MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-06-08 |
| FROM | Billy
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] The Source : OpenBSD revisited
|
On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 07:29:52PM +0100, Inker, Evan wrote:
>
> The Source : OpenBSD revisited
> Juha Saarinen, Auckland
> 07 June 2004
> http://www.computerworld.co.nz/cw.nsf/0/F7C960083289B28DCC256EA60079E55E?Ope
> nDocument
>
> I'm busy and want to sleep soundly and not with one eye on my
> internet-exposed hosts. Therefore I picked OpenBSD 3.5 as the operating
> system for the firewalling router handling my new home office connection.
>
> OpenBSD is one of the three major free Berkeley Software Design Unix
> derivatives, the other ones being FreeBSD and NetBSD.
> Unlike Linux, which is a kernel with a userland bolted on, the various
> free BSDs are complete operating systems, each with their own area of
> strength.
Stupid statement. The Gnu/Linux story is really the other way around,
and Linux is not an 'incomplete' operating system, contrary to the
implication here. With a few exceptions, differences in Unixlike kernel
shouldn't dictate differences in userland interfaces. Yet whenever I'm
stuck on a BSD machine, the BSD-style "standard" Unix tools always seem
*much* less capable than the GNU counterparts I'm used to from my
experience on GNU/Linux machines. As far as I can tell, this stems from
a conscious and deliberate effort from the BSD community to
systematically reject usability improvements from Cambridge, seemingly
out of spite.
> One of the goals for the OpenBSD project is to try being the most secure
> operating system. The OpenBSD developers say the open software development
> model allows them to take a "more uncompromising view towards security than
> other vendors are able to". To this end the developers have been auditing
> OpenBSD components on a file-by-file basis since 1996, and continue the
> process to this day.
> Not saying that this is a fail-safe process, but the results speak for
> themselves: apart from a single security hole in SSH, there have been no
> breaches in the default OpenBSD installation for eight years.
Yeah, and there's almost nothing *IN* the default OpenBSD installation.
My coffee machine is safe from internet attack, too!
....
> I tried out versions 2.6 to 2.8 some years ago and wasn't all that happy
> with them. I felt that compared to FreeBSD and, for that matter, Red Hat
> Linux, OpenBSD was too awkward to be usable.
>
> With that in mind, I was surprised how slick version 3.5 is. The
> installation is text-based with the trickiest bit being the disk
> partitioning but it's not hard as long as you take a few minutes to read the
> very good instructions for setting up OpenBSD. The defaults are sane, and
> there's very little you need to do apart from saying "yes" to the majority
> of the prompts.
> What's nice about OpenBSD is that the default kernel covers just about every
> hardware set-up, at least on x86, so there's usually no need to recompile.
> In fact, if you do recompile, the OpenBSD team explicitly states that you're
> on your own, so don't go crying for help if things break - you're likely to
> be laughed off the mailing list.
Yes, because that's the kind of people they are.
I'll pass.
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