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Comment by Shared404 | Hacker News Reader

Came here to comment on the missing song as well.

It's a fun time playing around with OpenBSD on laptop. I've used it a couple times on old thinkpad's, it's always an interesting reminder that there is *nix that is not Linux, and that there's more than one way to do things.

Maybe when I finally get around to building a router it'll be OpenBSD, that would be fun.

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Setting up an OpenBSD router is almost trivial - it's all there in the base system. dhcpd, unbound, net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 and a forwarding rule in pf.conf and you're good to go. Then the tinkering starts, of course (even wireguard's available in base). Do run a few benchmarks - my APU2 can't really live up to gbit IP throughput (iperf3 speeds were about 500 Mbps, no performance tuning ). Luckily the veb(4) software switching does reach 1 Gbps locally and my uplink is only 100/100.

Would recommend it, very nice to work with.

What I'm more worried about is hardware support, specifically for a PCI Wifi board I pulled from recycling a while ago. It'll probably trivial to find out, even if just by installing the OS and trying fw_update.

I need to just sit down and do it, but I have a working setup right now and can't quite get the motivation to at the moment.

Yeah wlan is by far the weakest point of OpenBSD networking - especially as an AP. Slipped my mind completely actually. The way most do it is to have separate APs.

Still, you can check https://man.openbsd.org/pci.4#Wireless_network_interfaces to get a general idea. Unfortunately only a few support host AP mode (last I checked).

Yes, once in a while I play around with it as well. And each time I like the straightforwardness. But building on premises windows software there are not much uses cases for using OpenBSD boxes and I have a lot of stuff related to our business I first have to spend my time on before fiddling around for fiddling arounds sake.

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