Episode Details

We look at an OpenBSD setup on a new laptop, revel in BSDCan trip reports, and visit daemons and friendly ninjas.

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OpenBSD and the modern laptop

• Peter Hansteen has a new blog post about OpenBSD on laptops:

Did you think that OpenBSD is suitable only for firewalls and high-security servers? Think again. Here are my steps to transform a modern mid to high range laptop into a useful Unix workstation with OpenBSD.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that whenever I'm out and about with my primary laptop at conferences and elsewhere geeks gather, a significant subset of the people I meet have a hard time believing that my laptop runs OpenBSD, and that it's the only system installed.
and then it takes a bit of demonstrating that yes, the graphics runs with the best available resolution the hardware can offer, the wireless network is functional, suspend and resume does work, and so forth. And of course, yes, I do use that system when writing books and articles too. Apparently heavy users of other free operating systems do not always run them on their primary workstations.

• Peter goes on to describe the laptops he’s had over the years (all running OpenBSD) and after BSDCan 2017, he needed a new one due to cracks in the display.

So the time came to shop around for a replacement. After a bit of shopping around I came back to Multicom, a small computers and parts supplier outfit in rural Åmli in southern Norway, the same place I had sourced the previous one.
One of the things that attracted me to that particular shop and their own-branded offerings is that they will let you buy those computers with no operating system installed. That is of course what you want to do when you source your operating system separately, as we OpenBSD users tend to do.
The last time around I had gone for a "Thin and lightweight" 14 inch model (Thickness 20mm, weight 2.0kg) with 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD for system disk and 1TB HD for /home (since swapped out for a same-size SSD, as the dmesg will show).
Three years later, the rough equivalent with some added oomph for me to stay comfortable for some years to come ended me with a 13.3 inch model, 18mm and advertised as 1.3kg (but actually weighing in at 1.5kg, possibly due to extra components), 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD and 2TB harddisk. For now the specification can be viewed online here (the site language is Norwegian, but product names and units of measure are not in fact different).
The OpenBSD installer is a wonder of straightforward, no-nonsense simplicity that simply gets the job done. Even so, if you are not yet familiar with OpenBSD, it is worth spending some time reading the OpenBSD FAQ's installation guidelines and the INSTALL.platform file (in our case, INSTALL.amd64) to familiarize yourself with the procedure. If you're following this article to the letter and will be installing a snapshot, it is worth reading the notes on following -current too.
The main hurdle back when I was installing the 2014-vintage 14" model was getting the sy