BSDTalk has an almost hour-long interview from BSDCan 2012 with Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer(henning@); they talk about recent work on OpenBSD.

As a bonus, both Peter and Henning presented at BSDCan; the slides from Peter's PF tutorial and Henning's preview of upcoming queuing changes are online.

Philip Guenther(guenther@), the man who got this hackathon rolling, takes the time to organize his post-its:

Sometimes you go into a hackathon knowing exactly what you're going to tackle and it all follows the plan. No, wait, that never happens. There's always something that comes up that ends up eating more of the hackathon than you would have expected.

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Gilles Chehade(gilles@) gives us a preview of an upcoming OpenSMTPD feature:

During the r2k12 hackathon in Paris, Marc Espie committed SQLite to OpenBSD's base system.

This has the side effect that OpenSMTPD can start using it and while we agreed that we did not want it as a strong dependency, the backends API allows us to make it a soft dependency that can be removed without breaking the daemon if someone *really* does not want SQLite linked.

Today I decided to give it a try and implement a SQLite backend to the map API. About ten minutes later (yes, really ten minutes !), I had a working prototype that was suboptimal and that didn't make use of SQL capabilities.

An hour later, I have a SQLite backend that will use multiple tables with different structures and that can be used to lookup aliases, virtual domains and credentials for authenticated relaying.

gilles@ walks you through it below the fold.

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The editors are a bit late to the party, but are pleased to belatedly announce the publication of SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels, and Keys . From the author, Michael W. Lucas:

Secure Shell (SSH) lets systems administrators securely manage remote systems. But most people only use the bare minimum SSH offers. Used properly, SSH simplifies your job.

You can order the book from the OpenBSD online store, or from a number of other outlets. Mr Lucas explains how, as well as the book, below the fold.

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Still more reports coming in from r2k12: asynchronous DNS resolving, code slavery, and 3rd-party bugs; read on! Read more...

Jochim Selzer writes in to remind us about FrOSCon which, while not specifically BSD-related, may be of interest to our readers: Call for Papers FrOSCon 2012 The Free and Open Source software conference (FrOSCon), a summer conference for users and developers of FOSS, will again be held on the 25th and 26th of August at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany. It is organized by the department of computer science in collaboration with the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin, the student body and the FrOSCon e.V. Read more...

May 1st 2012, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and elsewhere: OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) today announced the release of and general availability of OpenBSD 5.1, the latest version of the project's namesake operating system, via FTP, HTTP and other network distribution.

In the run-up to the general release, reports of pre-ordered CD sets, T-shirts and other OpenBSD 5.1 merchandise arriving at their destinations have trickled in from Europe and elsewhere.

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Following up on our earlier report from r2k12, we have a pair of fresh reports from our illustrious hackers. Read more...

Maxim Bourmistrov writes in to share his L2TP/IPSEC setup using npppd.

An OpenBSD user since 3.2, I deploy OpenBSD on anything what I want to be secure and stable(yes, even -current is STABLE, as long as you know what you are doing).

This guide is split into two sections. The first and major one is server-side configuration. The second is about what should be done on client-side. I use npppd both at home and at the office. My office setup is a bit more complicated than the one described here.

Read on for the story of how one man conquered his corner of the internet. Read more...

Miod Vallat (miod@) has just posted a message on the sgi@ mailing list to give the world some news about the OpenBSD SGI port: the IP20, IP22 and IP24 SGI systems (also known as Indy and Indigo, true classics) are now officially supported on -current!

Please see below to read Miod's words:

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In December of 2005, Ted Unangst (tedu@) commited the first iteration of a new threading library to replace the existing implementation with the message "add userland thread library. incomplete, but functional" This new approach, labelled rthreads, took threading from being a strictly userland to an OS-wide implementation.

A bit over seven years later, Phillip Guenther (@guenther), who had been doing much of the work to complete rthreads, flipped the switch and took what had been an experimental option and made it the default. And two weeks ago, 16 OpenBSD developers gathered in Paris ("Best croissants I've had at any hackathon so far!" says Ken Westerback(krw@)) to perform even more concentrated work on bringing rthreads to a complete state. A few of the hackers have shared their experiences. Read more...

Alexandre Ratchov (ratchov@), OpenBSD developer and composer of one of the extra audio tracks on the newly released audio CD, writes in to tell us how he created the song:

As the "Sonate aux insomniaques" track was just released, I take few minutes to explain how the audio track was produced and where it comes from.

The music is entirely inspired by a poem titled "Sonate aux insomniaques" by Guillaine Dioudonnat. The initial plan, was to work with Guillaine to turn it into a song. But it turned out that the text would add constraints to the rhythm, which would make harder to make the music reflect the universe created by the poem. That's why there are no lyrics. Read more...

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote in with an article about how OpenBSD helps him produce better research. Kristaps writes,

It's no secret that OpenBSD is an excellent research platform. From packages(7) for specialised software to out-of-the-box httpd(8), sshd(8), and so on, it's a no-brainer to pop OpenBSD onto a workstation and just get to work.

In this article, I explore how OpenBSD's clean code and sane defaults recently saved the day. For great science!
Read more...

As Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) announced in a message to the misc and announce mailing lists, pre-orders for the upcoming OpenBSD 5.1 have opened.

Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:47:24 From: Theo de Raadt To: announce@cvs.openbsd.org Subject: pre-orders activate for OpenBSD 5.1 It is that time again. I have just activated pre-orders for CDs, tshirts, and posters for the 5.1 release -- due May 1. http://openbsd.org/orders.html At the same time, I am making available the song that will come out with the release (hmm, it is still moving out to the ftp mirrors at the moment, but that is ok). The song and details of it are linked from: http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html

And this time there's even more goodies available for you to grab for your collection.

Read more...

The organizers of EuroBSDCon 2012 wrote in to tell us that their Call For Proposals is out:

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers on BSD-based systems. The EuroBSDcon 2012 conference will be held in Warsaw, Poland from Thursday 18 October 2012 to Sunday 21 October 2012, with tutorials on Thursday and Friday and talks on Saturday and Sunday.

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Gabor Pali wrote in to announce and invite OpenBSDers to the upcoming BSD-Day in Vienna, Austria. Gabor writes,

Dear All,

I am glad to inform you that we are again organizing a "DanuBSDCon" (aka. BSD-Day). It is going to be held at the UAS Technikum Wien in Vienna, Austria on Saturday May 5, 2012 as part of the Austrian Linuxweeks (Linuxwochen).

We would like to invite everybody — anybody who is just looking for an excuse to make a short trip to Central Europe, spend a nice weekend in Vienna, join us for a beer, talk about her favourite topic, or meet fellow developers from the region (and from other BSD flavours), or accidentally will not be able to make it to Canada :-)

So, please contact me if you are interested!

In a blog post titled IPv6 NIDS evasion and improvements in IPv6 fragmentation/reassembly, security consultants SI6 Networks report on some experiments they conducted recently in order to test IPv6 fragment handling in various general-purpose operating systems.

While the authors did not say so in so many words, the conclusion is that OpenBSD is ahead of the pack in both RFC compliance as well as sane and secure handling of IPv6 fragments.

Read the full article over at the SI6 site: IPv6 NIDS evasion and improvements in IPv6 fragmentation/reassembly

Michael W. Lucas writes in with news about his book, SSH Mastery:

The OpenBSD Project is selling SSH Mastery print version as a fund-raiser. If you've been waiting for a print copy, this is your chance.

If you don't need it, you know someone who is still using passwords with SSH. Buy a copy. Slap them soundly with it.

The book is now available from the OpenBSD site. Please visit http://www.openbsd.org/books.html for details