FreeBSD News

The New York City *BSD User Group has announced a m ailing list dedicated to running the Tor anonymity software on the BSDs.  The list aims to become a forum for BSD users and developers interested in improving the performance and expanding the use of the BSDs as a platform for Tor.

Tor is an open source public anonymity network that is utilized around the world for anonymity and to bypass internet censorship.  More information can be found at https://www.torproject.org.

At this point, the only BSD recommended by the Tor Project is FreeBSD 5.x or higher.  While there is an OpenBSD port, and a pkgsrc port for NetBSD and Dragonfly BSD, they are not considered recommended operating system platforms.  This is one issue the list could approach.

The user group believes the BSDs make an ideal platform for running Tor considering the stability and security track record of the operating systems.

If you’re interested, the mailing list is located at lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/tor-bsd.

(via G+)

Will Backman has interviewed Michael Dexter and in this 23 minutes chat they talk about bhyve, a BSD hypervisor.

bsdtalk223 – bhyve with Michael Dexter

Watch out, another BSD-Day is rising: next April in Naples where BSD people of Italy and Central Europe meet up! This event is an excellent opportunity for BSD developers and enthusiasts to present their work to larger audiences, share their thoughts with their fellows and reach out for their potential partners.

Traditionally, the event tries to avoid formalities as it does not require the speakers to submit papers or the attendees to register or pay an entry fee. However, the invited folks are encouraged to a give a brief talk on their favourite BSD topic. The goal is to motivate everybody, especially university students to see the benefits of our approach and take a chance on working with BSD systems.

For more info, visit bsdday.eu/2013

Thanks Giovanni for the heads up. If you have anything FreeBSD related to announce, let me know.

The FreeBSD Security Team has identified another issue in Bind and also one in libc. Software will always contain unintended issues and problems, but since FreeBSD is open source these get picked up and fixed up quickly.

The following security advisories have been issued:

• Bind
• Libc

FreeBSD is by far the most active BSD when it comes to sheer numbers, having the largest user and developer base (roughly 80% of the whole BSD community). In 2012, a new minor version of FreeBSD 8 (8.3-RELEASE in April) was released, as well as a new major version (9.0-RELEASE in January) and its first minor release (9.1-RELEASE in December).

With 9.0-RELEASE, there came a long list of changes.

Read the whole post here on the many exciting changes that found their way into FreeBSD 9.1: 2012: a BSD year in retrospective (osnews.com)

Inspired by the theoretical offspring between Tank Jr and a ten year olds colouring book, Defile of Eden 2 is a game of fast paced 2D action where teams protect their bases whilst devising offenses to their opponents defences. A light hearted and humorous team death-match game, requiring skill and team play to achieve certain game objectives, within a hand drawn world.

Check the Kickstarter page and the announcement on the FreeBSD forums.

The EuroBSDCon 2012 videos have been online for a few weeks already, but I realised I had not linked to them yet. If you have not seen them, they can be watched on the EuroBSD Youtube channel.

The FOSDEM 2013 videos can be downloaded/watched from here.

Phoronix has an article on the new FreeBSD hypervisor, BHyve.

BHyVe is a legacy-free hypervisor being developed by FreeBSD developers that was recently merged into mainline to be part of the FreeBSD 10.0 release. The BHyVe virtualization hypervisor relies upon Intel VT-x and already has several interesting features as it aims to be truly legacy-free, high-performance, while being contained within a very small footprint.

BHyVe: A New Hypervisor Coming to FreeBSD 10.0