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."

Comments

Pico

[Anonymous Coward]

(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. :-)

steathly FBSD pitch

[kace]

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.

Re:Great guidelines, but...

[PopCulture]

Why help the stupid ?

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 /. is getting insane.

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.

Re:OpenBSD Desktop? Icky Poo.

[evilviper]

I didn't find the upgrade procedure easy or transparent

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?

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.

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?

I switched because I had too many odd (quite possibly atypical) problems that I just didn't have the time to get into,

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.

there are things that I just don't want my PHB to be involved in.

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.