Absolute OpenBSD

Appendix A. Afterword

Failure’s bad enough; add the human element and things really suck.

Back around 2000, my employer’s main business was designing web applications, but once those applications were built, our clients would turn around and ask, “Where should we host this?” That’s where I came in, building and running a small but professional-grade datacenter for custom applications.

As with any new business, our hosting operation needed to make the most of existing resources. Hardware was strictly limited to cast-off equipment from the web developers, and we used only software that was free. The only major expense was a big-name commercial firewall, purchased for marketing rather than technical reasons.

With a whole mess of open source software, ...