RUN BSD - Key Persons

Adli Wahid runs BSD I am Adli and currently work as a Senior Internet Security Specialist at APNIC. My first job was at a public university in Malaysia. Other than teaching and the libary (I'm a bookworm!), the best part about being in an university environment (late 90s - early 00) was having access to the Internet and spare hardware. Back then we still had many commercial Unix systems (HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, SGIX) on campus, but I remember some friends in the computing centre started experimenting with Linux. I joined the bandwagon - removing Windows from the desktop then laptops and replacing them with RedHat Linux. Overtime I also used Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, and Ubuntu and did a couple of install-fest on campus for both students and lecturers. At about the same time I started to hear about FreeBSD and OpenBSD from a couple of mailing lists and forums. Eventually the opportunity to use BSD came about when I managed to convince the university computer center to let me set up the web and mail server for the faculty. Everything was centralised and I was not a full-time system administrator, so this was a big deal :-) I should also give a shout out to Matt Simerson's for putting together the Qmail toaster script that I used for the mail server. I started using OpenBSD for my UltraSparc64 workstation perhaps sometime in 2003. That made me fell in love with it mainly because of the simplicity, low resources requirement and the focus on security. I ventured into setting up a couple of webservers and used pf for firewalling wherever I can. These days I still managed some OpenBSD servers - including the host for my personal blog.

Ben Adams runs OpenBSD Hello, I'm Ben Adams a 37 year old web developer and system administrator. I started using Red Hat Linux 7.0 in 2000. That's not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but Red Hat from pre-Fedora era. For the next few years I did a good amount of distro hopping. :) I used Linux until around 2005, where I started to use FreeBSD, and then I came across an OS that had no security holes for over seven years. Wondering how this could be I dug in to the system. At that time was OpenBSD 4.2 released-November 2007. I found the documentation very easy to read and pick-up. At the same time I worked at a hospital as a Clinical Data Manager, I found a security hole in a enterprise vendor web application where I could see patient information from other hospitals, for incident occurrences (med errors, patient falls, lawsuits based on incidents, etc). After going back and forth with the company's developers in India and finding they have trouble fixing the security vulnerability. My boss challenged me to come up with a safe secure alternative. I then created my own incident occurrence system that was using PHP on a small OpenBSD workstation the application was used across two hospitals and five long term care facilities. Application held this information and I recorded and calculated core measures information for tracking by floor/wing. The system held its own with software code updates and running on a RAID 1 setup on this small workstation for over three years at which I left the hospital.

David Bern runs OpenBSD You know me as (@_drobban) on Twitter or drobban on IRC. I work as a developer in a Linux environment. In my spare time, I like to fiddle with my UAV / Drones and Software Defined Radio Been a long time user of Linux and Mac OS X at home, but recently got my eyes open for OpenBSD. I have followed the OpenBSD project since the Heartbleed bug, I noticed an increase of OpenBSD recommendations when the Specter/Meltdown bug was discovered which led me to test OpenBSD. To further increase my feeling of making the correct decision came after watching this talk with Theo. It was love at first sight and I have not encountered a single problem since my first installation (okey, one problem, I tried to install OpenBSD with the wrong image for my CPU). My goal with OpenBSD is to use it with my hobby-projects, so for the UAV I started pushing patches upstream to the Ground Control Software - APM Planner 2, there is now a working version available for OpenBSD 6.2.

Glenn Faustino runs OpenBSD I'm Glenn Faustino (@glenn_faustino). I administer Windows systems at work and run OpenBSD at home. I started to use OpenBSD in 2007 when I heard from Jesper Johansson (a Microsoft Security guy) that he uses OpenBSD. This is where I started to get interested about it. Why OpenBSD is my favorite? It's a secure minimalist OS, it has sane defaults and its code is clean. I like the culture of the projects. Everything you might need to provide a network service is in base. The developers not only add new features, but also tedu (remove) garbage from the system. Aside from that they don't let serious problems sit unsolved. I always runs -current to be able to test new features which I'm interested in and to report bugs to help the project in small ways. Also I managed to donate a small amount to the project. I'm not using BSD at work now, but in the past, I ran my employer's network on OpenBSD. I use OpenBSD on my home wireless network as my router/firewall, DNS, DHCP, proxy and bandwidth shaping tool on my apu2. I also use it as my VPN server on the cloud to be able to connect my mobile phone wherever I am. It's also my daily driver on my ThinkPads X200, X220, and X62.

