Supervision on the BSD's

["Scott Colby" <scott@scolby.com>]

Hello,

I'm planning to set up a router on an old x86 box with a couple of
NIC's for the fun/experience of it. I'm looking at using one of the
BSD's as the operating system, since I haven't used those before.

I started looking at how to configure daemons/services on OpenBSD
and FreeBSD and am a little surprised at what I found. As far as I
can tell, OpenBSD's rc assumes that services will background
themselves and does no supervision at all. It seems like FreeBSD's
daemon(8) has some supervision capabilities with the -r flag, but
it is unclear to me how widely used that is.

Given the apparently poor state of supervision, I'm considering
using s6 when I configure this system.

In searching, I found some messages on the Skaware lists about
running s6 as PID 1 on FreeBSD; has that work been published anywhere?
I'm not sure if I want to go so far as replacing PID 1 right out
of the gate, but having some existing service directories would be
nice.

Have I correctly understood how daemons/services work on the BSD's?
If not, what am I missing? Are the daemons included with the
distributions so incredibly stable that they don't need supervision
in order to keep the system functional?

Finally, if you wanted to create a router that you could (metaphorically)
put in a closet and forget about for 5 years, what approach would
you take? My initial thought was OpenBSD + s6, but I worry now that
there could be an impedance mismatch between these systems.

Any thoughts people have on this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Scott Colby