Category Archives: FreeBSD
RTLD Security Exploit in FreeBSD
Date published: December 3rd, 2009
Posted in FreeBSD | No Comments »
On November 30 2009, a security vulnerability was discovered by Nikolaos Rangos (aka Kingcope) in recent FreeBSD releases exploting code in the run-time link-editor, rtld. A patch was shortly issued and updated binaries were announced December 3 2009 in FreeBSD security announcement FreeBSD-SA-09:16.rtld. This vulnerability is critical in nature as it allows a local user to get root access.
All new VPS deployments we make as of December 3 will have the necessary updates to mitigate this vulnerability.
FreeBSD 8.0 now available
Date published: December 3rd, 2009
Posted in Announcements, FreeBSD, RootBSD, VPS | No Comments »
Hello all,
RootBSD is pleased to announce that FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE is now available on all of our Xen VPS Products. If you are an existing customer and need help upgrading to the latest release, please let us know, we will be happy to assist you with the upgrade.
Don’t forget we are still running several promotions on our products page.
Another look at FreeBSD 8
Date published: June 24th, 2009
Posted in FreeBSD, RootBSD, VPS | No Comments »
A customer recently linked us to a blog post, http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html (link broken as of 02/28/2016), that gives a really good look at what there is to come in the up-and-coming version 8 of the FreeBSD operating system. It looks like the FreeBSD developers have been busy and there are a number of new features which caught our eye.
First, as a company which provides FreeBSD VPSs running on Xen the support for running FreeBSD as a paravirtualized guest in Xen is of major interest to us. We currently run our VPSs using Xen’s support for full virtualization (known as HVM mode in Xen lingo). This mode allows unmodified guest operating systems to run in Xen and is, most familarly, how Windows is support in Xen. Paravirtualized guests however, are ported to run within the Xen hypervisor, and since the guest is designed to operate in Xen and cooperate with the hypervisor the guest can run much more efficiently and quickly. To our customers the greatest boost in performance will be seen in disk and network throughput so we are eagerly anticipating this support in FreeBSD 8.
By the looks of it there will be other improvements in almost every part of FreeBSD. The ULE scheduler which first appeared in FreeBSD 7.0 and became the default with 7.1 has received a number of improvements which will boost performance particularly for the SMP configurations that ULE was designed to handle. The inclusion of stack-smashing protection also gives FreeBSD an edge in security by protecting the system from a number of common exploits used to attack software vulnerabilities. Light weight kernel threads are also to appear in FreeBSD 8 which will mean that kernel threads will consume less resources and be less resource intensive to create and destroy.
Seems like FreeBSD 8 will be another great release for our favorite operating system. For a look at all the other features planned for FreeBSD 8 see the original post at http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html (link broken as of 02/28/2016).
FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE
Date published: May 5th, 2009
Posted in FreeBSD | No Comments »
The FreeBSD release team announced the availability of 7.2-RELEASE on May 4. We’ve loaded it in our system and its now available for new VPS setups.
Official announcement:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.2R/announce.html
Highlights:
- support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory
- support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails
- csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository
- Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2
- sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors