> From: Chris > Subject: [OT] Pursuing Management to adopt OpenBSD > > > I been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to convince various clients and > employers to adopt OpenBSD. Most people, I find, are resistent to > change and would not use anything they are not familiar with. Others > would say that if I leave the job, it would be hard to find people who > can use (or even heard of) OpenBSD and in some places Management never > heard of OpenBSD and have very little clue as to how good or bad it is > compared to Linux/ Solaris and Windows thus they will just knock off > the proposal in 2 seconds. > > Is there any way I could convince these people to make the move to > OpenBSD? Suggestions, tips and tricks along with real life examples > would be much appreciated. Thanks. > >
I have been in this same boat. The company I work for was a completely Windows environment when I was hired. Any suggestions of anything non- Windows was answered with angry looks and the mantra "We are a Windows shop! We are not interested in anything else!" Then it happened. One of the big Win2003 FTP servers went down... hard... very hard... smoke rolling out of it hard... and everyone was running around crying "Oh noes! Oh noes! What'll we do?" because nobody bothered to come up with a disaster recovery plan beyond "load up another box and put it out there" and as many of us unlucky bastards know, It takes all day to get a Win2003 server ready for deployment, especially if that deployment is one that connects it to the Wild Wooly Internet. Now, normally their plan would have been fine because this particular business (at the time) could live without their FTP server for that amount of time but fate stepped in and they really needed their FTP server to be up and running for a particular reason that evening. So, I calmly walked in and made the boast that I could get them an FTP server up and running in a matter of an hour or two. They were just desperate enough to call me on it. We used that first OpenBSD 3.6 based FTP server for a couple years upgrading as we went. We are now running OpenBSD 4.2 (soon to be upgraded to 4.3 YAY!) oddly enough on the same (repaired) box that used to house the Win2003 FTP server. The bosses have never looked back, and never regretted giving a lowly "data processor" a chance to pull their biscuits out of the fire by building an OpenBSD FTP server. I have FINALLY even talked them into supporting the project by pre-ordering 4.3 (and a nice t-shirt for me). Oh, and that first OpenBSD FTP server has been joined by 8 or 9 other OpenBSD boxes doing various this-and-thats around the place. Firewalls, mail servers, Time server, NIDS, Web Application server, and just about anything else that I can throw together using spare parts while the Windows tards are still trying to calculate the Hardware, OS, and Licensing costs to implement. I still haven't been able to break the SQL server or Domain Controller barrier yet, but give me time. The boss is finally admitting that maybe we could do a few projects with something other than Visual Basic... Change comes slowly sometimes. s
