BSDTrap

New security advisories have been released from NetBSD security team :

Robert Swindells made some changes of boot(8) in NetBSD to allow loading of xen kernel directly without using GRUB. However as he said this future is anly available for i386 and amd64 platforms and the console output does not show up until DOM0 is not finished. You can read more on the news here.

FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and 6.4-BETA are now available on freebsd project FTP mirror sites. Here is more on the news

"Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a 2 clause BSD license. A template version of this new license is included at the bottom of this email. This recommended license is the one that the Foundation strongly encourages its contributors to use when assigning copyright to the Foundation." More ...

TCP options padding:
1./ Problem Description
Under certain conditions, TCP options are not correctly padded.
2./ Impact
A small number of firewalls have been reported to block incorrectly padded TCP SYN and SYN/ACK packets generated by FreeBSD 7.0, with the result that an attempt to open a TCP connection to or from an affected host across such a firewall will fail.
3./ Workaround
Disabling RFC 1323 extensions and selective acknowledgments will eliminate the need for TCP option padding and restore interoperability. Note that disabling these features may cause a reduction in performance on high latency networks and networks that experience frequent packet loss.

In the past few weeks, Andrew Doran has made another bunch of changes to NetBSD's kernel area, including interrupts in NetBSD's audio framework, benchmarks of the system, and the handling of kernel modules.
Areas of work: SMP,audio,benchmarking,kernel modules. More on the subject ...

UDF write support Reinoud Zandijk has been working on support for the Universal Disk Format in NetBSD for quite some time, and in mid-may he has reached another major mile stone by adding write support to NetBSD's UDF file system: ``It can now read and *write* files and directories on CD-R, CD-RW, CD-MRW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD+MRW, (USB) flash media and harddisc partitions. Media like Iomega Rev should also work fine since they attach to the cd(4) device.

Some of the recent NetBSD source changes:

New project NetBSD on a stick is online explaining with a small install guide how to put your favorite NetBSD on a USB storage devices.

Project information "This is the home of "NetBSD on a stick", a project devoted to installing the NetBSD operating system onto a USB based storage device. Its supporters are enthusiastic users of NetBSD and desire the ability to carry the OS on a keychain in the event of a need to run UNIX at short notice."

"We will first discuss the new and different features that SCTP (a new transport in FreeBSD 7.0) provide to the user. Then we will shift gears and discuss the extended socket API that is available to SCTP users and will cover such items as: