Hello, as there are so many questions about OpenBSD -current on IRC, Mastodon or reddit I’m writing this FAQ in hope it will help people.

The official FAQ already contains answers about -current like Following -current and using snapshots and Building the system from sources.

What is OpenBSD -current?

OpenBSD -current is the development version of OpenBSD. Lot of people use it for everyday tasks.

How to install OpenBSD -current?

OpenBSD -current refers to the last version built from sources obtained with CVS, however, it’s also possible to get a pre-built system (a snapshot) usually built and pushed on mirrors every 1 or 2 days.

You can install OpenBSD -current by getting an installation media like usual, but on the path /pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/ on the mirror.

How do I upgrade from -release to -current?

There are two ways to do so:

1. Download bsd.rd file from the snapshots directory and boot it to upgrade like for a -release to -release upgrade
2. Run sysupgrade -s command as root, this will basically download all sets under /home/_sysupgrade and boot on bsd.rd with an autoinstall(8) config.

How do I upgrade my -current snapshot to a newer snapshot?

Exactly the same process as going from -release to -current.

Can I downgrade to a -release if I switch to -current?

No.

What issues can I expect in OpenBSD -current?

There are a few issues possibles that one can expect

Out of sync packages

If a library get updated into the base system and you want to update packages, they won’t be installable until packages are rebuilt with that new library, this usually takes 1 up to 3 days.

This only create issues in case you want to install a package you don’t have.

The other way around, you can have an old snapshot and packages are not installable because the libraries linked to by the packages are newer than what is available in your system, in this case you have to upgrade snapshot.

Snapshots sets are getting updated on the mirror

If you download the sets on the mirror to update your -current version, you may have an issue with the sha256 sum, this is because the mirror is getting updated and the sha256 file is the first to be transferred, so sets you are downloading are not the one the sha256 will compare.

Unexpected system breakage

Sometimes, very rarely (maybe 2 or 3 time in a year?), some snapshots are borked and will prevent system to boot or lead to regularly crashes. In that case, it’s important to report the issue with the sendbug utility.

You can fix this by using an older snapshot from this archives server and prevent this to happen by reading bugs@ mailing list before updating.

Broken package

Sometimes, a package update will break it or break some others packages, this is often quickly fixed on popular packages but in some niche packages you may be the only one using it on -current and the only one who can report about it.

If you find breakage on something you use, it may be a good idea to report the problem on ports@openbsd.org mailing list if nobody did before. By doing so, the issue will be fixed and next -release users will be able to install a working package.

Is -current stable enough for a server or a workstation?

It’s really up to you. Developers are all using -current and are forbidden to break it, so the system should totally be usable for everyday use.

What may be complicated on a server is keep updating it regularly and face issues requires troubleshooting (like major database upgrade which was missing a quirk).

For a workstation I think it’s pretty safe as long as you can deal with packages that can’t be installed until they are in sync.

This is a little story that happened a few days ago, it explains well how I usually get involved into ports in OpenBSD.

1 - Lurking into ports/graphics/

At first, I was looking in various ports there are in the graphics category, searching for an image editor that would run correctly on my offline laptop. Grafx2 is laggy when using the zoom mode and GIMP won’t run, so I just open ports randomly to read their pkg/DESCR file.

This way, I often find gems I reuse later, sometimes I have less luck and I only tried 20 ports which are useless to me. It happens I find issues in ports looking randomly like this…

2 - Find the port « comix »

Then, the second or third port I look at is « comix », here is the DESCR file.

Comix is a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically
designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It
reads images in ZIP, RAR or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed)
as well as plain image files.

That looked awesome, I have lot of books as PDF I want to read but it’s not convenient in a “normal” PDF reader, so maybe comix would help!

3 - Using comix

Once comix was compiled (a mix of python and gtk), I start it and I get errors opening PDFs… I start it again from console, and in the output I get the explanation that PDF files are not usable in comix.

Then I read about the CBZ or CBT files, they are archives (zip or tar) containing pictures, definitely not what a PDF is.

