The astute amongst you might be wondering what “edge” in this case means. It means exactly what you think it means. This is going to be a public facing server that receives and forwards requests.
I’m going to have a couple of them eventually under a load balancer, but for now I’m just playing around with this one.
Yet again, I’m genuinely surprised that this system isn’t more used in the wild or enterprise. Out of the box you get the latest packages for the software that’s available. I ALWAYS heard that FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD was “old” and “ancient”. Yet, on FreeBSD I got the latest version of Nginx and Rust. On OpenBSD I’m getting the latest version of Golang and HAProxy*.
* It’s slightly behind, apparently version 2.0 just released. OpenBSD comes out with 1.9 in the pkg_add utility.
I plan on updating this thread once I get the network stood up. I have a FreeBSD server I’ve been running Postgres on. I might set up another for replication and see what kind of performance I can eek out of it.
Installation was easy enough, when you first login you’re encouraged to read your mail – Some friendly (and verbose) tips on how to get comfortable with the system.
I was more talking about the poor MP scaling due to the amount of network related stuff under KERNEL_LOCK and limited drivers for 10G+. One of the big reasons FreeBSD can’t just pick up the newer PF from OpenBSD is because the FreeBSD version of PF was heavily modified for MP scaling.
Flipping through some OpenBSD release notes though I do see stuff being removed from KERNEL_LOCK pretty regularly, which is encouraging. Most recently bridge(4) fast path: https://www.openbsd.org/66.html
My history with computing didn’t start with Unix (or Unix-like) like a lot of people on here. I started with Windows 95 I’m sure. I remember playing StarCraft, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Diablo. When I was into computing I was on Windows 98 for a while (had to click the MSN butterfly to log into the internet lulz) and then went to Windows ME which was quickly replaced with Windows 2000.
Later I had a laptop with XP, then went straight to 7, retroactively spending time with Vista SP1 and SP2. Since 7 I’ve gone sequentially: Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10. Around 2011 I started playing with Ubuntu. I think I read about it in an issue of Maximum PC. I read about the terminal, running commands to install software, etc. I installed it with relative ease but went down a deep rabbit hole because audio didn’t work.
I edited files, changed configurations, updated kernels… Crashed the system over and over again. Turns out all it was was a muted speaker I guess that version of Ubuntu came muted out of the box.
Since then I’ve dabbled in Linux, Unix, and Unix-like system, eventually making them my full time job for a while. Now I’m back into a hybrid world, and I enjoy using both, Unix-like and Non-Unix-like. Trying to get back into a full on *nix world, though.
Yeah, I am specifically using this for networking stuff. Although, I guess a lot of people use containers for networking, too
Good to know! And there are definitely a lot of interesting tools in this bad boy.
Initially, no. I just want something besides firewalld managing my home network lol.
Thanks for the link! I’m definitely catching up on my homework. I know they’re hardcore on hardening measures and refusing binary blobs as much as possible.
I remember now, I was thinking of reverse proxy. It’s nice because you can put everything behind libressl. I don’t know how good of a load balancer it is. As freq mentioned, in general, performance isn’t it’s strong suit.
I’ve grown uncomfortable with Linux-based systems, and have decide to port everything from Debian. I’ve got Absolute OpenBSD: Unix for the Practical Paranoid on the ereader right now.
I might go with GhostBSD on the desktop, but headless stuff is going to OpenBSD. I’ll need to do some AMDGPU testing before settling on the desktop.
On Linux, a whole bunch of distros hardlock due to an ACPI bug on this hardware. I was expecting OpenBSD on this thing to be hell, but it’s working quite well.
My initial impression is highly positive. The first boot after install gave me a wonderful console. Aesthetics are subjective of course, but the pre-X boot sequence feels especially nice. Fonts seemed crisp and readable, spacing was aligned, and overall it felt like someone cared about that experience not being a mess.
(Edit: This is because of the new default monospace font in OpenBSD: Spleen)
Firmware management on OpenBSD? Fuggin SWOON! Stupidly easy to install.
$ fw_update -a
It makes use of my integrated Vega APU now, rather than LLVMpipe.
Went through my Debian workstation script and tried to install everything on this new system. With the exception of two theme related packages (breeze-cursors and papyrus-icon-theme), everything I use is available on -stable as a binary package so far.
Including Pulseaudio. I certainly do not want to use that before playing with OpenBSD’s very interesting sndio subsystem, but I think it’s inclusion is a good sign of the system’s flexibility.
OpenBSD’s default display manager is Xenodm. It’s not sexy like LightDM or Slim, but it fills me with happy feelings because it’s so basic and retro. It’s also very nice having one file (.xsessions) to set my desktop as a user and just have the display manager know what to do. No dropdowns to pick pre-login, no system *-session packages needed. Very Unix-y, and much appreciated.
I have encounted some issues though.
Xenocara doesn’t ship with sane touchpad settings. As is, it’s nearly unusable. The touchpad is garbage though, so it might be that. Still need to investigate that one.
The on-board wifi chipset is detected as “Atheros Unknown”, and there are no firmware packages that work with it as of the 6.6 release. Lack of 802.11ac is probably OpenBSD’s biggest weak spot, especially for an operating system that prides themselves on being good for networking use. Using an older 802.11 dongle works fine, and is my workaround for now.
I guess that version of Ubuntu came muted out of the box.
