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A third of London boroughs 'fess to running unsupported server software

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

I'm not sure if suggesting OpenBSD is sarcasm m0rt, but if it isn't you clearly haven't used it much.

I am an OpenBSD fan and use it frequently on the desktop as well as infrastructure, but the support policy is *one year* - current and previous release, new version approximately every six months. There are no LTS versions.

It's true that OpenBSD is secure, and that there have only been two remote holes in the default install, but the default install is mostly limited to OpenBSD specific infrastructure software (firewall, email, very basic web server, routing, dns). If there is no local execution of programs or third party software then yes, upgrading is less essential, but many people need additional functionality.

If there is a need to go beyond the default install ports/packages are not audited to the same extent as the base install, there is no binary compatibility, and the ports tree is a moving target, so a couple of releases on it's possible it will not build against an unsupported release.

Furthermore, OpenBSD's policy is pretty much 'security before all else' - firewire, bluetooth, and the Linux compatibility layer were dropped completely because they weren't being adequately maintained and security couldn't be guaranteed. Currently hyperthreading is disabled by default under OpenBSD due to the speculative execution information leakage issues, which is certainly an effective mitigation but (on Linux) leads to around a 30% performance degradation in some scenarios.

If a council can't upgrade beyond a Windows Server version released in 2000, I'm not sure BSD is really the best idea..

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