OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD home projects revisited

Contributed by merdely on from the mmmmmmmmmm-cookies dept.

Mark Peoples writes:

A few months ago, I asked what people were doing with OpenBSD at home. People were doing some cool things ... environmental monitoring, security cameras, etc. But, I had been hoping for some web pages. In the article, I had mentioned that I had been working on making any old thumb drive bootable, and a recent thread on misc@ reminded me about it. Here it is.

What cool projects are you working on with OpenBSD? Links to web pages would be really cool. Cookies for xkb Arabic recipes!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (216.68.198.1) on

    staying under the proverbial radar, or reducing the signature...
    Otherwise, its all quiet here in the hen house.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (165.228.157.146) on

      > staying under the proverbial radar, or reducing the signature...
      > Otherwise, its all quiet here in the hen house.

      I doubt that these goofball projects are the domain of OpenBSD enthusiasts. I use OpenBSD for what it does best: the boring, mundane, setandforget roles that servers are used in. The rest is geek time-wasting.

      BTW, what ever happened to the USB rocket launcher driver?

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

        > > staying under the proverbial radar, or reducing the signature...
        > > Otherwise, its all quiet here in the hen house.
        >
        > I doubt that these goofball projects are the domain of OpenBSD enthusiasts. I use OpenBSD for what it does best: the boring, mundane, setandforget roles that servers are used in. The rest is geek time-wasting.
        >
        > BTW, what ever happened to the USB rocket launcher driver?

        What's "the rest..."? You seem to think you know of them all, published or not, useful or not, not one cares if you don't care, that's just you.

      2. By Mike Erdely (merdely) on http://erdelynet.com/

        > > staying under the proverbial radar, or reducing the signature...
        > > Otherwise, its all quiet here in the hen house.
        >
        > I doubt that these goofball projects are the domain of OpenBSD
        > enthusiasts. I use OpenBSD for what it does best: the boring, mundane,
        > setandforget roles that servers are used in. The rest is geek
        > time-wasting.

        You're absolutely wrong if you think OpenBSD users only use it for cookie-cutter server systems. People use OpenBSD for all kinds of cool, out of the box solutions. This is a good forum to share them with each other.

        > BTW, what ever happened to the USB rocket launcher driver?

        This statement seems to contradict you previous ones.

      3. By Anonymous Coward (2a01:348:108:155:20e:9bff:fe93:23e4) on

        > > staying under the proverbial radar, or reducing the signature...
        > > Otherwise, its all quiet here in the hen house.
        >
        > I doubt that these goofball projects are the domain of OpenBSD enthusiasts. I use OpenBSD for what it does best: the boring, mundane, setandforget roles that servers are used in. The rest is geek time-wasting.

        and servers aren't? (-:

      4. By Anonymous Coward (76.250.126.209) on

        I do all kinds of crazy things with openbsd. The fact that all code is there enables me to do all that. For example I wrote a TCP packet jammer that is loadable via modules so you can alter the code to jam the packets and then reload a new module without rebooting. Handy and fun. I also have done things like "scsi bus resetter" to test some hardware. You know fun geek out stuff.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

          > I do all kinds of crazy things with openbsd. The fact that all code is there enables me to do all that. For example I wrote a TCP packet jammer that is loadable via modules so you can alter the code to jam the packets and then reload a new module without rebooting. Handy and fun. I also have done things like "scsi bus resetter" to test some hardware. You know fun geek out stuff.
          >
          >

          And have you released these? :-)

          Good work!

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (76.250.126.209) on

            no too hacky. fun nonetheless :-)

            you get to play with enough of my code :-)

  2. By Anonymous Coward (169.244.143.119) on

    I used OpenBSD to provide a browser appliance to a friend who didn't have a computer. I had an old 500 or 600 mhz laptop and a spare 802.11b card, and with OpenBSD and some slight customization, he was happy. It was simple, secure, and the wireless card support was rock solid. It is amazing how just putting "dhcp" into a config file works so well.

  3. By Bayu Krisnawan (krisna) krisna@infobsd.org on http://www.infobsd.org

    Nice Work..

    Hey, It work. I can use it as recovery disk, virus scanner for fat32 and i think we can do much more thing with it.

  4. By wobe (87.230.56.35) on

    The disussions and projects you are working on are really interesting! Nice idea with the lpr queues.

    I am just using openbsd to port my WinXP Office environment on a secure platform. I use KDE and port my office environment step by step to KOffice. I compiled JDK 1.5 an run now JAP (german anonymizer tool) for web access. I imported my TheBat! Mail Client stuff to KMail etc.

    so its working fine up to now. Some pf configurations, thats it. Its fun, too....for me.

