HPR4388: BSD Overview

Hacker Public Radio

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

Intro

• How I know BSD
• Very minimal NetBSD usage
• I'm am leaving out Dragonfly BSD
• Previous episodes
• Several by Claudio Miranda and others - check the tags page.
• hpr3799 :: My home router history
• hpr3187 :: Ansible for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
• hpr3168 :: FreeBSD Jails and iocage
• hpr2181 :: Install OpenBSD from Linux using Grub

History and Overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Software_Distribution The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and released it as BSD to select universities.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems

Comparisons to Linux

• Not better or worse, just different.
• BSD is a direct descendant of the original UNIX
• Not distributions - Separate projects with separate code bases.
• Permissive vs Copyleft
• One Project vs Kernel + User land
• Most Open Source software is available on BSD
• ports and packages
• Network Devices and DISKS will have different naming conventions. BE CAREFUL

Distinctives

FreeBSD

• Probably most widely used
• Base OS Commercial products
• Tightly integrated with ZFS
• Jails
• OS for Firewall appliances - PFSense and Opensense

OpenBSD

• Focus on Code Correctness and Security
• Often First to develop new security methodologies - ASLR and Kernel relinking at boot
• Home of OpenSSH, ...
• Base includes Xorg and a minimal Window Manager
• The Best docs - man pages

NetBSD

• Supports the most platforms
• pkgsrc can be used on any UNIX like.

How I use BSD

Home Router

• Recently migrated from FreeBSD to OpenBSD
• Better support for the cheap 2.5G network adapters in Ali express firewalls

Workstations

• OpenBSD Dual boot laptop - missing some nice features - Vscode and BT audio
• OpenBSD for Banking

NAS

• FreeBSD
• Was physical by migrated to Proxmox VM with direct attached drives
• Jails for some apps
• ZFS pools for storage

My recommendations

• Router
• OpenBSD - Any BSD will work
• Opensense - similar experience to managing DD-WRT
• Thinkpads - OpenBSD
• Other laptops / PC - FreeBSD desktop focus derivative. ghost or midnight
• Servers/NAS FreeBSD
• ZFS
• Jails
• BSD is worth trying
• Dual booting is supported but can be tricky if unfamiliar.

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