Binary Updates for OpenBSD

Present situation
Even OpenBSD needs an occasional bug fix. If you are following -stable, this means you have to recompile the kernel, userland or both when a patch is issued. Especially on older hardware, this will take quite some time.
Every now and then, people ask why OpenBSD doesn't provide binary patches so the time consuming compilation step can be avoided. The main answer is that OpenBSD is developed by a relatively small group of people and it takes a lot of time to do this right. At the moment, I'm not aware of anyone working on a system to distribute and apply binary patches.
There are of course snapshots: regular builds of the -current tree. But not everybody can or wants to run -current.

What can we do about it?
A really cool feature of OpenBSD is the possibility to create your own release. A release can be used to install or update an existing installation, just as the official releases. Maybe it's not the ideal way to patch a system, but it works very well.
Until there's a better and more efficient way of distributing binary updates, I decided to start creating and distributing file sets of the -stable tree. My goal is to build a new release after a security fix and maybe once a month to keep up with other fixes in the -stable tree.

Limitations
This might sound really cool, but there are some limitations:

• The official releases are provided by the OpenBSD team. These updates are provided by just me. Why should you trust me? You probably don't even know me. Perhaps I messed up accidentally or perhaps I created a backdoor in sshd. If you don't trust these files, don't use them.
• I don't have access to all supported platforms, so I can't build a release for all architectures. I hope to extend the number of platforms in the future.
• You never know in advance when a security fix is released. If I'm on holiday, nothing gets done until I'm back. So if you need timely updates, it's better not to rely on this service.

Download
The files are available at

• ftp://ftp.openbsd-stable.org/pub/OpenBSD-stable/ or ftp://ftp.z74.net/pub/OpenBSD-stable/ (Netherlands)
• ftp://ftp.su.se/pub/mirrors/openbsd_stable/ (Sweden)
• http://mirror.startek.ch/OpenBSD/releases/ (Switzerland)
• rsync://mirror.z74.net/openbsd_stable/ (Netherlands)

Want to help?
This service is far from perfect. If you can help improving it by building one of the missing architectures or you have some spare hardware that you want to donate, please let me know. Comments and suggestions are also welcome. Please send an email to openbsd@z74.net. Thanks.