UDF enhancements (read-write CD/DVD file system)

UDF is a full read-write operating system independent file system to be used on CD and DVD media but also very usable on `flash media'. See the OSTA website and Wikipedia for a more in depth overview. A read-only version made it to NetBSD-4.0 and a full read-write version made it to NetBSD-5.0

Recent enhancements to UDF available in NetBSD-current and pulled up to netbsd-5 are

Accurate disc space calculation that won't allow overfilling discs that could previously panic the machine.

Rewritten read-modify-write backend.

Significant reduction of system time spend when encountering huge numbers of nodes.

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New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-008 and NetBSD-2009-009 (concerning OpenSSL)

Two new security advisories were published concerning OpenSSL:

• NetBSD-SA2009-008 OpenSSL ASN1 parsing denial of service and CMS signature verification weakness
• NetBSD-SA2009-009 OpenSSL DTLS Memory Exhaustion and DSA signature verification vulnerabilities

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

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Google Summer of Code zfs-port project status update 2

ZFS as whole has 2 major parts the first one is ZVOL and the second one is ZPL. In my first status update I said that I had ported ZVOL layer to NetBSD, and I was able to create and use ZFS Zpools and Zvols (Logical partitions exported from one disk storage pool called zpool).

Over the last few weeks I have worked on a ZPL port. ZPL is ZFS file system layer. I have ported zfs_vfsops.c file and zfs_vnops.c file to NetBSD. Today I have ZFS to state where I can mount ZFS data set, copy whole kernel source tree there and finally build NetBSD kernel on it.

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Google Summer of Code: GPT bootloader

The GUID Partition Table is a new standard for disk partitioning. The GPT layout provides a set of advanced partitioning features including, but not limited to:

• modern logical block addressing (LBA)
• 64-bit LBA pointers, allowing partitions up to 8 Zbytes in size, and even bigger
• suitable for disks with sector size, other than 512 bytes
• by default up to 128 partitions per disk
• backup partition table.

The NetBSD already has support for GPT disks via dkwedges, but can't boot off a GPT partitioned disk. My GSoC project is to implement a GPT aware bootloader for the NetBSD operating system by extending its existing MBR/disklabel BIOS-based multistaged kernel loader.

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New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-005 through NetBSD-2009-007

Three new security advisories were published, covering OpenSSH, ntpd, ntpq and hack:

• NetBSD-SA2009-005 Plaintext Recovery Attack Against SSH
• NetBSD-SA2009-006 Buffer overflows in ntp
• NetBSD-SA2009-007 Buffer overflows in hack(6)

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

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Google Summer of Code: Improve and Extend resize_ffs

The utility resize_ffs is a program intended to resize Berkeley Fast File Systems (FFS) by either growing or shrinking them. This filesystem is the standard filesystem for the NetBSD operating system -- a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system.

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USENIX 2009 - Rump File Systems: Kernel Code Reborn

At USENIX 2009 I talked about rump file systems. The paper (html) and slides are available. Additionally, USENIX members can view a video of the presentation.

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Google Summer of Code: Efficient wide character regular expressions

During this year’s Google Summer of Code I’m improving the performance of NetBSD’s regular expression library and add support to it for wide characters.

We made good progress and I’m glad that I can announce that tre is very likely to replace the regular expression code in libc

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Postfix 2.6.2 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.6.2, the latest stable version of the popular mail transport agent, was imported into NetBSD-current recently. The following features have been added since version 2.5.4:

• Multi-instance support introduces a new postmulti(1) command to create/add/remove/etc. additional Postfix instances. The familiar "postfix start" etc. commands now automatically start multiple Postfix instances. The good news: nothing changes when you use only one Postfix instance. See MULTI_INSTANCE_README for details.
• Multi-instance support required that some files be moved from the non-shared $config_directory to the shared $daemon_directory. The affected files are postfix-script, postfix-files and post-install.
• TLS (SSL) support was updated for elliptic curve encryption. This requires OpenSSL version 0.9.9 or later. The SMTP client no longer uses the SSLv2 protocol by default. See TLS_README for details.
• The Milter client now supports all Sendmail 8.14 Milter requests, including requests for rejected recipient addresses, and requests to replace the envelope sender address. See MILTER_README for details.
• Postfix no longer adds (Resent-) From:, Date:, Message-ID: or To: headers to email messages with "remote" origins (these are origins that don't match $local_header_rewrite_clients). Adding such headers breaks DKIM signatures that explicitly cover non-present headers. For compatibility with existing logfile processing software, Postfix will log ``message-id=<>'' for email messages that have no Message-Id header.
• Stress-adaptive behavior is now enabled by default. This allows the Postfix SMTP server to temporarily reduce time limits and error-count limits under conditions of overload, such as a malware attack or backscatter flood. See STRESS_README for details.

Enjoy!

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wake(8), a New Wake-on-LAN Command

wake is a new command to send Wake-on-LAN frames over an ethernet to Wake-on-LAN capable machines, remote powering them up. This functionality is generally enabled in a machine's BIOS and can be used to power on machines from a remote system without having physical access to them.

wake is available in NetBSD-current. See the wake(8) manual page for details.

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Interview with Soren Jacobsen

A couple of weeks ago, Guillaume Lasmayous and I threw the idea of interviewing NetBSD developers through our website, NetBSDfr, to promote the NetBSD Project, and to make their work known to the widest possible audience.

Today, we are discussing with Soren Jacobsen, snj@, NetBSD 5.0 release engineer.

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Google Summer of Code: PXE Bulk Install Update

The PXE Bulk Install system is essentially an NFS mounted root directory that, when mounted at boot time, installs various configurations of NetBSD on client machines through its /etc/rc file. A "configuration" or "class" of machine can include essentially anything imaginable, from custom kernels to configuration files, SSH keys and packages installed. Once a class is created and a MAC address assigned to that class, a machine that NFS mounts the directory will have its chosen class applied to it.

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