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OpenBSD 5.6 Released
An anonymous reader writes Just as per the schedule, OpenBSD 5.6 was released today, November 1, 2014. The theme of the 5.6 release is "Ride of the Valkyries". OpenBSD 5.6 will be the first version with LibreSSL. This version also removed sendmail from the base system, smtpd is the default mail transport agent (MTA). The installer no longer supports FTP, network installs via HTTP only. The BIND name server will be removed from the OpenBSD base system. Its replacement comes in the form of the two daemons nsd(8) for authoritative DNS service and unbound(8) for recursive resolver service. OpenSSH 6.7 is included along with GNOME 3.12.2, KDE 4.13.3, Xfce 4.10, Mozilla Firefox 31.0, Vim 7.4.135, LLVM/Clang 3.5 and more. See a detailed log of changes between the 5.5 and 5.6 releases for more information. If you already have an OpenBSD 5.5 system, and do not want to reinstall, upgrade instructions and advice can be found in the Upgrade Guide (a quick video upgrade demo is here). You can order the 5.6 CD set from the new OpenBSD Store and support the project.
>The installer no longer supports FTP
With FTP acting as fragile as glass in the world of NAT and firewalls, I don't see this as a bad thing any longer. HTTP is reliable when serving large files these days.
OpenBSD is fantastic. Thanks to the developers who spend so much time to make it work well!
Also related, Peter N. M. Hansteen is auctioning off the first signed copy The Book of PF, 3rd edition. He will be supporting the OpenBSD project by donating the amount raised to the OpenBSD Foundation.
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2014...
[Citation needed]
Seriously - is there anything that OpenBSD does better than ?
Internet slide shows suck, but a "10 reasons OpenBSD is better than linux" would help out a lot here.
Seriously? The last ditch and unsuccessful attempt by the forces of heaven to prevent the destruction of Valhalla is not a good omen. The forces of good are overwhelmed by the forces of evil despite heroic efforts. I think Carl Jung pointed out that the Norse mythos was the only one he knew of where good does not triumph in the end. Or perhaps it was a reference to 'Apocalypse Now'. In ether case, as I said, not a good omen.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The best feature systemd has is that it is stuck in linux land. Let the kids have their bleeding edge shiny. Everyone else has the BSDs.
Are you a systemd fanboy? I don't give a fuck what you think.
Just about EVERY SMTP MTA is named "smtpd". Sendmail's is, but so it Postfix', and so is OpenSMTPD's.
In case anyone wants to know, OpenSMTPD replaces sendmail as the default MTA in OpenBSD 5.6. Now how hard was that, to actually state a piece of useful information instead of a nonsense phrase conveying nothing?
1. OpenBSD supports laptops, specifically Thinkpads, better than any other operating system not called Windows. Suspend/resume works, instantly.
2. Does not require PulseAudio, but can still output multiple channels from multiple apps at the same time. This was always a problem with ALSA.
3. PF is a lot easier to configure than ipfw. It is the firewall of OSX.
4. Man pages for EVERYTHING.
5. A simple init system. Whether or not it is better than systemd is debatable.
6. Not tied to any one desktop environment. Gnome 3.x is well-supported, but not requisite for anything.
7. The first place you will find updates for new wireless cards, OpenSSH, LibreSSL, libc (Android actually uses this instead of glibc).
8. Full disk encryption without requiring an unencrypted boot partition, unlike Linux.
9. Simple, text-based config files.
10. No need for HAL or *Kit or whatever flavour of the week abstraction layer is needed for interfacing with your hardware.
OpenBSD is not for everybody; there is a steep learning curve and a lot of software is not supported. But if you need a simple operating system that doesn't change much from release to release, it's worth checking out. If you are looking for an alternative to systemd (which I honestly have no problem with), check out OpenBSD before checking out FreeBSD, and I cannot stress this enough. FreeBSD developers don't use their own operating system; they run it in a Virtual machine on their Macs, and it shows. Suspend/resume has been broken there since 2008, and drivers for any recent Intel graphics adapter will not run (you cannot switch from Xorg to a console and back) properly. FreeBSD devs do not care about their OS; OpenBSD devs actually use their system.
Has our AC determined whether Kerberos is in OpenBSD ports? I am reading "Kerberos has been removed from the base system. Kerberos support will be available via a package."
When they introduced that SystemD trash in Linux, I packed my bags and moved to OpenBSD. Have not looked back.
If something works, what like gas guzzlers? Yeah, time has changed, it *is* possible to get more than 15mpg. However, systemd sucks right now.
Why UNIX?
If you say it's the same team that works on bases system and ports, then I don't have the knowledge to take issue with that. I would not have guessed so, though.
At any rate, OpenBSD has this to say: "The ports & packages collection does NOT go through the thorough security audit that OpenBSD follows. Although we strive to keep the quality of the packages collection high, we just do not have enough human resources to ensure the same level of robustness and security."
I think it's a pretty big deal.
OS-X is not 1970's Unix by any stretch of imagination. It's a descendent of NeXTstep, or in other words, its base system is a descendant of Mach and BSD. Unix, as per the 70s definition, was SVR4.x. So the versions that were really Unix - until the Unix certification programs kicked in - were Solaris and SCO. BSD based Unixes didn't count - whether they were the original BSDs, or OSF/1, or SunOS or Ultrix.
OpenBSD's malloc implementation is noticeably slower than anyone else's. It is, however, more likely to make certain categories of memory management error crash the program (rather than leaving it in a state where an attacker might be able to exploit the bug). Unfortunately, most modern exploit techniques don't rely on the invariants that OpenBSD's malloc() breaks, so you end up paying the performance cost without getting much by way of security gain (unless your attacker is a script kiddie who is using 5-year-old scripts).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I second the thank you to the developers.
What I like about OpenBSD.
There are no black boxes. I can do a "ps aux" and very easily understand every process that is running and it only takes up one page on the terminal. I use linux for my desktop/laptop and it is great for that but there are pages of processes running and I have to hunt to figure out what some of them are. If I want to understand the boot process it is well documented and I can edit a few files and figure it out.
PF. PF is a great firewall with some amazing features.
Secure. Again only processes running that I want running.
Small footprint. I just downloaded the 5.6 AMD64 iso. 227mb. It got smaller from 5.5 to 5.6. You never see that.
I find it a pleaser to work with. It doesn't make a lot of assumptions for you. Easy install. Give it a try.