OpenBSD 3.6 Released!

dspisak writes "The people over at OpenBSD have released version 3.6 containing significant new features such as: SMP support for i386 and amd64 archs, the ability to optimize pf rulesets, better hotplug support, in addition to more robust encryption and vpn functionality. This is in addition to more recent hardware support, for a full list of changes take a look at the 3.6 changelog. Don't forget to use the mirrors!"

SMP

[Anonymous Coward]

WOHOOO!!!!

I wonder if they plan to do smp on any other arch?

On Address Space Randomization...

[nweaver]

There was an excellent paper at CCS last week on the limits of address space randomization. If you want address space randomization to be effective, use a 64 bit architecture and native 64 bit binaries for your OpenBSD system.

Firewall ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the differences ,between packet filter and ip tables, for use as a firewall box ?

It's like a BSD golden age lately

[ewg]

It's like a BSD golden age lately, with (alphabetically!) FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD releases coinciding.

Hooray for all three. It's a amazing luxury to have so many open source Unix-like operating systems and kernels out there, free for the download.

i notice...

[null-sRc]

i noticed under new features:

tcpdrop(8), a command to drop TCP connections.

this looked like an awesome idea, and I'm wondering what the windows / linux equivalent is... anyone know?

OpenBSD impossible to update?

[berck]

I've got OpenBSD running as a little personal webserver, DNS server and so on. It's running OpenBSD3.1, because at least back then, it was absolutely impossible to update. Every up understanddate involves going through and manually mucking with endless configuration files, etc. I use Debian for most everything, and have grown so used to the ability to run an apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.

The inability to easily update OpenBSD, to me, nullifies any benefit one gets from it being "secure". If I'm running a two year old version of Apache because it's such a pain in the butt to update, how iss that secure? I think automatic security updates are imperative for a secure system.

And, furthermore, the automatic updating system should be secure as well.

Re:SMP

[Nonesuch]

I asked about SMP for Sparc32 (I have a quad SS20!) but there was no take on that. SMP for Sparc64 maybe coming..

The new darling of the OpenBSD developers is AMD64, we can expect development on that platform to take priority, with Sparc and Sparc64 being somewhat neglected. As much as I hate to say this, we may never see OpenBSD offering SMP for Sparc platforms.

Re:OpenBSD

[onlyjoking]

Ths installation is the fastest and simplest of any unix ....

Depends what you're smoking. Are you telling me that manaul partitioning with OpenBSD's hellish tools is anything like RedHat/Mandrake's polished graphical config? Sorry, but there's no comparison. If you thought Debian's installer was bad, OpenBSD's curses-based nightmare is strictly for masochists.