OpenBSD Webzine Particular

OctOpenBSD

is a month devoted to the OpenBSD working system, celebrating its utilization, formally introduced by Solène on the 1^st of October. The occasion invited customers to share with the world their expertise with OpenBSD. Considerably subversively, it was by no means mentioned out loud what the end result of the occasion can be. It has been 4 weeks since OctOpenBSD started and this particular OpenBSD Webzine challenge is the results of that occasion. Evidently, within the wake of standard manipulations with the month of October, assume inktober or spooktober, preceeding OctOpenBSD was a humorous suggestion to launch a Halloween themed challenge on the finish of the month. Although the thought was entertaining, it will definitely advanced right into a venture celebrating OpenBSD and by extension its net-free insect daemon siblings. Whereas the outskirts of the free and open our on-line world nonetheless permeates intoxicated concepts in regards to the use-cases for BSD techniques, their customers have lengthy since recognized that these, who discover their paths crossed by spiked fish, daemons and dragonflies and fall below their spell, not often look again. The particular challenge hopes to point out you one thing new, helpful, humorous and scary, and maybe enable you to discover new authors and initiatives to comply with. Whether or not you swim with the fish within the C, or simply observe it from afar, saddled on the again of a penguin, this challenge is for you, all of the hackers, techno-wizards, the curious, the amateurs and the veterans of the cyberwars. Could you have got a nice learn by this particular challenge. And as at all times: RUNBSD.

The Particular OctOpenBSD challenge

“The fish got here to me in a dream”

Header pictures : Three pictures of prahou’s Puffy

7.4

-stable updates for the reason that final webzine challenge

001 (all architectures)

Repair a number of enter validation errors within the X server.

002 (all architectures)

Community buffer that needed to be cut up at sure size might crash the kernel.

Scary Tales
from
(not simply)
the
Aquarium

ghane: Booting up my Thinkpad X220 after a number of weeks of it not getting used. Taking longer than normal… I begin to get frightened: “Why have not it booted but?” Then: fsck output fills the entire display with cleared inodes, and so forth. Panic begins to construct. Is that this the tip of my SSD? All my non-backed-up knowledge! All my code initiatives are on that one… (I’ve after all git mirrors elsewhere, however they won’t have been synced up just lately.) Panic begins to construct whereas it’s effsucking! Then it lastly begins. I can log in. Recordsdata look good, and after I double-check which partitions have been affected, it was solely /tmp and /var. I begin to get relieved, however then notice that I may need had it hibernated with some necessary tabs in firefox. In personal mode. So these are gone, after all… nevertheless it might have been a lot worse.

gnemmi: Again after I purchased the Thinkpad E490 that I am typing this from, Dragonfly would not boot on account of a double fault in ACPI (usually such a me sort of recursion challenge on the stack) on account of AML bugs. So I instructed Dillon, and he had me go “reminiscence tackle by reminiscence tackle” on the lookout for symbols that appear like functions. He got here up with a patch so I might boot my new Thinkpad! The whole lot was performed from syscons!

simon: Many, a few years in the past I tweaked the bge driver on an OpenBSD manufacturing field to permit IPMI pass-through…

nameless BSD person: One night time I am making an attempt to SSH to my exterior IP tackle and get an SSH key warning! Huge panic of being hacked! However it was simply my ISP, who had a fiber modem/media converter factor that had an incorrectly configured distant administration ssh interface, so it stole the ssh site visitors! So, I used to be the truth is sshing to a different field, alone IP!

miah: As soon as upon a time, a pal and I have been putting in NetBSD on some outdated Apple {hardware}. We received by the set up, it booted up, however… networking wasn’t working. WTF? After scratching our heads and taking a look at every part we found the time on the system was set to a date earlier than the UNIX Epoch. We reset the {hardware} clock to be inside the epoch (and correct to the date) and out of the blue… we might ping!

loop0: working a mail server for an ISP and rapidly, the IMAP server stopped working for no purpose. Mapped it all the way down to a corrupted shared library file – the repair was to repeat the identical file from one other BSD that was working the identical model, nevertheless it took me a pair hours to search out that out and it did not assist that it was in the course of the weekend throughout my off-hours. And so it occurs – I had one-too-many drinks that day.

esoterik: Working netbsd/macppc on an outdated energy macintosh 8600/120 I needed to write OpenFirmware forth code blind to allow the show earlier than putting in it. The primary time I attempted it, it did not work and I believed that perhaps I bricked the machine! I ultimately managed to reset the firmware and do it accurately to allow the show. The machine had an excellent life offering NAT/DHCP/firewall/filesharing for some associates of mine.

