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Telent writes "OpenBSD 3.1 is out. I've been using a -current snapshot from April as my desktop, and this is truly an amazing release with lots of new PF tricks, improved driver support, and many other cool things. Get it from the master site at ftp.openbsd.org, or use a mirror when possible. Even the release art kicks butt. Enjoy!"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those bored out of their skull this morning, there are some interesting tunes available on the OpenBSD website to enlighten (frighten?) those cow-orkers. Also should be noted that the Canadian and European ordering site have the OpenBSD 3.1 3CD set available for pre-order, it's scheduled for release around 19 May."

LiquidPC writes: "Todd Miller has made his BSDCon slide presentation available online. It's primarily focused on new features in 3.0, the pf filter, and what to look forward to in 3.0.1."

LiquidPC writes: "OpenBSD's Louis Bertrand has put his MUSESS 2002 presentation online, entitled Fix the Bugs, Secure the System. Does an overview of OpenBSD, then explains Format String Ugliness, Buffer Overflows, The Wrong Way to Fix Overflows, along with numerous other things."

LiquidPC writes: "OpenBSD's Louis Bertrand has put his MUSESS 2002 presentation online, entitled Fix the Bugs, Secure the System. Does an overview of OpenBSD, then explains Format String Ugliness, Buffer Overflows, The Wrong Way to Fix Overflows, along with numerous other things."

It's not a contradiction: Free software costs money. (That's because server space, bandwidth, coffee, electricity, computers, and workspace all cost money.) Besides which, the time it takes to code new window managers, programming libraries (and languages), web browsers, and all the other goodies which make a modern computer useful may be spent as a labor of love, but it's time that competes with real-world jobs, family time, vacations in the Riviera and sleep. Besides the relative few who work at work on their Free software projects, the programmers, project managers, web-site maintainers, documentation jockeys and QA volunteers behind the programs we enjoy every day don't seem to be in it for the money, so much as the thrill of releasing new software, a desire to make their own world a little better, and for plain old fun. The staffers and volunteers who put long hours and dedication into organizations trying to safeguard online freedoms are also obviously interested in rewards that go way beyond salaries. This New Year's, consider giving them a little money anyhow. Here are a few ideas; you're invited to point out projects and organizations that I've left out.

As you may have read the other day, the FreeBSD project is now taking donations via PayPal. And if you're in a clean, roots-UNIX kind of mood, the folks at OpenBSD and NetBSD (NetBSD PayPal) would probably also appreciate your goodwill, not to mention your money, hardware and time.

If you don't have a specific project in mind, but would like to donate some of your chunk of the time-money continuum to a worthy software undertaking, a good place to start is Software in the Public Interest. They can take both general donations as well as earmark for projects they support, like Berlin, Debian, GNOME and more. (Not into GNOME? KDE could use some assistance, including money, too.)

If you like the projects funded by the boxed-distribution makers (like paying for full-time work on endeavors like KOffice), you can do more than buy the box: Mandrake has recently formed something called the Mandrake Club as a gathering place for both people and funds.

To encourage (and reward) cross-platform goodness, supporting the Mozilla project is hard to beat. (This story was posted using a 9.7 build using the wonderful Modern theme.) Source of Mozilla wisdom Mozillazine could use some help paying for the switch to a new host, and to defray ongoing costs. Another good place to cast your perls is Yet Another Foundation, which supports the somewhat scrutable development of the not-so-scrutable Perl.

More generally, consider investing some money in organizations like the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), all of which help battle (in court and in the marketplace of ideas) the forces who wish to monitor and otherwise exert top-down control of your computer and everything to do with your on-line life.

Remember, with all of these projects, non-monetary contributions are welcomed as well -- if you can write or correct some online documentation, create test-cases to root out weaknesses, or create some pretty graphics to smooth the user experience, you can contribute. (Long-distance pizza deliveries to developers are also generally appreciated.) Teaching a coworker, classmate, parent or friend how to set up mailfilters on a Linux box, or how to edit photos in the GIMP, is a nice way to save them money, too. Making a difference locally might also mean contributing some time, money or hardware to help run local LUG events.

Note: Many of the organizations named above are set up as 501(c) charities; if you'd like to claim any charitable contributions as tax deductions, now's the time to get the postmark, at least if it's important to you for those donations to be on the current calendar year. For a few more ideas on ways to donate geekily this year, see Jack Bryar's Newsforge column with some more links.

And a Happy New Year's!

mvw writes: "Here is an interview with OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt. Interesting is his comment on Soft Updates and the comparison to the rivaling Journaling file systems technology. Further he links to a very interesting paper by some Soft Updates researchers." And although OpenBSD 3.0 has an "official" release date of December 1 for whatever reason, it seems to be available by FTP or CD already. Lots of changes since 2.9.

mvw writes: "Here is an interview with OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt. Interesting is his comment on Soft Updates and the comparison to the rivaling Journaling file systems technology. Further he links to a very interesting paper by some Soft Updates researchers." And although OpenBSD 3.0 has an "official" release date of December 1 for whatever reason, it seems to be available by FTP or CD already. Lots of changes since 2.9.

mvw writes: "Here is an interview with OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt. Interesting is his comment on Soft Updates and the comparison to the rivaling Journaling file systems technology. Further he links to a very interesting paper by some Soft Updates researchers." And although OpenBSD 3.0 has an "official" release date of December 1 for whatever reason, it seems to be available by FTP or CD already. Lots of changes since 2.9.

osiris writes: "Theo de Raadt has just announced that OpenBSD 3.0 is now accepting pre-orders. 3.0 will now be shipping with 3 cds supporting booting from cd for 6 architectures. Plus there is a bonus audio track on the cd :) Plus the all new pf firewall, which replaces Darren Reed's ipf. I hear pf is pretty rock solid with quite a few new features."

