Secure Architectures with OpenBSD 90
| Secure Architectures with OpenBSD | |
| author | Brandon Palmer, Jose Nazario |
| pages | 515 |
| publisher | Addison Wesley Professional |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | Mathew Caughron |
| ISBN | 0321193660 |
| summary | Overview of BSD systems administration practices |
The godfather of OpenBSD, Theo De Raadt, was given space on the cover for a snarky comment, his blessing apparently, that the book "works in tandem with OpenBSD's manual pages. As a result it will help many users grow..."
This comment is apropos, since the OpenBSD man pages, beginning with man afterboot, are some of the best getting-started OS documentation available anywhere on the net. So it is perhaps fair that a certain justification be offered for texts on this topic. This book gives many example configurations, some shell scripts, and an organizational approach that are simply beyond what one can realistically expect from the online manual pages. So yes, Theo, this book is destined to help mere mortals grow in knowledge and skill.
One nice feature of this book is that its authors refer to Linux equivalents where appropriate, e.g., in terms of configuration and system file locations and names. This makes it an ideal text for a Linux sysadmin who wants to take OpenBSD for a test drive on the public network. Two chapters covering the OpenBSD packet filter (pf) and IPSec are the gems of this text and even advanced Linux users will likely benefit from alternative approaches to solving the same problems in the alternate universe of a different operating system.
The Start-Up and Shutdown chapter has a careful and complete walk-through of /etc/rc, the equivalent of Linux's inittab. I found this to be a useful part of the book, because the various parts of this script are not always obvious from a first read through of the shell commands. Palmer and Nazario break it down into 41 sections, each with a discrete purpose. After running through the primary boot process run commands script, a brief explanation is given of each of the seven default OpenBSD processes.
Although a close examination of a minimalistic OS setup shouldn't be foreign to any mildly accomplished sysadmin, even those of the Microsoft camp, reviewing exactly what it is that the process list tells you is always a worthwhile exercise.
Like other opera omnia, the work falls into three parts, in this case: I. Getting Started, II. Configuration and Administration, and III. Advanced Features. The index and contents occupy only 25 or so pages out of the total 500 and will readily direct the casual reader into an appropriate chapter of her choice. The index entry for chroot, for instance, will direct the reader to the section on the most commonly encountered chroot issue: dynamic content generation under apache.
Coverage of the X Window System is as minimal as it should be on a platform where the benefits derived from its use have little immediate relevance for client-side GUI applications. Mac OS X users might find the book helpful, since OpenBSD can be installed, for those willing to undergo the hassle of repartitioning, on pretty much all current hardware from Apple. Many of the recipes (apache, sshd, gdb, sudo) are directly relevant to their own Darwinian flavor. Windows users will also find various parts of this book useful, since the Services for Unix product from Microsoft/Interix is widely known to be based upon an early version of OpenBSD. Note: Microsoft here joins a very long list of BSD-license adherents in opposing the world of GPL functionality, whether this be for better or for worse. So although the audience for this text is decidedly directed at those who are taking the plunge with Puffy the Blowfish, other audiences will benefit from the insights into basic systems administration activities.
This text may also serve as potent advocacy for the systems-administration practices of BSD masters. For instance, the process of user removal from a Red Hat or Debian system versus OpenBSD's rmuser script. The lifecycle of user accounts on long-lived systems does, after all, have an end as well as a beginning, so this process deserves attention, though it may occur less frequently in growing systems it nonetheless deserves attention. Note also the detailed description of rate-limiting, packet-scrubbing, transparent filtering, and load-balancing features of the platform's packet filter. It hardly seems fair to criticize snort2pf for being immature when pf itself is a novel feature with the 3.4 openbsd kernel.
Backup and Housekeeping chapters are particularly well laid out, and include strategies, not merely howto recipes. This is an important and often-neglected body of sysadmin knowledge. The Towers of Hanoi strategy backup script that uses key-based authentication to remotely backup servers will likely be a useful tool for readers of the text who are administering a remote server that needs to have routine off-site transfer of its contents.
An explanation of how to modify the default send-only setup of sendmail starts off the chapter on mail administration. Unfortunately, there is no mention of how to set up certificates for secure IMAP or POP authentication. This is an obviously necessary part of administering an email server in which passwords are not sent in the clear and I consider it to be the most egregious omission of the book. Perhaps the authors don't see email services as a place in which BSD actively or effectively contributes. X.509 key generation is covered in the Apache section for SSL and then again under the IPSec chapter, but configuration of the popular mail serving daemons to use cryptographic authentication surely deserves a place in this text which claims "secure architectures" as its purpose.
