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The way this happens is inclusion of propetiary binary drivers into the kernel, or thin wrappers around binary blobs (NVIDIA, for instance, or Intel to use wireless network cards). Then we have the NDIS wrapper so that Windows drivers might be used.

This is happening today in the Linux kernel, and FreeBSD is on the same path. Why should a vendor release hardware documentation when OS developers bends over to include their binary blobs?

Besides, the newest darling Ubuntu embraces binary blobs

>> On LinuxTag '06 the idea of a 'Blob-Award' came up ...

> Wel, I would like to nominate Mark Shuttleworth, the sugar daddy behind Ubuntu,
> who during his keynote speach at LinuxTag answered a question about this and
> stated that they embrace as many binary contributions from vendors without
> questions to offer their users the "best experience". He wanted to sign an exclusive
> deal with Broadcom.

Maybe it would be good to have two different Blob-Awards. One for Vendors and one
for those people who try to poison free software from within (project leaders,
developers and other 'subjects' in the community which are proud of their blob-love) ...

I think you have to run Ooo in Linux emulation mode (add kern.emul.linux=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf and pkg_add relevant packages (see OpenBSD FAQ)). This is absolutely the best (and only) way to run Ooo in OBSD for now...

One problem is that Ooo contains lots of bugs, especially those related to memory handling. These bugs cause problems with e.g. OpenBSD's new malloc(3) call. Some porting and bugfixing work has actually been done by some OpenBSD developers but as far as I know that particular port is nowhere near production quality. Apparently more developers/coders/testing guinea pigs (with proper bug reporting skills) are needed. Some information about the OpenBSD port of Ooo is available in this presentation.

Look I'm an OpenBSD fan but even I'm a little unsure on this one... The Linux folks reverse engineered the Nvidia ethernet driver in forcedeth and in fact forcedeth was helpful in the creation of nfe.

Are you sure that you want to claim that OpenBSD had "the first [nforce ethernet] open source driver" (emphasis is mine)? Can you give some links to back this claim up? I haven't found any yet but then again I don't hang out on the OpenBSD lists all that much...

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2006032 1034114
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/15 55243

Should Open Source be hidden behind licensing fees? I think that's a poor question. A better questions should be "How do people plan on paying open source developers?". The food they eat, the electricty they need, you can't exactly rpm -Uvh that from somewhere. In the end, someone has to write a check somewhere.

"I wish you, and everyone else here, would stop putting words in my mouth."

Sorry, but it seemed a reasonable analogy to respond to an apparently unreasonable person. Your comment made you sound like a heartless greedy bastard, and evidently I was not the only person to read it that way. If that is not the impression you meant to give, you might want to take it up with your ghostwriter. :-)

On a much more civil note, please remember that the project linkage you call wagging the dog exists for historical reasons: OpenBSD developers wanted a free version of SSH, so they made one. Then they gave it away. That same developer pool still maintains it, because the OpenBSD project requires a free and highly correct implementation of SSH and they think they are maintaining a better one than anyone else is. I'm sure they're delighted that world+dog uses their tool, but that's ancillary to what they're interested in doing. It's not really a separate project, it's just part of the toolkit OpenBSD develops for its own use and gives away freely.

(Also, don't forget that OpenSSH profits from being developed on and by OpenBSD. Their coding and auditing practices with an eye towards correctness and security make it a very reliable tool.)

Of course, you still may not like this. That's fair enough. But I seriously doubt they'll alter their practices to suit you... especially since you didn't ask nicely or say please.

So you have some choices: Stand aside and let other people donate to support OpenBSD and its child project OpenSSH, overcome your objection and donate to them knowing that much of your donation will go towards other projects, or do it your own damn self.

It's BSD licensed code, after all. If you don't like the way they're handling the business, just grab the source and arrange to maintain it yourself. Or start a foundation, or a for-profit, whatever. It's free code.

If, like me, you lack the interest, time, and expertise necessary to do this, then I'd suggest that you stick with one of the first two options. And if, as you said, you use and appreciate OpenSSH, then I'd suggest that the second option is more likely to achieve the results you want.

(Incidentally, the article quoted marco out of context. He mentioned OpenSSH as part of a pitch for OpenBSD donations, not the other way around. See the whole thing here.)

I've never wanted to use OpenBSD. The reason? Their community is filled with assholes. Sure, every group has its problem members, but it seems to be a requirement for OpenBSD users to be complete dicks to everybody. Have you ever read undeadly? Every chance they get they respond to posters with vitriol and bash other projects. Not to mention the leader, Theo.

