Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why use OpenBSD?

tumfatig.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 106 posts

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#51

Post by epakai »

Guestmodinfo wrote: post #38
PunchyHamster wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not....it's Ubuntu. Not Linux, not Debian, Ubuntu. Debian (provided you don't just dump a bunch of 3rd party repos) just upgrades cleanly, we have hundreds of servers that just run unattended-upgrade and get upgraded to new Debian version every 2 years. The few Ubuntus we had had more problems.

How to upgrade Debian unattended if it's not a rolling release

Debian still has security fixes, and point releases. unattended-upgrades is the package that automates their install.

I think you can also do unattended release upgrades by using the 'stable' release alias in sources. That will probably result in some stuff breaking since there will be package and configuration churn.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#52

Post by dijit »

matt-p wrote: post #31

I adore openbsd and have been using it since 4.x however it is still slow, not slow to boot or anything like that but if you run it as a web server it manages about half the req/s of Debian. Network performance is also slower than Debian if you're using it as a firewall (but I still prefer it as the syntax of PF is just perfect).

there's a lot of optimisations they don't engage with because it makes the code "ugly" but there's a larger one here, where they disable hyperthreading outright due to side-channel attacks.

Might be a leading cause of what you're seeing.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#53

Post by throwaway270925 »

matt-p wrote: post #31

I adore openbsd and have been using it since 4.x however it is still slow, not slow to boot or anything like that but if you run it as a web server it manages about half the req/s of Debian. Network performance is also slower than Debian if you're using it as a firewall (but I still prefer it as the syntax of PF is just perfect).

It's gotten a lot faster with 7.6 (lots of work on the TCP stack iirc). We saw huge improvements in throughput after updating.

The new 7.8 release should bring some more performance, haven't tested it yet though.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#54

Post by [deleted] »

mono442 wrote: post #12

To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system myself other than just for the sake of using something different and less mainstream. FreeBSD had some advantages in the past but nowadays Linux has caught up in features.

[deleted]

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#55

Post by graemep »

shevy-java wrote: post #6
brobdingnagians wrote: post #3

Servers I setup in openbsd just keep working, and are an easy patch/upgrade process. Servers I setup in Ubuntu break and have weird patching issues. Maybe it's something I'm doing, but I sure do like that OpenBSD seems a lot easier to just have solid and work indefinitely.

Well - I would recommend using a better linux distribution than Ubuntu. I run just lighttpd these days; used to run httpd before they decided the configuration must become even more complicated. I don't have any issues with lighttpd (admittedly only few people use it; most seem to now use nginx).

I have used lighttpd in the past but have been using nginx largely because I got used to it because other people chose it.

Now in more of a position to pick for myself, and I wondered how you feel about the pros and cons of lighttpd? I remember quite liking its config at the time.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#56

Post by dilippkumar »

Long time OpenBSD fan. Used it as my daily driver for years before standardizing all computers at home to macOS. I still think about going back to openBSD one day, but it's no longer very practical as a daily driver.

I want to use OpenBSD for the next project I'm building. However, I can't wrap my head around the old way of doing deployments (before containers). People who've built production grade systems with OpenBSD:

1. How do you deploy software? 2. How do you manage fleets of servers? 3. How do you spin up/turn down servers from cloud providers? (I only know of Vultr who provided an OpenBSD option out of the box).

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#57

Post by rfmoz »

mono442 wrote: post #12

To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system myself other than just for the sake of using something different and less mainstream. FreeBSD had some advantages in the past but nowadays Linux has caught up in features.

The development move in ZFS from FreeBSD to OpenZFS (AKA Linux) was a mayor point on that.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#58

Post by DeathArrow »

mono442 wrote: post #12

To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system myself other than just for the sake of using something different and less mainstream. FreeBSD had some advantages in the past but nowadays Linux has caught up in features.

>To be honest I don't really see a reason to use a *BSD system myself

I see some reasons:

- the BSD license

- the system is composed of pieces written to work together, it is built from start up as a coherent operating system as opposed to things cobbled together like other UNIX-like OS-es do

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#59

Post by finaard »

matt-p wrote: post #31

I adore openbsd and have been using it since 4.x however it is still slow, not slow to boot or anything like that but if you run it as a web server it manages about half the req/s of Debian. Network performance is also slower than Debian if you're using it as a firewall (but I still prefer it as the syntax of PF is just perfect).

It used to be faster than Linux for that, but that's been a while ago.

I moved some stuff away from OpenBSD when the release of Linux 2.4 implemented all missing firewall functionality - but kept others still due to the early issues with the 2.4 kernel. But by the time 2.5 was getting decent - roughly a year before the 2.6 release - in most cases just using Linux with a custom 2.5 kernel was the better option.

Re: Why use OpenBSD?

#60

Post by hylaride »

Guestmodinfo wrote: post #41
shevy-java wrote: post #5

I appreciate that OpenBSD sold its course on security-everywhere. Unfortunately I also kind of lost faith in the BSD variants. There are a few minor things such as PC-BSD suddenly vanishing, or years before NetBSD on their mailing list admitting that Linux outperformed their "runs on any toaster and other gimmick" strategy. But one of the key issues I had was this: I installed it (FreeBSD) on my second computer. I we…

Just a few hours ago on the irc channel of OpenBSD someone said that OpenBSD is good at not letting a wonky hardware run compared to linux. So you could use the dmesg and ask it in the OpenBSD mailing list and they will point out which wonky hardware is causing trouble and you can replace that problematic part. I ran OpenBSD current for 6 years and never faced such issue

Years ago (circa ~2005) I was working for a company with a mix of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux. I was more of a fan of OpenBSD and I received a lot of grief when the OpenBSD team suddenly ripped out support for one of the Dell hardware RAID controllers (I don't remember which one, but IIRC it was one based on something from Adaptec), claiming they couldn't reliably reverse engineer it to create stable drivers. Their attempts ultimately always ended up with "random" corruption.

A year or so later our main DB on Windows (long story on why we were running windows DBs with most of the other kit being BSD/Linux) had a total corruption incident (it was painful, but we had a replica failover that we recovered from) - turns out we could get an answer from Dell since Windows was obviously supported by Dell themselves. There was a known issue with that model of RAID controller that would result in random and total corruption - and there was no way to fix it in firmware.

I was smug about it, but had to concede that people should still be given an informed choice. IIRC Dell was very quiet about it, which is certainly not "informed choice". Had we known, we'd have shelled out for different hardware for our databases!

Post reply on HN