Slashdot Mirror

one way, executable bits for the stack and heap:

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11 /04/55560.aspx
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20020826013 453&mode=flat

This is great news. Hopefully it will scare more companies into compliance. I'm sure that there are a lot of companies using code from open source projects in their products, and I bet that there are more than a few in violation of the GPL.

Why not just mod me up instead? I provide links!

http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20040401005 222

I still want a PPC ATX board. Pegasos was supposed to deliver, but their boards are still so expensive. :-(

Supposed to deliver? OpenBSD people thought that as well, and got the OS running on it. Now OpenBSD consider Pegasos a scam operation and has pulled the support for Pegasos from CVS :

R.I.P. OpenBSD/Pegasos - All the story

Because if any free Unix (sue me SCO!) will do OpenBSD already supports that (since 3.4, and way faster support coming in 3.5).

Have you checked Deadly today? Two security patches today. I'm sure you'll see a few more before 3.5 ships.

The test was biased. Discussion was held at http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20031019083 707 and (also on slashdot, but it didnt talk much about openbsd more about the whole test in general)

OpenBSD has state synchronization, which could be used to implement failover. But I don't know how this would compare with Cisco's failover support.

Ah! Here it is! It's the encryption that the C3 seems to rip through.

At least one BSD is unhappy about the prospect of the new license and is threatening to fork. Hopefully everyone can get together and have a single fork with a license like the older X license if it does end up coming to a fork.

See Daniel Harmeier answer.

Basically OpenBSD releases are supported one year (2 releases). i.e. you have to upgrade only any other release. In fact a release is supported for 13 months to give users a 1 month window to upgrade.

At the time of the telnetd exploit (July 2001) the oldest supported release was 2.7 or 2.8 and telnetd had been disabled from the default install between 2.5 and 2.6. So if you used a supported release you were safe. Since upgrades are free and take about one hour there's no reason not to do it once a year...

When the shit hits the fan today which OS will SCO be running?

BSD!

As you can see.

Interix used OpenBSD as is evidenced at deadly.org

So like 95% of it is just OpenBSD, mostly pulled from theh 3.0 release tree.

Microsoft was giving tons of them away on their Windows 2003 Server promotional tour and as has been note elsewhere this is really just an OpenBSD distro with a few more LDAP-ish tools thrown in.

I think the message from Microsoft with all of this seems to be that Unix stuff is worthless and just a hassle to tie together with their products. Reality: Microsoft products are a huge liability. Ask anyone who has had their files randomly mailed due one of the thousands of email viruses. The security breaches that Microsoft products bring to the table far more than offset any of their claimed savings in techie hours. Typical BigCo at this points wants to be safeguarding what productivity they have, not tossing it away by opening up more holes than can be patched twice monthly over broadband. Bleh. Even if they gave away MicrosoftServer 2003, I still wouldn't bite. Put the Exchange stack on Linux, and then we'll talk.

Microsoft based this product upon OpenBSD: http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090 008

The thing is, though, that he seems to be proven correct every single time this comes up. Remember when BitKeeper restricted their license, effectively prohibiting anyone from contributing to the Linux kernel and, say, Subversion? Or when Darren Reed re-interpreted the license to IPF, forcing the OpenBSD team to remove it from their system? Or any of the other stories on Slashdot where a closed-source company lures users and developers with gratis copies of their new, shiny product - and then changes licensing terms once everyone's hooked?

The fact is that if you use non-Free software, then you are beholden to the whims of someone else. I always recommend Free software solutions to my employer when remotely possible, not to save a few pennies, but to ensure that we have the right to use our systems as we see fit, not as someone outside our business allows us to.

RMS is loud, obnoxious, and irritating to a lot of people. He's also right almost every time when he warns of the dangers of non-Free systems. Although you might not like the delivery, the message seems to be dead accurate.

As I was lucky enough to run into this on a relatively new install I could just do a complete reinstall, but not reading the upgrade instructions can get you in a lot of trouble this time... :)

As I was lucky enough to run into this on a relatively new install I could just do a complete reinstall, but not reading the upgrade instructions can get you in a lot of trouble this time... :)

Read more about it here.

I posted this on deadly.org last year, and it got enough hits that I think the Slashdot community would enjoy it: a picture of my black cat "causing" bad magic. :-)

OK, thanks for your contribution to /. misinformation.

