This interview of Ty Sarna about AFS (Andrew File System) by Emmanuel Dreyfus, covers a lot of ground. This rare glimpse, explains what you need to do to properly deploy AFS in most environments. You will discover the advantages of deploying AFS in lieu of NFS or CIFS (Samba) and it is actually an enjoyable read.

Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security (Bogen, David) 200604

A review of the O'Reilly book Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security by Yanek Korff, Paco Hope, & Bruce Potter.

Interview with Jan Schaumann (Dreyfus, Emmanuel) 200604

Jan Schaumann has been an important contributor to the NetBSD project for several years. He spent a lot of time working on the NetBSD package system, known as pkgsrc, and he currently uses NetBSD as his desktop system. We will try to learn from his experience during this interview.

Book Review: Virtualization with VMware ESX Server (King, Mikel) 200603

A brief overview of the book Virtualization with VMware ESX Server (ISBN: 1-59749-019-9). The review touches on many of the books key chapters to give you a good feel for this publication. Whether you are a VMware veteran or newbie you'll find information in this volume quite useful.

Interview with Theo de Raadt (Silva, Chris) 200603

Every release we place "Puffy" (our mascot) in a different thematic situation based on issues which we see are being faced (or ignored) by the free/open source community. Most of these issues have been about where a freedom is being impinged by some vendor, or sometimes even more sadly, some hypocritical open source project. We try to always use some sort of well known story which we can allegorically twist to be like the situations that we feel we are facing. Ever since 3.0, we have also been lucky to have some local Calgarian musician Ty Semaka (and his gang of friends) to also set music to each of the stories. Readers can go visit http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html to see the cartoon and the lyrics that accompany each release. But more importantly the left column comments on the reason for the theme, and the issue we feel the larger community needs to be aware of, and face head on.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200502

I've been thinking once again about Poul-Henning Kamp's rant about tools. A decade ago, I worked for a small division of a very large company that made equipment for television broadcasters. It was an interesting business, small volume, high value, with lots of custom work for most of the customers.

Sometimes we had to send an engineer on-site to finish the custom work. Often the customer would have some weird piece of equipment we had never encountered before, but needed to interface to. The customer of course never had a spare, and we had little to no ability to acquire another of these gizmos, usually because the manufacturer had departed or stopped making the item years ago. We would dutifully package up an entire HP workstation, complete with 19" monitor, and send it to the customer site in advance of our engineer arriving. When the engineer arrived, he often found various parts of the workstation broken or missing, so we would order spares while he became familiar with the customer site.

Book Review: Firefox Hacks (Bogen, David) 200502

There are some books that were just never meant to be read front-to-back. Dictionaries, thesauruses, and repair manuals are rarely noted for their clever writing and gripping plots. Reference books like those are designed to quickly deliver information in a relatively easy to navigate format. Into that same category, one can safely file Firefox Hacks by Nigel McFarlane.

FreeBSD Applications Part II (Bejtlich, Richard) 200501

An important system administration task, and a principle of running a defensible network, is keeping operating systems and applications up-to-date. Running current software is critical when older services are vulnerable to exploitation. Obtaining new features not found in older applications is another reason to run current software. Fortunately, open source software offers a variety of means to give users a secure, capable computing environment.

Daemon's Advocate (Long, Scott)(Watson, Robert) 200501

There has been a lot of recent talk and advocacy for NetBSD 2.0 from the NetBSD team. Most recently there were a series of articles posted by Chritos Zoulas describing why NetBSD is relevant and why it's a better choice than either FreeBSD or OpenBSD. While I strongly applaud the accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD.

Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200412

When I hear somebody like Robert Watson complain about not being able to find features and options in OpenOffice, I am reminded of my own introduction to UNIX: "I'm sure there is a way to do this, but I wonder what the program is called...".

As the deadlines made me older I came to know the contents of /usr/bin by heart, and it now feels like my organised but cluttered workshop where I can almost always find a gadget and thingmajic which can be used to solve the problem at hand.

