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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious. What are people here using OpenBSD for? In which scenarios would you consider using OpenBSD over Linux?

I've used OpenBSD primarily for network edge and utility services. Things such as a firewall, gateway, vpn/tunnel connector, ipv6 router, dns server, dhcpd, ntpd, lightweight httpd, imapd, SMTP forwarder, and ssh/shell access. I've also installed it for the sole purpose of playing atc, the air traffic controller game. Hardware support and raw performance are the only things that keep me on Linux in most server roles.

I have been wondering why there aren't any commercial router based on openbsd.

You can create a firewall handling a 1Gb/s link with OpenBSD, but passed that, it's quite limited.

Even with top end hardware, we could not go past ~5Gb/s with simple pf rules and after a lot of tweaking. With FreeBSD or Linux, we got the 10Gb/s out of the box with similar rules.

That's for the network part.

As for userland application, it's also slower than Linux or FreeBSD, I remember benching some OpenSSL/LibreSSL based application. On the same hardware I was at 200 transaction/s (transaction ~= RSA signature) with Linux/FreeBSD, with OpenBSD I was at 150 transaction/s, so significantly slower.

That's what hardenedBSD [https://hardenedbsd.org/] is for :) FreeBSD with lots of the same bells and whistles security features OpenBSD is known for.

Genua has products based on OpenBSD: https://www.genua.de/en.html

It makes really nice workstation operating system, believe it or not.

The reason I don't believe it is because I doubt it has drivers for the latest graphics cards and modern desktop environments such as Gnome/KDE. Is Ryzen even supported? What about sleep/suspend and resume? What's the story on package management? Can you run VirtualBox / VMWare on it?

People used to talk like that when someone suggested they switch from windows to linux. My my, how times have changed...

Yes, those things work. You'll want to select hardware that is well supported though for the best experience.

It makes a damned good router or ssh gateway

We used to call it bastion host but yes. Rent a few physical machines around the world, make production SSH firewalled off from everywhere except those ones. Now you only need to worry about all the security holes in your web app stack which are of course quite numerous... but at least you are not bothered by SSH bots.

Just put SSH access behind a decent VPN such as WireGuard.

WorkstationOS in my case.

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