Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Code rot and why I picked OpenBSD (homing-on-code.blogspot.com)
239 points by ezequiel-garzon on Jan 4, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 86 comments



OpenBSD is really great, and it qualitatively feels really solid and cohesive. Especially compared to Linux which by comparison feels like a bit of a clusterfuck at times.

But I just can't switch to OpenBSD as a daily driver yet. The big ones for me are battery life and responsiveness. Unfortunately compared to Debian I get almost 2 fewer hours on a single charge, and using OpenBSD's power management functions makes my i7 thinkpad sluggish and laggy. Noticeably longer delays when starting applications and whatnot.

I'm sure OpenBSD is a great desktop/server OS but IMHO it's just not there yet for laptops, which is surprising/disappointing to me because I'd always heard the OpenBSD guys dogfood their stuff heavily.


I can't yet get it to boot and run properly on my Haswell based workstation, but it works a treat on my 15 year old laptop apart from aggressive cooling cycles (Windows and Slackware would rarely spin the fan up above idle speed, OpenBSD runs it full blast 50 percent of the time). It amazes me just how responsive and useful that ancient laptop is with an OS released less than three months ago.

And yes, it just feels solid, much the same way Slackware does but even more so. It's not the perfect "Desktop OS", dogfooding or not, but it's good enough if you're focused on using it to get work done and leaving the entertainment stuff for Linux/Windows/OS X.

And you should submit your dmesg and any info you have about your battery and PM issues to the OpenBSD devs. They really do listen and try to fix issues like that!


Yeah I'd submit it but I don't really want to have to deal with Theo and his planet-sized ego.


I've yet to interact with him specifically, but it's been my experience that OpenBSD devs are helpful folks, if not as friendly as the Slackware crew. But I'm not submitting bug reports to make friends.


You should watch some talks and interviews with Theo. He is very nice and cares about his development team and his users; he's really not the cranky jerk that he's often depicted as.


Oh, he is from time to time, but it's mostly towards people from the outside who pop in at random and tell OpenBSD folks How Things Should Be Done. I get it that some people tend to think they know what's right for any and every project and I'm sure their heart is in the right place. But at the same time I can see why this comes across as impolite to order people around like that. Dev's responses are typically proportional to BS dumped at them. But taken out of context it's easy to paint them as hostile and ego-driven.


"it's mostly towards people from the outside who pop in at random and tell OpenBSD folks How Things Should Be Done"

See also: Richard Stallman's attempt to troll the OpenBSD mailing list[0] after having been called out[1] about a misunderstanding of the OpenBSD ports tree (and its existence as an index of software that can be built or installed on OpenBSD, free or otherwise).

[0]: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119730630513821&w=2 [1]: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119725673616073&w=2


Theo is South African. He comes from a culture where you are very blunt.


Oh please what absolute bullshit. Almost in the same vein as all Americans are stupid and know nothing of world affairs.


Haha, yeah I was thinking the same thing. SA, like most countries, is too diverse to be able to make such blanket statements.



>He comes from a culture where you are very blunt.

No we're not. Stop talking kak.


Is the joke too subtle? Oh well.


:-) you got it


The solution I have used for this for well over a decade is Windows on the hardware, then a VM, then my OS of choice running full screen ontop. The overhead of even semi-modern virtualisation is pretty low, and you benefit from power management that has thoroughly matured.


I always test drive a new-to-me OS in VirtualBox and VMWare first, just to make sure I can get my head around how it works, but even running it fullscreen on a fast system, it's not quite the same as bare metal. Random slowdowns, unaccelerated window managers, printing not working properly, and issues with some guest OSes sharing folders with the host can be annoying.

Another thing to consider is that bug reports are only valid for the virtual environment; sometimes things that happen there simply don't happen on bare metal. I always test Haiku OS on any new hardware I get so if I come across something wonky, I can submit it to the devs for more testing. In a VM, that's pointless (but then Haiku is a hobby, not a job, so maybe not relevant to this discussion).

All that said, if all you need is a terminal and a web browser to be productive, a VM is a solid choice for getting things done efficiently.


