[nycbug-talk] Which B

[Tillman Hodgson]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 08:08:11PM -0500, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, G T wrote:
> 
> >Indeed. OpenBSD is the way to go. Less extra,
> >more juice. Choose OS that will get more from
> >the hard and layered it 
> >with security. OBSD do well specially wit sparc and i386
> 
> Would OpenBSD be easy enough to learn for a FreeBSD user?
> At a new client of mine they have two Sparc enterprise 220s.
> I am still undecided if to advice them to sell or to see if there would be 
> any use for them.

Assuming that you're used to 5.X (the only FreeBSD releases to support
sparc64), I found OpenBSD to be only vaguely similar to FreeBSD. The
local console was different, the RC system is different, the ports
system was different ... it was a different beast. NetBSD would be a
closer match if you want something FreeBSD-like and don't want to use
FreeBSD.

I've run a headless production mail (Postfix and Mailman) and web server
(Apache with mod_perl and HTML::Mason) with FreeBSD on a Sparc64 for
almost 2 years now. Once installed, it felt and acted exactly like any
of the x86 boxes I have. Before I recently rebooted it for an upgrade to
the newest -current, I had 182 days of uptime.

This isn't using only basic and simple software, there's a fairly heavy
load on the box. It uses NFS, NIS, Kerberos, Quagga (for OSPF), OpenVPN,
IPsec and lots of custom Perl scripts. It has a 4-port NIC in addition
to the on-board NIC and it functions as a firewall and end-point for
multiple tunnels.

-T


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Page 461: Tools that are simple enough to use the first day are often a
real pain after the first month.
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