Perhaps if the OpenBSD users were a bit less arrogant and a bit more kind toward people I would be tempted to give it a look. But not as of now, and since I've never used it, I feel no need to contribute to the project (yes, I use OpenSSH, maybe I'll send a nickel some day).

1. The Airport Express works with iTunes and is *really* fun if you get a group of friends with iBooks and/or Powerbooks in one room. So you don't need to buy any extra software. Not sure if it works with the Windows port because, well, I don't use Windows when I'm not being paid to.

2. http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 60210191441&mode=expanded

Yeah, listen to what OpenBSD developers implementing ACPI support thinks about ACPI

Also the ACPI spec blows other specs out of the water when it comes to unreadability. It's a classical spec in the sense that someone was bribed to go to Honolulu to "talk the spec over" and "reach a compromise". They don't even use spec language like shall and optional! It's deliberately vague so that everyone involved could agree. So Marco's engineering assessment is ACPI is a pile of camel pooh.

Sun x2100 - $675 for a barebones system, just use whichever SATA drive you prefer, and brand name PC3200 DDR400 RAM (I use kingston mostly), voila an Opteron based box with 2 hard drives (there's an onboard RAID card as well), dual gigabit ethernet (broadcom, very nice), up to 4 gigs of ram (4 slots), lights out management, service light, great airflow, serial port that allows BIOS access as well as OS access (most whiteboxes won't do that). PCI-E slot for a raid card/fiberchannel/ethernet/etc. Oh and that $675 includes shipping and handling (which makes a big difference, shipping on a 1U is typically 100$ US with insurance/etc). These machines run Windows, Solaris, Linux (certified for Red Hat and SuSE) and OpenBSD (undeadly.org is running on a Sun x2100 as we speak).

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2005111 2002121&pid=2

I've never used OpenBSD, but I really like their release songs!

You realise that the C malloc/free calls are just the same right? It never releases memory back to the OS.

Not true in OpenBSD.

Fiction. There are *many* resources out there...

And don't forget the actual books that are available too...

• Absolue OpenBSD
• Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and pf
• FreeBSD & OpenBSD Security
• Secure Architectures with OpenBSD

Re: Computerworld: Setting the story straight... (mod 15/17)
by Mark T. Uemura on Tue Oct 25 14:18:17 2005 (GMT)

It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.

First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was just very resourceful in doing so.

Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.

No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed. In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore, they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result of our efforts and the decisions that we made.

In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious. Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!" or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go home early anymore!"

In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.

> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.

Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet there's so much more.

> "PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open
> source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up
> and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad
> relationship between our users and IT."

Well it's either replace Windows with Window for Internet facing servers or find a more secure alternative that didn't have to be patched and rebooted so often. Bringing back network and applicati

Read his reply to the article @ www.undeadly.org

Re: Computerworld: Setting the story straight...
by Mark T. Uemura

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 51024113247

More interesting reading his reply about the article than the article itself.

Mr. Uemura posted a fairly long de-sensationalizing clarification on the OpenBSD Journal (http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20 051024113247). It was more interesting than the Computerworld article...

It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize
a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly
taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who
were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.

First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across
as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't
desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was
just very resourceful in doing so.

Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.

No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big
and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network
and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it
referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't
about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows
to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying
to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for
the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had
nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain
Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also
introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal
Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive
applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was
related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather
than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the
way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed.
In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the
difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore,
they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for
as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result
of our efforts and the decisions that we made.

In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes
where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious.
Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!"
or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or
something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go
home early anymore!"

In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was
always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN
for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative
such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.

> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.

Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as
we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to
improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet there's
so much more.

> "PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open
> source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up
> and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad
> relationship between our users and IT."

Well it's either replac

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 51024113247

BTW: When he said, "just do it", he's not talking about informing management; he's talking about informing/surveying USERS. He's meaning, "Don't bother trying to convince users, instead, just tell them the procedures have changed, and this is 'The New Way' (TM) to do things. They'll do it, find it better/faster, than thank you"

Shamelessly stolen, so don't mod me up.

Mark T. Uemura (IP 221.249.159.51) (mark.uemura@gmail.com) on Tue Oct 25 14:18:17 2005 (GMT)
It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize
a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly
taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who
were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.

First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across
as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't
desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was
just very resourceful in doing so.

Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.

No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big
and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network
and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it
referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't
about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows
to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying
to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for
the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had
nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain
Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also
introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal
Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive
applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was
related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather
than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the
way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed.
In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the
difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore,
they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for
as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result
of our efforts and the decisions that we made.

