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OpenBSD 3.2 Available

Posted by michael on from the daemon-goodness dept.

fredrikv writes "Right on time, the files defining OpenBSD 3.2 have moved away from "snapshots" to the 3.2 directory of the OpenBSD mirrors. It is well known as the world's most secure operating system and now sports chroot'd Apache, fewer suid binaries, cool pictures for xdm-logins, a brilliant "antispoof" packet filtering rule and as usual includes lots of small updates and fixes. The files are there. What are you waiting for?"

2 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Re:security by c13v3rm0nk3y · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's pretty common to run a few releases back on important and complex daemons like BIND, or Sendmail.

    There is little value in going to BIND 8 or 9 if it has not been audited by the OBSD team first. BIND 4 is well understood and the faults, warts and bugs are well-known. BIND 8 is still new enough that it is considered an unknown.

    This is one of the downsides (if you consider it a downsid) of trying to be "secure by design".

    Of course, OBSD is free, as in beer and as in speech. This means you can run a parallel box with BIND 8 or 9 (or whatever) yourelf until you deem it safe. The responsibility is now yours to maintain security on that chunk of the OS, but everything is a trade-off, especially in host security.

    BIND 8/9 will eventually make it into a future release. 99% of us do not need it, however, and so having a well-known and secure BIND 4 implementation has more value for the rest of us.

    --
    -- clvrmnky
  2. yes, we need SMP by mainmain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    BSD is great, but it's just not going to make inroads into the server market without SMP. It's fine for us amateurs with racks at home and 384k upload at best, but for business that really need to crank it up, OpenBSD falls short.

    What's great about Open over Free (and most Linux distros) is simply that one can go from zero to installed, up and running in no time flat. The need to secure the OS is minimal (though as another said, why portmap and why inetd?), which also greatly reduces time to production. And no worries about all of those "extra" packages that one doesn't want installed that get installed whether you like it or not, and then having to find a way to yank them out.

    That said, yes, I pre-ordered my CDs.

    Jud.