BSD: OpenBSD on DigitalOcean and undeadly.org turns 20
-
Matthew J Ernisse ☛ OpenBSD on DigitalOcean
Last night I had a need to put together a new OpenBSD machine. Since I already use DigitalOcean for one of my public DNS servers I wanted to use them for this need but sadly like all too many of the cloud providers they don't support OpenBSD. Now they do support FreeBSD and I found a couple writeups that show how to use FreeBSD as a shim to install OpenBSD.
They are both sort of old at this point and with OpenBSD 6.6 out I ran into a bit of a snag. The default these days is to use a GPT partition table to enable EFI booting. This is generally pretty sane but it looks to me like the FreeBSD droplet doesn't support this. After the installer rebooted the VM failed to boot, being unable to find the bootloader.
Thankfully DigitalOcean has a recovery ISO that you can boot by simply switching to it and powering off and then on your Droplet.
-
Undeadly ☛ 20 years since "and we're just starting": undeadly.org turns 20 (2024-04-09)
It's been 20 years since the first undeadly.org post appeared.
At that point in our history, we had been enjoying frequent updates to the OpenBSD Journal at the deadly.org site for more than four years, and most of us thought it was an April's Fool prank when the the editors announced that they were ceasing publication, effective immediately on April 1st, 2004.
Fortunately, Daniel Hartmeier quickly realized the announcement was not a joke, and went to work on a functionally equivalent CGI binary written in C and negotiated to take over the archive of existing articles. The rescued (resurrected?) site went live at undeadly.org on April 9th, 2004.