4 - mcomix > comix

After a few searches on the Internet, I find that comix last release is from 2009 and it never supported PDF, so nothing wrong here, but I also found comix had a fork named mcomix.

mcomix forked a long time ago from comix to fix issues and add support for new features (like PDF support), while last release is from 2016, it works and still receive commits (last is from late 2019). I’m going for using comix!

5 - Installing mcomix from ports

Best way to install a program on OpenBSD is to make a port, so it’s correctly packaged, can be deinstalled and submit to ports@ mailing list later.

I did copy comix folder into mcomix, use a brain dead sed command to replace all occurrence of comix by mcomix, and it mostly worked! I won’t explain little details, but I got mcomix to work within a few minutes and I was quite happy! Fun fact is that comix port Makefile was mentioning mcomix as a suggestion for upgrade.

6 - Enjoying a CBR reader

With mcomix installed, I was able to read some PDF, it was a good experience and I was pretty happy with it. I’ve spent a few hours reading, a few moments after mcomix was installed.

7 - mcomix works but not all the time

After reading 2 longs PDFs, I got issues with the third, some pages were not rendered and not displayed. After digging this issue a bit, I found about mcomix internals. Reading PDF is done by rendering every page of the PDF using mutool binary from mupdf software, this is quite CPU intensive, and for some reason in mcomix the command execution fails while I can do the exact same command a hundred time with no failure. Worse, the issue is not reproducible in mcomix, sometimes some pages will fail to be rendered, sometimes not!

8 - Time to debug some python

I really want to read those PDF so I take my favorite editor and start debugging some python, adding more debug output (mcomix has a -W parameter to enable debug output, which is very nice), to try to understand why it fails at getting output of a working command.

Sadly, my python foo is too low and I wasn’t able to pinpoint the issue. I just found it fail, sometimes, but I wasn’t able to understand why.

9 - mcomix on PowerPC

While mcomix is clunky with PDF, I wanted to check if it was working on PowerPC, it took some times to get all the dependencies installed on my old computer but finally I got mcomix displayed on the screen… and dying on PDF loading! Crash seems related to GTK and I don’t want to touch that, nobody will want to patch GTK for that anyway so I’ve lost hope there.

10 - Looking for alternative

Once I knew about mcomix, I was able to search the Internet for alternatives of it and also CBR readers. A program named zathura seems well known here and we have it in the OpenBSD ports tree.

Weird thing is that it comes with two different PDF plugins, one named mupdf and the other one poppler. I did try quickly on my amd64 machine and zathura was working.

11 - Zathura on PowerPC

As Zathura was working nice on my main computer, I installed it on the PowerPC, first with the poppler plugin, I was able to view PDF, but installing this plugin did pull so many packages dependencies it was a bit sad. I deinstalled the poppler PDF plugin and installed mupdf plugin.

I opened a PDF and… error. I tried again but starting zathura from the terminal, and I got the message that PDF is not a supported format, with a lot of lines related to mupdf.so file not being usable. The mupdf plugin work on amd64 but is not usable on powerpc, this is a bug I need to report, I don’t understand why this issue happens but it’s here.

12 - Back to square one

It seems that reading PDF is a mess, so why couldn’t I convert the PDF to CBT files and then use any CBT reader out there and not having to deal with that PDF madness!!

13 - Use big calibre for the job

I have found on the Internet that Calibre is the most used tool to convert a PDF into CBT files (or into something else but I don’t really care here). I installed calibre, which is not lightweight, started it and wanted to change the default library path, the software did hang when it displayed the file dialog. This won’t stop me, I restart calibre and keep the default path, I click on « Add a book » and then it hang again on file dialog. I did report this issue on ports@ mailing list, but it didn’t solve the issue and this mean calibre is not usable.

14 - Using the command line

After all, CBT files are images in a tar file, it should be easy to reproduce the mcomix process involving mutool to render pictures and make a tar of that.

IT WORKED.

I found two ways to proceed, one is extremely fast but may not make pages in the correct order, the second requires CPU time.

