Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Walking around amsterdam
Author: Joshua D. Boyd Posted: 5/16/2000; 8:23:30 AM Topic: Walking around amsterdam Msg #: 17339 (In response to 17291) Prev/Next: 17338 / 17340 Yes! I got bit by that one. Am in the process of switching to OpenBSD. OpenBSD comes out of the box with all the known holes closed, and there hasn't been a published hack for it for the last 2 years.Now that I've installed a new file server for myself (a p75 with 64 megs of ram and currently 10 gigs between 2 HDs), I thinking of reformatting my old firewall/proxy (486dx2/66 with 28 megs of ram) to be an OpenBSD machine, just because it comes with all holes closed.
My firewall needs are simple. Allow me to ssh in and telnet out, allow me to ftp out, allow me to run squid, apache (used for ppp conection control and ftp batch scheduling), and dante (socks proxy), and do nightly mail and news processing. Oh, and perl and python are needed for some of my apache web applications.
I had a horrendous time trying to get redhat to do those things for me. Getting apache working was easy, but I experience some flakiness (initially I didn't realize that I'd installed apache twice). I never got dante or squid working. Ssh I never got around to attempting. Ftp out did work, but then there wasn't really anything to it.
News always drove me batty. My news needs are simple (download a certain list of news groups nightly, and upload new posts), so why do I have to go through so much hassle to configure innd? But, when I looked, there was never any other free software that would do what I wanted.
Mail I got working, but it too me forever. Then, when I finally got it working (and I had to do some very unpleasant things to get it to that point), I only got to enjoy it for a few months before my ISP switched to FreeBSD, and in the process they changed something that broke the mail system that I'd worked out. Sigh.
I love linux, but somethings can be so difficult (although many of the above things are jsut as hard if not harder to do under NT). All I want to do is use the system, I don't like spending my time configuring and installing stuff.
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