On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 09:44:46PM -0500, David Noel wrote:
> I started playing around with FreeBSD back in the 2.2.7 days. I'd
> describe myself as a casual desktop/workstation user. Back in the day
> I was attracted to OpenBSD's heavy focus on security but was pulled
> towards FreeBSD due to a good friend of mine being a FreeBSD
> contributor ("dude, trust me, it's the way to go"). Recently I've
> purchased a handful of servers for a software project I've been
> working on and have started reconsidering my choice of OS's.
> Administering a single FreeBSD workstation isn't too much of a
> headache; I've kind of gotten used to having to rebuild kernel and
> world every few months as security advisories are released. But now
> that I'm administering 6 of them I'm really starting to get annoyed by
> the whole process: rebuild kernel... rebuild world... reboot, and then
> pray that it doesn't blow up in my face (as it often does). That got
> me thinking about OpenBSD. Looking at the security advisories the last
> one I see was from nearly a year and a half ago! That's pretty
> incredible to me. Does this mean that I could theoretically have
> gotten away with a year and a half uptime? What's the catch here? I'm
> sorry but I'm incredulous by how good it sounds so I have to ask. For
> me the biggest selling points of an operating system are security and
> maintenance. I've been wowed by ZFS, but really how often do
> filesystems need to be fsck'd? --and I never take snapshots. I feel
> like I could do without it. UFS+J is good enough. Given my priorities,
> does it sound like OpenBSD could be the one for me?Hi, OpenBSD and FreeBSD each have their own annoyances. The trick is to match the annoyances to business roles. What's acceptable in one role is unacceptable in another. I use both. Each of them annoys me in their own... special way. The only way to learn where each goes is to play with them. And any time you administer a bunch of machines, it's best to have some kind of infrastructure to manage them en masse. Ansible, Puppet, rdist, something. ==ml -- Michael W. Lucas - mwlu...@michaelwlucas.com, Twitter @mwlauthor http://www.MichaelWLucas.com/, http://blather.MichaelWLucas.com/ Absolute OpenBSD 2/e - http://www.nostarch.com/openbsd2e coupon code "ILUVMICHAEL" gets you 30% off & helps me.