  5. By Anonymous Coward (213.77.90.239) on

    OpenBSD and Samba secure MyDocuments out from MS frontend.

  6. By Anonymous Coward (12.168.235.2) on

    Using 4.1 with a 1Wire adapter and temp/humidity sensor to log that data in an indoor garden.

    Sensor is this: http://www.hobby-boards.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=57

    Got the original code from Aaron Linville. http://www.linville.org/code.html

    Working on changing from mysql to postgres at the moment. Plan to add support for ph and ec/tds sensors using the differential voltage capabilities of the 1Wire chips.

    After that I hope to add 1Wire relay control but we'll see. Nothing webpage worthy yet but perhaps by this spring.

    Cheers

  7. By Terrell Prude' Jr. (151.188.247.104) tprude@cmosnetworks.com (this is a spamtrap address) on http://www.cmosnetworks.com/

    Just an ol' vanilla firewall/spamd box. But damn, is it effective. And yep, I do it at home. It fronts my "real" SMTP server, an Ubuntu Linux box, that runs postfix.

    Oh, BTW, my spamd logs show that spam attempts against me have increased about seven-fold. The logs for spamd went from just over 500KBytes per day to just under 4MBytes. Even with that, I still only get about 1 spam a day that slips through, and that's with *only* spamd. My CPU usage has gone up due to this, as you'd expect. But that 270 MHz UltraSPARC is still doin' the job quite nicely.

    I understand why not everyone runs their own mail server at home. But there are a lot out there who could (it ain't that hard). If more who could, did, it'd help out w/ the spam problem a lot more. Imagine if you had not hundreds, not thousands, but *millions* of spamd boxes out there tarpitting these spammers...the resources it would consume on the spammers's end is a very happy thought....

    --TP

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

      > Just an ol' vanilla firewall/spamd box. But damn, is it effective. And yep, I do it at home. It fronts my "real" SMTP server, an Ubuntu Linux box, that runs postfix.
      >
      > Oh, BTW, my spamd logs show that spam attempts against me have increased about seven-fold. The logs for spamd went from just over 500KBytes per day to just under 4MBytes. Even with that, I still only get about 1 spam a day that slips through, and that's with *only* spamd. My CPU usage has gone up due to this, as you'd expect. But that 270 MHz UltraSPARC is still doin' the job quite nicely.
      >
      > I understand why not everyone runs their own mail server at home. But there are a lot out there who could (it ain't that hard). If more who could, did, it'd help out w/ the spam problem a lot more. Imagine if you had not hundreds, not thousands, but *millions* of spamd boxes out there tarpitting these spammers...the resources it would consume on the spammers's end is a very happy thought....
      >
      > --TP

      I agree with you on that, if only more people and companies would use spamd, even in front of their MS Exchange Servers, then that would help a lot for everyone elsewhere too.

  8. By Rodrigo Rocha (201.75.10.27) rmaues.rocha@gmail.com on

    I use my openbsd box in my home network was a firewall. Simple, secure and functional.

    I like very much the easy way to make firewall rules with PF, and how this works. I know it's about OpenBSD but inside of my network I have a FreeBSD box running a asterisk server, a webserver for my cacti system and a samba sharing.

    That's all.

  9. By Alexey Vatchenko (av) av@bsdua.org on http://www.bsdua.org

    I do several projects (netfwd, cdma) on http://www.bsdua.org/. Another project i'll make public soon :)

  10. By Damon McMahon (58.179.243.24) damon.mcmahon@gmail.com on

    Wireless gateway to my home network consisting (at this time) of Windows and MacOS X hosts. IPsec secured using the inbuilt OpenBSD/Windows/MacOS X IPsec support (none of this OpenVPN crap... *ducks*). Great learning experience for IPsec, pf, named, dhcpd for anyone interested in learning about OpenBSD!

    Comments
    1. By Terrell Prude' Jr. (151.188.247.104) tprude@cmosnetworks.com (this is a spamtrap address) on http://www.cmosnetworks.com/

      > Wireless gateway to my home network consisting (at this time) of Windows and MacOS X hosts. IPsec secured using the inbuilt OpenBSD/Windows/MacOS X IPsec support (none of this OpenVPN crap... *ducks*). Great learning experience for IPsec, pf, named, dhcpd for anyone interested in learning about OpenBSD!

      That's true, you learn a lot. I tried this back a few years ago for wireless when IPSec on OpenBSD was a lot more...um, "interesting" to configure. It's gotten a lot better now, so small shops really don't have that excuse anymore.

      And if you do this, then you get a fundamental understanding of why IPSec is the more secure way to go.

      --TP

Latest Articles

Credits

Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]