NetBSD Archive

AFS: Network Filesystem Beyond NFS’s Weaknesses

Submitted by user123 2006-06-15 NetBSD 15 Comments

"Network attached storage has been known to Unix users for a very long time with NFS. NFS is reliable, performs well on the performance front, but it is infamous for its security. The biggest problem with NFS is that the client is responsible for controlling user file access. The NFS server just accepts file system operations on behalf of a given UID and enforces nearly no control. NFS require you trust your clients, something that may not be adequate. Andrew File System is an alternative network file system. In this interview, I ask Ty Sarna about his experience with AFS. Ty Sarna has been an AFS user since 1992 and is a NetBSD developer since 1998."

NetBSD Announces Google Summer of Code Projects

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2006-05-26 NetBSD 8 Comments

"The NetBSD Project is proud to announce the list of projects accepted for this year's Summer of Code. While the list of proposals was impressive and of particularly high quality, a choice of eight applications had to be made Details about each project will be posted to the NetBSD SoC SourceForge website."

CARP Ported to NetBSD

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2006-05-19 NetBSD 5 Comments

NetBSD's Liam J. Foy has ported CARP from OpenBSD and committed it into NetBSD-current. CARP is a secure, free alternative to the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol and the Hot Standby Router Protocol. CARP works by allowing a group of hosts on the same network segment (known as 'redundancy group') to share an IP address, and in the event that the master host suffers a failure, the IP will move to one of the backups hosts and the service will continue unaffected.

The NetBSD Foundation Quarterly Report: January – March 2006

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2006-04-18 NetBSD 16 Comments

From the article: "In order to allow our users to follow the most important changes over the last few months, we provide a brief summary in these official status reports on a regular basis. These status reports, released with irregular regularity, are suitable for reproduction and publication in part or in whole as long as the source is clearly indicated. This report summarizes the changes within NetBSD during the first three months of 2006."

Interview: Jan Schaumann

Submitted by anonymous coward 2006-04-05 NetBSD 7 Comments

"Jan Schaumann has been an important contributor to the NetBSD project for several years. He spent a lot of time working on the NetBSD package system, known as pkgsrc, and he currently uses NetBSD as his desktop system. We will try to learn from his experience during this interview."

Interview: ‘der Mouse’ on NetBSD’s Real-Time Network Backup

Submitted by SlashDot_Reader 2006-03-09 NetBSD No Comments

"Hard disks tend to be one of the weakest points in today's machines. If you can afford it, RAID setups will address the problem. And if you cannot afford it, you probably cannot afford a NAS or a SAN either. The poor man's solution is to regularly back up the information from one disk to another. Of course if your disk dies between two backups, you lose. der Mouse is a Canadian open source developer who produced a bunch of valuable software ranging from anti-spam tools to a PPPoE implementation. At the BSDCan 2005 conference, he presented an innovative solution to hard disk replication. In this interview, der Mouse explains his idea and how he implemented it to us."

NetBSD To Add Elements of the POSIX Standard

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-20 NetBSD 7 Comments

"The IEEE and The Open Group have granted permission to the NetBSD Foundation to incorporate more than 1400 interfaces from the joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX standard and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6 into its NetBSD operating system. This step benefits developers in the NetBSD Project and software engineers using NetBSD as their target platform. NetBSD developers can now use standard documentation to express that a NetBSD operating system conforms to the POSIX standard. The step also gives engineers who write software to run on NetBSD a better understanding of how to create portable programs using IEEE 1003.1."

Interview: Manuel Bouyer of NetBSD on Xen

Submitted by BSD_User 2006-02-17 NetBSD 1 Comment

"Manuel Bouyer is a NetBSD developper who has been involved in kernel hacking for many years. He recently added support for Xen to NetBSD, based on Christian Limpback's work for the Xen team. In this interview, Manuel will tell us what is so good about Xen, and what was the work required to have it working on NetBSD."

NetBSD Status Report Q3/Q4 2005

Submitted by Mike M. Volokhov 2006-01-26 NetBSD No Comments

"This is the first quarterly status report of 2006. However, since there was no status report for the last quarter of 2005, this report summarizes the changes within NetBSD over the last six months, which includes the release of both NetBSD 2.1 and 3.0, a summary of the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code and the release of two stable pkgsrc branches, among many other things."

