Re: [Sheflug] Re: Suggestions of distro?

[Richard Lowe <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Chris J (cej [at] nccnet.co.uk) wrote:
> 
> Will wrote:
> > 
> > I have to disagree on that - OpenBSD is a very harsh install. IMO
> > most Linux users would not have seen anything quite like it before.
> > 
>
> Then Richard scribbled:
> >
> > No, it's easy to install. The instructions are on the inside of every 
> > CD that you buy from the Open BSD people. 
> 
> It's a half and half. If the user is technically minded, then OpenBSD will 
> install quite straight-fowardly. The difficult part with OpenBSD is the disk 
> partitioning as on x86 architecture you have to partition the disk with a 
> *single* partition (well you can use two or more, but that gets interesting), 
> and within that one partition you create a disklabel - it doesn't use 
> "standard" partitions, per se.

Or when it says "Use entire disk for OpenBSD [y/N]" say Y :)

> On other UNIX boxen however (alpha, Sparc) you go straight into the disklabel 
> editing as they have no concept of partition tables ... on x86, its a BIOS 
> nesscesity (aka limitation).
> 
> But the fact that you have to set up your partitions within a partition may 
> be confusing to start with (think of it in terms of physical partition and 
> logical partitions and it will then make a bit more sense). Confused me when 
> I first installed Open, but once I knew what it wanted, it all clicked into 
> place.

The FAQ and install stuff is really well written, I think.
The only problems I've had (with the two installs I've done recently) have
been down to hardware (one failed cdrom, 2 failed 3c509 nics).

> The rest of the install is a doddle though. "Enter hostname" ... "Enter IP" 
> ... "What timezone are you in" ... questions.
> 
> > I had to read a BSD book and all the 
> > BSD sites to get to the point where I could get Open BSD to work with 
> > ISDN and then come the day of installation of the ISDN drivers I 
> > found out that I was being told that it they just don't work.
> > 
> 
> Patches do exist for OpenBSD to use ISDN ... but only if you want to use 2.8 
> or lower. The ISDN maintainer got no feedback from people, and there seemed 
> to be a general apathy towards the feature. They probably /were/ being used, 
> but he wasn't getting any interest from the OBSD mailing list, thus dropped 
> support as no-one seemed to be interested.
> 
> > This is in contrast with Net BSD and Free BSD which are quite a good 
> > bit friendlier.
> >
> 
> The OBSD ISDN drivers were/are ports from NetBSD. Open actually nabs a lot of 
> code from Net ... although Open has now dropped ipf from its source tree as 
> it came from Net originally and the license terms aren't particularly 
> brilliant. 

They dropped it because the license changed in an incompatible way.
IPF came from Darren Reed originally, it just happens that *BSD chose to
incorporate it.

> Thus, there's a fair change under the hood to the firewalling for 
> Open 3.0, and some grammer changes needed to the filter and NAT rulesets you 
> have.
> 

Not many, most for the better IMHO (being able to list
ports/hosts/protocols in a single rule, is *nice*).

> And before anyone asks what the changes are, I'm still running 2.9 on my 
> firewall ... but I'm looking at 3.0 on the Sparcs and one Alpha box I have 
> here. I will know more about the grammer changes a couple of months down the 
> line maybe :)
> 

My router is running 3.0-stable, and I have a machine here (x86) running
-current, but I'm not much help regarding grammer changes, since I
haven't used it for packet filtering before now.

-- 
[ Richard Lowe - richlowe - richlowe [at] richlowe.net ]
[             http://www.richlowe.net/            ]

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