OpenBSD

[redrouteone]

For the past week I have been experimenting with OpenBSD. I really like it. It is what Linux used to be. I like that the Install CD with everything is 233MB, compared to the CentOS 6 netinstall CD which is 237MB.

I think I am going to am going to move my DNS and DHCP servers over to OpenBSD. I was just looking and they do have a Mac 68K port. However it is quite old as support for the platform was dropped in OpenBSD 4.6.

Then again if I take off my tin foil hat for a moment. The DNS server is on my home network, I block all incoming traffic at my router. So running a 2 year old DNS server is likely ok.

I likely won't get to it until after Christmas, but I intend to replace my Cisco router with a Atom based PC running OpenBSD. The reason I chose OpenBSD because the base has only had 2 security holes in a heck of a long time. Of course the base install is pretty sparse, but that is exactly what I need.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

If you're going to run a BSD on a 68K, just stick with NetBSD. OpenBSD is going to be a bigger headache and its ballyhooed advantage of super duper security evapourates quick when you're on an old unsupported version forever.

 

[redrouteone]

Yeah you're right.

I need to think think this over. I thinking of moving cross country. So it is not like I need to be getting more stuff right now.

 

[Gorgonops]

It's funny, really. I know a few people who are excited about OpenBSD, and the common thread running between all of them is they never touched NetBSD first. The two are really pretty similar in feel (and OpenBSD's hype aside their security records are pretty close), but... coming from NetBSD first I've never been able to stand OpenBSD for two reasons:

A: Politics. The founder of OpenBSD is famously outspoken and generally not in a nice way. Say what you want about Linus Torvalds he's at least *nicer* than Theo de Raadt.

B: OpenBSD has historically had an incredibly crummy kernel. The security software produced by the group is fine and is extensively reused all over the Open Source world (OpenSSH/SSL, the OpenBSD pf firewall is great and has been ported to both Net and FreeBSD...) but the OS kernel has a bad habit of being slow, unstable, or both when compared to either FreeBSD or NetBSD. On performance and scalability benchmarks OpenBSD usually falls flat on its face compared to the other BSDs. (Of the other two FreeBSD is *usually* faster but NetBSD has sometimes leapfrogged it, particularly when it comes to the network stack.) OpenBSD also seems to suffer from these random and curious gaps in hardware support; the most notable instance of this recently was the fact that until very recently (this year!) the amd64 build of OpenBSD didn't support more than 4GB of RAM by default and was notoriously unreliable if you did enable it. The OpenBSD developers have at different times blamed both "old buggy MMUs" and "x86 is hard compared to, er, sparc!", for their problems but the fact is it's pretty much been a non-issue for years on every other open-source unixoid that has an AMD64 tree. (In contrast, NetBSD used to crow about how they were the *first* Open Source OS to run on x86_64, having had it working on simulators and pre-release Opteron hardware before the product was even lauched. NetBSD i386 doesn't even bother supporting PAE because amd64 worked so early and so well it was a no-brainer to tell anyone that wanted NetBSD with > 4GB of RAM to go 64 bit.)

I dunno. I'm sure OpenBSD has its good points but I've just never found a good reason to run it instead on NetBSD when I'm looking for an OS to install on something "obscure". And if I'm dealing with x86 FreeBSD will run rings around either of them most of the time. Different Strokes for Different Folks, I guess.

 

[redrouteone]

Yeah Theo de Raadt can be an ass at times. That is for sure.

NetBSD is an option also. Think I'll download it and take it for a spin.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

s/at times//

FTFY. }

 

[redrouteone]

A sed joke, I love it. :lol:

I loath using optical media to install systems. I much prefer to use netboot or USB media.

However there is not a nice USB install image for OpenBSD. I tired unetbootin, but it did not work. I found a real easy method. I created a VM in VMware fusion and attached a USB stick to it. Then I use installed OpenBSD to the stick. Then I booted the target machine with the stick. At the boot prompt I selected the bsd.rd kernel and the install process started.

I have it installing onto my Atom system now. I think I am going to have some fun with this one.

--Just setup the installer to PXE boot. It was pretty easy. I just had to grab the pxeboot and bsd.rd files off a running system and through them up on a TFTP server.

 

[Gorgonops]

For the record, NetBSD is trivially easy to netinstall on just about every hardware that supports it. Undoubtedly OpenBSD isn't much different since they have a lot in common but it's certainly not something it has a monopoly on.

 

[redrouteone]

Got the system running last night before I left for vacation. Unrelated to *BSD but the first USB stick I tried to install to did not work. I've had pretty poor lucking booting from USB flash drives. I'd say only about 50% of the drives I have tried with work.