OpenBSD, I Have Conquered Thee!

I'm in the process of moving our work website from externally hosted to in house. Being as security conscious of a company as we are, I opted to go with OpenBSD 4.1 since it is very, very secure out of the box. With only two security holes in the last 10 years in the default install, it was the best choice.

OpenBSD is definately for the server and admin crowd. There is no gui; in fact, OpenBSD has the leanest install program I have seen in a long time. My first task was to figure out how OpenBSD wanted to be partitioned. Tutorials on the internet were of differing standards as to how one does this, but after attempting to install it three times I finally figured it out.

After the install comes updating. OpenBSD does its updating by downloading the source for the kernel and the userland binaries and then compiling them. So, I did that about three times before I finally got the CVS to download everything and then compile. Overall, OpenBSD took over eight hours to install by the time I figured everything out.

The best thing about OpenBSD is, though, that since I'm following -stable, I can take that machine that I went through hell to install and make an install image from it. I made my own release of -stable, copied the files to my Ubuntu box at work, and made an installation ISO out of it.

Now I can install OpenBSD 4.1-stable on my new servers at work, and be safe in the knowledge that they are that much safter.