On Sunday, February 1, 2004, at 10:33 PM, Jim Ray wrote:
How tough is the installation? Any rocket science required?
Rocket science? No. The worst part is partitioning the disk. Just read up a little, have the installation howto printed in front of you (or open on an adjacent machine) and you should be fine. It's very spartan and simple, and you can easily fit the full distribution on 1GB with room to spare.
It's also a great way to learn more of a pure UNIX environment that will get you around in other UNIX flavors. All of the big Linux distros take creative liberties and really offer a UNIX-like experience.
The security aspects of OpenBSD are light years ahead of other platforms in some ways. Once you learn the pf firewall, for example, you'll never want to go near iptables again.
There are other areas in which OpenBSD is extremely lacking, like supporting LDAP user authentication, journaling filesystem, etc. Some of the more consumer-ish hardware like firewire storage is not well supported.
I ran it on my workstation at $WORK for awhile and found it to be better than most would believe as a desktop OS. Though it really shines as a network infrastructure server like a firewall or proxy server. I've built some insanely complex firewalls with OpenBSD and it's actually pretty straightforward once you RTFM a bit.
Speaking of RTFM, OpenBSD has the *best* man pages in the *NIX world, hands down.
--
C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain
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