OpenBSD Archive

OpenBSD Gets Harder to Crack; Get to Know the HYDRA OS

Submitted by Social Engineer 2003-06-04 OpenBSD 18 Comments

The latest OpenBSD 3.3 release arrives with even stronger attack defenses coupled with an amazing record of just a single remotely exploitable vulnerability in more than seven years, the best security track record for any general-purpose operating system around. Read the review at eWeek.

OpenBSD Hackathon c2k3 Continues in Success

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-18 OpenBSD 10 Comments

The OpenBSD project is having currently its Hackathon event (despite their financial sponsor backing down last month), where all the developers are getting together to code for almost two weeks. Usually, that's the month of the year with the most CVS commits and the biggest advancements that are happening to the OS. Canada's tech media are reporting the event with more info.

NTFS Support for OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 OpenBSD 9 Comments

Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support.

OpenBSD 3.3 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-01 OpenBSD 35 Comments

OpenBSD 3.3 is out and more secure than ever. Get it while it's hot. Store, changelog.

DARPA Pulls OpenBSD Funding

Submitted by Anonymous 2003-04-18 OpenBSD 45 Comments

The open-source project's leader says the unused portion of a $2.3 million grant has been withdrawn due to concerns that it was mainly funding foreign researchers. OpenBSD would have 60 developers flying in from around the world (they bought their own tickets, non-refundable) for a Hackathon May 8 - 20, which is a major part of OpenBSD's development cycle. Follow the discussion here.

OpenBSD Team Fights Buffer Overflows

Eugenia Loli 2003-04-12 OpenBSD 35 Comments

The OpenBSD project hopes that new changes to its latest release will eliminate "buffer overflows," a software issue that has been plaguing security experts for more than three decades.

Porting The PF Stateful Packet Filter

Submitted by KernelTrap 2003-04-09 OpenBSD 8 Comments

KernelTrap offers an in depth look at the recent efforts to port OpenBSD's stateful packet filter, pf, to other operating systems.

OpenBSD’s SMP Status

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-29 OpenBSD 9 Comments

"An update on the current status of OpenBSD Symmetric Multiprocessor support was recently posted to the OpenBSD smp mailing list. At this time, it still looks to be quite a ways off in the future, with currently only i386-specific code that will detect and spinup a 2'nd processor, but not yet actually use it." Read the report at KernelTrap.

OpenBSD 3.3 Available for Pre-Order

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-27 OpenBSD 8 Comments

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.

Securing Small Networks with OpenBSD: NAT with pf

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-09 OpenBSD 3 Comments

OpenBSD's packet filter has really grown up. Since its introduction in OpenBSD 3.0, it has become an advanced tool for networking and security. In the first of four articles, Jacek Artymiak examines recent updates to pf. This week, he looks at Network Address Translation. The whole series of OpenBSD articles can be found here.

Theo on Security Improvements in OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-31 OpenBSD 12 Comments

From the OpenBSD Journal: In his post, Theo deRaadt gives a brief technical overview of the four major security changes in OpenBSD: POSIX page protection schemes, WorX, read only segments, and Propolice. Not all of these are on all platforms, but every platform has some protection. To quote Theo in his message, "We feel that these 4 technologies together will be a a royal pain in the a$$ for the typical buffer overflow attacker."

OpenBSD’s Battle For UltraSparc III Documentation

Guest post by Jeremy Andrews 2003-01-27 OpenBSD 17 Comments

In late November of 2002, OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt announced on the project's mailing lists that after over a year of attempting to obtain useful UltraSparc III documentation, they had still not made much headway. In the email he rallied the OpenBSD community to help out, asking them to contact the people within Sun responsible for providing such information. C/Net reported on this in their story titled, Open-source clan in spat with Sun. The UltraSparc III is Sun's third generation 64-bit RISC architecture based processor.

Patching OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-17 OpenBSD 8 Comments

"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.

OpenBSD SMP Project Started

Submitted by Acheron 2002-12-09 OpenBSD 11 Comments

Acheron writes: "Spotted this on Deadly.org today. Four University of Waterloo students are working on adding SMP support to the OpenBSD kernel as their 4th year Computer Engineering Design Project. Their website can be found at Spinlocks.org. Best of luck to them."

A Guide to Building an OpenBSD PPPoE Gateway, with Firewall

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-22 OpenBSD 11 Comments

Seen the interesting article linked from Deadly.org: "Why would one install his own personal gateway to the Internet? Because it is quite easy to do. And also because it simply is the most reliable, safest way to connect machines to a dedicated xDSL modem. Moreover, we can stash a whole bunch of useful features in such a little box."

Introduction to OpenBSD Networking

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-06 OpenBSD 5 Comments

"In today's Internet-centric computing world, networking components are a paramount feature of any system worth its salt. Easily falling into that category, OpenBSD contains strong network code and configuration interfaces which, with a little research and learning, can be put to powerful use. This series of articles aims to illustrate that with practical examples and direct application to real-world situations." Read the article at OnLamp. In the meantime, patch 001 for OpenBSD 3.2 was posted.

OpenBSD 3.2 Is Back on Track

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-05 OpenBSD 20 Comments

"IT staff can make almost any software system secure with enough pain and wizardry, but getting great security with hardly any effort at all is true magic. That's the attraction of the Internet's most secure operating system, OpenBSD. The latest release of OpenBSD, Version 3.2, started shipping Nov. 1." Read the article at eWeek.

OpenBSD 3.2 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-01 OpenBSD 14 Comments

"Todd Fries and Todd Miller happily send along notice that OpenBSD 3.2 has been released. It's available by FTP, CDROMs are shipping, and is CVS if you want to source upgrade. This is a big release for OpenBSD with many substantial changes. Many users will want to reinstall from scratch and not upgrade, as architecture changes on some platforms as well as enhanced security features are best taken advantage of that way. Read on for the release notes." Read the full release notes at Deadly.org.

OpenBSD Snapshots 3.2 Available

Eugenia Loli 2002-09-14 OpenBSD 4 Comments

From Deadly.org: "Yep, bagged and tagged, 3.2 is in beta. Snapshots are up, and you can keep up to date on -current via CVS. Give it a whirl, please test it and make 3.2 a solid release. I'm running it on a couple of systems and find it to be pretty stable, so far."

OpenBSD GUI Installer Project

Eugenia Loli 2002-08-05 OpenBSD 44 Comments

The main goal of the is to add a graphical installation to OpenBSD. This project has been developped in the spirit of OpenBSD which means that the installation is as close as possible as the text one. wishes to add some value to the product by developping installation modules to known servers such as Bind, Sendmail, Inn, Apache etc. Our Take: Great project, but may I point out the illegal use of the BeOS and (some) Windows icons in the Installer?