3 ms·

To be fair, starting with something like a BSD might be easier in terms of networking. Mainly because the tooling hasn't been all over the place in the last 2 d

To be fair, starting with something like a BSD might be easier in terms of networking. Mainly because the tooling hasn't been all over the place in the last 2 decades. Also, a lot of network knowledge is not OS specific. Learning about IP, ethernet, routing protocols etc is valuable no matter which OS you use.

skrtskrt 6y ago
I have done some learning about more generalized network concepts (ip addresses, protocols, routing) but I want to make the jump to actually apply it in some VMs now I think my next stop is the network section of Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook
tiew9Vii 6y ago
I agree. I've had years of Linux experience and decided my home network + router was quite poor and I'd set up my own home network router and use OpenBSD to do it as an excuse to look at a BSD and fix my network issues. OpenBSD has been an absolute pleasure to work with. The man pages are well written and complete, the filesystem is well organized, having no issues that people have with Systemd the simplicity of OpenBSD's init system showed you don't need complex init systems. Then you have PF which is far easier to deal with than IP tables. It took me a few hours of playing to set OpenBSD up with multiple vlan's, dhcp server, firewall, cross vlan routing, mdns etc. The hardest part was figuring out the correct parameters for my ISP broadband connection as the ISP didn't publish some of the information so needed to sniff the network traffic to find that i needed to set a vlan for my isp. The simplicity of OpenBSD makes it very easy to learn networking and if you are familiar with Linux you will become familiar with BSD very quickly as BSD's are less fragmented than Linux by their nature.
- __turbobrew__ 6y ago
  I was amazed when my OpenBSD network config worked on the first try using only the man pages as reference. On the other hand it took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to change the DNS server used by an Ubuntu install.
  - ohnemint 6y ago
    > On the other hand it took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to change the DNS server used by an Ubuntu install. Might I ask why/how exactly?
    - __turbobrew__ 6y ago
      Well, I first checked /etc/resolv.conf which told me to change the dns settings in systemd. So I read up on the systemd documentation and tried to change the dns setting using systemd-resolved but got a permissions error. So I did a bunch of reading online and found out that netplan is actually used to configure the dns so I spent some time reading the netplan documentation on how to change the dns server. This process took me about an hour.

skrtskrt 6y ago

I have done some learning about more generalized network concepts (ip addresses, protocols, routing) but I want to make the jump to actually apply it in some VMs now I think my next stop is the network section of Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook

tiew9Vii 6y ago

I agree. I've had years of Linux experience and decided my home network + router was quite poor and I'd set up my own home network router and use OpenBSD to do it as an excuse to look at a BSD and fix my network issues. OpenBSD has been an absolute pleasure to work with. The man pages are well written and complete, the filesystem is well organized, having no issues that people have with Systemd the simplicity of OpenBSD's init system showed you don't need complex init systems. Then you have PF which is far easier to deal with than IP tables. It took me a few hours of playing to set OpenBSD up with multiple vlan's, dhcp server, firewall, cross vlan routing, mdns etc. The hardest part was figuring out the correct parameters for my ISP broadband connection as the ISP didn't publish some of the information so needed to sniff the network traffic to find that i needed to set a vlan for my isp. The simplicity of OpenBSD makes it very easy to learn networking and if you are familiar with Linux you will become familiar with BSD very quickly as BSD's are less fragmented than Linux by their nature.

__turbobrew__ 6y ago
I was amazed when my OpenBSD network config worked on the first try using only the man pages as reference. On the other hand it took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to change the DNS server used by an Ubuntu install.
- ohnemint 6y ago
  > On the other hand it took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to change the DNS server used by an Ubuntu install. Might I ask why/how exactly?
  - __turbobrew__ 6y ago
    Well, I first checked /etc/resolv.conf which told me to change the dns settings in systemd. So I read up on the systemd documentation and tried to change the dns setting using systemd-resolved but got a permissions error. So I did a bunch of reading online and found out that netplan is actually used to configure the dns so I spent some time reading the netplan documentation on how to change the dns server. This process took me about an hour.