Here’s another quick tip I’ve started using. Actually, I don’t normally run X with xdm and right now I can’t remember why I am on one of my boxes. But I am.

If you put xdm_flags=”" in your /etc/rc.conf.local, xdm will start automatically during the boot process. This is probably what you want nine times out of ten. But, that tenth time, it’s annoying when X starts and you didn’t want it to.
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This is really just a quick tip for (re-)starting daemons. Many converts from other operating systems complain about OpenBSD’s lack of an rc.d or init.d structure to quickly re-start/stop daemons. Admittedly, it was a slight annoyance when I switched years ago. But, I’ve gotten used to either looking up a daemon’s PID and killing it or using pkill(1). Then looking at /etc/rc.local to find the commands (and possibly /etc/rc.conf* for variables) to re-start the daemon.
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I’ve finally put up binpatches for sparc64 (to accompany i386 and amd64).

The cumulative sparc64 binpatch for Errata up to and including 002_openssh2 for OpenBSD 4.3 is also available.

Recently I had the privilege of publishing an eight part series of articles summarizing the recent Network Hackathon in Ito, Japan (n2k8) written by Mark Uemura (mtu@) with pictures from Tomoyuki Sakurai (sakurai@):

I was honored that Mark chose to send the articles to me to publish. It was truly a pleasure to work with Mark and share these summaries with the OpenBSD Journal audience.

Announcing YAIFO 4.3!

For the yaifo release accompanying OpenBSD 4.3, I decided to match OpenBSD’s version number. From this point forward, only one version of yaifo will be active. I will not backport updates for older versions of OpenBSD… who is “upgrading” to older versions anyway? So the current OpenBSD release and some recent version of -current will be supported.

You can download Yaifo 4.3 from SourceForge.