Anon wrote: OpenBSD has started getting a new packet filter, pf, written largely by Daniel Hartmeier. The commits have been flying since then, but it looks like the new filter is going to be ipf-compatible as well as BSD licensed.

Anon wrote: OpenBSD has started getting a new packet filter, pf, written largely by Daniel Hartmeier. The commits have been flying since then, but it looks like the new filter is going to be ipf-compatible as well as BSD licensed.

unFKNreal writes "A fellow by the name of Georgi Guninski has discovered a local root compromise in OpenBSD 2.8 & 2.9. He says its due to a race in the kernel, similar to the linux kernel race a few months back." The patch is out as of a few hours ago. Even a BSD newbie like me got his firewall patched and rebooted with no problem, after taking a moment to reread the patching instructions and kernel rebuild FAQ. The bad news: the hole was posted to bugtraq Thursday morning, with exploit code, so the black hats had a jump on you (sadly, note the date Guninski says OpenBSD was informed). If your system has any users you don't fully trust, check it over carefully after you patch! Update 3h later by J : Apparently NetBSD is affected too, and a fix is in-tree.

unFKNreal writes "A fellow by the name of Georgi Guninski has discovered a local root compromise in OpenBSD 2.8 & 2.9. He says its due to a race in the kernel, similar to the linux kernel race a few months back." The patch is out as of a few hours ago. Even a BSD newbie like me got his firewall patched and rebooted with no problem, after taking a moment to reread the patching instructions and kernel rebuild FAQ. The bad news: the hole was posted to bugtraq Thursday morning, with exploit code, so the black hats had a jump on you (sadly, note the date Guninski says OpenBSD was informed). If your system has any users you don't fully trust, check it over carefully after you patch! Update 3h later by J : Apparently NetBSD is affected too, and a fix is in-tree.

unFKNreal writes "A fellow by the name of Georgi Guninski has discovered a local root compromise in OpenBSD 2.8 & 2.9. He says its due to a race in the kernel, similar to the linux kernel race a few months back." The patch is out as of a few hours ago. Even a BSD newbie like me got his firewall patched and rebooted with no problem, after taking a moment to reread the patching instructions and kernel rebuild FAQ. The bad news: the hole was posted to bugtraq Thursday morning, with exploit code, so the black hats had a jump on you (sadly, note the date Guninski says OpenBSD was informed). If your system has any users you don't fully trust, check it over carefully after you patch! Update 3h later by J : Apparently NetBSD is affected too, and a fix is in-tree.

Attila Nagy writes: "The unofficial (made by the FSN project) OpenBSD 2.9 CDs can be downloaded from ftp.fsn.hu/pub/CDROM-Images/openbsd. The set consists of two images, the first holds the necessary stuff for the installation (only for the i386 architecture, on which the CD is bootable), the second contains the binary packages. Please note that they are NOT the official OpenBSD CD-ROMs. The official bits can be ordered from the OpenBSD orders page. If you can afford the money, please buy the official set to help the OpenBSD project."

Attila Nagy writes: "The unofficial (made by the FSN project) OpenBSD 2.9 CDs can be downloaded from ftp.fsn.hu/pub/CDROM-Images/openbsd. The set consists of two images, the first holds the necessary stuff for the installation (only for the i386 architecture, on which the CD is bootable), the second contains the binary packages. Please note that they are NOT the official OpenBSD CD-ROMs. The official bits can be ordered from the OpenBSD orders page. If you can afford the money, please buy the official set to help the OpenBSD project."

Well, the mirrors have had overnight to update, so I suppose we can announce that OpenBSD 2.9 is available. The release notes and changelog contain details of what has changed and improved. For our newer readers, OpenBSD is a BSD flavor that concentrates on security - they aim to be the most secure server operating system.

Well, the mirrors have had overnight to update, so I suppose we can announce that OpenBSD 2.9 is available. The release notes and changelog contain details of what has changed and improved. For our newer readers, OpenBSD is a BSD flavor that concentrates on security - they aim to be the most secure server operating system.

Well, the mirrors have had overnight to update, so I suppose we can announce that OpenBSD 2.9 is available. The release notes and changelog contain details of what has changed and improved. For our newer readers, OpenBSD is a BSD flavor that concentrates on security - they aim to be the most secure server operating system.

A nameless reader writes: "A few hours ago Theo DeRaadt removed the ipf source from the OpenBSD cvs tree in reaction to the licensing change by Darren Reed, the author of ipf. Theo's remarks on the licensing change are visible in the commit log here." Theo notes there that "software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." That's keeping things all-purpose all right ;)

Teknoenie writes: "Upon a recent visit to the OpenBSD website http://www.openbsd.org i noticed a nifty change. 4 years without a remote exploit in default install. I have to dish out a big congrats to the OpenBSD team. Great job guys." It seems good to mention as well that now's a good time to order OpenBSD 2.9 if you're so inclined, since it's scheduled to ship in three weeks.

Teknoenie writes: "Upon a recent visit to the OpenBSD website http://www.openbsd.org i noticed a nifty change. 4 years without a remote exploit in default install. I have to dish out a big congrats to the OpenBSD team. Great job guys." It seems good to mention as well that now's a good time to order OpenBSD 2.9 if you're so inclined, since it's scheduled to ship in three weeks.

dj_flux writes: "OpenBSD is now taking preorders for v2.9. New features include a significant improvement in filesystem speed and enhancements in documentation. The release will be begin shipping on June 1."

jmallett writes: "xMach, the microkernel BSD Operating System, first made an announcement on Daily DaemonNews stating that there were some new source and binary snapshots available. Also, OsOpinion has an article I wrote about my experiences so far, entitled 'Giving Birth to xMach'. Development of xMach currently is limited to the microkernel and its servers, but a userland (based on that from the good people at OpenBSD) will be worked on shortly. Some of the primary focuses on xMach are data storage, security, and non-bloat."

