On 28/08/2019 15:32, Mohamed salah wrote:
I wanna put something in discussion, what's your motivational to use
OPENBSD what not other bsd's what not gnu/Linux
Of all the things that naturally pull me towards BSD, I can not think of
anything that OpenBSD does better than the other BSD's.
Conversely OpenBSD is not very good at being a file server. It's also
not very good at SMP. These issues have been known for a long time and
it doesn't take much research to find out these facts when evalutation
technologies for specific important use cases. I understand that the
SMP deficiencies are being worked on. I don't know about the lack of
file server functionality however.
In other words, I don't know how important it is for the OpenBSD project
that it eventually becomes a top contender when evaluating an OS for a
file server or NAS.
I also use NetBSD. NetBSD and OpenBSD are both excellent and often I
enjoy using NetBSD more.
I use OpenBSD for many reasons. Here are a few, and many of them apply
equally well to my use of NetBSD:
- The /community/ of /any/ software that I have the luxury of choosing
is a critical factor. It is equally as important as the technology
itself. OpenBSD's community has been wonderful to work with. I mostly
interact on the the misc@openbsd.org mailing list and the #OpenBSD IRC
channel on freenode.
- Its out-of-the box pf firewall. This has a LOT of community
knowledge, which is a huge advantage. Not only is this important to
implement 100% correctly, but it's important that you understand all the
relevant lurking unknowns so that you don't have false confidence in a
misconfigured firewall. This is one area where a large community of
experts is extremely helpful.
- I would prefer to use a simply configured OS instead of an appliance
like OPNSence or pfSense. I don't think they add much value.
However, if I was a network or security engineer in a large
enterprise, I'd probaby be working very differently. Based on my
experiences working in large corporate enterprises so far, i.e., based
on my observations, I'd probably be using an appliance from Cisco,
Juniper, F5, etc.
This is not a negative point against choosing OpenBSD. I've never
been in a position of influence in a large, corporate enterprise's
network division (I'm not a network engineer professionally).
It's an observation, not something I would /necessarily/ choose.
To be fair, I have seen many amazing things that these expensive devices
from Cisco, Juniper, and F5 can do too.
On the other hand the libre nature of OpenBSD is one its major
benefits. If you ever need to audit your security infrastructure then
OpenBSD puts you in a good place right from the beginning.
- OpenBSD's documentation is excellent. Documentation is clear and
complete. Man pages exist and are meaningful. In fact, I use OpenBSD's
(and other *BSD's) coding standards and documentation style as a model
for my own projects, even they have nothing in particular to do with *BSD.
- OpenBSD has a concise base system that is understandable, learnable
without too much congitive stress, and (usually) fast to install.
- As somebody else has mentioned, they use OpenBSD precisely *because*
they also use other operating systems. It is the same for me. It is
important to learn how different OS'es do similar functions. Moreover,
I am starting to learn how to write my software to be more portable.
Portable software is, by its nature, of a higher standard than software
that runs only on GNU/Linux, for example. I'm still a beginner as far
as this is concerned. It means expanding beyond *nix too.
(This blind adherence to "the Unix philosophy" as though its
superiority in OS design is axiomatically true has had a negative effect
on the collective imagination of many people.)
- OpenBSD runs on architectures other than x86_64 that I am interested
in. For example, PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh systems and SPARC-based
systems. This ties in intimimately with my previous point re: support
of architectures.
Andrew
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