Hacker News Reader

Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be dismissive, but isn't almost anything a decent home server nowadays? As long as your'e OK with the performance, size, cost, storage, there are just myriad options available. Just about any PC or mac would do. Finally, we all have our own preferences, but I'm not sure why one would really want to use OpenBSD for a home server. There's less driver support or application support than just about any other choice. It sounds like an ideal choice if you like to spend countless hours fiddling with things.

I'm really curious what you see to like in this setup.

View on HN

The M1 mini would be a great home server in its form-factor (small size), power usage and performance. As the current mini is pretty much an empty shell, the minis' size should get smaller in the next generations. Intel nucs are popular for these reasons, but it seems the M1 will give better performance/power/size.

I've used Linux for the past 20 years. I recently tried OpenBSD because I never used a BSD, so I thought I wanted to have a look and had a pet project building a home router. My experience of OpenBSD as a headless server is it's been an absolute joy to use. Simple, well structured and strong consistency with config and where files are placed, great man pages etc. From no experience at all with OpenBSD I had a fully functioning router with PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating etc etc within a few hours. Regarding fiddling with things, for a headless server, it's been the easiest server I've set up to date.

The only negative experience I've had is when not shut down properly I've had a few issues starting it. I think I could solve that if I wanted to. Using it as a router I can set up a read-only filesystem etc. The other drawback is it's not Linux and I use Docker daily for development so would need to do what Docker on OSX does and run Docker in a Linux vm.

CPU performance is a funny argument for a router as the hardware reqs on a home router are already so low. My current router is gigabit, has best in class WiFi, is smaller than a mac mini and is fanless.

I got to say though: PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating do not sound like something a home user should be setting up. The only reason one would play with these things in a home environment is because they want to. Which is fine... but makes it a toy/pet project and not something to recommend to others. My home router is Ubiquiti and it "just works" zero fiddling required. I'm not sure why one would want anything more complex for a home environment.

I guess we all have different preferences where we like to spend our time. I fiddled with things for decades, now I only want to fiddle for something really worth it.

Security.

EdgeOS is proprietary and closed source, and not updated as frequently as OpenBSD.

EdgeOS is mostly just vanilla debian with some proprietary configuration tools on top.

Yeah for a router you wouldn’t use the M1, it has one Ethernet port and overkill. I use one of the Pc Engines APU2 board’s.

The reference to the router was in regards I used OpenBSD and found OpenBSD a great server OS.

I have multiple vlan’s as have a guest wifi for visitors, all iot devices like tv, soundbars on a private vlan with restricted network access, dns ad blocking, dns over tls, wireguard for remote access etc. I use ubiquiti access points/switches but run my own router for learning purposes plus the flexibility. To be honest, since I’ve set it up I haven’t done any fiddling, it’s been rock solid. I’ve had more issues doing updates on the ubiquiti devices dropping the wireless uplink I have then having to power cycle them to come back up.

Again, nothing wrong with it, but your home network is far more complex than most small (10-20 person) offices I've ever seen. It's the kind of thing you do because you're interested, not because of a practical reason. I guess you mentioned it was for learning purposes which is a good reason.

Have you actually used OpenBSD?

Agree available drivers/applications might be less than a mainstream linux, but for what is there, things work completely solidly and require basically negative fiddling

If you have a mainstream motherboard, you'll likely have Realtek Ethernet drivers.

These do not reliably work in OpenBSD and will hang if you try to use it as a NAS.

I’ve found when shopping for a motherboard, it’s usually $10-20 more for intel ethernet, which is a much better experience under Linux and *BSD

Unless you want to build on the Ryzen platform for ECC support on the consumer series.

-Current works fine.

I love BSDs and try to use them personally because I like the experience, but as far as drivers go, I feel like Linux is generally on par with the BSDs. It's the userland which can be a PITA.

Basically, I'm not sure there's enough of a difference to warrant someone who can already do linux to use openbsd. Diminishing returns if you're interested in hosting a media server or NAS or whatever people wanna do with home servers.

That said, I highly recommend running either Open or NetBSD for a while just to get the experience. For me, running NetBSD as my only OS on my laptop through my late teens gave me a great foundation for my professional life up till now in my mid twenties. Really pleasant and simple OSes, great for learning OS problem solving too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com