Episode Details

Today on the show, we’ve got a look at running OpenBSD on a APU, some BSD in your Android, managing your own FreeBSD cloud service with ansible and much more. Keep it turned on your place to B...SD!

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OpenBSD on PC Engines APU2

• A detailed walkthrough of building an OpenBSD firewall on a PC Engines APU2
• It starts with a breakdown of the parts that were purchases, totally around $200
• Then the reader is walked through configuring the serial console, flashing the ROM, and updating the BIOS
• The next step is actually creating a custom OpenBSD install image, and pre-configuring its serial console. Starting with OpenBSD 6.0, this step is done automatically by the installer
• Installation:
  • Power off the APU2
  • Insert the bootable OpenBSD installer USB flash drive to one of the USB slots on the APU2
  • Power on the APU2, press F10 to get to the boot menu, and choose to boot from USB (usually option number 1)
  • At the boot> prompt, remember the serial console settings (see above)
  • Also at the boot> prompt, press Enter to start the installer
  • Follow the installation instructions

The driver used for wireless networking is athn(4). It might not work properly out of the box. Once OpenBSD is installed, run fw_update with no arguments. It will figure out which firmware updates are required and will download and install them. When it finishes, reboot.

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Where the rubber meets the road… (part one)

• A user describes their adventures installing OpenBSD and Arch Linux on a new Lenovo X1 Carbon (4th gen, skylake)
• They also detail why they moved away from their beloved Macbook, which while long, does describe a journey away from Apple that we’ve heard elsewhere.
• The journey begins with getting a new Windows laptop, shrinking the partition and creating space for a triple-boot install, of Windows / Arch / OpenBSD
• Brian then details how he setup the partitioning and performed the initial Arch installation, getting it tuned to his specifications.
• Next up was OpenBSD though, and that went sideways initially due to a new NVMe drive that wasn’t fully supported (yet)
• The article is split into two parts (we will bring you the next installment at a future date), but he leaves us with the plan of attack to build a custom OpenBSD kernel with corrected PCI device identifiers.
• We wish Brian luck, and look forward to the “rest of the story” soon. ***

Howto setup a FreeBSD jail server using iocage and ansible.

• Setting up a FreeBSD jail server can be a daunting task. However when a guide comes along which shows you how to do that, including not exposing a single (non-jailed) port to the outside world, you know we had a take a closer look.
• This guide comes to us from GitHub, courtesy of Joerg Fielder.

• The project goals seem notable:

• Ansible playbook that creates a FreeBSD server which hosts multiple jails.

  • Travis is used to run/test the playbook.
  • No service on the host is expos