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List:       pfsense-discussion
Subject:    Re: [pfSense-discussion] Re: Just some doubt on the OS choice
From:       Bill Marquette <bill.marquette () gmail ! com>
Date:       2005-03-30 18:26:45
Message-ID: 55e8a96c05033010267f608006 () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:31:55 +0200, Michael Hamerski <lists@blurbfly.com> wrote:
> Bill,
> 
> heh, please read my first sentence again, especially the ending ";)"

I did read it and comprehended, but thought it was worth expanding on
anyway.  We're on the same page.

> it all depends on hardware used, the BSD's share a lot of code in
> general and NIC code can usually be traced back to Bill Paul anyway, on
> consumer-off-the-shelf hardware (Dell and HP are not really COTS in my
> book), OpenBSD works better out-of-the-box in my experience. YMMV.
> 
> I *never* said it's worth the switch.

Agreed.  I stopped using FreeBSD years ago cause they pissed on IDE CD
Burners, at the time, I installed OpenBSD and it _just worked_.  At
work however I don't have the luxury of buying hardware w/out support
contracts (search hard enough on the OpenBSD lists, you'll see that
I'm running HP hardware w/ OpenBSD anyway), my experience is that
FreeBSD works better from a hardware perspective on server gear, but
the pain I have to go through to make OpenBSD work is worth it
regardless.

> Just that people always bring up hardware support and performance issues
> when comparing Open/Free and it is just not true in my experience.
> Especially not with 5.x, and even more for firewalling.

I won't even get into performance :) If you (figurative you) don't
have a good tool that can reliably reproduce benchmarks any claim of
"this OS is faster/slower" doesn't hold much water.  Personally
speaking, the performance between OpenBSD and FreeBSD is negligible
for most users.  In my experience, it's been easier to "just throw
more CPU" at a problem than switch OS's.  With one exception where
more CPU was soooooo much more and bought soooo much less that it cost
less in people time to switch OS's.

> well, you have to recheck all the scripts, as the config files are not
> located uniformly. Startup is pretty different on Open/Free etc.

They both use init and spawn /etc/rc...that's about as far as we take
it.  Both m0n0 and pfsense use a custom rc startup - init spawns our
/etc/rc not the OS's.

> What is so particular about the pkg manager? Does it currently use
> something else than standard pkg_* tools?

Location of packages - this is manageable just by checking which OS is
running before choosing where to pull down a package from - is one
item.  The other is that not all the packages we currently support
necessarily compile/run on other platforms or have officially
supported ports on the other platforms.  It can all be worked around -
genericizing the OS in code won't take much work once the target stops
moving :)

> > Not too bad as long as all the OS's share PF/Carp/ALTQ.
> 
> Which they now do, intra-BSD, no?

Mostly...Dragonfly still needs some stuff, FreeBSD doesn't officially
have it until 5.4 releases (we're running a beta release), and I can't
comment on NetBSD (other than remembering something in regards to PF
and NetBSD, but I'm not sure if it's mainlined there).

> Evidently. I meant how to best do it. Or at least the way you're
> considering it.

We're starting to expose internal pfsense functions via XMLRPC.  I
expect that a gui will be written using it.  Centralized management
would be along the same lines.

--Bill

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