Jim Abercromby runs OpenBSD Whats, up! My name is Jim and I am a retired United States Air Force Master Sergeant since 2005, and then retired from the civilian sector in 2013. I live alone with my wife and dog in New Jersey. I pretty much do that or I am reading, cooking or riding my bike. So I have been around computers all my life since my first exposure to them via a Radioshack TSR-80 in 1979. I have also used civilian and military mainframes, Amigas and Commodores. In December of 1996 while living in San Antonio, TX, I was on IRC using Mirc32, Windows 95. I stumbled into some hacker channel, and this guy was talking mad shit to me about how real men ran Unix or BSD if they wanted to be real hackers etc. I instantly became a man on fire and this totally blew my mind, so later that night at Barnes and Nobles I found an O'Reilly book on Red Hat Linux. At first I was so clueless, I literally recruited the help a doctorate student from the nearby uni to help with installation. When we were finished in a strange way I was underwhelmed because I was like. "OK, I can do a ‘ls' what do I do now?" A few months passed by and I was PCSed to Aviano Air Base, where I hooked up with a local ISP, and then had to endure hours on irc with profanity laden rants of RTFM, tough-love, and outright abuse on how to succesffully configure my dial up scripts. At this point I learned to compile the kernel source by hand as well and other linux tasks etc. My first time of feeling like a god, hahahahahaha. I was proud. I first installed OpenBSD version 2.5 which the release date was in May 1999. Prior to this I was a Linux zealot, obsessed with GNU, and Open Source concepts and ideology. I was stationed in Italy at the time, so everything was done over a modem or you actually mailed off and bought the CDs. Unfortunately I cannot recall accurately whether I was successful at the onset of using my modem with OpenBSD, but now the thought occurs to me that I was using FreeBSD with my modem so yes I do now know for sure that I did have connectivity via OpenBSD on the modem. At this time I was using both OpenBSD and FreeBSD for my go to Desktop and I turned one of my troops on to it at work, and he installed OpenBSD on a Sun Sparc Station but I have no idea nor recollection of what we used it for if anything. The United States Air Force was not down with us just doing guerrilla installs and deployments of Unix Like Operating Systems into "Production" so when we did it it had to be a perfect and instantly working use case of which we had none for that box. But it sure was cool to dick around on for the time being.

Jovica Ilic wants to try OpenBSD I got involved in IT when I was 15, when I started learning Pascal and Delphi. Soon after that, some of my programs managed to get their way to the most popular IT magazines in Serbia. That was a big thing back then. While being at the university, I totally moved out from the Windows world, and dived into learning about networks and Unix/Linux world. Today I work as a sysadmin. I am a big fan of Vim and Gentoo.

Job Titles:

• Software Developer from Germany

Manuel Wildauer runs BSD I'm a software developer from Germany delivered in 1983. My favourite BSD is OpenBSD and I use it at home. In 1998 I made my first experience with Linux. I played with it and switched to Debian GNU/Linux after few weeks. My first touch with BSD was in 2006 and OpenBSD 3.9. People talked about it in some IRC channels and I tried it out for curiosity. I liked OpenBSD a lot. It had a awesome community and a had good documentation. I used it from Version 3.9 until 4.2. After 2 years, I switched back to Linux for unknown reasons and for the last 10 years I never used OpenBSD again.

Maurizio Giunti runs FreeBSD I'm Maurizio Giunti (@mgiunti) and I met freeBSD back in 2003. It was FreeBSD release 5! At the time I was a Windows and web developer for a company here in Italy, but also spent a lot of my free time developing my own stuffs and having fun with system configuration. In particular, I used to run my own server in my house basement: Internet was very young at the time and it was not unusual having people run in-house mail servers and web servers, just they usually did it for companies, while I did it for fun! I used to run it on a Windows 2000 server first, and I migrated it to a Linux server later. I always had a crush for Unix-like systems since I met Aix and the beautiful Solaris workstations back at the Uni, but unfortunately at the time the company I worked for wasn't very interested about making stuffs on Unix. Anyway, when I decided to switch my home server from Windows to Linux, I had a go with several distros, but they looked to me way too cluttered: too many configuration files and no real standard about their names and contents. Than I remember that a couple of friends were great fans of FreeBSD, so I decided that I could try it too. I also decided to buy a book about it, and I was so lucky to get a printed copy of the first edition of "Absolute FreeBSD" by Michael W. Lucas. It was one of the best tech book I ever read: clear, accurate and even very fun to read. It made me understand and love FreeBSD. I found FreeBSD was exactly the work environment I was searching for: it was clean and consistent. User programs are separate from base operating system files, for example os system config files are in while user programs configuration files are in .

Mischa Peters runs BSD I am Mischa Peters. I am running a hosting and co-locating company out of Amsterdam as a out-of-hand hobby and my $dayjob is leading a team of Systems Engineers for a security startup. I recently kicked off OpenBSD Amsterdam. I started in the wonderful world of Unix (SunOS) while in university and I wanted to run something at home that had the same feel to it.

