[ale] Newbie Greg's Question of the Day - Smoothwall vs OpenBSD

[Greg]

Apparently while playing OS roulette (I was replacing MS 2k & 98 Winbloze
with Linux on several of my home machines) and in the process hosing my
email my question never made it to the right place for this group.

Does anyone have any experience with either Smoothwall or OpenBSD ?  For the
OpenBSD especially when used as a firewall and hosting Apache with Jserv.  I
would like to start my home system small (read simple) with a DMZ and a
choke point and bastion firewalls with Smoothwall and a web server using
Linux in the DMZ and maybe later graduate to using OpenBSD for the web
server and an app server in the DMZ..  All of which I intend to run on
several P-133 and 486's I rescued from my company's dumpster.  Maybe later
converting the home intranet server to OpenBSD too.  I have been researching
both for sometime and Smoothwall appears to be a pure firewall app using a
cut down Red Hat distro with a simple to configure interface and a kernel
stripped for firewalling and nothing else.  It is advertised to run on
low-powered (486 - 368) hardware.

OpenBSD seems to be a more secure form of Linux that requires more in-depth
knowledge to use - and the OpenBSD newsgroup that I subscribe to appears to
be somewhat over my head and more interested in flaming those new to the
system rather than helping others and promoting their OS (oh my, what IF
they found out I used to be a VB / ASP programmer/scripter whatever.... They
might just form a lynchin' party an' come after me !!)  So, any help from
anyone on this newsgroup would be appreciated.

Also, while I missed the ALE meeting (had to help fix my company's primary
mission - critical - gotta' - have -  it -  to - exist software) I would
like to help in the Install Fest.  Having left the Dark Side (M$) only
several months ago I can really relate to anyone just starting to look at
alternatives.

TIA
Newbie Greg

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