Daemon News 199904 : April 1999 Daemon News

April 1999 Daemon News

Copyright © 1999 Louis Bertrand

Usenix 99 Technical Conference

This year's event looks BSD-friendly. The Freenix track covers BSD, Linux and other open source projects, while evening Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions put attendees face to face with developers and project leaders.

OpenBSD CD-ROMs for attendees.

The Usenix Association has provided a grant to the OpenBSD Project to underwrite the expense of producing the CD-ROM release of OpenBSD 2.5. Conference attendees will get a complimentary copy. Cynthia Deno, speaking for Usenix, says this grant continues Usenix's 25 year tradition of support for open source software, independent development and open airing of issues unfettered by stodginess or commercial interest. "Hey," she says, "we are the original free Unix group!" Other groups are invited to submit grant proposals.

Freenix Track

The Freenix track promises high quality technical papers specific to BSD and Linux as well as networking and portability issues.

DaemonNews BOF

Some members of the DaemonNews team are trying to organize a BOF, or at least a damn good party. Look for more details next month, as the plans fall into place.

The Scoop on BSD Networking

Three news items this month about the proposed new Internet standards for expansion (IPv6) and secure connections (IPsec) show there is a lot of back room activity even if commercial providers are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. Also, the more accepted ISDN technology is coming to BSD.

KAME Project Announces Stable Releases for Testing

The KAME Project, a collaboration of seven companies in Japan to produce reference implementations of IPv6 and IPsec networking for BSD, announced that a stable release is available for downloading, testing and comments. The release supports FreeBSD, NetBSD and BSDi's BSD/OS, and is the first release since recent refinements were made to a couple of IPv6 protocols which have been promoted to the status of "proposed standards".

Naval Research Laboratory Releases Alpha Software

The US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Internet Security Technology Project has released version Alpha 7.1 for testing. The code, an early release after a year of preliminary work, provides networking stacks for IPv6 and IPsec. The cryptographic code is available from MIT but cannot be exported from the USA due to the usual restrictions. A non-crypto version is available from the KAME project site in Japan. The code release supports all three free BSDs, BSD/OS, and Linux.

OpenBSD IPSEC and Key Management Updated

Angelos Keromytis, one of the OpenBSD Project's IPsec developers, has finished some commits to the source tree to support PF_KEYv2 as the protocol for kernel communication with userland programs and daemons for setting keys, algorithms, etc., for use by IPsec or other security protocols. Until now, OpenBSD has used PF_ENCAP, which was something John Ioannidis and Angelos put together a while ago.

PF_KEYv2 (described in RFC 2367) is a protocol similar to the PF_ROUTE protocol used in all BSD operating systems for routing table related messages. Switching to it improves portability of key management protocol (ISAKMP) daemons -- OpenBSD's daemon can easily be swapped with other ISAKMP daemons, and vice-versa, all with minimal changes.

Besides PF_KEYv2, a lot of work went into debugging, verifying compliance with the RFCs, removal of useless or deprecated features, and updating man pages. OpenBSD now supports the Skipjack algorithm for encryption, which is not very strong, but is a requirement in the military and government community, where OpenBSD seems to have quite a few users.

ISDN "4" BSD European Test Release

The ISDN4BSD project has announced that the second isdn4bsd beta version is available for download on the isdn4bsd ftp site. The release supports NetBSD (i386, Amiga and Atari), and the i386 architecture for OpenBSD, FreeBSD 3.1, and BSD/OS. It includes drivers for several commercial interface boards. However, only the European protocol suite is supported in this test release.

The ISDN4BSD package is available from isdn4bsd@ftp.consol.de/pub. You must log in as user isdn4bsd and give your email address as the password, then change to the pub directory. Anonymous ftp logins as user ftp or anonymous will not suffice.

