I work for an ISP. We use it (CARP and relayd) heavily for HTTP and DNS load balancing in an IPv6-laden environment. Performance is better than that we saw a few years ago under Linux.

CARP is sweet.

There's an (as far as I can tell) IPv4-only implementation for Linux in ucarp. [0] I use it for failover on my home LAN.

Question: Does OpenBSD CARP support "passwords" longer than 15 or 16 characters?

[0] http://www.pureftpd.org/project/ucarp

Did you also evaluate FreeBSD? If you did, I'm curious what the pros and cons were that ultimately affected your decision.

I did not. I was more familiar with OpenBSD to begin with, and like its slant toward security. Although we do use FreeBSD for a few other servers used as NAS controllers. HAST + ZFS + CARP is great.

Fair enough, thanks. I was curious since I've heard that FreeBSD generally has the best performance for network-heavy architectures.

I use it for servers except for home directories (FreeBSD with ZFS for that) and required applications (Red Hat, Windows, OS X, and an AS/400 (iSeries)). It works fine on bare metal and in VM on VSphere. Management is quite easy and the 6 months between major upgrades has been ok. Patching is build a set (I am all amd64) and deploy.

I use it as a firewall/router/network appliance OS.

The neat thing is that most of the things you need for that role are in the base install, which is quite minimal.

Given its reputation, I was surprised at how little I needed to do to have a suitable working environment.

Which reputation is that?

That it is more suitable for a firewall or router than desktop. To be clear, I didn't actually expect it to be bad at that. I was just surprised at how quick and easy it was to install it and to have a setup that I enjoy.

We used OpenBSD with carp and pf as our external firewall for quite a while - worked great.