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Development

What's coming in OpenSSH 5.1

By Forrest Cook
July 9, 2008

OpenSSH is an important tool for remote connectivity: "OpenSSH is a FREE version of the SSH connectivity tools that technical users of the Internet rely on. Users of telnet, rlogin, and ftp may not realize that their password is transmitted across the Internet unencrypted, but it is. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides secure tunneling capabilities and several authentication methods, and supports all SSH protocol versions."

On July 6, 2008 a call for testing was issued for OpenSSH version 5.1: "OpenSSH 5.1 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This release is one of the biggest in recent years, with two hackathons' worth of improvements and fixes for some of our most recalcitrant bugs."

A large number of new features are being added to the OpenSSH suite of utilities. Some of the feature highlights include:

  • Experimental SSH fingerprint visualization (see this paper [pdf]) will produce visual representations of host keys for quick key validation.
  • The sshd daemon will get a new extended test mode with capabilities for dumping the configuration and testing match rules.
  • A "df" command has been added to the sftp client for displaying server filesystem information.
  • There will be a new mechanism for disabling further session requests between ssh and sshd.
  • The ssh-keygen command will get a new -l option that will allow searching for a host in the known_hosts file.
  • ssh and sshd will better support port forward destination hosts with multiple forward addresses.
  • Some basic interoperability tests have been added for Twisted Conch.
  • Configuration file changes:
    • Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) address/masklen matching will be added to sshd_config "Match address" blocks and authorized_keys "from" restrictions.
    • A new sshd_config AllowAgentForwarding option will control authentication agent forwarding.
    • The sshd_config MaxSessions option will give finer grained control to the number of multiplexed sessions.
    • sshd_config "Match group" blocks will get new support for group negation.
    • sshd_config match blocks will now support the MaxAuthTries option.
  • Performance improvements.
  • Documentation improvements.
  • Bug fixes.

For those who would like to experiment with the new features, a series of snapshot releases are available for download.

Comments (2 posted)

System Applications

Database Software

PostgreSQL Weekly News

The July 6, 2008 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.

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Filesystem Utilities

g4l: verison 0.26 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.26 of g4l has been announced. "G4L is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool. The created images are optionally compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally. Latest changes with 0.26: added mdev as hotplug program, updated ntfs-3g, kernel 25.9, busybox 1.11.0 with patches to 7/02/2008, g4l30 script that shows partition size and type, added sfdisk and fsck programs."

Comments (none posted)

Interoperability

Samba Team Releases Samba 3.2

Version 3.2 of Samba has been announced. "Samba 3.2 builds upon the success of Samba 3.0 by modernizing and enhancing the code whilst still retaining compatibility with all existing Samba installations."

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LDAP Software

python-ldap 2.3.5 released

Version 2.3.5 of python-ldap has been announced, it includes several bug fixes. " python-ldap provides an object-oriented API to access LDAP directory servers from Python programs. It mainly wraps the OpenLDAP 2.x libs for that purpose. Additionally it contains modules for other LDAP-related stuff (e.g. processing LDIF, LDAPURLs and LDAPv3 schema)."

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Mail Software

Vacation 1.2.7.0 released

Version 1.2.7.0 of vacation has been announced, Chris Samuel has stepped up as the maintainer of the SourceForge version "This is a complete rebase of the current Vacation code base from the closely related version at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the two clause BSD license (no advertising clause). This means Vacation finally links legally with the GPL's GDBM (something I don't believe people previously realised)!"

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Web Site Development

dobrado: 0.10 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.10 of dobrado has been announced. "Dobrado is an easy to use online website creator. There are no templates, just drag and drop content anywhere on the screen. This release of Dobrado allows the system to be used as a wiki, with user defined copy and edit permissions, and undo/redo from history log."

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scgi 1.13 announced

Version 1.13 of scgi has been announced, some new capabilities have been added. "The SCGI protocol is a replacement for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol. It is similar to FastCGI but is designed to be easier to implement. The scgi package includes implementions of the SCGI protocol for Python, Apache 1 and Apache 2."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

jack_capture V0.9.19, Snd-ls V0.9.8.17 and Rollendurcmesserzeitsammler V0.0.4

New versions of jack_capture, Snd-ls and Rollendurcmesserzeitsammler have been announced. "jack_capture is a program for recording soundfiles with jack. Snd-ls is a distribution of Bill Schottstaedt's sound editor SND. The Audio Rollendurchmesserzeitsammler is a conservative garbage collector providing general ways to efficiently allocate and use memory inside a realtime audio thread without having to manually free it later."

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SLV2 0.6.0 announced

Version 0.6.0 of SLV2, a library for accessing LV2 audio plugins, is out with several new capabilities and bug fixes.

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Desktop Environments

GNOME 2.22.3 released

Version 2.22.3 of the GNOME desktop environment has been announced. "This is the third update to GNOME 2.22. This includes all the bug fixes, all the new translations, updated documentation and other improvements made by the various GNOME teams since the last stable release."

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GARNOME 2.22.3 released

Version 2.22.3 of GARNOME, the bleeding edge GNOME distribution, has been announced. "It includes a wealth of new application releases, updated translations and bug fixes as part of this GNOME release -- as well as updates and fixes after the GNOME freeze and a host of third-party GNOME packages."

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GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week: You can find more new GNOME software releases at gnomefiles.org.

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KDE Commit-Digest (KDE.News)

The June 1, 2008 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "Amarok 2 gets basic video playing support, and a connection to Librivox public domain audio books. Major porting to KDE 4 continues in K3b. More work on "Fuzzy Search" integration in Digikam. The start of support for sound effects in KGoldRunner, and the addition of a sound feature in KPresenter. Improvements in the msword-odf and kpr-odf import facilities in KOffice..."