In Other News

Company Flamed in Domain Name Dispute

A California software company got a taste of 'Net dynamics when their request to take over a domain name was firmly and publicly refused. THEOS Software Corporation asked their attorney to request a takeover of the domain name theos.com currently owned by Theo de Raadt, lead developer of OpenBSD. The dispute went public when Mr. de Raadt posted the lawyer's letter on his site and the dispute was reported on the news-of-the-minute site Slashdot. When Slashdot readers hit both sites, the Theos Software site went down overnight. The company has agreed to end the dispute and Mr. de Raadt is posting a link to theos-software on his page.

Kurt Waag, vice-president of Theos Software, says he was surprised at the response. "[The name] didn't look like it was being used, so we made an offer to compensate, to pay for the expenses of switching names". Mr. Waag couldn't say how much was offered, only that this was to be a negotiated matter. "We thought we acted in an open and friendly manner. Obviously we used a lawyer because we're a business" he said. Mr. Waag wasn't involved in 1995 when Theos Software registered theos-software.com a few months after Mr. de Raadt had registered theos.com, and he couldn't comment on why the company did not pursue the matter at the time.

On his web site, Mr. de Raadt simply asked for someone in the company to talk to him "as a person", and noted that no one had returned his calls. He also objected to the policy of the .com domain registrar, Network Solutions Inc., to favor corporations over individuals in granting domain names. The only offer to compensate he received was for the cost of registering a new domain name with Network Solutions, currently US$70. He notes that the settlement, to post a link to the company's site, was something the company could have obtained just by asking.

Michael Dalton, the attorney for THEOS Software, expressed dismay at the "attacks of a personal nature" he received by email. "I was trying to initiate a dialog on behalf of my client," he says. "It's obviously gone in the wrong direction."

Mr. Waag couldn't comment on the down time of the company's web server. The server, running Theos Software's proprietary THEOS 32 OS for i386, appeared to go down thirty minutes after the Slashdot posting in the evening (local time) of March 24 and recovered in the early hours of March 25. Mr. de Raadt's site, running OpenBSD, continued to operate to the capacity of his ISDN line. The buzz on Slashdot calls it "the slashdot effect," when thousands of readers follow up an article by browsing the links. Mr. Dalton refuted the allegations that the action had anything to do with a battle of the OSes, pitting THEOS 32 against OpenBSD. Theos Software sells to system integrators and OEMs of turnkey IT solutions.

NetBSD Updates

Ignatios Souvatzis wrote in to tell us about some new driver support in NetBSD:

The Amiga port now supports the Cyberstorm Mark 3/Cyberstorm-PPC SCSI host adapter.
The mvme68k port now has support for Motorola's MVME-167 board (VMEbus board with mc68040 CPU).
The macppc port now has a MESH SCSI driver.

Also, there were some changes to the kernel and the RAIDframe code. Read the details in the NetBSD "Recent Changes" page.

Fast Network Sniffing

Anzen Computing has published the results of a study that compared the performance of Network Flight Recorder (NFR) on several different operating systems. NFR is a fast packet sniffer that has been getting a lot of attention recently as an intrusion detection system. Anzen's NFR page also includes an online demonstration of their NFR intrusion detection filters.

FreeBSD as a "Guest Operating System"?

VMware, a California startup venture, has produced "virtual platform" software that supports multiple operating systems running concurrently on the same hardware, as opposed to the usual either-or multi-boot procedures. Beta versions are being released for Linux and NT 4 as "host operating systems". Supported "guest" operating systems include the various flavors of Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. Read the article in the Windows Tech Edge online journal.

Daemon Advocacy and Silliness

Wilde About FreeBSD

Bob Bruce of Walnut Creek CDROM announced that Donald Wilde and Wilde Media have been retained to act as a paid consultant to The FreeBSD Project for the purposes of expanding its advocacy and paid public relations efforts.

