Author: Justin Sherrill

I’ll play catchup on all the interesting UNIXReview articles that have gone by:

– Cleaning Up Large Mailing Lists: Removing Bad Addresses (a perennial issue)
– Shell Corner: DVD-RAM Daily Backup (handy!)

– Book reviews:
Mapping Security : The Corporate Security Sourcebook for Today’s Global Economy
Classic Shell Scripting (A tortoise on the cover – good symbolism)
Network Security
Buffer Overflow Attacks: Detect, Exploit, Prevent

Joerg Sonnenberger has updated GCC to GCC 3.4.4. Also, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert reports his experimental DragonFly system built entirely with GCC 4.0 is working well.

I missed this recently: OpenBSD 3.7 is out, and ONLamp.com/BSD has an interview with some of the developers.

A recent thread about describing DragonFly’s kernel led to this post from Matthew Dillon, tying together monolithic kernels vs. microkernels and how they relate to DragonFly’s Single System Image future.

David Rhodus’s recent blog entry on GoBSD.com notes he is most of the way through a “block level journaling system for FFS/UFS”.

As I understand it, this is different from Matthew Dillon’s journaling work – this is the traditional form of journaling, while Dillon’s is a mechanism to treat disk activity as a relocatable/rewindable stream.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has posted his patches for using GCC 4 to compile DragonFly – it works for the world, but not for the kernel, yet.

Joerg Sonnenberger has a fix for libtool in pkgsrc that may allow programs like orbit, arts, etc. to compile on DragonFly.(necessart for the Big Programs like KDE)

UnixReview.com has a reprinted SysAdmin Magazine article, among other updates, that talks about avoiding SQL injection attacks.

Joerg Sonnenberger mentioned some of the gotchas involved in porting a network driver from another BSD flavor.

There’s a new entry in the FreeBSD Basics section of ONLamp.com: Setting up a Secure Subversion Server

Joerg Sonnenberger listed a few links describing benchmarks with GCC 4.0, as part of a conversation on why he’s working on GCC 3.4.4 instead.

Colin Percival of the FreeBSD Project discovered a security problem with “Hyper-Threading Technology”, found on newer Pentium 4 processors, where information from one thread can be read by another. He talked about it at BSDCan 2005 today (wish I was there!), and there’s a corresponding security alert for FreeBSD. The FreeBSD securing procedure should work for DragonFly, too.

Matthew Dillon, David Xu, and Joerg Sonnenberger have been having an extended conversation on kernel@ about RTLD, TLS, and other things – look for the “kernel library interfacing layer” topic if you want to browse it. All three of these guys are heavyweight kernel programmers, so it goes in-depth.

UnixReview.com has a review up of the book “Linux in a Windows World“. Why mention this here? Because it doesn’t really cover Linux as much as it’s covering applications that run on Linux… All of which run on DragonFly too.