I tried that out and noticed minification and bundling of my js code taking several seconds rather than a couple of milliseconds. Am I doing it wrong or is that to be expected? I was using Ubuntu in virtual box on win8.


Are available hardware virtualization features enabled in the BIOS?

A little digging brings a 9/2014 comparison of virtualization software that notes VirtualBox as a distant third on performance benchmarks (http://www.tekrevue.com/parallels-10-fusion-7-virtualbox-ben...) and an Ubuntu thread noting that its performance under VirtualBox leaves much to be desired (http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/virtualbox-or-vmware-for-linux...).


If the files are in a Virtualbox shared folder from the host OS, that performance is to be expected. Just google "Virtualbox shared folder performance."[1] If you're using Vagrant to manage the VM it's easy to work around this by switching the file share mechanism to nfs. If you're not using vagrant, you can do this manually too, or just move the files to a non-shared folder inside the VM.

[1] Scroll down to the graph at http://mitchellh.com/comparing-filesystem-performance-in-vir... to get an idea of how bad this is.


Have you tried Hyper-V as a client hypervisor?


I haven't, most of my experience is VMware (on server farms) and VirtualBox on desktop.


Yes, sadly the last time I've tested, OpenBSD was actually the best of the BSD's when it came to power management... And I'm not even a big laptop user, but I've gotten so used to suspending systems instead of shutting them down…


My second development laptop runs FreeBSD - switched away from Debian in 2012. I wanted to try OpenBSD, however the amount of labor required to simply upgrade the system (Google "openbsd upgrading") outweighed all benefits for me at the current point. Also, FreeBSD has pkg, which is a neat binary package manager - which is important on a desktop/laptop - and it looks like OpenBSD still uses the old, manual pkg_add way. Maybe I'll try it on the third laptop, curiosity grows bigger every day for sure.


> I wanted to try OpenBSD, however the amount of labor required to simply upgrade the system (Google "openbsd upgrading") outweighed all benefits for me at the current point.

Are you sure you understood the documentation? Most upgrades are done in ten minutes, and it's mostly an automated process (the package updates are limited by your bandwidth of course). Every once in a while something on the system is changed or removed, and the upgrade guide tells you how to deal with that -- unlike on many other systems, where you upgrade and then find out things have changed and broken and you have no idea what needs to be fixed.


Hmm.. Let's take this FAQ, for example: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade56.html

To me this looks more "manual" than FreeBSD's freebsd-update. Additionally, if there's no tool like pkg then upgrading all the user land packages will be quite an undertaking. A typical desktop/development environment may have about a thousand of them installed. On FreeBSD, I can do pkg upgrade, and it will take care of all dependencies pretty much automatically. Is there something similar available on OpenBSD?


Look very carefully. 99% of what happens in the upgrade happens under the title "Upgrading by install kernel". Literally, you just boot bsd.rd, smash return a few times, reboot, and you're done.

After that you're into the "final steps" territory. Which means running sysmerge to merge changes in config files. It's not called openbsd-update, but freebsd-update requires you to do the same thing.

Typically the only "manual" part is removing some files and users no longer needed by the new release. Now 5.6 has lots of these files, but it's not really representative -- most releases have a much shorter list of file removals. In any case, there are very good reasons for the system not to do this automatically for you. And, in any case, if you know you haven't done anything unusual so as to depend on these files, you can get away with copy pasting these instructions.

At this point you update your packages with pkg_add -u. Just as you would have to on freebsd...


Thank you! Makes sense.


> Literally, you just boot bsd.rd, smash return a few times, reboot, and you're done.

No, you're not done. You've merely dropped a new OS onto an old OS. It's now an exercise to the user to figure out how to remove all the files leftover from the old OpenBSD release. Leaving older libraries around is dangerous as programs could link against them long after they've been retired potentially exposing you to vulnerabilities that you didn't think you were exposed to anymore.

The correct way to upgrade OpenBSD is to do a clean install. Hopefully someday they'll support a tool like "freebsd-update" which handles all of this for the user.


What exercise? The upgrade guide tells you exactly how to remove what leftover files. You could copy and paste the rm commands mindlessly, not that I would suggest doing anything mindlessly.

