Blog of Echothrust Solutions

Here we are again with another set of answers for you, surrounding the applications that we use and how we use them. Sorry for the delay since the previous post but its busy lately.

Like every previous part of the series, if your question is not answered here post a comment and I will try to include it on the upcoming "episodes".

I do use a lot of LaTeX for publishing engineering papers and I was curious on your set up with OpenBSD. For example, in Linux, I simply installed the tex packages from debian along with a utility called rubber that automatically handles LaTeX compilations. (Amit)
I don’t believe you’ll find much different the way LaTeX is installed under OpenBSD. You simply pkg_add the necessary packages and you’re ready to go. I have never used rubber before, but I will definitely take a closer look. For our compilation and LaTeX handling we used a combination of tools (scripts that we wrote) to merge different templates that we had created with each document generated from Dokuwiki based on the “namespace” (folder) that it was located. All this was handled by a Makefile that took care of all the necessary steps for the compilation of our tex files.

We tried to keep separate the content from the actual layout of the document. As an author I am only interested for the content, the layout and "beautification" of the final PDF to be generated was not part of my concern.

Our techies don't have to worry about layouts, only about content. The content is transformed into LaTeX which then we include in our templates (almost transparently). If there are layout modifications, graphics and other media that we have to put into the final version we do it on the latex version and always with the less "intrusive" way.

How do you view YouTube videos? (Patrick)
The short answer is we don’t. We do not require YouTube for any of the tasks we perform so it is not something we needed. In matter of fact even if our company was Windows based we still wouldn't include the flash plug-in on the workstations.

The long answer is that it depends on the YouTube video. We have a small Firefox bookmarklet that simply grabs the flash file (.flv) and downloads it. Mplayer seems to handle most of those videos without a problem, so if there is something we’re desperate to watch, we have a way to do so.

Another option will be the Opera and linux flash plugin as someone already mentioned in the comments, but to be honest, only recently I found my self trying this, flash movies, games, and such was never one of my priorities.

We preferred the bookmarklet way in order to make it more complicated and thus avoid the temptation of spending all day on YouTube. This way only worthwhile videos were watched (hehehe).

What about issues such as stability? Any crashes? (Amit)
Well I suppose stability is one of the areas that every OpenBSD user can brag about. Depending on the use, however, we did come across some crashes, but all of them were application specific.

Firefox is one example of such crashes. I had some crashes when many tabs opened at the same time. This happens when I’m in the middle of researching something which I would open at least 50-60 tabs (if not more), and depending on what each of those tabs display there will be some crashes. However this is not something that happens all the time and what makes it frustrating is that we cannot efficiently reproduce the crashes in order to report or solve them.

Gaim was another one that used to crash and dump core, but this has gotten fixed in the way and we haven't noticed any crashes during the last couple of versions.

What about hotplug? Without automatic mounting of CDs, iPods, fileshares, most of my users would be lost. (Anonymous)
I have to agree with you that if you simply remove those features most of the users would be lost. This is why you have to dedicate some time aside and train your users. It’s not that difficult to explain some procedures for the users to follow and since its a business workstation, most users know that they have to learn this. Just like they learned how to do it on Windows, they’ll have to learn how to do it with OpenBSD simple as that.

However, OpenBSD does have hotplug support take a look at hotplug(4) and hotplugd(8) manual pages. Although, we don't currently use it, we had quite a success with it during our testing.

Which directory services do you use? Do you use Jabber for internal communication? (Patrick)
Our OpenLDAP holds a variety of organizational structures. It keeps our address books, users, groups, machines and some service configurations in sync. We don't use jabber, although we took a quick look at it. We run an IRCd for really “private” talks, and MSN for everything else, usually communications with people outside Echothrust Solutions.

If you could change something for OpenBSD on the Desktop, what would it be? (Bernte)
Although, I have to say that I am used to OpenBSD’s way of working, what I would really like to see on OpenBSD is better hardware support for things that "desktop” users would most likely have such as sound cards, webcams, X hardware acceleration, etc.

However, since documentation for those things is not widely available, I’d rather not have support at all, than have something which is inner workings are unknown even to the developers.

As a last note, I’d love to see an “Ubundu” like project based on OpenBSD, with emphasis on desktop and home users. This would greatly influence the adoption of OpenBSD on other systems than servers.

Do you have any security auditing software that keeps track of accessed files? (Amit)
We use a small set of scripts to monitor certain modifications on the filesystems, other than that securelevel=1 and sane permissions and file flags take care of the rest.

Did you use Feh to set wallpaper images? Or is this capability already provided in an included tool? (Harpalus)
Yes, feh is the tool we use to set our desktop wallpapers. It seemed to be more reliable than some other alternatives and it is quite simple in its way of working.

How is the QEMU performing, as the openbsd port has no kqemu acceleration module? How about the bochs, that project has been around for ages. How did you liked it? What made you chose qemu instead? (Grimmer)
The speed depends on many parameters but for our needs and with our current systems it was bearable. The performance hit of the extra security is visible, but you know what you get in this area. You chose OpenBSD for its stability and security enhancements, all those extra calls add up to the performance hit you take. You could always disable those mechanisms using malloc and kernel options, but I don't advise you to take that road.

As for Bochs we do have it installed as a matter of fact, but we don't use it quite that much. The reason we chose qemu over Bochs was that qemu seemed easier to become embedded into shell scripts. We needed this ability in order to simplify a lot of the standard operations regarding the virtual machines.

Furthermore, one of our future projects is the creation of a virtual machine console on OpenBSD, that will have the ability to launch qemu based virtual machines on remote workstations. So, having a bit of extra experience around qemu seemed like a good idea at the time.