OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD Hobby Projects

Contributed by merdely on from the home-improvement dept.

Mark Peoples writes:

Here I am today, watching a few make builds run on a few machines with nothing much else to do and I got to wondering about what people are doing with OpenBSD at home. We've all read plenty of howtos that people have written about redundant corporate firewalls and vpns and whatnot, but how about at home? For example, right now, I'm tinkering with making a bootable flash drive for installing OpenBSD and creating a music player out of lpd and rtunes.

So the question I pose is, what kinds of home hobby projects are people doing with OpenBSD?

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By nuintari (64.246.119.65) on

    I am actually doing something very similar right now, jukebox with cups+mpg321, running on a soekris net4501. So everyone in the house can submit tunes to play over the house speakers.

    I promised a few people a howto, I suppose I should actually write the damned thing.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (70.173.172.228) on

      > I am actually doing something very similar right now, jukebox with cups+mpg321, running on a soekris net4501. So everyone in the house can submit tunes to play over the house speakers.
      >
      > I promised a few people a howto, I suppose I should actually write the damned thing.
      >
      >
      isn't cups a bit of overkill? wouldn't stock lpd work for this? This was done at a hackathon a few years back if I remember correctly.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (64.246.119.65) on

        > > I am actually doing something very similar right now, jukebox with cups+mpg321, running on a soekris net4501. So everyone in the house can submit tunes to play over the house speakers.
        > >
        > > I promised a few people a howto, I suppose I should actually write the damned thing.
        > >
        > >
        > isn't cups a bit of overkill? wouldn't stock lpd work for this? This was done at a hackathon a few years back if I remember correctly.

        I had some delays issues in between the songs with lpr, rather than tweak and tinker around with lpr, I switched to cups, which I am far more familiar with. Problem gone. No idea what caused it, I suppose I'll figure it out someday.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (70.141.212.164) on

      > I am actually doing something very similar right now, jukebox with cups+mpg321, running on a soekris net4501. So everyone in the house can submit tunes to play over the house speakers.
      >
      > I promised a few people a howto, I suppose I should actually write the damned thing.
      >
      >

      I'm sorry, but I'm a bit confused. What does a printing system have to do with streaming mp3's? It must be something I completely missed. Maybe some new fangled way to use cups and lpd or something. It's been awhile since I've seriously messed around with Unix in general.

      Comments

      1. By marco (208.0.109.221) on http://www.azbsd.org/~marco

        I'm sorry, but I'm a bit confused. What does a printing system have to do with streaming mp3's? It must be something I completely missed. Maybe some new fangled way to use cups and lpd or something. It's been awhile since I've seriously messed around with Unix in general.

        you submit jobs to a queue with lpr, and lpd handles playing them. a cheap playlist manager of sorts

      2. By scot bontrager (216.62.11.163) on


        > I'm sorry, but I'm a bit confused. What does a printing system have to do with streaming mp3's? It must be something I completely missed. Maybe some new fangled way to use cups and lpd or something. It's been awhile since I've seriously messed around with Unix in general.

        lpd/cups are printing systems... but abstracted out they are also excellent queueing systems. They can be used to spool up a bunch of songs (jobs) that are sent to the proper device (the mp3 player). It's a big of a conceptual hack, but brilliant once you understand what it's doing.

        My home project is running my music collection off firefly/mt-daapd. The box also does dhcp, dns, VPN, web/oBAMP (OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL, PHP), pf... all my eggs are in one very-well-backed-up basket.

        Right now I'm re-ripping my entire CD collection (3000+ discs) as high-quality MP3 (not going FLAC yet) since I finally broke the 1TB of online storage mark. God bless abcde and having multiple CDROM drives.

        I've also been tracking -current (more or less as my schedule allows) since 1.7.

    3. By Steve Shockley (68.80.137.106) steve@shockley.net on

      > I am actually doing something very similar right now, jukebox with cups+mpg321, running on a soekris net4501. So everyone in the house can submit tunes to play over the house speakers.

      I'm doing something similar... I took an old Compaq Armada laptop (P2-366, 256mb RAM) and stripped it down to the system board, and put that in an old Technics CD player chassis. I use it with a Xitel DG2 USB-Toslink device to hook to my receiver. Sounds great, but don't assume that because a device has Toslink that it'll sound good, the first two Toslink/SPDIF devices I tried sucked.

      I control it with either Ampache or Jinzora depending on my tolerance for bugs vs. features that day. mpd does the actual sound output.