If you're using the official OpenBSD packages, they would be linked to the correct libraries for that release, so there's no need to worry about linking to the wrong libraries. If you're compiling your own packages, you should be aware of anything you've done with any libraries that would require you pay any particular attention necessary to files being removed. Otherwise, it's not anything you would need be concerned about as a user.

Where do you get the idea that a clean install is the correct way to upgrade? Considering how conservative OpenBSD is, it would not provide an upgrade process if it wasn't something that was very well supported.


Removing files is included for completeness (because people kept asking for it), but it's hardly necessary. Just glancing at the list reveals half the files are old man pages; there's little harm in retaining them. Even libraries aren't a problem; the linker won't use old versions.


If you're custom building any software you could end up making a mistake though. Not everything a user may want to use is in packages/ports. I end up building several things manually because they're not in ports.

But you're right, removing files documented.


> It's now an exercise to the user to figure out how to remove all the files leftover from the old OpenBSD release.

No it's not. The upgrade guides for each release literally tell you exactly which files should be cleaned up, which packages are now part of base, which parts of base are now packages, etc. OpenBSD has a good reputation for having complete and thorough documentation on every last detail of its operation, and system upgrades are no exception.


having lost data on every single automatic Ubuntu update, I'm happy back on Debian using one partition for data, another for etc, and another for system. every upgrade i just format the system one, move the etc and then move back the files i care on the new etc. done.


You can upgrade every package on the system simply by running `pkg_add -u`. This has been the case since they were rewritten by Marc Espie for the 3.5 release in 2004.


You'll, I hope, note that a lot of the text is under the section "Upgrading without install kernel" which starts with "This is NOT the recommended process. Use the install kernel method if at all possible!".

In practice, it takes very little time to upgrade an OpenBSD machine. As calrogman pointed out pkg_add -u is quite nice.

Is FreeBSD easier. Mostly, but I just went through a lot of manual crap because of a change in gnome and a php module causing a crash. I use a mix of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Red Hat, and Windows servers at work.


Upgrades are not that bad. I used to also think the same as you, because the documentation is pretty extensive, and I was used to Windows/MacOS "click here to install updates" process.

But in practice, upgrading OpenBSD is basically:

1) Download and boot the bsd.rd for the new version.

2) Select [U]pgrade when prompted.

3) Mostly just accept defaults on the rest of the prompts. Do read carefully however.

After rebooting, run sysmerge(8). This has actually gotten even easier recently as you no longer need to point it to etc.tgz and xetc.tgz for that release.

If you have any packages installed, run pkg_add -u. If anything goes wonky, you might need to run pkg_check to clean up dependencies.

If you have compiled anything else from source you will need to remake/reinstall that also.

It's definitely more "hands on" than Windows, Mac OS, or most Linux distros. But really not bad.


> I wanted to try OpenBSD, however the amount of labor required to simply upgrade the system (Google "openbsd upgrading") outweighed all benefits for me at the current point.

It's actually not that hard. Even with the 5.4->5.5 upgrade (which broke binary compatibility on my PowerBook), I just needed to fire up the install disk, pick "upgrade" instead of "install", press Enter/Return a few times, and reboot (after which you run "sysmerge" to get your configuration files in order, then tweak $PKG_PATH and run a quick "pkg_add -u" in most cases (in mine, I had to save a list of all installed packages, uninstall everything, then reinstall from that list, but that was only slightly more tedious), similar to FreeBSD from what I understand).

It's only "hard" if you're trying to upgrade without booting into the install kernel first; not being recommended aside, even this isn't particularly difficult if you follow the upgrade guides, though perhaps it's a bit tedious, and just involves doing manually what the installer does for you automatically.

> Also, FreeBSD has pkg, which is a neat binary package manager - which is important on a desktop/laptop - and it looks like OpenBSD still uses the old, manual pkg_add way.

A pkg_add command is still involved, but it doesn't seem to be much different from most package managers; it still downloads binaries, checks dependencies, and does all the other nifty things that most modern package managers do. It ain't zypper or nix, but it does its job well enough.

