The ZFS Intent Log ZIL is a mechanism that gathers together in memory transactions of writes, and is flushed onto disk when synchronous semantics is necessary. In the event of crash or power failure, the log is examined and the uncommitted transaction would be replayed to maintain the synchronous semantics.
FreeBSD
Articles about FreeBSD, my operating system of choice — release announcements, security advisories, and practical administration with jails, ZFS, the pf firewall and system hardening. If you run servers on FreeBSD, you’ll feel at home here.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD security advisory 10-02: ntpd
Felix EhlersThe ntpd(8) daemon is an implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) used to synchronize the time of a computer system to a reference time source.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD security advisory 10-01: bind
Felix EhlersBIND 9 is an implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. The named(8) daemon is an Internet Domain Name Server.
DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) provides data integrity, origin authentication and authenticated denial of existence to resolvers.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD rtld local root exploit
Felix EhlersKingcope discovered and posted on Full-disclosure that the Run-Time Link-Editor rtld in recent FreeBSD versions has a dangerous bug. An attacker can trick rtld to accept a manipulated LD_PRELOAD environment variable even when executing setugid binaries like ping or su.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD 8.0 Release available
Felix EhlersFreeBSD 8.0 is available for download on the ftp servers. Please note that at the time as we are writing this, there’s not yet an official statement on the FreeBSD website.