Security Portal: OpenBSD 2.6 – new features

“Well it’s been a few months, and a new release of OpenBSD is
out (since December 1st 1999 actually) and I thought it was high
time I covered some of the new features and improvements. For those
of you unfamiliar with OpenBSD it is a flavor of UNIX based on BSD,
with one main goal in mind. Security. The entire purpose of
OpenBSD is to provide a fast, stable, and above all, secure
computing platform.“

“The most noticeable change in OpenBSD 2.6 is probably the
addition of OpenSSH. OpenSSH is SSH with all the proprietary
components ripped out, a lot of bug fixes, and the encryption is
all done externally via OpenSSL. OpenSSH ships with 2.6 and is part
of the default install, but due to the RSA patent in the US the
OpenSSL components are not available on the CD-ROM, so you will
need to download this from an OpenBSD ftp site (they could have
included OpenSSL on the CD-ROM, but then they would need to produce
one for the US, and one for international use, and there would be
other possible legal problems as well, so they opted not to).
During the install however you will be prompted to install it,
first which version (US or international) and then for the method
(FTP, HTTP, CDROM, etc), and then for the location….”

“OpenBSD has historically lagged behind systems like Linux and
Windows for driver support, which is a good thing in my opinion.
Linux and Windows support a lot of BAD hardware (i.e. estimates run
as high as 70% that NT crashes are due to bad drivers and software
problems), OpenBSD tends to support the better quality hardware,
because that is what the developers want. However OpenBSD has also
lacked support for some very popular hardware (especially in the
area of sound cards), so with the release of 2.6 a lot of drivers
have been added, and others improved.”

Complete
Story