Making CBT files - easiest process

The first way is super easy, it requires mutool (from mupdf package) and it will extract the pictures from the PDF, given it’s not a vector PDF, not sure what would happen on those. The issue is that in the PDF, the embedded pictures have a name (which is a number from the few examples I found), and it’s not necessarily in the correct order. I guess this depend how the PDF is made.

$ mutool extract The_PDF_file.pdf
$ tar cvf The_PDF_file.tar *jpg

That’s all you need to have your CBT file. In my PDF there was jpg files in it, but it may be png in others, I’m not sure.

Making CBT files - safest process (slow)

The other way of making pictures out of the PDF is the one used in mcomix, call mutool for rendering each page as a PNG file using width/height/DPI you want. That’s the tricky part, you may not want to produce pictures with larger resolution than the original pictures (and mutool won’t automatically help you for this) because you won’t get any benefit. This is the same for the DPI. I think this could be done automatically using a correct script checking each PDF page resolution and using mutool to render the page with the exact same resolution.

As a rule of thumb, it seems that rendering using the same width as your screen is enough to produce picture of the correct size. If you use large values, it’s not really an issue, but it will create bigger files and take more time for rendering.

$ mutool draw -w 1920 -o page%d.png The_PDF_file.pdf
$ tar cvf The_PDF_file.tar page*.png

You will get PNG files for each page, correctly numbered, with a width of 1920 pixels. Note that instead of tar, you can use zip to create a zip file.

15 - Finally reading books again

After all this LONG process, I was finally able to read my PDF with any CBR reader out there (even on phone), and once the process is done, it uses no cpu for viewing files at the opposite of mcomix rendering all the pages when you open a file.

I have to use zathura on PowerPC, even if I like it less due to the continuous pages display (can’t be turned off), but mcomix definitely work great when not dealing with PDF. I’m still unsure it’s worth committing mcomix to the ports tree if it fails randomly on random pages with PDF.

16 - Being an open source activist is exhausting

All I wanted was to read a PDF book with a warm cup of tea at hand. It ended into learning new things, debugging code, making ports, submitting bugs and writing a story about all of this.

If you want to contribute to OpenBSD ports collection you will want to enable thePORTS_PRIVSEP feature. When this variable is set, ports system will use dedicated users for tasks.

Source tarballs will be downloaded by the user _pfetch and all compilation and packaging will be done by the user _pbuild.

Those users are created at system install and pf have a default rule to prevent _pbuild user doing network access. This will prevent ports from doing network stuff, and this is what you want.

This adds a big security to the porting process and any malicious code run by ports being compiled will be harmless.

In order to enable this feature, a few changes must be made.

The file /etc/mk.conf must contains

PORTS_PRIVSEP=yes
SUDO=doas

Then, /etc/doas.conf must allows your user to become _pfetch and _pbuild

permit keepenv nopass solene as _pbuild
permit keepenv nopass solene as _pfetch
permit keepenv nopass solene as root

If you don’t want to use the last line, there is an explanation in the bsd.port.mk(5) man page.

Finally, within the ports tree, some permissions must be changed.

# chown -R _pfetch:_pfetch /usr/ports/distfiles
# chown -R _pbuild:_pbuild /usr/ports/{packages,plist,pobj}

If directories doesn’t exist yet on your system (this is the case on a fresh ports checkout / untar), you can create them with the commands:

# install -d -o _pfetch -g _pfetch /usr/ports/distfiles
# install -d -o _pbuild -g _pbuild /usr/ports/{packages,plist,pobj}

Now, when you run a command in the ports tree, privileges should be dropped to according users.

Introduction

rsnapshot is a handy tool to manage backups using rsync and hard links on the filesystem. rsnapshot will copy folders and files but it will skip duplication over backups using hard links for files which has not changed.

This kinda create snapshots of your folders you want to backup, only using rsync, it’s very efficient and easy to use, and getting files from backups is really easy as they are stored as files under the rsnapshot backup.

Installation

Installing rsnapshot is very easy, on most systems it will be in your official repository packages.