Granted, I don't have all that much experience with pkg, so perhaps pkg_add is indeed primitive in comparison (it's certainly pretty spartan, to say the least). It's a step up from dealing with the ports tree directly, though, so there's that :)

> Maybe I'll try it on the third laptop, curiosity grows bigger every day for sure.

You definitely should.

[0]: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade56.html


Code rot: LOL and amen. I had to (help) make a nuclear reactor simulator work on Win32. 30+ megalines of Fortran developed by mostly nuclear engrs over three decades. Thankfully it worked in reasonable time by disabling swapping.


"... At my previous job I worked with a 2 mln LoC code base for a core banking system. ... Imagine working with a code-base, that's layer upon layer of quick fixes. Imagine being woken up at 3 am to diagnose & resolve an issue with it. ... The company wasn't really affected by heartbleed. ..."

AND

"... OpenSSL code base, counting how much resources are needed to plumb it into shape, how the original maintainers - let's not go there. Let's say 'didn't do a great job'. ..."

Does anyone see the disconnect here?


I'm the author of the article. Can you elaborate more clearly on what you are pointing out?


Hi @mulander, this is a good read (quickly went thru your other posts as well).

The point I wanted to make was the bank code base described in the article reads like it's insecure (no mention of it being exploited). The article then describes using Unix variants at home, [0] though not which one. I assume Linux. Usable, permissive and open, Linux has always been inherently insecure. Then the article goes on to describe finding of OpenBSD, post Heartbleed.

The question I asked myself: "How does a smart capable person as yourself, miss security being the heart of the operating system and programming while working on core bank systems?" Is this atypical? That's the crux I've what struck me. The dis-joint between the description of what represents a secure, large code base and the personal move to OpenBSD.

From what I understand OpenBSD, a bastard child of 386BSD [1] was a deliberate move to build a secure and audited and most importantly free operating system. This is such a contrast to the cruft described in the article. Maybe that's the point of the article, a growing awareness that fast a moving code-base left unchecked, comes at a cost. It has to change and it can be done.

[0] I fully endorse this btw. A linux user since '95, I love how I could use lots of different hardware with it. Linux is also fast. Fast to use, fast to install software. Fast. Secure it is not. I got sick of trying to secure my boxes and started using OpenBSD. Read about my pathetic attempts to install it on old hardware <http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0310/msg01026.html>

[1] P57, Tovalds & Diamond, 'Just for Fun', "One BSD derivation in particular is worth mentioning. I was the 386BSD project by Bill Jolitz based on the BSD code-base, distributed over the Internet. It was later to fragment and become the freely available BSD favors-NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD".


Hi @bootload, I deeply appreciate your response. It's sometimes hard to read between the lines as English is not my native language.

I'll try to put some more light and perspective into how my previous work place 'ticked' and how I intended to outline my passage to OpenBSD in the article.

My previous workplace was a large corporation. I were literally on the clock accounting for every 0.25h of work I did. You were not allowed to touch a single line of code unless you had billed hours against that task (contract with a client, bug report from a client). This literally meant that doing comprehensive code reviews or reworking a particularly nasty part of the code was not possible. There was a 'process' for doing code reviews but it was so bureaucratic that going through the paper work you had to submit after one took 0.5h-2h but the time you had for a code review was counted as a percentage of the time it took someone to produce or alter the code. So if you reviewed a change that took 1h - you had 10 minutes to do the code review and all the alloted paperwork.

I don't want to speak about the quality of the code base in detail due to obvious reasons but I can assure you that people working on it are really experienced and know what they are doing. Most of the problems and the humongous technical debt is years of corporate culture. Did I mention that the banking system I worked on was born around 15 years ago?

During my 7 years at that job. I had the chance to refactor code once. In my first 3 months of working there since I was not yet on the 'clock'. When I was at my leaving period I was given a free hand and was took off the clock again. This allowed me to really look at the code, analyze potential problems and actually react on them. People that are still working on it don't have that privilege on a daily basis.