Over time new things have appeared in /usr/bin but that has not been a problem for me, because it did not rename the old commands so all the tricks I learned on System III still work.

Keeping FreeBSD Applications Up-To-Date (Bejtlich, Richard) 200412

An important system administration task, and a principle of running a defensible network, is keeping operating systems and applications up-to-date. Running current software is critical when older services are vulnerable to exploitation. Obtaining new features not found in older applications is another reason to run current software. Fortunately, open source software offers a variety of means to give users a secure, capable computing environment.

This article presents multiple ways to keep FreeBSD applications up-to-date. I explain how to install and upgrade several applications on a FreeBSD 5.2.1 RELEASE system. In my previous article "Keeping FreeBSD Up-To-Date," I described how to patch and upgrade the FreeBSD operating system, beginning with FreeBSD 5.2.1 and ending with FreeBSD 5-STABLE. Taken as a pair, these two articles will help system administrators keep their FreeBSD OS and applications current and defensible.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200411

Between rumors of updates to the ubiquitous Gnu Public License (GPL) to the open source release of Solaris and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) from Sun have fueled new discussion on this old topic, raising issues of whether we really need hundreds of slightly different licenses, and renewed interest in one or a very few open source licenses that can easily be understood by businessmen.

While remaining skeptical as to whether most businessmen really care about licensing at all, I am curious to learn how (or if) all this open source licensing and software have translated into the business world? Let us take a tour through some corners of the open source business you may not be familiar with.

A few months ago I was casting about for a small system to use as a mail server for a handful of users, preferably one that would run NetBSD.

Keeping FreeBSD Up To Date (Bejtlich, Richard) 200411

An important system administration task, and a principle of running a defensible network, is keeping operating systems and applications up-to-date. Running current software is critical when older services are vulnerable to exploitation. Obtaining new features not found in older applications is another reason to run current software. Fortunately, open source software offers a variety of means to give users a secure, capable computing environment.

This article presents multiple ways to keep the FreeBSD operating system up-to-date. I take a FreeBSD 5.2.1 RELEASE system through a subset of security advisories to explain the different sorts of patches an administrator might apply. In a the next article I describe how to use the FreeBSD ports tree and related tools to keep non-OS applications up-to-date.

Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200410

I met Peter Salus the other evening, he was in Copenhagen for a talk and he invited me out because he has started writing yet a computer history book (If you have not yet read "A quarter century of UNIX" and "Casting the NET" by all means do so).

He told me that Kirk had told him to talk to me about FreeBSD, and his first question, while we waited for our "Galletes" to arive was "Why bother ?"

Why They use BSD: Netcraft (Rosamond, George) 200410

Recently, Daemon News asked Mike Prettejohn from well-known web server survey firm Netcraft.com about why they use BSD. Here's what Mike wrote:

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200409

This month in BSD...summer is quiet...

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200409

One of the columns I read regularly is the BackSpin column at the back end of Network World magazine each week. I enjoy Mark Gibbs' sense of humor, and this column helps me keep in touch with what's going on in the minds of my customers. I don't always agree with what Gibbs has to say, but I rarely actively disagree with his viewpoint.

This summer, however, Gibbs came up with a doozy. It's been quite a summer for the IT types here in the USA, and one of the current hot spots is a conflagration between hospital IT departments, medical device vendors, and the US government Food and Drug Administration.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200408

After the hive of activity in June, a more laid back July.

Daemon's Advocate (Watson, Robert) 200408

Robert Watson's been very busy working on the FreeBSD 5.3 release. This is summary of just a few things that are going on.

Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200407

I remember when the Alpha chip was first unveilled in sufficient detail that we could try to understand what kind of beast it was. And I remember seeing and installing the first one, and doing some heavy duty math on it to see if the performance was interesting.

Then we heard the NetBSD crew were porting to the Alpha and we got a bit envious about that. But since none of us had Alphas we could play with much less time to do so, it did not take long before we realized that we could lift 64-bit cleanup patches from NetBSD rather than have to do the hard work ourselves.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200407

Sam Smith reviews the goings on in the month of June, and as his article says. "Lots happened". Take a look if you don't believe us.

