Mailing Lists

You can find a variety of mailing lists dedicated to OpenBSD, run by both the official OpenBSD project and various third parties. We'll discuss what lists exist and how to use them to best advantage.

The Main Mailing Lists

OpenBSD has quite a few mailing lists for public use. All mailing lists are accessible to the public. Some of the lists are a little more private than others, however. Each major hardware platform has a mailing list, but discussion on those lists is strictly limited to people who are either actively developing that platform or sending bug reports for that platform. They aren't of much use to the average OpenBSD user, unless you're tracking problems in a development version of OpenBSD. Here, we're just going to cover the mailing lists that are useful for the average user.

• <[e-mail]>: This is a very low-volume, moderated list that only has important news about the OpenBSD Project. This list receives at least one message every six months, when a new version of OpenBSD comes out.

• <[e-mail]>: This mailing list contains security announcements for OpenBSD. When the OpenBSD team learns of a security flaw in OpenBSD, they post a notification and a fix to this mailing list. If you are running an OpenBSD machine plugged into the Internet, you must subscribe to this list. We'll see more about this in Chapter 14.

• <[e-mail]>: This list is for general OpenBSD discussion and user questions. While this is the "miscellaneous" list, it still has strict rules for acceptable messages. We'll discuss how to usefully post to an OpenBSD mailing list later this chapter.

• <[e-mail]>: This list is for in-depth technical discussions, such as code discussion and protocol analysis. This is a useful list to subscribe to, but you probably don't want to post here unless you are a developer. As a good rule of thumb, if your post to <[e-mail]> doesn't contain a code diff, you're on the wrong mailing list.

Subscribing to a Mailing List

OpenBSD uses the Majordomo mailing list manager. To subscribe to a mailing list, send a message to <[e-mail]> containing the following:

 subscribe mailing-list-name 

For example, to subscribe to the misc list, you would send

 subscribe misc 

OpenBSD's majordomo requires that all subscription requests be verified. You will receive a message of instructions back. Be sure to follow those instructions to complete your subscription!

Other Official Lists

If you want to become more deeply involved in the OpenBSD community, you might well wonder what other official OpenBSD mailing lists exist. The best way to learn about the lists that currently exist is to ask the mailserver; it'll tell you. Just send a message to <[e-mail]> containing the single word:

 lists 

You will receive a reply giving the name of each OpenBSD mailing list and its purpose.

Note

If you want to learn more about the OpenBSD mailing list manager and what other information you can get, send the single word "help" to <[e-mail]>.

Non @OpenBSD.org Mailing Lists

You can find a fairly complete list of all OpenBSD-related mailing lists hosted by third parties at http://www.OpenBSD.org/mail.html. This includes a variety of lists in languages other than English, as well as some very narrow, special-purpose lists. One particular mailing list I highly recommend for less experienced UNIX administrators is the OpenBSD Newbies list. To subscribe, send a message to <[e-mail]>.

Using the Mailing Lists

Now that you have a subscription to an appropriate OpenBSD mailing list (hopefully misc, and definitely security-announce), you can go and ask all your questions on that mailing list. You won't make any friends, though, and you may even be told to shut up and go away. That's mainly for two reasons: discussion topics are permitted only within a narrow range, and the lists are there to be read and not posted to.

Unless you're in a truly unique situation or really on the bleeding edge of OpenBSD development, someone has probably struggled with your problem before. They've probably posted a message to the mailing lists before. They probably got an answer. That answer probably hasn't changed. The quickest way to get an answer to your question is to find that previous message. That's where the mailing list archives come in.

You can find a variety of mailing list archives on the Net at places such as Geocrawler (http://www.geocrawler.com/). By far, the easiest way to get access to the mailing list archives is to use a powerful search engine such as Google. Carefully choosing your search terms will get results very quickly.