Making friends with C-Shell and TC-Shell Part I
by Konrad Heuer

Today, csh and the more comfortable successor TC-Shell (tcsh) are still the default login shells on a BSD system. Despite their impressive functionality, they seem to lose popularity compared to the GNU Bourne-Again-Shell (bash) of the Free Software Foundation. This article, divided into three parts to be published in consecutive issues of the Daemon News, will show that csh and especially tcsh don't need to hide. Read More

Do you Trust your System Logs?
by Alejo Sanchez

A commonly used technique among computer cracker, and experienced thieves as well is to erase their fingerprints from the crime scene. This usually means erasing or modifying the logs stored on the computer that will expose them if carefully examined. Unprotected logs, will make system security checks an impossible task in most cases. When crackers gain complete access to the system, they also gain the ability to read, modify or erase any logs. Read More

SNMP Agent Development
by Girish Hampali

Simple Network Management Protocol is de-facto standard for network management. Every innovated network element in data network requires to support SNMP. This white paper lists down the present trends and proven techniques in making a network element manageable by adding SNMP agent to the network element. Scope of the paper is limited to comparison of available techniques so as to deploy the better solution in least possible time. This paper does neither provide nor dictate new techniques in the fields of network management and agent development. Read More

Generating MRTG graphs of qmail statistics under FreeBSD
by Paul Hoadley

This document describes how to configure qmail to generate separate logs for SMTP, POP3 and local delivery activity, so that Inter7's qmailmrtg7 package can generate statistics for use with MRTG. Read More

The Case for Consistent Application of a Single Coding Style
by Sheldon Hearn

Humans issue instructions to computers using programming languages, not human languages. Many programming languages exist on various levels of abstraction from the native hardware language of the computers themselves. A set of instructions intended for a computer but written in one of these abstracted languages is called source code and the act of writing it is called coding. Read More

Answerman
by Gary Kline, David Leonard, Dirk Myers

Happy December, fellow BSDers. This month, in addition to the annual archive for the year, we're offering five seemingly trivial questions. --Trivial if you don't know the answer at any rate. How can I use ftp to transfer an entire directory? What's the deal with file-descriptor handling in the Bourne shell? Where, oh where are the imap-uw man pages!! How can I tell if a manual page came with a package I just installed? I can't find it anywhere. Where are the /etc/skel files in OpenBSD, please? Read More

Daemon's Advocate
by Greg Lehey

Meanwhile, in Europe... the first BSDCon Europe in Brighton, England was held in mid-November. Like the first FreeBSDCon in Berkeley, this was an experiment to a certain extent. Unlike the first FreeBSDCon, sponsorship levels were much lower, making it a lot riskier. Read More