I started playing around with FreeBSD back in the 2.2.7 days. I'd
describe myself as a casual desktop/workstation user. Back in the day
I was attracted to OpenBSD's heavy focus on security but was pulled
towards FreeBSD due to a good friend of mine being a FreeBSD
contributor ("dude, trust me, it's the way to go"). Recently I've
purchased a handful of servers for a software project I've been
working on and have started reconsidering my choice of OS's.
Administering a single FreeBSD workstation isn't too much of a
headache; I've kind of gotten used to having to rebuild kernel and
world every few months as security advisories are released. But now
that I'm administering 6 of them I'm really starting to get annoyed by
the whole process: rebuild kernel... rebuild world... reboot, and then
pray that it doesn't blow up in my face (as it often does). That got
me thinking about OpenBSD. Looking at the security advisories the last
one I see was from nearly a year and a half ago! That's pretty
incredible to me. Does this mean that I could theoretically have
gotten away with a year and a half uptime? What's the catch here? I'm
sorry but I'm incredulous by how good it sounds so I have to ask. For
me the biggest selling points of an operating system are security and
maintenance. I've been wowed by ZFS, but really how often do
filesystems need to be fsck'd? --and I never take snapshots. I feel
like I could do without it. UFS+J is good enough. Given my priorities,
does it sound like OpenBSD could be the one for me?
