The Comms Room

voretaq7

8:00 PM

@WesleyDavid SpamAssassin gives me grey hairs on any platform. Except Windows -- there it makes my hair fall out :-D

WesleyDavid

@voretaq7 I barely remembered that SA had a Windows distribution. I guess I didn't take it seriously.

Then it's fun to toss the "FreeBSD vs OpenBSD" grenade into a room of BSD fans. =)

Chris S

@WesleyDavid CARP + Sendmail & SA would be pretty quick... I don't know what they did (or when, might have been before CARP, but that was while ago).

WesleyDavid

Whatever happened to dragonfly BSD?

Chris S

@WesleyDavid It's still around and kicking just as well as when it forked (ie, very small following)

WesleyDavid

I guess it's still around, but I hear so little about it. I liked what I saw of it a few years ago when I was looking at BSDs.

Chris S

8:03 PM

I don't know of any significant things they've done, so they're not very well known.

voretaq7

@WesleyDavid I just wish FreeBSD would import pf faster :-)

Chris S

OpenBSD has a pretty small user base too, but they do so many notable projects (that are 'stolen' and used in other projects) that they're very hard to ignore.

voretaq7

I'm almost willing to run OpenBSD on my edge firewalls, but I dislike Theo's release mentality ("Everyone runs -current all the time").

Chris S

@voretaq7 What's wrong with ipfw?

WesleyDavid

@ChrisS Yeah, as I've tried to whittle down which BSD to take the time to focus on, I just can't seem to decide between free and open. I was thinking Free just because of its userbase.

Oh, yes, I forgot about Theo. That seems to be a negative to the use of OpenBSD as well, but it could just be my glancing perception.

voretaq7

8:05 PM

@ChrisS nothing really, but altq & nat under pf seem more natural to me, it's almost entirely a syntax thing too since I'm used to hanging out with Cisco folks.

Chris S

@WesleyDavid FreeBSD is much easier to learn because of the number of people you can ask questions. Once you know one of them pretty well, the other's aren't terrible different.

voretaq7

@WesleyDavid what @ChrisS said -- I'd start with FreeBSD just because of the handbook though. 99% of what you need for *BSD (and really a wealth of info on general unix topics) is right there.

Chris S

@voretaq7 that is my main complaint with ipfw is that you can really tell the various pieces that are cobbled together to make a 'complete' firewall; configurations all over the place, different syntax. Even ipfw's CLI has goofy commands.

voretaq7

@ChrisS yeah. I'm used to ipfw from the old days (back when it was that or ipf), but like I said pf just seems more put-together.

plus I can do a lot of load balancing/HA type stuff with pf rather than running haproxy :-)

Chris S

@voretaq7 shudders at the thought of ipf

WesleyDavid

8:09 PM

Okay, so FreeBSD it is. Now we begin the argument about quantity of drivers and if it will work on my Dell laptop as well as SUSE does... ;)

packs

@ChrisS One of the few things I think Apple did well with the BSD shift was give a workable GUI for ipfw.

Chris S

@WesleyDavid Probably not... when is your laptop from and do you have any strange attachments?

WesleyDavid

Dell XPS m1530, late 2007 manufacturing, has nVidia mobile card, no strange attachments other than a card reader.

SUSE is actually supported on this thing and has nVidia drivers as well.

No, early 2007 manufacturing

It just turned three years old a few weeks ago and probably has another three years left in it.

Chris S

@WesleyDavid You should be fine, but you'll have to download the nVidia driver from their website, compile, and install. Or you can use Xorg's driver, but it doesn't have OpenGL.

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