Here you go: straight answers to your questions from Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. Read, enjoy, and comment away. (Theo might even check in with a comment or two of his own if he has time -- although he's been awfully busy lately, so please don't hold it against him if he can't, okay?)

A book on code auditing?
by LizardKing

Would you and/or other members of the OpenBSD coders consider writing a book on secure, bug-free coding and auditing? Most programming books feature sample code that is written for pedagogical purposes. Quite often this runs contrary to how secure code should be written, leaving a gap in many a programmers knowledge. A book on audinting and how to avoid security pitfalls when coding would also make your life easier - less code to audit for OpenBSD, and more time top concentrate on nifty new features!!!

Theo:

There is perhaps a split between the two issues you bring up. On the one side is secure coding, as in code written to be secure by the original author(s). On the other side, auditing, which is where an outsider (or an insider) later on goes and tries to clean up the mess which remains. And there is always a mess. Perhaps part of the problem is that a huge gap lies between these two. In the end though, I think that a book on such a topic would probably have to repeat the same thing every second paragraph, throughout the book: Understand the interfaces which you are coding to! Understand the interfaces which you are coding to! Most of the security (or simply bug) issues we audited out of our source tree are just that. The programmer in question was a careless slob, not paying attention to the interface he was using. The repeated nature of the same classes of bugs throughout the source tree, also showed us that most programmers learn to code by (bad) examples. A solid systems's approach should not be based on "but it works". Yet, time and time again, we see that for most people this is the case. They don't care about good software, only about "good enough" software. So the programmers can continue to make such mistakes. Thus, I do not feel all that excited about writing a book which would simply teach people that the devil is in the details. If they haven't figured it out by now, perhaps they should consider another occupation (one where they will cause less damage).

Making the rest secure
by squiggleslash

OpenBSD has a well deserved reputation for security "out of the box" and for the fact the inbuilt tools are as secure as they're ever likely to be. However, the Ports system is, perhaps, an example of where the secure approach currently has limitations - an installation of OpenBSD running popular third-party systems like INN can only be so secure because the auditing of INN, and other such software, is outside the scope of the BSD audit.

My question is, has the OpenBSD team ever proposed looking into how to create a 'secured ports' tree, or some other similar system, that would ensure that many of the applications people specifically want secure platforms like OpenBSD to run could be as trusted as the platforms themselves?

Theo:

We have our hands already pretty full, just researching new ideas in our main source tree, which is roughly 300MB in size. We also lightly involved ourselves in working with the XFree86 people a while back for some components there. Auditing the components outside of this becomes rather unwieldly. The difficulty lies not only in the volume of such code, but also in other issues. Sometimes communication with the maintainers of these other packages is difficult, for various reasons. Sometimes they are immediately turned off because we don't use the word Linux. Some of these portable software packages are by their nature never really going to approach the quality of regular system software, because they are so bulky.

But most importantly, please remember that we are also human beings, trying to live our lives in a pleasant way, and don't ussually get all that excited about suddenly burning 800 hours in some disgusting piece of badly programmer trash which we can just avoid running. I suppose that quite often some of our auditors look at a piece of code and go "oh, wow, this is really bad", and then just avoid using it. I know that doesn't make you guys feel better, but what can we say...

OpenBSD, security, et al.
by jd

With the release of SGI's B1 code, and the attempts by many U*ixen to secure their contents via capabilities, ACL's, etc, ad nausium, how is OpenBSD approaching the issue of resource control?

On a side note, is OpenBSD likely to ever head in the direction of being a distributed kernel? And, if so, how would security and resource management be maintained? (It's hard enough on a central kernel system.)

Theo:

On the first question, I think there is great confusion in the land of Orange Book. Many people think that is about security. It is not. Largely, those standards are about accountability in the face of threat. Which really isn't about making systems secure. It's about knowing when your system's security breaks down. Not quite the same thing. Please count the commercially deployed C, B, or even A systems which are actually being used by real people for real work, before foaming at the mouth about it all being "so great". On the other hand, I think we wil see if some parts of that picture actually start to show up in real systems, over time. By the way, I am surprised to see you list ACLs, which don't really have anything to do with B1 systems.

As to the second issue, I have no idea what a distributed kernel is, nor do I see how anything like that would improve security or quality of a system.

Forks and cooperation
by PapaZit

A lot of people know that OpenBSD forked from NetBSD, and there's still some animosity between the two groups. Personally, I think that the competition has helped both groups (NetBSD now ships with far fewer open services, for example).

Egos are delicate things, but do you see any chance for greater cooperation in the future, or do you see more forking and division as inevitable?

Theo:

Considering that NetBSD has maintained a black-hole route to the OpenBSD project networks for roughly four years, I don't see how any cooperation at higher levels are possible. However, there are developers who work on multiple projects. Some of them used to complain about having troubles from various groups. Nowadays, I think they've got it easier. Politics do not dictate developer relationships these days.

In Linux land, it appears that projects fork for financial reasons. In BSD land, it appears that the forks that have happened were purely political reasons. I don't know what will happen. It's been 5 years since the last fork in the BSD camp. Why are you guys so fork paranoid? Do you want everyone to vote for the same political party, too?

Kernel design
by laertes

I have only been using OpenBSD for a short while now, so forgive me if this question is based upon some incorrect assumtions.

