[rescue] OpenBSD

[Christian J Hedemark]

Patrick Giagnocavo said:
> Yes, I tend to buy PCs myself - but they get loaded with OpenBSD.

Amen.

Although I usually run on "rescued" hardware.  Yeah there are a couple of
machines I put together from new parts but the rest is discarded scrap that
even the public schools didn't want anymore.

I just set one of them up tonight as a matter of fact for my father in law.
It's now serving the following functions for his home:

* Firewall
* NAT
* DHCP Server
* DNS server
* transparent http proxy
* WINS server (he is mostly running various flavors of Windoze over there)
* Windoze file server (Samba)
* Banner ad stripper

I haven't quite figured out tranparent ftp proxying.  The OpenBSD FAQ is
wrong on how to do this.  Recent threads on misc at openbsd.org seem to suggest
it has been fixed in -current but I've never done that sort of upgrade
before, the docs aren't too clear on how to do it, and I'm not going to do
it for the first time on someone else's computer (especially not one that I
have to support!).

The web access hauls ass now.  Lots of latency has been stripped, due in
part to the nearby DNS server that isn't being overused like the one Road
Runner has provided.  Stripping the banner ads also helped a lot.  How many
times do you sit there waiting for a banner ad to download before the rest
of the page will finish rendering?  While actual throughput hasn't really
improved much, stripping the latency can make things more enjoyable for a
web surfer than a little more bandwidth will.

Not bad for a Pentium 133 with 32MB RAM (up from 16MB, mostly to improve
Squid performance).

This has been configured as a stateful firewall so if you nmap it from
outside it is totally stealth.

I am so in love with OpenBSD.  I'm trying to find about a half a day of
consecutive free time to install in on my Sun Ultra 5, which I've dug up a
16.8GB drive for.  I hear it should run really well on this hardware.

Also have OpenBSD running now for one of my clients.  I am on a mission to
replace his NT servers, which is basically what he hired me to do.  WINS,
DNS, DHCP, and some other services are already done.  All of this is running
on a single Pentium II 233MHz box for over 100 users.  When I am done a
second host will be set up as a hot failover box for the first.  Once the NT
servers are replaced, I'll recycle the hardware they ran on to run XDMCP.
Apparently they have a store room of old Pentiums and Pentium II's, and even
an ALR four-way Pentium Pro box.  Those old machines are going to become
OpenBSD boxes with X, basically acting as X Terminals for the old Windows NT
servers (which will probably run Linux).

I know some folks here are too into the politics of NetBSD vs. OpenBSD and
can't open their eyes to see the new directions that OpenBSD is pushing in
on their own.  But if you've got an old POS that recent Linux distros won't
work on anymore, give OpenBSD a try.  I've confirmed version 3.0 (the latest
release) to install and run on a 486/66MHz with 12MB RAM and 220MB hard
disk.  Give yourself about one gig of hard disk and 32 or more megs of RAM
if you want to go all out with X Windows and such.