OpenBSD

Daniel Gracia writes in about his own experiences with OpenBSD: “ I began playing with OpenBSD with the 3.2 release. I remember that as being a great milestone: PF was just starting to gain power and ALTQ, still a separated feature, catched ... [More] my curiosity. I was deploying a wifi network to share Inet access in my town, so I looked for security, simplicity and a queue manager. That was love at first sight, a really K.I.S.S. solution for all my problems!!! Whenever stuck with any problem I found the community to be very helpful, only to punish those too lazy to even look at the archives. Read more... [Less]

As an experienced UNIX journeyman, I know how valuable it is to learn from the experiences of your peers. With this in mind, I've been asking other OpenBSD users to write in and tell us their stories. We'd like to hear how you use OpenBSD, both at ... [More] work and home, for work and play. How did you get started with OpenBSD? What have been your biggest successes (and failures) with our favorite UNIX-like operating system? Our first contributor, "A Casual User" writes in anonymously with some of his (or her) experiences: “ If you discount the Commodore 64, I sort of started with SunOS, after being hired as a gofer in a small research institute. A good boss encouraged me to experiment with other systems, too. At some point I had a couple of Sun Ultra 5s and 10s that were idle and spent some time working through the OpenBSD docs and installing OpenBSD on them. (this was in the early 2000s) OpenBSD resurrected the Suns for roughly two or three years. It worked well for me in fun, allowing me to learn a new (to me) OS, teaching me more about Unix style, and giving me a bit of an introduction to C. (having real patches to install and compile was a lot more interesting than binary patches!) Better, it did some real service for the institute. Read more... [Less]

Just like last year, Seth Fulton writes in about the SCALE 9x event in Los Angeles this weekend: “ I'm running the OpenBSD booth this weekend at the So Cal Linux Expo in LA. We'll be peddling OpenBSD merch, talking turkey with the local ... [More] yokels, and swilling cold beverages as necessary from a cooler under the table. The more people we have to cover the booth, the more time we'll have to attend the plentiful presentations. If you don't have any plans for this weekend and would like to volunteer some of your time in exchange for a free full conference pass to Scale 9x, please get in contact with me. ” To contact Seth, give him a call at +1 619 630 7384 or seth.fulton on skype. Alternatively, you can send him an e-mail at seth (dot) fulton (at) gmail (dot) com. [Less]

Michael Dexter writes in with news about the PCC project: “ Thanks to the hard work of Anders "Ragge" Magnusson and his team plus the help of donors from around the world, the Portable C Compiler is now ready for final beta testing in ... [More] preparation for its 1.0 release. "This is the beta of the first release of pcc since almost forever." Please download it, put it through its paces and report any bugs you encounter along the way! ” [Less]

Since the day I got my shiny new FTTH internet connection complete with IPTV, I was curious about making the TV show on my desktop. Eventually, purchasing a network based video player that was capable of playing IPTV too was the final straw - the device only has one Ethernet port and I needed that for accessing the LAN. Read more...

The Nagios Exchange recently added check_relayd, a new check which monitors an OpenBSD relayd(8) service for health and availability. It was written by Philip Garner of Sysnix and published on the Exchange just a couple days ago. From the ... [More] description: Comprehensive perl relayd checker. This plugin is designed to run on a local host if Nagios is not local I suggest you run it via NRPE. However if you are running this on a firewall I would strongly [recommend] not using NRPE and run a local Nagios [using] OCSP/OCHP to passive messages back to your main Nagios. Usage: Check_relayd checks that all redirect & relays loaded by relayd are active. If a redirect/relay or table are down/empty it will give a CRITICAL message with information regarding what has failed. If host(s) are down in a given redirect/relay then it will give a WARNING unless there are 0 up for that relay/redirect in which case it will give a CRITICAL. If relayd returns any unexpected output (command failure, system errors) this program will return a CRITICAL. check_relayd -h, -?, --help Print Help Information -V, --version Print Version Information -r, --relay, --redirect Optional -r argument you can give a list of the expected relays/redirect separated by commas (,). If it does not find the relay/redirect returns CRITICAL. If a relay/redirect fond that is not defined returns WARNING. If you need any support or help with this plugin or if you find any cool ways of improving it please let me know. Editor's Note: Reviewing the check's source code, it does a basic inspection on the output of relayctl show summary, looking for active status on redirection or relay entries. There is no performance data passed back in the output, so users looking for trending data should continue to use an alternative graphing utility. [Less]

Found a new blog post from a recent tweet by @knightgats. Check out his tutorial on setting up your own site-to-site VPN with OpenBSD IPSec. This is well-covered territory, but it never hurts to see a refresher for new users. The author walks ... [More] thorugh all steps of: Enabling the IPSec protocols in /etc/sysctl.conf Creating your /etc/ipsec.conf rules Filtering the IPSec traffic with PF Synchronizing your IPSec host keys Troubleshooting your connection [Less]

Michael W. Lucas, author of Absolute OpenBSD, has posted a brief introduction to deploying the Unbound caching DNS resolver on OpenBSD. Michael also demonstrates how simple it can be to activate DNSSEC on your nameserver. Setting up a local DNS ... [More] resolver looks easier than ever, and now you don't have to deal with the routine Bind security patches. Read the full article over at Michael's blog. [Less]

Undeadly editor and OpenBSD developer Janne Johansson (jj@) writes in with some creative ideas for helping the OpenBSD project. Janne clearly demonstrates that all it takes to make a difference is some resourceful thinking and the proper motivation. ... [More] “ Every now and then you read mail threads on misc@ that end with someone saying he or she would be glad to help out, if "I only could code some more". Well, I think there are more ways you can help the project even if you can't code at all. Read more... [Less]

Peter N.M. Hansteen writes in with news about the next major BSD conference: “ The AsiaBSDCon conference organizers have published this year's schedule, with a strong OpenBSD showing. Speakers include OpenBSD developers Damien Miller ... [More] (djm@), Eric Faurot (eric@), Mark Kettenis (kettenis@), Paul Irofti (pirofti@), Henning Brauer (henning@) Ryan McBride (mcbride@), Nicholas Marriott (nicm@), David Gwyne (dlg@), Ken Westerback (krw@) and Claudio Jeker (claudio@). Peter Hansteen will be giving an updated PF tutorial. The dates to mark on your calendar are March 17 through 20, the venue is the Tokyo University of Science. ” [Less]