OpenBSD 6.9 | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD 6.9

openbsd.org

174 pointsyabones49 comments

OpenBSD continues to fascinate me. It's impressive that a small team can produce such a coherent operating system and so many add-ons, like httpd, relayd, OpenSSH, pf and various networking tools.

Ignoring the things that happen when we add a desktop environment, everything in the base operating system just feels like it was designed to work together and with a clear guiding principle. Even the documentation is remarkable. It's rare that I can't simply rely on the man pages to figure out how something works.

The main feature for me in this release though is an updated network driver which seems to fix an issue I had where traffic would just pause for a few seconds.

Question. As i read can one use intel AC wireless with OpenBSD now?

Having a x250 and try'd FreeBSD13 some days ago, wireless speed was horrible (2.5 MB/s). It's a bit disappointing that FreeBSD just cant bring that to work...at least n would be acceptable.

I don’t have anything new enough to support AC so I honestly don’t know. Also the most heavy use I have for wireless is streaming and that’s plenty fast on my 6 year old NUC.

Hey thanks for reply.

From the changelog:

>Implemented a new 802.11n Tx rate adaptation algorithm ("RA") for iwm(4), iwn(4), and athn(4). Fixed association problems with the ipw(4) and iwi(4) drivers.

>Fixed automatic selection of the 11a/b/g/n/ac operating mode when the interface is running as an access point.

I start dd right now ;)

AFAIK they're still using CVS, too. Development must be like pulling nails.

Whats the problem with CVS in development model like openbsd?....i wait...

Larger repos and slow to clone. Also, difficult to get into OpenBSD develooment when you already know git but not CSV.

Fortunately there is a git mirror, so it's actually not that bad. Perhaps one day when most of the devs prefer git they will switch.

>Also, difficult to get into OpenBSD develooment when you already know git but not CSV.

That's your smallest problem if you wanna go into openbsd development, trust me if cvs is a burden for you, writing clean and correct code will be even harder....it's a version control system...should not be too hard to learn.

From what I understand, some devs do use git for their local work, and then prepare a patch to update the official source code in CVS.

From the changelog,

  Preliminary support was added for devices using the Apple M1 SoC

Thanks for pointing that out, may need to pick up a Mini just to mess around with this.

It may be something you already understand, but just to be clear to everyone, this preliminary support. It's a work in progress. You can't boot and run OpenBSD 6.9 on an M1 Mac Mini.

Like clockwork. I first started using the system in 6.4, so each release is a reminder to me of how quickly time has passed. Looking forward to a painless upgrade of my two servers and continued improvement of the project!

It is charming how anti-climactic such upgrades tend to be. Also, the art and music for 6.9 are delightful.

sysupgrade has needed me to force a manual hardware reboot at the end each time I've used it. We'll see how it goes tomorrow.

Yes, it's called a patched kernel.

No, upgrading OpenBSD manually prior to sysupgrade never required me to physically hold the power button on the machine.

I bet you did not made a bug-report right?

Goodness me, thank you for pointing this out. The songs are back as of 6.8 and I thought they finally kicked the bucket after 6.2. Below is a link for the 6.9 release song, it is – as you say – really nice:

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#69

Yeah, the most time consuming thing for me is if a PostreSQL upgrade is required on the machine. Other than that, sysupgrade, package upgrades, and a quick reboot seem to be the norm.

From the 6.9 upgrade guide:

There was a major update to PostgreSQL 13.1. Use pg_upgrade as described in the postgresql-server pkg-readme or do a dump/restore.

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html

Yep, been using it since 4.8. Just upgraded my servers this weekend. Aside from my NAS, which has its own peculiar issues, everything went smoothly. sysupgrade, let it reboot, automatically updates, reboots again back to a working system. pkg_add -u to get the latest versions of installed packages, and that's it. Didn't even have to look at any sysmerge'd conf files this time.

OpenBSD finally got installed because I had a corner case where Linux cannot rein in the misbehaving systemd.

This corner case is where I must block all network access with and by systemd.

systemd DHCP is still immature in dealing with Juniper DHCP server (used by Verizon FiOS) so I stayed with ISC DHCP server.

Further more, despite disabling DHCP in systemd, this systemd continued to spew network packets (think aggregate link and bridging).

Since I want no part of systemd accessing the network, I found that there is no way to QUIET that systemd despite its own config effort.

Not even Linux firewall can block this PID 1 (systemd).

Coupled that with recent but devastating CVE vulnerability of systemd, I’ve since moved to Denuvan distro, which uses SysV init as well as Debian APT repositories.

Initial pre-production review shows that this OpenBSD OS remains the only one OS that can block by PID.

So, I am sold.

No more effort to super-hardening of Linux. No more.

Just install and go.

When fanboys kick you butt...welcome to HN ;)

Yeah, ugly truth prevails.

I just wait for the day when systemd implement's THE standard filesystem with a backup program a backup-status-webpage just viewable with their systemd-fork of webkit and presented with a webserver running with pid 1 (can even be used as a bootloader)...like that genius idea...journald.

can’t even Nagios (or any Network Management System access) into those journalctl-formatted file.

It's a stupid binary format..you have to convert it internally to a syslog'ish format which is clear-text readable even by humans and utilities like more...linux nih sickness once again, reinvent the wheel but this time we make it square.

No Wayland no party ....

nice

I hope they rewrote the pf rule syntax yet again so I get to go around rewriting every ruleset for every pf firewall I’ve deployed and all the books and documentation on pf can be obsolete. /s

As far as I remember they last did that when the OBSD 5.x branch was launched. Since then it's been stable.

Or atleast my rule-setd are simplistic enough that I haven't noticed.

There are some minor tweaks to what port range syntax is acceptable: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html

Has anyone ever tried to propose a "universal" firewall syntax. Like an "intermediate representation" that can then be translated into the syntax for any version of any firewall software. Obviously it would not work as a 1:1 translation for every rule. There are things that one program can do that another cannot. Even something pre-pf like ipf still has some yet-to-be duplicated functionality. However there are many commonalities between all these programs.

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