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Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

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Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#61

Post by detaro »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #38
detaro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who want to have support by a large vendor. If your DIY-setup fails you can't blame a vendor. In theory using the same kind of appliance as everybody else means you can easily find an networking guy to work with it, people who are good at both traditional networking gear and BSD/Linux are harder to find. If a dedicated box fails you can just have someone with some experience plop a new one in, reapply the conf…

I've heard the "blame a vendor" argument again and again in my life, but I have yet to see this "blame" ever occur. Granted, I'm dealing with small and medium-sized companies, but I've never seen any kind of tangible financial outcome from "blaming" a vendor (other than that vendor not getting future sales).

Not tangible financial outcome for the vendor. But for the employee suggesting it, who doesn't have to explain why "his" "cobbled together thing" doesn't work, but can point to all kinds of outside validation for the choice, even if it doesn't work out.

Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#62

Post by Cyberdog »

gknoy wrote: post #51
ubercow wrote: post #45

What's the difference between OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I've heard great networking things about both, but never really seen them compared side by side.

According to Wikipedia [1], OpenBSD optimizes for maximum security, whereas FreeBSD optimizes for performance, and NetBSD optimizes on portability. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sy...

As might be expected from a description so terse, this is a bit of a generalization. I think my preferred explanation is that FreeBSD aims to be a more usable general purpose operating system, whereas OpenBSD is more conservative, preferring to grow at its own pace and in its own directions which may not necessarily be the state of the BSD art in terms of user friendliness. A great example of this is ZFS; no free or paid OS outside of Solaris supports ZFS to the extent that FreeBSD does, but if you want to use ZFS with OpenBSD, you're outta luck - it's not even on the roadmap. Last I checked, OpenBSD had no interest in moving from GCC to Clang/LLVM either.

That being said, both OSes are free, and so is VirtualBox, so why not spin up a couple virtual boxes and give them both a try when you have the time?

Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#63

Post by mark-r »

lmm wrote: post #2

Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…

I once worked for a guy who wouldn't buy anything that didn't say Cisco on it, even when the networking guys made a solid case for something different. I often wondered if it was more than a "nice dinner" that he was getting.

Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#64

Post by scurvy »

profeta wrote: post #40
scurvy wrote: post #34

A couple of elephants in the room: Why on earth were you running a hosting business with Cisco 2950s? Those are wiring closet desktop switches with tiny buffers. That alone probably caused a lot of pain. You didn't know about it, but they did. Second, the Juniper J4350 is a software router based on BSD. There's no special hardware in there like ASICs. It's just a PC. JunOS (historically) is based on BSD. They're movi…

well, he did mention the lack of $150k for the proper cisco hardware.

In economic terms, this would be known as "barrier to entry" if you don't have the money to enter the market. In business terms, it's known as "the cost of doing business." Not having the money to push packets is bad when you're in the packet pushing business. That's like trying to run a high frequency trading shop from Alaska and blaming your ISP instead of the speed of light.

That said, you can buy a ton of good gear cheap on the secondhand market. This is extremely popular in the lower end of the hosting market. It's cheap. It works. It's a known quantity. You can get secondary support from companies like NHR. You don't have to buy gear new.

Used gear was probably a much better decision than new gear here.

Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#65

Post by tres »

scurvy wrote: post #34

A couple of elephants in the room: Why on earth were you running a hosting business with Cisco 2950s? Those are wiring closet desktop switches with tiny buffers. That alone probably caused a lot of pain. You didn't know about it, but they did. Second, the Juniper J4350 is a software router based on BSD. There's no special hardware in there like ASICs. It's just a PC. JunOS (historically) is based on BSD. They're movi…

Ha, my first gig with a hosting company, 2950 was at the top of every. single. rack. We grew that company from a rack to about 40 racks using 2950s. Each one of those racks had hundreds of VPS customers. We didn't have issues with 2950s not doing what they needed to do, in fact, they were perfect for the job -- performance, price and design were just right & the success of the business kind of underscores that.

Later on, I was working a network overhaul at a private college dedicated to video game creation (DigiPen). Each student was provided a desktop with their own roaming profile. These profiles got huge because there were things like 3D Studio Max projects being transferred to whatever computer the student happened to be at during that period. So we're talking about hundreds of students signing on at about the same time & massive amounts of data being transferred in a very short time. The old network topology was melting down on a regular basis causing the entire campus to come to a halt.

We fixed that by putting in a pair of -- you guessed it -- OpenBSD/PF routers. Now this wasn't some "oh crap" kind of bandaid fix; we had planned this all out & implemented over the summer months when there were no students. It was all planned out (the only problem was that the original plan called for FreeBSD & PF, which crashed -- once we had OpenBSD running, it was 'set it & forget it.')

Maybe I'm just too dumb to know the difference, but those 2950s and OpenBSD routers helped me sleep a lot better at night... they were perfect for what they were intended to do.

And as more than a decade of experience since has proven, the right tool for the job is often the one that gets scoffed at as a "toy" or good "for small projects."

Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#66

Post by scurvy »

tres wrote: post #65
scurvy wrote: post #34

A couple of elephants in the room: Why on earth were you running a hosting business with Cisco 2950s? Those are wiring closet desktop switches with tiny buffers. That alone probably caused a lot of pain. You didn't know about it, but they did. Second, the Juniper J4350 is a software router based on BSD. There's no special hardware in there like ASICs. It's just a PC. JunOS (historically) is based on BSD. They're movi…

Ha, my first gig with a hosting company, 2950 was at the top of every. single. rack. We grew that company from a rack to about 40 racks using 2950s. Each one of those racks had hundreds of VPS customers. We didn't have issues with 2950s not doing what they needed to do, in fact, they were perfect for the job -- performance, price and design were just right & the success of the business kind of underscores that. Later…

You monitored those ports for drops, buffer errors, and discards? You alerted when they occurred? Most don't watch the right counters or log messages. Even then, I guess you can get away with it if your customers aren't savvy enough to complain. Detecting microbursts in a VM would be impossible. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

One of my first bosses thought his Dell switches were awesome until I showed him all of the drops.

Also, roaming profiles were a great idea in principle and a horrible idea in practice. There's a good reason those things went away circa Windows 2000. ;)

Re: Unscrewed: A Story About OpenBSD

#67

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #37
_yy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but no sane organization is going to do that. It would create so much headache.

A sane organization will do it if the benefits outweigh the risks. An organization with sufficient risks will chose it. Most won't, because the risks (specifically, hard cash) won't be outweighed by the benefits. But that's incidental to what was my real point, which is that if you do want a separate network, it has to be separate . Tie your two "separate" networks together with integration and you're returning singl…

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