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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

Could you perhaps run it with a read-only root filesystem (only mounting r/w for changes/upgrades)?

I’d have to put /etc on another partition, which really means I’d have to up front plan to put every damned writable thing on its own partition, which OpenBSD encourages specifically because it allows you to mount more stuff as r/o. And even then, any partitions which are writable would not be able to be mounted after boot until I do the same ridiculous fsck dance.

But that’s, in my opinion, brain-dead stupid when it only exists to work around the idiocy of not having a journaled file system like ever other modern OS has had for the past 25 years. Having to up-front plan a size (and inevitably get it wrong) for half a dozen partitions, just to work around glaringly obvious weaknesses in the OS itself, is beyond stupid.

You are on point. I still use OpenBSD where it makes sense though—in your case it does not. All my OpenBSD systems are backed by a UPS, but a crash, while rare, could still readily cause file system corruption.

Here's how I solved it:

https://www.mimar.rs/blog/how-to-increase-openbsds-resilienc...

I know of the non-standard workarounds, I'm just not interested in doing them unless it's for a very specific deployment and needs to be repeatable across a large number of systems.

Great article and a cool way to learn more about the inner workings of OpenBSD, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of a separate /var/syspatch directory. I typically make separate /var/log and /var/www directories too.

I noticed you're using a good quality SD card and wrote a couple times about flash wear, is there any reason you didn't opt for an mSATA SSD? It might be more resilient than SD.

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