Re: Open Letter @ the developers of oBSD

[Brian Keefer <chort_(_at_)_amaunetsgothique_(_dot_)_com>]

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 17:37, rembrandt wrote:
<snip the drivel>
> Rembrandt

Look kid, hopefully you're still reading the replies you get by this
point, but maybe I can communicate what everyone else is trying to tell
you, only in a manner that doesn't scorch your eyebrows...

Quite simply, you do not understand what you're talking about.  You
"miss" HT in OBSD?  Would you even notice a difference if OBSD had it? 
I seriously doubt you would even notice an impact.

You're dead wrong a bunch of things.  It seems like most of what you're
spouting is just stuff you're repeating 3rd hand that you heard from
someone else.

Have you tried using an Intel NIC with OBSD?  Many are supported, even
the cards with IPSec off-loading.  I'm running 3 82559s in my firewall
and another one in this box (which incidentally is my workstation and I
love it).  Try man fxp some time.

The comment about not being able to use OBSD for a firewall is
hysterical, for instance.  Do you know what CPU most of the popular
firewalls have in them?  Celeron 300.  Most of the mid-range firewall
boxes these days have very little CPU power in them, compared to say a
database server or an e-mail server.  Additionally, code has just been
comitted that will allow multiple OBSD firewalls to share states for
load balancing.  If that's not scalable, I don't know what is.

So OBSD doesn't have SMP at this point, so what (your whole post seems
to boil down to saying "I wish you had SMP" every other sentence)?  The
comparison to FBSD as a firewall is pretty funny, because everything I
read tells me that pf is substantially easier on resources than ipfw. 
Maybe you need a dualie to run a FBSD firewall, but OBSD does just fine
w/o it.  For instance I run my firewall on a PentiumPro 200 (older than
anything you mentioned) and it does an outstanding job.  No bottleneck
here!

The main point is that you fail to realize why OBSD exists.  It doesn't
exist because a whole bunch of whiney people want special features and
whole projects dedicated to their whims.  It doesn't exist so that
everyone will love it.  OBSD exists because a small group of hackers
(actual hackers, not the media's overly-hyped evil super-villan
"hackers") want their own OS and they want to do it their way.  Am I one
of those developers?  Nope.  I would love to contribute, but coding is
not my strong point.  On the other hand, the OS exactly fits my needs so
I use it.  In fact, read http://www.openbsd.org/goals.html.  Which of
those goals would you say OpenBSD is not meeting?  I think they're doing
a great job of staying focused to the core objectives.

So there it is.  Hopefully you have read this far.  I hope you
understand now why you get hostile responses from the mailing lists. 
People probably resent you because you don't know what you're talking
about, yet you make endless demands.  If you realize this and learn to
live with what OBSD is, you'll be a lot happier.  Alternatively, you
could use a different OS that actually does do all the things you want
it to.

-- 
Brian Keefer, CISSP