Noah Axon runs OpenBSD I'm Noah (a.k.a. ax0n, Noah Axon). My career trajectory has been mostly systems and network administration, and information security, though I've spent the past five years in engineering management roles. I've been into UNIX since I was 12, cutting my teeth on AT&T System V, IBM AIX, and DEC OSF-1 beginning with shell accounts provided by various local dial-up ISPs and the college my mother taught at. In 1994, my father and I gave Slackware a spin on the family's old desktop after an upgrade. But this isn't about Linux. This is about BSD. When I moved out of my parents' place in 1998, one of my new roommates introduced me to FreeBSD, which he was running on a SPARCStation IPX. Coming from Slackware and Red Hat, the thing that stuck out to me most was FreeBSD's Ports system-a welcome departure in package management. The layout of the configuration files made more sense to me as well. I had a laptop that worked better with Red Hat-at the time, FreeBSD didn't like to suspend, and frequently crashed when inserting or removing PCMCIA cards. A classmate of mine had mentioned trying OpenBSD instead, especially given my interest in the information security field, but I was comfortable with my setup. I took that laptop with me to the DEFCON conference in the summer of 1999 and, while trying to install some libraries needed for new software tools I'd learned about, managed to get my laptop into an unusable state. My classmate introduced me to Theo deRaadt, who was at a vendor booth hawking CDs and merch. I bought OpenBSD 2.5, tossed it into my laptop's CD drive, and hoped for the best. What I got was a minimalist setup, with the Ports system I'd come to know and love. And everything-even PCMCIA cards and sleep- just worked, once I'd read the contents of "man afterboot" and the documentation referenced therein (such as "man intro"). Indeed, it felt like all the documentation I'd ever need was expertly crafted in the man pages. The (and ) syntax was familiar, and I had a pretty easy start with OpenBSD. I easily installed WindowMaker, Firefox, and a few other things I needed. OpenBSD felt like home in under an hour.

Ollivier Robert runs FreeBSD I read the Jolitzes's series of articles in Doctor Dobb's Journal back in 1991 and started with 386BSD when it came out. Then FreeBSD 1.x in 1993 and ever since. I became a committer in February of 1995 as FAQ maintainer.

Tom Atkinson runs OpenBSD My journey to OpenBSD is one of pure luck. One saturday afternoon in summer of 2016, I was browsing a bookshop when I came across a copy of Absolute OpenBSD. It was cheap enough for me to afford on a student's budget, so I bought it, got home, pulled out my trusty T410 and followed the advice to get a fully functional OpenBSD machine. I've never looked back, so thanks @mwlucas. When I read that book, one of the things that struck me is how much it focused on doing things the right way, not the quick way. I'm normally a very impatient person and, strange though it may sound, OpenBSD has helped me control that a bit more. Shortly after, I started getting involved with the community, which I had avoided in the Linux community because their differences in opinion tend to be steadfast and no manner of logical arguments tended to affect their opinions in the slightest. I strongly believe that a good community fosters a good environment in which to develop a project at it's best and I strongly believe that OpenBSD and the wider *BSD community have achieved an almost perfect community in which to grow the projects. Unlike many of these other stories, I can't really talk about BSD in my work, because I've not long graduated university (one month at the time of writing) but I can talk about my hobby project with OpenBSD and my future job with OpenBSD as well. I have long held an interest in data and data visualisation and so in 2017, I started freelance development of custom data visualisation platforms built on OpenBSD using BCHS as a basis for them. This generally involves taking long, codified log files and taking them apart, classifying them and displaying the data in a user friendly way. I'm not really a web developer so when I came to my final exams in summer 2018, I hung up that hat and decided to start a new learning experience once I had a job. My job is something that I have been looking forward to for the past six months since I got the offer. Two of my true passions in technology are networking and security. OpenBSD is exceptionally good at these so what a brilliant platform to base my work on. I have got a job which I am yet to start (but massively looking forward to) as a vulnerability researcher for networked devices. This means writing low level networking code of the type I admire from the OpenBSD base to attempt to take advantage of newly discovered vulnerabilities in networked products. Part of my responsibility is to find vulnerabilities in networking devices, such as routers and IoT devices, and the other part is to develop systems for, and produce, advisories to clients about suitable replacements. This means a chance to spread OpenBSD to more people as I develop my advisories on top of OpenBSD. This might involve suggesting a whole package solution in which I configure them a device to replace an insecure off the shelf piece of hardware or working with their IT team to work out how OpenBSD could more reliably support their needs. My tech needs are very small so I tend to work with vim(1), firefox(1) and mutt(1) open on a normal day, using cwm(1) as my window manager. I've not done a lot with maintaining my own servers but I plan on doing so shortly, so I might have more tech to add soon. I love to learn and there are probably many people I don't know yet who have a lot of interesting things to say that I'd love to hear so please come and talk to me on Mastodon preferably, or Twitter if you don't use Mastodon because I would love to know what you have to teach me.