MidnightBSD Developer Journal

The MidnightBSD FTP server has been down since the server migration.  I'm working on getting it back into place.  It's over 32GB in size currently.   

I've made several changes to the Apache 2.2 port.  mod_proxy_connect should now work properly and scgi has been added to the list.  I've also added support for BDB 4.x 

 Tip: If you're using MidnightBSD current, you can try out the netpgp utility as part of the base system.  It allows you to do PGP operations without installing a port. 

There's also the new unzip utility which works for basic unzip operations but doesn't always work as a replacement for the port version.

There's also been some recent improvements to several periodic scripts; be sure to mergemaster if you upgrade to recent current.

 Magus website and bugzilla are back up.  I also committed a fix for the seg faulting sftp problem on some systems.  I've noticed it on amd64.

Several perl prots were updated today and I found a bug in XML:Parser.  Don't give it two single ticks in a row.

I have the new server setup, but several services still need some TLC including Bugzilla and magus.  I probably wont' get to them until Saturday. 

I just wanted to point out that bsd magazine is now free and online. 

The most recent magus run looked much better.  We had 2150 packages pass.  Both KDE and Gnome have a few packages that need work.

We've been running the MidnightBSD website on a Dell Precision 650 workstation for several years.  It's a dual xeon 2.0Ghz with 3GB PC2700 ECC ram, intel nic (gigabit), 500GB IDE HDD + 2 x 160GB RAID1 IDE on 32bit MidnightBSD.

Today, we bought a new server.  It's a HP Proliant ML110 G6 with Intel Xeon X3430.   It should be a nice little upgrade.  

QT4 has been updated to qt 4.5.2 this weekend.  We've also begun the work to update KDE 4 to 4.3.1.  Work on Gnome 2.26 has been progressing as well.  We need to fix a few dependancies (gstreamer plugins and fuse). 

MidnightBSD now has support for posix_spawn(3) related functions in libc.  We've also made changes to kqueue(2) to support libdispatch (Apple's GCD).  libdispatch does not work yet as there are other change that must be made to support it.   

A vulnerability has been reported in Sendmail, which can be exploited
by malicious people to conduct spoofing attacks.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error when processing
certificate fields containing NULL characters. This can be
exploited to e.g. conduct Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks via
specially crafted certificates.

Our latest magus run was significantly better than the previous run.  With the previous run, we had roughly 700 ports pass, mostly due to bugs with our Perl environment.  The new Magus run had 1904 ports pass.  Several of the failures were in Java ports and due to a problem with the chroot tarball used during the run.  It contained JAVA_HOME in the environment.   This is the first amd64 current run to use the system perl correctly.  

Yesterday, I updated the Python 2.6 port to 2.6.4.  This seems to work as expected on i386, but there are some issues on amd64 related to libffi and _ctypes.  I'm working on the problem.

src:

amdtemp(4) was added to current.  This allows you to monitor the temperature on AMD CPUs such as the Phenom and Phenom II.

openssl and other security fixes.  See UPDATING for more info

mports:

Several different categories of ports have been updated.  We're still working on the Gnome 2.26 update.  gstreamer and pidgin are particularly behind and need work.  

 MySQL 6.0 ports were dropped due to EOL upstream.  MySQL even deleted the manuals online for this release.  We made 5.1 default.  Python 2.6 is now the default version of Python.

There have been some reports of cyrus-sasl2-saslauthd not building.  Please send logs and details of your environment.  Both of the cyrus-sasl2 ports were updated for a security issue from some time back.  

lightttpd was updated for a security issue.

p5-Error was just updated.

mercurial, git, ogg, theora, and flac ports were updated tonight.   

Our last magus run showed a noticable improvement in package building on 0.2 amd64.  I'm quite pleased with the progress on the ports system.  It's not quite where I want it, but 1900 packages were built.

I've been so busy with work that I haven't had time for MidnightBSD this week.  I'm hoping thigs will go back to normal soon. On the upside, I've been reading up on some new security research with regard to kernel designs.  I'm considering some changes that could greatly reduce attack vectors of rootkits on the system. 

 I'm indexing for a new magus run right now.  It should start running on 0.2 amd64 soon.  I do miss the cluster setup at EMU sometimes.  It takes us at least two days to get results, often times do to fetching time.  I'd love to separate the fetch and build testing for magus. 

Last night, I committed a change to our TCP stack.  Anyone running current should report unusual problems.  It does seem stable so far.

I just updated the egroupware and unzip ports.  The former update is a major version jump 1.4 to 1.6 and includes many security updates.  Optional components for mail and ldap must be installed separately if you choose to use those modules.  The latter contains updates for handling symbolic links as well as fixes for fetching the source distribution.

crash@ and I have been working on getting gnome ports updated to 2.26.  He's done most of the work so far, but I did get Mk extensions updated and a few ports last night.  Assume the gnome system is broken until we get this done.  Also, note that KDE 3.5.10 should build on midnightbsd 0.2.x but several ports are broken on current.  You can work around this by installing many things manually without using the meta package.  The sysadmin related tools are broken and possibly some of the multimedia stuff.  While, I was going to fix this, I think my time might be better spent getting KDE 4.x working instead.  Gnome will come first, however. 

I finally got around to requesting a new SSL certificate for MidnightBSD.org.