Mount a Reminiscence File System (MFS) on OpenBSD

: matto

A Reminiscence File System (MFS) is a file system arrange in digital reminiscence, typically known as a “RAM-disk”. A MFS lives in RAM, and when it’s unmounted, the contents of the file system are misplaced.

Populating the MFS

OpenBSD has a really attention-grabbing mount possibility for reminiscence file techniques. That is the choice “-P”.

Within the man web page it’s described as “-P file”. That is what the person pages states:

If file is a listing, populate the created mfs file system with
the contents of the listing. If file is a block system, populate
the created mfs file system with the contents of the FFS file system
contained on the system.

Earlier than mounting the MFS, you arrange a listing tree, and name the mount_mfs command with the “-P” flag, pointing to the foundation of this listing tree. The MFS is mounted and instantly populated with the contents of the listing tree.

Setting the MFS measurement

The choice “-s” is used to set the scale of the MFS. With this selection, you maximize the quantity of RAM that the MFS can use. That is the scale in sectors, often 512 bytes. So, to mount a MFS of 10MB we have now to set a measurement of 20480.

Mounting the MFS

As normal we have now to state the system to mount. For MFS, we use swap. Allow us to say we have now a listing tree on our system in “/proto/check”, and we wish a 10MB MFS, mounted in /mnt.

This could be our mount command:

mount_mfs -o rw -s 20480 -P /proto/check swap /mnt

Or, as a line in /and so forth/fstab:

swap /mnt mfs rw,-P=/proto/check,-s=20480 0 0

Learn the pleasant guide

There are a lot of choices. The person web page for mount_mfs may be very precious. Learn it.

Why is this convenient

A MFS is helpful on techniques with read-only storage or techniques that run f.e., from an SD-card. This fashion we will scale back the variety of writes to the SD-card. An instance of that is to run /var/log in a SBC like a Raspberry Pi in MFS. We are able to arrange a minimal tree in /proto/var/log and populate the MFS with that utilizing the -P possibility.

For this the road in /and so forth/fstab could possibly be one thing like this:

swap /var/log mfs rw,nosuid,noexec,-P=/proto/var/log,-i=128,-s=16384 0 0

One other instance is a small house listing for such techniques, with a small listing tree containing f.e., .ssh/authorized_keys. Once more, this prevents writing to the disk.

A much bigger and maybe extra unique instance is to run your total house listing in your laptop computer in MFS. You possibly can setup all of your config information and so forth in a proto-directory, and use that to populate your property in MFS. This fashion you begin with a clear slate after each boot.

xconsole

: prahou

The xconsole(1) is usually a goal of undeserving hate amongst OpenBSD customers composing guides on easy methods to tweak the desktop expertise. Typically I come throughout sentences like: “subsequent let’s eliminate the ugly xconsole”, however I am right here to evangelise in protection of xconsole and to make you take into account in any other case, turning it right into a minimalistic message heart.

The basic factor to know is that any output redirected to /dev/console will seem within the xconsole window.

$ print "hello, xconsole" >/dev/console

Maybe it is already changing into obvious, how you would make the most of this.

Customization

If the xconsole is began robotically with xenodm, one can customise its look in /and so forth/X11/xenodm/Xsetup_0 with choices, or whether it is began manually, say by .xsession, one can customise it by .Xresources (and run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources) after logging in, earlier than beginning xconsole.

Working xconsole robotically, after logging in:

..
#in .xsession
xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
xconsole &
..

..
!Xresources
xconsole*background : pink
xconsole*foreground : black
..

Working xconsole manually:

This command will begin the xconsole with an orange background, white textual content and the fixed-20 bitmap font.