OpenBSD's kernel design seems to be of the monolithic species. OpenVMS (no relation) and NT are two prominent operating systems that use a microkernel archetecture. The microkernel design seems to me to be fundamentally more secure, since there is less priveledged code. Further, if one of the servers is compromised, the damage is minimezed.

My question is this: Is the OpenBSD design fundamentally secure, or is it only a very well done implementation of a basically flawed design?

Theo:

I don't think it makes any difference, whatsoever. I think your computer science teachers are still teaching you from books written in the 80's, when the word "micro-kernel" was associated with a future utopia. We do not think that NT is a microkernel, and are you really so sure that OpenVMS is? A microkernel is not a kernel that does things through loadable modules. As well, I don't think it makes any difference, as long as a system does what it is supposed to do.

Where Did You Learn Your Code Audit Discipline?
by EXTomar

Did the drive to audit code come from the need or the design of BSD? Or was it initially a whim? More imporantly, where did you learn it from? Is their some "mentor" you looked too for ridge design? I have to admire your team's daunting code reviewing...I wonder if I'll ever have that kind of meticulous coding nature.

Theo:

The auditing process developed out of a desire to improve the quality of our operating system. Once we started on it, it becames fascinating, fun, and very nearly fanatical. About ten people worked together on it, basically teaching ourselves as things went along. We searched for basic source-code programmer mistakes and sloppiness, rather than "holes" or "bugs". We just kept recursing through the source tree everytime we found a sloppiness. Everytime we found a mistake a programmer made (such as using mktemp(3) in such a way that a filesystem race occured), we would go throughout the source tree and fix ALL of them. Then when we fix that one, we would find some other basic mistake, and then fix ALL of them. Yes, it's a lot of work. But it has a serious payback. Can you imagine if a Boeing engineer didn't fix ALL of the occurances of a wiring flaw? Why not at least try to engineer software in the same way?

Firewall/NAT box
by yamla

Linux has FreeSco, a product that fits on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and acts as a router and NAT (Network Address Translation). I always thought something like this would be ideal for OpenBSD. After all, I would rather trust OpenBSD than Linux for this.

Are there any plans to produce something like this? Something with a very simple user interface that is quick and easy to get set up? I'd love to play with OpenBSD and do it by hand but I simply do not have the time.

Theo:

I must say that I am not a fan of these floppy-based routers. Essentially, you are taking one of the most unreliable pieces of storage known to man, and trying to build security infrastructure on it. That's madness. Just buy a small disk. Perhaps somethings based on a CD plus some other (non-floppy) persistant storage might be sane. But please. Not floppies. Are you mad?

Code-auditing
by AT

Any advise for code auditers? Can you share any tips or techniques you have found useful in uncovering bugs? What do you first look for in a fresh piece of code? What about a mature piece of code?

Theo:

I suppose the biggest tip would be to become a better programmer. In particular, study what functions that programs are calling, and ensure that the calling code is following the rules of those functions 100%. How many of you understand the complete & correct semantics of every function in libc, or even just the libc functions being called by the program you are looking? (I mean, we went through our entire source tree, and about half the strncat() and strncpy() calls were subtly wrong, even if it only meant they copied a character extra and then zero'd it out -- it is still sloppy).

When you know exactly what the APIs are, you'll spot the bugs very easily. In my mind, it is the same as any other job that requires diligence. Be careful. Humans learn from examples, and yet, in this software programming environment, the tremendous complexity breeds non-obvious mistakes, which we carry along with us, and copy into new chunks of code. We've even found in manual pages where functions were mis-described, and when we found those, lots of programmers had followed the instructions incorrectly...

Dual Processor Support
by dragonfly_blue

Although there has been some indication that people are interested in running OpenBSD on machines with dual or quad processors, it appears that there are not enough resources and volunteers available to make this a reality. Although I use OpenBSD for my web server, I am by no means an expert, at this, but I'm curious nonetheless.

From what I've heard, multiprocessing support is going to be a very tricky thing to implement, because it gives rise to so many possible exploits, particularly with regards to race conditions. I also understand that it would take a remarkable amount of effort and time to rewrite much of the code base for SMP without compromising the OS's integrity.

With that in mind, what kind of resources would you need before you could seriously consider attempting dual or quad processor support? And, if you were given unlimited access to those resources, how long would it take before a -stable release would be ready? I would really like to see this feature get implemented, although I know that at this point your developer team is busy enough as it is.

Theo:

At this time, we are not working on SMP. It's a lot of work, and not considered the most interesting thing to our developers. Sorry.

Time warp
by rho

Thanks for your work, Theo. I use OBSD every day as a workstation and as a firewall, and the Cop-chasing-script-kiddie t-shirt is the best.

If you could time warp back to the beginning of OpenBSD's development (ignoring the scism that brought you to that point), what would you do differently? Would you have chosen a more commercial focus? Pushed SMP development earlier? Run around in circles waving your hands in the air?

On another note, what's your feeling about commercial use of OpenBSD? i.e., do you support it, tolerate it, or what? (better example, I make a set-top box running OpenBSD, and I need the OS to do "X". If I called you and said, "Theo, I need OpenBSD to support 'X'", would I be told to piss up a rope, write it myself, or would the OpenBSD team do it for a price?)

Theo:

The licence on our code is pretty clear. We want vendors to use our code. We want commercial operating systems to ship with OpenSSH. Not shipping with an SSH varient causes great grief, and it is time that ends.

Same goes for OpenBSD. We would prefer if companies building commercial network appliances used OpenBSD, rather than writing their own operating systems. Typically, these companies are very comfortable with solving the problems within their application space. Yet, there is a history of these companies writing their own cruddy operating systems, and at the same time writing worse applications.