The stab at Linux was actually accidental :) I use Linux personally since late 90s. What I mostly pointed out was some of my bad hardware choices in the passage and how OpenBSD drives me more into actually diving into the code contrasted to all the years I solely used Linux.

You are correct that my 'evolution' towards tighter, smaller and correct implementations drew me towards OpenBSD. I think I had that feeling for a long time but hopefully you understand that it's not always in the hands of the programmer himself to call the shots and do things right. What I really loved though was auditing and removing a ton of cruft in one code base while OpenBSD did the same with LibreSSL :)

Hope this answers your question.


@mulander

"... I were literally on the clock accounting for every 0.25h of work I did. ..."

That is a revelation. Please follow with more articles like this.

I like to think the development of software as something akin to making music. If startups are Punk, big business is Pop. Manufactured Pop. It makes a lot of money and does the job, but at it's core the product sounds crap and devoid of time for creativity.

There was one guy who was a natural at playing guitar, a born player. He started in school and went on to be a top session player for a commercial company in the UK. It got to the point where he would turn up and be handed a folder of music and would have to play it on the spot, no practice, just play.

At that point he realised he was just a highly skilled session player, churning out muzac. He quit. That man was Jimmy Page who went on to play in Led Zeppelin.

Understanding how these musicians/programmers make the choices and tradeoffs to create, be it commercial muzac or punk rock, hearing about this trade-craft is good value.


Is the performance of the JVM/PostgreSQL/NGINX on OpenBSD the same as on Linux? Are there any reliable OpenBSD VPS providers?


I would recommend http://www.ramnode.com/

Reliable and cheap, even more so if you take 10 minutes to google for a discount coupon.


No, (in many cases) it's not the same, OpenBSD uses a giant lock.


I'm using Vultr.com but I installed as "Custom ISO" since they didn't have a 5.6 option at the time.


The main reason why it's not an official image is OpenBSD doesn't seem to support any sort of online disk resizing.

Operating systems get deployed from an image, and typically expand the own partitions to fill up the disk... OpenBSD can't do this, which makes things pretty tricky.


I haven't benchmarked anything, but at least for PostgreSQL and nginx, I've found OpenBSD's performance to be right on par with what I've come to expect from GNU/Linux servers; nothing feels particularly slow.

As for VPS providers, I've heard good things about 1984[0], though I haven't used them myself (yet; I'll probably do this pretty soon). I've also used EDIS[1] without any particular problems. Both provide OpenBSD as OS options.

[0]: https://www.1984.is/ (in Icelandic, but there's a drop-down to set the language to English). [1]: http://www.edis.at/en/home/


I had a good experience with RootBSD in 2014.


The article advises paying attention to the mailing lists.

Is there a LWN style product covering OpenBSD (possibly with free/net as well?)


The closest that I know of is http://www.undeadly.org which does a good job of covering news, sprints etc


Not exactly LWN, but you can find a good sum-up of interesting news/changes/discussions concerning all the BSDs here: http://www.dragonflydigest.com/

I also watch tedu's blog (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/) and the OpenBSD tag on lobsters.


For http://www.dragonflydigest.com I find the "Lazy Reading" articles to be some really great pointers to all types of cool articles. The "In Other BSDs" is a great survey of the BSD news highlights.

For general news, undeadly is in my rss feeds. I also like the BSD Now and bsdtalk podcasts. BSD Now is from two folks from PC-BSD and FreeBSD, but covers the other BSDs as well.


BSD Now is from three people, the third of which seems to be more of an OpenBSD person. That balances the news out a little more I suspect.


They do a pretty good job, although the interview with the FreeBSD security person who didn't want to get contaminated by the OpenBSD code was painful. I really wish they had challenged that statement.


MARC has good OpenBSD mailing list archives...

OpenBSD Misc is here http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&r=1&w=2


Not the same but bsdnow.tv is a weekly video/podcast on the BSDs.


I am more of a NetBSD guy these days but when I was into OpenBSD I liked OpenBSD Journal (undeadly.org). Currently I regularly check a site called NetBSD Planet, which has a section called "In Other BSDs":

http://netbsd.fi/


avoid nvidia if switching to OpenBSD, you miss out on dropping all X privs http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140223112426&mo...


