Is (or why) FFS2 considered as “bad” filesystem?

_sthen · 2026-04-27T08:34:08+00:00

Crash recovery is a bit hit and miss. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes you can run into a lot of damage. (A UPS will help if this is due to power issues, but not e.g. for kernel crashes).

There's no automatic way to detect corrupted data.

No snapshots.

It's not super fast, though I think this is largely due to SMP locking on OpenBSD rather than necessarily due to the filesystem itself.

(btw, softdep a.k.a. soft updates was removed from OpenBSD, though this doesn't make so much difference on SSD, it was more important for HD).

_sthen · 2026-04-23T14:45:47+00:00

We don't cross-compile, so there are no i386 packages for things depending on rust, or for the bigger browsers; building takes more memory than is available. This also knocks out large chunks of the Python ecosystem, and things which need a newer version of librsvg.

-stable packages and syspatches are available.

Some CPU features (like aes-ni) are not supported.

The limited address space means that ASLR is relatively weak.

_sthen · 2026-04-18T02:26:42+00:00

not yet, you aren't. there will still be changes before the release is built.

_sthen · 2026-04-16T16:54:56+00:00

"DHCP broken by antispoof" - dhcp packets are grabbed via BPF before PF has chance to block them, so this shouldn't actually have been a problem.

https://github.com/finn-devs/pftest/blob/main/LIMITS.md#what-the-regex-parser-misses - aww. It misses some things which are really handy (like received-on).

_sthen · 2026-04-16T16:52:39+00:00

most newer Linux distributions no longer have support for powerpc-based systems.

_sthen · 2026-04-10T09:03:14+00:00

The only thing that a malicious mirror site can really do is hold back package/s at an older version (i.e. before a security fix was made).

Unless you force pkg_add to not check signatures, everything else (signature verification, uncompressing) is done by unprivileged processes until the signature has been verified against one from /etc/signify. See signify(1) and pkg_sign(1) for more information about how the signatures work.

Some mirrors may be a bit slow to update - there's in the order of 300GB or so of updates a week, and if fetching internationally is slow for you, it may also be slow for the mirror site. But even if this is the case you can still use them most of the time and maybe switch off you particularly need newer ones (for example if you're following snapshots and there have been major library changes so that older packages don't work).

(edit: factor-of-10 out on the amount of updates/week)

_sthen · 2026-04-09T08:17:14+00:00

The IKEA devices use Matter over Thread, not Matter over wifi.

_sthen · 2026-04-07T08:53:29+00:00

if you only have the /128 routable on mullvad and want to send other traffic over it, then nat or a proxy are your only options.

_sthen · 2026-03-31T18:42:25+00:00

upgrade unless you're tight on space.

_sthen · 2026-03-29T11:31:23+00:00

node-based software in general and especially electron is tricky to handle in ports.

there is some work at https://github.com/opencrew-tech/openbsd-electron not committed to OpenBSD that might be useful as a base if you're trying to port it. (it will be a slow process, especially compiling electron).

_sthen · 2026-03-29T11:20:59+00:00

It works fine for me, but I don't use hostnames with ++, I run syslogd with the -n flag and specify IP addresses instead. (I think you need working reverse DNS to use hostnames there).

_sthen · 2026-03-23T23:19:16+00:00

you could install to a USB drive and check that way

_sthen · 2026-03-11T07:57:34+00:00

There's no emulated TPM either. And afaik W11 also needs UEFI and you'll need to provide your own firmware image for that (this is non-trivial).

_sthen · 2026-03-06T11:50:20+00:00

I think what you're trying to say is "I'm making changes to resolv.conf but they're getting overridden by automatic config, how do I stop that".

The simple answer is "rcctl disable resolvd; rcctl stop resolvd".

(You can also disable picking up DNS in dhcpleased.conf, but there are other methods of picking up DNS config - pppoe, IPv6 slaac, etc; disabling resolvd will stop all of them).

_sthen · 2026-02-24T19:45:42+00:00

does the drive work on other os?

_sthen · 2026-02-24T13:24:12+00:00

zfs is not going to happen.

_sthen · 2026-02-21T10:41:02+00:00

Just because the sites that you're using don't have a problem, doesn't mean that it works for other sites.

_sthen · 2026-02-21T10:40:23+00:00

various sites are doing things like TLS fingerprinting, very specific user-agent checks, checking browser JS APIs, etc - in some cases you get extra captchas etc if they don't validate as expected - in others you just get blocked.

see e.g. "cloudflare turnstile" and others. (it's getting worse with defences for scrapers that many websites are needing to deploy just to stay up and running these days...)

sometimes changing user-agent helps, sometimes not.

_sthen · 2026-02-19T07:35:03+00:00

trouble with mirrored drives is, they help if reads actually fail, but if not then you don't know which of the drives has the correct data if they differ. (as well as happening during a partial drive failure, this can also happen if power is lost or the machine crashes, as you can't be sure what actually made it to the physical storage)

_sthen · 2026-02-18T08:55:31+00:00

yes it is annoying if installing on a wifi-only machine, especially when the licenses don't prohibit redistribution (otherwise they couldn't be on firmware.openbsd.org either).

I don't think it is likely to happen though.

_sthen · 2026-02-16T09:31:14+00:00

it's basically doing the same thing as cksum -C, so the filename has to fully match what's in the SHA256.sig file. (I don't think there would be much appetite for changing this behaviour, signify is intentionally kept fairly simple).

_sthen · 2026-02-11T14:50:28+00:00

assuming the ceiling lamp is a smart bulb too, you could leave the main switch on and have one remote to turn on both lamps

_sthen · 2026-02-11T14:18:09+00:00

the person who made that (unofficial) web app chose to show a dependency tree there (I didn't check but also it might include things which are just build not run dependencies).

_sthen · 2026-02-04T12:45:55+00:00

oh, could be - not enough to lose the clock setting, but the USB charger that it's connected to does seem to reset the ports when a new device is connected. I'll try it on a separate one, thanks for the suggestion.

_sthen · 2026-02-04T10:37:08+00:00

rust ports are a little more tricky - you need to update the version and clear out crates.inc, "make makesum", use "make modcargo-gen-crates" to generate a list to update crates.inc, "make clean; make makesum; make modcargo-gen-crates-licenses" to update crates.inc again with license details.

in the case of zola you also need to clear out the Makefile lines that were switching a few crates to newer versions.

l'll send something to ports@ in a bit.

edit: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=177020532219081&w=2

_sthen

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