tek-ops » Blog Archive » Building home OpenBSD router - Part 1

tek-ops » Blog Archive » Building home OpenBSD router - Part 1.

Tek-Ops has a pretty good 5-part article about building an OpenBSD wireless router for the home.

I think we’ll stick to our beloved Linksys WRT54G access points for now, but it’s a pretty well-written tutorial nonetheless.

Flash on OpenBSD

Although I am very happy thus far with my new Thinkpad T30 laptop running OpenBSD 4.3, I am a little disappointed that it still seems unlikely that Flash player support will be forthcoming at any point in the near future.

That makes it difficult to enjoy YouTube, to watch screencasts of the various MVC frameworks I’m interested in, and even presents some small difficulty in how I can preview the websites we’re developing.

Mostly, I don’t think I will miss video that much; it appears to be fairly distracting sometimes and I get plenty of video input from Comcast cable hear in South Minneapolis, but on the other hand, it’d be nice to get it working somehow so I could participate in the aforementioned indulgences.

Also, there is always Strongbad to contend with. How will I know what is going on in Strongbadia?

Maybe I will subscribe to Strongbad’s RSS feed. Or maybe he’s come out with a text-only video game by now.

Any suggestions?

A new ThinkPad is like an old friend

I finally got a replacement for my IBM ThinkPad T42, which had itself been a replacement for my ThinkPad T30, and have just about wrapped up configuring the little beastie with OpenBSD 4.3 and all the fixin’s.

The new machine is an old machine in near-mint condition. Guess what I opted for, even though there are all these newfangled dual-core sub-notebooks with solid state hard drives and integrated webcams?

That’s right.

Another T30.

This will be the third one I’ve owned, and I’ve been really happy with them over the years. The first one I got (let’s call her, oh, I don’t know, “Raven”) in 2002, then replaced it in 2005 (the keyboard was shot, what with all the typing I do.) with another T30 (”Raven2″) for 1/4 of the price I had paid for the first one. Had the power adapter socket not started to wiggle like a loose tooth a few months ago, I wouldn’t have expected Raven2 to give out on me so soon, but I digress.

In any case, this time I paid 1/8 of the price I had for the original, and she’s truckin’ along like a trooper so far. 1440×1050 resolution, ATI Radeon 7500 with 32MB, 768MB system memory, and an old 40GB hard drive I found in a desk drawer and she’s good to go.

I know, it’s old-fashioned, and she’s not the fastest crow in the flock (don’t they call it a “murder” of crows? Where did I hear that?), but it’s not like I’m trying to recompile KDE on her or anything.

Plus, all my old spare parts work really well with the new machine, so I’ve got a spare power supply, extra CD-RW/DVD drive, LCD, battery, and what-have-you, in case I need them.

OpenBSD 4.3 vs Windows XP Pro

Maybe it’s just because I’m so used to OpenBSD by now, having used it since 2.7 or so, but tonight I must say I had a really good time installing and configuring my “new” laptop. It’s been a long time since I could say that; sometimes computers can seem like a lot of work and drudgery for very little result, but I must admit that I really enjoyed myself and the process, and I’m looking forward to having Raven3 around for a while.

I like being able to install the entire operating system off a tiny 2MB cd-iso image, connect to an FTP mirror wirelessly, download the rest of the operating system while I read a book, install all the packages myself (without having to install a bunch that I don’t want, or need), and still have time to do some development work before bed.

OpenBSD 4.3 is still the same old rock-solid, time-tested operating system that it’s always been, and I didn’t run into hardly any unexpected bugs or glitches along the way. It runs very cleanly on the ThinkPads, boots quickly, supports both the trackpad and the little nub, supports external USB mice without any manual configuration (man, X configuration has come a loooong way since the old days!), and allows me to take my entire development stack (L.A.M.P., Catalyst, Symfony, Vim, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, Subversion, Firefox, et cetera.) with me wherever I go.

It also runs the G.I.M.P., Audacity, aMule, MLDonkey, MPlayer, XMMS, and many other fine applications, and lets me get really geeky with the network configuration, and do stuff like set up a nightly rsync-over-ssh backup to my remote server, which is really cool. I can install say, ImageMagick if I want to learn about CLI image processing, or Python if I want to expand my horizons with a new language, and all it takes is a single command. Installing OpenBSD packages has to be the easiest and most robust package management system I’ve even used, and that’s even including apt-get.

So, why am I so excited? Isn’t it just business as usual for a developer at Dragonfly Networks? Sadly, no. I had been running Windows XP Professional (why do I always want to say that in a Homestarrunner voice? Like, “Introducing… Windows ex pee Pwo-feshun-ow!” I don’t know. I blame StrongBad for a lot of things.) on the T42, because that’s what was on it, I guess. It was only for a month or two, and I was able to get a lot of work done with Windows, and I spent a lot of time thinking about user experiences and the future of personal computing, and I was sufficiently amused by Microsoft’s latest ad campaign shenanigans to devote a little bit of thought to why I never seem to be able to stick with a Windows OS.

I thought maybe I’d finally find out the one or two things that REALLY BUG ME about Windows, and be able to better define my distaste for it, or that maybe I’d just get so sick of it I’d overwrite the XP installation, but I never really got around to it. In fact, I used Windows XP just enough now to finally have reached a little bit of a conclusion about it.

You know what?

I don’t hate it. Windows XP Pro does lots of the stuff I need it to do, and it also makes a lot of things easy, and it runs lots of Open Source software now, like Audacity and Firefox and the G.I.M.P., and it has Putty and FileZilla and what-have-you, and so forth. I’m sure I’m dating myself here since Vista’s been out for quite a long time and whatnot, but… well, I haven’t tried Windows Vista yet, and I doubt I’m going to, but as far as Windows XP Pro goes?

I don’t hate it.

But I don’t like it, either. Not like OpenBSD 4.3 on a ThinkPad T30, no sir. There’s just something almost tangibly home-made, or hand-crafted, or something, about this particular operating system coupled with this particular hardware that seems to complement my tastes. I guess I know now why some people prefer classic cars, or why I had such a long-term affair with my Palm V, even when the newer, showier models came out.

Good engineering is timeless, whether it’s industrial design, software engineering, aesthetics, or usability, and I think the best advice I can give anyone who wants to find the Right Computer is that you don’t have to buy new (much like cars, laptops lose a lot of their value as soon as you take them out of the box/drive them off the lot), and that there are a lot of options out there these days for what kind of software you can run on them.

OpenBSD has evolved considerably over the last ten years. I hope I’ve evolved with it.