I’ve been dabbling with OpenBSD for a little while; it intrigues me as the philosophy and ideals form a good contrast to the way things usually work for Linux-based systems. I’m still very new to it, but I’ve learned a few key lessons:
- All the BSD variants, including OpenBSD, are direct descendents (in a source-code sense) from the same common ancestor;
- OpenBSD is designed to be clean, secure, minimal and powerful;
- OpenBSD makes you carefully specify what you want, without making assumptions. For example, if you install a package which includes a daemon, the daemon will not be autostarted, nor will it autostart at boot-up time. You must modify the appropriate startup script to do so. The means that OpenBSD operates on a policy of Least Surprise, which makes a lot of sense;
- OpenBSD is structured differently to, for example, Linux. In a typical Linux distribution, the kernel and userland programs are pretty independent. Under OpenBSD, the kernel and core userland programs are part of the same source code tree;
I’m planning on setting up a machine at work to run OpenBSD and act as a centralised syslog server. It’ll be educational 🙂
Be sure to play with ports and to play with pf, they’re the best parts of the system.
PermalinkIt’s nice to see you’ve correctly realized some of the key points! Sometimes it takes Linux people a while to realize the differences. Along those lines I’d like to expand a bit on your last bullet point:
The BSDs are complete operating systems, not a kernel plus userland. This may sound like a pedantic distinction, but there are practical and noticeable results. Userland utilities ALWAYS work correctly with the kernel. Man pages are kept up to date (this can be surprising to Linux people who go looking for HOWTO documents and can’t find them). Utilities and daemons come with sane defaults, and put things in the proper places, etc.
Once you get used to having an operating system instead of a distro, most Linux distros begin to feel like a hodgepodge. Some do better than others, of course, but one begins to realize that the coherency they’re shooting for has already been accomplished by the likes of OpenBSD.
PermalinkI know about pf; if I decide to overhaul our firewall one day, it’ll probably run on OpenBSD/pf.
Ports and packages are useful: they’re more limited in scope to what I’m used to under Debian, of course, but I think there’s probably everything I need.
Permalink@Darrin – yes, I meant to mention the man pages. With some Linux distros, the man pages often are rather an afterthought; definitely not so with OpenBSD.
I’ve learnt almost everything I need to know about how OpenBSD works from reading the man pages. Actually, I suppose I should say: I’ve learnt almost everything I need to know about how OpenBSD is different from a Linux distro by reading the man pages.
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