      Right now the project is to get the 40x2 display working (off the printer port), hook up all the buttons on the front of the CD player, mount a CD ROM drive, and install an infrared receiver/transmitter.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

    If this is worth mentioning, I don't do much lately other than running some things I like in OpenBSD - mostly over XDM from my main Windows gaming machine with cygwin, xming, etc. ; aside from also using OpenBSD for Firewall / NAT using CARP, AltQ, ifstated and authpf; OpenNTPd, httpd, ftpd, sftp-server, ssh, samba, vpn, etc. etc.

    I've created a script once that helps build a full -stable release to be installed mostly on embedded systems - WRAP, Soekris, USB Flash, SD, CF, CF-IDE, etc. sets everything up in a MFS and has the flash media (root) as read-only. Similar to flashboot, flashdist, etc. - X being optional or leaned out on my WRAP/Soekris systems for XDM usage if/when a GUI is needed...

    Another script I wrote was to also help simplify using CARP for redundant Firewalling/NAT, while the ISP uses dynamic IP's via DHCP _and_ the ISP reserves the IP's based on MAC Addresses...

    Contrary to popular belief for doing this with CARP while getting my IP's from DHCP, it works like a charm! OpenBSD rocks!

    Sounds overkill, but it's useful if I want to upgrade to latest -stable on my main firewall or what not, without disrupting any internet access for my workstations.

    It's hard for me to find a new home project/hobby in OpenBSD because it does all I need it to do so far and just runs and runs without ever any problems in the background. I love it and I swear by it!

    My fastest system is my Windows gaming machine and I have an OpenBSD install on an external drive, connected over USB 2.0 - I use this to do 'make build', build -stable releases (and bootable ISO's - for internal binary upgrades) and even just compile kernels and other things for my other OpenBSD systems - may be simple to some and not much of a hobby at the moment, but it's related to how I use OpenBSD for some of my other stuff...

    I'd love to hear more about your project and other people's too. I'm glad to see this.

    I'd especially like to find a way to create an OpenBSD based webcam security system with motion detectors that take video/audio and/or pictures and upload them remotely.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (12.30.222.105) on

      I for one would like to see more written about carp being used where static ip is not available. This is exactly what I would like to use OpenBSD at home for.

      On a larger scale there are some blogs or sites that write (in a pleasantly detailed manner) how they used OpenBSD to solve their problems. However there needs to be more of those to show for the larger audience how and why exactly OpenBSD rocks.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (68.22.71.222) on

      > I'd especially like to find a way to create an OpenBSD based webcam
      > security system with motion detectors that take video/audio and/or
      > pictures and upload them remotely.

      Me too. I work for a non-profit (thrift store) where donations are routinely stolen from our donation area after hours. The current security camera system sucks. It's b&w, grainy, choppy, and doesn't EVEN come close to getting license plates. Now, we COULD PAY for such a wonderful system, but it's completely cost-prohibitive, being that we're a non-profit charity where 100% of our profit (after payroll & bills are taken care of) goes right back into the charity services that we provide. If I could build such a system with OpenBSD and several fairly inexpensive webcams, I'd be one happy camper. I'd like it to be in color, fluid, handling multiple angles at once, zoomable with clarity (to get those license plates) and easily archivable. Hmmm, I feel like I'm halfway there just fleshing out the details.

      Comments

      1. By sthen (85.158.44.148) on

        > Now, we COULD PAY for such a wonderful system, but it's completely cost-prohibitive, being that we're a non-profit charity where 100% of our profit (after payroll & bills are taken care of) goes right back into the charity services that we provide. If I could build such a system with OpenBSD and several fairly inexpensive webcams, I'd be one happy camper.

        You might want to look into used Axis cams (ebay: axis network camera), maybe with motion-triggered snapshots to an ftp server. They may be a little more expensive than you'd ideally like to pay, but I don't think you'd regret it. They seem to know something about quality and attention to detail; these are sadly lacking with pretty much every other webcam vendor I've experienced.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

      Contrary to popular belief for doing this with CARP while getting my IP's from DHCP, it works like a charm! OpenBSD rocks!

      Just to clarify, dhclient doesn't work off of the carp_if per say - i've created a couple of custom ifstated.conf and script template files (one of each, for each host involved) to get it all working for such scenarios.

      It works great and even when I down my main firewall and the backup kicks in and renews it's ip, there's no downtime at all. I've tried to make it as clean and quick as possible by flushing old arp tables, numerically, among other things.

      I don't know if anyone else has much interest or need for this, but I should maybe clean it up and post it on openbsdsupport.org or something soon - I have most of it already documented.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (12.30.222.105) on

        Yes please, put it up somewhere.
        Another place to put it may be www.openbsd-wiki.org.

