Users
The term "users" has several connotations. End users often
want to meet other users of the system, to share ideas, problems and solutions,
and discuss the system over a meal or a beer. One of the best ways to do this
is with one of our
User Groups worldwide.
Another connotation of the term is "who is using the system, and for what?",
and that is the subject of the rest of this page. These companies and organizations trust OpenBSD's rigorous code audit
and security-first development model. They use the system to build firewalls,
intrusion detection systems, or general purpose servers.
University researchers and IT department developers often
have similar security and stability requirements and choose OpenBSD.
Many Internet Service Providers find OpenBSD's
security features hard to resist.
Even governments from different countries pick OpenBSD
for securing their vital informational infrastructure.
If you would like to be listed on this page, send the information to
press@openbsd.org .
NOTE: For reasons of security, companies can ask us to withhold
their names, or those of their clients. They would then appear as
"Undisclosed Company".
- Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission, Australia
Established in 1986 and based in Sydney, HREOC is an independent
statutory organisation which administers federal laws relating to
alleged human rights breaches and discrimination. The Commission is also
responsible for human rights education and the investigation and
conciliation of discrimination and human rights complaints. OpenBSD is
being utilised to offer various network services.
- Ministerio de
Obras Públicas del Gobierno de Chile
The Public Construction Ministry of the Republic of Chile runs
a national WAN and use OpenBSD for their firewalls and link loadbalancers,
based on
pf.
They have been using OpenBSD since the year 2001, and selected the OS
so they could sleep well at night without fear of being hacked.
- Sonora State Electoral Council,
México
This government agency uses OpenBSD to protect its
network and for intrusion detection. The OpenBSD-based VPN
provides online electoral results to both internal and external users.
- Azienda Ospedaliera, Mantova, Italy
Azienda Ospedaliera "Carlo Poma" is the largest health institution in
the province of Mantova (Lombardia) with six hospitals and other small
ambulatories. OpenBSD was chosen for its reliability and now serves as
the bridging firewall between the WAN and the main Hospital of Mantova.
We use pf and altq for firewalling and QoS applications, and use fwanalog
to generate WAN traffic statistics.
- Belper School, Belper, Derbyshire, UK
The Belper School uses OpenBSD machines as Samba file servers for around
1100 students as well as for student web hosting and a firewall/NAT gateway.
- ELM consortium, Biocomputing Unit EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany
The ELM consortium runs the The Eukaryotic Linear Motif Database and uses
OpenBSD for the consortium's communication servers.
- ENEP Iztacala
ENEP Iztacala is one of UNAM's peripheral
schools. UNAM is Mexico's largest University, with over 250,000 students,
and at ENEP Iztacala we have a bit over 10,000 students. This is mostly
a health-oriented campus, so the computer area is not a big one.
We run as servers currently two OpenBSD, one Solaris and two Linux boxes.
With OpenBSD we handle the main web site (happily running on a 7-year old
Sparcstation 5), part of our mail accounts and our firewall.
There are two additional OpenBSD computers, in our development area. One of
them acts as a network monitor (using Snort) and will shortly be moved to
sit next to the firewall, and the other one serves as an OpenBSD CVS
mirror.
We do not do run very creative stuff, we just use OpenBSD for what it does
best: run smoothly, even on older hardware, freeing us from most concerns
and doubts we have about our other operating systems.
We also host a Spanish OpenBSD mailing list (openbsd@tlali.iztacala.unam.mx).
- "Forcefield" art installation
Part of the audio and lighting for the Forcefield art installation
at the 2002 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York is being controlled by a VAXstation 3100 running OpenBSD.
OpenBSD was chosen because it is simple and reliable.
- Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland
The Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS), with staff totaling approx. 18.000,
provides specialized medical care for the residents of the capital and other member
local authorities. OpenBSD is used for DNS, mail gateway, VPN and firewall solutions both
on the internal campus network and on the Internet.
