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rahen

For those interested, OpenBSD also works on the Rasp Pi. The Pi 4 is supported officially.

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

https://dev.to/spacial/installing-openbsd-7-on-raspberry-pi-...

This makes it a great choice for a small node requiring security.

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Or it would, if the Pi 4 didn't have a street price of 100+ even for the 2GB model.

We're getting to the point where buying a barebone x86 system on Aliexpress is cheaper than some of these ARM development boards, definitely not something I saw coming.

When you add performance as a consideration, for just straight computing tasks, you might also want to consider a refurbished or used 1 liter PC. They'll have a 6th or 8th generation intel CPU and power draws usually below 60 watts. There are also some other alternatives like Orange Pi. Generally speaking, some of the other options don't have a PoE capability (my Pis are all PoE) and you lose the exposed GPIO pins. But if you're just running a web server and don't care about PoE or hooking an i2c device to it, used 1 liter machines aren't a bad way to go.

Ahh I've accidentally been referring to all of these 1 litre PCs as "NUC"s - didn't realise there was a non-intel, generic name for it

Some also call them SFF (Small Form Factor) PCs but that term for me typically means the slightly larger desktop size PCs you could set a monitor on top of. The 1L PCs are more like the thin clients hospitals have bolted on their monitors.

ServeTheHome has a great ongoing series on "TinyMiniMicro" computers that make great little home servers.

SFF is about two, two and half stacked pizza boxes when it comes to Dell OptiPlex and Lenovo ThinkCentre. There is also USFF which is tiny, but still bigger than NUC.

There's a bunch of info about 1L PCs at ServeTheHome. Look for the 'tinyminimicro' tag: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

Those guys tend to buy new; although you can easily find used (but still very capable) models on Fleabay, &c. for cheaper. Usual caveats apply; but I've had good experiences after checking sellers carefully.

Manufacturers also have factory-refurbished sales websites, usually separate from their normal website (lease-returns from their financial services arm). Those come with short warranties, and an option to extend them. They are also nicely cleaned up and re-boxed, sometimes with accessories.

I have one from Fleabay and another from Dellrefurbished. Both have been running great for nearly 3 years.

Just as a heads-up, OpenBSD isn’t a great low wattage OS. My NUC came with Ubuntu and sipped power at idle, but OpenBSD doesn’t idle well and (worse) doesn’t SpeedStep on mains power either.

Install and set obsdfreqd.

> and power draws usually below 60 watts

That isn't really in the same class as the Pi though, it seems the various models use somewhere in the range of 1-6watt max.

Except 60 Watts of power is roughly the power-usage of a Lasko box-fan. A PC, even 10 years old, barely uses any power in the scope of things that are in our houses.

The 5W of a Rasp. Pi is extremely awkward in practice. Its "a lot smaller" than a PC for sure, but not small enough to make AA-batteries usable or otherwise a portable computer. And if you're using 18650 Li-ion cells, well... that's called a laptop / typical computer in the 30W to 60W range anyway.

There's something to be said about ESP32 / ESP8266 which actually gets you to that sub-1W level where AA batteries are viable. Its just a new set of opportunities. As it is, Rasp. Pi4 really doesn't feel much different to me (from a power-usage perspective) compared to laptops, or even PCs.

What's going on? I'm pretty sure I got 8GB one some time ago for peanuts?

High demand, low supply.

More like no supply.

There's lots of supply, but like 90% of it is going to corporations and backdoor deals before it hits retail shelves for consumers.

Ever since the pi foundation took that $45M investment and added their first outside shareholders about a year an a half ago it's been all downhill from there in terms of consumer supply.

OpenBSD still supports it, regardless of whether users can actually purchase the hardware. I mean, it also supports loads of hardware that hasn't even been manufactured in years if not decades, so availability of the hardware on the market is hardly its limiting factor.

You can still get them at retail price but you have to put a mild amount of work into it.

https://rpilocator.com is an invaluable resource, especially this guide: https://rpilocator.com/tips-and-tricks.cfm

From 2014-2017, I used small Linux-capable SBCs running BSD as a "router on a stick" for my home network.

