[eksith]

Even more than the security, the reason I use it at home is because I'm lazy and I don't want to go hopping about applying patches to lock things down. Most things take the least amount of effort to configure and, probably most importantly, things are predictable.

There's no "magic", everything must be clear, documented and open.

An old friend of mine also runs OpenBSD on his machine and I don't think he's restarted in 2 years. Granted, he's running ancient software, but it works, he's using sane configs so it's secure, although he hasn't taken his eyes off the news in case any patches are released. That's really the best you can do in the end.

As much as I feel bad for the Rails team, it may hopefully be a blessing in disguise in the end. Complacency is never a good thing.

[martinced]

"An old friend of mine also runs OpenBSD on his machine and I don't think he's restarted in 2 years"

I regularly reach 6 months of uptime on my Debian desktop and I've got a Linux server which reaches 4-digits days of uptime.

I only reboot when I need to physically move the machine or when a remote-exploit affecting my setup is discovered.

OpenBSD takes this even further and more power to them. My "todo list" since a very long time is to install a firewall running OpenBSD. I should really take the time to do this.

[jdhendrickson]

May I recommend PFSense rather than OpenBSD proper, all the power of PF wrapped up in a gui that lends itself directly to firewall configuration. I really enjoyed setting up CARP with it.

[mben]

PFSense is using an older and patched version of OpenBSD PF and as you said all the configuration is done using the gui. PF configuration in OpenBSD is very simple using the cli and following the official FAQ: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html