Introduction to the DarwinPorts Project
by Landon Fuller

The DarwinPorts Project is a BSD licensed software build, install, and packaging infrastructure conceived as a part of the OpenDarwin Project. DarwinPorts is designed to be easily extended, embedded in other applications, and ported to a wide variety of architectures. DarwinPorts is in active development and is currently supported on Mac OS X 10.2 and Darwin 6.0.2, with support for Mac OS X 10.1 and FreeBSD forthcoming. Read More

DNS and "The djb Way"
by Wayne Marshall

This article will consider a few scenarios that would benefit from running djbdns, demonstrating the easy set up and configuration of djbdns on FreeBSD. We will also open the door a crack for a peek at "the djb way", an alternate parallel universe of doing things Un*x. The first look is weird and scary, but after a while "the djb way" may even begin to make sense (and that can be scary, too!) Read More

Book Review: Absolute BSD
by Linh Pham

In this month's book review, I will be taking a look at a book that is billed as "The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD", Absolute BSD, which aims to be an all-in-one guide for anyone starting in FreeBSD and UNIX administration. Read More

Trawling the Ports Collection
by Greg Lehey

One of your most central tools is doubtless your Mail User Agent or MUA, sometimes simply called a mailer. BSD systems supply a standard MUA, but it's pretty unlikely that you'll want to use it. In this article I'll look at what's available before homing in on my favourite. Read More

Answerman
by Gary Kline, David Leonard, Dirk Myers

This month, we've got a grab bag of tuning tips and tricks, in no particular order, including notes on tuning your kernel. Read More

This Month in BSD
by Sam Smith

Sam Smith outlines the events and product releases related to BSD, Darwin, Mac OS X and Open Source that occurred in the past month. Read More

Daemon's Advocate
by Greg Lehey

This issue marks the beginning of the fifth year that I've been writing this series. You can't claim that it's been a boring time--it's been more like the allegedly Chinese curse ''may you live in interesting times''. During that time free operating systems went from being a geek curiosity to a major factor in the ''dot com'' collapse. Read More