At first I was running FreeBSD on a Rasberry Pi 2 (not the Model B version). There was some bug at the time that made Vim unusable over a serial terminal, so in spite of it always working and never requiring a reboot, I decided to look for another solution.

The solution was OpenBSD running on a Beaglebone Green. It was actually easier to set up, just as stable, and the pf syntax was even simpler.

Were I to go with a similar setup today, I'd prefer something that:

- has multiple NICs

- can be tuned to boot very fast

- capable of rolling-back updates/changes

- runs NSH[0]

The 3rd point is something NSH could facilitate for the network configuration. For system-level changes, I suppose the best I could do on OpenBSD is use CARP between two OpenBSD systems, and switch between the two as I apply and test updates.

[0] https://www.nmedia.net/nsh/

I run OpenBSD on a NUC-like from Seeed studio for this. Don't recall which model, but has a decently strong Atom, dual GigE, plenty of memory and an NVME slot. And Rpi compatable GPIO, which has some interesting possibilities. Has worked flawlessly for several years.

Probably the Odyssey Blue, which uses a Celeron rather than an Atom CPU. I disabled the fan so it is silent, and the temperature stays very stable (and pretty low). It’s a wonderful device. I’ve programmed the Arduino and use it with Home Assistant (serial sensor). My Odyssey Blue is virtualised using Proxmox and also runs OpenWrt (router), Home Assistant, UniFi Controller, Plex, Transmission, CUPS, SAMBA and more. It still has plenty and ram and CPU left too, if I only I could think of anything else I want to run on it.

> Celeron rather than an Atom CPU

This isn't very helpful as Intel calls some mainstream core based processors Celerons, and some atom core based processors Celerons.

The current trick is J before the four digit number is Atom based, U after the four digit number is mainstream laptop core. G before gives you mainstream desktop core for Pentium, and I think Celeron as well. But really just put the model number into search, go to the Ark page and see that it's products formerly Blah and then look up Blah to see what that actually means. Yay marketing.

Yes, it's a Seeed Odyssey. It's got a J4125.

Yeah, that's definitely an Atom (or Intel is calling them low power cores now). It's fine, you're clearly happy with the product and Atoms are generally ok (other than some issues with Bay Trail that resulted in an early end of service in early steppings), but the cores are roughly 50% the performance of contemperaneous mainstream cores, and it's often not totally clear when comparing a Celeron to another Celeron that one has half as powerful cores.

Funny, I connected up an old rPi 3 that I wasn't using just yesterday, and put OpenBSD on it for the first time. I wrote the miniroot iso to my SD card using one of those cheapy camera USB adapters on my desktop, then just installed to the SD card after the miniroot was loaded into memory.

Very satisfying seeing the serial TTY come up with the familiar ASCII spinner. My plan is to configure this to connect to wifi, establish a VPN connection to somewhere, then set it up to dispense an IP address and function as a NAT for anything plugged into its ethernet port.

Is it still necessary to do the serial console procedure to install it on the RaspberryPi? If that's the case does anyone know why I can do a simple `dd` with a FreeBSD image to the SD card and boot the RaspberryPi but not with an OpenBSD image? I tried once OpenBSD in my laptop and was extremely happy with with it. Then for some reason that I can't remember I switched to FreeBSD which also makes me very happy.

I couldn't connect to the pi using the serial console. Linux detects it and it gets logged in dmesg but the telnet doesn't seem to work.

It could be that I have a faulty cable.

Oh it's on an rpi3 . Maybe the serial connection only works on 4? The documentation doesn't say.

Er, serial and telnet are very different things; what exactly are you doing?

Oh sorry I meant `screen`

Basically these instructions:

https://dev.to/spacial/installing-openbsd-7-on-raspberry-pi-...

But...

This was a while ago. It looks like the instructions for OpenBSD have changed?

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

Maybe I'll try again soon...

Try Minicom.

> Is it still necessary to do the serial console procedure to install it on the RaspberryPi?

No, you can switch to a glass console by typing 'set tty fb0' at the 'boot>' prompt.

https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.2/arm64/INSTALL.arm64

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