  3. By Jason Taylor (66.131.96.58) on

    I am modifying my little Plextor Landisk EH40L to have two IDE devices, the internal HDD and a CF card mounted at the front (where the internal power supply would go if it came with that option). I will put the OS on the CF ard and the internal HDD will be used as "just storage". That way, the HDD could die a horrid death and not take the system down with it.

    Once that is done though, the little landisk will find itself as my off-site secondary DNS server, while the 400GB drive gets added to my home storage array.

  4. By dentarg (dentarg) spam@dentarg.net on http://dentarg.net

    Me and some friends are running a webserver with some other services, here is some info about the server (and about our backup-server).

  5. By Floor (80.56.133.83) on

    I have a lot of old computers lying around at home, from m68k to alpha and i try to use OpenBSD on all of them. But mostly I have an old ultrasparc as little webserver and an old x86 as file/backup server, both running OpenBSD.

  6. By Alexey Vatchenko (82.207.74.21) av@bsdua.org on http://www.bsdua.org

    Currenly I'm doing two things:
    - hacking on cdio. I have patch for adding keyboard control for cdplay.
    - implementing BSD licensed libiconv. Why? Because i dream about charset support for mounted filesystems. For example, i want cd9660 and msdos to have cyrrilic support :)
    So, check http://www.bsdua.org/libiconv.html for progress. Soon i'll release first version with working engine and all cyrrilic/unicode charsets.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (60.35.181.69) on

      > - implementing BSD licensed libiconv.

      FWIW, Citrus alreadly has an implementation.
      http://sigsegv.s25.xrea.com/distfiles/citrus/OpenBSD/

      Comments

      1. By Alexey Vatchenko (88.214.121.135) av@bsdua.org on http://www.bsdua.org

        > > - implementing BSD licensed libiconv.
        >
        > FWIW, Citrus alreadly has an implementation.
        > http://sigsegv.s25.xrea.com/distfiles/citrus/OpenBSD/

        Any plans to incorporate it into OpenBSD?

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

          > > > - implementing BSD licensed libiconv.
          > >
          > > FWIW, Citrus alreadly has an implementation.
          > > http://sigsegv.s25.xrea.com/distfiles/citrus/OpenBSD/
          >
          > Any plans to incorporate it into OpenBSD?

          http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20050518060555

        2. By Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) espie@openbsd.org on

          > > > - implementing BSD licensed libiconv.
          > >
          > > FWIW, Citrus alreadly has an implementation.
          > > http://sigsegv.s25.xrea.com/distfiles/citrus/OpenBSD/
          >
          > Any plans to incorporate it into OpenBSD?

          Plain citrus has a few issues that make it a problem, at least wrt Theo... which is why i18n is progressing rather slowly.

          That, and the fact it is just one of three large projects I'm trying to move forward, the other two being package tools and make.

          Hence the somewhat slow progress... we've got a lot of the hard parts in already (the stuff that needed major bumps in the libc, like FILE * changes), but quite a lot of the citrus stuff needs changes to be acceptable for us, unfortunately.

          Comments

          1. By Jordan Gordeev (87.126.91.80) on

            > > > > - implementing BSD licensed libiconv.
            > > >
            > > > FWIW, Citrus alreadly has an implementation.
            > > > http://sigsegv.s25.xrea.com/distfiles/citrus/OpenBSD/
            > >
            > > Any plans to incorporate it into OpenBSD?
            >
            > Plain citrus has a few issues that make it a problem, at least wrt Theo... which is why i18n is progressing rather slowly.
            >
            > That, and the fact it is just one of three large projects I'm trying to move forward, the other two being package tools and make.
            >
            > Hence the somewhat slow progress... we've got a lot of the hard parts in already (the stuff that needed major bumps in the libc, like FILE * changes), but quite a lot of the citrus stuff needs changes to be acceptable for us, unfortunately.

            What make related project are you involved in?

            Comments

            1. By Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) espie@openbsd.org on


              > What make related project are you involved in?

              Duh... OpenBSD's. In case you haven't noticed, most of the commits in our make over the last 8 years or so have been mine. I've been slowly replacing the incredible mess of code with stuff we can understand and fix.

              The primary goal was to speed it up, which has been accomplished. It's definitely the fastest make of all 3 BSDs.

              It still has other issues, which are slowly getting fixed.

              And no, borrowing stuff from NetBSD doesn't work, because they still haven't cleaned up a lot of the code, and there are a lot of gremlins in their ways of coding make... if you look at their cvs history, it's obvious they try to fix things, then go back, then go forward again. I must say, the code was (still is in some areas) a complete nightmare, with all parts interacting in very weird ways.

              Often, you can't figure out what's going on until you remove some code and figure out what weird undocumented feature you broke.

