OpenBSD Webzine #2

OpenBSD Webzine

TL;DR

• OpenBSD 7.0 released! (Announcement)
• No more packages updates for 6.9, syspatch will still be published
• No more syspatches for 6.8, it is now end of life and shouldn't be used any longer
• OpenBSD 7.0 song released as well!

New 7.0 release highlights

• doas is now asking password again on failure
• better hardware support (AMD, docks)
• faster (un)hibernate (ZZZ)
• faster wifi speed
• xterm has unveil
• base gcc removed on amd64
• bsd-reconfig to have a KARL compatible modified kernel
• new dhcpleased and resolvd superseding dhclient (no configuration change required)
• performance improvements for heavy loads on many cores
• Firefox isn't available anymore on i386 (because its compilation requires too much memory), seamonkey is a fine alternative
• Many other changes!

7.0-stable changes

• No syspatch yet.

Shell tips

OpenBSD 7.0 comes with a new utility named timeout to run a command and stop it after an user defined time. The man page is available for full information. While it was possible to achieve this in shell using a child process sleeping for some time and stopping the main process if it wasn't finished yet, timeout makes this job very easy. One simple real world use case would be a lazy site-to-site synchronization using a rsync job run every night when the Internet uplink can be fully used and stopped right before people will need the network. Such a scenario can be done with timeout 8h rsync -a /data/ remote:/data/ and started from a cron job at 00h00. In this case rsync would run at midnight and timeout would stop it at 8h00 if the job is not finished.

Interview

OpenBSD is great as an OS, but also for it's side projects. My mail server is using OpenSMTPD on OpenBSD. OpenSMTPD is very easy to configure compared to other MTA.

OpenBSD includes also a lot of various network tools that makes it a great choice for routers. At home I set up two APU2 in redundancy as personal router, as a commercial box replacement. Everything is included: CARP makes it easy to manage IP failover mechanism, of course the firewall pf, and other convenient tools like dhcpd and unbound.

BONUS: OpenBSD makes very easy to play beeper music, see spkr(4).

To play the first notes of Bach's prelude in C minor (BWV 934) (transposed to A minor to ease the writing), you need two OpenBSD boxes with beepers, and pipe the two following strings on /dev/speaker on both computers at the exact same time.

On box 1:

oll8
abc<e>b<d cbacea <d>cbdf<a g+f+eg+bd
caeac+a da>e<a>f<a bgdgbg cg>d<g>e<g
afefac gedegc <fedefc bcdbgf
egcgeg f>c<g>cac gcacb-c l4 acl2f
l4dl2o4b l4 g>e. l8dcbab cgl4ep

On box 2:

olo2
a>ae f<fp p64 >fdb e<ep p64
a>ag fed p64 <g>gf edc p64
fao3d ego3c p64 dfd g<gb p64
c<co2b- agf p64 edc l8 >acfedc
bdgfed ceag-fe l4 de<e l2c

Guy Godfroy

Reader comments

Nice! - jcs@openbsd

This is a very good idea! - anonymous

Going further

Artworks of the moment

Artwork originally published here.

On social media

Quote

Boredom is a powerful driving force. — solene@openbsd

Note from the editorial team

We are very happy of the feedback we got from the community for the first release. We will try to release a new issue every two weeks from now. We still have no bot to automatically report news on Twitter or Mastodon (this is often asked) but we have an Atom feed, bots will come later.

If you want to contribute, you can tell us how you use OpenBSD and why, we will be happy to publish your text.

Content under CC-BY-4.0. Artworks are under their own licenses.
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