I started with OBSD 2.5, reading a book on making an invisible
firewall. I remember because my associate flew up from Orange County CA
to SF to show me and my friend how to install openbsd on the quick
(basically get through fdisk and cylinder settings). Didn't even order
pizza, we were serious.
The main thing I remember is that it worked. It actually worked. We
did what it recommended and it worked. A few weeks later I got a call
from a friend at a Biotech who heard about our 'experimenting' and asked
me to break into, or attempt to break into, a firewall they had paid
$8,000.00 USD for.
I got in with a laptop running 33.6 modem in 600 seconds, mapped the
network, cat the info to an html document and piped it to mail. They
were shocked. They mentioned they had FDA-regulated patient data that
needed to be protected at all costs, or the heart research they were
doing would lose funding if it ever got compromised. Could I/we come
down and help them out.
In talking with the folks on the misc list, I got the firewall rules
down right. Took a while, but we did it. I deployed many updated
'invisible firewalls' over the years afterward, and started to earn a
living doing what I liked, all the while porting the knowledge gleaned
here to aid serious, well-intentioned folks over the years.
-when IPF changed to PF, I remember asking the list "has anyone done an
invisible firewall in 3.0 snapshot yet? can we check this out before
the release?" And none other than the maintainer said "hey, I haven't
played with that yet, will check it out and report back". Sure enough
my email wound up on the maintainer's site, with his explicit findings,
showing how it could be done, exactly.
Since then other major victories, openssh, openssl, openbgpd, w^x,
chroot-dns, -you name it, it saved me, and my peers, and employers,
clients, and friends, -from getting hacked, from having to waste time,
from failing somehow.
The OS is one thing, but the people who make it are the real victory -I
can't think of a more solid, consistent group of people than who i've
run into here. Not only did I learn Unix here, but I learned how to
communicate in technical terms that allowed people to understand what I
was asking about.
I came here to compute, to help inanimate machines do so, well. -this
list, more than any other resource (including my old favorite
google.com/bsd) got me where I was going. The OS -how long will it
last? I hope forever. But nothing lasts forever. I do have an old
host that's been up for 1,248 days without reboot, i'm sure there are
those on this list with longer.
How many remote holes in default? What are you trying to do again? Is
it free for a reason? Can I get crypto technology abroad? Can it exist
for free when only few buy the rad CD's (you just gotta get these, they
are just too too cool), artwork, and stickers? Are we always reasonable
in our daily dialogue with the people who make/maintain this?
Sometimes I wonder how they all put up with the negatives -all I know is
that I owe you alot, and i'm going to visit your site right now and pump
some cash into any donation link I can find, because in the end, -you
folks did me far better than vendors I gave 300K to get a server that
was a door stop inside of 3 years.
Thanks for doing this thing when no one else would, or could.
-krb
