Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: Kintaro on 30 March 2005, 23:11
-
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 (http://www.trustix.org) 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 (http://www.microsuck.com/forums/showpost.php?p=93567&postcount=2) 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!
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...
[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... (http://www2c.airnet.ne.jp/toyo/legend.html)
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".
-
chroot is yesterday's security feature! real men run their services under an isolated Xen virtual server ;)
-
Yea, I plan on getting into Xen. I love the idea of it.
-
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.
-
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 (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Linux+sucks%22+BSD+rules&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)
-
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.
-
Linux is better, and doesn't have those annoying fanboys that are on the IP side of things.
Fixed. :p
-
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.)
-
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.
-
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 (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=google.com) are now some of the internet's bigest newbs...
-
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
-
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 (http://uptimes.hostingwired.com/account.php?op=details&hid=13350). (http://In%20the%20beginning,%20Linux%20was%20pretty%20cool.%20It%20was%20free%20%28always%20a%20plus%29,%20had%20a%20rapid%20development%20cycle,%20a%20moderately%20knowledgeable%20user%20base,%20and%20a%20funny%20mascot.%0A%0AThen%20the%20pinheads%20arrived.%20)
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
"I didn't create Linux to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a fortunate side effect." - Linus Torvalds.
Don't confuse the Linux community with the anti-Microsoft community. This site is the latter...and you will notice many Apple, etc. fans. Go to a site like LinuxQuestions and you won't find much anti-Microsoft stuff...some, but not much. The reason the two seem to overlap is because currently, Linux appears to be the path of least resistance for the anti-MS group to spread something else.
Also, don't confuse the Free Software group with the Linux group. They were around long before Linux was (1984 vs. 1991). Many want to focus on the HURD (longest vaporware ever, btw: 1989-present). The reason for the apparent overlap is the same as above: path of least resistance.
-
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.
Sorry about this post I was drunk and I'd just been brainwashed by a BSD fanboy. :o
-
the very fact that you bill the above as a bonus kind of illustrates my meaning! :-D
If you had never labeled the BSD community as elitist, I wouldn't have bothered to mention that.
We've had a discussion or two on the board about BSD advocacy and the elitist label placed on the BSD community, and the general concensus is that sites like this (http://linuxisforbitches.com) are not a good thing - even if we might agree in part with the message.
-
I completely agree with WMD.
I'd like to add that an OS should not be judged by it's user base. What bullshit. The fact that Linux is trying to be accessible to everyone is a GOOD thing. We (or "you") should not try to make any operating system an exclusive thing for the more technical people. NO ONE SHOULD BE FORCED TO USE MICROSOFT. That is my point there. If Linux won't accept the lowly, who will?
-
The user base is only one of many things I like about BSD over Linux. The slower development cycle, the general consistency of everything (even accross the different BSD's), and the superior documentation are the techical reasons for me choosing BSD. The ports collection is another thing that BSD have that make using BSD such a pleasure. Various Linux distros ( I think Gentoo was the first with their 'portage' system) have caught onto this, and implimented their own version of the BSD ports collection.
-
I have been using BSD variants as my primary OS for a long time now, and i have to agree about OpenBSD kicking ass. Although i like FreeBSD alot better, most BSD variants have specialtys, ie: OpenBSD = fucking uber security, FreeBSD = uber network capabilities, NetBSD = uber number of platforms supported. I would be willing to bet that OpenBSD is about as secure as an OS as your going to find on the x86 platform, and on most other platforms as well.
Heres an excerpt from this (http://www.thesecure.net/blog/archives/000068.html) page, this is to show the diffrence in encryption strength between FreeBSD MD5, OpenBSD blowfish, and Kerberos which a common encryption method on Windoze server OS's
"Benchmarking: FreeBSD MD5 [32/32]... DONE
Raw: 4373 c/s real, 4417 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: OpenBSD Blowfish (x32) [32/32]... DONE
Raw: 342 c/s real, 346 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: Kerberos AFS DES [48/64 4K MMX]... DONE
Short: 162764 c/s real, 164408 c/s virtual
Long: 436838 c/s real, 441250 c/s virtual"
c/s = "characters a second"
notice how much faster kerberos can be cracked, also notice just how few characters a sec can be cycled on OpenBSD encryption