              Fortunately, I'm slowly reaching the stage where I will have read most of the code, and replaced over half of it with *sane* stuff. The suff.c stuff I have in my development tree, for instance, is hugely simpler to understand than what you currently see in OpenBSD...

  7. By Noryungi (noryungi) noryungi@yahoo.com on

    I am going to put together a small backup server for the different machines on my LAN. I have two Windows XP machines, one OpenBSD, one Solaris 10 workstation, one Slackware Linux machine and one (future) NetBSD machine, all of which will backup their crucial data over the LAN to the OpenBSD machine once a week.

    Backup software will be rsnapshot, backup media will probably be CD-RW if I can compress things down to a couple of CDs, and DVD otherwise. The goal is simply to have a snapshot of all the important data hosted on the different machines so that I can restore it quickly if need be.

  8. By leonk (213.250.32.193) komlosi@siol.net on

    I'm trying to setup WRAP board as internet gateway and home heating controller with statistic. So far I have installed some sensors in different rooms. It is summer time now and I have 3-4 months time to finish this.

    Comments

    1. By êarx (81.56.211.110) on

      > I'm trying to setup WRAP board as internet gateway and home heating controller with statistic. So far I have installed some sensors in different rooms. It is summer time now and I have 3-4 months time to finish this.

      i'm interrested, do u will do a web page ?
      i want to sensors temperature and hydro :)

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (12.30.222.105) on

        WRAP with OpenBSD is relatively easy. Here's a page that's still applicable: http://blog.innerewut.de/articles/2005/05/14/openbsd-3-7-on-wrap

        At least I followed it and got it working.

  9. By Tony S (12.38.8.233) on

    Nothing as elaborate as some of the other replies, but I've just finished taking an old Sun Ultra 5, ripping out the hard drive, putting in two quad ethernet cards, and running the whole box from a 32MB CompactFlash card. Trimming the sparc64 base install down to fit in 32MB took a little work, but I got enough on there to do PF, IPSec, OpenVPN, OpenSSH, OpenNTP, spamd, and syslogd sending off to another box. The box can easily handle my 6Mb DSL connection plus vpn connections over my wifi dmz and bridging on the remaining ports (poor man's switch). The CF card is mounted r/o, and all /tmp and /var run in a ramdisk (mount_mfs). It was a fun project, and it's great because I have no fear of the fsck. :)

  10. By the84silverdrone (205.166.66.2) the84silverdrone@yahoo.com on

    i'm trying to set up a dial-in BBS with an old 28.8 USR faxmodem i have laying around ... i've used openbsd for a lot of security implementations before but i really have next to no ideas on how to start this project ... i'm guessing just try to configure it as dial-in ppp and set the ppp users' default shell to the bbs server's sibling login program ... assuming the server will run as a daemon ... anyone have some ideas or been able to get a similar project going ?

    Comments

    1. By Clay Dowling (12.37.120.99) clay@lazarusid.com on http://www.lazarusid.com

      > i'm trying to set up a dial-in BBS with an old 28.8 USR faxmodem i have laying around ... i've used openbsd for a lot of security implementations before but i really have next to no ideas on how to start this project ... i'm guessing just try to configure it as dial-in ppp and set the ppp users' default shell to the bbs server's sibling login program ... assuming the server will run as a daemon ... anyone have some ideas or been able to get a similar project going ?

      Instead of using PPP, which could be a serious pain in the backside, try just using the modem as another terminal. That's how the old traditional BBSs worked, and it was a fairly decent model. There's a special login for the BBS, and it should be something fairly obvious that you can publicize and people can remember without any problem.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (12.205.149.225) on

        Horray! I can actually use my V.24 modem I hooked up the other day. Numbers! Send numbers!

  11. By Anonymous Coward (216.220.225.229) on

    I have a Dell Latitude D620, which is happy to boot off of a thumb drive with OpenBSD installed on it. I take a long ferry ride a few times a summer. One fun "hobby" is putting the laptop into HostAP mode, turning on DHCP and DNS, and watching people get excited because they think there might be WiFi out in the middle of the ocean. Ok, so my hobby is being a jerk. I do like that I can have a few different 1GB thumb drives that can be custom setups for random purposes. I even have one thumb drive that is pre-configured as a PXE boot install environment. I don't have to do a lot of work to get OpenBSD installed in a small space, well, at least as long as I don't try to install KDE.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

      I have a Dell Latitude D620, which is happy to boot off of a thumb drive with OpenBSD installed on it. I take a long ferry ride a few times a summer. One fun "hobby" is putting the laptop into HostAP mode, turning on DHCP and DNS, and watching people get excited because they think there might be WiFi out in the middle of the ocean. Ok, so my hobby is being a jerk.

