OpenBSD

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 5.2-beta. Snapshots should be available soon for testing, check the mirrors for availability. Read below for the full commit messages: Read more...

Mailing lists can be fun. Most of the time the discussions on lists like openbsd-misc are useful, entertaining or both. But when your battle with spam fighting technology ends up blocking your source of information and entertainment (like in ... [More] the case of the recent thread titled "spamd greylisting: false positives" - starting with this message), frustration levels can run high, and in the process it emerged that some readers out there place way too much trust in a certain site offering barely commented recipes (named after a rare chemical compound Cl-Hg-Hg-Cl). Read more... [Less]

Artwork by Marie Mantopoulos Gilles Chehade (gilles@) sends us the following: I was asked if I could write a small article about OpenSMTPD, what we've been up to since last article and what we plan to do still. It turns out ... [More] that last article, if you omit the small SQLite blog post, is from 2009 and there's been waaaaaay too many things to mention. So here's a short overview of the last few months, the current state of things, the most important features we came up with and the things that are planned for the next weeks and months ;) He's taken the time to round up the entire mail-moving crew, with Eric Faurot (eric@) and Charles Longeau (chl@) pitching in to get us up to speed. Read more... [Less]

Ted Unangst(tedu@), the original author of rthreads (you can watch his DCBSDCon09 presentation on youtube), recently took the time to answer some of our questions. Read more...

BSDTalk has an almost hour-long interview from BSDCan 2012 with Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer(henning@); they talk about recent work on OpenBSD. As a bonus, both Peter and Henning presented at BSDCan; the slides from Peter's PF tutorial and Henning's preview of upcoming queuing changes are online.

Philip Guenther(guenther@), the man who got this hackathon rolling, takes the time to organize his post-its: Sometimes you go into a hackathon knowing exactly what you're going to tackle and it all follows the plan. No, wait, that never ... [More] happens. There's always something that comes up that ends up eating more of the hackathon than you would have expected. Read more... [Less]

Gilles Chehade(gilles@) gives us a preview of an upcoming OpenSMTPD feature: During the r2k12 hackathon in Paris, Marc Espie committed SQLite to OpenBSD's base system. This has the side effect that OpenSMTPD can start using it and while ... [More] we agreed that we did not want it as a strong dependency, the backends API allows us to make it a soft dependency that can be removed without breaking the daemon if someone *really* does not want SQLite linked. Today I decided to give it a try and implement a SQLite backend to the map API. About ten minutes later (yes, really ten minutes !), I had a working prototype that was suboptimal and that didn't make use of SQL capabilities. An hour later, I have a SQLite backend that will use multiple tables with different structures and that can be used to lookup aliases, virtual domains and credentials for authenticated relaying. gilles@ walks you through it below the fold. Read more... [Less]

The editors are a bit late to the party, but are pleased to belatedly announce the publication of SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels, and Keys . From the author, Michael W. Lucas: Secure Shell (SSH) lets systems ... [More] administrators securely manage remote systems. But most people only use the bare minimum SSH offers. Used properly, SSH simplifies your job. You can order the book from the OpenBSD online store, or from a number of other outlets. Mr Lucas explains how, as well as the book, below the fold. Read more... [Less]

The editors are a bit late to the party, but are pleased to belatedly announce the publication of SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels, and Keys . From the author, Michael W. Lucas: Secure Shell (SSH) lets systems ... [More] administrators securely manage remote systems. But most people only use the bare minimum SSH offers. Used properly, SSH simplifies your job. You can order the book from the OpenBSD online store, or from a number of other outlets. Mr Lucas explains how, as well as the book, below the fold. Read more... [Less]

Still more reports coming in from r2k12: asynchronous DNS resolving, code slavery, and 3rd-party bugs; read on! Read more...