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.

Comments

Re:My success with OpenBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OpenBSD on Quad anything is silly at the moment.

OpenBSD is known to be used at the Pentagon and various other .gov and .mil sites and when was the last time the USAF donated a foreign software project $2M US?

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.

Re:My success with OpenBSD

[_Sharp'r_]

This guy (grandparent poster) knows even less about Windows than he does about OpenBSD.

[...] he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords.

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?