It would be better if routers, firewalls, telephone switches, fileservers, and whatever else used reliable components, designed by people who care.

So go ahead, use any parts of OpenBSD as parts of commercial systems.

Full Disclosure And Version Numbering
by Effugas

First of all, I want to thank you for the hard work you've done building OpenBSD. It truly is a wonderful package.

Much of the security in OpenBSD lies under the hood in the work you've done cleansing the source of unsafe library calls. While this work is appreciated, I've become more and more concerned lately about the fact that these changes are not necessarily documented and certainly not reflected in the version number of an application or utility.

Version numbers reflect a snapshot in the life of a codebase. They're used to reference unsafe editions or particularly stable builds. Major number reflect code branches, but minor numbers reflect specific states of the code -- such is the expectation of a user or an administrator when a version number is detected. Without granularity of versioning, I have no reason to trust or distrust a given application by its number; I must personally audit its source -- and end up giving it a number of my own.

You and your team are code auditing masters. Rather than pollute the namespace by making indistinguishable your securely built modified code and the original(and, by extension, your secure code and numerous unnamed distributions' "just get it to compile" modifications), wouldn't it be appropriate for OpenBSD to apply a name extension to any package which it has modified, and in the interests of full disclosure, to provide a reasonable CHANGELOG of the fixes contained therein?

Theo:

Two numbers exist for every component of OpenBSD. One number is the release that the piece came in, ie. 2.8.

The other number exists in each source file that was built. And that number is also in each binary that was built from those files. You can use the what(1) command to determine the revisions of source files which make up each binary.

As to the "original" you talk about, there is no original. OpenBSD uses it's own components. I don't know what packages you are talking about. cat is cat. ftpd is ftpd. tar is tar. It's the one that came with a certain release. In the systems approach, the version numbering that other groups do is sometimes invalid, because pieces (such as libraries) are all part of the picture.

Was the last plane you were on using front wheel version 2.7 or 2.9? You don't care. You do however care greatly that a "systems approach" was used to ensure that it was whole. And in the OpenBSD case, that means pick a version, and install the patches.

Asking for more means that you want us to do less work on the system, and more version numbering.

Where does the money go?
by MrSparkler

I've seen reports of estimated CD sales per release at being as high as 10000. Add in t-shirt/poster sales and donations and a relatively considerable sum of money is flowing around OpenBSD. Combine this with the fact that checks are to be written to Mr. de Raadt and I get curious as to how the finances are handled. Not that I'm suggesting any misappropriation is occurring, I would just like to know who is in charge of the money and whether or not the OpenBSD project is registered as a non-profit organization (and if it is then checks should be made out to - and the CD image should be copyrighted to - that organization). Also, I would like to see a small financial report put out (as would be required if it were a non-profit organization in Alberta) so that users can see where their money is going. Plus, I would also like know exactly how many CDs are sold per release.

I greatly appreciate the work that the OpenBSD project developers have put in, and I plan on continuing to use, purchase, and donate to OpenBSD (and maybe even contribute when I get the technical skills) regardless of the answer to this question: Where exactly does the money go?

Theo:

We've not yet sold 10,000 CDs in a release. Hopefully we will soon. The project ends up with a bit less than 50% of the revenues from CD sales. The tshirt business is doing OK, but you make a lot less selling textiles. With posters we operate just above break-even. Even though some are sold on the web, most turn out to be free handouts at most conferences. That is how I planned the posters to operate.

We have thought about becoming a non-profit organization, but it is not really a good idea. It would not provide any real benefit -- to you -- as the masses. Especially in Canada, there are costs and serious responsibilities associated with doing such a thing. We would be giving up a lot of freedom, and would need to hire someone to do a lot of accounting. Also, since many of our donations come from outside Canada, we still could not really generate taxable benefits to you. (And I must ask, why are people so cheap, that they only give donations when it provides a partial reduction in their taxes, rather than a real donation? I actually find that pretty fake.)

Money from the project goes to various things. First off, it ensures that I can work full time on OpenBSD, and not need another job. I am also hoping to do the same for other developers in the project, who have indicated that they are interested in doing so. Secondly, certain grimey, unenjoyable, and very important development tasks sometimes put a bit of money in developer pockets. Some OpenSSH work was funded by matching OpenBSD money against donations from a Van Dyke. Thirdly, the project buys a fair amount of hardware: In powerpc land alone, 4 machines this year. Fourth, shipping costs to conferences sometimes severely cut into profits from sales. And finally, when developers get together to do hacking, project money sometimes pays for various things, like airplane tickets, accomodation, and sometimes even some beer. And beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

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Before you ask: yes, we'll be doing Slashdot interviews with people from other *BSD projects in the near future - Robin

Dr. Dobb's Journal has an interview with Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project, discussing the future of OpenBSD, where they are now, driver development, the teams that work on OpenBSD, and how OpenBSD is supported. An interesting read describing the fearless leader of the "Secure By Default" BSD.

rho writes "Stephan Somogyi at MacWEEK trumpets everybody's favorite security-concious *nix OpenBSD with an article telling why he likes it. Pretty plain jane, but introduces OpenBSD to a new audience (i.e. Mac users)."

OpenBSD 2.8 was released today, so this seemed like a good time to ask project leader Theo de Raadt about OpenBSD -- or anything else. He's a rather colorful person; a pizza eater, kernel hacker, and devout rock climber, so even though this is a big day for OpenBSD you might want to discuss a few other things with Theo, too. We'll choose about 10 of the highest-moderated questions and e-mail them to him shortly after noon (US EST) tomorrow. His answers will appear next week.