Review Daemon: BSD Hacks (Rosamond, George) 200407

Dru Lavigne's BSD Hacks (O'Reilly and Associates, May 2004) is an enormously useful resource for systems administrators and end-users alike.

There has been a variety of BSD books that have been released over the past several years. BSD Hacks, however, is the first book that is almost solely focused on hacks for sysadmins, without boring you with the details for basic operating system installation and configuration that has been so well documented elsewhere.

It's not just for sysadmins though. Intermediate and more advanced BSD users will also find the book an excellent tool.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200406

Sam Smith rounds up the latest major happenings in BSD, including the changes to OpenBSD 3.5 -current, the release of FreeBSD 4.Ten, Cisco wanting to patent parts of TCP, BSDCan writeups and photos and PF ported to NetBSD 2.0.

Daemon's Advocate: SIGALARM (Peters, Wes) 200406

My wife and I have a problem. Alarm clocks don't work for us. It's not that ours are faulty, but more that they're just so limited. Mine, for instance, starts bleeping loudly at 6:55 each morning, again at 7:00, and again at 7:05. Each time, it will bleep increasinly loud and increasingly fast for 1 minute, then stop, or will stop when I mash the big "shut up" button on the top.

Other than that, it tells the time and nothing else. Oh sure, it displays the date too, in such small digits you can't see it unless you're holding the clock, but it's a pretty limited functionality. Where's the alarm at 2:20 pm, when it's time to pick up my daughter from school? Why does the stupid thing insist on waking me at 6:55 Saturday morning, when I don't have to be up? Why not an alarm for Thursday afternoon's doctor appointment?

Review Dæmon: Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, 2nd ed. (Rosamond, George) 200406

Without question, OpenBSD's packet filter (pf) has leaped from strength to strength since its release with OpenBSD 3.0. What seemed to start out as a placeholder for IPF, has become not only the premier open source firewall in terms of capabilities, but something that could only make your standard commercial firewall vendor shake in their smug boots.

A simultaneous trend has been a significant increase in the publication of BSD-related books. Sure, we've been graced with a variety of brilliant handbooks, FAQ's and guides, not to mention the most readable manual pages in the UNIX world, but for many years, understandable publications for the BSD end user administrator were sorely lacking.

Blueprints: Watchdog Timers (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200406

This month's blueprint is about watchdog timers. A watchdog timer is a small bit of hardware which will reset the machine if your operating system or program fails to pay attention to it before the timer loses its patience.

BSD Chop Shop: MAC address spoofing on FreeBSD using netgraph (Yeske, David) 200406

This article explains how to spoof a MAC (Media Access Control) address using FreeBSD. This is commonly known as "MAC cloning", and it is offered as a feature on some commercial routers and wireless access points. The Netgraph system is built into FreeBSD, and it provides all the required tools. This will work on a FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE system "out of the box". This has only been successfully tested with FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE.

The MAC address is usually burned into an EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) on the ethernet card at the factory. Some ethernet cards are able to have their MAC address changed, but this should usually be avoided because it requires special hardware, and it can damage the card. The ifconfig utility can be used to change the MAC address of certain cards, but this does not always work. Some ethernet card vendors offer a utility to do this, but this often must be run in DOS or is not convenient.

Daemon's Advocate (Watson, Robert) 200405

The BSD phenomenon is quite remarkable: a community of incredibly talented and experienced developers, administrators, and users, joined by diverse technical interests and a common desire to build and use the best operating systems in the world. What's interesting, though, is that despite the fact that advocacy is arguably not one of the strongest aspects of the BSD world, BSD and BSD-derived systems seem to continue to be widely used, with growing developer and user communities. While BSD lacks flashy multi-million dollar advertising campaigns involving graffiti-ing San Francisco sidewalks, it seems to have grown a firm base of committed fans who respect the technical accomplishments and maturity of the system. Which raises the question: what role should advocacy play for the BSD community?