      I don't know if you're serious, but that's hilarious! =)

  12. By Gilles Chehade (veins) veins@evilkittens.org on http://www.evilkittens.org/

    several stuff ;-)

    I'm setting up an OpenBSD-based hosting service which mainly targets BSD coders and users. It is a "friends" service but outsiders may be hosted if they make a yearly donation to both our (soon to be) not for profit organization as well as a BSD project of their choice.

    Most of us are coders so we also use BSD to experiment, build, make sure that code is portable, ...

    Comments

    1. By mips (213.41.184.19) on

      > several stuff ;-)

      Don't be shy and talk more about your projects :)

  13. By Sebastian (84.82.25.78) on

    I'm currently testing the "phone home" aspect of a clean install of Vista Home Premium on a laptop by putting an OpenBSD machines with two NICs in between acting as a bridge and then letting PF pass and log all inbound and outbound traffic in both directions. I also watch the traffic with tcpdump looking at interface pflog0.

    The laptop sits staring at the desktop mostly and gets rebooted once or twice by me. I also start programs that shouldn't be connecting to the network, like Computer Management and Mahjongg Titans, and watch the tcpdump output while taking notes.

    I have to admit I'm pleasantly surprised so far, I haven't found any suspicious activity.

    Not having a lot of network knowledge there are things that look scary at first until you've looked up the ip-address in a search engine.
    Like:
    14:59:12.667564 10.0.0.16 > 224.0.0.22: igmp-2 [v2] [ttl 1]
    14:59:12.668332 10.0.0.16.49157 > 224.0.0.252.5355: udp 24 [ttl 1]
    Or my router sending udp packages to 239.255.255.250.

    All in all a fun learning experience. :-)

  14. By timethy (72.90.123.215) on http://woz.gs/tim/

    Besides the normal router/firewall/server stuff, I am playing around with an OpenBSD based surveillance system using bktr capture cards. I'm modifying the bktr2jpeg source as a starting point. I only have one card at the moment but I am capturing stills from two cameras by toggling between the composite and svideo inputs. Tuner could be input 3. I get 2 or 3 fps on a dual P2-200, plenty for this kind of application. The bottleneck right now is that when the save directory get tens of thousands of jpeg files, the filesystem slows to a crawl, so I have a cron job delete files older than 24hrs. Still tinkering with it.

    Also playing around with ELGG, very nice GPL PHP social networking software.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (134.58.253.57) on

      > The bottleneck right now is that when the save directory get tens of thousands of jpeg files, the filesystem slows to a crawl, so I have a cron job delete files older than 24hrs. Still tinkering with it.

      Make use of subdirectories to keep the number of files per directory low enough. e.g., make a subdirectory per day and subsubdirectories per hour.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (206.248.190.11) on

        > > The bottleneck right now is that when the save directory get tens of thousands of jpeg files, the filesystem slows to a crawl, so I have a cron job delete files older than 24hrs. Still tinkering with it.
        >
        > Make use of subdirectories to keep the number of files per directory low enough. e.g., make a subdirectory per day and subsubdirectories per hour.

        This shouldn't be needed, that's what dirhash is for. Perhaps the original poster is using an ancient version of openbsd? Or some script is listing the whole directory contents when it doesn't need to?

        Comments

        1. By timethy (72.90.123.215) on


          > This shouldn't be needed, that's what dirhash is for. Perhaps the original poster is using an ancient version of openbsd? Or some script is listing the whole directory contents when it doesn't need to?

          No I'm running 4.1. The script is dead simple at the moment, just saves 1 jpeg per second to a folder. After a day it contains 80,000+ files. I'm running a P-II and there is still headroom left but I'd like to optimize it.

          The dirhash patch looks scary and I don't want to compile a kernel. Folders sound nice :)

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (74.115.21.120) on

            >
            > > This shouldn't be needed, that's what dirhash is for. Perhaps the original poster is using an ancient version of openbsd? Or some script is listing the whole directory contents when it doesn't need to?
            >
            > No I'm running 4.1. The script is dead simple at the moment, just saves 1 jpeg per second to a folder. After a day it contains 80,000+ files. I'm running a P-II and there is still headroom left but I'd like to optimize it.
            >
            > The dirhash patch looks scary and I don't want to compile a kernel. Folders sound nice :)

            Dirhash has been in the kernel for quite a while:
            $ sysctl vfs.ffs | grep dirhash
            vfs.ffs.dirhash_dirsize=2560
            vfs.ffs.dirhash_maxmem=2097152
            vfs.ffs.dirhash_mem=330517

            $ for i in `jot 80000`; do touch $i; done
            $ time ls > /dev/null
            0m0.36s real 0m0.26s user 0m0.10s system

            And that's on my laptop with a slow hard drive. There's no reason at all for 80,000 files in one directory to cause any problems.

