My home router/web/mail server was originally a miniITX running netbsd. I used netbsd because it is small, and because I was used to it from messing with the CLNP stack (to do with my job). When I moved the Soekris I wanted things a bit more secure so I wanted support for jails. NetBSD and OpenBSD seem to have given up supporting jails so I went to FreeBSD and it seems to work very well. I suppose that Linux vserver would work equally well though. One thing to look at is package management. To go from one release to the next seems to be quite painful with OpenBSD. On my desktop systems and servers at work I use Debian Linux and I really really like the APT package management system. If you want to constantly compile stuff from source etc then it probably doesn't matter, but if you are lazy like me then you want to make sure that an OS is easy to keep up to date and easy to upgrade to the next release. I'm still getting used to FreeBSD but I'm not sure I like the package management to be honest, probably because I prefer binary packages but it seems to work better with source packages. I always got on quite well with NetBSD package management but never tried a release upgrade. On my old NetBSD boxes I actually had a cron job that runs audit-packages and emails me the result if something need patching. I do like PF as well. I can't do anything with iptables without a GUI. All the software packages in both Linux and BSD are the same. You don't really touch the kernel much day to day directly but I do use the package management system/upgrade methods quite a lot so IMHO it's something that should be considered more than people normally mention.
regards, Philip > > On Apr 12, 2011, at 9:08 PM, Ryan Whelan wrote: > >> Watching the mailing list, it -seems- like BSDs are more prevalent on the >> soekris platforms then Linux. I've only ever used Linux ( a custom >> Buildroot build and hand-rolled kernel ). I am NOT trying to troll, and I >> know this is a technical mailing list, but I'm really curious why those that >> chose BSDs chose them? Without being a BSD user, I'm hoping to get some >> insight into what I don't know. >> >> I really want to know the reasons for the decision, not start a flame war- I >> promise >> >> ryan _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