- INFN Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, Florence, Italy
This non-profit government research and academic institution uses OpenBSD
for domain name service and IPF firewall packet filtering.
- The LOCKSS Program
("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe"), Stanford University Libraries, uses a
network appliance
based on a modified version of OpenBSD that boots and runs from CD.
Over 100 of these appliances are running in libraries around the world.
They collect and preserve materials published on the web,
including academic journals, theses and dissertations, cultural
collections and government documents.
- Peter-Weiss-Gesamtschule, Unna, Germany
This German comprehensive school educates students of ages 10 to 19 years old.
The school offers Computer Science classes and provides laptops to students.
Peter-Weiss-Gesamtschule has been using OpenBSD routers since 2004 and
since January 2006, all servers run OpenBSD exclusively.
They chose OpenBSD for its security and its powerful packet filter.
- Polytechnic Preparatory Country Day School
Poly Prep CDS, a large private school in the south of Brooklyn, NY,
has been using OpenBSD since its 2.9 release for its firewalls (on
both campuses) and now for its student fileservers. The student
fileservers, which are a part of the student computer club, run
OpenBSD 3.2 and are administered by students under the guidance of
an experienced UNIX Administrator. The goal of the program is to
teach potential computer professionals the responsibility needed
in running a UNIX-like system, good security practices and to show
the students that there are alternatives to Linux.
- Prague Institute of Chemical Technology, Czech Republic
The university uses OpenBSD on PCs to provide WWW, mail and shell access to
staff and students, and on a SPARC IPX for a time server and secondary DNS.
The admin stations also run PCs with OpenBSD.
- The University of Alberta
uses OpenBSD on SPARC and Intel hardware for proxy servers, Kerberos
servers, print servers, service monitoring, pre-emptive security
scanning, and incident response. OpenBSD on Intel Hardware is used
for Firewalls and Lan-to-Lan VPN for the university's secured subnets
behind which all the University's new administrative systems
reside. OpenBSD is used for authenticating
gateways in front of public labs and public ethernet jacks in
approximately 40 locations across campus (about 1500 seats) to help
secure public internet access. The Department of Computing Science is using two
20 seat OpenBSD labs for undergraduate instruction.
- The University of Lund's Law Department
The Department uses OpenBSD for Firewalls, NAT, squid proxies and
intrusion detection. Their students use the web for applications
such as internet courses and multimedia lectures, all of which
pass through one or more OpenBSD boxes.
- The University of Michigan's
Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI)
The CITI laboratory uses OpenBSD as the basis
for many intensive research projects.
OpenBSD is used for developing and analyzing
smart card
contents and protocols, both in isolation and in real
applications. Plans are underway to issue cards
containing secure tokens for user logins and kerberos ticket acquisition.
OpenBSD is also used as a test platform for the
mobile computing
program at CITI. Internally "The Packet Vault" is an
OpenBSD machine that captures and records on cd-rom every packet on the
local 10 Mbps ethernet. Packet contents are encrypted to comply with
privacy requirements. This practice is used for intrusion detection. In
addition, a number of people within the department are using OpenBSD as
their primary operating system.
- The University of Minnesota
This university uses OpenBSD on Sun Sparc workstations for network monitoring
and capacity planning. They query 53,000 (as of May 1999) different interfaces
via SNMP, logging more than 250MB of SNMP data to concatenated disk for
processing each month.
- Uppsala University Hospital, Department of Infectious Diseases
The department uses OpenBSD for intranet servers, as well as for firewalls and
gateways to the Internet.
- Warsaw University's Department of Chemistry
The Department uses OpenBSD for Firewalls, Mail servers, DNS servers,
web servers, squid proxies, file servers and more. The deployment
supports more than 1,000 students.
- Xscanners Information Warfare Center
Xscanners IWC is geared toward many different aspect of Information
and Cyber war dealing with topics and discussions that are very
relevant in todays post 9/11 world. Xscanners builds and designs
secured environments using OpenBSD for many different areas.
