Dave's OpenBSD Blog #3: More!

Page created: 2022-12-27
Updated: 2026-01-16

Go back to my OpenBSD page for more entries.

Six more chapters of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition (nostarch.com) complete. With a long hiatus between chapters 14 and 15.

Summary (in my words):

Indeed, the security chapter is short and painless. Honestly, it’s pretty comforting to see how few recommendations there are for securing OpenBSD. But that’s kinda the point, right? It’s secure by default.

The TCP/IP chapter is very important, but damn near put me to sleep. Same with the next networking chapter. Thankfully, the wireless connection on my laptop hasn’t caused any issues and I’d consider these either a crash course, a refresher, or a quick reference (pointer-style) when you need to do something specific with OpenBSD’s networking. It’s coherent and useful.

The software chapter was really good and I really like OpenBSD’s ports/packages system a lot. I would be jealous, but Slackware Linux has a very similar system (minus the automatic dependency management with the official Slackware tools). I will say that OpenBSD has a definite edge on Slackware regarding coherency, but I can live with a certain amount of chaos.

Particularly nice are the ability to see which packages were installed manually versus which ones were installed as dependencies (and which ones can be uninstalled without anything depending on them!). This is an area where default Slackware shrugs its shoulders.

Edit: I guess it would be nice to see an example of that! (I just re-discovered it three years later.) It’s the -m (for "manually installed") option of pkg_info:

phobos2:~$ pkg_info -m
bash-5.2.37         GNU Bourne Again Shell
colorls-7.6         ls(1) that can use color to display file attributes
fzy-1.0p1           fuzzy text selector for the terminal
git-2.50.1          distributed version control system
intel-firmware-20250812v0 microcode update binaries for Intel CPUs
inteldrm-firmware-20250708 firmware binary images for inteldrm(4) driver
iwm-firmware-20240410 firmware binary images for iwm(4) driver
password-store-1.7.4 simple password store
php-8.4.12          server-side HTML-embedded scripting language
php-pdo_sqlite-8.4.12 PDO sqlite3 database access extensions for php
quirks-7.103        exceptions to pkg_add rules
rsync-3.4.1         mirroring/synchronization over low bandwidth links
ruby-3.4.2          object oriented script language with threads
sqlite3-3.49.1p1    embedded SQL implementation
stow-2.4.1          manages software package installations with symlinks
the_silver_searcher-2.2.0p2 code searching tool, with a focus on speed (ag)
tree-0.62           print ascii formatted tree of a directory structure
vim-9.1.1265-no_x11 vi clone, many additional features
wget-1.25.0         retrieve files from the web via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP

It’s so nice to have this list of installed packages!

The tour of /etc is excellent. This is where Michael Lucas’s experience really shines and the extra commentary on the contents of /etc is one of the highlights of Absolute OpenBSD for me so far. It was also interesting to see how much the 2013 book differs from my 2022 install. Most of it is the same, but it’s nice to see which things have changed. Clearly OpenBSD is not afraid to jettison old cruft and adopt new things. (Sorry, I’d give examples but I didn’t take good notes during this chapter and it’s been a couple weeks since I did the tour on my machine.)

Finally, the maintenance chapter is really good. I wish I had this information for Slackware Linux. Again, everything is as coherent as it can be given the weird Unix historic baggage that just about every Unix-like has to deal with. With Slackware, you just bring your own Unix knowledge or read some wiki content for 2017 or find some forum answers.

Nothing too exciting. I added and removed packages and explored the pants off of /etc (and let that metaphor fill your brain with delightful images).

I’d love to close out this guided book tour of OpenBSD this year (2022) to get a thing off my plate going into the next year, but we’ll see if that happens. :-)

See you next episode, starting with demons! Er, daemons.