NetBSD 3.0 Released

Submitted by guilherme 2005-12-23 NetBSD 46 Comments

"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 3.0 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 3.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in stability, performance, networking, security, also includes support for two new platforms (iyonix and hp700), and many new peripherals. Far reaching improvements to the network stack will not only provide better performance but also make NetBSD an excellent choice for a VPN gateway. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) framework adds more flexibility to NetBSD's user management and simplifies integration into heterogeneous networks. The kernel, libraries and utilities can now handle filesystems larger than two terabytes, and support for Xen 2.0 allows hosting many virtual servers on a single machine." Read the full changelog here, and downloads are here.

Inside NetBSD’s CGD

Submitted by anonymous 2005-12-22 NetBSD 2 Comments

"NetBSD is well-known for its portability, but since the release of NetBSD 2.0, the project has also included tons of interesting and unique features. While waiting for the upcoming 3.0, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Roland Dowdeswell, the author of the Crypto-Graphic Disk system."

NetBSD 3.0-RC6 Released

Eugenia Loli 2005-12-13 NetBSD 17 Comments

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I'm happy to announce the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC6 for testing." Download locations are here.

NetBSD 3.0_RC5 Binaries Available for Testing

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2005-12-04 NetBSD 21 Comments

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Matthias Scheler announced the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC5 for testing. NetBSD 3.0 RC5 is available in the "daily builds" section of your local FTP mirror, and users are encouraged to test it out and report any bugs using send-pr(1). A brief summary of changes from NetBSD 3.0_RC1 to 3.0_RC5 is available in Matthias's announcement (a list of changes from NetBSD 2.0 to NetBSD 3.0 can be found here).

Submitted by quique 2005-11-19 NetBSD 16 Comments

Matthias Scheler, on behalf of the NetBSD Release engineering team, announced that the release process for NetBSD 3.0 has officially begun. The first release candidate is available for download here.It is expected to have RC2 available on the FTP server in about a week, which hopefully will be the final release candidate. So if all goes well the release of 3.0 is approximately three weeks away.

Lightweight Web Serving with thttpd (and NetBSD)

Eugenia Loli 2005-11-11 NetBSD 19 Comments

Apache httpd is full of features and abilities, but sometimes it's too heavy for simple sites or static pages. In some cases, a simpler, lighter web server is a good alternative (or addition). Julio M. Merino Vidal demonstrates how to install and configure the simple, fast, and powerful thttpd to serve simple static and generated content very quickly.

How NetBSD Uses Their Donations

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2005-11-09 NetBSD 8 Comments

As reported previously, the NetBSD Foundation made a call for donations a few months ago. This was widely publicized, and the open source community responded generously, donating almost $30000,- (E25500,-). As also previously noted, this money was earmarked for specific purchases, and the NetBSD Project would like to let its users know what in particular was bought from these donations. Please see Thor Lancelot Simons detailed summary for information regarding what was bought, the current status and a long list of people that made all this possible.

NetBSD 2.1 Released

Submitted by Michael 2005-11-03 NetBSD 8 Comments

NetBSD 2.1, the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch, has been released with binary distributions for 54 architectures. More information is available in the 2.1release announcement.

NetBSD 2.0.3 Security/Critical Update Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-31 NetBSD 9 Comments

NetBSD 2.0.3 is the third security/critical update of the NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. All fixes in security/critical updates (ie., NetBSD 2.0.2, 2.0.3, etc.) are cumulative, so this latest update contains all such fixes since the NetBSD 2.0 release. These fixes will also appear in future releases (NetBSD 2.1, 2.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. Download locations are here.

NetBSD Summer of Code Summary

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2005-10-17 NetBSD 7 Comments

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce the results of its participation in Google's "Summer of Code". After Google announced this program to introduce students to the world of open source software development at the beginning of June, the NetBSD Project was happy to join the approximately 40 other open source groups as a mentoring organization and compiled a list of suggested projects.

Submitted by ghen 2005-09-28 NetBSD 9 Comments

"The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches (5551 packages supported on 13 platforms). As well as updated versions of many packages, the infrastructure of pkgsrc has been improved for better platform and compiler support, and also for enhanced security. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2005Q2 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch."