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BSD Leftovers
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Miod Vallat ☛ The scariest boot loader code
The HP machine used to have two 425MB SCSI internal disk drives, but one of the disks was dying, and the system would not come up multiuser without some manual interaction to bypass the failing filesystem check and let the system run in a somewhat degraded mode. But there was no intent to buy a replacement disk, and as long as the X terminals could still boot, we would happily forget about this machine until the next power outage, a rare event which would suddenly remind every X terminal user and every system administrator that this machine existed.
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Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1152, 15 December 2025
Ultimately, I decided to try OpenBSD for my second trial. I've used OpenBSD for brief periods in the past and generally like the platform's keep-it-simple approach, the clear documentation, and the lack of clutter in the filesystem. It's nice to have an operating system which doesn't use a lot of resources by default and which can be managed using text-based configuration files. Also, I knew OpenBSD could operate as a desktop system, even if I hadn't spent a lot of time using in that capacity.
The OpenBSD project provides new releases every six months and upgrades across major versions should be straight forward, making long-term use of the operating system a low-maintenance affair.
The latest version of OpenBSD, 7.8, became available in October. The install media was provided as a 773MB ISO file. I downloaded it and jumped into my new experiment.
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[Old] UNIX Log ☛ NetBSD Most Secure OS ever – UNIX Log
Running on almost twenty different architectures, and easily portable to others, NetBSD gained its reputation as the most portable operating system on the planet. While that may indicate high quality code, the ever demanding networked world cares about more than just that. Over the past year, NetBSD evolved quite a bit in various areas. This paper, however, will focus on those aspects relating to security.