This past weekend I upgraded my home firewall, wintermute, and one of my internal servers, aragorn, to OpenBSD 4.2. aragorn was running 4.1, and wintermute was kicking ass on 3.6!

wintermute is the first computer I ever owned; a Sony VAIO PCV-90. It’s a 90MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM and an (upgraded) 3600 RPM 8GB PATA drive. aragorn is an ancient PowerEdge 1300 I bought for a contract many years ago; it’s a two-way Pentium II 400MHz box with something like 128MB of RAM and a couple of SCSI disks.

The upgrade went fine, though I did get tripped up by the fact that the ftp-proxy in 4.2 is a total rewrite from 3.6, so I had to adjust my pf.conf with three special anchors and enable the ftp-proxy service. I also screwed up during the disk labeling and created a swap partition that was 500 sectors, not 500MB, so I keep running out of swap space, doh!

I use aragorn to monitor my wireless network traffic using an EDIMAX PCI card with a Ralink rt63 chipset. Let me just say that the rt63 support in 4.2 is just as unreliable as it was in 4.1 and 4.0; kismet lasts between 20 minutes and a day before a kernel panic. I could get a card with decent support, but I don’t want to accept defeat just yet.

Overall the upgrade was painless. I strongly recommend it. It’s practically the last credible OS that’s actively hostile to those trying to use it. Now that my grandmother can get Ubuntu going, a retarded ten year old can figure out Slackware, and a booze-addled pop star can probably get FreeBSD to boot, OpenBSD is the only niche OS that a n00b lamer can’t get to work. Whenever some little shit starts to get a little too full of himself coz he’s so over Micro$loth and does all his 1337 hax0ring on Ubuntu Gutsy, I find an OpenBSD install CD and a dare are all that’s required to reduce him to tears. Puffy p0wnz Tux every time.