To install it on OpenBSD: pkg_add rsnapshot (as root)

Configuration

Now you may want to configure it, in OpenBSD you will find a template in /etc/rsnapshot.conf that you can edit for your needs (you can make a backup of it first if you want to start over). As it’s stated in big (as big as it can be displayed in a terminal) letters at the top of the configuration sample file, you will see that things must be separated by TABS and not spaces. I’ve made the mistakes more than once, don’t forget using tabs.

I won’t explain all options, but only the most importants.

The variable snapshot_root is where you want to store the backups. Don’t put that directory in a directory you will backup (that will end into an infinite loop)

The variable backup is for telling rsnapshot what you want to backup from your system to which directory inside snapshot_root

Here are a few examples:

backup  /home/solene/   myfiles/
backup  /home/shera/Documents   shera_files/
backup  /home/shera/Music   shera_files/
backup  /etc/   etc/
backup  /var/   var/    exclude=logs/*

Be careful when using ending slashes to paths, it works the same as with rsync. /home/solene/ means that into target directory, it will contains the content of /home/solene/ while /home/solene will copy the folder solene within the target directory, so you end up with target_directory/solene/the_files_here.

The variables retain are very important, this will define how rsnapshot keep your data. In the example you will see alpha, beta, gamma but it could be hour, day, week or foo and bar. It’s only a name that will be used by rsnapshot to name your backups and also that you will use to tell rsnapshot which kind of backup to do. Now, I must explain how rsnapshot actually work.

How it work

Let’s go for a straighforward configuration. We want a backup every hour on the last 24h, a backup every day for the past 7 days and 3 manuals backup that we start manually.

We will have this in our rsnapshot configuration

retain  hourly  24
retain  daily   7
retain  manual  3

but how does rsnapshot know how to do what? The answer is that it doesn’t.

In root user crontab, you will have to add something like this:

# run rsnapshot every hour at 0 minutes
0 * * * * rsnapshot hourly

# run rsnapshot every day at 4 hours 0 minutes
0 4 * * * rsnapshot daily

and then, when you want to do a manual backup, just start rsnapshot manual

Every time you run rsnapshot for a “kind” of backup, the last version will be named in the rsnapshoot root directory like hourly.0 and every backups will be shifted by one. The directory getting a number higher than the number in the retain line will be deleted.

New to crontab?

If you never used crontab, I will share two important things to know about it.

Use MAILTO=“” if you don’t want to receive every output generated from scripts started by cron.

Use a PATH containing /usr/local/bin/ in it because in the default cron PATH it is not present. Instead of setting PATH you can also using full binary paths into the crontab, like /usr/local/bin/rsnapshot daily

You can edit the current user crontab with the command crontab -e.

Your crontab may then look like:

PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin
MAILTO=""
# comments are allowed in crontab
# run rsnapshot every hour at 0 minutes
0 * * * * rsnapshot hourly
# run rsnapshot every day at 4 hours 0 minutes
0 4 * * * rsnapshot daily

Good news for my gamers readers. It’s not really fresh news but it has never been written anywhere.

The commercial video game Crosscode is written in HTML5, making it available on every system having chromium or firefox. The limitation is that it may not support gamepad (except if you find a way to make it work).

A demo is downloadable at this address https://radicalfishgames.itch.io/crosscode and should work using the following instructions.

You need to buy the game to be able to play it, it’s not free and not opensource. Once you bought it, the process is easy:

1. Download the linux installer from GOG (from steam it may be too)
2. Extract the data
3. Patch a file if you want to use firefox
4. Serve the files through a http server

The first step is to buy the game and get the installer.

Once you get a file named like “crosscode_1_2_0_4_32613.sh”, run unzip on it, it’s a shell script but only a self contained archive that can extract itself using the small shell script at the top.

