Pre-orders are now being accepted for OpenBSD 4.7, which is scheduled for release on May 19th, 2010.

Fresh from the keyboards of the developers, this release brings us support for a new platform, Loongson, expanded SGI systems support, a large pf rewrite, a collection of new (athn(4), urndis(4), lom(4), etc) and improved drivers, a major overhaul of the pkg_*(1) tools and OpenSSH 5.4 to name just a few. Visit the 4.7 release page (which is at this moment still under construction) for more details.

Of course, a t-shirt and a poster are available too. Order your set NOW!

A short while ago, Marc Espie (espie@) wrote to the ports mailinglist with a short rant about autoconf. His mail gives good insights into the problems porters face when dealing with GNU software, especially those using autoconf.

Please read on for Marc's post: Read more...

Damien Miller (djm@) posted to announce@ with the announcement of OpenSSH 5.4. Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new 'netcat mode', many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.

Please read on for the full release announcement: Read more...

Some time ago, we featured an article with a request for hardware. Specifically, Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (jasper@) was looking for a Lemote Yeeloong and Otto Moerbeek (otto@) had recently received one from a donor to work on the Loongson port. Jasper had his Yeelong sponsored by two donors and received his machine less than two weeks after the article was posted.

Quite a few commits have hit the tree (eg. here, here, and here) since then, mostly from otto and miod for src/ and jasper for ports/ and it looks like the 4.7 release will feature an OpenBSD/Loongson port that should work on the Lemote Yeeloong, the Lemote Fuloong and the EMTEC Gdium.

Undeadly followed up on the donations and asked Miod Vallat (miod@), Otto and Jasper about the porting efforts, please read on for their story: Read more...

On January 12, Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (jasper@) announced that the ports tree has switched in softlock mode, meaning that users were welcome to test and report bugs. Now, on February 17, he announced on the ports@ mailing-list that the ports tree has been locked for the upcoming OpenBSD 4.7 release.

Please read on for Jasper's message:

OpenBSD will be represented again this year at SCALE 8x in Los Angeles.

Stop the exhibitor booth and say hi if you're attending, buy some merch, or perhaps ogle our fully clothed booth babe. (or celebrate the fact that we at least have one).

If you live near LA and covet a last minute opportunity to attend the conference, I've got some extra passes to dole out if you'd like to help staff the booth for at least 4 hours on Saturday or Sunday.

For more information contact Seth at 619-630-7384

Recently, Claudio Jeker (claudio@) added his request for an iSCSI-capable SAN device to want.html. This was a fairly low profile addition to want.html, so David Gwynne (dlg@) made it more obvious with an e-mail to misc@.

Please read on for David's full mail: Read more...

Bret Lambert (blambert@), your friendly OpenBSD hacker in Norway, writes in about some hardware requests that have been added to want.html recently.

The requests focus on (for now) unsupported or partially supported hardware that is under active development. Machines like the Lemote Yeelong, more SGI hardware and USB infrared dongles are being asked for and Bret asked some of his fellow developers why they requested this gear. Please read on for their replies. Read more...

Michael Dexter from BSD Fund writes in with an update on pcc developments:

Anders Magnusson (ragge@) reports that pcc can now build a bootable OpenBSD -current x86 kernel and that amd64 support is coming soon. Your testing using a fresh snapshot is greatly appreciated.

Please report any bugs in the pcc bug database and be as precise as possible. Code samples are welcome.

We'd like to thank Jonathan Gray (jsg@) for finding many code-generation bugs that were revealed by the kernel and also the dozen donors who contributed a total of over $750 to this effort this month, bringing us less than $3,000 from our goal.

This is great news for software projects in general, as it is another step to try to diminish the GCC monoculture and for OpenBSD specifically as this marks the first architecture kernel that can be compiled with this compiler with hopefully many more to come.

Claudio Jeker (claudio@), our favourite network hacker from Zürich, Switzerland, writes in with a story about his work on ospf6d:

A few days ago I decided it was time to enable ldpd(8) and ospf6d(8) in the builds since without additional attention they will never get finished. ldpd still needs a kernel with option MPLS enabled to be usable but this does not really matter here. This is about ospf6d and what drives me crazy about IPv6.

Check out the rest of Claudio's adventures in IPv6 land below. Read more...

Tunnelling out of corporate networks - logs, collection and analysis

I haven't heard too many people say good things about log analysis or monitoring but in reality it can be really simple and effective. More importantly, if you take the necessary steps to reduce your network to exposure to malware, log monitoring becomes really easy and fun.

Read on to find out more about how we collect and analyse logs:

Regarding episode #180 of Will Backman's BSDTalk series, Luke Seubert writes in:

BSDTalk #180 features an interview with Girish Venkatachalam from Chennai, in the Tamil Nadu state of India.

Through his interest in cryptography, Girish first tried OpenBSD in 2003, and has been using it consistently for the past four years. Tasked by his employer to develop IPSec for a router, he examined Linux and FreeBSD, but did not care for the quality of their code. Girish then reviewed the IPSec code in OpenBSD, and used it in the router project thanks to its clean, elegant style and technical excellence, as well as its license. He also found the minimalism and simplicity of the code particularly key, as it was better suited to less-powerful hardware.

Girish contributes to the community in several ways. He actively maintains twenty ports at present (such as randtype, multimux, and others), and occasionally submits code. His first ever free software code submission was a three line patch fixing a memory leak in OpenBSD's IPSec implementation. Girish has written a variety of articles, and makes presentations to local Linux and free software groups about OpenBSD. Through such advocacy, he hopes to see more developers from India contribute code to the project. He also runs the LiveUSB-OpenBSD project, which offers various bootable USB images.

In addition to these efforts, Girish earns a living through his company which sells OpenBSD-based hardware to local clients in India. Another one of his company's offerings is a live CD called SpamCheetah, which uses spamd, pf, and other tools to protect mail servers from spam.

File info: 25 min, 12MB. Available in mp3 or Ogg Vorbis formats.

[AsiaBSDCon 2010]: March 11-14, 2010, Tokyo - Call for Papers

The AsiaBSDCon 2010 Program Committee is happy to announce a Call for Papers. "The conference is for anyone developing, deploying and using systems based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Darwin and MacOS X. AsiaBSDCon is a technical conference and aims to collect the best technical papers and presentations available to ensure that the latest developments in our open source community are shared with the widest possible audience."

Read on to find out why it's a great conference to attend:

Here is the story about h2k9 (the 2009 Hardware Hackathon) and some of the results of that week.

Pedro Almeida tells the story about how the h2k9 came to be and how it went down.

Since 2006, I've been running the logistics for the hardware hackathons. h2k6 was a bit stressful for me since I didn't know how these kind of events used to work, and I didn't want anything to go on the wrong direction. At the time, some developers help was crucial to make the right choices.

I want to thank the Physics Department of the University of Coimbra, particularly the Computational Physics Center and to the Advanced Computation Laboratory, who gently have hosted us since h2k6.

Please read on for the rest of the story: