[ILUG] Firewalls... linux -v- BSD

[Nick Murtagh]

Lisa Muir wrote:
> Does anyone here know of a comprehensive objective comparison of the two?

We run a highly available firewall which consists of two OpenBSD boxes
running pf and carp. We get two ethernet cables from the datacentre's
switching network. It works great. In fact as the hardware in the two
firewalls has proven to be flaky, at least when running OpenBSD, we've
found this invaluable.

However, unless you are doing something like this, I would not recommend
OpenBSD, especially if you are used to Linux. It has no proper package
management. There are lots of little annoying things such as the cursor
keys / home / end / delete not working in shell or vi.

pf syntax is nicer than iptables, but shorewall is even better ;)