Contributed by grey on from the third party endorsements dept.
Here's a positive review of OpenBSD 3.6, even recommending getting the CDs His summary is "what strikes me most about OpenBSD in general is the professional manner in which it is developed and released."
The review may be found here.
(Comments are closed)
By almeida (66.31.180.15) on
By Anonymous Coward (65.42.15.242) on
By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
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By Brad (216.138.200.42) brad at comstyle dot com on
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By LJ (62.59.31.68) lj@2u2.nu on
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By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
That dmesg is obviously from 3.6, but the hardware hasn't changed since I ran 3.5. em0 was the one giving me trouble.
Henning e-mailed me after I posted to misc@ about it. He said the issue was fixed in CURRENT, and suggested I upgrade. I wasn't comfortable doing that, but CURRENT has since become 3.6-release, and it is indeed fixed.
With 3.5 a "ping -f" from my Linux box would bring down the OpenBSD machine in seconds. Sometimes to a debugger prompt, sometimes causing a spontaneous reboot. With 3.6 I left it on all night without noticing any ill effects. Thus, I a) consider it to have been a bug and b) I consider that bug fixed.
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By Anonymous Coward (216.238.113.174) on
You can't comaplain about the level of support you received. :-)
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By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
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By Nick Holland (68.43.115.33) nick@holland-consulting.net on http://www.openbsd.org/faq/
3.5 was much more picky about this, that was deliberate. If this was your problem, your system was broke before, we just let you know in no uncertain terms this time. Not like I and other people hadn't been saying "This is NOT the right way to set up your disks" for years.
Reminder: OpenBSD 3.5 was the first release to support booting on i386 with a root partition that was not fully within the first 8G of a disk. As long as the boot code was being worked on, lots of new features went in, including a check on installboot so it would not put a PBR where only the MBR should be.
All things considered, considering how few computers (I can't think of any, actually) that the all-new boot code broke, it's really incredible. I did a huge amount of testing of that code before it was shown to the general public (one of the downsides of having a huge repository of OpenBSD-capable i386 systems!), and I can tell you that it basically worked from the first version Tom showed me. Incredible work by Tom Cosgrove, and great design from Toby Weingartner (which eliminated the translation issues that plagued the old boot loader when moving a hard disk from machine to machine.
There is nothing which should have prevented 3.5 from reading a healthy 3.4 file system, I feel fairly confident in saying your machine was broke in some way.
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By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
I'm disinclined to accept that explaination without further evidence, as it would imply that my old OpenBSD disks were broke, my USB disk was broken, and another unrelated hard drive was broken. That's not impossible, but it's unlikely enough that I'm not going to assume it's the case.
My pre-upgrade system had two hard disks. I couldn't read any filesystem on either with 3.5 (or 3.6), but the partitions appeared correct with fdisk. That was a fresh install from 3.4, and I told fdisk to use the whole disk for OpenBSD, so I think it's unlikely that I screwed up. Also, the system was (and is) unable to mount either a backup hard drive I move from place to place that's one giant ext2[1] partition or either of the filesystems on my USB key (one FAT32 and one ext2).
In practice, I don't care because my Mac and my Linux box can read these, and it's a lot easier to put drives in these machines (they're not in the crawlspace). However, even if these other OSes are creating screwed up filesystems or partitions (easily possible), there's not much point in having FAT32 or ext2 drivers if they can't read partitions created by other OSes.
When I get home I will post with error messages I get with the USB disk.
1-The only thing all of my *nixen can read.
By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
I remain less than thrilled at being unable to mount the filesystem, but I'm not sure it's not my fault and figuring this out will probably take longer than it's worth.
btw, the dmesg for the machine (same hardware, now 3.6) is higher up in the thread.
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By Anonymous Coward (213.84.84.111) on
By Anonymous Coward (68.125.27.117) on
Someone who knows what they are talking about suggests you do something and you don't do it?
Let me repeat; -current is just as reliable as -stale and -release. -current is used on production systems with NO PROBLEMS!
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By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
Let me repeat; -current is just as reliable as -stale and -release. -current is used on production systems with NO PROBLEMS!"
My lack of skills, my risk: my decision.
The risk of sticking with 3.5-stable was low: It didn't crash under normal loads. The external network was too slow for anyone to crash the machine, and all the users on the LAN could just as easily have yanked the power cable.
The risk of upgrading to -current was high: Even if the code was bug free, I was still perfectly capable of fucking it up myself. From what Nick has said in this thread it seems likely that the problems I had upgrading 3.4 -> 3.5 were completely my fault, so this is clearly possible.
I'm still new enough at this that I can't safely assume I won't screw up given the opportunity. Given that I was using Windows a year ago, with OpenBSD on my spare machine so I could poke around when I wanted to experiment, I think my progress has been satisfactory. However, I am no expert.
By tedu (67.124.88.142) on
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By Anthony (68.145.111.152) on
By Anonymous Coward (66.91.134.210) on
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By Brad (216.138.200.42) brad at comstyle dot com on
By Simon (217.157.132.75) on
There are nice things in the base system, but it isn't enough for many users, they need the port tree to provide easy access to third party software.
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By Brad (67.70.23.103) brad at comstyle dot com on
I don't see you pointing out any real problems. The point of your post was?
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By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on
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By Simon (217.157.132.75) on