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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."

22 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Troll-in-one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    All the *BSD is dying posts are contained in this one post to spare the BSD section of the heavy trolling. If I've missed any, please add your troll as a reply and I'll include it in the next Troll-in-one. Keep your flames to yourself -- I already know you have a distorted psychological need to imagine BSD as dying because it only helps to relieve the cognitive dissonance you are currently experiencing with Linux. In reality, though, it only shows a deep-seated jealousy towards BSD, which you'll go to any lengths to deny.
    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

    I must make it clear that:

    1) *BSD is associated with the Devil (see mascot).
    2) *BSD promotes anti-social behaviour.
    3) *BSD encourages a homosexual lifestyle.
    4) *BSD stands for destruction of the economy.
    5) *BSD attacks the average man in the street.
    6) *BSD allows no critisms of its mission.
    7) *BSD harbours terrorists and other state enemies.
    8) *BSD collects weapons of mass destruction.
    9) *BSD believes in the enprisionment of mankind.
    10) *BSD is dying.
    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

    The *BSD Wailing Song

    What's left for me to see
    In my ship I sailed so far
    What can the answer be
    Don't know what the questions are.
    And after all I've done
    Still I cannot feel the sun
    Tell me save me
    In the end our lost souls must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low.
    Who knows what's really true
    They say the end is so near
    Why are we all so cruel
    We just fill ourselves with fear.
    And heaven and hell will turn
    All that we love shall burn
    Hear me trust me
    In the end our lost sould must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low
    Final curtain
    Final curtain


    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

    • flask of ripe urine
      pressed to bsd lips
      bsd drink up

    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

    I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BSD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

    In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

    I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.

    BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.


    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

    It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. Almost everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the

  2. I also wrote an informative article about this: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    !daed si DSB

  3. And do you know what BSD stands for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Braindead Software Distribution

  4. Slashdot Summer Camp 2004 by ReluctantBadger · · Score: -1, Troll

    SLASHDOT SUMMER CAMP

    Hey Slashboteers! Are you finishing university? *STILL* unemployed after the dot com layoffs? Well, have we got the answer for you! Chief Executive Officer Rob Madla and SS Officer Michael Sims invite you to join them at the Black River Public School in Holland, Michigan from the 10th of August for the SLASHDOT SUMMER CAMP. Three full days of pony rides, coding and male bonding. Special Appearances by NAMBLA Grand Wizard Katz with his partner Wai Tu Yung.

    Activities include:

    • Bouncy 'CowboyNeal' Castle - Pick a cheek and jump, bitch!
    • Salami Slam - Jon Katz's unusual variation of naked leapfrog.
    • Anime Association - Sit around with CmdrTaco and watch Anime with no subtitles or dubbing and pretend to know what's going on. Free Juice.
    • Advanced Kernel Hacking - Workshop on changing printf() statements and then re-compiling to make it look like you're 3ll37. Hosted by Alan Cox.
    • Masters of Perl - Jamie shows you how NOT to code by demonstrating the latest version of Slash.
    • Delusional Paranoia 101 - How to quote 1984 and Franklin for your YRO posts.
    • The Great Penguin Push - Instructional piece on cramming penguin plush toys into tight spaces.
    • DivX for the C64 - Featuring our guest speaker "Junis".

    Tickets are US$90 each, and the event lasts for three days. For more information, or to book a place, contact CmdrTaco

    Terms & Conditions:
    Spaces are limited to how many people we can lock in a basement. Camp is open to males aged between 12 and 19. No soap is allowed on the premises. CmdrTaco's Jubei cabinet is not to be used as a simulated coffin for sex games without his involvement.

  5. BSD is an embarrassment to open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    With all its bugs, constant security problems and totally ridiculous ways of handling ports/packages, the TCO for BSD is so high that it would make Microsoft proud. Just wait until Billy uses BSD in his case studies against open source.

  6. PLEASE don't confuse OpenBSD with other BSDs!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    OpenBSD is Open about its being wide Open to crackers.

