OpenBSD

No April Foolery: The Portable C Compiler version 1.0 was released on April 1st! As with so many things BSD, this project proves that good code is timeless and can benefit from literally generations of review. It can build the majority of the BSD base systems (C++ code aside) and is undergoing continuous improvement. Read more...

What is the answer to life, the universe and everything? Naturally 42. Quite different from the answer to "what shall I pre-order today?", as that is obviously OpenBSD 4.9, which is scheduled for release on May 1st, 2011. This new release is ... [More] again packed with lots of goodies like mandoc(1) as the groff(1) replacement, TCP send and receive buffer scaling, an /etc/rc.d directory for use by the ports system and of course many substantial improvements in the various areas such as the suspend / resume department, the USB subsystem, the handling of random numbers, etc. For a very long list have a look at the plus49 page. So, grab your towel and head on over to the order page and make sure you'll get your set before May 1st! After you've placed your order, download the new release song "The Answer" (MP3 or OGG) and sing along to the lyrics. [Less]

On saturday, Ingo Schwarze (schwarze@) deleted groff(1) from the OpenBSD source tree. This is the culmination of a lot of work by Ingo but also Kristaps Dzonsons and Joerg Sonnenberger who are responsible for the new mandoc(1). A lot of work has ... [More] gone into mandoc recently. Those of you following the source-changes@ list have probably noticed the huge amount of work Ingo put in: 373 commits in 2010 alone, most of which were either directly related to mandoc or fixing bugs in manpages that did not show with groff. You may also remember our article on m2k10 about the mini hackathon on mandoc in May last year. Ingo's log message hardly does justice to all the work that was done in the last two years and four months (Kristaps made his first commit to mdocml.bsd.lv in November 2008): Replaced by mandoc(1) for base and xenocara purposes, and comes with 4.9 ports. ok deraadt@ Ingo will presenting a talk on mandoc at BSDCan 2011. If you have the chance, do go and see it! The removal of groff means that src/ is now free of C++ code. Groff was also one of the slowest parts in a full build (and its replacement is much faster in rendering manpages). All in all, mandoc is a very nice improvement so a big thank you goes to Ingo, Kristaps and Joerg for their work. [Less]

Michael W. Lucas posted a new blog entry about one of his own harrowing experiences years ago. Helpless vendors and inadequate commercial software forced his company to turn to OpenBSD and PF for a solution to their bandwidth problem. “ One ... [More] Monday morning, a customer that had expected to use very little bandwidth found that they had sufficient requests to devour twice the bandwidth we had for the entire datacenter. This affected every customer. If your $9.95/month web page is slow you have little to complain about, but if your multiple-thousands-of-dollars-a-month Web application is slow you pick up the phone and scream until the problem stops... ” Does Puffy arrive in time to save the day? Read Michael's story to find out! [Less]

Henrik Kramshoej looks way back at his early days with OpenBSD: “ While studying at the University of Copenhagen, DIKU.dk we used Unix systems - the sandbox it was called and I liked it. I wanted Unix at home, but at the time a SCO Unix would ... [More] cost about EUR 2000 and my machine was much too small for it anyway. We could borrow Minix and install that, and it was great fun, then came some information about 386BSD, also that it might core dump across your hard drive if it had some problems ;-) Read more... [Less]

Dan Langille recently announced the schedule for BSDCan 2011. It looks like another great event, with a good lineup of OpenBSD-related talks: Tutorial: Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter - Peter Hansteen Talk: How ... [More] the Cart Came to Draw the Ox: the Roff Tradition and Mandoc - Kristaps Dzonsons (kristaps@) Talk: Training a foal to replace a venerable workhorse - Ingo Schwarze (schwarze@) Talk: vscsi(4) and iscsid, iSCSI initiator the OpenBSD way - Claudio Jeker (claudio@) Talk: 10 years of pf - Henning Brauer (henning@) and Ryan McBride (mcbride@) Read more... [Less]

NetBSD developer Jaime Fournier has published a new round of Ruby benchmarks comparing the various BSD projects and Ubuntu Linux. Some readers will remember he performed a similar test a couple of years ago. A quick review of the data reveals ... [More] improvements by OpenBSD. The following is a snippet from the full report available on his website. Benchmarks from ruby-benchmark-suite run on ruby-1.9.2-p180 with rubygems-1.5.3 Benchmarks found at https://github.com/acangiano/ruby-benchmark-suite Dragonfly 2.9 - With Hammer root filesystem FreeBSD 8.2 - Default disk layout NetBSD 5.1 - Default disk layout OpenBSD 4.8 - Default disk layout Linux - Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition Read more... [Less]

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.9-current. That means that we are one step closer to the upcoming release. Keep an eye out for pre-orders! From: Theo de Raadt To: [email protected] Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src ... [More] Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 18:58:41 -0600 (MDT) Sender: [email protected] CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: [email protected] 2011/03/01 18:58:40 Modified files: sys/conf : newvers.sh Log message: we are now hacking on 4.9-current [Less]

Nick Humphrey writes in to tell us about how he got started with OpenBSD: “ I started using OpenBSD around 2000. In early 2001 I joined a small company with an almost non-existent IT budget, so securing cash for hardware, software and support ... [More] was extremely difficult. I used OpenBSD in a wide variety of roles to provide excellent security and robust services at minimal cost. On arrival, the infrastructure was mainly Windows NT4/2000 desktops and servers. No anti-virus (on anything), a firewall with ANY-ANY-ALLOW as the active ruleset, almost no ACLs in place on any shares/directories. Server systems were crumbling, tape drives flaky and without support/maintenance contracts lots of the software was out-of-date and unpatched. There was a pile of older low spec Dell desktop machines that were unused. Most of these were around 128MB RAM and 20GB hard disk drives with 100MB ethernet. Read more... [Less]

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.9-current. That means that we are one step closer to the upcoming release. Keep an eye out for pre-orders! From: Theo de Raadt To: [email protected] Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src ... [More] Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 18:58:41 -0600 (MDT) Sender: [email protected] CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: [email protected] 2011/03/01 18:58:40 Modified files: sys/conf : newvers.sh Log message: we are now hacking on 4.9-current [Less]