The appendices may be worth the price of the book alone for junior sysadmins first discovering the joys of BSD. These include a walk-through of CVS basics, how to use patch and diff, kernel tuning with sysctl, how
to make sense of dmesg output, and the basics of core file analysis, interpretation of RAM dumps by gdb produced at crash time. If pkg file creation were given similar treatment, it may help the *BSD package system find a broader appeal.
If you take a "hold forever" approach to your investment in books, it might be worth waiting until the second edition. Brandon Palmer indicated in a posting to the OpenBSD journal that a rewrite of the book would
likely include greater coverage of spamd administration as well as BGP and some of the high-availability features in CARP. No timing on the second edition is available and it should be noted that everything in the text is appropriate for OpenBSD 3.4, i.e., the Robin Hood puffinfish, not the 3.5 Monty Python puffinfish. I'd expect that in two more release cycles, summer 2005, it will be time to ask around about an update to this text. The IPv6 chapter will likely need a dramatic rewrite by then since it gives helpful configuration parameters for a handful of the current crop of IPv6 v.6 applications. As it is, the book stands on its own: current and relevant. A year and a half is many generations of kernel compiles in Linux-land but only a few rounds of planned upgrades for the slower-paced approach of BSD admins.
Attention to documentation seems to be the distinguishing mark of a mature project. In that vein, the recent round of OpenBSD texts can be seen as an argument that the platform is destined for greater mainstream use. Listed here are a few other recent texts on OpenBSD. The most direct competitor to this text is Absolute BSD: Unix for the Practical Paranoid by Michael Lucas and Jordan Hubbard which has been available in bookstores now for more than a year. For greater detail on the packet filter, refer to Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF by Jacek Artymiak or OpenBSD Firewalling by Jorg Kutemeier which is so far only available in German. Brian Carter's text OpenBSD: Implementing the Secure UNIX Platform was not available to the reviewer at the time of this writing but is expectedly to be out in distribution shortly.
Daniel Hartmeier's quotation on the back cover stating that the book's organization will help you save time is right on target. Although time will tell whether this book becomes the de facto standard as a systems handbook or complete text on OpenBSD, it is a book you can confidently recommend to anyone who wants their first experience with OpenBSD to include learning the ropes of minimalistic, and therefore robust, secure server administration practices.
Postscript: Addison Wesley has made the index of the book available. You can purchase the Secure Architectures with OpenBSD from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
undeadly.org runs on thttpd... (Score:2, Informative)
Hopefully they've set up throttling [acme.com]...
Thinking of changing... (Score:2, Funny)
The joys of BSD... (Score:1, Funny)
I can't be the only one who read that as "...the joys of B&D, can I?
Re:Fact: *BSD is dying (Score:4, Informative)
Ask that same question of any IT security professional out there.
90% of the IT security people I know prefer using OpenBSD as their firewalls or VPN tunnel boxes. They are fast, reliable, and easy to work on.
And writing rulesets for pf is definetly MUCH easier than writing them for iptables.
Re:Fact: *BSD is dying (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fact: *BSD is dying (Score:2, Interesting)
Truth is, *BSD is far from dead. In fact, until this April, FreeBSD to quote Netcraft "...had without exception been the most common operating system amongst the top ten each month.". This quote was in relation to a most reliable web servers list. In April, 5 of the top 10 were Linux based systems and 4 were *BSD (the other 1 if your curious was Windows).
Re:Wait a minute- (Score:2)
good cook, eh? (Score:1)
timothy knows, she made him breakfast on many occasions.
Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm afraid I wasn't aware of Slashdot in the late 90s; I started reading in 2001.
How was Slashdot different in the late nineties? Would anyone care to compare the differences between then and now? I'm wondering if there were even any significant differences, or if this is just someone's misguided nostalgia.
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:1, Offtopic)
Well, the goatse guy wasn't around to torture us, but without the help of "Display Link Domains" you had to be more careful about clicking links in comments.
Slashdot does Archive early stories [slashdot.org].
What I remember best about Slashdot in the late nineties is that the Linux zealots were out in force, and would gleefully mod down anything I posted just based on distaste for my .sig :)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:2)
And there were lots of articles by some "Jon Katz" fellow that were supposed to be enlightening. *shudder*
Other than that, the same kind of drivel that fills the site today.