  7. I love BSD, it makes me an elitist! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I'm 1447, d00d!

  8. OpenBSD is not a real system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    It's just a fork. Anyone could take linux source
    cp -r /usr/src/linux /usr/src/penux
    it. Rename everything to Penux, introduce some braindamage and market it as a new version of Linux. But Linux people just aren't as gullible to fall for that kind of stuff.
  9. The problem with BSD is its ports system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    With ports, you usually have to install everything from source, that means spending a lot of time configuring something, then trying to compile it, failing to compile (because ports aren't really very well tested for mutual compile-compatibility). Sometimes you may spend 10 hours compiling, say, KDE only to find out that the compile breaks because of something, and you have to start over. BSDs are now trying to make binary packages and binary updates the norm, but there are huge difficulties with those, because the ports system simply isn't designed to work well for binaries. In conclusion: use Debian instead!

  10. Best *BSD Hosting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Cemetery

  11. People, please do not say anything bad about BSD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Please do not say anything bad about BSD. In Western cultures you should say only good things about the deceased or say nothing at all. Thank you.

  12. Open Source? No: Open Casket by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    If *BSD keeps shambling along like one of those mall-rats in "Day of the Dead", we will have to coin a new term for this type of program: open-casket software.

  13. BSD is d3d. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    s33 t0p1c. 1447 d00d!

  14. Difficulties ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Come on, OpenBSD hosting is very easy.
    All you need is an open coffin with an internet connection.

  15. DID YOU HEAR? NETCRAFT CONFIRMS: *BSD IS DYING! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dbblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying

  16. Re:Nitpick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dbblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying

  17. What I know about *BSD: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    1. You can not play games on it.
    2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
    3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
    4. There is no support available for it.
    5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
    6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
    7. You have to compile everything and know C.
    8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
    9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
    10.It is dying.

  18. Re:Nitpick by TheLink · · Score: 0, Troll

    For network servers or personal machines I don't see FreeBSD being much less secure than OpenBSD. Dunno much about NetBSD except that it runs on tons of things and the NetBSD devs are pretty savvy security-wise.

    For machines shared/used by untrusted users perhaps OpenBSD might be more secure, however I personally think that giving untrusted users an account on your machine is almost the same as giving them root. This is true for most popular operating systems and environments.

    Show me an O/S that is architecturally secure and it's probably an O/S that doesn't run most of the stuff that people want.

    What I like about FreeBSD is
    1) Documentation - you can do man wi and you get docs on the wifi driver, do man dc and you get docs on the dec nic driver. Then there's the handbook.
    2) Ports/packages. Installing Bugzilla on FreeBSD is mostly just:
    cd /usr/ports/devel/bugzilla
    make install
    Then a bit of configuration.

    Whereas on say RH Linux, you have to download bugzilla, various Perl modules, MySQL, and all the other stuff by yourself. FreeBSD's port system downloads all the dependencies.

    Same thing goes for other stuff like say squirrelmail.

    You could use binary packages if you want to, or even build your own from the ports (to redistribute to machines where CPU is slow or at a premium).

    3) IPFW does the stuff I want (netfilter doesn't seem to be able to). And does other stuff I want in simpler ways.

    4) Ease of being reasonably sure that a system is fully up to date with the latest stable stuff. With stuff like RH Linux and many other distros (except maybe Gentoo) things could get screwed up - binaries could get overwritten and you are no longer sure if the system is up to a consistent and recent patch level. I suppose with RH you could reinstall all the RPMs - that might fix all binaries.

    If you want to compile everything by hand you can. But for FreeBSD, lots of stuff is in the ports.

    OpenBSD is supposedly more secure than FreeBSD, but in terms of direct remote root exploits, they're just about the same as FreeBSD- both use Openssh which hasn't had that great a security track record. OpenSSH appears to be developed and maintained by the OpenBSD team. Whether OpenSSH's security/quality is representative of the rest of the OpenBSD team's work is up to you to figure out.

    Performance? your mileage may vary. OpenBSD generally doesn't scale as well as FreeBSD/NetBSD or Linux 2.4/2.6. FreeBSD 4.9 is very competitive with Linux 2.4 (IIRC faster in some stuff, slower in others).

    --
  19. You forgot one.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Q: What do you call a review of the latest version of FreeBSD?
    A: An autopsy.

  20. Re:Ack! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying

  21. NOBODY GIVES A SHIT YOU FUCKING DICKHEAD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dying

  22. NETCRAFT has confirmed that BSD is dying. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    What more proof do you need?