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200405

Sam Smith rounds up the latest major happenings in BSD, including the release of OpenBSD 3.5, Developer Interviews, PF2K4 -- PF Developer's hackathon, Security Announcements, FreeBSD mailing list summaries, Wikipedia Entries for *BSD, and BSDCan Conference.

Daemon's Advocate (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200404

There are no persons more defensive about their knowledge than kids. If my children have picked up some random fact, they will defend it with everything they can, for as long as they can, rather than admit that maybe they got it just a tiny little bit wrong. As we grow older, we learn to appreciate getting more and better information, and of the benefit of more shades of grey. And then there comes a day in every man's life where we feel secure enough to say "Really ? I guess I was totally wrong then, thanks for setting me straight." And actually mean it.

In the last couple of weeks I have had my view of the Dæmonized part of the world seriously remodelled and enjoyed it every bit of it. So I guess I must be growing old.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200404

Sam Smith rounds up the latest major happenings in BSD, including status reports, release announcements, an Interview with Matthew Dillon and Luke Mewburn, planned work, MacSlash roundup and a new OpenBSD Song: Parody on Cisco's.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200403

Computer and Network Security has been in the news a lot lately. We've had another spate of security advisories, for both open and closed source systems; the spam keeps flowing; the virus and worm writers have been keeping busy inventing new menaces to Internet society. And if that weren't enough, Microsoft and the US Department of Homeland "Security" want to help us.

I've written about security a number of times before, so I'm going to try not to rehash past history, or to simply regurgitate what you've doubtlessly already read in the news. I'm going to write a bit about my background in security and what kinds of security interest me.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200403

Sam Smith covers Security Alerts, OpenBSD JDK, OpenBSD AMD64, Apache License Issues, NetBSD and FreeBSD status reports, DragonFly BSD updates, Apple, and BSDCan.

BSD This Month (Smith, Sam) 200402

Sam Smith rounds up the latest major happenings in BSD, including status reports for DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD, a NetBSD logo contest and SGI Indigo support, an interview with Henning Brauer of OpenBSD, and help configuring SpamAssassin with the Evolution email client.

Dæmon's Advocate - BSD: The professional's choice (Lehey, Greg) 200402

The BSDs have prided themselves on supplying professional, reliable, secure and high performance systems, much better than this Linux stuff. We didn't care so much about whether other people wanted it: it's enough for us to be happy with it.

For the past four years, my job has brought me more and more into contact with the Linux world. I have always advocated maintaining good relationships with the Linux community, and I had considered that some of the prejudice about Linux that exists within the Linux community is just that, baseless prejudice. I was correspondingly disappointed when I had to install Linux on a machine to run my satellite downlink: Linux really did have many of the disadvantages that I had discounted as prejudice.

That's a few years back now, though. How do things look today?

BSD This Month (Smith, Sam) 200401

Sam Smith rounds up the latest major happenings in BSD for the month of January 2003.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200401

Yes, FreeBSD 5.2 really is usable. Mostly. At least enough that if you're a FreeBSD user, you should be trying it and getting to know it. There is much new about 5.2, and much to like. For instance, if you're a laptop user with a hankering for wireless, you're really going to love the 802.11 subsystem. There is now support for CardBus 10/100 ethernet cards, and a new disk-support system named GEOM. The usual caveats also apply. We haven't labelled 5.2 as "STABLE" yet because it's not up to the standards our community expects from a FreeBSD STABLE release.

Newbies Corner: Getting The Right Results from Webalizer For Many Virtual Hosts (Coleman, Chris) 200401

It is increasingly more common to have several virtual domains running on a single server. Apache makes it extremely easy to configure this and FreeBSD is such a powerful server, multiple domains are limited mostly by bandwidth available. Weblogs are an important part of running website. A good traffic analysis can help you figure out where your traffic is coming from and where you need to promote your site so you can increase traffic. It also helps convince advertisers who want to advertise on your site if you can reliably show how large an audience you reach.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200312

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200312

Is open source software innovative? Are its developers innovative, or do we just follow Microsoft paradigms?