Mr. Bruce, a longtime supporter of the Project, believes that it is in his enlightened self interest to advance the cause of FreeBSD. Mr. Bruce and Mr. Wilde both believe that FreeBSD's ace in the hole is the BSD license, because it enables users to create profitable applications like Yahoo! without encumbrance by onerous license restrictions like the GPL and other more restrictive legalisms. The profits, they point out, are often returned in the form of equipment, advocacy and contributed code.

Jordan Hubbard will continue to be "The FreeBSD Guy". This is intended to free him up to tackle new projects for FreeBSD. Mr. Wilde will be using the freebsd-advocacy mailing list forum to coordinate requests for specific project support from users, as well as DaemonNews and other ezines. His goal is to increase the CPUshare of FreeBSD in both the consumer and server marketplace. He wishes to avoid hype and flame wars, emphasizing instead the operating system's benefits in the server marketplace. A strategy session is planned for April 8 in Concord, California, in conjunction with the Bay Area FreeBSD Users' Group meeting.

Mad About OpenBSD

The OpenBSD Project is putting the finishing touches on release 2.5. After a hectic month of last minute testing and source tree commits, the branch is locked down and the team is preparing the CD-ROM production for a release in late May. Development will continue on -current after the 2.5 lockdown.

Theo de Raadt, lead developer, also announced two new promotional t-shirts for advocacy and fund raising.

User Friendly

Little daemons met "User Friendly" cartoonist Illiad at Linux Expo. Have look at the multi-day thread.

Windows Refund Day

Congratulations to the anonymous daemon advocates who pushed their way to the front of the line at one of the Windows Refund Day rallies somewhere in California. There is a good picture of them in the March 15 issue of Maclean's news magazine (Canada), "Bill Gates Besieged". One is looking away from the camera, but he's holding a FreeBSD 3.0 CD-ROM in front of Linux advocates brandishing "pro-choice" placards. The other seems confused: he has the FreeBSD CD in one hand and a plush penguin in the other. BSD enthusiasts are generally more dignified, but Derwin says any publicity is good publicity.

All The News Printed to Fit

Want to support DaemonNews? T-shirts and sweatshirts are now available through Desert Graphics. Get the ordering information from the DaemonNews administrative pages.