Change directory into data/noarch/game/assets and apply this patch, if you don’t know how to apply a patch or don’t want to, you only need to remove/comment the part you can see in the following patch:

--- node-webkit.html.orig   Mon Dec  9 17:27:17 2019
+++ node-webkit.html    Mon Dec  9 17:27:39 2019
@@ -51,12 +51,12 @@
 <script type="text/javascript">
     // make sure we don't let node-webkit show it's error page
     // TODO for release mode, there should be an option to write to a file or something.
-    window['process'].once('uncaughtException', function() {
+/*    window['process'].once('uncaughtException', function() {
         var win = require('nw.gui').Window.get();
         if(!(win.isDevToolsOpen && win.isDevToolsOpen())) {
             win.showDevTools && win.showDevTools();
         }
-    });
+    });*/

     function doStartCrossCodePlz(){
       if(window.startCrossCode){

Then you need to start a http server in the current path, an easy way to do it is using… php! Because php contains a http server, you can start the server with the following command:

$ php -S 127.0.0.1:8080

Now, you can play the game by opening http://localhost:8080/node-webkit.html

I really thank Thomas Frohwein aka thfr@ for finding this out!

Tested on OpenBSD and OpenIndiana, it works fine on an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (CPU from 2008).

Wikipedia and openzim

If you ever wanted to host your own wikipedia replica, here is the simplest way.

As wikipedia is REALLY huge, you don’t really want to host a php wikimedia software and load the huge database, instead, the project made the openzim format to compress the huge database that wikipedia became while allowing using it for fast searches.

Sadly, on OpenBSD, we have no software reading zim files and most software requires the library openzim to work which requires extra work to get it as a package on OpenBSD.

Hopefully, there is a python package implementing all you need as pure python to serve zim files over http and it’s easy to install.

This tutorial should work on all others unix like systems but packages or binary names may change.

Downloading wikipedia

The project Kiwix is responsible for wikipedia files, they create regularly files from various projects (including stackexchange, gutenberg, wikibooks etc…) but for this tutorial we want wikipedia: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

You will find a lot of files, the language is contained into the filename. Some filenames will also self explain if they contain everything or categories, and if they have pictures or not.

The full French file is 31.4 GB worth.

Running the server

For the next steps, I recommend setting up a new user dedicated to this.

On OpenBSD, we will require python3 and pip:

$ doas pkg_add py3-pip--

Then we can use pip to fetch and install dependencies for the zimply software, the flag --user is rather important as it allows any user to download and install python libraries in its home folder instead of polluting the whole system as root.

$ pip3.7 install --user --upgrade zimply 

I wrote a small script to start the server using the zim file as a parameter, I rarely write python so the script may not be high standard.

File server.py:

from zimply import ZIMServer
import sys
import os.path

if len(sys.argv) == 1:
    print("usage: " + sys.argv[0] + " file")
    exit(1)

if os.path.exists(sys.argv[1]):
    ZIMServer(sys.argv[1])
else:
    print("Can't find file " + sys.argv[1])

And then you can start the server using the command:

$ python3.7 server.py /path/to/wikipedia_fr_all_maxi_2019-08.zim

You will be able to access wikipedia on the url http://localhost:9454/

Note that this is not a “wiki” as you can’t see history and edit/create pages.

This kind of backup is used in place like Cuba or Africa areas where people don’t have unlimited internet access, the project lead by Kiwix allow more people to access knowledge.

What this article is about ?

For some times I wanted to share how I manage my personal laptop and systems. I got the habit to create a lot of users for just everything for security reasons.

Creating a new users is fast, I can connect as this user using doas or ssh -X if I need a X app and this allows preventing some code to steal data from my main account.

Maybe I went this way too much, I have a dedicated irssi users which is only for running irssi, same with mutt. I also have a user with a stupid name and I can use it for testing X apps and I can wipe the data in its home directory (to try fresh firefox profiles in case of ports update for example).

How to proceed?

Creating a new user is as easy as this command (as root):

# useradd -m newuser
# echo "permit nopass keepenv solene as newuser" >> /etc/doas.conf

Then, from my main user, I can do:

$ doas -u newuser 'mutt'

and it will run mutt as this user.

This way, I can easily manage lots of services from packages which don’t come with dedicated daemons users.

For this to be effective, it’s important to have a chmod 700 on your main user account, so others users can’t browse your files.

