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FreeBSD 9.0 has been released. A lot of  important new features were added, such as FFS softupdates journaling, ZFS v28, HAST framework, Capsicum kernel sandboxing, user-level DTrace, TCP/IP congestion control framework, NFSv4, High Performance SSH, LLVM compiler infrastructure and clang, Sony PS3 support for the powerpc branch, and this new installer called bsdinstall.

The release announcement is available here.

Allegedly, the OpenBSD crypto stack has backdoors carefuly placed in by FBI-sponsored open source developers ten years ago. If it’s true, this is very troubling news indeed. We do hope it’s only FUD.

Update: This is most probably BS. Here’s why. Supposedly, Bin Laden’s men are also involved. Right.

It’s been a while since we haven’t had any BSD related posts.

I have recently modified this script to generate a PF ruleset from the Spamhaus DROP list in order to keep evil packets out of your network. The DROP list is a tiny subset of the SBL containing netblocks controlled entirely by spammers. The modified script you can get here. To use it, put it somewhere in your PATH and run it once a day via cron. The ruleset is loaded via an anchor. In order to load it at boot time, put the following lines in your pf.conf above the usual rules:

# anchor for Spamhaus DROP list
anchor droplist
load anchor droplist from "/etc/pf.drop"

Enjoy.