The Code Is Fine. What’s Wrong with You?

Systems administrators rarely have trouble with OpenBSD itself; the software runs, and it runs well. Most problems arise from their own understanding, or lack thereof.

When a program behaves unexpectedly, the problem is usually a gap in your expectations or understanding, and the OpenBSD community expects that you will work to improve your own knowledge so that you can make the system meet your needs. Other people make OpenBSD work correctly, and you can, too.

That said, you may still find that a problem is quite real, but you can’t be certain that it was caused by OpenBSD itself until you understand correct behavior—not just how you think the system works, but how it really does work. The problem could be an OpenBSD bug, bad hardware, or an errant third-party tool. To correctly identify bugs, you must learn how the system should behave and why.

For example, before writing the first edition of this book. I had never used an OpenBSD machine to display a serial console. All of my Unix-like boxes had connections to a rusty old terminal server. Most people don’t have that many serial consoles, and they want to use a null modem cable between two OpenBSD machines and have each serve as the terminal for the others’ console. (We’ll cover serial consoles in Chapter 5.) From reading the manual page (discussed in the next section), this common configuration seemed simple enough: Attach the cables, configure one machine to dump its console to the serial port, become root on the display machine, and enter tip tty00. The other machine’s console should have appeared in the terminal window, but that didn’t happen.

The next question is, “What’s wrong?” It might have been an OpenBSD bug, a hardware failure, or a gap in my comprehension. Swapping systems around demonstrated that the command worked on other OpenBSD machines, just not my particular test box. Further tests with a serial mouse and modem showed that the serial port on the test machine was bad.

Had the serial port been in working order, I might have actually found an OpenBSD bug, but probably not.