MS has used considerable amounts of BSD code in the past, and still does so, for a recent example(last week) see:
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090 008

You can also just do a strings of the ftp command on windows, for more details:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=BSD%20Cod e%20in%20Windows

The original windows TCP/IP stack was lifted directly from BSD too... and I'm sure there are many other examples that we will never know of.

Oh, and there was zlib too, because when a hole was found in zlib MS Office and quite a few other MS products had to be patched:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-860328.html

They have even publicly said that they think the BSD license is great, obviously as long as others use it and they can take advantage of it, I can't recall MS ever releasing anything under the BSD or any other open source license(no, "shared source" is _not_ open source).

Still, as Theo says, if MS uses BSD/public-domain code it's great, that is the point of the BSD license, to improve the sorry state of the software quality in our world, if MS uses BSD code to make their software suck less, great that is what people that releases code under the BSD license want, to make software suck less, not to push any stupid political agenda.

Best wishes

\\Uriel

Microsoft Services For Unix uses a bucketload of OpenBSD code.

PF is [Open|Net|Free]BSD. FreeBSD PF news.

FreeBSD homepage.

NetBSD PF news.

NetBSD PF homepage.

PF is [Open|Net|Free]BSD. FreeBSD PF news.

FreeBSD homepage.

NetBSD PF news.

NetBSD PF homepage.

Yup, more details on that here:

http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030417181 810
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030421190 834
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030422123 107


basically, Theo said expressed anti-war sentiments and they killed the funding including the (non-refundable!) hotel reservations for the hackaton.

oh well, what can you expect from the govt?

Yup, more details on that here:

http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030417181 810
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030421190 834
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030422123 107


basically, Theo said expressed anti-war sentiments and they killed the funding including the (non-refundable!) hotel reservations for the hackaton.

oh well, what can you expect from the govt?

Yup, more details on that here:

http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030417181 810
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030421190 834
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030422123 107


basically, Theo said expressed anti-war sentiments and they killed the funding including the (non-refundable!) hotel reservations for the hackaton.

oh well, what can you expect from the govt?

That doesn't mean that OpenBSD is bad or has a small group of supporters.. It's only one of the most secure ("out of the box" is one of the items of high importance to me) firewall operating systems in the world. It's completely Open Source and available for free download.

The original book on OpenBSD from the year 2000 is sorely outdated since the OpenBSD project tries to release a new version every six months. This book covered lots of security/firewalling concepts and how to implement them in OpenBSD 2.5 (as well as Linux) while we are now at OpenBSD 3.3. The above-mentioned books should be able to help fill in the background details as to the "whys" more than the "hows."
The "hows" are provided on the OpenBSD website for free:
FAQ (installation)
Packet Filter User's Guide (does most of the amazing firewalling that OpenBSD is famous for)
Manual Pages

OpenBSD is freely available for download, but if you like the project, I strongly encourage you... Buy something from them (they have a few shirts and posters): Or donate money or hardware.

Also, I wonder if this book is in any way related to the Deadly.org plea from the community for topics that an OpenBSD book should cover.

I bought Practical Unix and Security because I also wanted a primer in network and computer security and I can only say that the book has not disappointed. The title may sound like it is Unix specific, but it has a lot about general computer security that applies to all platforms, personnel security, backup routines, etc. Basically all that has to do with computers and security is covered in this book. Even secure programming gets touched on. Here you will find links to some excerpts from the book.

So you're probably wondering why it is slashdotted...well probably not, but if you were. The site is served over a terrestrial wireless broadband from Sprint Broadband Direct with a maximum uplink of 15k/s. Furthermore the server, is circa 1997 AMD-K6/200 with 96 megs of ram.

So this finally answers the question of "can slashdot destroy a low grade consumer broadband connection?". Incidentally, the load on the server is still around 0.4. I think it peaked out around 0.8.

Sigh...slashdot needs a distributed automated mirroring service.

And if you're wondering, I did the article on my weblog because people on deadly were asking about how to do it. On guy even thought they had a sound device (remember the speech thing?) connected to the parallel port doing it.

The OpenBSD guys had this long ago! ;)

And enjoy. Don't mod me up though, it would be karma-whoring.

And wanted to add that the idea isn't new as you can see in this recent thread on deadly.org here (See post "mp3's playing via lpr?").

If you're installing from CD, OpenBSD 3.3 did not contain sendmail 8.12.9. Correct me if I'm wrong but this was fixed in 3.3-current but didn't make it onto the CDs (?). Older sendmail-based servers should use patches 014, 027. See: www.sendmail.org/patchps.html

I didn't say they were unusable as a desktop OS, in fact I'm typing this on my FreeBSD 5.0 laptop ^_^

But they are more concerned with the server side of their systems then with the desktop, is all I'm saying. They will spend more energy on making it a better server then they do making it a better desktop.

