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Metawire.org Admin On OpenBSD Hosting
hext0r writes "Open Hosting provider metawire.org administrator Daniel Selans recently wrote an informative article for the OpenBSD Journal about the difficulties and successes in running a free hosting provider using OpenBSD. It's an informative read for anyone considering starting any type of hosting company using free technologies."
One of the main reasons for selecting OpenBSD is that it handles local security better than some of the other flavors. FreeBSD is my personal favorite for servers, but as a server that handles local users, I would never go with anything other than OpenBSD ever again.
The package system is also very nice. OpenBSD audits the packages that are included to protect against retarded local exploits. OpenBSD doesn't trust third party packages and this shows in its track record of local and remote root priveledge escalation's. Third party software is often overlooked as a flaw with Open Source software. Every day we hear about a new Microsoft Outlook hole, but nothing ever gets mentioned on slashdot on how XMMS allows arbitrary code execution. This kind of stuff happens all the time, but is often overlooked because most people running servers don't let their users do anything.
As a free hosting provider like we try to be, we wanted to give the users as much access to the system as we could safely allow. This has been both a hinderance and a help. Having a truely open provider available for users has helped us grow at an exponential rate. But we have to be very concerned about every local vulnerability that exists.
hrrm.
What do you want to know? As long as you post to the correct list, people are very nice. Stay away from the developer list with questions, the tolerance for that is apparantly fairly low.
Package management? The ports collection is awesome. Installation is, honestly, very easy. The pkg_add command takes care of everything (at least in my experience).
Compiling _everything_? I can't answer this one. Compiling all your programs (minus the libraries, etc) went very smoothly for me.
As for lacking serious packages...I haven't found anything that I needed that I couldn't get, but that's me. Most of the time, if you're package won't work on OpenBSD, there is some sort of BSD licensed equivalent that works well.
If the package version you want is not available, you can always recompile, but the amount of packages and their different available versions is astoundingly huge.
One of the biggest advantages of OpenBSD? The documentation is beautiful. They really weren't messing around with this. Not only is the documentation abundant, the quality is really nice. There are examples and troubleshooting tips all over the place (in the man pages).
It runs on essentially anything, so grab an old machine and play with it, I think you'll find most things are intuitive.
--Mx
How funny, you list a samsung article that is dated back to 2001. What year do you live in? Not to mention that there was a follow up to the article that tweaks *BSD settings and they match the other OS' almost 1 for 1 on performance:
q /
Which OS is Fastest -- FreeBSD Follow-Up
http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0108
What most people forget is that *BSD are configured for stability and it is up to the admin to tweak for performance. And performance depends on what kind of server you are going to be running. As MS would say, get the facts and actully read the first article as well as the follow up. How about responding to this one mr./mrs. troll.
FYI: the follow up is still in 2001. Perhaps reading and providing some more recent articles might make your point. If you can find any that prove less than stellar performance. Bring it on!!! And I am read with tons of new bench marks that prove my point and they are recent, like a month old.
They also place very little restrictions on what you can do. SSL access to webmail will be online soon too.
I just signed up for an account and have been very pleased. It sounded to good to be true, but its been great. But if people don't eventually donate, it may not be able to continue in the long run, so please consider that. They seem fine now, but lets keep it that way.
Sign up, contribute, and eventually donate if you like at:
http://metawire.org/donate.php