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Open Source Operating Systems Security Upgrades BSD News

OpenBSD 4.7 Preorders Are Up 191

badger.foo writes "The OpenBSD 4.7 pre-orders are up. That means the release is done, sent off to CD production, and snapshots will turn -current again. Order now and you more likely than not will have your CD set, T-shirt or other cool stuff before the official release date. You get the chance to support the most important free software project on the planet, and get your hands on some cool playables and wearables early. The release page is still being filled in, but the changelog has detailed information about the goodies in this release."
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OpenBSD 4.7 Preorders Are Up

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  • by Tiger4 ( 840741 ) on Saturday March 13, 2010 @08:15PM (#31468588)

    Just begging for it aren't you?

    Prepare for incoming!!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Jose ( 15075 )
      pffft! don't you read the Financial Post? it has been screaming about Rely on the BSDs [financialpost.com] for a while...
  • But I want it now (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Saturday March 13, 2010 @08:22PM (#31468644) Homepage Journal

    Thats how people think these days. They don't care about having the three CDs in their soft shell case. The T shirt probably won't fit (I have a NetBSD shirt which would fit two of me).

    So charge for an ISO download. Get'em out the door. Save money on CD burning, etc.

    • You can choose the TShirt size from S to XXXL. I really hope that some of those sizes fits you :)

    • (I have a NetBSD shirt which would fit two of me).

      Obviously you are not the target audience. I suggest an immediate increase in the consumption of Mtn Dew, Cheetos and pizza, followed by a rigorous session of WoW

      • by Rhaban ( 987410 )

        Does WoW even run on openbsd?

        I'd suggest nethack instead. Just bringing back the amulet of Yendor once should be enough for his shirt to fit him.

    • You'll get the CDs BEFORE you can download the ISO. That should be sufficient incentive for those who can't wait to pony up some cash.

    • when you come up with a working model for charging for ISO downloads for an *OPEN SOURCE* project, come back and tell us.

  • by flydpnkrtn ( 114575 ) on Saturday March 13, 2010 @09:20PM (#31469018)

    See the upgrade guide for upgrading 4.5 to 4.6... it's a 280 line upgrade guide:
    http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade46.html [openbsd.org]
     
    ...on RedHat and CentOS, to go from RHEL 5.3 to RHEL 5.4 I did "yum -y update". That's it.

    Can we get there with OpenBSD? At my current place of employment we were using OpenBSD, but the upgrade process was an argument that was made (by other members of my team) to move to RHEL...

    • The BSD projects have a great packaging system but it is only used for layered applications. It could certainly be used for the whole system but I think that defeats the "as simple as possible" approach they try to use.

      You can install from source and update with cvs if you want.

      • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        Much of how the BSD systems do things is very "clean" in principle, but in practice sucks the tits right off a cow.

        It's so goddamn simple and straigh-forward that it requires an administrator to do one (or more, in combination) of the following:

        a) devise an atypical, custom build process for dealing with simple systems administration tasks, upgrades, installs (partially due to the 'simple' approaches not working consistently or being all too finessed).
        b) writing custom package/kernel/whatever administration

    • by flydpnkrtn ( 114575 ) on Saturday March 13, 2010 @09:31PM (#31469092)

      To follow up on my own post, they have a draft upgrade guide up it looks like (they recommend that it not be used yet though):
      http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade47.html [openbsd.org]

      Looks like they include a utility to make life easier when upgrading... looks similar to what Gentoo Linux does when config files are upgraded... new configs are diff'd, and can be interactively merged, etc:
      "OpenBSD now includes the sysmerge(8) utility, which helps administrators update configuration files after upgrading their system. Sysmerge(8) compares the current files on your system with the files that would have been installed with a new install, and gives you the option of keeping the old file, installing the new file, or assisting you in the manual merging of the old and new files, using sdiff. For past upgrades, we've presented a list of files that are usually copied over "as-is", and a list of files which should be changed, and a patch file that applies those changes to what might be in those files on your system. You may opt to use sysmerge to make the changes, or you may wish to use the patch file first, and then follow up with a sysmerge session to clean up any loose ends."

      So it looks like they're at least making an effort to make it less painful

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by bertok ( 226922 )

        To follow up on my own post, they have a draft upgrade guide up it looks like (they recommend that it not be used yet though):
        http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade47.html [openbsd.org]

        Looks like they include a utility to make life easier when upgrading... looks similar to what Gentoo Linux does when config files are upgraded... new configs are diff'd, and can be interactively merged, etc:
        "OpenBSD now includes the sysmerge(8) utility, which helps administrators update configuration files after upgrading their system. Sysmerge(8) compares the current files on your system with the files that would have been installed with a new install, and gives you the option of keeping the old file, installing the new file, or assisting you in the manual merging of the old and new files, using sdiff. For past upgrades, we've presented a list of files that are usually copied over "as-is", and a list of files which should be changed, and a patch file that applies those changes to what might be in those files on your system. You may opt to use sysmerge to make the changes, or you may wish to use the patch file first, and then follow up with a sysmerge session to clean up any loose ends."

        So it looks like they're at least making an effort to make it less painful

        Are you kidding me? The upgrade process is for the administrator to manually merge the configuration files!?!?

