The OpenBSD 5.3 Release

http://openbsd.org/53.html

by conductor • 13 years ago

96 63 13 years ago

openbsd.org

conductor• 13 years ago

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

gabeguz• 13 years ago

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

heidar2• 13 years ago

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

protomyth• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I'm interested to know if it will implement Milter or what the workalike will look like.

papsosouid12• 13 years 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?

heidar2• 13 years 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.

papsosouid12• 13 years 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.

shin_lao• 13 years ago

A lot of open source os caught up in the security field, making the choice of OpenBSD less interesting because it supports less hardware.

papsosouid12• 13 years ago

I never used openbsd because it is secure, I used it because it is the least horrible OS I've tried. Poorly supporting more hardware is not very important to me, supporting the major hardware well is far more valuable.

zdw3• 13 years ago

I think it's more that OpenBSD has always been aimed at "infrastructure" tasks - it chugs away as a router or firewall with aplomb. The core is very mature, thus most development is on refinements, not entirely new features.

It might be better to follow the papers/presentations given here that detail what work is being done:

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/

Additionally, undeadly seems to be, well... more dead than usual. I wonder if this is just based on waning interest from the website maintaner than OpenBSD slowing down.

doktrin• 13 years ago

I'm a bit curious as to who uses *BSDs these days. At one point I knew of at least a few with copies of FreeBSD, but these days most of my acquaintances, social & professional, use OSX or some Linux flavor. As far as servers go, I haven't seen one in the wild in quite some time.

This is of course highly anecdotal, but even on the distrowatch page hit rankings FreeBSD ranks below distros I've never even heard of (Zorin, SolusOS) at #19. OpenBSD is down in the 70's. On a complete tangent, I was also surprised to find Mandriva well in the 40's. [1]

What is the community & ecosystem like these days?

[1] http://distrowatch.com/

papsosouid12• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "these days". Most people used linux back then too. People who use BSDs are generally people who care about quality and simplicity, and who don't like having to learn a new replacement for a core component every few weeks.

forkandwait• 13 years ago

I run freebsd or OSX, basically for the aesthetic. FreeBSD is the least annoying of the OS's I have run (never tried OpenBSD), and most of the stuff I want compiles on it, though not as well as Linux stacks.

andyking• 13 years ago

Distrowatch only counts distros that Distrowatch users click on, rather than actual popularity.

I wouldn't go on there and click Ubuntu or FreeBSD, because I know what they are and have no real need to view their Distrowatch pages. But my curiosity might lead me to click on Zorin or SolusOS because, like you, I've never heard of them.

profquail3• 13 years ago

The Apache Software Foundation (you might have heard of them ;) runs their servers on FreeBSD.

NetFlix runs some (all?) of their servers on FreeBSD.

Google uses FreeBSD for their network search applicance (for corporate intranets or whatever). They also just announced their funding of the Capsicum security framework project for FreeBSD (and later, a port to Linux).

The Weather Channel uses FreeBSD to power their network appliances that render the forecasts for local cable networks.

NetApp and Juniper Networks use FreeBSD for their networking gear.

There are more examples here if you want to read them:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/testimonials

The FreeBSD Foundation also has a list of donors:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors

The FreeBSD forums are reasonably active and very friendly, you should check them out if you want to learn more (or have more questions about *BSDs in general):

http://forums.freebsd.org/

---

EDIT: I forgot one; VeriSign apparently uses FreeBSD enough that they just started their own BSD-related conference:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2013-Ap...

numbsafari• 13 years ago

Linux popularity with IaaS and PaaS providers has a lot to do with it.

Support for the BSD crowd at AWS pretty much is non-existent (they are working on it and making progress, though, with FreeBSD). Rackspace has some support, but only for FreeBSD and with some limitations.

Most of the PaaS players use Linux under the hood because they rely on AWS under the hood.

I'd love to hear about IaaS or PaaS players who use BSD, though.

