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Comment by ivenkys | Hacker News Reader

Its actually one of the easiest O.S to install and work with when it comes to back-end servers for running network infrastructure type services (vpn, firewall, chat server, torrent server, dns, dhcp etc. etc.) - nothing comes close.

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What are some reasons for OpenBSD not being a more popular OS on web servers? I always wondered about this, as on paper OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) seem like they have the edge but most server admins end up running linux. Another case of linux being slightly easier to use and doing the job well enough?

I'm a big fan of FreeBSD/OpenBSD as server OS's. I've put OpenBSD/pf to great use as firewall machines, as they're VERY easy to configure, and the docs are most everything you need. FreeBSD has been great for general-purpose workloads.

For some time OpenBSD has been regarded as "slow", in big part because it couldn't use large amounts of RAM, and it scaled across multiple cores poorly. I'm not sure if this is still the case.

5.0 will lift lots of memory-related limits (significant chunks of code are already in -current).

OpenBSD has never had performance as a driving criteria, and has for long time, both justly and unjustly, been considered "slow", especially on machines with more than two CPUs, when compared to Linux and FreeBSD. Though it's been 6 years or so since I did any sort of serious large scale sysadmin work with it so I don't know if things have changed.

OpenBSD is not friendly to the kind of newbie who prefers HOWTOs, GUI admin tools, etc. It does have excellent man pages and tasteful text-based tools, though - e.g. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html#allrules is enough to configure a SOHO firewall.

> Its actually one of the easiest O.S to install.

Hmm, really? I love OpenBSD, but last I checked the installer tells you to create slices then drops you straight into fdisk. Has this been polished up? I'm just concerned "one of the easiest to install" would give a n00b the wrong impression.

well, you could expect someone who handles server to know his ways around partitioning a volume?

Sure, but that's not "easy to install". That's "faster for an expert to install".

The partitioner on Ubuntu's LiveCD is easy to use. (Choose full disk and go)

OpenBSD installer can auto-partition the disk for you.

You are correct, there's a whole disk auto-partition option now. I guess it's been a while. :)

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#InstDisks

Yet, I'm still waiting for an automated network installer comparable with anaconda from Fedora/RHEL.

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