Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

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Of course it's fair. He built it to just have a person UNIX that he enjoys working on. Lots of other people did the same. Security was never a priority for them. Whereas, by that time, there were already multiple OS's with strong levels of built-in security. He could've copied stuff from them. There's even more now. They're still keeping broken model for (a) their priorities that put security low and (b) avoiding rewriting anything depending on broken security architecture. All the container developments are the classic solution to (b) but their security is often similarly shoddy vs what it could've been.

So, yeah, blame Linus and others in that ecosystem who do everything but make a solid foundation. Contrast that to OpenBSD for monolithic or GenodeOS for microkernel approaches where they bake security in at various levels. MINIX 3 for reliability levels they achieved 10x faster than monolithic UNIX's did. You get what you focus on. :)

Right. I'm saying give up on expecting the project to change. The project isn't for what you want it to be for and never will be.

You should be shouting at companies who use it for applications where security is a must. That's where the madness lies.

I use OpenBSD and so should you :)

I also use OpenBSD (and donate to it, since I have more money than time right now)... but damn, they do need a VM that I can use, so that it can be my regular desktop.

QEMU too slow?

Sadly yes. For several specific clients I have to run their Win7 VM in an emulator, and it can't quite manage on my (rather old) hardware right now.

Due for a hardware refresh soon, and I will obviously be trying it again :)

Are you saying a VMM to virtualize other software or a pre-configured VM containing OpenBSD you can run on top of other OS's with better hardware support? Or something else entirely?

A VM to virtualize other software. In this case, my desktop has to support some clients who have very specific VM images of Win7 to access them. VirtualBox and VMware are fine, but for QEMU it's just way too slow (for me, at the moment)

Well that's mostly true. I guess we have to shout at the cloud companies then. ;)

Digital Ocean supports FreeBSD, but not OpenBSD. Which is close, but not quite the same. Perhaps with a little persuasion, they could be talked into it

You can install and run OpenBSD on DO. Here's the guide by Derek Sivers: http://50pop.com/d.html

Thanks! I think I'll give that a try. That's a great idea.

Please do!

It's even possible to do modern web stuff on OpenBSD. Erlang and Elixir run on it, as does Postgres. Phoenix framework pretty much works out of the box.

http://arpnetworks.com/ offers OpenBSD VPS, and has a great service record! I strongly recommend them.

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