Re:Quick and dirty way to have OpenBSD running on Linode
by yellowapple on Monday July 20, 2015 @08:37PM
(#9920004)
There are several reasons why folks (myself included) prefer OpenBSD for a lot of server roles:
-- PF (which, in my system-administrating experience, is way nicer than any GNU/Linux firewall to date) is only available on BSD-derived systems (including OS X and - IIRC - Solaris), and originated on OpenBSD.
-- OpenBSD has a very strong security track record over the last 1 1/2 decades or so.
-- OpenBSD has been the source of a lot of really nice bits of software [0], and tends to be the first and preferred platform for quite a bit of that software. My own use cases revolve around PF, OpenSSH, tmux, httpd/relayd, spamd, and OpenSMTPD. httpd and relayd in particular are currently exclusive to OpenBSD last I checked.
This isn't to say that OpenBSD is right for everyone (notably, upgrading between releases and getting the latest patches for a given release can be... involved, to say the least), but there are certainly reasons to prefer it over GNU/Linux or the other BSDs.
Not to mention that some Linux-only software will happily run on the mainstream BSDs - OpenBSD included - thanks to a binary compatibility layer. Even things that rely heavily on Linuxisms - like Docker - can run on at least FreeBSD [1], and doing the same for OpenBSD, while probably more involved (OpenBSD notably prefers chroots over newfangled virtualization techniques like containers and jails; in the opinion of its authors and users, containers/jails/etc. only provide an illusion of isolation, and chroots provide equivalent functionality without dishonesty. While I don't entirely agree with this, I can see where the attitude comes from and understand the rationale.), might very well be possible sometime in the not-so-distant future.
-- PF (which, in my system-administrating experience, is way nicer than any GNU/Linux firewall to date) is only available on BSD-derived systems (including OS X and - IIRC - Solaris), and originated on OpenBSD.
-- OpenBSD has a very strong security track record over the last 1 1/2 decades or so.
-- OpenBSD has been the source of a lot of really nice bits of software [0], and tends to be the first and preferred platform for quite a bit of that software. My own use cases revolve around PF, OpenSSH, tmux, httpd/relayd, spamd, and OpenSMTPD. httpd and relayd in particular are currently exclusive to OpenBSD last I checked.
This isn't to say that OpenBSD is right for everyone (notably, upgrading between releases and getting the latest patches for a given release can be... involved, to say the least), but there are certainly reasons to prefer it over GNU/Linux or the other BSDs.
Not to mention that some Linux-only software will happily run on the mainstream BSDs - OpenBSD included - thanks to a binary compatibility layer. Even things that rely heavily on Linuxisms - like Docker - can run on at least FreeBSD [1], and doing the same for OpenBSD, while probably more involved (OpenBSD notably prefers chroots over newfangled virtualization techniques like containers and jails; in the opinion of its authors and users, containers/jails/etc. only provide an illusion of isolation, and chroots provide equivalent functionality without dishonesty. While I don't entirely agree with this, I can see where the attitude comes from and understand the rationale.), might very well be possible sometime in the not-so-distant future.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD#OpenBSD_component_proj...