On a completely different note, OpenBSD can run Mozilla now. In fact I've seen news on Deadly of Mozilla 1.3 running (with some level of patching), and there's even instructions to get it using Phoenix.

Banning FOSS would remove certain types
of infrastructure components (e.g. OpenBSD) that
currently help support network security.

Look people, I can read this news, and get more comments on it at deadly.org. Let the specialty and community-oriented news sites do their thing. Why couldn't a link have been given to the place that first aired this story? Give credit where credit is due, damnit. What, is your next BSD story going to be the continued DARPA funding? If the news is happening at Deadly.org, have some class, and give them some flow. Take a page out of Dave Winer's book.

Also, by removing down-moderating this post, you are proving my point that you censor what isn't convenient or fits your own purposes. Objectivity is sorely needed here, and the best place to start is by rigorously acknowledging the origins of a story. Be a part of the solution and not the problem, take some criticism once in a while, don't restrict your news items to what is simply in your own best interest!

That is all.

Don't all these "overflow checkers" kill the speed of C(++) apps?

The poster couldn't be more right!

And once again, OpenBSD is taking the innovative lead--pf now has better bilingual support than any other packet filtering software out there!

Banning FOSS would remove certain types of infrastructure components (e.g., OpenBSD) that currently help support network security.

Perhaps they decided an upgrade was in order

DARPA has been funding the OpenBSD project for awhile now. The grants have been a staple of the OpenBSD team's funding for quite awhile now. Come on, you didn't think they existed solely on the revenues generated from their t-shirts, CD's and posters did you? Congrats to the OpenBSD team on this latest grant. This is fortuitous especially with version 3.3 right around the corner.

Aha! Good question. The IPv4 security bit will not be implemented on OpenBSD because IPv4 support has been dropped. Todd Fries says, "It is too hard to get IPv4 addresses, we're switching to IPv6 tomorrow."

(This post is a day late, of course, so just pretend it's still the 1st.)

You think these stories are obvious? Check out the OpenBSD Journal. Yeech.

I know you can probably detect a NAT box by looking at all the packets

Yet another reason to go with OpenBSD!

I'm going to take up the challenge here of explaining why this is interesting. Since November of 2002, OpenBSD's pf has had support for load balancing. RedHat's $2499 Premium Edition of their Enterprise distro features Piranha load balancing which was derived from the Linux High Availability project.

So what the OpenBSD pf project is giving you is enterprise-class high availability and load-balance clustering for a tiny fraction of the price. With a handful of cheap dotcom-throw-away x86 servers, a small company or mildly well-capitalized individual can personally build a multi-datacenter-fault-tolerant clustering setup that will rival Fortune 500 uptime ratings.

In other words, the pf project's list of accomplishments is starting to read like a ToDo list for RedHat's Enterprise Linux development team.

OpenBSD has a (alpha? beta? alpha hydroxy? I dunno) anti-relay addition to the PF firewall. Theo first mentioned it here and it was carried the story here. It sounds similar in that it puts the onus of time and bandwidth waste back on the spammers.

The hurt-back part of the project is not new. Theo de Raadt is working on just that, in connection with an IP number list (much faster, so suitable for busy servers):

Very simply, this hangs the full list of ~12,000 spam-sending IP/mask entries listed at www.spews.org off a pf(4) rdr-anchor (which is only entered for port 25). When connections from these spammers arrive they are redirected to a daemon which minimally fakes the SMTP protocol with very low overhead -- for multiple connections at the same time -- and then the message is left on the sender's queue by providing a 550 return code.

The theory here is that most spam still comes in via open relays, and the only way we are going to convince them to clean up their act is to waste _their_ disk space, their time, and their network bandwidth more than they waste ours. For those spammers who drop messages when they received a 550, well, we have not wasted any further time or network bandwidth, and even in that situation I think some of the might remove an address if they receive a 550.

Some obnoxious developer for MicroBSD was always starting flamewars at Deadly.org He seemed to love saying how MicroBSD had X feature before OpenBSD, despite the fact that the OpenBSD team found many bugs in the mentioned software before merging. The MicroBSD team seemed to be about copy and pasting code. They may have done some interesting things, but the way they promoted their product...