  15. By Anonymous Coward (213.114.108.147) on

    would appreciate to have a possibility to install openbsd system on encrypted root partition straight from obsd installer.

    Comments

    1. By silent (134.114.138.2) on

      > would appreciate to have a possibility to install openbsd system on encrypted root partition straight from obsd installer.

      I second that!

    2. By Anonymous Coward (12.205.149.225) on

      > would appreciate to have a possibility to install openbsd system on encrypted root partition straight from obsd installer.

      Well, I have not done this... but I'd imagine you'd need a small initial partition with all the works (kernel, init, rc) that's unencrypted. Boot from that. Then hack your rc to mount a svnd that's crypted and chroot into that.

      You won't have to go beyond /bin/sh scripting to do that to the installer.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (24.226.127.231) on

      > would appreciate to have a possibility to install openbsd system on encrypted root partition straight from obsd installer.


      I used to think along these lines, but I have come to think that fully encrypting everything is at best a waste of resources.

      You want to minimize the amount of known material that is being encrypted, so encrypting all the common binaries could theoretically help while doing a brute force attack to find the keys. Also as has been stated already, you're going to need what effectively is an unencrypted root file system to boot the rest of the machine anyway...

      Really the only things you *WANT* encrypted are swap (now done by default), /var /tmp and /home as these are where important/personal information is stored.


    4. By Marcus (151.136.100.2) on

      > would appreciate to have a possibility to install openbsd system on encrypted root partition straight from obsd installer.

      I have build a bootable usb stick with the kernel and some files which decrypts the 'root' device of my laptop. It was terrible slow!

      I've dropped that aproach and just use a encrypted home partition.
      You need hw-encryption to use it for the whole os.

      so long,

      Marcus.

  16. By Ligthert (83.160.140.70) sacha@ligthert.net on http://sacha.ligthert.net/

    My machine hosts pr0n for friends.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (24.89.228.211) on

      > My machine hosts pr0n for friends.

      Don't tease us, how do we connect?

  17. By Tobias Weingartner (68.151.168.15) weingart@tepid.org on http://www.tepid.org/~weingart/

    Some of the non OpenBSD specific things I use OpenBSD for is to do things
    like development for 8051 type microcontrollers. In the past I've also
    developed various programs/scripts to reverse engineer the 1990 300ZXTT
    engine ECU. It helps being able to tune any parameter when you're doing
    500HP out of a 300HP OEM engine. :)

    Other things I've worked on in the past are things like FPGA routing,
    EDA (circuit design, etc). USB connected microcontroller programming
    and design of circuits. Real-time image and face recognition from a
    30Hz image stream out of a web camera. Never quite finished the
    tracking portion of this one.

    Lately I've been trying to learn some AI, and in that vein have been
    putting together a Sokoban solver. Current status is that it makes
    moves, random looking, but all legal. The next part is to try and
    get my IDA* search to have a better heuristic function, as well as
    implementing a hash based cache to reduce the amount of states being
    re-evaluated. Also, a simple deadlock detection scheme is being
    implemented. Once these are done, I'll finally be getting to the
    part that I wanted to explore, and that is implementing a planner to
    help reduce the search tree (hopefully) and allow solving more of the
    "standard" problem set.

    I'm sure I'm forgetting something... :)

    Comments

    1. By ognid (70.8.126.107) on

      > Lately I've been trying to learn some AI, and in that vein have been
      > putting together a Sokoban solver. Current status is that it makes

      How neat, I love Sokoban. I plan to write a Sokoban 'door' for my bulletin board system

  18. By thoren (128.95.196.94) on

    http://wx.slackology.net/ <--graph external weather stuff
    http://wx.slackology.net/systemps.html <--graph internal temps
    http://wx.slackology.net/particles.html <--trying to graph local "particle weather" (beta/gama)
    http://wx.slackology.net/pacific_north2/ <--recreate sat imagery gsfc used to do.

  19. By USB? (84.56.86.68) on

    A thing that haunts me now and then are the new USB drivers initially intended for the Zaurus. It should be possible to use my notebook transparently as a USB-HD on another machine, if I don't err. Time to get into it.