Answerman 200311

The Answer Crew take us on a tour of file permissions, file management and shell programming.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200311

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200311

What do users want? And how is BSD doing on satisfying user wants?

Answerman: Using The Command Line, part 2 of 2 (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200310

Have a question on how something works or why something isn't working? Ask Grzegorz Czaplinski.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200310

Advocacy of the BSD's, this month by Greg Lehey who reflects back on the past five years of BSD conferences and turning points.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200310

Answerman: Shell history overview (Czaplinski, Grzegorz) 200309

Have a question on how something works or why something isn't working? Ask Grzegorz Czaplinski

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200309

Wes Peters does a little bit of reminiscing on Daemon News' fifth anniversary as well as Java on FreeBSD

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200309

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200308

If you read Slashdot on a regular basis, you'll know the troll who keeps claiming that BSD is dying. In truth it's anything but; the projects are constantly growing. FreeBSD has grown so much that coordination is becoming quite difficult...

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200308

Sam Smith reveals numerous events that made July hotter than ever! Highlights include Matt Dillon's effort to build a new flavor of BSD called DragonFly, Hubert Feyer's report of NetBSD at LinuxTAG, Exclusive interview - Theo De Raadt, Daniel Hartmeier and Miod Vallat reveal The Essence of OpenBSD, announcement regarding Michael Lucas' new book - Absolute OpenBSD and many others!

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200308

FreeBSD Kernel Blueprints: Userland/kernel interfaces (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200308

Having survived my first article with no ill effects (actually I did chip a tooth right after it came out, but I haven't been able to prove the connection), this months installment will pick up where the previous one ended, and take a peek at configuration interfaces for complex and extensible kernel features.

Newbies Corner - Managing Disk Space: Using df and du (Coleman, Chris) 200307

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200307

The Answer Crew reply to more questions from the mailbag.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200307

The Advocate discusses online identities and identification, online freedom (or the lack thereof), and you!

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200307

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200306

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Answerman 200306

The AnswerCrew answers several reader submitted questions, including how to rename many files with a simple tool called mmv and how to build custom kernels under FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200306

Greg Lehey takes a look at the recent developments regarding SCO's action against IBM and Linux, as well as how BSD can play a part in the situation and asks if the BSDs really want to run on every desktop.

Book Review - FreeBSD: The Complete Reference (Pham, Linh) 200306

In this month's book review, I will be taking a look at one of recently released titles that bills itself as "The Complete Reference" to FreeBSD. My goal for this book review is to pick through it's nits and find out if it lives up to its name or not.

Newbies Corner - Backing up Key Files (Coleman, Chris) 200306

Not everyone has access to a tape drive backup system big enouth to make daily copies of all the files on all their servers. And, even if they do have access to such a system, making a complete backup of every file can be a waste of tape.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200305

he Advocate discusses Directory Services and BSD; FreeBSD's NSS implementation, LDAP and more...

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200305

The Answer Man pokes his head through the bottom of the mailbag...

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200305

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200304

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Answerman 200304

Gary Kline and his AnswerCrew take on seven questions that readers have sent in, including how to write a basic rc.d script and connecting via PPTP using MPD.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200304

It's anniversary time again: the NetBSD project celebrated its tenth anniversary on 21 March, and the FreeBSD project will celebrate its tenth anniversary on 19 June. Things have changed a lot in that time, and it's time (isn't it always?) to think about how the projects should change as a result.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200303

This month: Old Compaq machines, OS X Office Applications support, a newcomer to the Land of Weird Hardware, terminal servers, and SIGCHLD déjà vu. Plus: the mailbag reaches a new level of weirdness... CRLF issues on Win2K's FTP mount support.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200303

Open source software has been in the news a lot lately, as least in the geeky news sources I read. Much ink was spilled extolling the virtues of the GNOME 2 and KDE 3 desktop software releases, and of OpenOffice 1.0, and how they are "good enough to be viable competitors to Microsoft" now. For many of us, these and other open source tools have long since replaced Microsoft, but apparently it takes the press longer to catch on.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200303

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Bye, Bye, Mr. Answerman Pie (Kline, Gary) 200302

