Hello, I'm planning to set up a router on an old x86 box with a couple of NIC's for the fun/experience of it. I'm looking at using one of the BSD's as the operating system, since I haven't used those before.
I started looking at how to configure daemons/services on OpenBSD and FreeBSD and am a little surprised at what I found. As far as I can tell, OpenBSD's rc assumes that services will background themselves and does no supervision at all. It seems like FreeBSD's daemon(8) has some supervision capabilities with the -r flag, but it is unclear to me how widely used that is. Given the apparently poor state of supervision, I'm considering using s6 when I configure this system. In searching, I found some messages on the Skaware lists about running s6 as PID 1 on FreeBSD; has that work been published anywhere? I'm not sure if I want to go so far as replacing PID 1 right out of the gate, but having some existing service directories would be nice. Have I correctly understood how daemons/services work on the BSD's? If not, what am I missing? Are the daemons included with the distributions so incredibly stable that they don't need supervision in order to keep the system functional? Finally, if you wanted to create a router that you could (metaphorically) put in a closet and forget about for 5 years, what approach would you take? My initial thought was OpenBSD + s6, but I worry now that there could be an impedance mismatch between these systems. Any thoughts people have on this will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Scott Colby
