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OpenBSD 6.2

openbsd.org

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Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#51

Post by INTPenis »

christophilus wrote: post #2

Off topic a bit, but anyone here use OpenBSD? I'd be interested in hearing why you use it, and what your experience has been like.

Home router/firewall. Outer-most point in my network. Inside I have a turris and used to even have an Apple but the outer-most point has been an OpenBSD firewall since 4.x.

My first job in IT was such a prolific openbsd advocate that we were listed on their homepage as one of the companies that use openbsd.

My current opinion is that I would never put myself or anyone else through using OpenBSD. Linux can do anything it can and I've actually become an SElinux advocate in the last 2-3 years.

I do however trust it completely on my home firewall and it gives me some practice with BSD.

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#52

Post by snksnk »

eeks wrote: post #24
christophilus wrote: post #2

Off topic a bit, but anyone here use OpenBSD? I'd be interested in hearing why you use it, and what your experience has been like.

Mail server, web server, CalDAV and CardDAV server, and development laptop. Never looked back.

What do you use for CalDAV and CardDAV? I only found Nextcloud to be working well.

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#53

Post by elchief »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #50

Has anyone ever installed OpenBSD for Macbook White (MB 5,2)? I'm interested to resurrect this laptop since Apple no longer support (newer OSX can't be installed) the hardware. I would love to see OpenBSD + Openbox + Crunchbang theme/window-decorator.

If it has a Broadcom wifi, then you're probably SOL on that front

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#54

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

christophilus wrote: post #2

Off topic a bit, but anyone here use OpenBSD? I'd be interested in hearing why you use it, and what your experience has been like.

As a firewall it's unbeatable; I've been using it this way since late nineties. I fell in love with its simplicity and excellent performance. Everything just works. An old PC can handle huge traffic with ease, it's just a question of good NICs. Of course you can do pretty much the same on Linux, but in OpenBSD it's more elegant and coherent.

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#55

Post by jbronn »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #50

Has anyone ever installed OpenBSD for Macbook White (MB 5,2)? I'm interested to resurrect this laptop since Apple no longer support (newer OSX can't be installed) the hardware. I would love to see OpenBSD + Openbox + Crunchbang theme/window-decorator.

Yes, I successfully run it two older MacBooks for server use. I haven’t tried WiFi or sound but everything else, including trackpad and X, worked fine for me. There were other tweaks to make suitable for a server, but OpenBSD has otherwise resurrected the laptops. Bonus: this hardware predates Intel ME.

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#57

Post by [deleted] »

saghm wrote: post #14
bch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think the tools you use like your web browser, mail client etc, have less vulnerabilities on OpenBSD... A reasonable question, but presumptuously and poorly framed, I think. Mitigation efforts like privilege separation[0] (for daemons), ASLR[1], SSP[2], and now KARL[3] are designed to make things systemically better. I'm personally a NetBSD person, and don't see that ending anytime soon, but I do appr…

OT, but I've had trouble in the past when trying out NetBSD; I wanted to install it on my laptop with full disk encryption, but I clearly was missing something about how to do it properly, and I've never been able to find a good guide for it. Any chance you might know a blog post or something that details how to do this properly for a NetBSD newbie like me?

[deleted]

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#58

Post by aomix »

Even following the OpenBSD mailing lists I didn't realize all the anti ROP features they put into this release. The big idea is that popular attack surfaces are randomly relinked at boot/upgrade/run time. Now now the kernel, libc, libcrypto, and ld are unique to each machine. So instead of a single information leak giving away the whole game it gives away basically nothing. An attacker would need to chain many, many information leaks together to get anything useful so the bar is raised quite a bit.

Re: OpenBSD 6.2

#59

Post by PhantomGremlin »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #9
christophilus wrote: post #2

Off topic a bit, but anyone here use OpenBSD? I'd be interested in hearing why you use it, and what your experience has been like.

It's generally easy to maintain on my server. With normally fewer than 40 processes/daemons running at any time, I can reason about what's going on, as opposed to Linux or macOS. Downsides are that much of the system feels stuck in ancient times (there seems to be more support and documentation for tape drives than SSDs), the ongoing removal of sometimes useful software like sqlite from base, and anemic or absent sup…

It's generally easy to maintain on my server. With normally fewer than 40 processes/daemons running at any time, I can reason about what's going on, as opposed to Linux or macOS.

This really can't be emphasized enough.

It's very simple to see what's running. Right now on my OpenBSD system, when I do

   ps ax |wc -l
the answer is 51. But that's misleading. Because:

   nsd  5 processes
   ntpd 3 processes
   nfsd 5 processes
Etc. So there are really very few processes, and they're all easily understood.

In contrast, I just tried the same ps on my macOS Sierra laptop that I'm typing this on, and the count was 510. Ten times as many!!!

Mere mortals can't easily understand all of that.

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