Comments (none posted)

KDE Software Announcements

The following new KDE software has been announced this week: You can find more new KDE software releases at kde-apps.org.

Comments (none posted)

Xorg Software Announcements

The following new Xorg software has been announced this week: More information can be found on the X.Org Foundation wiki.

Comments (none posted)

Financial Applications

SQL-Ledger version 2.8.16 released

Version 2.8.16 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, has been announced. Changes include: "Added quantity, warehouse when checking for obsolete parts Added array initialization for perl 5.10. Fixed sales invoice import to separate invoices by invoice number for the same customer. Fixed wrong number assignment when printing/posting vendor invoice. Fixed several formatting errors when number format set to European format. Added default ship to address for generated purchase orders."

Comments (none posted)

Games

New WorldForge releases

The WorldForge virtual world project has announced several new software releases. Ember 0.5.3: "Ember is a 3d client for the WorldForge project. It uses the Ogre 3d graphics library for presentation and CEGUI for its GUI system. This release fixes a couple of memory leaks and improves memory handling overall, as well as some problems with Ogre 1.4.8+ and CEGUI 0.6.1+."

WOMBAT 0.1.0: "I’m happy to announce the first alpha release of WOMBAT. WOMBAT provides a nicer web frontend to the WorldForge media repository." WOMBAT 0.1.1: "Thanks to Thomas Ingham aka. magnethead, WOMBAT now uses CSS instead of tables for layout elements. While he was at it, Tom also revamped the colour scheme."

Comments (none posted)

Multimedia

Oggz 0.9.8 Released

Version 0.9.8 of Oggz a collection of tools for working with Ogg media, has been announced. "This release adds a new oggz-chop tool, which can be used to serve time ranges of Ogg media over HTTP."

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Music Applications

Patchage 0.4.1 released

Patchage version 0.4.1 has been released. "Patchage is a graphical modular patch bay for audio/MIDI systems based on JACK, LASH, and ALSA. This release fixes several bugs, and adds support for the new Jack D-Bus control interface. Two libraries which Patchage depends on are also released in parallel: raul 0.5.0 and flowcanvas 0.5.0."

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rakarrack: 0.2.0 is released (SourceForge)

Version 0.2.0 of rakarrack has been announced. "Rakarrack is a jack guitar FX processor emulator. Lineal and Parametric EQ, Distortion, Overdrive, Echo, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Compressor, Reverb, WahWah, Alienwah, NoiseGate, Harmonizer, Musical Delay, Pan, Cabinet. Tuner and MIDI Converter. Seven new effects including Harmonizer, Musical Delay, Cabinet emulation, NoiseGate, AutoPan/Extra Stereo, WahWah, AlienWah. Better look with new widgets, color customization. More MIDI control."

Comments (none posted)

PDA Software

palmBTremote: Version 0.2 available (SourceForge)

Version 0.2 of palmBTremote has been announced, it features some code cleanup. "palmBTremote contains both client and server side components to allow remote control of totem and MythTV from your palmOS device over bluetooth."

Comments (none posted)

Science

FreeEOS-2.2.1 has been released (SourceForge)

Version 2.2.1 of FreeEOS has been announced. "FreeEOS is a software library for calculating an equation of state for conditions in stellar interiors. The latest stable version of this library source code, FreeEOS-2.2.1, has been released on 2008-07-08. The new release fixes all known bugs in FreeEOS-2.2.0".

Comments (none posted)

Speech Software

PocketSphinx: 0.5 release (SourceForge)

Version 0.5 of PocketSphinx has been announced. "Sphinx is a speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer released under a BSD style license. It is also a collection of open source tools and resources that allows researchers and developers to build speech recognition systems. The newest stable version of PocketSphinx is now available. This release is about 50% smaller and up to 18% faster than the previous one, and introduces a new, re-entrant and "modern" API."

Comments (none posted)

Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The July 8, 2008 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.

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Haskell

Haskell Weekly News

The July 2, 2008 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online.

Comments (none posted)

Shells

CODESH: 1.4.0 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.4.0 of CODESH has been announced. "CODESH (COllaborative DEvelopment SHell) is an automatic persistent logbook for sessions of personal command line work. It records what and how is being done, for private use/reuse and for sharing selected parts with collaborators. It is an intelligent shell that automatically logs user's shell sessions. Sessions are uniquely tagged and stored in local or distributed backend repositories (ASCII flat file or Subversion or CVS based) and can be extracted and reproduced at any time by the user who created the session or by collaborators located anywhere in the world. The focus of this version is the distributed computing (remote) aspects of CODESH."

Comments (none posted)

IDEs

eric 4.1.6 released

Version 4.1.5 of eric, a Python IDE written using PyQt4 and QScintilla2, is out with bug fixes.

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Test Suites

Linux Desktop Testing Project 1.2.0 released

Version 1.2.0 of the Linux Desktop Testing Project, a test automation framework for desktop applications, has been announced. "This release features number of important breakthroughs in LDTP as well as in the field of Test Automation. This release note covers a brief introduction on LDTP followed by the list of new features and major bug fixes which makes this new version of LDTP the best of the breed,"

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Version Control

GIT 1.5.6.2 announced

Version 1.5.6.2 of the GIT distributed version control system has been announced, numerous bug fixes are included. "There still are a handful more fixes queued for 'maint' so we might see another maintenance release, 1.5.6.3, not too far in the future."

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Miscellaneous

Google releases Protocol Buffers

Google has announced the release of its "Protocol Buffers" code under the Apache license. "Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format." In other words, it's another XDR/RPC/pickle implementation, but tuned to Google's performance needs.

Comments (23 posted)

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