Slashdot Mirror

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

The link for the first article incorrectly points to the second article - it should point here.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Subjective reasoning is not evidence. Sorry, try again.

The reality of what tends to happen is that very few people ever actually read the source code of OS products, much less modify it. And if the bug happens to get past the original developers, there is very little chance that a stranger to the code will find it. Thus we come back to the traditional model of reporting "I'm having this problem" and the developers responding, "Sorry, that's a bug. We'll fix it when we get a chance." (Actually, developers are rarely that polite, but you get the idea.)

Reference:
http://www.neilgunton.com/open_source_myths/#under _the_hood
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default .asp?cmd=show&ixPost=139833
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/security/2004/09/16/op en_source_security_myths.html

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

You may be thinking of systrace.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'. -- Requiem for the FUD

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Scaffold is vulnerable, input any data like

<script>alert('I have been fooled')</script>

and when you see the data it will happily execute that code.

The bug tracking system they use is also full of XSS holes. Browse their database and you risk giving your login/password to anybody.

Even on the tutorials, they teach people to write XSS vulnerable software. From the first tutorial:

...
<input id="recipe_title" name="recipe[title]" size="30"
type="text" value="<%= @recipe.title %>" />
...

The user only has to input

"/> <script> alert('fooled again')</script>

for the title, and presto, he can get all other user's cookies

All the other tutorials have the same vulnerability.

The developers don't care about these. Some people even activelly oppose fixing them. I can only imagine what else is in there. I wouldn't touch ruby on rails with a 10 foot pole for anything where security mattered.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
W hat's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Look here. It's for FreeBSD, but it works the same way under many Linux distributions. You can either use a calculator or print a list.

"The better SCM initiative was established to encourage improved OSS/FS SCM systems, by discussing and comparing them. Among other things, see their comparison file. Zooko has written a short review of OSS/FS SCM tools. Shlomi Fish's OnLamp.com article compares various CM systems as does his Evolution of a Revision Control User. The arch folks have developed a comparison of arch with Subversion and CVS (obviously, they like arch). Another pro-arch discussion is Why the Future is Distributed. A pro-subversion discussion is available at Dispelling Subversion FUD. Slashdot had a discussion when Subversion 1.0 was announced. Kernel traffic posted a summary of a technical discussion about BitKeeper. Brad Appleton has collected lots of interesting SCM links. jemfinch has some interesting essays about SCMs (he uses the term VCS), including why he thinks the approach to branches used by Darcs, Arch, and Bazaar-ng is a poor one. A brief overview of SCM systems that can run on Linux is available."

There are lots of OSS/FS software configuration management (SCM) tools. CVS, Subversion (SVN), and GNU arch get lots of press, but there are many others such as Aegis, CVSNT, Darcs, FastCST, OpenCM, Vesta, Codeville, Bazaar and Bazaar-NG.

You might also take a peek at my paper Software Configuration Management (SCM) Security.

All I now need is the Postgres-R (replication) stuff to work out of the box (like it does for mysql). I don't know if transaction speeds might be hit by replication or not.

From the interview:

One other question that I would like to answer is replication, because I get this question all the time: unlike some other database systems within PostgreSQL, replication is an add-in. It's a separate application. That isn't an accident. It's done on purpose.

There are several reasons for that. One is that replication is actually not a single feature. It is a set of four or five different related implementations, which serve four or five different needs. As a result, we don't want to bundle one particular kind of replication with the main database, because that's not suitable to all users. Our leading replication project, in terms of popularity, is something called Slony-I, lead by Jan Wieck, who is also on the Core Team. That has actually been quite popular as one of the leading master-slave high availability replication systems of any kind. Jan is currently working on Slony-II, which will be synchronous multi-master replication for database server clusters. Based on the pace of his past work, I would anticipate that it would be available in about a year or so. But don't look for that information in the main release notes for PostgreSQL, because it will always be a separate parallel project. [emphasis added]

In other words, just use Slony-I. From the overview:

Slony-I was born from an idea to create a replication system that was not tied to a specific version of PostgreSQL, and allowed to be started and stopped on an existing database with out the need for a dump/reload cycle.

Slony-I is a "master to multiple slaves" replication system with cascading and slave promotion. The big picture for the development of Slony-I is a master-slave system that includes all features and capabilities needed to replicate large databases to a reasonably limited number of slave systems. Slony-I is a system for data centers and backup sites, where the normal mode of operation is that all nodes are available.

See also the basic documentation. For more technical details dewnload the design document (PDF). For an excellent introduction make sure to read Introducing Slony by A. Elein Mustain on ONLamp:

Slony-I, the first iteration of the project, is an asynchronous replicator of a single master database to multiple replicas, which in turn may have cascaded replicas. It will include all features required to replicate large databases with a reasonable number of replicas. Jan has targeted Slony-I toward data centers and backup sites, implying that all nodes in the network are always available.

The master is the primary database with which the applications interact. Replicas are replications, or copies of the primary database. Since the master database is always changing, data replication is the system that enables the updates of secondary, or replica, databases as the master database updates. In synchronous replication systems, the master and the replica are consistent exact copies. The client does not receive a commit until all replicas have the transaction in question. Asynchronous replication loosens that binding and allows the replica to copy transactions from the master, rolling forward, at its own pace. The server issues a commit to the master client based on the state of the master database tra

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

As the sibling post mentioned, I'd love to see an article on what you've done. Maybe you could even get O'Reilly's onlamp site to publish it. Or just throw it up somewhere :).

Stateful TCP normalization (prevent uptime calculation and NATdetection)

MF: Stateful TCP normalization is a set of techniques to remove or resolve ambiguities in network traffic. One of the techniques most important to the average user is TCP timestamp modulation. Most operating systems with high performance networking include a timestamp in every TCP packet.

Since that timer starts ticking when the machine was booted, a server (or anyone in between) can look at a packet and know the machine's uptime. An attacker could look at a machine's responses to know it hasn't been rebooting since the last patch came out so it is probably still vulnerable. Alternately a stingy internet service provider that charges extra for home networks can look at all of the timestamps coming from a link and count the number of NATted machines by the number of unique timestamps. The PF firewall can scramble both uptime calculation and NAT detection by modulating the timestamps with a random number. There are a variety of other normalization techniques done and others still in development.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2004/04/15/pf_deve lopers.html

• Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails. This article steps through the development of a web application using Rails. It won't teach you how to program in Ruby, but if you already know another object-oriented programming language, you should have no problem following along (and at the end you can find links on learning Ruby).

As a result, you will become a happier, more spiritually enlightened person. No, really!

I'd be more inclined to using Ruby on Rails.

I was impressed with what I saw when... a lot of bang for very little code.

>I never found adequate documentation for how to deal with it (most seemed to assume I already knew what I was doing).

I would suggest this excellent trilogy of articles about FreeBSD ports:
Ports Tricks
portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports
Together with the ports chapter on the FreeBSD Handbook, they should pretty much cover anything you'd need to know to work with ports - they did for me.
And btw, as another poster already pointed out, the BSD section of Onlamp is a *great* source for BSD technical info.

I've also heard great things about NetBSD's pkgsrc system - I have to try it out some day.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

>I never found adequate documentation for how to deal with it (most seemed to assume I already knew what I was doing).

I would suggest this excellent trilogy of articles about FreeBSD ports:
Ports Tricks
portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports
Together with the ports chapter on the FreeBSD Handbook, they should pretty much cover anything you'd need to know to work with ports - they did for me.
And btw, as another poster already pointed out, the BSD section of Onlamp is a *great* source for BSD technical info.

I've also heard great things about NetBSD's pkgsrc system - I have to try it out some day.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

>I never found adequate documentation for how to deal with it (most seemed to assume I already knew what I was doing).

I would suggest this excellent trilogy of articles about FreeBSD ports:
Ports Tricks
portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports
Together with the ports chapter on the FreeBSD Handbook, they should pretty much cover anything you'd need to know to work with ports - they did for me.
And btw, as another poster already pointed out, the BSD section of Onlamp is a *great* source for BSD technical info.

I've also heard great things about NetBSD's pkgsrc system - I have to try it out some day.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

>I never found adequate documentation for how to deal with it (most seemed to assume I already knew what I was doing).

