Running FreeBSD

A lot happened in the FreeBSD world last week, including important releases, useful articles and some critical vulnerability announcements.

• FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Announcement

Trac is an open source wiki, subversion interface and issue-tracking system for software development projects. “Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way,” say the Trac developers. Trac’s wiki markup enables you to seamlessly integrate bugs, tasks, changesets, files and wiki pages.

Florent Thoumie reports that he has a new Planet FreeBSD set up using Feedjack - and it’s looking pretty good. The production Planet FreeBSD is at planet.freebsdish.org.

FreeBSD 6.3 is out with performance and stability improvements, bug fixes and some new features, including new versions of KDE, Gnome, Xorg, Bind, Sendmail, the lagg driver from OpenBSD/NetBSD, a re-implementation of unionfs and freebsd-update support for i386 and amd64 binary upgrades from earlier versions.

Here are some noteworthy FreeBSD links from the past week.

Security Advisory: inet_network() buffer overflow

Security Advisory: pty snooping

New RSS Feeds on www.FreeBSD.org

A Jabber server is an excellent tool for private, secure, reliable communication among workgroups. It’s also great for remote system monitoring and receiving notifications from online todo list services. This a complete howto for setting up a Jabber server on FreeBSD.

Running FreeBSD is dedicated to your FreeBSD servers. We’ll talk about ports, security, automation, how to set up popular software, troubleshooting and your questions. RF is published by me, George Donnelly, a longtime FreeBSD systems administrator. I manage around 70 FreeBSD machines right now, a collection that has been growing since 1999.