Continuing down the path of evolutionary development, release time for OpenBSD 3.3 grows near. Pre-orders of CD sets are now being accepted and new t-shirt designs are up. More at OpenBSD Journal.
OpenBSD 3.3 Available for Pre-Order
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have used OpenBSD since 2.8. It is a great system. The current version, 3.2 has a chrooted Apache server, which was sort of a headache to get PHP/PEAR and MySQL working correctly without disabling the chrootedness, but I am impressed at the level of thought that has gone into the OS and can’t say enough good about it.
The thing I like most about OpenBSD is that I can have a secure server up and running in a matter of minutes and it is quite easy to configure (well, I say that now. When I first installed version 2.8, I think I felt otherwise.
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I agree fully with Iconoclast and would like to add the magnificent packetfilter (pf) the the list of fine things about OpenBSD. It is just soo easy to set up and yet soo powerful! The developers of OpenBSD are doing a really great job!
Cant wait to hear new song
/jens
OpenBSD orpheus 2.8 GENERIC#399 i386
4:24PM up 726 days, 23 hrs, 0 users, load averages: 0.34, 0.16, 0.10
As soon as 3.3 comes out, I should upgrade that machine. I think two years uptime is probably enough.
Of course OpenBSD’s main claim to fame has always been a rock solid secure server, but the OpenBSD team has also made great strides porting/including the latest desktop environments giving a person rock solid secure and private desktop.
I still don’t understand what the great big hype about OpenBSD and its robust security. FreeBSD and NetBSD is every bit as secure as OpenBSD. As a matter of fact, NetBSD is probably even more secure than OpenBSD as far as the default install goes.
I’ve have not seen too many NetBSD or FreeBSD exploits out there other than exploits that affect all three flavors.
apparently you dont know to much
So, the fact that OpenBSD plows pragmatically through code and fix potential errors. Include many security features, such as non executable stack, enhanched gcc for stack protection, fixes holes long,long before they show up on bugtraq and similar things is ofcourse irrelevant ?
I second that. NetBSD is more secure in some cases; just because they dont advertize it like OpenBSD doesn’t mean they’re not doing anthing. There was a security hole on bugtraq just recently (the sun rpc xdr overflow one), where NetBSD fixed the problem back in 1997. They are very proactive about security too and 80% of the time, security holes in NetBSD affect OpenBSD as well (and vice versa in some cases). NetBSD also audits their code, but they don’t feel the need to announce it to the world, like OpenBSD.
There is a big difference between the projects’ security approaches. While OpenBSD tries to include all kinds of gadgets and counter mechanisms for security holes, the NetBSD folks code clean to begin with, so holes barely show up in the first place.
I don’t even understand why people preach about OpenBSD, and how stable and great it is. Most of OpenBSD’s drivers were ported from NetBSD, and most notably 7 out of OpenBSD’s 9 supported hardware platforms came from the NetBSD project. Still today, NetBSD has far more ported applications, drivers and hardware platforms than OpenBSD.
OpenBSD doesn’t even support SMP. NetBSD has SMP for i386, alpha, vax, sparc and sparc64 is in progress. You OpenBSD fanatics should really give NetBSD a try; the people on the mailing lists are nicer and the OS feels much like OpenBSD.
Cheers