        And this is the improved version? Wow. Just... wow.

        I can't believe people here whine about how the Windows 'registry' is somehow the root of all evil, even though the vast majority of Windows apps (and Windows itself) handle version upgrades automatically.

        It's like I've time travelled back to the 70s.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      This is very disingenuous. The upgrade guide contains all possible contigency plans incase you have altered system files, or have chosen not to upgrade the kernel etc.

      For example look at the debian lenny [debian.org] upgrade notes. They are way longer but generally debian based distros are considered some of the best for upgrades.
      • I applaud OpenBSD for having good documentation, but again with Debian I remember just doing "apt-get dist-upgrade" and apt "figuring everything out"

        Upgrading OpenBSD still looks to be a very manual process, to me anynway....

    • The funny thing (to me) is that the upgrade process looks a lot harder than it actually turns out to be. On our servers, it usually amounts to running the installer, running patch to update files in /etc, running a single command to upgrade all the installed 3rd-party software, and rebooting a last time to make sure it comes back up cleanly.

      In practice, the things that OpenBSD doesn't automatically upgrade with the above steps are the kinds of things you wouldn't want a script to attempt, such as upgrading the firewall configuration to use new features. The process certainly isn't slick or pretty, but it does the job well and safely.

      • Hmm... it's entirely possible you're right. I'm not someone who's been using OpenBSD for years, so I was basing my opinion mostly on what I'd seen in the docs.

        The way you put it, the upgrade process doesn't sound that bad

      • by Niten ( 201835 )

        I agree. The thing generally missed by people who criticize the OpenBSD upgrade process without having actually tried it themselves, is that OpenBSD is so cleanly designed and well documented that it's actually possible to hold a thorough understanding of the operating system in one's head, so to speak. It's like the Arch Linux philosophy [phraktured.net]:

        Relying on complex tools to manage and build your system is going to hurt the end users. [...] "If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you'll end up with a mor

        • by awyeah ( 70462 ) *

          FreeBSD in-place upgrades are also very smooth. They have been for as long as I've been using it (since 2.2.5-RELEASE, if I recall correctly). Occasionally, the mergemaster gets a little confusing (there are a lot of config files)... and once in a while I've accidentally replaced a config file I didn't want to... but other than that. :)

    • by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Sunday March 14, 2010 @12:36AM (#31470050) Journal

      See the upgrade guide for upgrading 4.5 to 4.6... it's a 280 line upgrade guide:
      http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade46.html [openbsd.org] ...on RedHat and CentOS, to go from RHEL 5.3 to RHEL 5.4 I did "yum -y update". That's it.

      You can just do the OpenBSD upgrade without reading those instructions... as you did with RHEL.

      If you'd actually started to read those instructions, you'd have seen they outline basically all feature changes between the previous and current release. See:

      scrub in all no-df max-mss 1440

      can be replaced with a rule using the new "match" action:

              match in all scrub (no-df max-mss 1440)

      Did the yum upgrade automatically make all necessary syntax changes in all corner cases in your config files to adapt them for the newest versions of the software? Obviously not... You're left to figure those out yourself. If the new version of iptables uses different options for some obscure option, you're screwed. Oh well, guess you should have read the RHEL 5.4 errata, which happens to be SEVERAL THOUSAND LINES http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html/Release_Notes/index.html [redhat.com]

    • Read the bits in bold teletype font. Those are the commands that you need to run. The rest of it is an explanation of what has changed since the last release and how it may affect you. Note also that those are the instructions for remote upgrading. If you have physical access to the machine, just boot from the install kernel + initrd and follow the on-screen instructions.

      That said, I'd love it if they'd port the freebsd-update tool. Updating an OpenBSD machine remotely does take a few minutes of int

    • by Noryungi ( 70322 )

      Yeah, right.
      Here is MY OpenBSD upgrade guide:
      1) insert CD, select (U)pgrade.
      2) once upgrade is finished, enter, as root: "pkg_add -vvv -u -F upgrade"
      That's it. I have used this for at least the past 5 upgrades.
      You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by Noryungi ( 70322 )

          If you like Gentoo better than OpenBSD, all the more power to you.

          But don't come and tell me that upgrading OpenBSD is a mess, because it is clearly not. It may be different from Gentoo, but it's not a mess.

          And I strongly suspect it is much faster than upgrading Gentoo, but I haven't used Gentoo in a very long time, so I may be mistaken.

    • I wouldn't characterize it as a "mess", but I do notice there are some changes [openbsd.org] to to pf rules syntax, so some rewriting of your firewall rules might be required.

      I've been using OpenBSD since around 2.7. I've come to really trust the judgment of the developers in general, and the pf developers in particular. I've yet to see them break backwards compatibility without good reason.

  • Seriously! Even for commercial products don't people purchase them electronically? Maybe I'm just so far-removed from the commercial software world that I can't even comprehend this in this day and age... I did order a free Ubuntu CD once, but never even ended up using it because Ubuntu releases so often that there's almost always a newer version the next time you want to install it, and downloading via bittorrent is so fast. Of course I understand for those unlucky folk who are living in the middle of

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