I'd venture that your professor isn't particularly well-educated if he
thinks BSD is dead or dying from either a commercial or a pedagogical
perspective. A considerable amount of literature on the subject of
networking is written using the BSD codebase as reference (e.g. the
Richard Stevens TCP/IP books), and I don't expect that anyone is going
to turn around and tell you that the Linux people got to where they
are by ignoring all of that literature and the code base around which
it was written. Second, beyond the base of open source host networking
stacks, the BSD code base has been extensively grafted into
proprietary Unix implementations, not to mention serving as the
foundation for dedicated network devices such as Junos. You might
argue that Junos isn't as prominent in the market as Cisco, but there
are a fairly considerable number of arguments against teaching using
IOS implementation pedagogically, except perhaps as a long series of
"gotcha" lessons. Third, BSD networking continues to be grafted into
other systems. A perfectly good example of this is that Sun has ported
BPF into the Solaris kernel to support firewall portability as one of
recent extension and refactoring initiatives to improve its network
performance and provide an alternate set of interfaces for portability
of networking code (e.g. for kernel code, or as an alternative to
write directly to DLPI or through libpcap for anything that can't be
implemented via [*cough*] Berkeley sockets).

The crux here is that the wisdom of acting as though *nix networking
is a monoculture completely dominated by Linux (which in my opinion
can both fail to be a monoculture in the way it needs to be and
succeed in being a monoculture in ways it needs to curb) or will
become one doesn't seem the only possible conclusion from examining
the history or contemporary dynamics (and that's setting aside the
rather material question of whether such a monoculture would be
desirable in any case, given how important cycles of divergence and
convergences have been to making *nix what it is qua dynamic and open
systemnot to say that Linux is a monoculture... or as dynamic and
open as ). Sure, Linux can have its value as teaching material, but
it's far less credible to do so if the premise is that this is the
only open source implementation worth teaching. There may be valid
reasons for focusing on a single implementation in course design, but
dismissing the value of a comparative approach or of subsequent
independent study of other systems strikes me as pissing away
credibility as an instructor and being dishonest about course design
decisions.

As for the instructor, you can lead a horse to water and all that.
Perhaps the more important thing to learn here is how and why he's
mistaken rather than that he is or to push him to such concessions. If
you can't push him so far as to change his decision, but you can
perhaps offer sufficient judicious counter-arguments to make other
students want to learn more and build some continuing study groups on
top of that.

Cheers,
Bayard

Am 13 Feb 2010 um 08:06 schrieb TS Lura:

Dear OpenBSD community,

I'm a student for a MSc Advanced Networking degree.

I have a little situation maybe you guys could give me some feedback
on.

The issue is that my module leader is refusing even to consider
mentioning
OpenBSD, or any BSD in introductory Linux course where the focus is on
network services. DNS, iptables, Apache.

It is a introductory course, with limited time. So it's
understandable that
one has to be level-headed on what's to go in as material in the
course. My
argument is only to have a reference to OpenBSD, PF, and maybe the
jailing
of named, when we go through the topics of iptables, and DNS.

My professor (the module leader) argue that almost no one is using
BSD, and
those that does is probably 70+ and so it will soon die off, in a
humours
tone. In more serious tone, lack of applications.

I'm a bit resigned by this attitude, because we are at a master
level about
networking. We learn about all the technologies surrounding  routers,
switches, wan, security, etc.  As such I think that OpenBSD is
really a bean
to be counted when we learn about open/free software. So in relation
to
this, I would argue that OpenBSD is a excellent platform for
networking
services.

I have said so in writing, and verbally only to be brushed off.

I feel it's game over, at this point. But maybe you guys have some
suggestion about good arguments that might persuade my professor?


Cheers,

TSLura.

PS.

This might be the wrong crowd, but I also argue for the documents on
the
internal web-learning facility to be published in PDF (ISO 32000
standard)
(he insist on doc), and that Linux at least once should be mentioned
as
GNU/Linux.(system-tools/Kernel, to pay tribute). This is also met in
the
same way as my BSD arguments. Which I find strange, since my
professor has
developed a bit of stuff for the GNU/Linux platform.

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