Leaving OpenBSD for ...
September 30, 2010I’m migrating my home server away from OpenBSD.
The things I was able to setup in OpenBSD have worked very well. Things like DHCP, DNS and SQUID have worked excellently. I found some fantastic guides on http://www.kernel-panic.it/openbsd.html that allowed me to get everything up and working in no time at all. I wont bother posting any details from my setup it’s better to just visit that site and decide which pieces you want.
Why move away? These are surely very personal reasons to make the switch and are not a general condemnation of OpenBSD which is still a fantastic piece of software.
I wasn’t able to get DHCP & DNS to dynamically update DNS when a new host was added to the network. Instead I had a whole heap of static mappings for computers. Not an ideal situation!
The upgrade path for OpenBSD confuses me. When a new version comes out how do I upgrade without nuking all my local configuration? I really don’t want to go back through the setup every 6 months when the BSD guys bring out a new version.
I wasn’t able to get PHP + MySQL + Wordpress to play nicely together. Not being a PHP person I didn’t really grok how to setup the whole thing so I was forced to follow guides written by others. OpenBSD doesn’t really seem to be a Wordpress/PHP platform of choice for many so I struggled to find accurate docs on what to do.
I wanted to add new services to the server like Ruby/Rails, Java/EE, Python/Django and Erlang/OTP. Doing all this and keeping it current on OpenBSD is more work that I was willing to expend.
So the solution I’m turning to is Linux and specifically Ubuntu in all it’s glory.
What a spiffy system Ubuntu is? I remember struggling to install Debian way back when but Ubuntu is a pleasure and perhaps a little too easy. Kids these days don’t need to struggle for hours setting up XFree86 or a dodgy network card.
So over the next few weeks I’m migrating the essential services, DHCP, DNS and SQUID to Ubuntu. After that I’ll get a bit funky and start adding this blog on there and other bits and pieces.
Hooray for Ubuntu!!