Blog about the NetBSD open source operating system
For some time, I have ventured into low(er)level hacking & cybersecurity at OverTheWire and pwn.college . Today, a LOT of security & hacking is focussed on Linux/x86, but we all know there is more. More operating systems, and more CPUs. In the area of binary exploitation, I wondered if the basic tools for that work on NetBSD/aarch64 (ARM), and I had a look. Spoiler: they do! Here's an example of…
After some (mostly ongoing) absence from NetBSD, and with NetBSD 11.0RC2 recently announced, I wanted to give it a try. I have moved to a ARM-based Apple machine, and thus x86 / amd64 was not the way to go. Instead, I wanted to see how NetBSD works on ARM these days. Here's how I got it going! 1st try: VirtualBox NetBSD does not come with a VirtualBox image in 2026, so my workaround was to convert…
I had to move servers a few months back, and in the process something went south with this blog. I've changed a few things, and the blog is alive now again. As a matter of fact, I have little time for NetBSD these days, so don't expect many new articles. Just take this as a sign of life. :-) Of course if you think I should add some entry on something here, drop me an email and who knows - maybe I…
I was asked by a long-time g4u user on help with rebuilding g4u from sources. After pointing at the instructions on the homepage , we figured out that a few lose odds and ends didin't match. After bouncing some advices back and forth, I ventured into the frabjous joy of starting a rebuild from scratch, and quick enough ran into some problems, too. Usually I cross-compile g4u from Mac OS X, but for…
I've had Google Adsense advertising for quite a while on my blog, the g4u homepage and various other pages. In the start a little bit of money came in. This has all dried up long since, and in light of privacy regulations like the EU GDPR I've decided to not give away my users' data to Google any longer. So, there it is - my blog and other pages are free for your use now, and you are no longer the…
On December 22nd, NetBSD 7.1.1 was released as premature christmas present, see the release annoucement . NetBSD 7.1.1 is the first update with security and critical fixes for the NetBSD 7.1 branch. Those include a number of fixes for security advisories, kernel and userland.
So things have become a bit silent here, which is due to reallife - my apologies. Still, I'd like to wish everyone following this here a Happy New Year 2018! And with this, a few new security advisories have been published: NetBSD Security Advisory 2018-001: Several vulnerabilities in context handling - this affects amd64, i386 and sparc64 NetBSD Security Advisory 2018-002: Local DoS in virecover
I haven't seen this mentioned on the NetBSD mailing lists, and this may be of interest to some - there was a talk about security bugs in the various BSDs at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRg2vuwF1hY Talk: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/8968.html In summary, many reasons for bugs are shown in many areas of the kernel (system…
After a five-year period for beta-testing and updating, I have finally released g4u 2.6. With its origins in 1999, I'd like to say: Happy 18th Birthday, g4u! About g4u: g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed…
Jaromir Dolecek has worked on NCQ and is looking for testers in context of merging the development branch into NetBSD-current. What is NCQ? According to Wikipedia , `` Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is an extension of the Serial ATA protocol allowing hard disk drives to internally optimize the order in which received read and write commands are executed. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary…