OpenBSD Kicks Fucking Arse

[Kintaro]

I tried it a couple of weeks back after the harddrive fell into its arse on my FC3 server, so I tried OpenBSD.

Nonetheless it kept rebooting on that, the mailinglisters just blamed the hardware, and then I found another disribution that I consider quite secure called Trustix Secure Linux which is quite good, in a lot of ways I would consider it on par with OpenBSD. That became the OS of the Kintaro Labs webserver.

However tonight, due to my usual insomnia I decided to get my dads office computer (he just uses my brothers computer anyway and it hasn't been powered on for 9857235734 years). It is a PII 233 with 128MB of ram and a 10gb Hard Drive, certainly something not of this generation. After breifly trying BeOS Max 3.2beta and watching a still loading screen for the installer for 10 minutes while talking to people online I decided against it.

I wasn't seriously going to deploy a BeOS system in my house anyway, because I have no use for one at all. However tonight I had a mission and it is a sucsess. I decided to set up a named server on an OpenBSD box.

There were some causes for using OpenBSD:
A) Paranoia: This leads to constant feeling of insecurity, being an insecure internet attention whore with no friends: which leads to a constant desire for good security. This is something I found OpenBSD has without having to configure a great deal of stuff to get it that way.
B) Stability: Despite my past random crash problem with it I have heard some very good things about it.
C) Small: Smaller then my penis in fact, and my penis is tiny!

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shoen# df -h
Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a     295M  33.5M   246M    12%    /
/dev/wd0f    1006M  12.0K   956M     0%    /home
/dev/wd0e     501M   4.0K   476M     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0g     6.3G   333M   5.7G     5%    /usr
/dev/wd0d    1006M   6.9M   949M     1%    /var


The other thing I really liked about OpenBSD was how most the daemons run chroot. This is great because I just want a DNS server for my home network.

It took me less then 15 minutes to get a DNS server running on OpenBSD (ships with named). This is because I use webmin which is quite cool, I just want it for my home network...

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[x11@kintaro ~]$ host exeleven.home
exeleven.home has address 192.168.1.4


As in names like that for my machines on the local network.

You can see the uptime and stuff here: http://uptimes.hostingwired.com/account.php?op=details&hid=13202

She's responsive as a rocket, secure as a fortress, and as stable as Mt Everest.

And the name comes from the Kintaro Legend...

Development of "Sho-en"(Private land)：
　By the political reformation in 645 (Taika-no-kaisin), centralized government was established. For example, private land was prohibited, that is, all the land was owned by the government and the people were all directly controlled by the government. The people were all equal, got the same size of land and paid tax.
　Unfortunately, with this system, people did not get an incentive to work harder, therefore the system broke down quickly. As quickly as one hundred years after the reformation, the right to own private land started to be granted. The private land is called "Sho-en".

[muzzy]

chroot is yesterday's security feature! real men run their services under an isolated Xen virtual server

[Kintaro]

Yea, I plan on getting into Xen. I love the idea of it.

[skyman8081]

Sys V and its variants (like a toolchain rhyming with canoe, and a kernel based on minix) are crap.

BSD is better, and doesn't have those annoying fanboy's that are on the GPL side of things.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Lots of people seem to prefer BSD over Linux for some reason. I don't know Linux is more newb friendly but BSD is supposed to be a real UNIX.

A friend of mine keeps saying how much shit Linux sucks and people should just use BSD.

But just look at the Google results

[mobrien_12]

Sys V and its variants (like a toolchain rhyming with canoe, and a kernel based on minix) are crap.

BSD is better, and doesn't have those annoying fanboy's that are on the GPL side of things.

The Linux kernel is not based on minix.  Linux distro's are not SysV variants.

[Orethrius]

Linux is better, and doesn't have those annoying fanboys that are on the IP side of things.

Fixed.  :p

[WMD]

OpenBSD is by all means very good.  But there's no reason to bash Linux over it.  (Or reverse-bash BSD on top of that, either.)

[Aloone_Jonez]

Well BSD is made by more intelligent people than Linux. Yes I don't have a problem with Linux it's cool for newbs, but if I want to learn UNIX I think I'll go for something more hardcode, secure and stable.

[KernelPanic]

Well BSD is made by more intelligent people than Linux. Yes I don't have a problem with Linux it's cool for newbs, but if I want to learn UNIX I think I'll go for something more hardcode, secure and stable.

Meh, statements like this are bunk. OS choice is circumstantial, going with what you just said, google are now some of the internet's bigest newbs...

[Lord C]

Downloading OpenBSD (3.7snapshot) atm, gotta try this out on my dodgey server

Does anyone recommend the stable release, or the snapshot?
From my Debian experiences I usually download the latest snapshots, lol.

Also downloading the new Trustix.
Last version I had was 1.5

[toadlife]

I am one of those dudes who loves the BSD's and has little interest in Linux. I also don't hate Microsoft and actually think their products (post 9x series) are good.

The BSD community is one of the reasons I like BSD. The focus in the community is building and using a stable/secure/powerfull UNIX operating system - not destroying Microsoft, or freeing all of the software in the world. Alot of the political BS you find in the Linux community is a real turn off to a lot of people, myself included.

 There is a quote from an unnamed site that I think sums up the feeling many BSD users have about the GNU/Linux community...  

"In the beginning, Linux was pretty cool. It was free (always a plus), had a rapid development cycle, a moderately knowledgeable user base, and a funny mascot.

 Then the pinheads arrived..."


NOTE: I'm not calling anyone here a pinhead, just pointing out the fact that the Linux user base has become dumbed down over the past few years.

Unlike, linux, you won't find all of the newest whiz-bang features in the BSDs. The development cycle is much slower than Linux, which I think is one reason why the BSD's are generally a more secure platform than Linux. The BSD's development teams don't focus on the desktop as much as the Linux dev team and Linux distro providers do, and as a result, running BSD as a desktop can be a painfull experience.

As for the topic's title, I would agree. I set up an OpenBSD box over a year ago to filter spam at my work. It's a old surplus PII 400 desktop we had laying around, and it bitch-slaps around 18,000 spam messeges per day. The box jsut runs, and runs, and runs. I've rebooted it only three or four times times this year - most of the reboots were at the beggining when I was still getting the configuration settled, and the most recent one was due to a power outage.

That uptime thingy is cool. I installed it on my DSL router, and I might throw it on the spam filter server at work.

Here is my router.

[Calum]

in my experience, the BSD community is full of elitist arseholes that talk down to everybody (if they communicate at all). This is one of the reasons i prefer the linux community, they are infinitely more helpful.

That is not to say all BSD users or advocates are arseholes, but from a general point of view, even though they may still be a minority, i do think the arsehole quotient is considerably higher amongst BSD users than Linux users.

[toadlife]

I case you havn't been there, bsdforums.org is a pretty cool community of BSD users. You can go there and discuss Linux and they won't bag on you and call you a pinhead or anything.  I've heard the 'elitist' description of the BSD community before, so it probably has some truth to it.

[Calum]

You can go there and discuss Linux and they won't bag on you and call you a pinhead or anything.

the very fact that you bill the above as a bonus kind of illustrates my meaning! :-D

i like unix.com actually for cross *IX stuff, thanks for the recommendation though! i hope people find it useful, stuff like that is always welcome.