	April 1999 Daemon News Copyright © 1999 Louis Bertrand Usenix 99 Technical Conference This year's event looks BSD-friendly. The Freenix track covers BSD, Linux and other open source projects, while evening Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions put attendees face to face with developers and project leaders. OpenBSD CD-ROMs for attendees. The Usenix Association has provided a grant to the OpenBSD Project to underwrite the expense of producing the CD-ROM release of OpenBSD 2.5. Conference attendees will get a complimentary copy. Cynthia Deno, speaking for Usenix, says this grant continues Usenix's 25 year tradition of support for open source software, independent development and open airing of issues unfettered by stodginess or commercial interest. "Hey," she says, "we are the original free Unix group!" Other groups are invited to submit grant proposals. Freenix Track The Freenix track promises high quality technical papers specific to BSD and Linux as well as networking and portability issues. DaemonNews BOF Some members of the DaemonNews team are trying to organize a BOF, or at least a damn good party. Look for more details next month, as the plans fall into place. The Scoop on BSD Networking Three news items this month about the proposed new Internet standards for expansion (IPv6) and secure connections (IPsec) show there is a lot of back room activity even if commercial providers are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. Also, the more accepted ISDN technology is coming to BSD. KAME Project Announces Stable Releases for Testing The KAME Project, a collaboration of seven companies in Japan to produce reference implementations of IPv6 and IPsec networking for BSD, announced that a stable release is available for downloading, testing and comments. The release supports FreeBSD, NetBSD and BSDi's BSD/OS, and is the first release since recent refinements were made to a couple of IPv6 protocols which have been promoted to the status of "proposed standards". Naval Research Laboratory Releases Alpha Software The US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Internet Security Technology Project has released version Alpha 7.1 for testing. The code, an early release after a year of preliminary work, provides networking stacks for IPv6 and IPsec. The cryptographic code is available from MIT but cannot be exported from the USA due to the usual restrictions. A non-crypto version is available from the KAME project site in Japan. The code release supports all three free BSDs, BSD/OS, and Linux. OpenBSD IPSEC and Key Management Updated Angelos Keromytis, one of the OpenBSD Project's IPsec developers, has finished some commits to the source tree to support PF_KEYv2 as the protocol for kernel communication with userland programs and daemons for setting keys, algorithms, etc., for use by IPsec or other security protocols. Until now, OpenBSD has used PF_ENCAP, which was something John Ioannidis and Angelos put together a while ago. PF_KEYv2 (described in RFC 2367) is a protocol similar to the PF_ROUTE protocol used in all BSD operating systems for routing table related messages. Switching to it improves portability of key management protocol (ISAKMP) daemons -- OpenBSD's daemon can easily be swapped with other ISAKMP daemons, and vice-versa, all with minimal changes. Besides PF_KEYv2, a lot of work went into debugging, verifying compliance with the RFCs, removal of useless or deprecated features, and updating man pages. OpenBSD now supports the Skipjack algorithm for encryption, which is not very strong, but is a requirement in the military and government community, where OpenBSD seems to have quite a few users. ISDN "4" BSD European Test Release The ISDN4BSD project has announced that the second isdn4bsd beta version is available for download on the isdn4bsd ftp site. The release supports NetBSD (i386, Amiga and Atari), and the i386 architecture for OpenBSD, FreeBSD 3.1, and BSD/OS. It includes drivers for several commercial interface boards. However, only the European protocol suite is supported in this test release. The ISDN4BSD package is available from isdn4bsd@ftp.consol.de/pub. You must log in as user isdn4bsd and give your email address as the password, then change to the pub directory. Anonymous ftp logins as user ftp or anonymous will not suffice. In Other News Company Flamed in Domain Name Dispute A California software company got a taste of 'Net dynamics when their request to take over a domain name was firmly and publicly refused. THEOS Software Corporation asked their attorney to request a takeover of the domain name theos.com currently owned by Theo de Raadt, lead developer of OpenBSD. The dispute went public when Mr. de Raadt posted the lawyer's letter on his site and the dispute was reported on the news-of-the-minute site Slashdot. When Slashdot readers hit both sites, the Theos Software site went down overnight. The company has agreed to end the dispute and Mr. de Raadt is posting a link to theos-software on his page. Kurt Waag, vice-president of Theos Software, says he was surprised at the response. "[The name] didn't look like it was being used, so we made an offer to compensate, to pay for the expenses of switching names". Mr. Waag couldn't say how much was offered, only that this was to be a negotiated matter. "We thought we acted in an open and friendly manner. Obviously we used a lawyer because we're a business" he said. Mr. Waag wasn't involved in 1995 when Theos Software registered theos-software.com a few months after Mr. de Raadt had registered theos.com, and he couldn't comment on why the company did not pursue the matter