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OpenBSD 4.8 Released
Mortimer.CA writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.8 has been announced. Highlights include ACPI suspend/resume, better hardware support, OpenBGPD/OpenOSPFD/routing daemon improvements, inclusion of OpenSSH 5.5, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just the usual steady improving of the system. A detailed ChangeLog is available, as usual. Work, of course, has already started on the next release, which should be ready in May, according to the steady six-month release cycle."
Their targeted users have no problem with the installation. If you aren't comfortable with the installation tools, you probably wouldn't be comfortable with OpenBSD. A pretty installation method is looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
You're taking some random blog article linked to by Thom Holwerda at OSNews seriously? Those are your three strikes, and you're out, my friend.
Look, the OpenBSD team knows exactly what they're doing. They're some of the brightest minds in the field. They have many years of experience with real-world security. They've been around long enough to know that there are something things that sound totally fantastic in theory, but in practice they're a complete failure.
Many advanced security approaches fall directly into this theoretically-great-but-actually-quite-shitty category. They end up being difficult to implement, and end up being full of security flaws and other holes. They end up causing the very things they're supposed to avoid! Thankfully, the OpenBSD developers know this, and smartly stick with a model that's been proven successful over the couse of 40 years.
Oh, the problem exists, I can assure you of that. The problem however lies between the keyboard and the chair.
That's not a very ergonomic position to use a computer in.
The release song doesn't even have lyrics :-(
How good can the release be then, I ask!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
To spare this section of all the trolls (yeah right!), I have incorporated every *BSD troll into this one message. Thank you.
The *BSD Wailing Song
What's left for me to see
In my ship I sailed so far
What can the answer be
Don't know what the questions are.
And after all I've done
Still I cannot feel the sun
Tell me save me
In the end our lost souls must repent.
I must know it is for certain
Can it be the final curtain
As long as the wind will blow
I'll be searching high and low.
Who knows what's really true
They say the end is so near
Why are we all so cruel
We just fill ourselves with fear.
And heaven and hell will turn
All that we love shall burn
Hear me trust me
In the end our lost sould must repent.
I must know it is for certain
Can it be the final curtain
As long as the wind will blow
I'll be searching high and low
Final curtain
Final curtain
pressed to bsd lips
bsd drink up
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BSD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. Almost everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
It doesn't matter, no matter how many time you try to recesitate *BSD, it's just does
I've only installed OpenBSD twice, both successfully, but their fdsik version was very nice.
Different from Microsoft and Linux fdisk programs? Yes! Because you're not running/installing neither Windows nor Linux. Neither of these are identical systems.
The OpenBSD fdisk is quite possibly better, and without a doubt far better documented, and not just in the excellent up to date man pages but also in official faq's and installation procedures available on the OpenBSD webpages. Stuff one should read.
Who would read/read on Microsoft information when installing Linux?
Who would read/rely on Solaris information when installing Windows?
Who would read/rely on Linux information when installing OpenBSD?
If you're having trouble with OpenBSD fdisk or more likely OpenBSD installation peculiarities and requirements that other operating systems either don't have or gloss over then I would recommend reading the OpenBSD documentation, it's all there, yes the issues that can trap someone entirely new too, usually even emphasized.
A Windows poweruser or superuser can be and often is a total newbie on Linux.
A Linux poweruser or superuser can be and often is a total newbie on OpenBSD.
Don't assume different things to be the same.
They have suspend/resume now?
I guess this will be the Year of the OpenBSD Netbook!!
I'm curious. Having never used a BSD-based system, how are upgrades managed? I understand that instead of installing packages, one uses ports. My impression of that is that you run a file in a ports directory and it compiles the software and installs it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Ports are meant for building packages. Users should only use packages normally. You can update your packages after you upgraded your base system with "pkg_add -ui -D update -D updatedepends"
But how does one upgrade from, say, OpenBSD 4.7 to 4.8?
OpenBSD has excellent docs and FAQ's: http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade48.html
IIRC you can suffix a quantity with M or G to specify size in megabytes or gigabytes.
OpenBSD's claims are based on clean code, well-written documentation and sensible defaults, not a baked-in or bolt-on MAC system (which in this case stands for Mandatory Access Controls.)
Because it can be bolted-on, it's not really a criticism of the OS itself. To be fair, jails gets you 90% of the way there - MAC systems were hot stuff on multi-user systems, but most Unix installations these days are single-seat workstations or back-end servers in the new "appliance" model which don't have any human users at all apart from the admin. Applications can be effectively protected from each other with jails... so an elaborate MAC system is kind of a waste of time in most cases. Maybe in a few specialized file-server scenarios, it might come in handy... but it's pointless for a box running a LAMP stack.
Oh, wait, OpenBSD doesn't run jails, and the devs tell you to screw off and die whenever they're asked about it.
I suppose they still have clean code and sensible defaults. You just need to buy a new server every time you want to isolate applications from each other.
But this isn't actually a security issue, this is a developers-up-their-own-fundament issue.
From the article, about a "secure operating system":
> Generally, this would be taken to mean an operating system that was designed with security in mind, and provides various methods and tools to implement security polices and limits on the system.
Sadly most naive users still believe that security is about setting fine grained permissions, roles, resources and tagging system objects in general. In practice 1) security exploits simply bypass or reconfigure such validations or policies for their own purpose, and 2) getting a really good "fine grained" configuration and reconfiguration is pretty difficult, time consuming, and prone to error (i.e. to increase the vulnerability.)
I can't believe you got modded up. MAC is not bolted on at all, it is a kernel patch. This means you end up with a different kernel, where MAC is implemented from the ground up.
Equating MAC to jails also shows you simply don't understand what MAC is.
The industry is slowly heading in implementing MAC in some form, because DAC (Discretionary Access Control, the current standard) is simply inadequate. It's not all SELinux, Microsoft have Windows Integrity Levels where low privileged processes can't write to higher level processes, Ubuntu has AppArmor etc. The industry is heading in this direction because we realize that allowing all programs to have the full set of permissions equal to the user it is running as is not ideal.
The OpenBSD team stand out in their flat our rejection of the very idea, considering it to be too complex (does not have to bee, see SMACK, Tomoko or AppArmor), or horribly understanding it to the point they equate it with an ACL. IIRC Theo has said in several interviews it is basically security theater and not useful, which is just ignorant. Given they tend to actually ignore security vulnerabilities and argue rather than admit and fix them, the project doesn't seem that security focused to me.
Sorry, but I will take a fairly secure system that grants me the granularity to protect myself in the case of an attack, as opposed to a system which claims awesome security because it comes with almost no current software and nothing running by default.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
OpenBSD has gone down the userspace sound daemon route, with aucat. This is much simpler than something like portaudio and provides userspace sound mixing. I generally prefer the FreeBSD approach (fully working OSS 4 compatible, with high-performance low-latency kernel sound mixing), but the OpenBSD approach (like everything else in OpenBSD) trades a little performance for a lot more security.
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