NetBSD 7.1.1 is the first update with security and critical fixes for the NetBSD 7.1 branch. Those include a number of fixes for security advisories, kernel and userland.

[Tags: Releases]

About g4u: g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

The past: When I started g4u, I had the task to install a number of lab machines with a dual-boot of Windows NT and NetBSD. The hype was about Microsoft's "Zero Administration Kit" (ZAK) then, but that did barely work for the Windows part - file transfers were slow, depended on the clients' hardware a lot (requiring fiddling with MS DOS network driver disks), and on the ZAK server the files for installing happened do disappear for no good reason every now and then. Not working well, and leaving out NetBSD (and everything elase), I created g4u. This gave me the (relative) pain of getting things working once, but with the option to easily add network drivers as they appeared in NetBSD (and oh they did!), plus allowed me to install any operating system.

The present: We've used g4u successfully in our labs then, booting from CDROM. I also got many donations from public and private instituations plus comanies from many sectors, indicating that g4u does make a difference.

In the mean time, the world has changed, and CDROMs aren't used that much any more. Network boot and USB sticks are today's devices of choice, cloning of a full disk without knowing its structure has both advantages but also disadvantages, and g4u's user interface is still command-line based with not much space for automation. For storage, FTP servers are nice and fast, but alternatives like SSH/SFTP, NFS, iSCSI and SMB for remote storage plus local storage (back to fun with filesystems, anyone? avoiding this was why g4u was created in the first place!) should be considered these days. Further aspects include integrity (checksums), confidentiality (encryption). This leaves a number of open points to address either by future releases, or by other products.

The future: At this point, my time budget for g4u is very limited. I welcome people to contribute to g4u - g4u is Open Source for a reason. Feel free to get back to me for any changes that you want to contribute!

The changes: Major changes in g4u 2.6 include:

• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17 (shortly before netbsd-8 release branch), binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10
• Many new drivers, bugfixes and improvements from NetBSD-current (see beta1 and beta2 announcements)
• Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk, do not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows to boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE (Testing and documentation updates welcome!)
• Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u disk image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz
• In addition to MD5, add SHA512 checksums

Enjoy!

[Tags: g4u, Releases]

g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

For more information, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/.

Changes in 2.6beta2 include:

• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17, binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10
• Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk, do not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows to boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE (Testing and documentation updates welcome!)
• Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u disk image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz
• Put all object files into one object directory. This may need more cleanup in the future. Feedback from people building g4u welcome!
• Disable verbose device messages on Microchannel (MCA) machines
• New drivers:
  • Toshiba Dynabook hotkeys
  • Intel S1200,C2000 (non-pch) SMBus storage controller
  • Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage controllers and devices
  • Intel Wireless WiFi Link 7xxx PCI network
  • Intel 8259x 10 gigabit PCI network
  • Realtek 8188CE/8192CE 802.11b/g/n PCI network
  • VMware VMXNET3
  • Marvell Libertas PCMCIA network
  • ASIX AX88178a/AX88179 based USB network adapters
  • Realtek RTS5209/RTS5229 Card Reader
• Happy 18th Birthday, g4u!

• The g4u 2.6beta2 floppy images (zipped/ uncompressed floppy one, floppy two, floppy three, and floppy four)
• The g4u 2.6beta2 ISO CD image (zipped/uncompressed)
• The g4u/NetBSD kernel for PXE boot (gzipped)
• The g4u 2.6beta2 source code
• Some md5 checksums:

  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-1.fs) = 8214c1ded55e78aed2f34d3e318dc75d
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-2.fs) = 8b55f3fe6a4806c9a65a3d176463e1bc
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-3.fs) = 0f9629353ddd470d17c5b4fd4ec7fd8e
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-4.fs) = c25a955e5d876d64943fd03f957ed4c9
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.iso) = acabb0fb73d4a2f9062fb070b4ddd825
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.tgz) = f8387d5bf146f98dda040dfcc1c53e44
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.fs.zip) = 8ef324c71ae7b000708e69019e55ef4e
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.iso.zip) = 1f4bd37784405350ee3e8e6c75a6b6b6
  

``
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 54th quarterly release
of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system.  pkgsrc is available
with more than 17500 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more
information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/
A neutral overview can be found at https://www.openhub.net/p/pkgsrc

For the 2017Q1 release we welcome the following notable package
additions and changes to the pkgsrc collection:

  - python 3.6
  - Nextcloud 11
  - firefox 45.8.0 and 52.0.1
  - gradle 3.4
  - pkg_comp 2.0
  - qmail 1.03nb24 binary packages work, supporting common use cases
  - many additional Python, Perl and Ruby modules
  - many additional TeX packages

The default version of Apache has been changed to 2.4 (from 2.2); set
PKG_APACHE_DEFAULT=apache22 in mk.conf to stay with 2.2.