We also have Security Discussion boards.
- Adobe Systems
This software giant uses OpenBSD on a number of their network firewalls
and network testing systems.
- Alteon Networks
The gigabit ethernet
hardware manufacturer, uses OpenBSD machines in varying capacities ranging
from testbeds to gateways.
- Armorlogic
Proactive and positive information security company uses OpenBSD internally
for infrastructure purposes.
Furthermore, Armorlogic uses OpenBSD as the core of it's flagship
product Profense, an all-purpose web application firewall.
- CORE SDI S.A.
An Information Security company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina uses OpenBSD
as the main platform for operation and development of information security related
products. "The robustness, portability and commitment to security
of OpenBSD, as well as the ability to run on different hardware platforms,
provides an ideal operating system for environments where security and high
availability are major concerns", says Ivan Arce, CORE SDI's CEO.
- GeNUA mbH
GeNUA, a company specialized in IT security based in Munich, uses OpenBSD
for its sophisticated firewall solutions and VPN appliances.
- FSC Internet Corp.
A large Information Security and Internet development firm located in
Toronto, has used OpenBSD and its IPsec support to construct
a secure and flexible VPN for a multi-billion dollar client. "We are
delighted with OpenBSD's performance, reliability, and pro-active
attitude towards security," says a company spokesperson. "We intend
to use OpenBSD in many future projects. We believe strongly that
open-source solutions like OpenBSD are best able to provide the high
levels of security our clients require -- closed-source software
almost never receives the level of code review that OpenBSD is
committed to."
- Learning Tree International
Learning Tree International, the leading vendor-independent training company,
uses OpenBSD in some of their security and firewall courses.
- NetFriend Ltd.
NetFriend Ltd. is a Polish Service Provider of OpenBSD servers, web
hosting and development, domain name services, e-Commerce solutions,
dedicated servers, database and application services.
- Network Security Technologies, Inc.
This network and computer security firm uses OpenBSD for high speed
intrusion detection, virtual private networking, and data warehousing
applications. Network Security Technologies, Inc is located in the
Washington DC metro area, and uses OpenBSD at several undisclosed
military and government agency locations.
- SoftQuad Software Inc.
This maker of HTML and XML editing software uses OpenBSD for their
gateway/firewall and FTP services.
- Third-Net.Com
Third-Net.Com is a solution provider in Calgary. Many of our clients
have switched to OpenBSD for their firewall/VPN due to it's speed,
stability, and security.
- TouchTunes
TouchTunes is currently the only provider of digital downloading
jukeboxes to coin-operated machine operators across the U.S.
TouchTunes relies heavily on OpenBSD for high-traffic FTP servers,
secure firewalls and VPN connectivity. Internal DNS servers also run on
OpenBSD.
- Xtime
Xtime's core technology is the Time Inventory Management Engine, or
TIMEngine ®. This technology brings the benefits of e-commerce to
service merchants everywhere, making their time-based inventory available
via the web or phone, and delivering powerful new customer relationship
management capabilities. Xtime leverages the power of OpenBSD for 75%
of their mission-critical network infrastructure, which includes Mail
servers, DNS servers, several VPN/Firewalls, secure logging hosts,
monitoring/IDS and production web servers. OpenBSD is the de-facto OS
used by the Xtime network operations department, boasting a 100% usage
rate amongst the department for desktop workstations.
One goal of any ISP is to keep their customers' sites and accounts safe
from intrusion. OpenBSD's security record speaks for itself, so many
ISPs use OpenBSD for this reason alone. However, others use OpenBSD for
many, if not most, of their services.
- Anonix
Anonix is an ISP offering anonymous email, shell, and web hosting
services. All of these, plus DNS and billing, are run on OpenBSD.
"We feel confident in its security, and like its clean, layered approach.
The basic install doesn't have huge amounts of unnecessary baggage; we can
be sure that everything on our systems belongs there."
