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OpenBSD 4.4 Released
Linux blog writes "The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle."
Congratulations to the OpenBSD team. BSD is far from dead!
Congrats to the OpenBSD team.
In related news, NetBSD 5.0 should be released soon, too.
BSD proves Netcraft wrong again.
This is not flamebait. I encourage moderators to read the guidelines at http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
The parent did use "a name" but it was not an insult so much as voicing the consensus judgment of the behavior of the leader of OpenBSD, Theo de Raadt. de Raadt is, in fact, an "arrogant ass[]"; if a moderator thinks this is calling names rather than an accurate description, I encourage that moderator to peruse the history of Slashdot articles about de Raadt, perhaps starting with http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/17/127206
Thank you and let's all try to make Slashdot a better and more interesting place.
No, the UltraSPARC T2 was released in October 2007.
T1s aren't quite three years old yet, and T2s have only been out for just over a year.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I have been regularly running OpenBSD for the last 8 years, and I have never been disappointed. 4.4 keeps up the string of solid releases.
I have a thinkpad that runs it as well.
Yes, I buy the CDs, and a few shirts, and donate $ when I can. Hopefully it keeps them working on the next release. I don't know what I would do without it running my DNS and other servers.
KDE 3.5.8? Why so old... even if KDE 3.5.10 released in late August was too late to make it, KDE 3.5.9 came out in February, that's over 8 months.
although they lack a good pre-built distro like Ubuntu.
They do have a good pre-built distro. It's called PC-BSD. It's very good in my experience, very nice. And it's a breeze to install, just like Ubuntu.
I like Ubuntu even better. But PC-BSD is very fine, really, it deserves recognition. It's well worth trying.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
This site is geared towards Linux users that want to learn OpenBSD: http://www.openbsd101.com/
It was flamebait on several counts, the first being FreeBSD is not anything like Linux. Kernel, filesystem, hier, SMP, licensing, and general philosophy are greatly different.
I personally think Theo de Raadt is a great project leader, even if he leaves a bit to be desired in tactfully dealing with situations. He's a bit abrasive in way House, MD is abrasive. I think Linus Torvalds is an ass but if I were to use that a basis of running down his work, then I too would be guilty a flamebait.
The rest of the OpenBSD criticisms are simply there to troll, nothing substantive at all. SMP has been there for quite awhile.
Please let people spend their mod points how they see fit even if they don't agree with your viewpoint.
Thank you and let's all try to make Slashdot a better and more interesting place.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Yes, OpenBSD's performance is behind that of Linux and FreeBSD (which are neck-and-neck.) However, performance is still quite adequate. OpenBSD has a kind of austere simplicity, however, that makes it a pleasure to administer. It certainly has a niche.
[Death walking away muttering]
Death "SO DISAPPOINTING"
They're significantly behind Linux in many areas, but don't mistake optimization for specific workloads as obsolescence. Performance sucks once you hit userspace, but most OpenBSD machines spend almost all their time in the kernel, routing and firewalling, tasks for which they are quite competitive with Linux.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Linux doesn't take anything from BSD. Everything in Linux is free for BSD to use as long as the code stays free, ie under the GPL. While if apple takes code from BSD, you will never see that code again.
Every bit of BSD code that Apple uses is still available from them (either under the original license, or the OSI approved APSL).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
and yes we have backup systems, but if you've ever worked in a real industrial environment it's not as simple as flicking a switch when it comes to changing control systems, and it's certainly something you want to avoid.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Normally you don't NEED to upgrade it. Set up the device and forget about it, unless there's some type of remote exploit you'll be fine.
Linux is only at 2.6.27.4, as if we're back in the 1980s. Though unix-like systems in general are relics from the 1970s.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
OpenBSD puts a lot of money in consultant's pockets. It's hands down the most secure OS on the market. Got a client that needs a secure redundant firewall but can't afford big, over-priced Cisco gear? OpenBSD to the resuce. OpenBGP, CARP, etc. You can do things with OpenBSD and 15K worth of hardware that would cost six or seven times as much money with dedicated networking hardware. And, you can do it better. So, if you need some easy extra cash get into OpenBSD and start making a killing in the firewall business in your hometown. When you get a reputation for solid, secure systems (they'll wonder how you do it :)) donate some cash to the OpenBSD Foundation and buy some CDs.
CARP. Google upgrades backend stuff all the time, but you never know it. OpenBSD does CARP better than anyone. Try it. I can re-install in less than 10 minutes. Sparc64 or Intel machines. No one is aware as services are still available.
Let me just point out that PC-BSD's kernel is the very same FreeBSD, nothing related to OpenBSD; let me also just point out that the standard FreeBSD distribution combines the advantages of Gentoo's (customizing the building of packages to your needs or desires) and of Debian (superb dependency tracking, very fast on searches, always up-to-date (if you consider Debian Unstable)).
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
PC-BSD, like DesktopBSD, is FreeBSD based. Don't confuse FreeBSD and OpenBSD - they share many userspace utilities and their kernels have some common history, but they are not the same OS.