In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes
where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious.
Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!"
or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or
something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go
home early anymore!"

In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was
always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN
for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative
such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.

> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.

Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as
we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to
improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet ther

And I do mean you. Do some research before you start with the condescending attitude asshole.

You'll find Mr. Uemuera's response here:

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 51024113247

They final get rid of 'artsd'. It has been a huge wart on KDE since the day it was inserted. Let's face, sound support in your typical freenix distro already has some fundemental limitations http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 50901024119 and artsd only makes things worse (much worse).

Isn't most of it BSD licensed, OpenBSD in particular. @ undeadly.org: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 30927090008

There is an easy way : Maildroid - an OpenBSD based Mail Filtering Gateway made easy!

who is not a student anymore there is hackathon..

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2005052 7223034

A link to one of your other trolling attempts???

I think I have read the same comments from you in numerous places on Undeadly. Why not stop trolling and give up donating the hardware or stop whining and email some people in OBSD to try again. . .???

Look at how much MS or Apple have given back to BSD as opposed to how much linux has got from IBM. Who has the better dynamic community of sharing?

Wow! I like when people are really openly intelectually dishonest! Do you fail to see that IBM is in the server market, and that Linux OS is just a complement it needs to turn into a commodity to them? OTOH, Apple did give back to FreeBSD (see Since Mac OS X v10.0 was released in 2001, Apple has been filtering BSD code in and out of their kernel, userland, and libraries. This code then makes its way back to FreeBSD. Apple's pattern is to sync every major Mac OS X release with the latest major FreeBSD release. and Apple hires open-source leader.)

Just because you are desinformed, or because you think Leenox is Kewl does not change the facts.
Here are some simple facts of life:
1) A pure open-source software house is a very hard to maintain thing. I'm not the one saying that, Miguel de Icaza of GNOME/Mono fame says it here

2) Because some company incorporates code under BSD license, does not mean the code went away. It's still there. Otherwise, is it envy that moves you, because some people are more technically knowledgeable than you? In that case, your problem is not a license problem, it is a problem only solved by study. Envy only means you've got mental problems, too. For instance, BitMover wrote better code than the open-source guys. Tough luck.

Nevermind, OpenBSD just switched root's shell to ksh for 3.8.

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 50328171714

in the thread. Several of the comments there are responses from the BSD certification people.

The guy neverd mailbombed the account. His post was a joke. See his next post in that thread.

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 50318231311&pid=4 As long as b00bs like this behave this way we will always get the short end of the stick from companies like Adaptec.

All I know is that its AMI all the way from here.

See it here.

Some idiot mailbombed his account. It's only natural that Adaptec removed the squeaky wheel, rather than oiling it.

More on Undeadly.

OpenBSD is striving to open up all drivers, and refuses to allow binary modules. Currently, they are targeting Adaptec, trying to get the management interface opened up. We don't want them to write code for us, or to support it, we just want docs, so *we* can write the code, and support it.

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2005031 8231311&mode=expanded

This is not true, of course. BSD was in use when Linux was in it's infancy, and thus had more drivers. In general, *BSD is not far behind Linux when it comes to supporting new hardware with open source drivers, and in some cases are ahead. Lagging behind is often due to hardware manufacturers refusing to give documentation.

That said, several hardware manufacturers offer binary-only drivers for Linux for hardware. A well known example is accellerated 3D where open source drivers are lagging far behind.

What matters in the end, of course, is the hardware that you want to use has drivers.

MD5 (openssh-4.0p1.tar.gz) = 7b36f28fc16e1b7f4ba3c1dca191ac92

Source: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 50309172736

Are you hard of reading?

Dumbass.

We could always call it an UNDEAD cd.

That would be very appropriate: http://undeadly.org/

## TH

I see this story mainly as a reminder that your default firewall policy should be to block. Then open up only what you need.

Seriously, 617 may be a very nice number, but the number of host with a real need to access that port on your machine is likely to be a short one.

Oh well. See http://undeadly.org/ for links to a vaguely relevant lecture / tutorial.

I'd suggest *starting* with OpenBSD (or NetBSD though I've got no personal experience myself) and later trying a FreeBSD install. If you've been on Linux for 6 years and have run HP/UX I'd have to say you're qualified to run one of the less candy coated BSD's to get yourself integrated into the "whole BSD 'thang." DragonFly will be cool (someday) but I can't suggest it for someone new to BSD. Same with Darwin.

