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.