It has been so long since I ran a #BSD that I don't even remember which BSD it was.

[yvan@toot.ale.gd]

It has been so long since I ran a #BSD that I don't even remember which BSD it was. (I could probably dig up that info...)

Circa 20 years ago I used to run BSD gateway/router machines.

I think I'd like to do this again, for a variety of reasons.

But which BSD should I run for this kind of network gateway. It won't host any applications, it won't be a NAS, it'll purely be network/gateway... it'll have the telco router on one side, internal network on another, and one or two DMZ/separate type networks (one for hosting external facing things like Mastodon, the other for untrusted IoT stuff.) It'll run dhcp, dns, and probably be a VPN endpoint.

I do not want to run some specialist gateway adapted customised thing with dashboards etc, just want a plain vanilla OS. (And no bullcrap like containers, docker, etc. Just an OS running on a physical box.)

So, what OS should I run on my network gateway: #OpenBSD, #FreeBSD, #NetBSD

[stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@yvan I'd use OpenBSD or FreeBSD. The good thing is that, if you're using FreeBSD, you can make it read only in a very simple way: https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/05/31/freebsd-tips-and-tricks-native-ro-rootfs/