Not to mention that Nvidia cards don't play nicely with non-Linux (or OSX) Unixen in general.


Everybody is piling garbage on top of garbage, then taking the money and running. Don't be the schmuck who chooses to die on some godforsaken hill to make a point about software quality. When it starts to smell, move on. Is this world suboptimal? Yes, it is.


I worked at a place like that once. The application was the definition of lava layers. It was my second gig so I hustled, got uo to speed fast, and really impressed my boss. Found the exact same situation, crap on crap, features that never worked, features that were sold but never implemented, hand rolled transaction framework, a real pile of sh*t. At a year went out and lined up another job then gave notice.

Long story short, and against my better judgement i stayed, for a 50% raise and a promotion.


Not everybody. http://symas.com/mdb/

If you don't take a stand, what's the point of your life?


I love OpenBSD and I use it as my desktop OS at work and at home. But there are a couple of inaccuracies in this piece.

In OpenBSD you are encouraged to run current.

What they actually say[1] is:

  The name -stable refers ONLY to the API and
  operations of OpenBSD not changing, not the
  overall reliability of the system. In fact,
  if things go as desired, the -current flavor
  of OpenBSD, on its way to becoming the next
  -release, will be an improvement in reliability,
  security and overall quality over the previous
  -release and -stable.
What is implied is that sometimes things don't go as desired; -current sometimes has issues. They are almost always quickly fixed, but if you depend on as near as possible certainty that an update won't break anything, you should run -stable.

If OpenBSD states that something is configured then it works and will remain working flawlessly or will only get better over time.

Not guaranteed. I remember somewhere in the 4.x series my NIC driver was removed from the release build. I updated, and suddenly had no network access. My fault for not reading the release notes, but they don't always support old/obscure hardware forever. More recently, support for some older Microsoft VPN protocols was removed. It was because they were insecure, but this changed the way I had to interoperate with one of my client's internal networks.

[1]: http://www.openbsd.org/stable.html


I've been using OpenBSD for about a year now. It's still not quite my daily driver (it's running on one of my three main workstations - a PowerBook G4 - but not on my desktop or my other laptop, both of which are still running GNU/Linux - Slackware and openSUSE, specifically and respectively), but it's certainly the OS of choice for my servers.

OpenBSD appealed to me as a Linux user for the same reasons why Linux appealed to me as a Windows user. I was tired of bugginess, and just wanted things to work. Unfortunately, I still have the same obstacles migrating to it from Linux as I had migrating to Linux from Windows - namely, hardware support and gaming - that keep it from being my dream OS; however, it's still the OS I like to use when I need to get real work done (just as GNU/Linux was the OS I liked to use when I needed to get work done, back when I was still a Linux/Windows dual-booter so many years ago).

Even with those shortcomings, my PowerBook G4 is currently my favorite machine. There are some kinks, to be sure (power management is non-op, so I can't put the laptop to sleep), but with OpenBSD and WindowMaker, it's pretty rock-solid despite its age.

The nice thing about OpenBSD is that the devs aren't afraid of breaking backwards-compatibility if needed. They've already solved the 2038 problem as of 5.5, for example; with Linux's policies on backwards-compatibility, that'll be a nightmare to fix on 32-bit Linux systems (and even other BSDs, if I understand correctly). To me, that's awesome; I'll take a minor flag day to clean-reinstall my servers now over a major flag day to hack together some kind of band-aid "fix" later any day, and it's nice to know that, should I setup a server right now, it won't spontaneously vomit all over itself in 20 years or so due to it suddenly thinking it's 1970 again.


    Lesson 1 sources on the hdd
    This might sound simple but in a long time I didn't feel     so connected to my OS. Having the sources for every piece of software I use around made things really different. How? I'm  actually looking at them
I've taken to keeping a ~/code on my machines after experiencing the same thing with a BSD. It has been life-altering to be able to search implementation details with a simple :grep in my editor. I typically keep a copy of OpenBSD sources, along with major libraries for my current target OS and my dev toolchain (clojure/python(pypy)/clang) around to reference due to this. OpenBSD sources are kept around because it's cleaner to reference when I'm simply studying how something might be accomplished (as opposed to loading up glibc or the linux kernel if I need an implementation detail).


