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OpenBSD 3.5 Released
pgilman writes "The word just hit the announce@openbsd.org mailing list: "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 3.5.
We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As in our previous releases, 3.5 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system" including security, hardware support, software ports, and lots more. Support the project if you can by ordering the cds, or grab it from the net (use a mirror!). Thanks to Theo and the whole team!"
No. Lack of security holes are essential for a secure system.
If I write a daemon that prints "Hello World" it does not need to be chrooted to be secure. So should all daemons be. If a network-accessible program is accessing files, especially user-specified files, it needs to be god damned careful about it. End of story.
Chroot is a poor kludge of an attempt to turn a non-secure program into a secure one. I would prefer if it weren't in OpenBSD at all, it gives people a false sense of security. Even a perfect chroot leaves you open to all sorts of other vulnerabilities.
Random and weird software I've written.
"He said something I don't agree with.. OUT LOUD! You can't do that in America. Now I just can't trust his operating system, even though it's open source. It's gotta have some kind of commiehole in there somewhere. Look at me, I'm smart!
your posting as anonymous coward, hence your opinion does not matter
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Does OpenBSD 3.5 break backward compatibility with all previous releases, like every other OpenBSD release does?
I've always wondered if they did this on purpose or not.. Keeping up with the version game (and trying to support old users who can't afford the time and effort to upgrade) is somewhat difficult.
I have to say, I think you've got it backwards. I was using OpenBSD back in the day myself, and from the first install, it was impressive. Unlike all the other OSes, any hardware you had installed would just work, with absolutely no user intervention (assuming it was supported). You could shutdown, swap your soundcard with something completely different, reboot, and with no changes at all, your new soundcard would work.
More than that, though, was the elegance of the whole system.
On Linux you have a huge bundle of programs designed very differently, and thousands of configuration scripts all over the system.
With FreeBSD, the situation isn't as complex and unintuitive as Linux, but there is still dozens of individual scripts you may need to edit for even a small configuration change... Programs in the base system don't always work consitently, or at all (I can't remember the last time 'cu' worked right).
With OpenBSD, you have rc.conf, which is very simple to edit, and features 95% of the configuration you might want to change. The other 5% is in only a handful of other configuration files, so any system change is much simpler in OpenBSD than any other OS I've ever used. The programs all work very well, and consitently. Throughout the whole base system, the same varibles work on all the different programs... Any command arg that does the same thing in different programs is almost always the exact same string for all of them.
In my opinion, the best things about the system have been around from the beginning. The majority of the significant changes over the past 3 years have been added hardware support, more ported programs, and additional security. There have been a few significant changes, like the addition of PF, but significant changes like that one have been relatively uncommon over the past ~3 years.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Since he doesnt allow direct downloads.... who has a torrent of the 'real thing'...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...it's a stiff...bereft of life it rests in peace, it's climbed up the curtain and joined the choir invisibule etc ad nausium...
Only a matter of time before someone says it...