  20. By simon@ (85.176.215.59) on

    As OpenBSD is part of my work there isn't really much left what i'd
    call hobby as in something i just do from time to time, BUT:

    Years ago i was playing a few games - nowadays my hobby is to port open
    source games, play/test the first levels and get the additional porting
    experience points :-)

  21. By Paladdin (213.97.233.52) on

    My OpenBSDed Soekris controls a Cellkraft fuel cell. It keeps track of the health of the cell and, by means of the two integrated serial ports, gpio framework (outstanding! ;) and and additional ethernet/serial adaptor, it can send the status of the fuel cell by SMS, or serve through http, checks the hydrogen consumption with a mass flow meter, and reads the weather of the remote station with and Lacrosse Weather Station. Nice! It can even turn on and off two PTZ cameras, a 1Ohm load to force the fuel cell start, and detach the external battery :D

  22. By Aapo Lehtinen (m90) aapo.lehtinen@kotikone.fi on

    Well I've been using OpenBSD for 2,5 years about. With first install I had only 1 amd64 desktop, but number has grown to 10-11. I want to explore OpenBSD every way so I'm planning to use it in several ways (servers, firewalls, routers). I have no real need to do this but I find it enjoyable to see OpenBSD succeed in situations where other systems have failed.

    Hope I can say some day that I know bit more about OpenBSD than many more.
    I've started building my network over and over, though it's simplicity my plan develops faster than casefan spins.

    Oh, and thanks for all other posters. I like to read about how everyone else has figured out their systems.

  23. By Henri Salo (fgeek) fgeek@hack.fi on http://fgeek.fi

    I'm running Netra T1 200 at home. It is building NAT for internal network and DMZ-machine for internal machine. It has 500MHz CPU and 2G ram and Happy Meal -network card.

    It is running squid, lighttpd and so on. Nothing really interesting.

  24. By Anonymous Coward (62.180.31.65) on

    I'm running a WRAP with a simple standard setup of OpenBSD. No extra pkgs are installed. I use it as my Internet GW and Webserver.
    The system is readonly so I can just pull the plug if i want to.

  25. By ognid (70.8.126.107) on

    I wrote an ANSI graphics terminal user interface and a userland driver for an X10 serial adapter (CM11A) in C to control AC lights and DC pumps for a hydroponics system. This ran on an 80Mhz OpenBSD/hppa machine, which now acts only as a DNS server.

    Currently I am working on a very flexible teleguard-like BBS project written in python. It does amazing things, like the ability to 'attach'(spy) on each other's sessions, or make use of an event system to send messages between nodes, or broadcast events to all nodes. I plan to write some fun multiplayer games. Maybe re-write open source versions of PC-DOS Lord and Usurpers, or make a multiplayer rouge-like. A simple split-screen chat and irc-like script is the only cross-node communication right now. This system currently runs on OpenBSD/sparc64, but will soon be offloaded to a virtualized OpenBSD OS under Xen.

    Comments

    1. By psi0nik (65.200.153.2) psi [a] y0ru [d0t] net on

      > Currently I am working on a very flexible teleguard-like BBS project written in python.

      Is there any more information about this project available online?

  26. By Matthew Szudzik (mszudzik) mszudzik@andrew.cmu.edu on

    My "hobby project" is to use OpenBSD as my only operating system. At the end of June I put my old iBook in the closet, deleted the Windows partition from my ThinkPad, and haven't looked back. I use it for everything: movies, music, work, and play.

    By the way, I'm really looking forward to the gnash and jdk packages in OpenBSD's 4.2 release.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (74.115.21.120) on

      > My "hobby project" is to use OpenBSD as my only operating system. At the end of June I put my old iBook in the closet, deleted the Windows partition from my ThinkPad, and haven't looked back. I use it for everything: movies, music, work, and play.
      >
      > By the way, I'm really looking forward to the gnash and jdk packages in OpenBSD's 4.2 release.

      Why do you think 4.2 will have jdk packages?

      Comments

      1. By Matthew Szudzik (mszudzik) on

        > Why do you think 4.2 will have jdk packages?

        I should have said jvm, not jdk. It was previously reported
        http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070508192340
        that we'd get jvm packages for 4.2.

        Comments

        1. By simon@ (213.128.132.194) on

          > > Why do you think 4.2 will have jdk packages?
          >
          > I should have said jvm, not jdk. It was previously reported
          > http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070508192340
          > that we'd get jvm packages for 4.2.

          The article doesn't mention any date.
          See http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&m=118650319817149&w=2
          for the corresponding commit that disabled the port.

        2. By Anonymous Coward (74.115.21.120) on

          > > Why do you think 4.2 will have jdk packages?
          >
          > I should have said jvm, not jdk. It was previously reported
          > http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070508192340
          > that we'd get jvm packages for 4.2.

          You'll notice Sun still hasn't managed to get a complete JDK available under a free license, and there are no packages or even a working port for openjdk a this time. That makes it very unlikely that 4.2 will have packages for it.

