A Few of My Favorite Things About the OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools | Hacker News Reader

A Few of My Favorite Things About the OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools

bsdly.blogspot.com

81 pointssomat22 comments

> Other than Oracle with their port to Solaris, most ports of the PF subsystem happened before the OpenBSD 4.7 NAT rewrite, and for that reason they have kept the previous syntax intact.

It’s worth noting that the FreeBSD port has evolved in its own way and is SMP-capable despite keeping the “old” syntax: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pf/2012-Septembe...

Besides FreeBSD, I'm curious what/which noncommercial, non-Linux OS(es) are battle-tested at internet web ops scale. FreeBSD occupies multiple, nondescript, ubiquitous roles people aren't aware of powering key components of infrastructure in utilities like water, electricity, and delivery logistics

OpenBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, Inferno, openVMS

How are z/OS, AIX, or HP-UX non-commercial? In particular z/OS is still being developed and sold by IBM.

You're extrapolating, he didn't say that.

or she

>OpenVMS

I suspect by “battle-tested” they didn’t mean World War 2.

(/s of course, and trying out the x86 port is high on my TODO list.)

On a serious note, I dearly wish someone had taken the lessons of OpenVMS into the open source world. Its clustering is amazing.

Could you elaborate/provide a few reading pointers please?

https://vmssoftware.com/products/clusters/

We had machines in two buildings with multiple machines in the cluster. You could upgrade machines in a cluster and not lose any time. I thought DragonflyBSD is trying to head in that direction with storage (HAMMER).

I believe the problem here is business-level, and this can’t really be fixed technically. The problem is, this kind of design requires organized commitment to run it to completion, and can’t work in a culture focused on dropping a half-working MVP early and then failing to follow up.

Latest release was 2 months ago.

As much as i love Plan9, it's in dire need of bugfixes if you're gonna expose it to the net. Last official release was ~15 years ago

SmartOS

I stumbled across OpenBSD PF and FreeBSD ipfw early in my career and instantly recognized their superiority. So even though I've been a long time Linux user on the desktop, I always run OpenBSD on routers and gateways. Right tool for the right job.

The same for me, while I use Linux on laptops, desktops and computational servers, I use FreeBSD with ipfw on routers and gateways.

Website down?

NXDOMAIN because of NextDNS porn blocklist, for some reason.

Yes, some idiot keeps adding the "porn" tag to the site for some reason.

Anyway, the article in question is also available, trackerless and with "classic" formatting at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/better_off_with_pf.html - normally my WIP to show early reviewers spot.

The probable reason is that somebody did not like my reporting on the fairly obvious "sextortion" scams, in this piece https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-sextortion-scams-numb... which is also available as https://nxdomain.no/~peter/the_numbers_show_we_have_a_failur....

Enjoy! And I still refuse to believe anybody would actually be sexually aroused by any of my published writing.

They would be aroused by your unpublished writing?

Funny how I mentioned I got an NXDOMAIN from your main host, and your secondary one is called nxdomain.no :)

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