Package removals include gcc 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 and Xen 3.1, 3.3 and 4.1;
these are old and notable only because of their stature.

The following infrastructure changes were introduced:
  - mk/curses.mk enabled packages to depend on curses without specifying
      a particular version

In total, 192 packages were added, 25 packages were removed, and 1,458
package updates were processed since the pkgsrc-2016Q4 release.

Instructions on using the binary package manager can be found at
http://pkgin.net, and pkgsrc itself can be retrieved from
https://github.com/jsonn/pkgsrc or via cvs or tar file -- see
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html.  The branch name
for the 2017Q1 branch is "pkgsrc-2017Q1".''

Please help us out by testing 7.1_RC1. We love any and all feedback. Report problems through the usual channels (submit a PR or write to the appropriate list). More general feedback is welcome at releng%NetBSD.org@localhost.''

[Tags: Releases]

NetBSD takes quite some effort to keep such incompatibilites low, yet they happen. The only real solutions is: no updates. "Never change a running system" is nice for availability, but it poses security risks. The time when a big server uptime was considered a sign of good system administration are gone. Today, a long update means the system (probably) runs outdated and as such vulnerable code.

So to solve the problem a compromise is needed: little updates, but crucial security updates do get done. Which is where NetBSD's "minor" release like NetBSD 7.0.2 come into play. With its set of changes, a number of external software packages got security-related updates (e.g. OpenSSL, NTP, BIND, X), and a smaller number of security related changes were also added, e.g. a race condition in mail.local(8), crashes in the Networking File System (NFS) and the native Fast File System (FFS) plus some platform-specific crashes on MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC64.

For more information on downloading and installation see the release announcement as well as the platform-specific install documentation, e.g. for NetBSD 7.0.2/arm64's INSTALL.html file.

[Tags: bind, mips, ntp, openssl, powerpc, Releases, sparc64]

There are images available that are based on the latest development snapshot, NetBSD-curent, and with the NetBSD 7.0 release around the corner, there is also an image based on NetBSD 7.0 Release Candidat 1.

See the NetBSD wiki for many more details, and if you use your RPI for any cool hacks, be sure to let us know!

[Tags: arm, pkgsrc, raspberrypi, Releases]

Please help us out by testing 7.0_RC1. We love any and all feedback. Report problems through the usual channels (submit a PR or write to the appropriate list). More general feedback is welcome at releng@NetBSD.org. Your input will help us put the finishing touches on what promises to be a great release! ''

[Tags: Releases]

I'd like to push out version 2.6 within the next few weeks. Please test and let me know if there are any showstoppers!

Full list of news in g4u 2.6beta1:

• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2013-10-20
• Move back from a ramdisk that's loaded from a separate file back to a ramdisk that's part of the kernel image. This allows easier netbooting for those people who want it - added back by popular demand :-)
• Added more kernel buffer space, to hold all kernel messages for dmesg, even on machines with large ACPI tables (Hello VMware Fusion!)
• New drivers:
  • LSILogic 9x9 and 53c1030 (Fusion-MPT) PCI SCSI
  • LSI Logic Fusion-MPT II PCI SCSI
  • Atheros AR9k (802.11a/g/n) PCI Wireless
  • Marvell PCI Libertas Wireless
  • Atheros AR9k (802.11a/g/n) PC-Card Wireless
  • Broadcom BCM43xx PC-Card Wireless
  • Atheros AR9002U USB Wireless
  • Ralink Technology RT2500USB 802.11a/b/g USB Wireless
  • Ralink Technology RT(2[78]|30)00 802.11a/b/g/n USB Wireless
  • Realtek RTL8187/RTL8187B 802.11b/g USB Wireless
  • Realtek RTL8188CU/RTL8192CU 802.11b/g/n USB Wireless
  • Intel Atom E6xx PCI-LPC

• The g4u 2.6beta1 ISO CD image (zipped/uncompressed)
• The g4u 2.6beta1 source
• The g4u 2.6beta1 floppy images (zipped/ uncompressed floppy one, floppy two and floppy three)
• Some md5 checksums:

  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1-1.fs) = 264d5b27f208f1053777774d0c2b87a7
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1-2.fs) = 533b37fbeeb2d537928de61b25eb2ade
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1-3.fs) = 5abe1327326fcdac18bf4d68566f3e9b
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1.iso) = 37596efb42c014eb049e0027db059bd9
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1.tgz) = acd5907a7fb2cc8fbd4645a1b9db5272
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1.fs.zip) = 9b8da62fac57dcd38a4e3376189a087d
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta1.iso.zip) = 44cb8d01407b17f9d9839740b5a0d2d9
  

Read the NetBSD 6.1.2 and NetBSD 6.0.3 patch releases">6.x and 5.x release notes for more information.

[Tags: Releases]