OpenBSD specific links

Essential

References invaluable for any OpenBSD user. All people that have an interest in open source and/or UNIX should at least once try to be an OpenBSD user. Many of you will get stuck when you do.

• www.openbsd.org - OpenBSD main site
• OpenBSD FAQ
• OpenBSD Ports
• undeadly.org - Main OpenBSD news. See e.g. How OpenBSD is made.
• Absolute Openbsd: Unix for the Practical Paranoid (Book) - A very good introduction that you will use for a long time.

General information

• FreeBSD - The unknown giant
• Dru Lavigne Blog
• Dru’s BSD Events Twitter feed
• BSD News - Alive again
• BSD vs. Linux Holy war
• calomel.org
• Puffy Flock
• Polish Linux: OS Comparison
• http://www.openbsd101.com/
• OpenBSD Support
• BSD Confereces channel on YouTube
• SysAdmin Tips from PreFetch
• KernelPanic Guides
• OpenBSD guides (svenska)
• OpenBSD.se
• BlogFish
• www.weirdnet.nl
• Roqefellas
• sial.org how-to
• Polarwave’s OpenBSD Tips and Tricks
• IBM present OpenBSD 4.3
• NetBSD and Linux for Embedded Systems
• Hubertfs NetBSD Blog
• Phoronix Linux, xBSD, Solaris performance comparison
• Linux performance: is Linux becoming just too slow and bloated?
• Edd Barrett blog
• DragonFly Digest - Also contains general xBSD information.
• BSD cognoscenti on Linux and Linus compares Linux and BSDs
• devio.us - Free OpenBSD shell account
• Interview Dru Lavigne
• OpenBSD Commit statisitics
• Life is Puffy
• OpenBSD 4.8 Review by Distrowatch
• Some notes on Arch Linux - From a guy with BSD perspective. I always thought that Arch borrowed much of the philosophy from OpenBSD.
• Chess Griffin Blog - OpenBSD, Arch etc. user that previously ran Linux Reality podcast.
• huggpunkt.org - Swedish OpenBSD related blogg
• Meet Martin Husemann And NetBSD - Martin is obviously no friend of OpenBSD, but still interesting.
• bhyve.org - BHyVe and BHyVe Call for testing
• TuM’Fatig I.T. for the masses, by Joel Carnat - Many OpenBSD oriented guides
• micro systems - Company by Mark Balmer an OpenBSD (now NetBSD) developer.
• nixCraft OpenBSD topics
• Crowding out OpenBSD
• BSDAnywhere - Live CD

Fun

• Voice Chat on OpenBSD
• Port of Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection

Ports

• UsefulPorts
• How To Create a OpenBSD port
• Portstutorial
• OpenBSD TeXLive porting guide
• OpenIDS - OpenBSD based distribution for intrution detection using Snort.
• Epitome - a “deduplication” engine writted for OpenBSD
• Chromium on OpenBSD - Port created by Peter Valchev working in Google.
• WIP Ports
• M:Tiers stable packages

Special projects

• Alix Firewall
• Bowlfish - minimal OpenBSD install distribution (updated for OpenBSD 4.5)
• FreeBSD on ARM architectures
• TrustedBSD
• dmesg database
• Porting the Hammer FS to Linux - Hammer which could be ported to *BSD. A FreeBSD port is at least on the idea state.
• BhyVe Hypervisor - FreeBSD hypervisor which could be ported to xBSD.
• BinpatchNG - Also see binpatch-ng at M:tier

Installation and Configuration

• GSM / GPRS / UMTS with OpenBSD
• Binary patches for OpenBSD
• Bandwidth management for ADSL with OpenBSD
• Soekretis Setup
• Soekretis Setup 2
• IPSec Setup
• hoststated and load balancing
• Diskless Install How to
• Howto clone OBSD install
• CVS+SSH+OpenBSD
• OpenBSDBinPatch
• Running and tuning OpenBSD network servers
• Greylisting with PF
• Monitoring PF firewalls for health and performance
• RemoteCrashManagement
• Cleaning up the backyard
• Interview with Theo from 2000
• OpenBSD LiveUSB
• Asterix On OpenBSD
• The book of PF (Book)
• 16Systems - Various guides for e.g. partition encryption using both vnconfig and softraid. See also Softraid: OpenBSD’s virtual HBA for further description of softraid.
• OpenBSD SNMP MIBs. Also see snmpd in base. From OpenBSD 5.2 Net-SNMP should be replaced by snmpd(8).
• Server Failover For the Cheap and Forgetful
• Alix router med OpenBSD - Swedish guide to install OpenBSD 5.0 on Alix board. Also see Mark’s OpenBSD Router Guide.
• Next Door Laboratories
• Setting up full disk encryption in OpenBSD

