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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
While doing this within one organisational unit completely screws with your TCO (now instead of sitting smugly every time there is a Linux exploit, you now have to patch servers every time there is an exploit on Windows/Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/....), having different departments or different companies have different distros.
If you really need fault tolerance, having two redundant systems running different software is an excellent idea if you're willing to pay for that level of support.
You can also avoid the monoculture effect by making your "strain" subtly different, for instance prelink lets you randomise the addresses in memory of dynamically loaded libraries making automated exploits harder (since all the addresses changed), or using something like gentoo where you compile everything from scratch with subtly different USE lines, or optimisations.
Even recompiling your kernel with certain options can change the machine enough that common automated exploits won't work.
This is why the proliferation of Linux distros are a good thing, you can have some level of diversity by installing different distros without getting so much diversity that you your support costs go through the roof.
Portability of Linux means you can run Linux on intel and powerpc chips causing almost all automated exploits to fail, but only requiring a recompile as far as software is concerned. This can be a good solution for having two servers in a load balanced, failover cluster by having each server running on a different architecture.
In general, Windows doesn't have these advantages, Windows isn't portable across platforms. Windows doesn't let you recompile large chunks of the OS with different options, Windows only has a limited range of "Editions" and different editions are usually unsuitable for running the same task. Windows is often lacking equivilent software (How many replacements for exchange are there? How many Linux MTA/MDA/MAA's are there?)
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Why does this article keep saying, in effect, that OpenBSD is almost as good as FreeBSD? It took a little while for it to sink in, but now I get it.
The pointy-haired middle manager is never going to take your suggestion. But, if you forward him that article and tell him you want to use OpenBSD, he might just get brave and say, "what about FreeBSD?" -- then it will be his idea and you're in!!
K.C.
Why help the stupid ?
/. is getting insane.
um... because as part of the IT staff its part of your job?
If the PHB is tech illiterate yet still insists on making blind purchase decisions, let the punk shoot himself in the foot. You can always find a better boss elsewhere, or save up and launch your own business with _your_ skills and computer savoir-faire. Just be loyal to your paycheck until opportunity comes knocking.
You let "the punk" shoot himself in the foot, and needlessly spend $100k and there goes any semblance of a good reference for your next job... talk about bridge burning. And save up and start your own company??? Yeah, lets everyone do that because of management's choice of operating system. My god the rhetoric of
If your boss can't tell the difference between a 2 million$ investment + tech training, and a 0$ investment + tech training, then you should just smile and cash your fat check because there is no salvation for such math flunkies.
its obviously a lot more complicated than that, don't you think? Or in your opinion is everone running win2003 server over BSD total morons? Theres a time and a place for everything, and if you ask me your zealotry will get you in some serious career trouble sooner or later. Best of luck, man.
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
Why? Because it doesn't have a little graphical paperclip saying "Would you like to install the OS?"
OpenBSD's installer is absolutely the simplest OS installer I've ever seen. The only "difficult" things is that you have to partition the hard drive yourself, unlike the Linux/Windows world, where the installer just wipes your drive, and installs one single huge partition.
You need to elaborate. Are you talking about unsupported hardware? If so, the only thing OpenBSD didn't support in the old days, was my sound-card, and not only is that not an issue for a server, but soundcard support has much improved in the past couple years.
If you has some "incompatibilites", I'd be even more interested. OpenBSD has been better than any other OS at automatically detecting all the hardware, and setting it up (at every boot-up no-less). I was astonished to see that everything just came up and was working, when I had come from a Linux background, where everything took hours of manually selecting your hardware, fiddling with module parameters, editing config files, etc. Hardware that I though was impossible to get working together because of my Linux experince (eg two soundcards in one system, multiple IDE controllers, etc), was up and was working automatically.
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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.
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