Niall's Weblog

OpenBSD 4.5 was released the other day. I upgraded one of my servers and workstations to the new release, from 4.4-current and 4.4-release respectively. Mostly, things have gone pretty smoothly, as is usually the case with OpenBSD. The new release has plenty of incremental improvements, with the developers gradually polishing and refining things such that [...]

I’ve used Mutt as my mail reader (aka MUA) for years. My personal mail goes through OpenBSD’s greylister, spamd(8) which cuts out a very large portion of spam. However, my work email account, and also any personal account subscribed to mailing lists, still get a fair bit of spam. So some additional filtering is needed. [...]

Most people are probably familiar with the UNIX utility, mkdir(1). The mkdir utility makes directories (surprise surprise). There is a matching mkdir(2) system call available in the POSIX standard C library. The usage is pretty straightforward – how ever, the command-line executable, mkdir(1), supports a useful option -p to “create intermediate directories as required”. Its [...]

For quite a long time now, OpenBSD has, among numerous exploit mitigation techniques, had a very strict mmap()-based malloc() implementation. Recently re-written by Otto Moerbeek, it is even harsher now. I find that this feature makes OpenBSD one of the best platforms to develop C programs on. If you have a double-free, use-after-free, off-by-one, or [...]

Just committed the bits for Unworkable to build under Windows, using Cygwin. The code changes were pretty minimal – specifically, Cygwin lacks getaddrinfo() – however this was a relatively simple matter of bundling the KAME implementation (which is BSD licensed) in the source tree and building and linking with that if it wasn’t found. The [...]