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Old 16th October 2008
JavaUser JavaUser is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2008
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Default Qs for switching from Ubuntu to OpenBSD

I'm about to reinstall our main server here and I'm thinking of switching from Linux (which we've been using for years) to OpenBSD.

I like the stability and security of OpenBSD. Here are my questions:

1. All of our apps are in Java, running under Tomcat etc. I know that with the new IcedTea project we may have a way of running Java stuff directly on OpenBSD. Any experience with this? Is this a good way to go?

2. Encryption: This is a trickier question. I want to have the entire disk encrypted, so it would even boot from an encrypted FS. On Linux it's easy to install on an encrypted partition, using DM-crypt. I did find an article about using the loopback FS with OpenBSD but somehow it didn't give me much confidence in the system. Is OpenBSD ever going to get more stable FS encryption option, like dm-crypt or GEOM-based disk encryption? It's weird that a security-focused OS like OpenBSD would be so far behind in this area.

I'm ready to switch but I really want #2, a very solid and reliable way of running off an encrypted disk, and I'm not feeling like OpenBSD has it. Comments?

I did pre-order the 4.4 disks so I expect them any day now, and I'm looking forward to trying it out at least on a test machine.

(I posted this before on some other BSD forum but it was a non-functional forum so I found this forum which seems to be better)
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