I just logged into the OpenBSD ftp server and noticed that OpenBSD 2.8 is up and ready for download. From the Press Release, 2.8 contains improved hardware support for newer Apple Hardware (iMac, G3, G4, G4 Cube), security fixes, AES support, AES/Rindjael encrypted swap, OpenSSH 2.3.0, RSA libraries in base install, and many more ports in the ports tree. According to the project, this release commemorates 5 years of OpenBSD, on October 18, 2000. This is OpenBSD's 9th release. Happy Belated Birthday OpenBSD!

I just logged into the OpenBSD ftp server and noticed that OpenBSD 2.8 is up and ready for download. From the Press Release, 2.8 contains improved hardware support for newer Apple Hardware (iMac, G3, G4, G4 Cube), security fixes, AES support, AES/Rindjael encrypted swap, OpenSSH 2.3.0, RSA libraries in base install, and many more ports in the ports tree. According to the project, this release commemorates 5 years of OpenBSD, on October 18, 2000. This is OpenBSD's 9th release. Happy Belated Birthday OpenBSD!

I just logged into the OpenBSD ftp server and noticed that OpenBSD 2.8 is up and ready for download. From the Press Release, 2.8 contains improved hardware support for newer Apple Hardware (iMac, G3, G4, G4 Cube), security fixes, AES support, AES/Rindjael encrypted swap, OpenSSH 2.3.0, RSA libraries in base install, and many more ports in the ports tree. According to the project, this release commemorates 5 years of OpenBSD, on October 18, 2000. This is OpenBSD's 9th release. Happy Belated Birthday OpenBSD!

Until this week, I've been unconvinced by those who say the U.S. election process needs to be conducted with computers instead of paper, pencil, and punchcards. I've changed my mind. It's time to take a good hard look at our ancient voting system, and bring it up to date. When today's 14-year-olds go to vote in the 2004 elections, will they still take the pencil from the volunteer, slide the punchcard into the molded plastic, and turn the weird knobs? Or will they use the technology they've grown up with?

My change of heart came while listening to an NPR story last night. Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?

There are some fair concerns about moving to a more-than-just-dead-trees voting system. We have to consider what the impact will be on voter enfranchisement. A change that makes it possible for the rich to vote by telepathy, for example, while the poor have to drive a hundred miles uphill both ways (to access a non-telepathic voting booth) would not be exactly democratic.

Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know.

But my best guess is that, by 2004, this won't be a question anymore. Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years. So if it should be done, how can it be done? There are five key issues to solve: authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security.

I propose a system in which each voting booth runs a webserver which logs votes (without identification) to two internal media (hard disk and floppy would be good, see below). Once the polls close, each booth's computer can be totalled and sent over the internet to the state's central server.

Meanwhile, any computer that speaks https on the internet would become a voting booth of its own, running slightly different software.

Each state's official results could be in an hour after its polls close. Which beats the ten-day waiting period we have now for our overseas ballots.

Authorization isn't really that hard: When you register to vote, you (by default) get a password delivered by snail-mail a week before the election. Tampering with that mail is a federal offense, of course. On election day you use secure http to sign in from anywhere with your name, address and password. Lose the password? Sorry, you don't get the comfort of home/work; you go to the voting booth with everyone else.

Anonymity is trivial; any logs with identifying information either don't get stored, or get wiped immediately.

Computers crash. Data confidence means the servers write the votes to multiple media: network, hard drive, flash RAM. A dot-matrix printer makes a good emergency backup medium.

This system also needs a dirt-simple GUI for voters connecting from home or work. No butterfly webpages necessary; click a name, and get a confirmation screen that shows you name, party, (importantly) photo, and big "yes" and "no" buttons.

At the voting booth it can be even simpler, using touch-screens.

Security is, of course, always a problem. Secure http effectively eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack, so the main worry are that an attacker will be able to run unauthorized code on a government computer which could (read) correlate my name with my vote or (write) change my vote. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a completely open-sourced system, from the kernel up, combined with clean-room installations at a secure location, can make these concerns minor by comparison to existing vote-fraud concerns.

(My vote would go to OpenBSD, Apache, and Mozilla, though of course good luck predicting what will be best four years from now.)

Also, net admins overseeing the effort need to have enough access to track and lock out attackers, but obviously they can't have access to change the election results. Lock them in a room for the day with a hundred video cameras tracking everything they do, like the officers on missile-launch duty. Many net admins will find this a relaxed and enjoyable work environment compared to their current jobs.

There are many problems that have to be solved -- please bring up the ones I haven't mentioned here, let's start the debate! My hunch is that they can be solved. And the overriding question must be, will it be an improvement over the current system?

Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win.

The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.

I'll give my last word to Andre Uratsuka Manoel, a partner at the internet firm Insite, in Brazil. (Props to TBTF for putting Andre and me in touch.)

Brazil has a 100% electronic election. On election day I go my "electoral section," identify myself, sign my name. The "section president" then types in my code and I walk to the booth which is in a corner of the room where no one can see my vote. I then type the number of my candidate, see his/her photo and press "confirm."

The voting machines store the votes in at least three different places: a floppy disk (which is locked), a flash card and the internal hard disk. There are written procedures for any kind of failure I could think of and back-up machines readily available. Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.

The results are proclamed extremely fast. On the mayoral run-off elections that happened 2 weeks ago, results were out 2 hours after the election in the city I live in (Sao Paulo, with about 6 million voters) and 6 hours after it in the last city in which there was a run-off. In my home city the results came out a little after the election sites closed and the result was proclamed with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes).

In the first round of elections in Sao Paulo, the third place contestant lost the ticket for the run-off elections by less than 0.1%. The one who lost didn't even think of contesting the results because no one thought there were any kind of frauds.