Luyt• 13 years ago

I run FreeBSD on my data center servers. Works pretty well. I think with some adaptation I could run Ubuntu Server equally well.

sarnowski3• 13 years ago

The perception of OpenBSD's usage was always low. OpenBSD was always about network infrastructure and simple, super solid servers. It's never something you write blog posts about because of fancy bleeding edge setups. The chance is high that your packets travel through several OpenBSD boxes while surfing the web. Also virtualization was never a topic for OpenBSD[0] - it is not a use case for such a system.

[0] http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Virtualization_Security

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." -- Theo de Raadt

papsosouid12• 13 years ago

It seems like you didn't read my post. The perception of openbsd usage was not low, that's the point. OpenBSD was virtually unheard of it when it forked from netbsd, but in the days of the ipf -> pf replacement, openbgpd being developed, etc there was tons of blog posts, mailing list traffic, etc about openbsd.

Your link about virtualization is about people absurdly thinking that virtualization buys them security. He said nothing about virtualization being "not a use case for openbsd". You do know openbsd has explicitly added drivers to support running under virtualization right?

oofabz• 13 years ago

I used OpenBSD a lot ten years ago but I don't anymore. Two things have changed: OpenGL and filesystems. I use Linux on GUI machines because it has good GPU support. I use FreeBSD on servers because it has ZFS.

rhizome312• 13 years 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.

zdw3• 13 years ago

This. Simply the best written man pages, and the easiest to understand boot process of any currently developed unix variant.

berntb• 13 years 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.)

papsosouid12• 13 years ago

http://openbsd.org/plat.html

cdjk3• 13 years 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.

sarnowski3• 13 years 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.

SkyMarshal2• 13 years ago

>I don't care much about advanced security

Funny, I care very much about security and both OpenBSD and FreeBSD are primarily on my radar for that reason. Nice to know I get the simplicity too.

rhizome312• 13 years ago

Then I'm not sure if it will remain simple for you :) But you should have plenty of tools to get the job done. I can't comment much on the security features, except maybe for the firewall. PF is much simpler to understand than iptables. Rule definitions read almost like English. If you understand TCP/IP it's pretty easy to come up with a simple config. No need for a frontend à la UFW.

In my case I use it on a personal computer and as long as I've got X.org and network connectivity I'm happy. By default OpenBSD doesn't have much software installed. In term of user software, you get ksh, vi (not Vim), optionally X.org with FVWM and I guess that's pretty much it. Then you just add what you need. Oh you also get Tmux, which originates from the OpenBSD project.

thaumaturgy• 13 years ago

OpenBSD's documentation needs some work once you get into less well-traveled aspects of pf and routing. For instance, getting reliable external interface load balancing to work is maddening. (The example at the bottom of http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/pools.html does not work and is not the best approach.)

Other than a few esoteric situations like that one though, I agree: OpenBSD's documentation is pretty darn good.

I like them primarily because they're sitting in a corner quietly doing their own thing, and their own thing happens to be a very stable & very reliable network service operating system with an emphasis on security and performance. It's a refreshing change from the ADHD present in the development communities of other operating systems.

adventureloop• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

Scramblejams2• 13 years 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?

tobiasu2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

you have to be kidding. OpenBSD has the easiest upgrade ever.

papsosouid12• 13 years ago

Copy kernel, untar install sets, reboot.

cdjk3• 13 years ago

There is a useful and detailed upgrade guide here:

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).

Scramblejams2• 13 years 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.

sarnowski3• 13 years ago

OpenBSD's way for system upgrades is so easy: unzip tarballs, run /etc diff, reboot. Its always astonishing how simple and carefree it is to upgrade to the next major.

Contrary to that, most companies would never upgrade a linux system. My feeling is, the most used "upgrade" plan for debian is to not upgrade as long as possible and then do a full reinstall with a new version.

zokier• 13 years ago

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

tobiasu2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Wasn't there some problem with KDE4 highly tied to dtrace and other kernel space mappings that OpenBSD does not have?

bconway• 13 years 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/...) yet? The seamless update-image-and-switch is a killer feature for my embedded use.

papsosouid12• 13 years 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.

cdjk3• 13 years ago

The OpenBSD equivalent to NanoBSD is 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.

hexonexxon2• 13 years 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.

The OpenBSD 5.3 Release

Related Stories