SFOBUG Frequently Asked Questions
General
What does the SFOBUG do?
The SFOBUG is still very much a group in it's potential state, than
developed state. However, what we could do is:
- Helping ourselves
- Help our members develop in whatever way they want -
administration, installation, configuration, programming,
porting. Everyone has aspects of OpenBSD, or Unix, that interest them
and challenge them.
- Helping the community
- Help the OpenBSD community as a whole by publishing our projects
and experiments and ideas. OpenBSD is still relatively new, and has a
lot of areas for improvement.
- Advocacy
- We can help promote OpenBSD as an alternative to other OSs. Every
person who has chosen to use OpenBSD has implicitly answered some
question they had with this action. There was some reason that OpenBSD
seemed like a good idea. And if they kept the OpenBSD box running,
then there was something they liked about it. We can share our
personal questions, and our experience in answering that question, and
encourage people to explore alternatives like OpenBSD.
- Explore security
- Security is a problematic issue, and isn't confined to OpenBSD, BSD,
Unix or even computing. Exploration of issues surrounding (attempts
at) secure computing, law enforcement, civil suits, legal evidence
standards, physical security, policy creation and enforcement,
obtaining management cooperation with security standards, and so on
are issues we can explore and attempt to answer for ourselves.
- Fraternity
- Fraternity is something that is always nice to have. Despite the
punishing that many people take online from some mailing lists, or irc
channels, OpenBSD users like most people, are fairly civil in
person. It was for this purpose that I wanted to encourage face to
face interaction. Before I started using OpenBSD I was simply someone
who found myself reading articles and books on security, and then
looking at the practices around me and saying “but this isn't a
good idea”. I found OpenBSD and it seemed that they took the
security oriented ideas fairly seriously, and I found some resonance
with the ideas of what I thought should be done. In this vein,
finding other people who also find some sense of "correctness" to
using OpenBSD is reasurring.