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BSD Interview Roundup
Some anonymous readers wrote in to let us know about a couple of different interviews in the OpenBSD and NetBSD communities. O'Reilly's ONLamp has an interview with OpenBSD's Marc Espie, who maintains a good share of OpenBSD's build tools, as well as having made numerous contributions to the project. OSDN's own NewsForge also has a interview with NetBSD's Luke Mewburn of the NetBSD Core Group.
Which is more secure, OpensBSD or NetBSD?
Needless to say, I had our quad Xeons back running OpenBSD by the end of the week. Gerbil is back on its way to another glorious 3 years of uptime.
.gov and .mil sites and when was the last time the USAF donated a foreign software project $2M US?
OpenBSD on Quad anything is silly at the moment.
OpenBSD is known to be used at the Pentagon and various other
OpenBSD has a security track record that no other network operating system has ever matched.
FreeBSD has phenominal stability and incredible SMP performance is fast coming to a stable release.
NetBSD runs on everything and managed to beat Linux 2.6 scheduler performance (2 years in the making) with just 2 weeks of coding to "catch up".
The BSD's are complete systems and if you ever use one, you'll know why we BSD users value that. The best part is, the BSD's are able to share code amongst themselves. When NetBSD ports to an architecture which interests some OpenBSD developer, that quickly gets ported to OpenBSD. When OpenBSD finds holes, NetBSD and FreeBSD benefit not only from the heads-up but often from a patch which either applies cleanly, or is trivial to modify.
With ProPolice, OpenBSD are now finding lots of holes.
I challenge every person out there who honestly beleives that BSD is dying, to download OpenBSD 3.5 when it comes out. Read the FAQ, read the afterboot man page, use apropos with some level of intelligence and read the man pages, search Google groups and as a last resort ask questions on the OpenBSD mailing lists.
Here's a tip, SCO is dying and they want Linux to die too. Meanwhile, after already surviving a legal battle, BSD is thriving with mature developers who really know their stuff.
I cannot understand why people say FreeBSD is dead. Do they not work in the ISP/programming/networking industries? Are 90% of linux users just retards who get transparent terminals working and consider themselves educated on why linux is better than FreeBSD?
Reading slashdot when it comes to BSD is like reading a bathroom wall in a high school.
FreeBSD is all I use. I graduated from the ISP industry to a CLEC. And guess what??? They also use FreeBSD.
So all you linux dorks out there, you better not have that attitude when you go for an interview. No wonder you are unemployed. HAH.
kiss my ass linux zealots. Even plan9 interests me more than linux.
OpenBSD is far from a terrible choice for servers in general, except for one class; SMP boxes. Currently, OpenBSD has no SMP support, and although it is being worked on, it won't be out for at least another year, it will be for i386 boxes only, and it will be of a "Big Giant Lock" type of SMP, where if one kernel process holds the BGL, no other kernel processes will be able to run on any of the computer's CPUs. OpenBSD also has no kernel threading ATM, making it less optimal for really intensive tasks.
Here's a tip, SCO is dying and they want Linux to die too. Meanwhile, after already surviving a legal battle, BSD is thriving with mature developers who really know their stuff.
Do I detect a hint of condescension at the end?
That the *BSDs are able to pull off such feats is a testament to the continued good design from the projects.
Don't try to flaunt it.
Remember, we're on the same side.
So, they got "new boxes" from Dell without administrator passwords and Dell could send them administrator passwords after their employee had changed them? My head spins with the multitude of ways this story contradicts itself.
New boxes don't come with administrator passwords preset.
If they did, their employee couldn't have changed them without knowing them.
If they are new boxes, why would it cause havoc?
If they're smart enough to use OpenBSD, why aren't they smart enough to know to just burn something like knoppix and boot the servers that way to reset the local administrator password?
Or, since they were "new" boxes, just boot from the install media, format and reload them?
Does this guy really think people are dumb enough to fall for such obvious inconsistencies?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It mentions things even I didn't
know, but after some googling they
turned out to be true. Those
DragonflyBSD mailing lists are
indeed hilarious!
hahaha, good one troll.
It also brings up the question, how in the hell do you just change over an established infastructure from OpenBSD to Windows XP Pro? You can't run full IIS on XP Pro, you need a server edition (which would make sense on a quad processor server but...) . You can't utilize four processors on OpenBSD, and you can only use 2 on XP Pro.
It's just a post to show that anyone who says anything about BSD and against MS can gain mod points in the BSD section. Sad but true.
NetBSD runs on everything and managed to beat Linux 2.6 scheduler performance (2 years in the making) with just 2 weeks of coding to "catch up".
I'm no Linux zealot, but your point here is horse shit. NetBSD took only two weeks to catch up because they had Linux's (two years of) work to learn from.
Standing on the shoulder of giants, as they say.