- Appalachian Web Solutions
Appalachian Web Solutions is a Carolina based hosting and web design
company that utilizes OpenBSD for their enterprise firewall and other
behind the scenes security functions.
"After fully evaluating all the options both commercial and open source
it was an easy decision to use OpenBSD as our firewall and for other
security services."
- BizIntegrators, Inc.
BizIntegrators, a New York City based web and email hosting provider,
is using OpenBSD for their entire infrastructure as well as for most of
the dedicated servers they run for their customers. Servers running
OpenBSD include all web and email servers, DNS servers, MySQL and
PostgreSQL servers, firewalls and routers. OpenBSD is stable, secure
and very consistent, we love it.
- BS Web Services
BS Web Services, a german ISP, is using OpenBSD servers for primary and
secondary DNS (djbdns), primary Web hosting (Apache) and
primary mail services (qmail-ldap). They also run mission critical
LDAP Authentication Backend on OpenBSD (OpenLDAP), as well as MySQL databases.
Hostmaster Henning Brauer writes:
"OpenBSD needed some tuning on these machines, especially bigger maxprocs
and maxfiles, but it handles extraordinary loads on ordinary hardware. We are
using AMD Athlons (mostly the new Thunderbirds) and AMD K6-III's. We also have
some internal machines running OpenBSD as testbeds and printservers and all
sorts of other purposes. We plan to move some more machines to OpenBSD,
especially our firewalls. Unfortunately we are still running some closed
source software, but we'd like to try the Linux emulation. OpenBSD's
behaviour under high load, especially under DoS attacks, just doesn't
compare to the Linux we used before - Linux went extremely slow, while
OpenBSD doesn't even care (same hardware!)".
- Calyx Internet Access Corp.
This company uses OpenBSD for running all mission-critical services
including WWW, FTP, email, VPN traffic, and network monitoring at its
data centers in New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. Even larger web
sites such as
snapple.com,
tanqueray.com and others are no
challenge for OpenBSD.
- C2PRO
C2PRO is an Indonesian internet service provider using OpenBSD for their
web, mail, shell and network monitoring servers.
- Compartment
Compartment is a Swedish ISP that uses OpenBSD for many of its
production and development servers as well as mail, web and
routers.
- Crown.Net
This internet service provider is running almost completely on
a mixture of OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/i386. Our Web Servers(2), Mail
Server, Primary and Secondary DNS, and Radius servers all are running
OpenBSD/sparc and our shell server and several co-located servers are
running OpenBSD/i386.
- Elixor Networks Inc.
Elixor Networks uses OpenBSD on AMD hardware to provide shell accounts,
website hosting, and domain name hosting.
- Empire Net
An ISP in Bend, Oregon, uses OpenBSD on AMD, Intel, and Sun based hardware,
for routing, firewalling, IPsec (VPN), bandwidth
limiting, web hosting, database servers, network monitoring, intrusion
detection, mail servers, backup servers, cache servers, and workstations.
One of their OpenBSD routers handles traffic on between a T3 and eight fast
ethernet ports, also with several 802.1Q VLANs to separate networks for
co-location customers and business park tenants. An OpenBSD mail server
handles e-mail storage/retrieval and RADIUS authentication for over 5,000 users.
Several OpenBSD web servers each handle over 300 web sites.
- Globalwire Communications
Globalwire Communications is using OpenBSD on their Short Message
Service (SMS) gateway and database servers.
- Hobbiton.org
This ISP used OpenBSD to run their free shell server for many years
(it was shut down in November, 2001 due to rising costs of running
a "free" service). They also use OpenBSD on other systems.
The shell server, a single AMD Athlon 650, handled at the end
101,796 users. "We tried OpenBSD after having constant security
problems with other operating systems", said Hobbiton's Leif
Pedersen. "Since then, security in the operating system has not been a
problem and, as an added bonus, the systems have been more stable."
- Infotime
Infotime, located in the Netherlands, offers webhosting services
and domain name registration on servers running OpenBSD. We find
OpenBSD to be the most reliable and secure operating system on which
to offer services.