OpenBSD internal architecture

• OpenBSD developmer events - Check out the presentations!
• OpenBSD Kernel Overview
• Driver Architecture in OpenBSD
• Driver Architecture and Implementation in OpenBSD
• Using OpenBSD Security Features to Find Software Bugs
• SU+J code - Include in OpenBSD?
• OpenBSD Hardware Sensors: Environmental Monitoring and Fan Control - Hardware sensors, ACPI, IPMI etc.
• Experiences with kqueue and Kqueues for Fun and Profit - kqueue event notification.
• Porting OpenBSD to Fiasco - L4OpenBSD
• Finding Bugs in Open Source Kernels using Parfait - Static code analysis applied on Linux, Solaris and OpenBSD. Also see Parfait project page.
• rthreads: A New Thread Implementation for OpenBSD - rthreads is finally under way for OpenBSD 5.2.
• Choosing between portability and innovation - Problems with portabilitly between BSD’s and Linux.
• Improving Host Security with System Call Policies
• GNOME and/or systemd
• bsdtalk221 - Xenocara with Matthieu Herrb - Describes OpenBSD build system for X.org, Xenocara. Discuss current user land implementation of KMS. Mesa is not supported.
• About ZFS and Hammer on OpenBSD

Commercial Solutions based on OpenBSD

OpenBSD has a lot of commercial users but here I have listed a number of special interest to me.

• A company, Echothrust Solutions, using OpenBSD for everything from servers to desktop. The company setup is interesting for all of us using OpenBSD.

  • Backend (Part1)
  • Workstations (Part2)
  • Network (Part3)
  • Conclusions (Part4)

• Xenios WLAN gateway SW in OBSD

• Echothrust Blog

• COMIXWALL - Firewall solution based on PF and other tools. TechWorld Review(Svenska)

• BSDTalk 151 - OpenBSD used by Frantic Films in many applications.

• OpenBSD in Financial Industy

• OpenBSD at Santa Cruz University

• Firewall Failover with pfsync and CARP

• http://rgnets.com/

• http://www.fatport.com/

• Loopia Blog - One of the best webhosting companies in Sweden are using BSD OS for most of their services.

• RTMX O/S - a product extension to OpenBSD with emphasis on embedded applications. Extentions has been donated back to standard distribution. Soon we a real-time support on OpenBSD! See Solaris Real Time Foundations as comparison.

• SemiHalf - Company specializing in porting FreeBSD to embedded architectures e.g. ARM.

• Spam Cheetah - Spam filtering solution from India

• T2 SDE - Linux distribution creation inspired mostly by OpenBSD. T2 is based in Berlin. Also see Arch which also use concepts from xBSD’s.

• OpenBSD and Linux: Insights into a migration project at the INI

• Calyptix Firewall

• Profense by ArmorLocic - Firewall product is based on OpenBSD.

• NetClean - Based on FreeBSD/Linux

• Helion Prime - Russian software development company

• Bytemine

• CoreNAS (previously FreeNAS)

• Kanebox - Kanebox is a firewall/router/WAP/IPS replacement, running OpenBSD and written in C and Lisp.

• Enki Multimedia

• BSDLabs - Swedish hosting company

• M:Tier - Fortune 500 enterprise customers

• pfSense - Firewall appliance based on FreeBSD and OpenBSD pf filter

• Halon - Swedish firewall appliance products based on OpenBSD. See e.g. Halon SX-101. See comparison with similar products Halon Comparison.

• Netflix Appliance based on FreeBSD

• Cyphertite - Commercial solution based on Epitome.

• Thin Client by M:tier, undeadly article and more about M:tier

• GAINFRAME - provider of BSD friendly hardware. Also see related undeadly artivcle.

General UNIX

• TTYs and X Window now and then interesting anthology that explains the architecture of UNIX.