OpenBSD Community Support


If you have only worked with commercial UNIX before, you might find OpenBSD's support process a little surprising. There is no toll-free number to call and no vendor to escalate within. No, you may not speak to a manager. There isn't one. And there's a good reason for that; the management is you.

Commercial operating systems, such as those provided by Microsoft, conceal their inner workings. The only access you have to the operating system is the options presented by the GUI, plus a few command-line tools that are almost an afterthought. If you want to learn more about how your operating system works, you cannot. When something breaks, you can either live with it or make offerings to the vendor to make the problem go away. Even if you do pay for help, the people on the other end of the phone frequently know little more than you do.

OpenBSD, on the other hand, is completely open. You can view the source code. You can view object code, if you want to. You have manual pages, and FAQs, and all sorts of instructions and documentation that enable you to help yourself. You also have access to the CVS logs via the Web and via CVS itself. These logs describe every change that has ever been made to every part of the system so you can back out changes, understand the motivations behind changes, and even contact the people who have most recently updated the component you're interested in and ask them why a particular change was made. You have the opportunity to learn about the operating system in exquisite, excruciating detail. The OpenBSD developers have gone to a lot of trouble to answer basic questions for you in their existing documentation — and they expect you to use it.

If you want to learn about OpenBSD, you need to make the jump from eating what you're served to reading the cookbook and creating your own dinner. If you're willing to learn from what is provided, you will develop skills both in solving problems and in OpenBSD, and you'll make some friends in the OpenBSD community in the process. If you want to use OpenBSD and don't have the time or inclination to learn, invest in a commercial support contract. Many different vendors support OpenBSD; check the OpenBSD website for details.

If you aren't interested in learning or buying a support contract, then OpenBSD is simply not for you.




Absolute Openbsd(c) Unix for the Practical Paranoid
Absolute OpenBSD: Unix for the Practical Paranoid
ISBN: 1886411999
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 298

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