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:2)
All the comments for them were seething with loathing for John Katz. I remember thinking, "Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him so much?"
I have to admit that his articles weren't terribly interesting.
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:1)
this isn't my first nickname. i've been around since 1998.
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:1)
Katz was probably a necro-paedofile. i hate that SOB.
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:2)
Jon Who? Oh, yeah, that overbearing twerp who not only coudn't write, but felt he had to force his social aganda down everyone's throat in a totally inappropriate forum. I never did figure out why the editors kept the guy (at least at first, later on, they kept him because the outcry generated traffic and page hits.)
In those days, there really wasn't much a
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:2, Funny)
Lots more starry-eyed Linux advocacy.
People took ESR seriously, always cited his Bazaar book.
Witty trolls ruled the site, people bit on anything, no matter how ridiculous.
Story selection, karmawhoring, BSOD jokes, crapflooding, in-jokes, and so on were about the same.
Re:Slashdot in the Late Nineties (Score:2)
OT: Linux emulation on NetBSD (Score:3, Informative)
idiosyncrasies of operating systems (Score:5, Insightful)
I encounter a broad spectrum of BSD-derived and SYSV-derived operating systems, (as well as hybrids such as Solaris), and even in going back and forth between FreeBSD and OpenBSD can bring confusion, particularly with the very different way the two handle system startup scripts.
I would like to see somebody publish a book that does include information on using OpenBSD with X-windows as a secure desktop OS. Everybody focuses on the security of Open as a server OS for infrastructure, but it can be usable (if not user friendly, at least not user hostile) on the desktop.
Re:idiosyncrasies of operating systems (Score:3, Informative)
Step 2: Configure X
Step 3: Install desired Desktop environment or Window Manager from packages
I don't think that it would fill an entire chapter.
Re:idiosyncrasies of operating systems (Score:1)
Re:idiosyncrasies of operating systems (Score:1, Interesting)
Examples:
KDE --
OpenBSD is cool, new CD just came out (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OpenBSD is cool, new CD just came out (Score:2)
Personally, I dislike loadable modules, although my Linux kernels are modular, there are so many errors in the kernel config scripts that if you try to build a minimalist highly-optimised kernel, inc
Re:OpenBSD is cool, new CD just came out (Score:2)
CISC might be in fashion, but the CISC supermodels are all RISC wearing some fancy CISC frocks. ; )
As far as I'm concerned, a big turning point for major RISC dominance over CISC, came with the Pentium Pro.
The way I see it (not that it goes against your view), is that "CISC" is still largely "around" only due to it's unfortunate legacy in a very popular market.
Re:OpenBSD is cool, new CD just came out (Score:2)
But, as chip density increases and word size gets bigger, the CISC vs RISC situation changes. There is also the scenario that a RISC chip reaches a certain level of speed and complexity, then a CISC manages the same. They tend to chase each other, which is good for us end users, in means that both will improv
Hear hear! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hear hear! (Score:4, Informative)
OpenFirmware 3 or newer.
Re:Hear hear! (Score:1)
Re:Hear hear! (Score:1)
Well, it ain't OF3, so it isn't supported. Although there are a bunch of guys that are working on getting OldWorld machines supported (OF first, then CPU/device support).
Re:Hear hear! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hear hear! (Score:1)
Re:Hear hear! (Score:2)
No. Theo is a terrible packrat:
http://zeus.theos.com/deraadt/hosts.html [theos.com]
http://openbsd.org/images/newrack.jpg [theos.com]
Seriously though, they keep a wildly assorted compile farm, to periodically build/test everything. If you took back your hardware, you might not be supported for long :)
Damnit, cut and pasted the wrong URL (Score:5, Informative)
http://zeus.theos.com/deraadt/hosts.html [theos.com]
http://openbsd.org/images/newrack.jpg [openbsd.org]
Seriously though, they keep a wildly assorted compile farm, to periodically build/test everything. If you took back your hardware, you might not be supported for long :)
Re:Hear hear! (Score:1)
Deadly? (Score:4, Funny)
Picture of Theo De Raadt developing *BSD (Score:2, Funny)
What the hell? (Score:3, Informative)
What the hell? Two sentences and I'm already completely lost.
a good read (Score:1)
Re:[OT] Has anyone received the 3.5 CD yet? (Score:2)
Securing something with openBSD? (Score:1, Informative)
Ok, it's just one small detail of the several hundred. But the point is, OpenBSD
Re:Securing something with openBSD? (Score:1)