8 ms·

The OpenBSD 5.3 Release

96 points by conductor 13y ago

conductor 13y ago
The ISO images are already available on some of the mirrors, for example: http://ftp.openbsd.dk/pub/OpenBSD/5.3/ http://ftp.openbsd.dk/pub/OpenBSD/5.3/
gabeguz 13y ago
Right on time, as usual. Ordering CD sets to support the project.
heidar 13y ago
This is particularly exciting news: OpenSMTPD 5.3: code is now considered stable and suitable for use in production.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I'm very excited about that. I recently switched to FreeBSD for my samba server (because of ZFS), but I still use OpenBSD for everything else. I've long (delayed, delayed, etc.) been going to replace the mail server and I might move from Postfix to OpenSMTP. I will have to do some tests.
  - bch 13y ago
    I'm interested to know if it will implement Milter or what the workalike will look like.
papsosouid 13y ago
I've been out of the "paying attention to unix stuff" world for a long time now, but back in the 2.8-3.8 times I followed openbsd related news very closely. It seemed in that time period that openbsd usage was growing rather quickly, and lots of people were talking about it. Having just come back now, it seems as though all that growth has vanished. The mailing lists are very quiet, undeadly is practically dead, nobody is talking about openbsd anymore at all. Is it just that people ran out of things to say, or did everyone leave for one reason or another?
- heidar 13y ago
  Not sure if this is the reason but I think OS development was just much more exciting back then and more people were into it. Now people focus a lot more on the web. Some people left OpenBSD and forked it to make Bitrig, not sure how much that affected their development speed.
  - papsosouid 13y ago
    Yeah, I wasn't sure how much of that is my perception vs actual reality. I don't find unix fascinating and interesting any more, so I have a hard time judging whether that is skewing my perception of how much discussion and interest there seems to be from other people. On the other hand, openbsd has no xen support and ec2 and other xen based providers are hugely popular now. I wonder how much that has affected things. I ran everything on openbsd back then, and now that I am getting back to doing some sysadmining, it appears openbsd isn't even an option for a lot of people.
    - zdw 13y ago
      5.3 gives support for the virt- paravirtualized interfaces provided by KVM and others: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=virtio&sektion=4 http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=virtio&sekt... In earlier releases it supported the T-series Sparc64 logical CPU partitioning.
      - papsosouid 13y ago
        Neither of those things address the issue. A huge portion of the "people who will be installing a unix system" market are using EC2 instead of hardware. That cuts the potential userbase for openbsd down significantly.
    - EvilLook 13y ago
      OpenBSD fares no worse than Windows under Xen - both work just fine under HVM.
rhizome31 13y ago
I don't care much about advanced security or networking features but I use OpenBSD because of its simplicity and the quality of its documentation.
- zdw 13y ago
  This. Simply the best written man pages, and the easiest to understand boot process of any currently developed unix variant.
- berntb 13y ago
  So... Do you have a link to nice documentation of hardware support? (Not snarky; an honest question to verify my older "machine park" for an install to play around, which I've wanted to do for a while.)
  - papsosouid 13y ago
    http://openbsd.org/plat.html http://openbsd.org/plat.html
  - cdjk 13y ago
    The man pages and FAQ are a good place to start for documentation. It's rather nice having everything in one place, rather than scattered around forum posts, mailing lists, HOWTOs, etc, some of which might or might not be outdated. Unless you have some really weird hardware, I'd be surprised if OpenBSD didn't support it. The best way to check is to boot an iso and look at the output of dmesg, however.
    - zurn 13y ago
      The laptop department sounds a little limited currently: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=136255349221059&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=136255349221059&w...
- sarnowski 13y ago
  This. OpenBSD clean and simple design makes it a breeze to maintain. It's documentation always tells you the whole truth and for most tasks, its so intuitive that you almost always already know where to do your stuff.
adventureloop 13y ago
OpenBSD has been the model for opensource software release engineering. Their presentations on managing their releases are always worth a look. In 2013 regular quality releases are quite common, but OpenBSD has been releasing on schedule from the time of Debian's four year release cycle.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  The best thing is that they don't jump versions numbers for PR reasons.
Scramblejams 13y ago
Back when I looked at OpenBSD a decade ago, I liked the OS but upgrading from one version to the next seemed to be problematic. Anybody had any experiences (good or bad) with upgrading modern OpenBSD?
- tobiasu 13y ago
  Upgrading OpenBSD is as transparent as it gets. Put a new kernel in place, extract the install sets, run sysmerge to update /etc and X configuration and you're done. The FAQ has a very cautious explanation of the whole process, pointing out every imaginable pitfall. Once you've done it, it's a five minute job on most standard installations.
- segmondy 13y ago
  you have to be kidding. OpenBSD has the easiest upgrade ever.
- papsosouid 13y ago
  Copy kernel, untar install sets, reboot.
- cdjk 13y ago
  There is a useful and detailed upgrade guide here: http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade53.html http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade53.html The official recommendation is to boot the installation kernel and upgrade that way, but I've never had a problem doing a remote upgrade. It's always been entirely painless. One could argue that it's not quite as simple as "apt-get dist-upgrade" but I like it better - the upgrade process is more explicit about not touching your config files. And since it's a BSD, the base system isn't packaged, so I'm not entirely sure how it would work (although FreeBSD does have freebsd-update now, so it's possible).
  - Scramblejams 13y ago
    Thanks for the details. On Linux the upgrade process can be problematic depending on which distro you're using and how wrenching the upgrades are to the various packages you're relying on, but I must admit I've been spoiled by Debian's apt-get dist-upgrade. Good to hear that with a little experience, OpenBSD's upgrade can be similarly stable.
zokier 13y ago
Interesting that they are staying at KDE3. I wonder what are their plans with it.
- tobiasu 13y ago
  It has been more a lack of time and interest than anything else. KDE4 was added just past this release, and will be in 5.4 (unless another meteorite hits the wrong part of Russia).
  - cavilling_elite 13y ago
    Wasn't there some problem with KDE4 highly tied to dtrace and other kernel space mappings that OpenBSD does not have?
bconway 13y ago
I'd really love to give OpenBSD a try outside of VM testing. Does it have something like FreeBSD's NanoBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/index.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/...) yet? The seamless update-image-and-switch is a killer feature for my embedded use.
- papsosouid 13y ago
  Even after reading that, I still don't understand what "nanobsd" is supposed to be for. All of the big 3 BSDs have used crunchgen plus kernels with embedded filesystems to create small, single file systems for over a decade. That's how the installation images are made.
- cdjk 13y ago
  The OpenBSD equivalent to NanoBSD is flashrd: http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/ http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/ It's not officially supported, however, and only recommended for systems that are likely to suffer power outages and for which running fsck would be problematic. I've used it a little on embedded systems and so far it's worked fine.
hexonexxon 13y ago
"All softraid(4) boot(8) support is now enabled by default, including support for booting from crypto volumes." awesome. I also use OpenBSD for embedded work, in fact I think everybody is using it for embedded systems. You can strip the kernel down to a tiny install, run securelevel 2 and chflags to prevent any tampering from console.

