears that one of the FreeBSD core developers, Matt Dillon, has been barred from committing any changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Dillon was one of the developers 'responsible for making FreeBSD 4.x the most rugged and stress-proof free operating system in existence,' and also contributed to fixing the Linux VM. Unfortunately, there has been little explanation from the FreeBSD core team about why Dillon was thrown out, leading to speculation and worries about the future of the FreeBSD kernel. Does the Slashdot community have any more insight into this situation? Would someone from the FreeBSD team care to elaborate and assuage our worries?" CD Update: Greg Lehey from the core team has infact elaborated in this comment.

SlashChick writes "From a discussion on the freebsd-chat mailing list, it appears that one of the FreeBSD core developers, Matt Dillon, has been barred from committing any changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Dillon was one of the developers 'responsible for making FreeBSD 4.x the most rugged and stress-proof free operating system in existence,' and also contributed to fixing the Linux VM. Unfortunately, there has been little explanation from the FreeBSD core team about why Dillon was thrown out, leading to speculation and worries about the future of the FreeBSD kernel. Does the Slashdot community have any more insight into this situation? Would someone from the FreeBSD team care to elaborate and assuage our worries?" CD Update: Greg Lehey from the core team has infact elaborated in this comment.

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD developer Terry Lambert, in a recent posting to the 'freebsd-hackers' mailing list, mentioned that he'd tuned a FreeBSD 4.4 box with 4GB of RAM to achieve 1,603,127 simultaneous IP connections, and goes on to say: 'As far as I know, I hold the single machine connection record for an x86 box.' This is an impressive achievement any way you look at it (though it begs the question of whether or not the box had any resources left to actually do anything with those connections...), and it speaks well of both FreeBSD's capabilities and Terry's skills and knowledge. I'm curious, though, if anyone has approached, matched, or exceeded that number elsewhere?"

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 Bi-Monthly status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release, Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 Bi-Monthly status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release, Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 Bi-Monthly status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release, Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 Bi-Monthly status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release, Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

Pine Digital Security announced a FreeBSD kernel leak, found when auditing a customer. The leak can be exploited to panic the server or elevate privileges. FreeBSD swiftly updated CVS, a security advisory will probably follow. Both the -RELEASE branch and -CURRENT branch are vulnerable.

essdodson writes "Scott Long of the FreeBSD release engineering team has posted that FreeBSD 5.0 RC2 has been compiled and should be available shortly. Check it out and help make this the best FreeBSD release so far. The updated release schedule lists Jan 17, 2003 as the anticipated release date."

essdodson writes "Scott Long of the FreeBSD release engineering team has posted that FreeBSD 5.0 RC2 has been compiled and should be available shortly. Check it out and help make this the best FreeBSD release so far. The updated release schedule lists Jan 17, 2003 as the anticipated release date."