BSD derivatives

Spiros Papadopoulos spap13 at googlemail.com
Sun Jun 3 08:33:39 UTC 2007


Hi Blake,

On 02/06/07, Blake Finley, MA, ABD-2 <blakefinley at transpacific.net> wrote:
>
> I am primarily concerned about security from internet hacking, and am
> therefore considering setting up a separate internet computer with BSD.


Are you trying to secure a network with a secure gateway? To have a secure
PC?
What is your goal exactly?

What is your association with Open BSD?  with Linux?


They are both BSDs...I am not developing any of both, but i don't see any
reason why not adding a very good piece of code from the Free to the Open
BSD or the opposite. I am 99.9% sure that the association between them
is not competition.

What do you mean by "Linux"? Do you have any distro in mind? anyway...

FreeBSD is what it claims to be *clearly* on top of the page:
http://www.freebsd.org
and Linux is what it claims to be on http://www.linux.org (you need to read
a little
more than the top of the page here though, to see what it is).

Also check this link: http://www.linux.org/dist/list.html  (*press "go"*)

Are there copyright or other related issues involved?


It appears that FreeBSD is the most closely associated with the original
> Berkeley programmers. (1)


I was told that OpenBSD provided the best security.  But I also note
> that changes have occurred at OBSD, and wonder if this is still true.


It would have been better if the above questions were posted in
other, separate posts... :) These are irrelevant ((1) - see below) "to
security
from internet hacking"

Are you trying to decide if BSD is more secure than a Linux distro?

It seems to me that you place random questions/information here and
this way you can only get random replies and information that will
remain information and won't help you being "secured"
(considering that you said that primarily you are concerned about security)

If you know/learn how to setup a system and keep it up to date and monitor
it appropriately and spend a lot of time on it and many other things,
then it will be as much "secured" as possible from attacks.

...Supposedly, you decide that any of the OSs in question is
the "most secure":
You spend 3 days setting it up and you do nothing else for the next 2 years.
Your system won't be secure, no programmers will be responsible for this
and the copyrights usually claim/provide the software "AS IS", whatever its
name is.

(1)Programmers try to give you as much functionality and options ( obviously

along with security) possible. You are responsible to disable functionality
that you
don't need, to install the patches/updates they implement when
vulnerabilities are found, etc.
If for example they exclude things (i.e a driver) from the OS, for security,
you would
have an OS with limitations. Their goal is to write nice, neat, secure code.
Not preventing
people from attacking you nor you from not installing security updates to
your computer.
It would be like asking the hardware vendor not to put a network card in
your computer,
for security from "internet hacking".

The answer you want though is this: "FreeBSD is derived from BSD, the
version of
UNIX(r) developed at the University of California, Berkeley" which is BY FAR
more impressive
**in my opinion* *than this:
http://www.slackware.com/~msimons/slackware/grfx/ :P

Regards
Spiros


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