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OpenBSD 3.8 Released
Cowards Anonymous writes "OpenBSD 3.8 is out. It comes with improved hardware support, some improvements to the OSPF daemon, some new RAID management tools, among many others. Even if you plan on installing via FTP, why not order a CD copy, tshirt, or poster as well? "
NetCraft confirms it: BSD is NOT dead!
It has just turned into an invisible super-natural being that will come and bite you in the ass, YOU FAT PENGUIN!
Eh, I'm joking. Don't mod into oblivion please, pretty please...
Global warming is a cube.
I am a big guy and I love ordering shirts from OpenBSD over some other places because they have XXXL on their site!
Click here or here.
I used to run OpenBSD on my router/firewall, and I quickly grew to love it. Installing OpenBSD was one of the most painless installs I have ever experienced, although there is no graphical installer. The FAQ located on the OpenBSD web site is a very thorough and priceless guide, and there are quite a few books on OpenBSD that have been released recently, so the old argument that there's no documentation for OpenBSD to be found doesn't hold any water anymore.
Eventually, I ditched it for FreeBSD, because that's what I use on my desktop machine and on my notebook, and it feels more familiar. Also, I find patching and keeping the system up to date easier on FreeBSD than on OpenBSD. But don't let that discourage you, OpenBSD can be fun to use, just try it.
To see some of the current and new security features in OpenBSD, see this presentation by Theo.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
One of the most important things new in this release is the mmap(2) based malloc(3) implementation. I can't believe the submitter didn't mention it. It has huge implications, in terms of added security and increased code quality overall. Already, important off-by-one bugs have been found and fixed in X.org which had been sitting there un-noticed for years. These bugs could cause the X server to crash on many systems, but OpenBSD exposed them reproducibly so they could be fixed.
Read more about it in this Security Focus article titled Security-related innovation in Unix and in Theo de Raadt's post to misc@.
OpenBSD don't do ISOs.
You have to use the FTP sites: http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html
And yeah, they openly admit that this is becasue they want people to buy the CDs.
Please stop whining.
Lots of folks use it. But many use it in a place you'd never detect it. Firewalls. Your 'netcraft' numbers won't report those, because in the vast majority of cases those will be totally invisible.
Which is why F/OSS is so wonderful if you're a decision maker. There is no death, so long as somebody out there with the skills is willing to maintain it. And by the law of large numbers, any sufficiently high profile project like this is a close to immortal as any software project can be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've never used OpenBSD, but I really like their release songs!
I wish Ubuntu also had that tradition..
(and no, "Badger badger badger badger" is to my knowledge not an official Ubuntu release song)
--
"One doesn't need a large rocket to send a probe to Uranus." ~ Oscar Wilde on Space Travel
To say openbsd has risen from the dead makes no sense. It's only been getting stronger. With FreeBSD basically dying (sorry, a new website won't save you guys) and DragonFlyBSD not catching on as fast as it'd prefer, I'd say OpenBSD is the strongest of the BSD's. It continually pushes security ideas forward and continues to be the best foss network border operating system. It works fantastic for many things most people use Linux for. Web serving, file sharing, firewalling, database serving, etc...
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Seeing how OpenSSH, pf and several other 'OpenBSD Spinoffs' have made it to Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, I'd have to say that at the very least, OpenBSD is by far the most interesting project in the BSD world for non-BSD:ers.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
As a developer you should care about this release. The malloc/free implimentation has been changed to release memory immediately to the OS, causing any read-after-free bugs to immediately throw a SIGSEGV.
See theo's post to misc@.
I have to download a whole bunch of packages, make FLOPPIES
No, you don't. There is an install CD available. http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq4.html#MkCD-ROM
Download the install ISO, burn to CD, ta-da! Very difficult, indeed...
As someone who has installed OpenBSD before, I can tell you, it's really not that difficult. Download the install CD ISO and follow this: http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq4.html#Install
Slackware
This is a BSD we are talking about. The number refers to the whole operating system. Not just a kernal as in Linux. The same team that works on the kernal works on the rest of the system as well.
Would you trust an operating system that had a remote hole 8 years ago?...
I've used instructions similar to this to make my own bootable CD for OpenBSD before. These instructions were for OpenBSD 3.4 but they've worked for me for both OpenBSD 3.5 and 3.7. The package names for OpenBSD 3.8 will have a "38" in them rather than 34.
s html
http://www.pantz.org/os/openbsd/makingaopenbsdcd.
If you don't like these instructions do a quick Google search or something and you'll probably find a few more URLs showing the same thing.
Two ways:
. shtml)
i cle&sid=9953)
1. Make your own ISO (http://www.pantz.org/os/openbsd/makingaopenbsdcd
2. Download an inofficial ISO (http://www.hup.hu/modules.php?name=News&file=art
Both of these steps should of course be followed by buying at least something from the OpenBSD store at http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html
Have you even TRIED installing OpenBSD? It's simple. Download a 1M install disk, burn to CD, boot off the CD, select install, and it downloads everything that you select to install automatically. No need for an ISO, no need for a torrent.
:)
Quick and painless. Try it, you'll like it.
Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, of course, but I personally think this release is a big deal. Contrary to what is usually the case with point releases, this one actually improves the state of the art - namely in security of Unix-like operating systems.
Some important security features have gone into this release (see, for example, this presentation), security that are almost certainly not found in any operating system you can mention. Besides the obvious benefit of making OpenBSD more secure, these features help catch bugs, and already some years-old bugs have already been caught. When these bugs are fixed, other systems using the software the bugs were in becomes more secure, too.
Personally, I am very impressed with how many security features the OpenBSD team manage to put in their system, without great sacrifices in standard-compliance and performance. I'm much more impressed by that than what great new features for games developers Microsoft has integrated, or how their new GUI toolkit makes their interface less ugly, or how Linux supports yet another hardware gadget, or how yet another distro promises that they will cause Linux to topple Microsoft.
In today's world that is run by computers, we need security. Worms, botnets, trojans, automated and directed break ins, website defacements, spam, and information theft demonstrate that we aren't there yet. OpenBSD seems to be the only OS project that seems to fully realize this _and_ have a production-ready system available. There is still much to be desired, but they're much further than the competition.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I've read that the Glibc heap implementation will also be implementing functionality similar to the guard pages in OpenBSD malloc. Should help shake out quite a few memory allocation bugs...
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
I wrote a guide on how to make your own CD from FTP in Linux.
M aking_A_CD_From_FTP
I'm in the process of writting for how to do it in Windows.
Check it out and lemme know if something sucks:
http://etherpunk.com/knowbase/index.php/OpenBSD:_
"Do or do not. There is no try." -- Master Yoda (Half man, half muppet)
VMWare does not run on OpenBSD. You can install it as a guest system, with no support and no VMWare tools for it, but you can't use it as a secure host OS. I've been bugging VMWare for support for it for a long time. I hope anyone else interested will write them as well.