forkb0mb.org - BSD

XNU: The Kernel

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:20:21 -0400

XNU: The Kernel

/*
A great list of what features and subsystems in MacOS/X and their heritage. It lists all of the sections taken from the BSD world, and the others from the Mach 3.0 world. Very interesting!
*/

How to Win with OpenBSD

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:22:16 -0400

How to Win with OpenBSD

/*
This is a reply to a post on the OpenBSD misc@ mailing list regarding how to "sell" OpenBSD to the management people in your company. While most of this is aimed at OpenBSD directly, some of these selling points apply to other open source technologies.
*/

pfSense

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:15:21 -0400

pfSense

/*
pfSense is (yet another) all-in-one router/firewall/VPN device. It's based on the m0n0wall firewall, so it's based on FreeBSD and the entire system configuration is contained in one XML file. The entire rc process is written in PHP, making the XML parsing easy and also allowing for easy extendability.

I've seen about a million of these all-in-one devices, but what sets this one apart for me is the GUI. This looks to be the simplest, yet most-powerful, all-inclusive web-based GUI I've seen on such a platform.

Here's a quick rundown of the features included:

SSL web interface
wireless support
stateful packet filtering
NAT (many-to-one/one-to-one)
PPPoE and PPTP support on the WAN interface
DHCP client/server
IPsec VPN tunnels (IKE; with support for hardware crypto cards and mobile clients)
PPTP VPN (with RADIUS server support)
caching DNS server
DynDNS support
SNMP agent
traffic shaping
configuration backup/restore
load balancing
bridging firewall ("invisible" firewall)
many others
*/

FreeBSD 7.0 Released

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:14:23 -0500

FreeBSD 7.0 Released

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches.

/*
Release Notes available here.

Improvements in 7.0 include:
* Dramatic improvement in performance and SMP scalability up to 8 processors
* New 1:1 threading model the default
* Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking
* ULE scheduler improvements (4BSD scheduler still default)
* Experimental support for Sun's ZFS file-system
* Read-only support for SGI's XFS file-system
* Improved wireless (802.11) support
* Newer versions of default userspace such as BIND, X, KDE, GNOME, and GCC

You can grab torrents to download the past few releases from here.
*/

FreeBSD: Virus Scanning

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:41:29 -0500

FreeBSD: Virus Scanning

This article outlines how to setup virus scanning using AMaViS (A Mail Virus Scanner), ClamAV, and Postfix. The actions describe below are particular to a FreeBSD system and are applicable to other operating systems by altering the path to the configuration files, and adjusting for other OS-specific issues.

What? Virus scanning on non-windows? Well, yes. My mail server happens to be running FreeBSD. It also happens to have many clients which are running Windows. Let's just stop the viruses before they get past my mail servers. Thank you. :)

This article is written as a reminder to me for the next time I configure virus scanning with amavisd. It is very high level.

/*
A great article on how to implement a secure anti-virus email gateway. Better to block the virus before it gets to the user's PC, thus saving bandwidth and reducing the reliance on the user to do the right thing.

The majority of email-borne viruses have required some form of user intervention, such as clicking on the attachment. If you value your bandwidth and mail server resources, it's always a good idea to filter as much junk as you can before it reaches the end-user.
*/

FreeBSD: Creating Multiple Jails

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:35:07 -0500

FreeBSD: Creating Multiple Jails

Jails are a useful tool for achieving a certain level of virtualization. I have used jails in the past for creating sandboxes for testing of the Bacula project. Today, I will be setting up 7 jails, each for regression tests on different configurations. In the process, I'll show you some shortcuts that Ryan Lortie (desrt) told me about. It saves time. I'll also share some scripts that will help with the setup of various jail items.

/*
The FreeBSD Diary brings us yet another great article on securing your FreeBSD servers. Complete with screenshots and step-by-step instructions.
*/

Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF Packet Filter

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Sun, 20 May 2007 14:36:14 -0400

Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF Packet Filter

UNIX IP Stack Tuning Guide

nospam@example.com (TJE) — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:06:47 -0400

UNIX IP Stack Tuning Guide from Team Cymru

/*
This is an excellent document detailing the fine-tuning aspects of the IP stack on Unix. Flavors include AIX, Solaris, Tru64, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD and IRIX.
*/