Basically, OpenBSD is the one that is rabid about security - makes great server software.
NetBSD is the ultra-portable one - good for unusual hardware.
FreeBSD has excellent support for commodity hardware. It is the one used to make the user-friendly distros.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
How is it that these comments are raised again and again with rarely a genuflect towards the possibility that our social norms and our technical norms exist at cross purposes?
It is often pointed out that humans are hierarchical animals. What's pointed out far less often is that we are also polarizing animals. For the most part, it's pretty darn hard to get a community of people to rest comfortably within a dual hierarchy: the polarizers will either succeed in driving the culture toward a political hierarchy, or they will succeed in driving the culture toward a technical meritocracy, politics be damned.
What evidence do we have that people can be effective and polite at the same time? NASA? I think not. When it became a political culture, shuttles exploded.
Is Linus an ass, or does he choose to occupy the niche that has proven viable? Larry Wall has taken a gentler stance toward his position as benevolent dictator for life, and he's not getting much good press lately. Nice guys finish last or at best, five years late.
Every time this subject comes up, there is a lot of chattering from the "How to win friends and influence people" crowd that despite the technical merits of X, it doesn't suit that person's social worldview, as if technical merit belongs in a marriage with popularity and approval.
As far as I can tell from my experience, the majority of PC marriages of that ilk are functionally destitute, yet the chattering never ceases that the world *ought* to operate that way. On what basis? What annoys me most is that this chattering rarely includes even the slightest nod toward justification.
This is another fact about human nature: we seem to have an inbuilt algorithm for determining that certain kinds of opinions can be safely put forward with little or no justification (e.g. "that's just how things are"), and which kinds of opinion can automatically be called to account. In my experience, the hierarchy of what must be fully justified and what needn't be has been pretty much decided on the grade 3 playground.
There seems to be a lot of people out there who are offended to the core that Theo's objectionable personality has been associated with so much durable accomplishment. In my opinion, that's just a bad case of shooting the messenger. Given broad human instincts toward hierarchy and polarization, it was as inevitable as the rise of the spam king having created a zero-cost anonymous distribution channel.
The underlying problem is that there is no reliable chalk line between civility and brown-nosing, and it's hell to police in a project that could otherwise rely on more objective measures. It's kind of like Sudoku. A complete waste of time, but I enjoy it anyway. We've made almost no progress (as a social organism) at efficiently policing the line between civility and brown-nosing, but so many among our ranks seem to prefer sliding down this slippery moss bank over the firm traction of dystopian merit.
> What does Linux take from BSD? All those vendor supplied drivers? The userland? The vast array of high quality filesystems?
The overwhelmingly dominant SSH implementation?
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
As a Debian admin and user, I have to point out that Debian also makes this process trivial. Gentoo is overrated; Debian is the best OS to admin I've come across, whether Linux or BSD.
Yes and don't forget the other three since you're trying to be complete:
DragonFly BSD - clustering (freebsd 4 fork) good for servers.
MirBSD - OpenBSD fork (3.x i think)
MidnightBSD - FreeBSD 6.x fork (although bringing in 7.x features now) Focused on desktop use. Not at PC-BSD usability levels yet.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
For a distro that prides itself on proactive security, OpenBSD seems to lack one security feature most mainline Linux distributions have: some form of package signing. I know package signing doesn't make a system 100% percent secure from Trojan'ed applications. I'm not a security expert, but I think having signed packages helps reduce the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, say, from malicious DNS redirection that points the user to a bogus mirror even if the "real" mirror (which presumably is running a secure BSD system) isn't compromised. It seems to me the most secure OpenBSD system is one without anything besides the base system installed, good enough for a server, but unfortunately not for everyday Desktop use in Facebook era.
Spend $20 on a new ethernet card? I used a cheap off-the-shelf realtek on openbsd for years. On a Sun SPARC, no less.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
In other late breaking news, 100% of Coke drinkers prefer Coke to Pepsi.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Wasn't that one of the bad guys in "Under Siege: 2"?
Here's the song with lyrics for this release: 4.4: "Trial of the BSD Knights" http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#44
that's not a solution when you have applications processing information, and you switch over while your in the middle of processing requests. In my situation there isn't a single second the system isn't fielding 100's of requests. basicly it involves a hand shake where the client makes a requests and expects an answer, if you switch over the new system won't know the client is expecting an answer so you'd have to re engineer a black box system to do it somehow.
Ever heard of connection draining? You build systems with the expectation that they will fail. Any component at any given point in time should be expected to be broken, because it will be at some point. If your system can't handle bringing down a server for maintenance, then you have far bigger problems than picking a good OS. Good luck to you.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Apple releases the free code if and when it chooses to, sometimes only after repeated prodding. Apple is very likely going to be on the bad end of a lawsuit regarding GPL violations because there are still versions of XCode that they have never released the GCC source for (XCode 2.5 I think? I don't recall which.)
Apple regards the open source community as a convenience, not as partners.