Graphicals software with dedicated users

It becomes more tricky for graphical users. There are two options there:

• allow another user to use your X session, it will have native performance but in case of security issue in the software your whole X session is accessible (recording keys, screnshots etc…)
• running the software through ssh -X will restricts X access to the software but the rendering will be a bit sluggish and not suitable for some uses.

Example of using ssh -X compared to ssh -Y:

$ ssh -X foobar@localhost scrot
X Error of failed request:  BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)
  Major opcode of failed request:  104 (X_Bell)
  Serial number of failed request:  6
  Current serial number in output stream:  8

$ ssh -Y foobar@localhost scrot
(nothing output but it made a screenshot of the whole X area)

Real world example

On a server I have the following new users running:

• torrents
• idlerpg
• searx
• znc
• minetest
• quake server
• awk cron parsing http

they can have crontabs.

Maybe I use it too much, but it’s fine to me.

This blog post is about a nginx rtmp module for turning your nginx server into a video streaming server.

The official website of the project is located on github at: https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module/

I use it to stream video from my computer to my nginx server, then viewers can use mpv rtmp://perso.pw/gaming in order to view the video stream. But the nginx server will also relay to twitch for more scalability (and some people prefer viewing there for some reasons).

The module will already be installed with nginx package since OpenBSD 6.6 (not already out at this time).

There is no package for install the rtmp module before 6.6. On others operating systems, check for something like “nginx-rtmp” or “rtmp” in an nginx context.

Install nginx on OpenBSD:

pkg_add nginx

Then, add the following to the file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

load_module modules/ngx_rtmp_module.so;
rtmp {
    server {
        listen 1935;
        buflen 10s;

        application gaming {
            live on;
            allow publish 176.32.212.34;
            allow publish 175.3.194.6;
            deny publish all;
            allow play all;

            record all;
            record_path /htdocs/videos/;
            record_suffix %d-%b-%y_%Hh%M.flv;

        }
    }
}

The previous configuration sample is a simple example allowing 172.32.212.34 and 175.3.194.6 to stream through nginx, and that will record the videos under /htdocs/videos/ (nginx is chrooted in /var/www).

You can add the following line in the “application” block to relay the stream to your Twitch broadcasting server, using your API key.

push rtmp://live-ams.twitch.tv/app/YOUR_API_KEY;

I made a simple scripts generating thumbnails of the videos and generating a html index file, as you can see at the address https://perso.pw/gaming.

Every 10 minutes, a cron check if files have to be generated, make thumbnails for videos (tries at 05:30 of the video and then 00:03 if it doesn’t work, to handle very small videos) and then create the html.

The script checking for new stuff and starting html generation:

#!/bin/sh

cd /var/www/htdocs/videos

for file in $(find . -mmin +1 -name '*.flv')
do
        echo $file
        PIC=$(echo $file | sed 's/flv$/jpg/')
        if [ ! -f "$PIC" ]
        then
                ffmpeg -ss 00:05:30 -i "$file" -vframes 1 -q:v 2 "$PIC"
                if [ ! -f "$PIC" ]
                then
                        ffmpeg -ss 00:00:03 -i "$file" -vframes 1 -q:v 2 "$PIC"
                        if [ ! -f "$PIC" ]
                        then
                                echo "problem with $file" | mail user@my-tld.com
                        fi
                fi
        fi
done
cd ~/dev/videos/ && sh html.sh

This one makes the html:

#!/bin/sh

cd /var/www/htdocs/videos

PER_ROW=3
COUNT=0

cat << EOF > index.html
<html>
  <body>
<h1>Replays</h1>
<table>
EOF

for file in $(find . -mmin +3 -name '*.flv')
do
        if [ $COUNT -eq 0 ]
        then
                echo "<tr>" >> index.html
                INROW=1
        fi
        COUNT=$(( COUNT + 1 ))
        SIZE=$(ls -lh $file  | awk '{ print $5 }')
        PIC=$(echo $file | sed 's/flv$/jpg/')

        echo $file
        echo "<td><a href=\"$file\"><img src=\"$PIC\" width=320 height=240 /><br />$file ($SIZE)</a></td>" >> index.html
        if [ $COUNT -eq $PER_ROW ]
        then
                echo "</tr>" >> index.html
                COUNT=0
                INROW=0
        fi
done

if [ $INROW -eq 1 ]
then
        echo "</tr>" >> index.html
fi

cat << EOF >> index.html
    </table>
  </body>
</html>
EOF

Hello, this is a long time I want to work on a special project using an offline device and work on it.