I would suggest this excellent trilogy of articles about FreeBSD ports:
Ports Tricks
portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports
Together with the ports chapter on the FreeBSD Handbook, they should pretty much cover anything you'd need to know to work with ports - they did for me.
And btw, as another poster already pointed out, the BSD section of Onlamp is a *great* source for BSD technical info.

I've also heard great things about NetBSD's pkgsrc system - I have to try it out some day.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

I haven't tried them all, that's my disclaimer. But I did come to FreeBSD after 5 years with Linux (mostly Mandrake and RedHat). I'll never go back to Linux. The ports system alone rocks my face off.

Some early gotchas for me: I hated the default shell, I was used to Mandrake setting up bash with colorized ls commands and vim being installed with syntax coloring. I had to learn to do all that from scratch. But once you get it going it's as easy as installing the ports and then modifying your .cshrc and .vimrc files.

The other gotcha was the whole system startup area. FreeBSD has you enable the script (chmod 755, rename) *AND* put a variable in /etc/rc.conf. That sometimes messes me up. There are no runlevels in FreeBSD.

Installation isn't as slick as with the Linuxes, but once you get used to /stand/sysinstall you can handle it.

So, take the plunge. My recommendation is FreeBSD. It's rock-solid. But you couldn't go wrong with the others.

Also, visit Onlamp's BSD Devcenter. It has a ton of great articles for BSD novices and experts. There's an article on there right now called FreeBSD for Linux Users which covers many of the core issues for someone like yourself.

OnLAPP! Finally, the Life of O'Reilly becomes worth imagining.

Slony for PostgreSQL.

Actually, yes, yes you can

The other links posted are probably more useful (and practical) but this has a link to a file with all US zip codes and their lat/lon. They also have a simple PHP script for putting it into a database. I'm using it for my site and it seems pretty comprehensive, though you may have to change the script around some to get all the zip codes in depending on your version of PHP.

Since the arrival of Mac OS X, BSD has become the biggest desktop UNIX variant on the planet. Yes, even bigger than Linux.
Jordan Hubbards' keynote

If you take Linux as a unique movement, then it is bigger than FreeBSD, but if you take each distribution (per Netcraft's Linux OS detection statistics), then FreeBSD has more users than Red Hat.
Advocacy speech by Murray Stokely

ONLamp.com: Inside EuroBSDCon 2004

Stephen Fishman's Open Source Licenses Are Not All The Same divides the most popular licences into four categories. You might find it useful.

What's my conclusion? SPF and caller ID does two things, which I would do if I were writing spam software:

1. Encourages spammers to publish SPF records (and they have).

If I were a spammer, I would publish SPF records for my throwaway domains to allow the places I'm spamming from. There's a nice site about SPF that tells me how to do it :) The biggest SPF adopters I see on my site (from No. 2 above) are spammers.

2. Encourages spammers not to spam from SPF-publishing addresses.

(And don't forget, this is what AOL and MSN *really* care about.)

Have you ever seen a site using the Slash Wiki plugin?

It's news to me, but apparently Oreilly has an article about it. Alas, no pictures.

-jim

Why would you pick a name that has already been taken?

Notwithstanding the rather unfortunate name this project has a serious potential.

"Does the new version look legal?"

Of course it looks legal, but is it enough to avoid lawsuits? Very unlikely. MIT is the very place where the hacker culture were born, so obviously it is the first place for RIAA to keep an eye on.

The Link (spaces excluded)

> People can write some scary code and then
> just blame it on the engine.

Yup. There's a really good article by Stephane Faroult on OnLamp about writing better SQL... it's right here.

After reading that article, I went through some code I'd written and found some places where I was using DISTINCT incorrectly in exactly the way he described.

Ports Tricks
Portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports

Besides being well written, they contain a couple of hacks that turned my port maintenance tasks into piece of cake :-)

Ports Tricks
Portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports

Besides being well written, they contain a couple of hacks that turned my port maintenance tasks into piece of cake :-)

Ports Tricks
Portupgrade
Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports

Besides being well written, they contain a couple of hacks that turned my port maintenance tasks into piece of cake :-)

Coming soon: Dashboard and Beagle.

