Re: [SLUG] Linux the free operating system

From: Kwan Lowe (kwan@digitalhermit.com)
Date: Fri May 27 2005 - 19:47:05 EDT


paddy wrote:
> When I want a server I install a copy of OpenBSD. One hell of an
> operating system and the finest security software avaliable, IMHO. In
> addition, it takes some configuring to get up and running but the price
> is FREE or you can contribute to the development team by buying CD's for
> $45.

OpenBSD is a robust platform. I've maintained instances of it over the
years. Byte for byte, it's arguably more secure than most Linux
distributions *out of the box*. You rarely see a kernel exploit or
vulnerability in OpenBSD. Things like kernel-level PRNG is good to see,
especially in light of all the sequence-guessing exploits. It also seems
to have a better design and, for lack of a better term, "mission
statement" than Linux.

Now the buts:
It's a big debate whether a rigid design model or the almost chaotic
Linux development model is better....

As far as applications go, Linux and OpenBSD share much of the same code
so it's sort of a wash as far as user space security. For servers, the
SELinux extensions are really powerful. I worked at a firewall company
recently and they chose Linux over OpenBSD because of the MAC (mandatory
access control) features of SELinux *and* because the Linux TCP/IP stack
was better in most cases than OpenBSD's (in fact, some benchmarks place
OpenBSD *last* http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ ). Linux currently has
much better scalability (SMP support, e.g.) and this is really necessary
for higher end systems.

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