I’m a big fan of OpenBSD. I decided one day a few years ago to have a crack at this operating system that had such a reputation for security, since security is of much interest to me. I printed out the installation guide from the website, dusted off an old P-90 with 32mb of RAM and 3 or 4 goes later had it up and running.
OpenBSD quickly replaced the IPCop system I had running at the time. I made plenty of bungles in the early days and rebuilt it many times. Eventually I upgraded to a Celeron 300mhz machine with 64mb RAM and it became even better. Its still running on that same hardware over 2 years later and has only gone down when my house lost power, or more recently just last weekend when I recabled the power for that shelf.
The only thing that disappoints me about OpenBSD is that I currently don’t get to use it professionally. I would love to deploy and manage it for customers but I just don’t see the opportunities out there at the moment. Hopefully that will change soon.
If you don’t know much about OpenBSD there is a good article here that is worth reading. Then head on over to OpenBSD.org and get started.
About Paul Cunningham
