Re: OpenBSD CDs design

["Chris Hedemark" <chris@yonderway.com>]

Janet Sullivan says:


> I'd hope that any "sale" to management would be based on the features,
> not the fish.  After all, fat penguins and daemons in tennis shoes
> aren't exactly "suit and tie" either.

Linux wasn't an easy sell for me, either.  I basically had to just put it
in, get the users to depend on it, and then tell management we were running
Linux but we were already entrenched. :-)  It was really cool to see a
significant line item for "Linux nodes" on my 2001 budget.

OpenBSD is going to be a harder sell.  All the UNIX guys here know and love
Linux.  And it is probably more appropriate for the machines we've been
running it on, with only one or two exceptions.

But now that our shop is taking on more of a public face, secure extranet
servers are becoming a priority.  Now I can harden a Linux system to the
point where it is orders of magnitude tighter than any Windows-based server.
But it is a lot of work to get it there, and a lot of work to keep it there.
And it is never really all THAT secure (lots of holes, just no exploits
found yet).  I like the idea that just running OpenBSD is enough to turn
most script kiddies away to look for easier prey.  And I like that the
driving force behind it is security by design.  So this is one of those
times where I have to take the hard road, do the right thing, and hope that
nobody notices until OpenBSD has been running long enough in our shop to
prove itself out.

But I think the 2.8 CD's will stay in my drawer out of sight.  If I need to
do anything with the CD's in front of my boss, I'll burn a CD-R copy.
Anything to keep the cartoons from making this out to look like a toy OS.

OpenBSD will probably *not* go into general deployment at my company.  Why?
The automounter.  Basically Linux was a drop-in on our network because it
supported all of the NIS maps that we were already using for Sun.   But I
ask around about using autofs on *BSD and folks say "You mean autmount?"
But the maps are different.  I'd have to maintain a seperate set of
automount maps for *BSD than I do on Solaris/Linux.  Sounds like a small
stupid thing but I'm surprised there hasn't been some sort of push in this
area to use the Sun style maps (or at least support them as an alternative).
Granted this has nothing to do with the CD cover but I wanted to get that
out there.  :-)