$ xconsole -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-*-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1 -bg orange -fg white

Some fundamental examples

cwm companion

Return the CPU temperature when urgent Tremendous+W:

#a script
#!/bin/sh
echo "The CPU temperature is: $(sysctl -n hw.sensors.cpu0.temp0)" >/dev/console

#in .cwmrc
bind-key 4-w /path/to/script

new electronic mail

For electronic mail purchasers that assist customized command execution on mail supply, for instance with the Mutt consumer, one might execute the next script by Muttrc:

#a script
#!/bin/sh
echo "$(date +%H:%M) New mail!" >/dev/console

#in Muttrc
set new_mail_command = "/path/to/earlier/script"

The chances are countless. Give xconsole an opportunity.

OpenBSD
gaming

Moonring

: thfr

Moonring is an homage to the early RPGs within the vein of ultima. It is 100% free on Steam and runs on OpenBSD utilizing the bundle love, model 11.

Use the nonetheless in alpha indierunner or just:

$ love-11 moonring.exe

godot

: op

Due to thfr, we’re making progress with godot4 on OpenBSD. After a tiresome battle with some C++ sorts mismatches, right here it’s!

Be part of the #openbsd-gaming group on IRC at libera.chat!

: z3bra

When the federal government determined to lock everybody down due to a worldwide pandemic, no person anticipated it to final quite a lot of months.

Folks relied on house supply an increasing number of, and firms constructed a self-sufficient community of automated farms and factories, to reply to the ever-growing demand: the CYBFARMs.

Inside 10 years the CYBFARM community expanded, and their over-exploitation turned the world right into a wasteland. Because the world grew to become extra hostile, CYBFARMs despatched spaceships across the globe, and began delivering every part there, forcing humanity to maneuver into house.

For these caught on the planet, gathering assets from these extremely secured factories grew to become a matter of life and dying. After years of scavenging the CYBFARM’s trashcans, hackers across the planet began wanting right into a extra sustainable strategy to get meals and provides, by hacking it.

We name them CYBER HUNTERS.

The CYB3R HUNT is a recreation of which you’re the hero.

Set in a dystopian future, you’re a CYBER HUNTER scavenging provides from the CYBFARM, a community of automated farms and factories managed by a robust synthetic intelligence. Work your approach by the puzzles set by the CYBFARM, earn “flags” to replace your rating, and uncover the Historical past of this world as your quest unfolds!

See Also

A have a look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive textual content mannequin

It is
 the
   LISPY
 GOPHER
SHOW!

Two serving to arms from BSD:
inetd and gophernicus

: screwtape

Networking is difficult to grok. A rollercoaster with out a security bar. And it’s a must to construct it your self, and your self and everybody you like goes to be on the maiden run. And you’ll’t select to not come.

Luckily I’m a recipient of how nice OpenBSD is. On all of the BSDs, inetd(8) web super-server is the anticipated norm, implying top quality dealing with of all that networking stuff, price limiting, determining what community connection is whose, what to run. It’s with this context my pal Paul Another person pioneers and shares lispy OpenBSD networking. Collaborative designed-accessible safety is a reputation of the sport, resulting in the safe, reliable and absolutely featured gophernicus(1) amongst gopher servers (pledge(2)d and unveil(2)ed).

I used to be having bother with enabling UTF-8 – what I had performed ended up… A message to the mailing listing taught me that I used to be setting my locale stuff too late, and over time serving to context to search out out that that commentary was the suitable and helpful factor to say. It is good to really feel midway competent with my pf.conf(5) from the tradition of sharing information and accessibility of security and energy.

This isn’t nearly OpenBSD. If something, juxtaposing the inventory bozohttpd(8) on NetBSD to OpenBSD httpd(8) principally received me snug with inetd(8) in any respect, and the pretty gentooian FreeBSD set up handbook on So You Need X (and OpenBSD for the faintest of coronary heart). Really this helped me port interlisp’s maiko digital machine construct scripts of which one existed then for FreeBSD to OpenBSD readily. So I’d even say the BSDs are a staff (together with difficulties, variations, disagreements) that make the lispy gopher local weather potential! (actually SDF the place the magic occurs primarily makes use of NetBSD).

screwtape is the host of the Lispy Gopher Present on aNONradio, dwell each Wednesday at 0UTC.

unix_surrealism

Puffer fish with tentacles operates a pc

: thedaemon

tiny daemons ship a pc element up a woman’s arm

: prahou

Do you make BSD artwork? Share it with the world by unix_surrealism!

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