I've used OpenBSD for years in my router. Something that has given me a bit of pause recently, is that with all the various espionage revelations coming out in the past 14-16 months, I had expected the OpenBSD crowd to be out in force talking up the operating system but they've been surprisingly subdued. Just makes me wonder...


> I had expected the OpenBSD crowd to be out in force talking up the operating system but they've been surprisingly subdued

The OpenBSD motto is "shut up and hack". Look at the work that is being done recently with libressl, openssh, the new httpd, signify, static PIE, xorg privilege separation etc. etc.

They're letting the code do the talking.


I don't think that the OpenBSD crowd's response to the OpenSSH vulnerabilities are an example of some motto of "shut up and hack" at all. In fact, I find their response to demonstrate the difference in reactions that got my attention.

Heartbleed provoked substantial discussion as well as the LibreSSL project.


If by "OpenSSH" you actually meant "OpenSSL" (I'm a seasoned sysadmin and I still get those mixed up in conversation, so don't worry), then yes, the crowd's response was certainly an example of "shut up and hack": the OpenBSD devs wrote libressl to replace it, cutting out as much of the insecure cruft as they physically could.


What OpenSSH vulnerabilities?


You mean the OpenSSL vulnerabilities?


Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know.


Now, if we could only get the latter to shut up and listen, and the former to start talking. Wouldn't that be wonderful?


You reminded me of "Allegations regarding OpenBSD IPSEC" [0] which, WRT the recent news of the NSA (attempting to) compromise encrypted VPNs, makes me wonder a bit (although I don't believe the allegations in the linked e-mail).

[0]: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462


Yeah, I remember that controversy.

As I recall those allegations prompted the OpenBSD to team do a full code audit of the IPSEC stack and, while they did find a few bugs, the conclusion was that there was no backdoor and that the bugs they found were not intentional. I think it's really hard to respond these sorts of allegations and I'm not sure we could honestly expect more than that.

I'm really not trying to insinuate that OpenBSD is compromised or untrustworthy. I guess I'm just musing that, even though I've used OpenBSD for ages & ages and I do try to keep up with things in the OpenBSD world, I just don't grok the OpenBSD community... and that makes me feel uneasy sometimes.


Yes, sorry, I wasn't intending to make any accusations or insinuations either. I've been following the Snowden/NSA stuff pretty closely, however, and even after reading the recent revelations WRT VPNs, I had forgotten about this OpenBSD IPSec controversy until you reminded me.

(JFTR, I run OpenBSD in production, trust it greatly, and never believed the allegations of FBI/NSA/etc. "tampering".)


I'm curious about the mention of shopping with a bootable usb stick. Has anyone else tried this? Where can you do such a thing? I'd be afraid of salesmen thinking I was "hacking" or something.


Explain what you are doing and why; if they don't want to let you try it, then you aren't interested in buying it. It's understandable that, out of ignorance, they aren't comfortable letting you do that... it's equally understandable that you wouldn't pay thousands of dollars for something you can't even play with for a few minutes in the store first.


> I gave my 3 month leave notice to my employer at the end of March 2014.

3 months? That sounds excessive. How much would your employer have been required to give you if they decided to let you go?


I left a job after 8 years. It took 3 months to do a thorough knowledge transfer (documentation and training).

It's a business-critical system so as a professional, I wanted to ensure my replacement's (and my former team's) success.

I left on very good terms.


I would guess they aren't required to give any notice. However, they are probably required to pay him at least 3 months of salary after they do. If they choose to pay without having the employee do something for them during those 3 months, it's their call.


Time or money?

If they were the ones ending the contract then I also would have to stay for 3 months (getting paid for it).

I would get no money if we would both agree to let me go on the first day. They didn't want me to leave and I was not in a hurry to go on the first day. So I stayed for the whole period and tried to do my best both for my co-workers and my employer.


Quite common in many European countries.


The company probably doesn't care about his reference.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: