[nycbug-talk] fave BSD tips/tricks?

[George Rosamond]

Jerry B. Altzman wrote:
> on 8/26/2009 8:11 AM Brian Cully said the following:
>> 	As George says, it's not 1995 anymore. Developers are starting to  
>> reach for GUI toolkits for administration over CLI, and some tasks are  
>> just plain better done in GUI, anyway (wireshark is a huge win over  
>> tcpdump, especially in a crunch).
> 
> Why are developers on production servers?
> Why are you developing on production servers?
> 
> There's a bit of difference between J. Random Godaddy hosting where 
> everybody's on one machine -- for a development environment, I encourage 
> having a full complement of packages. For my production environments, I 
> want much tighter controls.

That's really the crux of it.

But take a step back: we all know (or know of) the relatively safe 
pre-http environment of academic computing in Unix's origins. . . or 
really the 1970's to be exact.

I think the wholesale installation of tools and packages made sense in 
that context.  But it was restricted by the expense of drive space and 
memory.

Frankly, trying to keep lots of ports updated (because they are the 
major source of vulnerabilities) is the point.  Why worry about keeping 
  more updated?  Why watch for more apps alerts?  The relatively 
infrequent BSD-related base vulnerability alerts are pleasant. ..  the 
third-party-based ports are what keeps most of us up at night.

I really don't understand the point here.

This was the beauty of comparing my first Linux versus my first OpenBSD 
install.  I could run 'top' on OpenBSD, and I wasn't doing anything I 
didn't want.   Hell, I couldn't do *anything* :). With Linux, I was 
probably running an open mail relay.  But the OpenBSD box was going to 
do what I asked, and nothing more.

It's not a "Windows attitude" versus a "BSD attitude."  Open Source and 
traditional Unix-land provides the keys to knowing every inch of code 
that is running.  Windows (and Linuxes) pile on the garbage to the nth 
degree for both the "ease of use" and crackers. (FreeBSD blob comments 
understood)

My $0.02 in this wildly useless tangent.

g