The OpenBSD developers have announced the availability of a new stable release of their security-oriented operating system. The new release, OpenBSD 6.1, introduces bug fixes, several new or improved hardware drivers and security enhancements to the system installer. “Installer improvements: The installer now uses privilege separation for fetching and verifying the install sets. Install sets are now fetched over an HTTPS connection by default when using a mirror that supports it. The installer now considers all of the DHCP information in file name, boot file-name, server-name, tftp-server-name, and next-server when attempting to do automatic installs or upgrades. The installer no longer adds a route to an alias IP via 127.0.0.1, due to improvements in the kernel routing components.“
Note: OpenBSD is a project released under the BSD 2-Clause license.
This license is recognized as free license, but is not copyleft.
P.S.
Creating a bootable USB key using a Un*x-like system:
Some older systems may not be able to boot from USB keys or require
changing boot priority. Check your BIOS settings if you run into
problems.
First, you will need to obtain a local copy of the bootable filesystem
image miniroot59.fs or install59.fs as described above.
You should use the signify(1) and sha256(1) commands to verify
the integrity of the images with the SHA256.sig file on the mirror site.
Next, use the dd(1) utility to copy the file to the USB storage device.
The command would likely be, under OpenBSD:
dd if=miniroot59.fs of=/dev/rsdNc bs=1m
where N is the device number. You can find the correct device number
by checking dmesg(8) when inserting the media.
If you are using another operating system, you may have to adapt
this to conform to local naming conventions for the USB key and
options suitable for copying to a "raw" disk image. The key
issue is that the device name used for the USB key *must* be one
that refers to the correct block device, not a partition or
compatibility mode, and the copy command needs to be compatible
with the requirement that writes to a raw device must be in
multiples of 512-byte blocks. The variations are endless and
beyond the scope of this document.
If you're doing this on the system you intend to boot the USB key on,
copying the image back to a file and doing a compare or checksum
is a good way to verify that the USB key is readable and free of
read/write errors.
Happy OpenBSD 😀