96 points by conductor 13y ago

The ISO images are already available on some of the mirrors, for example: http://ftp.openbsd.dk/pub/OpenBSD/5.3/ http://ftp.openbsd.dk/pub/OpenBSD/5.3/

gabeguz 13y ago

Right on time, as usual. Ordering CD sets to support the project.

heidar 13y ago

This is particularly exciting news: OpenSMTPD 5.3: code is now considered stable and suitable for use in production.

protomyth 13y ago
I'm very excited about that. I recently switched to FreeBSD for my samba server (because of ZFS), but I still use OpenBSD for everything else. I've long (delayed, delayed, etc.) been going to replace the mail server and I might move from Postfix to OpenSMTP. I will have to do some tests.
- bch 13y ago
  I'm interested to know if it will implement Milter or what the workalike will look like.

papsosouid 13y ago

I've been out of the "paying attention to unix stuff" world for a long time now, but back in the 2.8-3.8 times I followed openbsd related news very closely. It seemed in that time period that openbsd usage was growing rather quickly, and lots of people were talking about it. Having just come back now, it seems as though all that growth has vanished. The mailing lists are very quiet, undeadly is practically dead, nobody is talking about openbsd anymore at all. Is it just that people ran out of things to say, or did everyone leave for one reason or another?

heidar 13y ago
Not sure if this is the reason but I think OS development was just much more exciting back then and more people were into it. Now people focus a lot more on the web. Some people left OpenBSD and forked it to make Bitrig, not sure how much that affected their development speed.
- papsosouid 13y ago
  Yeah, I wasn't sure how much of that is my perception vs actual reality. I don't find unix fascinating and interesting any more, so I have a hard time judging whether that is skewing my perception of how much discussion and interest there seems to be from other people. On the other hand, openbsd has no xen support and ec2 and other xen based providers are hugely popular now. I wonder how much that has affected things. I ran everything on openbsd back then, and now that I am getting back to doing some sysadmining, it appears openbsd isn't even an option for a lot of people.
  - zdw 13y ago
    5.3 gives support for the virt- paravirtualized interfaces provided by KVM and others: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=virtio&sektion=4 http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=virtio&sekt... In earlier releases it supported the T-series Sparc64 logical CPU partitioning.
    - papsosouid 13y ago
      Neither of those things address the issue. A huge portion of the "people who will be installing a unix system" market are using EC2 instead of hardware. That cuts the potential userbase for openbsd down significantly.
  - EvilLook 13y ago
    OpenBSD fares no worse than Windows under Xen - both work just fine under HVM.

