The presentations from this year's EuroBSDCon held during late September in Lillehammer, Norway are now available on YouTube.

The program lists a number of interesting talks from seasoned OpenBSD developers such as Alexander Bluhm's assay of performance metrics on OpenBSD (cf. test results), and Stefan Sperling sharing the new Game of Trees git tool—more commonly referred to as got. But there are also many other speakers from various backgrounds presenting an assortment of topics ranging from Paul Vixie—the author of cron, and numerous RFCs—discussing DNS over HTTP (DoH) to an exposition on the basics of ZFS by Dan Langille …

OpenBSD's second of its biannual releases came early again this year with the release of OpenBSD 6.6 last week; while this post comes late.

For anyone who isn't yet aware, Theo's announcement came a few days ago on Thursday, October 17 to the relevant mailing lists.

Among the many changes are:

• sysupgrade(8): an automatic upgrade utility that performs release and snapshot upgrades with one command
• LibreSSL 3.0.2: a new release of the project's OpenSSL fork
• sshsig: a minimal signature and verification utility for ssh-keygen(1)
• OpenSSH 8.1: a new release of the project's ubiquitous ssh protocol implementation …

However, something else happened that summer which you won’t find in most history books… a Bell Labs researcher named Ken Thompson created the first version of Unix, which turned out to be one of the most important pieces of computer software ever invented.

This year, we celebrate 50 years of Unix! It was the summer of 1969 that Ken Thompson finished what came to be known as Unix over a three week period when his wife took his kid to visit the in-laws for summer. It wouldn't be hyperbole to suggest that what Ken accomplished literally revolutionised computing.

Bell Labs is …

You'll find that unlike macOS, ssh-agent doesn't automatically run at startup on OpenBSD, so you need to initialise it, which is quick and easy but somewhat abstruse.

First, don't do the seemingly obvious and simply run ssh-agent like so:

$ ssh-agent
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-MUxDCsIBiG5G/agent.38206; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=65950; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 65950;

Despite what you might intuit from the output, ssh-agent has only printed the shell script needed to initialise the daemon—it hasn't actually set the variables. Instead, we should evaluate the output, which will set both the SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID variables that allow ssh-add to communicate with …