OpenBSD would be great to learn on as it will definately push you into the documentation and get you used to some of the conventions used (slices v. partitions, startup scripts, etc.). I'd suggest you use an older or spare computer if you've got extra or can pick one up cheap. You could also just set aside space on those 80 gigs you've got. READ UP ON PARTITIONING, USE OF LARGE DRIVES, ETC. BEFORE YOU START ANYTHING!

Once you get some OpenBSD under your belt, put a box in service at your network connection (right behind you cable/DSL connection?) and learn to setup pf (packet filter - built in). Experiment with AltQ and get yourself a good firewall/NAT in place (junk the Linksys). Not too much trouble and the docs at OpenBSD - pf are quite good. Here you could experiment with adding a web server or MTA (if you don't have tons of boxen to keep your "real" services in some kind of dedicated DMZ). My home OpenBSD box forwards BitTorrent, Freenet, VNC and SSH to a variety of machines in my house. I also prioitize packets in the following order: 1st to tcp_ack_out, Vonage telephone, ssh_interactive, everything else, freenet, and finally ssh_bulk. Keeps my phone line crisp and prevents freenet from destroying my ssh sessions' latency. You can do this with other products but I've had a good time (and have learned quite a bit) constructing my /etc/pf.conf file. (Yes. I've got a life otherwise :)

Then build youself a FreeBSD box. This should be cake. 5.x should install without a problem for you and you've got access to all the ports you could ever imagine. Your experience with OpenBSD will help you understand some of the differences you'll encounter. Makes a great desktop. OpenBSD will work fine as a desktop machine but I've never done it. Same for NetBSD I suppose. Give it a whirl. I'm sure you'll learn a ton and be quite happy with whatever you decide.

Don't short yourself on learning OpenBSD. It is awesome, security aware and has some wonderful features (need encrypted swap case the feds might knock down your door at any minute? check.). It may just serve all your needs and knowing it is surely going to be useful to either yourself or others in the future. Use it for utility and the ability to sleep at night with your data behind it. (still better go with RSA keys on sshd though). Check out http://undeadly.org/

Don't short yourself either on checking out FreeBSD. I moved from Linux to "the beast" some 5 years ago and haven't looked back since. The 4.10 machine I use everyday has been up 168 days as of today. I had at shutdown the machine previous to that due to a scheduled power outage. It sits fully exposed on an unprotected IP and runs user apps, a web server and mail. Not a single problem in years. FreeBSD has certainly served me (and some clients of mine) well.

If you're a system developer or like playing with things at the driver level or experimenting with new code, new systems or want to put your toaster on the network, don't deny yourself a NetBSD 2.x install. Wonderful features at the leading edge. Very capable and I hope to get some more experience with it myself one day.

Learn OpenBSD. You won't regret it.

installation instructions

The Zaurus port is very new, and not yet finished. For instance, X11 is on the TODO list.

More info about the Zaurus port here.

I do the same, but I also run it systraced. You can use the policy posted in the BitTorrent security thread.

The number 4 (SecDog) is most likely running OpenBSD as can be seen from the alliances page. The SecDog ISP has been named many times as the most reliable host by Netcraft, and now all their infrastructure servers has moved to OpenBSD.

..it was released on 29th of October already, as you can read here. When download, please don't forget to use the torrent!

The official release has just happened. Here are the official announcement, the undeadly.org thread and a torrent for the i386 binaries (149MB, matching MD5 which might beat some of the mirrors). Cheers ;)

That was probably submitted last night or something. Deadly.org.

OpenBSD has ported the SMP work from NetBSD, giving it multiprocessor support in an amazingly short amount of time. I think this porting was largely the work of one programmer, which is some achievement. From postings on the OpenBSD Journal it appears that support is available for SMP on sparc and i386 at least.

If I was only sure VIA chipset-based boards were reliable and stable, I'd seriously consider buying one of those little fanless, power-saving things they make.

I don't know anything about the reliability, but this guy says that VIA chips are outperformed by AMD/Intel CPUs of equivalent power (and somewhat slower clock).

There's a thread just recently on undeadly.org that offers suggestions on low-power (under 30 watt) boxes to run OpenBSD.

Chances are if they run OpenBSD they will run Linux as well (although why you'd prefer the linux firewall features over the OpenBSD pf firewall escapes me).

If your main goal is lower electrical cost, that might be a good option anyway. If you are willing and technically competent enough to maintain your own box, you should. Othwerise you give up a _lot_ of flexibility (ability to run snort, dsniff, caching proxy, dns, honeypot, etc.).

The comments seemed to lean towards the Soekris and similar GEODE products, and the VIA EPIA.