Twitter Updates

Follow me on Twitter

If you are running your own server I’m sure you’ve thought about setting your own login banner for SSH connections. This can be handy to post any important information such as service notices or a legal warning before a user logs in. You can see a sample login banner below in this screen shot.

This is extremely easy to setup

Step 1: Login in as root and navigate to “/etc/ssh”.

Step 2: create a file named “sshd-banner” using your editor of choice.

Step 3: create your banner content and save the file.

Step 4: open “sshd_config” for editing.

Step 5: Add the following line to your config file “Banner /etc/ssh/sshd-banner” and save.

Step 6: Restart the sshd server. On a linux server this would be “/etc/init.d/sshd restart”

Feel free to log back into your server to test.

I saw an interesting news article on SecurityFocus last week titled “Open-source projects get free checkup by automated tools”

Coverity makes code-analysis software that can scan source code for potential flaws, bugs, etc.  They’ve been scanning for free some open source projects to help detect and clean up possible bugs and flaws.  It’s a nice thing to do but of course the reality is they’re doing it to prove the quality of their tools.

Anyways, they just finished doing a scan of the FreeBSD OS.  They found 306 potential software flaws from the scan.  That might sound like a lot but most are really not flaws.  The FreeBSD guys are saying only five issues can be triggered by user input and twelve are buffer overruns.  Plus, either way they [FreeBSD programmers] have looked over the issues and have corrected them.  So there are updates available now and all future release will be safe from these flaws.

I must say this is pretty nice of Coverity.  I mean sure as I said it’s just something for publicity but it’s cool to see them help out open source software.  I would hope that they think about doing yearly scans of the projects.  Now that would be awesome to have them do yearly checkups of many of the big open source projects like Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, Apache, etc.

quote:

---

The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Stable development branch. Since FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE in November 2004 we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and device driver support for some hardware, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes.

For a complete list of new features, known problems, and late-breaking news, please see the release notes and errata list, available here:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.4R/relnotes.html

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.4R/errata.html
Dedication

The FreeBSD 5.4 Release is dedicated to the memory of Cameron Grant. Cameron was an active FreeBSD Developer and principal architect of the sound driver subsystem despite his physical handicap. His is a superb example of human spirit dominating over adversity. Cameron was an inspiration to those who met him; he will be fondly remembered and sorely missed.
Availability

FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE supports the i386, amd64, ia64, pc98, sparc64, and alpha architectures and can be installed directly over the net, using bootable media, or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures except alpha are available now. The distribution for alpha should become available within the next day or two.

Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be offering FreeBSD 5.4 based products:

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/

Daemonnews, Inc. http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

If you can not afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images. We can not promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images. At the time of this announcement they are available from the following sites. MD5 checksums for the release images are included at the bottom of this message.
Bittorrent

As with the 5.3 release we are experimenting with Bittorrent. A collection of trackers for the release ISO images is available at

http://people.freebsd.org/~kensmith/5.4-torrent/
FTP

At the time of this announcement the following FTP sites have FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE available.
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp3.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp5.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.at.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.ch.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.ee.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.es.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.fi.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.fr.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.ie.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.is.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp5.pl.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp3.ru.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.se.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.si.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.tw.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp5.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/

FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries and territories: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp.

.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html
Acknowledgments

The FreeBSD Developers deserve the most thanks. Without their efforts FreeBSD would not exist.

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 5.4 including The FreeBSD Mall, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, Sandvine, Inc., FreeBSD Systems, Inc, and NTT/Verio.

The release engineering team for 5.4-RELEASE includes:
Scott Long

Release Engineering
Robert Watson

Release Engineering, Security
John Baldwin

Release Engineering
Ken Smith

Release Engineering, amd64, i386, sparc64 Release Building, Mirror Site Coordination
Hiroki Sato

Release Engineering, Documentation
Doug White

Release Engineering
Murray Stokely

Release Engineering, Documentation
Wilko Bulte

Alpha Release Building
Marcel Moolenaar

ia64 Release Building
Takahashi Yoshihiro

pc98 Release Building
Kris Kennaway

Package Building
Joe Marcus Clarke

Package Building
Jacques A. Vidrine

Security Officer
Paul Saab

Bittorrent Coordination
CD Image Checksums

  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 6882dd5ce59cda1ba4a66ef45f017597
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso) = 26bca75d799c0a1690c6ae0bf0886234
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-amd64-disc2.iso) = 3da9debeae15a49158b01b1d92843fbc

  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso) = 2afe65af7e7b994c3ce87cefda27352e
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso) = 3dbb37485535e129354bc099e24aed99
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso) = e4b748415ca783fce64cfafd6bd56f57

  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 45b032bf952e7ea8b2c42f94c3fa4997
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-ia64-disc1.iso) = 2b1ad22da2ea0fe86345c99590049ebd
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-ia64-disc2.iso) = 62e589928628453f1813db7402b4f3ad
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-ia64-livefs.iso) = 6c05d71c36d84179923668faddf58e43

  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-pc98-disc1.iso) = 003dee8647e9b2cbca7df0d92011800f

  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 91cb2304c2ecbcce0b312738649ba88d
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-sparc64-disc1.iso) = 5f77c9a20e09d5ef66fad9c60e17c2ac
  MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-sparc64-disc2.iso) = 7da34a32ca8196a34732548fe92d71e6

---

Scott Long, of FreeBSD fame, was interviewed recently over at O’Reilly’s OnLamp.com about SMPng.  SMPng stands for Symmetric MultiProcessing next generation.  SMP in general terms is just the technology that allows a computer to have more than one CPU.

This interview is very technical so the usual “Only geeks need bother to read” notice is in full effect here.

In order for any operating system to support SMP they have to specially design the OS.  This means there are many, many ways in order to provide SMP support.  Every OS does it differently. 

One of the big changes from FreeBSD 4.x to FreeBSD 5.x was to do a major overhaul of SMP support.  This is what SMPng is.  The project to create the future SMP system for FreeBSD.  It’s a major undertaking and has taken a long time for it to mature.

Now get yourself over to OnLamp.com and read the interview.

Oh yea, for those that might want to check out the SMPng project here is the url: http://www.freebsd.org/smp/

I decided today to get back into programming after being burned out from work for so long.  I work at UPS loading boxes every day.  Loading boxes all day is about the most brain-dead a job you can do.  You would think I would come home and want to programming just to use my brain. Yet, I just don’t feel like it.

I haven’t written a line of code since the middle of October.  So, today I made the effort to get back into coding.  I had started several programming projects a while ago and just stopped.  They projects were add-ons for the ExpressionEngine web publishing system that I’m using.

I really haven’t done any coding today.  Today was just prep and setup.  I’m making a FreeBSD 5.3 test server to do the development work on.  Right now I have the OS installed but I’m doing a buildworld on it in order to update everything and patch security holes.  Tomorrow I’ll get apache, mysql, php, etc installed and running.  The next day I’ll finally get ExpressionEngine installed and my special backup/rollback procedure configured and running.

Then after all that I’ll actually get around to start coding!

I’m sure I’ll have enough on my plate for a while but I’m already thinking of some other programming projects I’d love to work on so we’ll just see how much I manage to get done.