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A BSD For Your PHB
Kelly McNeill writes "The reaction one gets when attempting to get a manager in a corporate environment to consider an alternate operating system can sometimes be likened to a typical dilbert comic strip. Joseph Mallett contributed the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which suggests that if you present the case properly, your pointy haired boss will make the right decision when choosing a Unix operating system to run the business."
(repost from OsViews, anonymous for avoiding karma whoring/damage)
nano is a free replacement for pico (which is encumbered in some fuzzy licence I think), and is available in OpenBSD through the portstree or as a package. I highly recommend it for those of us that can't stand typing obscure key-combinations in editors.
Now, I'm a OpenBSD junkie, but still, I wouldn't dream of building a firewall, DNS, or static webserver on anything else than OpenBSD. ProPolice and the Write-XOR-Execute technology gives me a varm feeling. Not to speak about the privilege separated, chrooted bind, chrooted Apache (with some extra 3-4000 thousands lines of security fixes over stock Apache), and a kick ass firewall solution (stateful, trafic shaping, redundant failover solution).
As the article says, it may not be the best choice for every situation, but in this department it really shines.
That doesn't stop me from running OpenBSD as my primary desktop though. :-)
I ditched OpenBSD a while ago for FreeBSD on my firewall (been using it on laptops and fileserver for aeons now.) I didn't find the upgrade procedure easy or transparent, and while my questions to various help mailing lists were usually answered in at least some civil manner, I've seen plenty of perfectly reasonable ones that just elicited idiotic flames ("you're just not '1337 enough to run this OS") to make me wonder.
I am not questioning the quality of OpenBSD (or any *BSD/Linux.) I know people who happily use it as their OS for all desktop-type work. I switched because I had too many odd (quite possibly atypical) problems that I just didn't have the time to get into, and yes I do RTFM before doing stuff on my boxes. I also banished FreeBSD from my laptop in favor of Debian because I just didn't think it adequately supported things like ACPI, my wireless card, and other things that, for a machine I use to do loads of non-technical work, should "just work".
Like it or not, and this is the wave of stupidity that usually breaks against the immovable seawall of OS fanaticism, there are things that I just don't want my PHB to be involved in. Just like having a car and just wanting to send it to the garage for regular checkups and having it function shouldn't disqualify you from driving, nobody should _have_ to use an alternate OS just because it's the right thing to do in someone's opinion.
That said, if a PHB actually can be made to want to muck with OpenBSD or Linux or whatever as a desktop OS, great! I'm all for it, I think it's great! I think it's nice that people like Mallett make a convincing, well-argued case for how/why to use a non-commercial OS for daily tasks. I like the article; he does not resort to zealotry or preaching.
Bottom line, if you can make a well-founded, logical argument, and you have a boss who's receptive to trying new things (or has time) you may have rewarded him by giving him something new and interesting to try out. If not, well, feh, let him use his Windows box and you use whatever you're happy with or have to.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Who in thier right $deity damned mind lets their boss pick their OS? I don't know any boss I have that's educated enough to understand well enough what an OS is, let alone which one we should use.
Pretty Pictures!
Wow! Where did that come from? OpenBSD upgrade is possibly the simpliest OS upgrade around.
You just put in the CD/Floppy, select upgrade, tell it the source of the files (eg. CD-ROM, FTP), and it does everything for you. What did you find difficult about that?
You're not 1337 enough to post on slashdot.
Now are you going to leave? Does this make slashdot any less useful? Or are you just whining because someone complained that you didn't read the DOCS?
What problems? Start listing... I have yet to find one person with valid complaints about having problems in OpenBSD (at least, recently). They all ammount to some program not compiling, not knowing where the conf files are, etc.
What do you mean? Once you have a machine up and running, your PHB doesn't need to do anything to it, other than point and click on the icons, and use the programs. Once it's up and working, nobody needs to administer it, fix something that's broken, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
1) There is no budget for this machine. Funds have to come from the general lab account, meaning fewer spare parts, cables, donuts, etc.
2) The IT department is not supporting this machine, the lab manager is. And the lab manager knows more about Unix than Windows.
3) Who cares about replacement parts? The system is FREE OF COST! We can always go to Win/Dell when the Micron ever craps out. In the meantime there's nothing wrong with it. In addition, we have identical and similar systems in mothball, so replacing it would actually be cheaper than buying a part for a Win/Dell.
4) We don't have to bother getting the Micron working, because it ALREADY IS! And it already has FreeBSD installed!
In summary, the PHB chose Windows simply because that's the OS on his desktop. His first argument is that IT will support it, but that argument does not hold water because IT doesn't support our lab machines anyway. His second argument is that ISA cards for the Micron are obsolete, but that argument doesn't hold water either, because none of the ISA cards in the Micron have a problem. He wants to shoot the horse before it goes lame.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Were you under the influence of some controlled substance when you installed OpenBSD?
First of all, it does not ask what partition to install to... with or without defaults or a list. It automatically uses the first one, and as far as I can remember, it has since early in the 2.x days.
Second, I also find this strange, as even if it did ask you to provide the device name, you should know that, because install is the step immediately after partitioning. How could you have exited out of the partitioning program, and not have known how partitions were named? It shows you the naming as you are creating each one, and I'm sure you displayed it before exiting, where it gave you a nice list of each device name...
No, only the partitioning step... Other than that, OpenBSD is much easier. FreeBSD is a mess of sub-menus, sub-sub-menus, etc. There's no real way to know which step you should take next. If you go down the list, sooner or later you'll hit a step that you didn't want. Or worse, if you try to guess if you want to try an option based on the name, you're likely to skip something important, and the FreeBSD installer is dumb enough that it will let you go through all the steps of installing, even without any partitions, giving you pointless error messages that give no hint to the problem. I like FreeBSD very much, but I don't like the installer much. They could improve it immensely just by copying Slackware's similar-looking installer.
Did you have your HDD set to spin-down via the BIOS? If so, OpenBSD didn't used to play nice, and spun it back up almost immediately. Was that your problem? It reports a "reset", but that doesn't pose any problem at all, it's just giving you more info than other OSes do.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant