I love the simplicity and consistency of OpenBSD and everytime Ubuntu changes things like networking or startup script I want to switch out all our servers.
+1 for this. Until recently I had an OpenBSD machine which had an initial install date some time in 1997. I rarely had to change any configs when upgrading. Virtually painless. It was my home mail and db server and was running on an ancient Compaq Pentium Pro 200 with 128Mb of RAM.
It got replaced with Debian due to a complete hardware failure and I already had a Debian CD lying around and couldn't be bothered to download an OpenBSD ISO.
I have used OpenBSD for our servers for a while. It is super easy to setup (except for the brief fun of partitioning). I did switch to FreeBSD with ZFS for our samba server because of the partition size limits on OpenBSD.
I still don't understand this criticism of OpenBSD. I managed to use the installer to set up a fully partitioned OpenBSD system circa version 2.7 as a stoned highschool freshman. I think some people just have trouble using computer programs that require them to use a keyboard and read the documentation.
maybe. took me a few minutes but honestly it got in a number of peoples' ways the first time they saw openbsd's installed way back in the day, and they were no dummies. this is ~1999 mind you, i have no idea since about 2004 what openbsd has been like to install.
True, it really isn't. It is just different and a little weird with commands like 'a a'. After the first time you know all the letters and what partitions to lay down.
Don't you still have to fsck those FFS2 partitions though? That becomes a real problem with very large filesystems. I have been out of the loop for like 7 years now, but I didn't think openbsd offered background fsck or journalling?
Using FFS, OpenBSD supports an individual file system of up to 231-1, or 2,147,483,647 blocks, and as each block is 512 bytes, that's a tiny amount less than 1T. FFS2 is capable of much larger file systems, though other limits will be reached long before the file system limits will be reached.
The boot/installation kernels only support FFS, not FFS2, so key system partitions (/, /usr, /var, /tmp) should not be FFS2, or severe maintenance problems can arise (there should be no reason for those partitions to be that large, anyway). For this reason, very large partitions should only be used for "non-system" partitions, for example, /home, /var/www/, /bigarray, etc.
Note that not all controllers and drivers support large disks. For example, ami(4) has a limit of 2TB per logical volume. Always be aware of what was available when a controler or interface was manufactured, and don't just rely on "the connectors fit".
Larger than 2TB disks
The MBR system used on PCs only directly understands disks up to 2TB in size. fdisk(8) will typically report a disk size of the real size modulo 2TB, so your 2.7TB disk (sold as 3TB) will show as around 700GB in fdisk(8). This does not in any way hinder OpenBSD's ability to utilize larger disks, as the MBR is used only to bootstrap the OS, once the OS is running, the file systems are defined by the disklabel, which does not have a 2TB limit.
To use a larger than 2TB disk, create an OpenBSD partition on the disk using fdisk, whatever size fdisk will let you. When you label the disk with disklabel(8), use the "b" option to set the OpenBSD boundaries (which defaulted to the size of the OpenBSD fdisk partition) to cover the entire disk. Now you can create your partitions as you wish. You must still respect the abilities of your BIOS, which will have the limitation of only understanding fdisk partitions, so your 'a' partition should be entirely within the fdisk-managed part of the disk, in addition to any BIOS limitations.
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ZFS on FreeBSD was just a bit easier (for me) for our Samba PDC. Otherwise, I use OpenBSD.
Partitioning in OpenBSD seems a lot simpler in OpenBSD compared to to FreeBSD, but that might just be me. Not a huge problem in any respect, you don't do it that often.
Particulary in the last few releases, the installer will do the partitioning for you, and do it reasonably well, an of course you can always override it.
