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Today is the last day to submit your travel grant application for BSDCan 2010!

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel
grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit
the Travel Grant Request Application at by April 9, 2010 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers,
documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc).  In some
cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community
members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of
travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations
(conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your
employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our
budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to
cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct
request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek
reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our
overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to
the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on
travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical
costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that
funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project.
Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank
transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel
your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may
show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our
semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something
about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions.
The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can
spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers
get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and
advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation

The conference has continued it’s steady growth and the list of speakers this year is formidable. The following is a short list of examples;

If you are able to attend BSDCan you should as it is fast becoming one of the largest BSD conferences worldwide.

In this issue:

• A first look at PC-BSD 8 release- Jan Stedehouder

• Installing and securing an Apache Jail with SSL on FreeBSD- Rob Somerville

• The gemstones for FreeBSD- Marko Milenovic

• OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD as file sharing servers – Part 1 – NFS- Petr Topiarz

• IPsec VPNs An Introduction to IKE and IPsec- Paul McMath

• LDAP on FreeBSD- Eric Vintimilla

• Secure and stable mailservers with OpenBSD and qmail- Matthias Pfeifer

• Developing Secure Storages: Now On FreeBSD- Theodore Tereshchenko, EldoS Corp.

• Web Server Benchmarking- Mikel King

• OpenSSH: common but underappreciated- Machtelt Garrels

• Interview with Olivier Cochard-Labbé, Founder of FreeNAS- Jesse Smith

http://bsdmag.org/magazine/1004-bsds-as-servers

We’ve extended the deadline for accepting AsiaBSDCon travel grant applications. Please submit your application by Feb. 10, 2010. If you have already submitted an application, you will be hearing from us soon.

Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application at
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers,
documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc).  In some
cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community
members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of
travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations
(conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your
employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our
budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to
cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct
request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek
reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our
overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to
the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on
travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical
costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that
funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project.
Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank
transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel
your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may
show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our
semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something
about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions.
The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can
spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers
get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and
advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is available as an open source community supported version, a closed source and a hosted version. ZCS offers features that rival MS Exchange including active syncing of calendars and contacts to mobile devices in the commercial version.

It is interesting to note that Zimbra like Kerio runs on Mac OS X and Linux, where as the later also runs on Windows and is not open source. The open source edition is available in for porting to other operating systems but has yet to be ported to any of the other BSDs besides Mac OS X.

Although VMWare claims that they value Zimbra’s open source community, only time will tell if the thin air will affect their decisions.

While the RocketRAID 622 boasts some pretty impressive features it remains to be seen if the device can deliver. The following is a list extracted form the site;

• PCI-Express 2.0 x1 (Compatible with PCI-Express 1.0)
• Up to 2 SATA devices with point-to-point connectivity
• Port Multiplier support up to 10 SATA Devices
• RAID level 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD
• Multiple RAID Support
• BIOS Boot to RAID with point-to-point connectivity or through port multiplier
• Quick, Background or Foreground Initialization
• OCE/ORLM (Online Capacity Expansion / Online RAID Level Migration)
• Hot plug and Hot Swap
• Hard drive activity and failed LED
• HighPoint RAID Management Suite (Browser based, CLI and BIOS management through hotkey (ctrl-h)
• Monitoring (SHI Storage Health Inspector), Event log, SMTP and Alarm
• Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X Snow Leopard
• RoHS compliant

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The advisory describes a flaw in the libc/gdtoa code in OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X, as well as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla software, Opera, KDE, and K-Meleon. While most of the above projects have addressed the issue Apple seems to be lagging behind.

Although this may appear to be limited to a local system, it is possible that an end user could experience a breach, considering the issues faced with Apple’s Safari browser executing code malicious code from illicit web sources in the past. Granted the end user would have to allow the code to run in the first place, there is little reason for Apple not to issue a patch as soon as possible.

Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. The operating system runs in various forms their entire product line including Macintosh computers and servers, iPhones, iPods and Apple TV. It is a derivative of FreeBSD and a cousin to both PC-BSD and DragonflyBSD.

The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. The original form of what Apple would later name the “Mac OS” was the integral and unnamed system software first introduced in 1984 with the original Macintosh, usually referred to simply as the System software.