I am Mischa Peters. I am running a hosting and co-locating company out of Amsterdam as a out-of-hand hobby and my $dayjob is leading a team of Systems Engineers for a security startup. I recently kicked off OpenBSD Amsterdam.
I started in the wonderful world of Unix (SunOS) while in university and I wanted to run something at home that had the same feel to it.
I bumped into Linux, Slackware and later RedHat, and I even was a beta tester for RedHat 5.2 on SPARC at one point. After that I saw the light and moved to FreeBSD 2.x, been running BSD ever since. Also used OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD a couple of times in those days. Around 5 years, or so, ago I added OpenBSD to the mix again, full time.
What is my favorite BSD? I actually have two favorites, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. With OpenBSD everything just makes sense for me. The defaults are sane, hardly anything to install to have a desktop, server or router running. My intial draw to OpenBSD was networking. It just works and is easy to configure: pf(4), vlan(4), vxlan(4), carp(4), trunk(4), OpenBGPd, pppoe(4), and the list goes on.
Other things I am a big fan of are: relayd(8), httpd(8), OpenSMTPd, spamd(8), OpenSSH, of course, and more recently vmd(8)/vmm(4).
With FreeBSD I really enjoy jail(8), zfs(8), bhyve(8), pkg(8) together with pourdriere.
When I started with BSD all my servers where FreeBSD with jails. Today I have a mix of OpenBSD and FreeBSD running on my servers. FreeBSD is running on a couple of dedicated jails machine for customers, couple of ZFS machines for storage and streaming. OpenBSD is running on a couple of dedicated relayd machines, couple of routers in different locations (home, $dayjob, DC), dedicated DNS servers with unbound(8)/nsd(8), couple of machines running dedicated vmd(8)/vmm(4) for OpenBSD Amsterdam. And things like OpenSMTPd, spamd(8), OpenVPN, cgit, web hosting on httpd(8) (sometimes in combination with relayd(8)). Lastly using OpenBSD on my laptop (ThinkPad X270) with cwm(1).
For my own company and at home that is easy. I am using OpenBSD on my desktop, servers and routers and FreeBSD on servers and storage. As much as possible out of base, I adjust my workflow if I can replace a tool with something out of base.
Find me on Twitter and Mastodon.
7 Aug 2018
Hosted by OpenBSD Amsterdam
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