Review: OpenBSD 3.5 (NewsForge)

[Posted July 28, 2004 by ris]

NewsForge reviews OpenBSD 3.5. "OpenBSD is secure by default; that means that it does not start any services or daemons without your telling it to. It installs nothing secretly and does not leave any opening for a local or remote attack. The downside to this cautious approach is that you must configure and enable all of the features and services that you need. This is an ideal learning opportunity for beginners who are learning how to configure a server, and a more secure approach than that of most operating systems, which enable a lot of services and servers by default and then expect administrators to disable what isn't needed. While hotshot sysadmins might prefer the latter method to get a server set up more quickly, less experienced people will derive much more benefit from the result of the secure by default philosophy. This is not to imply that OpenBSD is meant only for beginners, but it is designed so that you don't need to be a security expert to properly administer your system."