I've been struggling with this piece for the past several weeks... have gone through a number of opening paragraphs. So far, I can't seem to come up with an appropriate way of saying what needs saying. This looks like an occasion to just stay it straight out. The even-month Answerman column is probably coming to an end.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200302

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200302

In this month's column, Greg Lehey discusses some of the communication hurdles that an ever evolving project has to deal with, along with hard decisions that one has to make at times.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200301

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Open Source, and general technology that occurred in the past month.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200301

This month, the Answerman looks at: user mounts, cable modems, more on the portupgrade answer from last time, diskless clients, the 2002 Year-End Round Up, and more!

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200301

Wes takes a look at Java, how important it has become in many different areas, and the not-so-great state of Java on BSD.

Book Review: Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition (Pham, Linh) 200301

For this month's book review, I will be reviewing the third edition of "Essential System Administration". The new edition of the book is the first one to include coverage for FreeBSD, how well does it fare? Read on to find out!

Book Review: Essential System Administration Pocket Reference (Pham, Linh) 200301

In addition to the review of "Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition", I will be doing a quick glance at it's "Pocket Reference" companion.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200212

Open source software is making inroads in commerce and government, but will BSD be part of that ingress? Only if we make it so.

Answerman (Kline, Gary)(Leonard, David)(Myers, Dirk) 200212

A few miscellaneous questions on some pretty widely varied areas within the general Berkeley Unix umbrella. Plus what we know that everyone this side of Mars has been waiting for: Yes, the Year 2002 Answerman Archives!!!

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200212

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Darwin, Mac OS X and Open Source that occurred in the past month.

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200211

Grog puts down the Cooper's and reels in information about rsync, the best cp around. rsync is a program designed to keep identical copies of files on different machines and to optimize network bandwidth while doing so. It's in the Ports Collection in net/rsync.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200211

In this month's Answerman, we have a pack of answers to the last mailbag question, and a pack of new mailbag questions... and a stack of little new questions in between.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200211

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Darwin, Mac OS X and Open Source that occurred in the past month.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200211

The advocate discusses telecommuting, telementoring, and the future of Western society.

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200210

One of your most central tools is doubtless your Mail User Agent or MUA, sometimes simply called a mailer. BSD systems supply a standard MUA, but it's pretty unlikely that you'll want to use it. In this article I'll look at what's available before homing in on my favourite.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200210

This issue marks the beginning of the fifth year that I've been writing this series. You can't claim that it's been a boring time--it's been more like the allegedly Chinese curse ''may you live in interesting times''. During that time free operating systems went from being a geek curiosity to a major factor in the ''dot com'' collapse.

Answerman (Kline, Gary)(Leonard, David)(Myers, Dirk) 200210

This month, we've got a grab bag of tuning tips and tricks, in no particular order, including notes on tuning your kernel.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200210

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Darwin, Mac OS X and Open Source that occurred in the past month.

Book Review: Absolute BSD (Pham, Linh) 200210

In this month's book review, I will be taking a look at a book that is billed as "The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD", Absolute BSD, which aims to be an all-in-one guide for anyone starting in FreeBSD and UNIX administration.

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200209

Last month's article on web browsers aroused a great deal of interest, including a lot of interesting feedback. Web browsers are a real can of worms, but it's probably worth looking at some of the details. It's become clear that my article only scratched the surface, and I'll need to come back and do a more detailed comparison. That won't happen immediately; in the meantime, I'll discuss some of the feedback I got.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200209

No column this month... Maniac that I am, I volunteered for two conventions this year instead of just one. If you are near New York City and see this in time, check us out: http://www.axny.org

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200209

Scattered among my usual summer reading selection, which runs to mystery novels and sailing magazines, have been two interesting essays at the confluence of Internet development and politics. They both present what I find to be a very compelling picture of the state of open source software development from the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200209

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Darwin, Mac OS X and the Open Source community.

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200208

In this month's "Trawling the Ports Collection", Greg covers a couple of the more popular web browsers available in the Ports collection as well as how the browsers fare when tested with Shockwave, Java and how well the browser renders select web sites.