rhizome31 13y ago

I don't care much about advanced security or networking features but I use OpenBSD because of its simplicity and the quality of its documentation.

zdw 13y ago
This. Simply the best written man pages, and the easiest to understand boot process of any currently developed unix variant.
berntb 13y ago
So... Do you have a link to nice documentation of hardware support? (Not snarky; an honest question to verify my older "machine park" for an install to play around, which I've wanted to do for a while.)
- papsosouid 13y ago
  http://openbsd.org/plat.html http://openbsd.org/plat.html
- cdjk 13y ago
  The man pages and FAQ are a good place to start for documentation. It's rather nice having everything in one place, rather than scattered around forum posts, mailing lists, HOWTOs, etc, some of which might or might not be outdated. Unless you have some really weird hardware, I'd be surprised if OpenBSD didn't support it. The best way to check is to boot an iso and look at the output of dmesg, however.
  - zurn 13y ago
    The laptop department sounds a little limited currently: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=136255349221059&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=136255349221059&w...
sarnowski 13y ago
This. OpenBSD clean and simple design makes it a breeze to maintain. It's documentation always tells you the whole truth and for most tasks, its so intuitive that you almost always already know where to do your stuff.

adventureloop 13y ago

OpenBSD has been the model for opensource software release engineering. Their presentations on managing their releases are always worth a look. In 2013 regular quality releases are quite common, but OpenBSD has been releasing on schedule from the time of Debian's four year release cycle.

RexRollman 13y ago
The best thing is that they don't jump versions numbers for PR reasons.

Scramblejams 13y ago

Back when I looked at OpenBSD a decade ago, I liked the OS but upgrading from one version to the next seemed to be problematic. Anybody had any experiences (good or bad) with upgrading modern OpenBSD?

tobiasu 13y ago
Upgrading OpenBSD is as transparent as it gets. Put a new kernel in place, extract the install sets, run sysmerge to update /etc and X configuration and you're done. The FAQ has a very cautious explanation of the whole process, pointing out every imaginable pitfall. Once you've done it, it's a five minute job on most standard installations.
segmondy 13y ago
you have to be kidding. OpenBSD has the easiest upgrade ever.
papsosouid 13y ago
Copy kernel, untar install sets, reboot.
cdjk 13y ago
There is a useful and detailed upgrade guide here: http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade53.html http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade53.html The official recommendation is to boot the installation kernel and upgrade that way, but I've never had a problem doing a remote upgrade. It's always been entirely painless. One could argue that it's not quite as simple as "apt-get dist-upgrade" but I like it better - the upgrade process is more explicit about not touching your config files. And since it's a BSD, the base system isn't packaged, so I'm not entirely sure how it would work (although FreeBSD does have freebsd-update now, so it's possible).
- Scramblejams 13y ago
  Thanks for the details. On Linux the upgrade process can be problematic depending on which distro you're using and how wrenching the upgrades are to the various packages you're relying on, but I must admit I've been spoiled by Debian's apt-get dist-upgrade. Good to hear that with a little experience, OpenBSD's upgrade can be similarly stable.

zokier 13y ago

Interesting that they are staying at KDE3. I wonder what are their plans with it.

tobiasu 13y ago
It has been more a lack of time and interest than anything else. KDE4 was added just past this release, and will be in 5.4 (unless another meteorite hits the wrong part of Russia).
- cavilling_elite 13y ago
  Wasn't there some problem with KDE4 highly tied to dtrace and other kernel space mappings that OpenBSD does not have?

bconway 13y ago

I'd really love to give OpenBSD a try outside of VM testing. Does it have something like FreeBSD's NanoBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/index.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/...) yet? The seamless update-image-and-switch is a killer feature for my embedded use.

papsosouid 13y ago
Even after reading that, I still don't understand what "nanobsd" is supposed to be for. All of the big 3 BSDs have used crunchgen plus kernels with embedded filesystems to create small, single file systems for over a decade. That's how the installation images are made.
cdjk 13y ago
The OpenBSD equivalent to NanoBSD is flashrd: http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/ http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/ It's not officially supported, however, and only recommended for systems that are likely to suffer power outages and for which running fsck would be problematic. I've used it a little on embedded systems and so far it's worked fine.

hexonexxon 13y ago

"All softraid(4) boot(8) support is now enabled by default, including support for booting from crypto volumes." awesome. I also use OpenBSD for embedded work, in fact I think everybody is using it for embedded systems. You can strip the kernel down to a tiny install, run securelevel 2 and chflags to prevent any tampering from console.