Reviewing "MicroBSD" 0.6 RC2

"While building on the roots of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD for their known
stability, security, robustness and portability. We have actually forked into a specialized hardened distribution. It seems we are on our way to merge the best of all worlds back into one. While most "hardened" and
"secured" distros these days seem to be Linux based." --Source:
http://www.microbsd.com (02/20/2003 12:23:54 CST)

I was curious as to how "close" MicroBSD really was to OpenBSD so I downloaded the ISO this morning and installed it on a spare machine.

The Australian Mirror (got to love that Google cache!): http://mirror.no1.com.au/microbsd/downloads/microbsd-x86-0.6-RC2.iso

My first impression was: Yup it IS OpenBSD (Like we already knew)

After seeing the MOTD on first boot (which is word for word the same as OpenBSD except for the fact that the name MicroBSD is used instead of OpenBSD) I ran 'sendbug'.

Well would you look at that! It sends bug reports to gnats@openbsd.org!

I wonder how many bug reports the OpenBSD team has received from users of MicroBSD......

Then... 'man release'..... "See http://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html for instructions on fetching the sources for the first time...."

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Hmmm.... Interesting.

Obvious changes:
* /etc/inetd.conf file has everything commented out (which I always do myself after the install anyway).
* /etc/rc.conf has inetd=NO
* A quick scan of system with Retina (with ftpd running out of rc.conf) reports VERSION 6.5/MICROBSD as the ftp server version.

I enabled Apache and much to my surprise the page had OpenBSD logo's with
"MicroBSD" alt tags!

"You can also use the image below on an [MicroBSD-powered] web server. Many
other [MicroBSD images] are also available."

The actual hyperlinks in the above sentence are http://www.openbsd.org/ and http://www.openbsd.org/art.html respectively.

There was one broken image in the page. The image "microbsd_pb.gif" does not exist.

Run lynx and it opens the OpenBSD website as its' home page....

I have yet to see anything that is not part of OpenBSD. So far all I have been able to observe is a mangled OpenBSD installation.

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I do actually prefer the separate option for installing Apache in the base install; this is something that I have personally wanted to see in OpenBSD, but I have not followed up on it by making any direct/official request for such an option. However, I do not care for the fact that it is simply an archive that gets unpacked. I would much rather prefer it to be an actual package that could be manipulated by the package manager in OpenBSD.

I can not fathom why the "MicroBSD Team" felt that they needed to "...fork into a special hardened distribution..." rather than contribute to the OpenBSD project that did all of the real work, other than the [undeserved] glory of having people believe that they have a *BSD distribution of their own.

I see no real reason to spend anymore time reviewing this obviously cloned
"distribution". Even though it is totally based on the OpenBSD that we all
know and trust, I would never actually deploy it in the real world.

--
Adam G. Sweeney