“In today’s Internet-centric computing world, networking components are a paramount feature of any system worth its salt. Easily falling into that category, OpenBSD contains strong network code and configuration interfaces which, with a little research and learning, can be put to powerful use. This series of articles aims to illustrate that with practical examples and direct application to real-world situations.” Read the article at OnLamp. In the meantime, patch 001 for OpenBSD 3.2 was posted.
Introduction to OpenBSD Networking
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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003: SECURITY FIX: November 6, 2002
An attacker can bypass the restrictions imposed by sendmail’s restricted shell, smrsh(8), and execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of his own account.
A source code patch exists which remedies the problem.
004: RELIABILITY FIX: November 6, 2002
A logic error in the pool kernel memory allocator could cause memory corruption in low-memory situations, causing the system to crash.
I know, Im as much of topic as the last post. But i must say, the crew delivers the fixes really fast! And Im really starting to like the way oBSD patches work!
regards
A simple clean article. But I don’t really see the big difference with Linux.
The author confirms this:
It is interesting to note that this method of configuration and network diagnostics differs only very slightly from that of Linux and other systems,[i]
but their users will primarily set this information using linuxconf, YaST, or other point-and-click tools.[/i]
But most people – who use Linux in the same way one would probably use *BSD – will use CLI and manually edit config files too, wouldn’t they?
In contrast to its sysv counterparts like Linux, OpenBSD has a very different way of controlling network interfaces and setting parameters. Other competing systems commonly use menu-based or graphical configuration utilities to make the administrator’s life easier.
I don’t see the link with SysV. I even thought not all Linux versions use it?
So Linux just offers more possibilities, but more code is a bigger risk of bugs of course.
BTW I never understood why a buggy tool like linuxconf uses its own database to store settings. This is really asking for trouble.
People who use this kind of Operating Systems don’t have a dialup connection i guess.
Why not an article about pppoe?
pppoe under OpenBSD is handled by a pppoe process which is called by ppp. I’ve been using OpenBSD exclusively for my DSL / dial-up firewall nat boxes for many years. I really like that even with “old” hardware like a 486/33+16M ram you can get a perfectly reasonable firewall easily capable of handling a house full of geeks.
Easy to follow instructions can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/adw/pppoe.shtml and more technically in-depth instructions can be found at: http://real.ath.cx/BSDinstall.html
ps. don’t forget to add
set redial 15 0
set reconnect 15 10000
so that whenever your dsl goes down the system will retry 10,000 times to reconnect before giving up.