There is no point in trying to convince you that BSD as you have already made up your mind.
/var for example where /usr and/var are different partitions) but even then a 17 meg file can be moved in a few seconds.
/dev/random to /dev/null? are you trying to copy a file to a recursive symlink?
Copying a 17 meg file should not take _any_ time as all it requires is an update to the file systems tables. It might take some time if you are moving the file from one file system to another (/usr to
I am not sure what you (or the person who set the box up) screwed up, but something is definitely wrong. I would suggest you find a unix admin and figure out what is really happening. Are you trying to copy
If you've never seen a FreeBSD box run faster than it's Windows counterparts then again we can not help you. You claim this 800 MHz box is slow. That is certainly possible. How about finding a properly configured system and givnig that a try? How about letting someone who knows what they are doing use the box?
I do a lot of Windows work. These days it is mostly active directory related stuff. Setting up servers, replication, DNS, etc. I have never seen an instance where Windows was faster to set up, easier to patch, or more stable. You want reasons, how about starting with those three.
-sirket
I do not believe that this is the case here (looking at the code of both from that time).
The fact that the problem areas were brought to the attention of the NetBSD developers seems to be a much more likely reason for the quick catch up.
Why are you just as quick to speard "FUD" as the person you're replying to?
- removal of *BSD operating system, replace with Linux or Windows XP
:)
The fact that you chose to lump Linux in with Windows XP is not lost those of who use FreeBSD
-sirket
couldn't one use a VM like VMware to run 4 versions of open BSD on a quad using 1 processor for each session?
Not the smartest way to do things, but what ever.
My, you're the bright one, aren't ya?
Do I detect a hint of condescension at the end?
That the *BSDs are able to pull off such feats is a testament to the continued good design from the projects.
Don't try to flaunt it.
Remember, we're on the same side.
Absolutely. I agree. Sorry if I came across a bit too zealous.
New boxes don't come with administrator passwords preset.
/. for a while.
Actually, Dell do, if what I have seen is anything to go by.
Here is the really scarey part about Dell.
I have worked at two firms so far which were Dell from desktop to servers. One was a large confectionary company that you all know and the other was,.. well I don't want to give too much away, but they're big enough in their own right and you know of what they have at least done in IT also, assuming you've been reading at
Here is the killer...
Dell, provide machines to both of these companies, which are independant of each other in every respect.... with a "backdoor/get_out_of_jail_quick/whatever" administrator account which was the same username and password for both of these companies! I can only assume that they do this for every business purchase in the area.
Granted, any company that keeps those accounts and worse still uses them as part of internal procedure, is really stupid.
But Dell must take some blame for encouraging such ridiculous behaviour. The best thing would surely be setting a blank password and password and forcing a password change at next logon.
I long for the days of DEC. ; ( When men were men and computer science really was a science.
BTW, those companies develop their own SOE's and take many months to do it, with QA and everything... yet they keep the Dell account username and password with administrative rights!
I should be able to walk into a company with Dell's and have a relatively good chance of becoming local administrator if this is anything to go by.
What I would like to know, is how many of you out there, have excelled in IT in the past, easily achieving feats that other IT staff, administrators or vendors claimed to be impossible, yet are today long term unemployed due to not being socially accepted amongst the clicky non-geek IT world (who loudly proclaim geet status)?
Check this out
Jesus god you're a faggot.
As /. rejected story about this, perhaps at least people, who read messages here can read this...
http://pkgsrcCon.org , the first pkgsrc conference ever will be held in Vienna (Austria, Europe) on April 30 - May 2, 2004
Visit the official www page
Because like me it is Stupid American
Funny - '*BSD is dying' gets a +1 insightfull
SlashDot is so anti bsd that even the moderators are promoting trolls.
SlashDot - News for Turds, Stuff that Splatters.
Condi, is that you? Nice to see you in such good form.
Considering that the issues were solved in a completely different way than in Linux and without refering to Linux source, that is not exactly true.
Its very clearly open. Code is being audited all the time, daemons are being modified to run with priviledge seperation, setuid root programs are almost non-existant now on open. Then on top of that, there is the non-executable stack, propolice, and W^X protection of memory pages, and stack gap randomization. The first things make exploits much less likely, and the second make it very difficult to successfully exploit something that has an exploitable bug. Anyone who pretends netbsd is more secure is delusional or lying to you.
How something so blatently stupid is modded insightful I can't imagine. Seriously, openbsd has had only 1 remote hole in 7 entire years with its defaults. This is a factual public record of how good their defaults are, and you think that's not as good as net? Get real.
Yup pretty damned 'insightful.'
Fucking Linux zealots.
Of course this is ./, why do I even post?
