Hey, OpenBSD. Haven’t seen you in a while, how’s life treating you? Say, you’re looking good these days. Guess Theo hasn’t been too rough on you, eh?
What? Windows? No, we broke up a long time ago. You knew that was never going to go anywhere, right? Everybody knew that, but I owed somebody a favor… anyway, that’s the past, baby.
So as long as we’re catching up, I’ve got this new project going, growing plants. I hear you have a bit of a green thumb yourself?
Listen, I have to run for a bit, but maybe I can Twitter you sometime?
I couldn’t stay away. OpenBSD just offers so much: a highly-audited base operating system, and a well-organized setup that just makes sense for sysadmins and hackers alike. So when my new virtual machine lab at home needed a host for a low-interaction honeypot setup, I immediately realized that it provided the perfect setup.
And honestly, who doesn’t love an update process that involves recompiling the entire operating system — kernel and userland?!
You don’t need to recompile the system to upgrade… you just upgrade.
Recompiling any of the system is entirely unnecessary – unless you need a specialized kernel with special options not available in the default kernel configuration.
You can just use the bsd.rd kernel and do an upgrade via ftp, http, or cd. Using either the release, or a snapshot which is compiled nearly every day.
When you do a non-release upgrade though, one must be aware that they will need to download the ports tarball, since their release version and ports version will be dependent on each other.
I should have been clearer: I’m referring here to updating (within the 4.8 branch) to apply errata. I haven’t seen a way to get binaries instead, though of course with so many years having passed I could well have forgotten.
Thanks for the reminder, because I still feel like I’m missing something obvious.
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