In the first round, 100 million voters (about the same as the active voters in US) in 5 thousand cities chose their mayors and councelors. All the results were proclaimed 30 hours after the voting closed.

This happens in a country that has a much lower level of literacy, technology-savvy and of money as the U.S. Remember that some mayors were chosen in places hours away from anyplace else (even by plane), i.e. in the middle of the rain forest. Those places don't have electricity.

Of course there were complaints, but not because of the electoral process. Mostly they were due to campaigning on the election day, voter transportation and coercion.

(Updates: Dave Riesz mentioned Riverside County, California, which has an electronic voting system already in place. Their 2000 primary turnout was the highest in 20 years, which may or may not mean anything. That led me to the California Internet Voting Task Force which looks interesting. Don Wegeng pointed me to RISKS thoughts by Douglas Jones. Brian Dunbar points out "Hurrah for Slow Recounts" by the always-interesting Ellen Ullman.

Lee Coursey passes along Elizabeth Ferrill's Discussion of Electronic Voting. James McCann, a programmer at VoteHere.net, says my description is "not terribly far off but very incomplete" -- I'll take that as a compliment -- check out his site and SecurePoll.com too. And finally, a story in Salon that makes my point better than I could: "Confessions of a Florida Poll Worker."

If you have more links or information, emailme.)

OSDNs favorite BSD zealot BSD-Pat Lynch was on the scene at the latest BSDCon, and took the time to send us in a report. Lots of links to stuff for you BSD folks to share and enjoy.

Well I just got back from BSDCon, and spent some time catching up with old friends, new core team members, and cool new products. The highlight of the event was the reception and dinner at the Monterey Bay State Aquarium, which in my opinion is a must-see. All five BSDs were represented this year: MacOS X, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

There were some really neat talks at BSDCon, three tracks in all: general, security, and development. The highlights of the security talks were Bill Fumerola's talk on DoS attacks and the new ipfw which uses compiled rulesets for better performance, Robert Watson's TrustedBSD presentation, and Mark Murray's explanation of the /dev/urandom work he has done with FreeBSD using Yarrow. In the development track, Greg Lehey and Jason Evans presented a paper on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT's new SMP model.

The exhibit hall itself was small, lending to a larger focus on technical issues, but there were several exhibitors that caught my eye. One was RelexUS, a company with its roots in Russia. They make a relational database called Linter which I found extremely easy to use (though commercial, it was very robust) It also bills Linux and FreeBSD among its native support list, as well as almost every other OS under the sun. It supports ODBC, stored procedures, transactions, asynchronous replication, and a host of other features. Also, the EFF were there, and I finally got around to joining.

Thursday night we piled into a bus to head on over to the Monterey Bay State Aquarium for dinner, drinks, and dessert. We had to wear Daemon horns to get in and fun was had by all. The new core team wrapped up the conference on Friday afternoon, and everyone left and went into town, tired, hungry, but satisfied with this year's turnout.

More pictures can be found at Greg Sutter and Jim Mock's pages. More coverage can be found on BSD Today.

Here is your regular irregular dose of Slashdot story updates and obsessive compulsion -- some of it sad, some amusing, some utterly neutral and of no caloric value. For instance: You can win more than 50 of Roblimo's personal dollars if you work really hard, and wait a really long time.

"Kilby ... Kilby .. Kilby ..." [WHACK!] BMagneton writes: "The Nobel Prize for Physics was just awarded to several electronics pioneers, notably Alferov and Kroemer, who invented a bunch of semiconductor device construction methods, and Jack Kilby, who pretty much invented the microchip. The Nobel seems to have gone to a more practical/applied achievement than it usually does." And sconeu writes: "Wired News reports that Jack Kilby have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the IC. The prize was split with Herbert Kroemer of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of Russia who worked on semiconductor development as well."

And as "Boo," acclaimed international film star Keanu Reeves! Godzookie2k writes: "I was bored out of my mind the other night, and stumbled to boo.com's old site to see what would pop up. Mouth agape, I read: 'Boo.com returns, October 30, 2000.' yippie, you can download the official "boo" screensaver and enter some contest. See for yourself."

Some things are worth bringing back (Old Coke, bermuda shorts), and others may not be. Frankly, I'd never heard of Boo except maybe vaguely in the background until they went bust, time number one. On the other hand, our friend Pee-Wee was pretty funny in Mystery Men, so maybe anything is possible.

A browser for your naked (P)PC; combine with image filtering, stir. Mozilla keeps getting better -- I'm not afraid to show it to anyone right now, for instance -- but it's not exactly lightweight. Anyone who's been following the progress of Galeon may be interested when Markos writes: "Tired of waiting for a lightweight browser, that supports https, frames and all the other good stuff? BrowseX may be what your looking for. 'BrowseX is an Open Source, cross-platform Web Browser written primarily in Tcl.' You can check out the screenshots, features, and download." Or, for those of the Motorola persuasion, you'll be happy to hear that, as sephus writes "Opera for Linux PPC is now available at http://opera.online.no/linux/tgz/ - by popular request from Slashdot readers :) Opera"

Remember, retailers, you better not install these on computer that you know full well are going to be loaded with a god-fearin' American OS-thingie, like Innernet 'Splorer!

"OK, Mr. Gates, Meet Mr. Ponzi. Howdya do?" robl writes "There was a suprisingly under-ranked comment in the Microsoft story yesterday [about Microsoft and Taxes], pointing to the Fool's take on Microsoft's tax situation. It does a great job of clarifying the sfgate article yesterday. You see, Microsoft exercises it's stock options by printing more stock certificates. So they really only lose the cost of the paper and toner to print the stock, and they gain the money from the employees who exercise the options."

