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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]