[TriLUG] need better router

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Jim Ray wrote:

>>That sounds like how I have run my firewall machine for quite some time.
>>First under Linux and now ( recently ) OpenBSD
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>[Jim Ray sez:] ever compared OpenBSD to FreeBSD?  I'm curious.
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OpenBSD is much more centered on security, being very svelte, and very 
much forging it's own way.  FreeBSD by comparison, is more "Linux-like" 
in that it has both a larger developer and user-base, has better 
hardware / driver support, and adapts a fair bit of technology incubated 
in OpenBSD.  Good examples of things brought out from OpenBSD into the 
rest of *NIX world include OpenSSH and OpenSSL, the PF firewall and 
ALTQ  traffic shaping (in FreeBSD 5.x), and numerous other goodies.  As 
Marcus (?) was pointing out the other day, OpenBSD folks tend to be a 
little more crotchety and disgruntled, and more in-your-face about their 
politics and policies, but that's generally true of all of the BSD world 
in comparison to the Linux world.  The camps are both indicative of 
their leaders, with Linus the easy-going centrist leading the Linux 
camp, and at the opposite extreme is Theo de Raadt leading the OpenBSD 
crowd.  A google on either one of these charismatic characters will turn 
up plenty of examples.  By contrast, FreeBSD is lead by a team of 
people, with no central figure that I'm aware of, that all slowly and 
methodically plug out better code, and continuous revisions.  Not to say 
that both OpenBSD and Linux don't have equally diverse developers, just 
that they have their "figure heads" that symbolise their general slant a 
little better.  You might could interject at this point that RMS 
symbolises another whole slant of the Linux community, but I'll leave 
that part of the discussion to the side.  :)

I suppose in summary, that you could say they are variously similar or 
different, depending on how closely you look.  From 10,000 feet, they 
sound different, as they are two different OSes maintained by two 
different groups of people.  Get in a bit closer and you see that things 
look very similar, and they share code frequently between the OSes, and 
they're not as different as you might think.  Get closer still, into the 
internals of the OS, or the politics of their seperations, and you see 
once again that they are not the same.

Hopefully that's a starter of a comparison.  Enjoy!

Aaron J.