  27. By Pieter Verberne (80.126.42.203) pieterverberne@xs4all.nl on

    Somethimes, when my ADD is mixing up my mind, I'm just 'browsing around'. It annoyes me that Gnash does not play YouTube video yet and I'm mostly just bored or even frustrated about everything including my computer and what I still don't know about it.

    But sometimes I'm very productive and read man-pages for hours. I'm dreaming about becoming a computer expert one day:-) I want to know how to maintain OpenBSD. For example, I think it would be pretty nice to have a job as system operator by my ISP (XS4ALL, wich uses FreeBSD).

    About 3 weeks I'll start my new study 'Informatica'. (Not at university. I think most UNIX users has done some academic study.) The first year I'll learn Java with BlueJ:-) , so I have to fix JDK, and if possible BlueJ on OpenBSD. Else I'm forced to use a Windows machine I guess.

    I still don't know anything about the ports-system so I couldn't install unrar:-( I wanted it for breaking copyright laws by downloading music-album (wich are oftern rar-ed) from usenet.

    And I did a lot of searching-work for a non-&#$$ webbrowser. But my conclusion is: all browsers suck. Firefox is rendering very nicely but is so goddamn bloated. It takes my brand new laptop more than 10 seconds to run it the first time! (why does it take longer the first time?) Dillo renders most sites just 'fine' but doesn't support SSL very well. I also tried W3M/lynks/'links -g'/uuuh, and others.

    I don't use OpenBSD as a luxury product. I'm willing to give some comfort away (in the first place) to learn to use a good system. I like thinks being as much as solid and think OpenBSD is what I'm looking for. EVEN when I have now idea about the differences between OpenBSD/FreeBSD.

    Maybe I was a little offtopic but I'm just relieve some of my feelings:)

    (now I'm not spell/gramm checking my message, I did my best)

    Pieter Verberne

    p.s. Ow, maybe I'm going to write a "Using OpenBSD for kidz having Attention Deficit Disorder" some day.

    Comments

    1. By Matthew Szudzik (mszudzik) on

      > It annoyes me that Gnash does not play YouTube video yet

      The newest version of gnash in the -current ports tree does play YouTube videos.
      http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118604309901640
      But you'll have to wait until the OpenBSD 4.2 release for an easily-installable binary package of it.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (74.115.21.120) on

      > About 3 weeks I'll start my new study 'Informatica'. (Not at university. I think most UNIX users has done some academic study.) The first year I'll learn Java with BlueJ:-) , so I have to fix JDK, and if possible BlueJ on OpenBSD. Else I'm forced to use a Windows machine I guess.

      cd /usr/port/devel/jdk/1.5; make install

      > I still don't know anything about the ports-system so I couldn't install unrar:-( I wanted it for breaking copyright laws by downloading music-album (wich are oftern rar-ed) from usenet.

      cd /usr/ports/archivers/unrar; make install

      > And I did a lot of searching-work for a non-&#65533;$$ webbrowser. But my conclusion is: all browsers suck. Firefox is rendering very nicely but is so goddamn bloated. It takes my brand new laptop more than 10 seconds to run it the first time! (why does it take longer the first time?) Dillo renders most sites just 'fine' but doesn't support SSL very well. I also tried W3M/lynks/'links -g'/uuuh, and others.

      cd /usr/ports/www/opera; make install

  28. By Doug Latornell (154.20.19.245) on

    I started out with a firewall between our home network and telco DSL connection. A friend said "Heh, you can build a firewall with OpenBSD with the OS on a floppy!" Never tried that, but a cast-off Pentium I scored from my employer has been doing yeoman service since 3.2 days.

    A while after that I dug deeper into OpenBSD and built a RAIDframe fileserver out of another cast-off PII. That box has been through some changes, but the hardware (with some additions) is running now as a fileserver, DHCP server, caching nameserver, and backup server for our home network.

    A year or so ago I plugged a X10 CM11A controller into the serial port, built heyu (http://heyu.tanj.com/), wrote some Python scripts, and installed a bunch of X10 powerline control switches and stuff around the house. Now Puffy makes the house look lived in even when we're away.

    I like the fact that I can re-purpose machines that the Windoze world of my employer thinks are beyond their useful life and they can do good stuff for me for years. (Of course when I manage to work OpenBSD into projects at work that use current hardware, it really rocks :-)

    The sensible, centralized configuration (/etc/) and rock-solidness of OpenBSD, as well as the excellent man pages and other online resources have kept me so happy that I haven't felt the compulsion to explore Linux or the other BSDs. And I've been pleasantly surprised by how much the things I've learned from OpenBSD have carried over to my forays into Mac OS/X.

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