Answerman (Kline, Gary)(Leonard, David)(Myers, Dirk) 200208

Here are several interesting Q's and A's as we step into late summer north of the line, late winter south of. (Anyone living directly on the equator can ignore this.) This time, David Leonard gives his thoughts on the twm window manager; soon (AKA: RSN) Gary Kline is planning a brief show and tell about twm's brother, ctwm. If any of the BSD siblings decide to throw in X11 as a default perhaps one of these lightweight WM's will be the default. Just a thought, people, just a thought. Your AnswerTeam is comfortable with the CLI, coding in straight hex, and chewing nails for snacks.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200208

Admittedly, some people claim that BSD is even less suited to the desktop than Linux, but I don't agree with that either. The issues that Linux has on the desktop are the same issues that BSD on the desktop has.

This Month in BSD (Smith, Sam) 200208

Dæmon News welcomes a new column this month in which Sam Smith covers the events that occurred in the past month in the world of BSD.

Channel Critic: O'Reilly OSCON report (Witt, Don) 200208

The O'Reilly show has long been looked at as being one of THE technical forums in the industry for years. This year, as in the past, they have continued the tradition. With tough economic times and though the United States is at war, this years show was about the same size as last year. Great job!

The Daemon News had a booth at the show which I helped staff. While at the show, I was able to view the show and evaluate it.

There were three things that really impressed me.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200207

Wes is on vacation as well, spending the (U.S.) Independence Day with his family.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200207

Hey! Mister Answerman is on vacation this month, running the Registration counter at Anime Expo (http://www.anime-expo.org). Come on by and see all the BSD machines in action!

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200207

Manipulating graphical images is an important part of using a desktop computer nowadays. Graphics-capable web browsers have been around for ten years, and in an earlier issue of this column we looked at graphics displays for documents. This month we'll look at using xv, one of the old graphics diehards, for processing images from digital cameras.

Book Review: Programming PHP (Pham, Linh) 200207

In this book review, I will be giving a detailed overview of "Programming PHP" and will provide any critiques and additional comments that you can take into consideration when deciding to purchase the book.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200206

An anarchy works when everybody is in agreement: you don't need an arbiter to make decisions. That's easy in a small group. You shouldn't need anybody in charge of a group of five people. By the time they get to be fifty, things aren't quite as easy, but with a bit of goodwill and mutual respect it can still work.

Answerman (Kline, Gary)(Leonard, David)(Myers, Dirk) 200206

Have a question on how something works or why something isn't working? Ask one of our Answer Men, Gary Kline, David Leonard and Dirk Myers.

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200206

In the first couple of articles in this series we looked at at how the Ports Collection can give you a more comfortable environment in which to work. This month we'll go off in a different direction: using the sound hardware.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200205

What is needed for online computing to become ubiquitous, part of the very background of our lives, is for all of our applications to become agnostic to the device type and location used for access. What we really need is an expanding of our viewpoint when developing or maintaining applications.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200205

The Answer Man dives into his mail bag to solve even more problems. This month: floppy-disk boot managers, FTP and NTFS in BSD, web-ifying 'passwd', and more!

Trawling the Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200205

Last month we looked at how the ports collection can give you a more comfortable environment in which to work. One of the things I mentioned there was the issue of printed documentation for the ports. This month we'll look at how to print some things with the aid of the ports collection.

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200204

How have project management practices influenced BSD in the past? How will they be needed in the future, as the BSD projects grow larger and more internally diverse? Here are some history, predictions, and questions about what is to come.

The Answer Man (Kline, Gary)(Leonard, David)(Myers, Dirk) 200204

This month we bring you a column on tuning your BSD system to best suit your needs and wants. Obviously, because everyone has different requirements, there may well be myriad different ways to tweak your system. If you run more than one machine you may wish to tune each differently.

Trawling The Ports Collection (Lehey, Greg) 200204

Our newest column is a slow saunter through the ports tree. Only when moving slowly can the wild beauty of individual ports truly be appreciated. Herein we present you with information gathered while walking through and playing with the ports tree.

Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200203

This month we have a bunch of short ones. List of Topics I know a compiler that lets you get away with typedef tricks. FTP plus NTFS equals corrupted file. Help? How do I shut off telnet to prevent it being used for break-ins? Can I put a web interface on top of the passwd command? Why is it so hard to get into the BIOS configuration of a laptop? Why do some serial port programs suck and others don't? Um, what is the permeability of steel? Mailbag: Questions I didn't get to, or didn't have a clue about.

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200203

When you're building a system that plays with nuclear warheads, the phrase "security at any cost" makes a lot of sense. There truly is no cost too great to bear in assuring that nuclear weapons cannot be launched without the proper authorization. As a popular bumper sticker of the period read, "One nuclear bomb can ruin your entire day."

Book Review: The DOSSIER Series (Pham, Linh) 200203

In this month's article, I will be reviewing four volumes from Prime Time Freeware's DOSSIER document collection: File Systems: FreeBSD, Text Processing: Essential Tools, Python: Language Reference, and PostgreSQL: Use and Administration. Since the four document collection volumes are compiled from other document sources (the content and information in the book is identical to the original source), I will be reviewing the presentation, the formatting and the value-added features of each of the volumes.

C BSD Run (Alton, Matthew) 200202

The immortal Isaac Asimov on at least one occasion responded to an obvious question with a seemingly paradoxical answer. Dr. Asimov, who held a Ph.D in biochemistry, was asked why, when he had written literally hundreds of expository essays and books on such diverse topics as theoretical physics, computer science, and psychology, he had not seen fit to write on his chosen field. He answered, "It is too difficult. I know too much about it."

Daemon's Advocate (Lehey, Greg) 200202

In the last few years, I've talked about all kinds of BSD-related topics, but the intention is always what's reflected in the name: advocacy. It's been some time since I discussed straightforward BSD advocacy; this month I'd like to consider whom we target with advocacy, and how we handle it.

The Answer Man (Kline, Gary)(Myers, Dirk)(Leonard, David) 200202

Greetings, salutations, and New Years best from your faithful Answer Team. This column addresses its usual wide variety of questions. Most are directed at the newer BSD user...but even long-time users are not current on the hows and whys of using grep. Or would rather not invest the hour or two to figure out how to get locate updating its database daily instead of weekly. If you understand the difference between the cua and tty /device files, then you may be well ahead of the majority of us BSD'ers. We make no pretense at being profound; instead we attempt to answer questions and de-mystify the idea that "Unix is so impossibly hard that it is only for the hard-core nerd".

Daemon's Advocate (Peters, Wes) 200201

I've read several columns lately about the limitations of open source software, or at least the open source development model. Being dedicated to several open source projects, I tend to dismiss these as the rantings of those who do not understand open source, or who have a political or economical axe to grind. Then I had an interesting design discussion with my boss, Matt Smith. We were discussing a problem in the user interface of our product, which is based on quite a bit of open source software. We have experienced very few problems with the open source components in our product, largely because we have selected proven technology; this is one of the big advantages to using open source in a commercial product.

Embedded BSD (Lambert, Terry) 200201

If you are considering building an embedded system, you would do well to learn from the examples of such companies as IBM, Apple, Array Networks (formerly ClickArray), Foundry Networks, Ricoh, Intel, and many, many others who use a BSD platform at the heart of some of their products.

Book Review: FreeBSD Unleashed (Pham, Linh) 200201

In October 2001, _FreeBSD Unleashed_ was published with a goal to provide a guide that ranges in topics from the very basics of FreeBSD to building a secure and multi-talented FreeBSD workstation or server. The book covers a lot of topics, as the size and weight of the book show, which is organized into six parts, which are broken into thirty-four chapters and four appendixes. The first five parts of the book are ordered so that it starts off with the basics of FreeBSD and progresses up to the more technical and detailed topics like security and networking services.

The Answerman (Whitesel, Todd) 200201

Topics This time Include: