Discovering OpenBSD

I have been spending more time in Azure lately. A surprisingly large percentage of the virtual machines in Azure are GNU/Linux based. As a former Unix Systems Engineer I have always felt at home at the command line and decided to spend some time in the Unix world. When I was an engineer for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) back around the turn of the century our primary Unix flavor was Solaris. Back then Sun Microsystems produced the absolute best and most rock solid hardware and software on the planet. GNU/Linux was coming on strong but Solaris was our Unix flavor of choice. I always kept an eye on the various other flavors of Unix and spent a lot of time in the various flavors of GNU/Linux world and following the BSD flavors as well.

Fast forward to today and GNU/Linux dominates. My personal philosophy has always been to keep things small, simple, and correct. As GNU/Linux distributions has grown there are so many lines of code that it makes my head swell and I struggle even understanding how it all fits together. Of the options available I have really enjoyed the Linux From Scratch project which builds the system from the ground up. However, as much fun as it is, it is a lot of work to get a system going. Which has drawn me back to the BSD flavors. In particular OpenBSD is a fit for my personality and my expectations of Unix. It is easy to understand and is simple and secure by default. I am sure there is a place for an initialization program like systemd but I prefer a simple and straightforward startup process like rc. It is easy to learn and performs its startup process in a linear manner (which just makes sense to my linear mind).

And so I have been diving into OpenBSD on my nights and weekends and getting a feel for it. Unfortunately there isn't a template instance for installing OpenBSD in Azure but my hope is that there will be in the near future. Maybe I am just obsessive but it is really refreshing to understand an entire operating system down to the firmware and to have the code completely open and available. Now we just need open firmware for those of us that like to tinker and we will be all set. Let's all root for the LibreBoot project and MiniFree.