at the time. On his web site, Mr. de Raadt simply asked for someone in the company to talk to him "as a person", and noted that no one had returned his calls. He also objected to the policy of the .com domain registrar, Network Solutions Inc., to favor corporations over individuals in granting domain names. The only offer to compensate he received was for the cost of registering a new domain name with Network Solutions, currently US$70. He notes that the settlement, to post a link to the company's site, was something the company could have obtained just by asking. Michael Dalton, the attorney for THEOS Software, expressed dismay at the "attacks of a personal nature" he received by email. "I was trying to initiate a dialog on behalf of my client," he says. "It's obviously gone in the wrong direction." Mr. Waag couldn't comment on the down time of the company's web server. The server, running Theos Software's proprietary THEOS 32 OS for i386, appeared to go down thirty minutes after the Slashdot posting in the evening (local time) of March 24 and recovered in the early hours of March 25. Mr. de Raadt's site, running OpenBSD, continued to operate to the capacity of his ISDN line. The buzz on Slashdot calls it "the slashdot effect," when thousands of readers follow up an article by browsing the links. Mr. Dalton refuted the allegations that the action had anything to do with a battle of the OSes, pitting THEOS 32 against OpenBSD. Theos Software sells to system integrators and OEMs of turnkey IT solutions. NetBSD Updates Ignatios Souvatzis wrote in to tell us about some new driver support in NetBSD: The Amiga port now supports the Cyberstorm Mark 3/Cyberstorm-PPC SCSI host adapter. The mvme68k port now has support for Motorola's MVME-167 board (VMEbus board with mc68040 CPU). The macppc port now has a MESH SCSI driver. Also, there were some changes to the kernel and the RAIDframe code. Read the details in the NetBSD "Recent Changes" page. Fast Network Sniffing Anzen Computing has published the results of a study that compared the performance of Network Flight Recorder (NFR) on several different operating systems. NFR is a fast packet sniffer that has been getting a lot of attention recently as an intrusion detection system. Anzen's NFR page also includes an online demonstration of their NFR intrusion detection filters. FreeBSD as a "Guest Operating System"? VMware, a California startup venture, has produced "virtual platform" software that supports multiple operating systems running concurrently on the same hardware, as opposed to the usual either-or multi-boot procedures. Beta versions are being released for Linux and NT 4 as "host operating systems". Supported "guest" operating systems include the various flavors of Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. Read the article in the Windows Tech Edge online journal. Daemon Advocacy and Silliness Wilde About FreeBSD Bob Bruce of Walnut Creek CDROM announced that Donald Wilde and Wilde Media have been retained to act as a paid consultant to The FreeBSD Project for the purposes of expanding its advocacy and paid public relations efforts. Mr. Bruce, a longtime supporter of the Project, believes that it is in his enlightened self interest to advance the cause of FreeBSD. Mr. Bruce and Mr. Wilde both believe that FreeBSD's ace in the hole is the BSD license, because it enables users to create profitable applications like Yahoo! without encumbrance by onerous license restrictions like the GPL and other more restrictive legalisms. The profits, they point out, are often returned in the form of equipment, advocacy and contributed code. Jordan Hubbard will continue to be "The FreeBSD Guy". This is intended to free him up to tackle new projects for FreeBSD. Mr. Wilde will be using the freebsd-advocacy mailing list forum to coordinate requests for specific project support from users, as well as DaemonNews and other ezines. His goal is to increase the CPUshare of FreeBSD in both the consumer and server marketplace. He wishes to avoid hype and flame wars, emphasizing instead the operating system's benefits in the server marketplace. A strategy session is planned for April 8 in Concord, California, in conjunction with the Bay Area FreeBSD Users' Group meeting. Mad About OpenBSD The OpenBSD Project is putting the finishing touches on release 2.5. After a hectic month of last minute testing and source tree commits, the branch is locked down and the team is preparing the CD-ROM production for a release in late May. Development will continue on -current after the 2.5 lockdown. Theo de Raadt, lead developer, also announced two new promotional t-shirts for advocacy and fund raising. User Friendly Little daemons met "User Friendly" cartoonist Illiad at Linux Expo. Have look at the multi-day thread. Windows Refund Day Congratulations to the anonymous daemon advocates who pushed their way to the front of the line at one of the Windows Refund Day rallies somewhere in California. There is a good picture of them in the March 15 issue of Maclean's news magazine (Canada), "Bill Gates Besieged". One is looking away from the camera, but he's holding a FreeBSD 3.0 CD-ROM in front of Linux advocates brandishing "pro-choice" placards. The other seems confused: he has the FreeBSD CD in one hand and a plush penguin in the other. BSD enthusiasts are generally more dignified, but Derwin says any publicity is good publicity. All The News Printed to Fit Want to support DaemonNews? T-shirts and sweatshirts are now available through Desert Graphics. Get the ordering information from the DaemonNews administrative pages. Louis Bertrand, louis@signalpath.on.ca