Class 4 was a hands-on session which introduced the topic of PHP debugging : see for example, the recent O'Reilly article on debugging.

A
(anchor or link)
The A tag lets you define anchors and links. An anchor defines a place in a document. A link displays a hypertext link that the user can click to display an anchor or a document.

A as anchor
An anchor identifies a place in an HTML document. To indicate that an <A> tag is being used as an anchor, specify the NAME attribute.

Note that you can also use the ID attribute of any tag to identify that tag as an anchor, as discussed in Universal Attributes.

Do not nest an anchor within another A tag.

Syntax

<A
NAME="anchorName"
>
...
</A>

Example

< A NAME=section2>
<H2>A Cold Autumn Day</H2></A>

If this anchor is in a file called "nowhere.html," you could define a link that jumps to the anchor as follows:

<P>Jump to the second section <A HREF="nowhere.html#section2">
A Cold Autumn Day</A> in the mystery "A man from Nowhere."
A as link
A hypertext link is a piece of content that the user can click to invoke an action. The most common actions are scrolling to a different place in the current document and opening a new document. A hypertext link can contain text and/or graphics.

To define a hypertext link, use the <A> tag with an HREF attribute to indicate the start of the hypertext link, and use the </A> tag to indicate the end of the link. When the user clicks any content between the <A HREF> and </A> tags, the link is activated.

The value of the HREF attribute must be a URL. If you want the link to open a new document, the value of HREF should be the URL for the destination document. If you want to scroll the current document to a particular place, the value of HREF should be the name of the anchor to which to scroll, preceded by the # sign. If you want to open another document at an anchor, give the URL for the document, followed by #, followed by the name of the anchor.

If you want the destination document or anchor to open in a separate browser window, supply the name of the window as the value of the TARGET attribute. If the named window does not already exist, a new window opens.

The link can also do actions other than opening and scrolling documents. It can send mail messages, point to files located on FTP servers, run any arbitrary JavaScript code, open local files, point to a gopher server, or read news groups. To do any of these actions, you specify an appropriate kind of URL, such as a mailto URL to send a mail message or a news URL to read a news group. See URLS for a discussion of the different kinds of URLs.

Most browsers display hypertext links in a color different from that of the rest of the document so that users can easily identify them. By default, Netscape Navigator displays links in blue, and displays visited links (that is, links that have been clicked) in purple. However, you can specify the default link colors for your document by specifying values for the LINK, VLINK, and ALINK attributes of the BODY tag, as discussed in the section BODY.

You can also define actions that occur when the mouse cursor enters or leaves the region containing the link by specifing onMouseOver and onMouseOut event handlers for the link. Additionally, you can specify an onClick event handler that determines the action to occur when the user clicks a link.

A link that has not been clicked is called an unvisited link. A link that has been clicked is known as a visited or followed link. A link that is in the process of being clicked is an active link.

Syntax
<A
HREF="location"
ONCLICK="clickJScode"
ONMOUSEOUT="outJScode"
ONMOUSEOVER="overJScode"
TARGET="windowName"
>
...

Both articles describe using a Soekris box with OpenBSD.

Both articles describe using a Soekris box with OpenBSD.

Nothing to back them up, eh?

Fact: OpenBSD has had one, count it, one remote hole in the default install in *eight years*. See http://www.openbsd.org/

Fact: Linux is a kernel, not a complete system, so without some more community-building and standardizing and code merging to come up with a base system universal to the distributions, there's no way Linux -- as opposed to individual vendors thereof -- can ever have a secure default install of a useable system.

Fact: Many people in the industry regard OpenBSD as the most secure OS generally available. This only indirectly supports the point, but nevertheless lends credibility thereto. See http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2000/08/08/OpenBSD .html and http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=832

I'm surprised that no one's made any decent generic game engines.

I'm not. I think before you can write a generic game engine, you must have at least one game running. See Programs suck; frameworks rule! for more on this.

I would refer you to the original post and suggest following the links to read about p0f here and here and various port knocking implementations. Port knocking has been covered in /. before and the original idea included consideration of a replay attack possibility. Thus, encryption of the knock sequence.