- inTEXT Communications
inTEXT Communications is a network security company that uses OpenBSD for
firewalls, virtual private networking, as well as various high end security
systems. inTEXT Communications Inc (1994) is located in Vancouver, BC,
Canada and deploys OpenBSD for several high profile companies including a
pharmaceutical firm.
- IOActive
IOActive provides WWW developers and hackers with a place to tinker on test
servers. The Seattle, WA, service provider also installs OpenBSD firewall,
VPN and IDS systems for regional businesses. "OpenBSD is fast, reliable, and I
sleep a little better at night knowing I'm using it," says owner Josh Pennell.
"The other thing I love about it is over half of the work is done to secure
the box right after installation, saving my company copious amounts of time.
OpenBSD in my mind is the defacto standard for open source secure operating
systems. Everyone else is just trying to catch up".
- M5 Internet Hosting
M5 is a commercial Hosting, Colocation and Dedicated Server
provider. They use OpenBSD for security devices including firewalls
(pf), bandwidth control (pf and altq), load balancing (pf), IDS and
front line spam filtering systems (postfix, spamd). They also offer
OpenBSD dedicated servers
for rent.
M5 has many customers who use these
OpenBSD systems as development platforms, web and email hosting
platforms, security auditing launch points, and shell boxes to get
around unfriendly security policies at their places of employment.
Michael J. McCafferty, Principal and Security Engineer of the company
says about OpenBSD: "Thank you very much for an awesome OS !"
- Meteksan Net
Communication Services Inc.
Probably Turkey's largest corporate-only ISP, Meteksan uses OpenBSD
in many of its own mission critical services and also creates
turnkey network security solutions built upon OpenBSD to customers
from government and private sector.
- Phoenix Communications
Phoenix Communications is an ISP in Dallas, Texas, that uses OpenBSD
for firewalls and other infrastructure.
- Poppe Tyson Europe
is using OpenBSD as a primary DNS, mailserver for
100+ mailboxes, and as their Website Development server for over 50
sites.
- qpalzm.com services
qpalzm services runs OpenBSD to offer web hosting and shell accounts. The
website offers daily updates on programming, gaming, irc, and other
technobabble. An online MUD is also available. There is also a
JavaScript Mailing List
using OpenBSD for the benefit of those interested in JavaScript
and DHTML. Incidently, qpalzm.com's busy WWW, FTP and mail server runs
just fine with OpenBSD on a 200MHz Pentium Pro.
- RTMX Networking Services
This North Carolina ISP is using OpenBSD on multiple servers for Web,
DNS and over 1000 e-mail users in their community just West of
Research Triangle. There is a mix of AMD K-6, MicroSPARC-II and
PowerPC systems in use, with more customer sub-net servers coming
on-line. RTMX.NET mirrors the OpenBSD
WWW
and ftp sites,
and also provides an anonymous CVS repository
(CVSROOT=anoncvs@openbsd.groupbsd.org:/cvs), all thanks to 47GB of
disk space and a dedicated T1 connection.
- Swebase Network
This ISP in Sweden uses OpenBSD for Web, DNS and mail servers.
- TronicGuard GmbH
This ISP and hosting company located in Germany uses OpenBSD for
hosting and all-purpose systems, as well as security appliances like
firewalls and database-servers to small and midrange companies.
- Vovoid Software & Multimedia.
Vovoid Software & Multimedia in Gothenburg, Sweden runs OpenBSD for
Firewalls, Web Servers, Mail Servers and DNS Servers. "The choice
of OpenBSD for our production servers is obvious and an important
keystone in our security strategy."
- WytheNet, Inc.
This Virginia ISP uses OpenBSD on all of its servers, including primary and
secondary radius, primary and secondary DNS, mail, network monitoring, and
several firewalls. They also sell OpenBSD based routers and firewalls to
their business DSL customers.
www@openbsd.org
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