The Tlog - a technology blog

OpenBSD is 10 years old today!

OpenBSD is my favorite Unix variant, although due to laziness I use Linux on my work desktop. But for servers… it’s a dream. Fast, secure by default (instead of closing stuff after installation, everything is already closed down, and you open what you need), lightweight, with the best man pages of any Unix in the world (which other Unixes almost never update, or simply forget about)… it just works. pf, the firewall, is incredibly easy to configure (makes Linux’s iptables look like a sadistic joke, if you ask me… yuck!) yet powerful. It doesn’t include everything but the kitchen sink as part of the OS, just mostly the OS itself - the rest can be installed as packages, ports, or from source.

All my sites, along with my internal proxy server, mail server, DNS server, etc. run on a single OpenBSD box. I’ve tried other server OSes, but I always come back to OpenBSD - it’s everything I want, and perhaps as important, it’s no more than what I want.

So… Happy birthday, OpenBSD!

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