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Article on OpenBSD and Theo de Raadt
Marcos Lopez writes "Good article on Theo de Raadt and his developement of the OpenBSD system and why he is based in Canada due to crypto laws in the US. Well written article/interview, was printed todays in the Calgary Herald, Theo's home town.
" A generalist overview of OpenBSD and its security-conscious direction.
I can't believe how long it took a local paper to recognize a local innovator.
I am a Calgary resiedent and actually I am not too shocked. The majority of the classified ads under technology are for Microsoft based products. Calgary, lately has been trying to pretend it is no longer an oil and gas town but a new technology mecca. I don't believe it.
The conservative attitudes of the aging oil elite prevail. The tone of the article was more a statement that OpenBSD exists rather than the glowing writing about another twit opening up a school to give people MSCE certificates for a really sick price. (That article I think was last week some time).
In fact I am shocked they even wrote about open bsd in a city where money talks - esspecially oil and gas money.
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I have near zero experience with OpenBSD so far, but I did try a couple installations.
Yeah, the OpenBSD disk layout program is really bizzare, at least to those of us who have used MS-DOS systems too much. When reading through the FreeBSD documentation that came with the Walnut Creek package, they shed some light on the *BSD disk model -- it appears to have been developed absolutely independantly of the IBM PC's HD layout, and they have different ideas about how things are done. When BSD was ported to the PC platform, the disk partitioning model was ported, too. Knowing FDISK probably hurts when laying out an OpenBSD system.
As I understand it, you basicly create a IBM/MS style partition which reserves space for OpenBSD. THIS becomes the BSD "disk". Now, this "disk" is partitioned. Kinda like "Extended partitions", but totally different 8)
My first attempt to load OpenBSD was on a generic clone, empty IDE hard disk, 3Com network card, FTP install. Worked great. I then tried putting it on a machine which I wanted to have it run on (Compaq Deskpro XL 575). Had more problems, as there was the infamous Compaq system maintence partition on the drive already, and a small DOS partition. But, the install appeared to go well. Until reboot. At which point, the system refused to boot, and upon investigation, the disk was blank, except for the OpenBSD boot loader. No OpenBSD partition, no DOS partition, no Compaq system partition (and those are a pain to reload).
I went back to FreeBSD after that. I'll try OpenBSD again, esp. once I found the explaination of the BSD disk concepts in the Walnut Creek FreeBSD book, but yes, for newbies, it would be best to practice on a BLANK hard disk at first. And of course, your backup are up to date, aren't they??
As someone else said, FreeBSD has a much nicer disk preparation program.
Nick.