“OpenBSD 3.2 is with us, and it’s time to upgrade our systems to the latest release. As usual, it is strongly suggested that you install the latest release on a spare machine, apply patches, and test it until you are happy with what the OpenBSD gang gave us. Only then you should upgrade and patch the production machine. But how do you patch OpenBSD?” Read the article at OnLamp.
Patching OpenBSD
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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You upgrade to the latest version every six month …
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
No, you do patch. Every release of OpenBSD, including the latest, 3.2, has some pretty serious security holes if left untouched:
http://www.openbsd.org/security.html#32
Actually, I’m surprised that the article doesn’t mention updating via CVS. In addition to security fixes, the -STABLE trees contain many other bugfixes. If you just apply the security patches, you don’t get the other bugfixes.
hmmmmm… from the article:
“To apply patches, you will need access to the sources of the OpenBSD release you installed on your machine. These are the sources that have been used to build that release of OpenBSD, not the CURRENT sources held in CVS. Strictly speaking, they are in CVS, but extracting them from there would take the uninitiated users too much time and effort.”
I don’t really think running “cvs update -rOPENBSD_32” takes that much time and effort. If you want a better introduction to updating OpenBSD, look here:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade-minifaq.html
http://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html
cvs is pretty simple… nice way to keep bsd systems up to date… and cvsup is nice too :o)
plus a lot of gnu goodies are in cvs… if you have limited bandwidth its a great way to stay up to date without downloading whole tarballs (or source rpms for those so inclined)
.. and all your problems are solved.
What problems are you talking about?
no elf support (in NBSD, FBSD)
no threads (now in NBSD-curr (as of today) and FBSD-5)
no SMP (avail. in NBSD and FBSD)
no gcc 3.2 (in FBSD)
BTW, I use it since 2.7, but denial of problems does not help.
Supports ELF on my sparcstation. If its not appropriate to use on your hardware, then don’t use it.
That’s funny, “man -k pthread” seems to show many threads functions. If you’re talking about POSIX threads, its supports it just as well as modern linux distributions, which is not at all.
I run OpenBSD on my firewall/router, where I think OpenBSD’s niche is. I have no need for SMP support… but it is actually being added very soon. FreeBSD does not run on my sparcstation, and NetBSD does not support SMP on my machine in a stable version.
No GCC 3.2? Why is that a problem? The system compiles and works fine. Please explain.
OpenBSD is a very useful and high quality operating system, but I’m curious, why do you use it if you have so many problems with it?
Hey Anonymous, you mention SMP… do you have an SMP box to run it on?
Also, no threads is just false. No elf? The kernel does support ELF binaries, but the tools aren’t built that way as default.
Upgrading GCC is a big deal so I’ll agree there.
You’re right about focusing on the problems and not denying them. But let’s actually focus on problems that really exist.
(for the record, I DO have an SMP box to run OBSD on, and do feel that this is an important feature, but also appreciate that it will be a big deal to implement and still satisfy the strict security requirements that Theo and Co have)