Mark Espie is the king of porting, knows more than almost everyone, so it is interesting to see what he thinks. I laugh at the prickly barbs he tosses in every so often. If there were one thing I think OpenBSD should do is relax a little bit and try to be just a little more diplomatic. So the world if full of jerks and dorks, but that means you still will get reasonable service at McDonalds, because they knew enough to treat the customer in a way that keeps them coming back.
I wish someone would interview me. I have an opinon about OBSD:
SD: What do you think of it?
Me: I got it running on nearly every old piece of hardware we have at the university. I run our nameservers on snapshot releases, tons of uptime (like 700 plus days)
SD: What do you do to support it?
Me: I talk it up around here, but no one seems interested, so I talk to my boss and we buy several copies of each release. I have a complete set of them, probably about half never opened, (because I run snapshots so much of the time)
SD: Got a beef with the way Theo runs the project?
Me: no, not at all. He cranks out the project, rides herd on a bunch of volunteers, and makes a living at it. More power to him, as long as it keeps working good for me.
SD: Why not run linux instead, it is more popular?
Me: Well I started out running a linux box as a management station (ping routers, telnet, traceroute) back in the Win 95 days, and it got hacked (ftp vulnerability) and was used as a bounce point for some jerk uploading porn. Pissed me off, so I shut it off. Soon we got a firewall and the consultant said "try OpenBSD, it's secure" This was with release 2.3, I tried it, installed so many snapshots over time that I could do it in a moment, never had any trouble. Linux seemed more involved, and yes it has more, but I have never had any of my 25 systems running OBSD get compromised.
How the hell does this garbage get modded up?
Oh yeah.
Slashdot moderators are RETARDS!
Why not try Linux instead? It works better
From Improving
Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling.
"Linux, a very popular OS used for running network appliances,
performs very poorly with respect to other OSs used in the same
test" (FreeBSD and Win2k).
"The Linux kernel module is almost as fast as the userspace
FreeBSD application".
Percentage of packets captured (in user space), using device polling, at
80,000 packets per second? Linux 5.6%, FreeBSD 99.9%. Linux manages
99.5% only using a kernel module.
SO LINUX MUST GO TO KERNEL SPACE TO ALMOST BE AS FAST AS FREEBSD
WITHIN USER SPACE! Oh yeah, Linux runs much better than the
BSD's.
Maybe if you BSD is dying trolls stopped crapping on here about BSD
dying and instead actually learned a language apt for your OS of choice,
you might actually be able to bring Linux up to "dead status" with the
BSD's.
But wait, it gets worse! While trying to capture packets from a
DoS application, Linux could only manage capture rates of 0.8% in user
space and 9.7% in kernel space, while FreeBSD managed 74.7% in user
space!
"FreeBSD performs much better than Linux"
"it is obvious that a vanilla FreeBSD systems is much more
efficient than a vanilla Linux system when used for packet
capture."
Just, when i was installing it on my Pentium 200 MHz, 48MiB RAM, it never did end the installation because it was installing at rate 9 KB per second!!!.
Why 9 KiB/s?
I don't know why, but i did a # top and i did see that the CPU was 90% idle and 10% running of cpio, gzip and others programs.
Why 90% cpu-idle for the slower and slower installation?
I don't know why, i believe that FreeBSD's president is hurting us and he wants money with worse and worse code.
open4free
!! your boss is a tool. If a MS sales person walked into our server room, you can bet I would go out to the lot and remove all the tires from his car. How a fortune 500 company can say 'hey, lets go all microsoft today!' and actually do it is beyond me. We do have some MS .NET pundits in the organization, but looking at what they were previously working on, it might have actually been an improvement. (Their systems were/are still based on PICK Basic and the PICK OS, no idea what they are doing with .NET)
I would have just quit. I can't handle looking at the windows desktop for more than a minute, much less have to interact with it.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Slashdot moderators are retards, plain and simple. And simple minded, goat buggers. And Linux users.
YHBT.
The OP is an old Mac troll... originally around the System 7 days, IIRC; you can see versions from six years ago online. It evolved over time, and became a BSD troll by way of OS X. I found out about it because I fell for it about a year ago. :-)
But I do have a couple of comments about your post:
Copying a 17 meg file should not take _any_ time as all it requires is an update to the file systems tables.
No, copying a file (as in, using cp) does duplicate all the data blocks. It sounds like you're thinking of making a hard link, which is just a directory update. But on my box (1400 MHz AMD, UW160 SCSI) it takes 3.3 sec to copy a file that's not in cache, on the same filesystem.
are you trying to copy a file to a recursive symlink?
If an operation goes through MAXSYMLINKS (32) links, then it's aborted with an ELOOP, so you don't have to worry about it.
Are you trying to copy /dev/random to /dev/null?
I know this isn't how you meant it, but just for interest, copying 17 MB from /dev/random to /dev/null takes 0.9 sec on my box.
But yeah, the OP with his 20+ minute 17 MB copy is a load of BS.