Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

marc.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 415 posts

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#101

Post by yarou »

brohee wrote: post #77
mhurron wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name another free ssh implementation. On every* UNIX and UNIX-like OS ssh is OpenSSH. OpenSSH is why we don't telnet everywhere anymore. *- Honestly, I don't know of anything that ships with something that is not OpenSSH.

Dropbear, seen for example in OpenWRT. Not that it's nearly as feature full as OpenSSH, nor as architected around security (process separation and all). But it's nice when you need a small sshd.

Yup, Dropbear is great for use on embedded devices. I only heard about Dropbear because once upon a time I needed an SSHd for an old Unix (believe it was Tru64). Unfortunately, no PRNG shipped by default, so I ended up symlinking /dev/zero to /dev/random. Thankfully this was not a production server, but an internal one laying around my house.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#102

Post by ibdknox »

jxf wrote: post #10

Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

If the maintainers of that page are around here, I suggest putting some visualization of how close you are to the goal on there. It's amazing how much of a psychological motivator a bar filling up is.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#103

Post by lnanek2 »

nailer wrote: post #79
sdkmvx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenBSD supports a number of odd and unusual platforms and does builds on them. See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html . Older hardware can both use a significant amount of electricity and require much more hand-holding than is possible. Virtualization and emulation are not acceptable substitutes because they claim that doing builds on e.g. VAX is one of the best ways to ensure that the code works on VAX as opposed to…

OpenBSD's main value is high security standards. - Is there a significant amount of people with high security standards and an interest in SGI workstation hardware? - What about people who have high security standards and Sharp Zaurus hardware? If these groups aren't as important, as say, ARM and x86 users, perhaps it could be worth dropping some of these platforms?

But if the project stops keeping obsolete build machines around, they would save on electricity bills. Hackers could still hack, they just wouldn't be killing the project with legacy support costs.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#105

Post by mjolk »

chrissnell wrote: post #96
nailer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenBSD's main value is high security standards. - Is there a significant amount of people with high security standards and an interest in SGI workstation hardware? - What about people who have high security standards and Sharp Zaurus hardware? If these groups aren't as important, as say, ARM and x86 users, perhaps it could be worth dropping some of these platforms?

As a longtime OpenBSD fan and advocate, this has always fascinated me. I loved SGIs back in the day but they are slow as shit today and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal. These platforms survive in OpenBSD land because somebody still cares enough about them to enjoy hacking on them. There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them proba…

>There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think.

If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#106

Post by chrissnell »

tptacek wrote: post #90
calpaterson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is moving an unacceptable answer It seems likely that they don't trust anyone else to have physical access to the machines for security reasons. Their threat model probably includes national governments.

A somewhat related note about branding. My first "real" job was in the mid-90's; I was the first technical hire at a small Chicago ISP (EnterAct) that grew into a relatively large ISP (when I left, we were default-free peered to several tier-1 providers and had more POPs than I can name). It was great, and the team that started it --- two Big-5 accounting firm programmers --- was inspiring, particularly when it came…

Thomas, thanks for that comment. If there was a "best of HN", this comment should be a part of it. Good storytelling, a great business lesson tidbit for all of us, interesting technical discussion, and a good reality check.

Well said.

Sorry for my slightly o/t comment.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#108

Post by kybernetikos »

microtonal wrote: post #40
cpprototypes wrote: post #18

A little bit off topic, but this reminds me again of how much the web needs an easy payment system (as easy as in-app purchases in mobile). EFF, wikipedia, I often see notices or news of things they're doing and think to myself that I should donate. But I'm usually in the middle of something and stopping everything to take out my wallet, get the CC, fill out a form, etc. is just too disruptive. So I try to remind mys…

Flattr was intended to provide easy microdonations: http://flattr.com/ Unfortunately, when I was using it, there weren't many interesting FLOSS projects to contribute to. Perhaps things have gotten better.

I really like gittip https://www.gittip.com/

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#109

Post by drdaeman »

mhurron wrote: post #59
drdaeman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: OpenSSH, not SSH at all.

Name another free ssh implementation. On every* UNIX and UNIX-like OS ssh is OpenSSH. OpenSSH is why we don't telnet everywhere anymore. *- Honestly, I don't know of anything that ships with something that is not OpenSSH.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_SSH_servers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_SSH_clients

Personally, I've mostly used OpenSSH on desktop and servers and Dropbear on embedded/low-memory devices. I've also installed lsh-server out of curiosity once, but that was just to take a look, not for production use.

However, I believe, security- and featurewise, OpenSSH is probably a best option (unless device's really low on resources).

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#110

Post by codezero »

tptacek wrote: post #90
calpaterson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is moving an unacceptable answer It seems likely that they don't trust anyone else to have physical access to the machines for security reasons. Their threat model probably includes national governments.

A somewhat related note about branding. My first "real" job was in the mid-90's; I was the first technical hire at a small Chicago ISP (EnterAct) that grew into a relatively large ISP (when I left, we were default-free peered to several tier-1 providers and had more POPs than I can name). It was great, and the team that started it --- two Big-5 accounting firm programmers --- was inspiring, particularly when it came…

This is a great observation, I don't think it diminishes OpenBSD at all, anyone wondering if this comment is worth reading, it is :)
Post reply on HN