On 4 Feb 2001, at 20:40, Garl R. Grigsby wrote:
> Now to my questions. Recently I have acquired several Sun Sparc
> (32)
> machines (IPXs, 5s, & 10s) and am looking to put a OS on them that is
> 1) Free/Inexpensive, 2) Fairly easy to install, & 3) is fairly
> complete. I have looked through the offerings from the Linux community
> in regard to the sparc platform and I am not impressed. I do know that
> OpenBSD offers a sparc port and my question is how is their install
> process? How different am I going to find OpenBSD as compared to the
> other flavors of Un*x that are out there? Can I download Iso images
> for the cds anywhere? Does OpenBSD come with any firewall/proxy
> abilities? Any other comments?
I've got an OpenBSD firewall at home, and my laptop at work is
running it. I like OpenBSD-- a lot. Much better than FreeBSD, in
fact. I would be running it on my workstation at my job, except
that I need VMWare to run Netware admin programs.
Once you figure out the OpenBSD install program, it's really easy.
It is text-based, however. The ports system is much nicer than
FreeBSD, in that it builds a port into a tarball, instead of directly
installing it-- ideal for using one box to build stuff for others.
I haven't seen iso images for sparcs, but you can get images for
i386 (though, these are technically warez). You can install off the
net or buy the CDs for $30. As for running, it's like any other *nix,
only way more secure, and more stable, due to the security
auditing process. I've found it to be more stable than Cisco IOS,
which is saying a lot. Firewalling and proxy are incredibly easy to
do-- much easier, in fact, than linux. Firewalls are fully stateful, as
well.
Personally, I think that OpenBSD is the best *nix going.
Cheers,
Dennis
"Custard pies are a sort of esperanto: a universal language."
--Noel Godin
