I was introduced to FreeBSD while working for NetApp as the base that runs ONTAP (NetApp’s storage OS).
In my current job, I administer a research cluster for a University. When I got a chance to rebuild the cluster, I relied on OpenBSD and FreeBSD for most of the infrastructure services.
I love using OpenBSD because it gives a minimal, secure, no bloat system by default. As a bonus, I get excellent documentation, sensible defaults, and constant audits by remarkable engineers who not only add features they’re interested in, but diligently remove old/deprecated parts of code. To hear Theo, and others talk about pledge(2), unveil(2), and other features, only emphasises the passion that goes into making this unique, rather opinionated software project.
We use OpenBSD for our core DNS (unbound(8)), DHCP, SSH & SFTP, firewall (pf(4)) and network gateway. If I’m building a public facing server, I’ll try very best to make it run OpenBSD.
FreeBSD gets my love for its tight integration with ZFS. I recently build a ZFS based file server for less than half of what an enterprise NAS was going to cost us.
It made me even happier when I learnt that it was able to munch data faster than the network it was connected to. Now, having used BSD for serious work stuff, I’m planning to use OpenBSD for my desktop, and personal firewall on Raspberry Pi. More fun awaits.
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7 Aug 2018
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