Skip to main content

SysAdmin Blog

another bad idea: OpenSSH on ancient OpenBSD

bochmann Wednesday 01 of December, 2004
I tried using the current portable OpenSSH (openssh-3.9p1) on an old OpenBSD 2.3 box.

Turns out it compiles fine as soon as it's persuaded not to use setreuid and the like, but authentication doesn't work - I assume that's because of the blowfish-encoded passwords.

So, in a fit of insanity, I started backporting the bsd_auth stuff from a current OpenBSD version, and actually got as far as an sshd compiled with BSD_AUTH starting up and telling me

Server listening on 0.0.0.0 port 2022.
sshd: invalid script: /usr/libexec/auth/login_passwd

when a user tries to log in.

After having a short look at the login_passwd sources, I decided to give up for now - seems the amount of dependency on things that simply don't exist in that old version is really too large.

I'm sticking with the old ssh.com ssh 1.2.33 for now...

(Yes, upgrading that installation to a current OpenBSD version would probably be the much better option, but some systems just don't die :) ...)