On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:35:46 -0500, Madhusudan Singh wrote:

> Hi
>
> I am working on setting up a web server with plone (content management). I
> have a fair bit (6-7 years) of Linux user and part-time admin experience,
> but want to do a good job (a very secure setup which can handle denial of
> service, etc. kind of attacks) for this latest project of mine.
>
> I am considering three alternatives - Slackware, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. From a
> security and speed point of view for my needs, which do you think is a
> better choice ? You may assume my experience with BSD, etc. to be nil,
> while with Slackware, I use it as my personal router / firewall and find
> its setup easy and secure.

In general I think you should stick with what you are most familiar with,
at least for live/production machines.

All of your possible choices would work just fine for what you intend. As
for the BSD's, I doubt you'll find much to complain about regarding their
security, stability, or performance...They are quit capable. And given
your experience with Linux, you would *probably* feel rather at home
with them...Although in my experience OpenBSD has a few specific
peculiarities, and took a bit more getting used to...
But regardless of how secure they are out of the box, a mistake by an
admin can render that security useless. And that is less likely to happen
when the admin is more familiar with the OS.

Regarding speed...I think most results show the BSD's and Linux to be very
close in performance. This of course will be argued by their respective
zealots until the end of time.
Anyway, whatever you choose, hardware compatibility is ( as I'm sure you
know ) very important, and can have a *huge* impact on performance. Not
every card/adapter/whatever that works well on Linux does on the BSD's...

>
> I am also interested in learning about the system I setup, so
> availability of good documentation and sizeable, helpful Usenet
> communities (like the good folks at comp.os.linux.misc, etc.) would be a
> big plus. I do not want too steep a learning curve, as I need to get the
> first version of the webpage up in a week or so.

FreeBSD has rather good documentation, and the mailing lists and usenet
groups are quite helpful. I'd say in it's current state, the
documentation at www.freebsd.org/handbook is a bit more complete and up to
date than Slackware's. But I've rarely run into an issue on Slack that a
solution couldn't be found...Can't say much about OpenBSD as I have only a
little experience with it, and that was on existing systems...I've never
installed/upgraded it, and have only read as much OpenSBD specific
documentation as I actually needed ( not much ).

And you can of course try them all for only the cost of hardware...I know
for a fact that FreeBSD runs quite well on older machines, so if you have
a spare Pentium around, it could make a good test bed, and you can learn a
bit more about the other OS's.

--
- Matt -