

The OpenBSD 5.3 Release - conductor
http://openbsd.org/53.html

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rhizome31
I don't care much about advanced security or networking features but I use
OpenBSD because of its simplicity and the quality of its documentation.

~~~
berntb
So... Do you have a link to nice documentation of hardware support?

(Not snarky; an honest question to verify my older "machine park" for an
install to play around, which I've wanted to do for a while.)

~~~
cdjk
The man pages and FAQ are a good place to start for documentation. It's rather
nice having everything in one place, rather than scattered around forum posts,
mailing lists, HOWTOs, etc, some of which might or might not be outdated.

Unless you have some really weird hardware, I'd be surprised if OpenBSD didn't
support it. The best way to check is to boot an iso and look at the output of
dmesg, however.

~~~
zurn
The laptop department sounds a little limited currently:
[http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=136255349221059&w...](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=136255349221059&w=2)

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adventureloop
OpenBSD has been the model for opensource software release engineering. Their
presentations on managing their releases are always worth a look. In 2013
regular quality releases are quite common, but OpenBSD has been releasing on
schedule from the time of Debian's four year release cycle.

~~~
RexRollman
The best thing is that they don't jump versions numbers for PR reasons.

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bconway
I'd really love to give OpenBSD a try outside of VM testing. Does it have
something like FreeBSD's NanoBSD
([http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/...](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/index.html))
yet? The seamless update-image-and-switch is a killer feature for my embedded
use.

~~~
cdjk
The OpenBSD equivalent to NanoBSD is flashrd:

<http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/>

It's not officially supported, however, and only recommended for systems that
are likely to suffer power outages and for which running fsck would be
problematic. I've used it a little on embedded systems and so far it's worked
fine.

------
heidar
This is particularly exciting news: OpenSMTPD 5.3: code is now considered
stable and suitable for use in production.

~~~
protomyth
I'm very excited about that. I recently switched to FreeBSD for my samba
server (because of ZFS), but I still use OpenBSD for everything else. I've
long (delayed, delayed, etc.) been going to replace the mail server and I
might move from Postfix to OpenSMTP. I will have to do some tests.

~~~
bch
I'm interested to know if it will implement Milter or what the workalike will
look like.

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gabeguz
Right on time, as usual. Ordering CD sets to support the project.

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conductor
The ISO images are already available on some of the mirrors, for example:
<http://ftp.openbsd.dk/pub/OpenBSD/5.3/>

------
Scramblejams
Back when I looked at OpenBSD a decade ago, I liked the OS but upgrading from
one version to the next seemed to be problematic. Anybody had any experiences
(good or bad) with upgrading modern OpenBSD?

~~~
cdjk
There is a useful and detailed upgrade guide here:

<http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade53.html>

The official recommendation is to boot the installation kernel and upgrade
that way, but I've never had a problem doing a remote upgrade. It's always
been entirely painless.

One could argue that it's not quite as simple as "apt-get dist-upgrade" but I
like it better - the upgrade process is more explicit about not touching your
config files. And since it's a BSD, the base system isn't packaged, so I'm not
entirely sure how it would work (although FreeBSD does have freebsd-update
now, so it's possible).

~~~
Scramblejams
Thanks for the details. On Linux the upgrade process can be problematic
depending on which distro you're using and how wrenching the upgrades are to
the various packages you're relying on, but I must admit I've been spoiled by
Debian's apt-get dist-upgrade. Good to hear that with a little experience,
OpenBSD's upgrade can be similarly stable.

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hexonexxon
"All softraid(4) boot(8) support is now enabled by default, including support
for booting from crypto volumes." awesome.

I also use OpenBSD for embedded work, in fact I think everybody is using it
for embedded systems. You can strip the kernel down to a tiny install, run
securelevel 2 and chflags to prevent any tampering from console.

------
zokier
Interesting that they are staying at KDE3. I wonder what are their plans with
it.

~~~
tobiasu
It has been more a lack of time and interest than anything else. KDE4 was
added just past this release, and will be in 5.4 (unless another meteorite
hits the wrong part of Russia).

~~~
cavilling_elite
Wasn't there some problem with KDE4 highly tied to dtrace and other kernel
space mappings that OpenBSD does not have?

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papsosouid
I've been out of the "paying attention to unix stuff" world for a long time
now, but back in the 2.8-3.8 times I followed openbsd related news very
closely. It seemed in that time period that openbsd usage was growing rather
quickly, and lots of people were talking about it. Having just come back now,
it seems as though all that growth has vanished. The mailing lists are very
quiet, undeadly is practically dead, nobody is talking about openbsd anymore
at all. Is it just that people ran out of things to say, or did everyone leave
for one reason or another?

~~~
doktrin
I'm a bit curious as to who uses *BSDs these days. At one point I knew of at
least a few with copies of FreeBSD, but these days most of my acquaintances,
social & professional, use OSX or some Linux flavor. As far as servers go, I
haven't seen one in the wild in quite some time.

This is of course highly anecdotal, but even on the distrowatch page hit
rankings FreeBSD ranks below distros I've never even heard of (Zorin, SolusOS)
at #19. OpenBSD is down in the 70's. On a complete tangent, I was also
surprised to find Mandriva well in the 40's. [1]

What is the community & ecosystem like these days?

[1] <http://distrowatch.com/>

~~~
profquail
The Apache Software Foundation (you might have heard of them ;) runs their
servers on FreeBSD.

NetFlix runs some (all?) of their servers on FreeBSD.

Google uses FreeBSD for their network search applicance (for corporate
intranets or whatever). They also just announced their funding of the Capsicum
security framework project for FreeBSD (and later, a port to Linux).

The Weather Channel uses FreeBSD to power their network appliances that render
the forecasts for local cable networks.

NetApp and Juniper Networks use FreeBSD for their networking gear.

There are more examples here if you want to read them:

<http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/testimonials>

The FreeBSD Foundation also has a list of donors:

<http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors>

The FreeBSD forums are reasonably active and very friendly, you should check
them out if you want to learn more (or have more questions about *BSDs in
general):

<http://forums.freebsd.org/>

\---

EDIT: I forgot one; VeriSign apparently uses FreeBSD enough that they just
started their own BSD-related conference:

[http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
questions/2013-Ap...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
questions/2013-April/250531.html)

~~~
TallGuyShort
Also, Netflix and Yahoo are pretty big users. I used to use BSD on my personal
machines just because I prefer their approach to things and the documentation.
I now use Linux just because my day job practically requires it.

edit: And regarding GP's surprise about Mandriva - Mageia is a community fork
and is #2 - the Mandrake users I knew all switched to Mageia.

~~~
teho
Yahoo has been moving away from FreeBSD for a long time. In 2011 they said
that 75% of their servers run on Linux, the rest on FreeBSD.

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/yahoo-the-linux-
compan...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/yahoo-the-linux-company/8618)

