Our server, gandalf.openbastille.org, got some more diskspace, and we replaced Gentoo with OpenBSD. All in all the experience of installing and configuring OpenBSD was very pleasant. Most things were just a matter of reading the manual, writing some simple and understandable configuration and then sit back and relax.
One of the nice things about OpenBSD is that it comes with acme-client for creating and updating SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. This makes it painless to serve web-pages over https and e-mail over SMTP+TLS.
Configuring software RAID for our two new disks was quite easy. The only hiccup was a slight misconfiguration where I first allocated only half of the disks. The size of the RAID volume therefore wrong. When I discovered, I noticed it was not enough to resize the volumes, because the RAID meta-data was written onto the discs and this was not automatically recontructed.
With help from the openbsd-misc list this problem was easily fixed by zeroing the inital data on each disk.
There are still a number of things to setup:
Spent considarable time today playing with pf, the packet filter system for OpenBSD.
Conclusion: Trying to completely block illegitimate trafic ends up blocking legitimate trafic.
However, I had success with setting up queues, so that when the server pipe gets filled some kinds of trafic are prioritized.
Today is 17th of May, Constitution Day here i Norway. It is the biggest national celebration each year, and consists of traditional costumes, children’s parades, ice-cream and hot-dogs – quite harmless as far as nationalistic traditions goes, and I hope it continues to become a more inclusive event. It has been at least six years since last time I was in Norway on the seventeenth, and we spent the day with my parents on Stord.
Having a few quiet days after being quite busy the last few weeks. The weather is pleasant, and my hayfever is not acting up. Stord has some great spots for hiking, and even some suitable walks for two-year olds. I am also working on some articles for publishing.
While the English name for the sixth day of the week, “Saturday”, comes from the planet Saturn, the Norwegian word for this day “Lørdag” comes from Norse “laugardag”, which means “washing day”. Today was indeed washing day at home.
Listening to Jaga Jazzist (just now: “Prognissekongen”), a Norwegian experimental jazz band, whom I started listening to after going to a really intense concert at Café Mono in Oslo back in 2011 (2011–04–04, to be precise – there are even traces of this concert on YouTube).
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