On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 3:44 AM, David Noel <david.i.n...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>
>
Best option is to try.
1) With stable you will need to compile if there's some security problem
found in core OS, but you can compile it on other machine and then do
binary upgrade from sets and not all security problems need complete
compile of OS. But a lot of people and I think all developers are using
current in production because simply it's so stable. I will say that
current is something like LTS of Ubuntu regarding real problems you will
encounter during regular use :-) Packages are updated in current, in stable
only some of them or really recommended to go for that service from M:tier
company
2) Start with reading FAQ immediately, that will give you a lot of info you
need for decision especially points 1,5,8,9
3) Filesystems. Well there's not journal, but there are at least softdeps
(of course not helping to shorten downtime). But filesystem is solid and is
able to go via a lot of problems which can render other systems like
ext2/3/4 unusable without a lot of manual work. Same is true for perfect
repair abilities of OpenBSD own packaging system for apps. If you want
something for storage maybe good idea is to make storage on DragonflyBSD
with their Hammer so you will get a lot of capability of ZFS and some not
even available in ZFS plus it's not so RAM hungry :-) and for the rest
using OpenBSD
Main point for me after years and probably for a lot of others is simply
that:
a) It works
b) It's simple
c) Text configs
d) Perfectly working binary upgrade between releases or snapshots so no
need to compile anything
e) Documenation
f) Good old Unix principles
g) No need to relearn every week/month/year something new just because some
crazy dev decided that even as it worked fine before he must re-write it
and break just because he can, he has power and just because he thinks that
everyone must be programmer (Lennart anyone? :D)
Playing occasionally with other BSDs just to see where they are and check
some interesting functions which are not here (Hammer, rump and so on), but
well. OpenBSD may get some things later, but once they are here they work
properly (KMS, suspend/resume, softraid crypto and raids, threading, own
ACPI and so on and so on).