In fairness, this is approximately the same system used to fill the hypothetical coffers of the Social Security administration, but MS probably doesn't pay $534.55 for each toner cartridge ;)

My god! And they claim to be secure!? sporri writes: "The OpenBSD homepage has been updated (or downgraded) and now announces "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!" after a root hole was discovered and exploted in a library used by chpass. The sad thing it was fixed in the "current" source tree in June.UpsideToday has an interview with Aaron Campbell." If that's the worst you can say about an OS's security, it's a pretty strong endorsement for it being exemplary in that regard. OpenBSD and Debian get my vote for Most Serious Projects. Comments on the strongest security for (any particular) default Linux distro? Makes me think about Bastille Linux ...

qbasicprogrammer writes: "At Daily Daemon News, Josh Pennell says the Reform Party's National Primary Online Election was constantly under attack during the 72-hour election window, however IOActive (the Reform Party's hosting service)'s OpenBSD server kept the kiddies and crackers away. According to the reader comments, Ralph Nader is using BSD/OS, as is the Libertarian Party Web site. It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."

mblase asks: "According to a recent MacCentral article, one of the benefits of Mac OS X's NeXT-based roots is that "since Mac OS X is BSD based, the ports shouldn't be too difficult. The hardest part, according to Robert Palmer, will be writing the GUI (graphical user interface) front end to make administration easy." My question is, is this likely to happen? Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both? Or is the demand likely to come from the other direction -- OS X server admins who want the stability and popularity of established UNIX applications, even if the graphical front-end Mac users have come to expect may be less than ideal? This will doubtless be a big issue for Apple as they tout Mac OS X as a server platform for the future."

nik says: How about "larger installed userbase"? Assume Linux has ~ 7 million users, and the BSD's have about 3 million (both those numbers are on the conservative side). Apple's probably going to ship 10 million or more OS X boxes in the next year or so, and porting most software is going to be no-brainer (particularly if it's already in the Free, Net, and Open BSD ports and packages collections).

AnonymousCow writes "At LinuxTag, an unbiased comparison of performance of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and Solaris." I'll let Tim's comment on this story stand: "Unbiased is hard to claim - all tests can be seen as biased in their formulation - but this is thorough, with 45 slides and well-explained methodology -- BSD does very well ..."

QBasic_Dude writes "Christian Weisgerber on the openbsd-advocacy list, wrote a summary of his experiences at LinuxTag 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany. Interesting read for anyone in the Stuttgart area."

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Kirk McKusick's soft updates page, the soft updates code that had a problematic license in the past is now (as of June 21 2000) released under a BSD license!. This is another big plus for the *BSD community, including some people that were hesitant in adding this stuff in their code base."

dragonfly_blue writes: "Just wanted to let you know, OpenBSD 2.7 is out, with significant advances; including OpenSSH2, better Linux binary emulation, DSA encryption, and (my personal favorite) support for encrypting your swap space. Theo and the gang have also expanded the ports and packages collections considerably, so get 'em while they're hot!" (More.)

ocipio contributed some more tidbits, writing: " ... OpenBSD 2.7 improves support for high end system boards, SCSI controllers, ethernet interfaces, and adds gigabit ethernet drivers and IPv6 networking. OpenBSD's cryptography has been further enhanced by encrypting virtual memory swap space, and by more flexible ISAKMPD key exchange and operating modes for IP Security networking." To keep things interesting in BSD Land, he adds "According to Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's release engineer, FreeBSD 3.5 will be released June 20th."

Cool on all counts. Way to go, BSD crew! (And Thanks! to everyone who pointed out this release.)

dragonfly_blue writes: "Just wanted to let you know, OpenBSD 2.7 is out, with significant advances; including OpenSSH2, better Linux binary emulation, DSA encryption, and (my personal favorite) support for encrypting your swap space. Theo and the gang have also expanded the ports and packages collections considerably, so get 'em while they're hot!" (More.)

ocipio contributed some more tidbits, writing: " ... OpenBSD 2.7 improves support for high end system boards, SCSI controllers, ethernet interfaces, and adds gigabit ethernet drivers and IPv6 networking. OpenBSD's cryptography has been further enhanced by encrypting virtual memory swap space, and by more flexible ISAKMPD key exchange and operating modes for IP Security networking." To keep things interesting in BSD Land, he adds "According to Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD's release engineer, FreeBSD 3.5 will be released June 20th."

Cool on all counts. Way to go, BSD crew! (And Thanks! to everyone who pointed out this release.)

Anonymous Coward writes: "The OpenSSH project released version 2.1 earlier this month. It now supports the SSH2 protocol. SSH2 is regarded by many as a more secure protocol (but was for a long time only supported in a restricted license implementation)." Nice work, guys. I'm downloading the source, I'm buying a T-shirt, life is good.

Anonymous Coward writes "Jim O'Gorman has an article at bsdtoday.com about choosing an OS for a firewall project. While OpenBSD has a lot of followers, find out why Jim chose FreeBSD instead."

Duke of URL writes: "Sam Williams, of Upside Today has an article discussing OpenBSD's overall design philosophy, with good quotes from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD project leader. Williams also covers how the OpenBSD project goes about supporting their financial needs (by selling t-shirts, CDs, and posters) and briefly covers their lack of desire to receive venture capital despite offers. "

Duke of URL writes: "Sam Williams, of Upside Today has an article discussing OpenBSD's overall design philosophy, with good quotes from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD project leader. Williams also covers how the OpenBSD project goes about supporting their financial needs (by selling t-shirts, CDs, and posters) and briefly covers their lack of desire to receive venture capital despite offers. "