I started using computers before my parents had an internet access and I was enjoying it. Would it still be the case if I was using a laptop with no internet access?

When I think about an offline laptop, I immediately think I will miss IRC, mails, file synchronization, Mastodon and remote ssh to my servers. But do I really need it _all the time_?

As I started thinking about preparing an old laptop for the experiment, differents ideas with theirs pros and cons came to my mind.

Over the years, I produced digital data and I can not deny this. I don't need all of them but I still want some (some music, my texts, some of my programs). How would I synchronize data from the offline system to my main system (which has replicated backups and such).

At first I was thinking about using a serial line over the two laptops to synchronize files, but both laptop lacks serial ports and buying gears for that would cost too much for its purpose.

I ended thinking that using an IP network _is fine_, if I connect for a specific purpose. This extended a bit further because I also need to install packages, and using an usb memory stick from another computer to get packages and allow the offline system to use it is _tedious_ and ineffective (downloading packages and correct dependencies is a hard task on OpenBSD in the case you only want the files). I also came across a really specific problem, my offline device is an old Apple PowerPC laptop being big-endian and amd64 is little-endian, while this does not seem particularly a problem, OpenBSD filesystem is dependent of endianness, and I could not share an usb memory device using FFS because of this, alternatives are fat, ntfs or ext2 so it is a dead end.

Finally, using the super slow wireless network adapter from that offline laptop allows me to connect only when I need for a few file transfers. I am using the system firewall pf to limit access to outside.

In my pf.conf, I only have rules for DNS, NTP servers, my remote server, OpenBSD mirror for packages and my other laptop on the lan. I only enable wifi if I need to push an article to my blog or if I need to pull a bit more music from my laptop.

This is not entirely _offline_ then, because I can get access to the internet at any time, but it helps me keeping the device offline. There is no modern web browser on powerpc, I restricted packages to the minimum.

So far, when using this laptop, there is no other distraction than the stuff I do myself.

At the time I write this post, I only use xterm and tmux, with moc as a music player (the audio system of the iBook G4 is surprisingly good!), writing this text with ed and a 72 long char prompt in order to wrap words correctly manually (I already talked about that trick!).

As my laptop has a short battery life, roughly two hours, this also helps having "sessions" of a reasonable duration. (Yes, I can still plug the laptop somewhere).

I did not use this laptop a lot so far, I only started the experiment a few days ago, I will write about this sometimes.

I plan to work on my gopher space to add new content only available there :)

Hi,

I’m happy to announce the OpenBSD project will now provide -stable binary packages. This mean, if you run last release (syspatch applied or not), pkg_add -u will update packages to get security fixes.

Remember to restart services that may have been updated, to be sure to run new binaries.

Link to official announcement

I write this blog post as I spent too much time setting up nginx and SSL on OpenBSD with acme-client, due to nginx being chrooted and not stripping path and not doing it easily.

First, you need to set up /etc/acme-client.conf correctly. Here is mine for the domain ports.perso.pw:

authority letsencrypt {
        api url "https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory"
        account key "/etc/acme/letsencrypt-privkey.pem"
}

domain ports.perso.pw {
        domain key "/etc/ssl/private/ports.key"
        domain full chain certificate "/etc/ssl/ports.fullchain.pem"
        sign with letsencrypt
}

This example is for OpenBSD 6.6 (which is current when I write this) because of Let’s encrypt API URL. If you are running 6.5 or 6.4, replace v02 by v01 in the api url

Then, you have to configure nginx this way, the most important part in the following configuration file is the location block handling acme-challenge request. Remember that nginx is in chroot /var/www so the path to acme directory is acme.

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    index         index.html index.htm;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    server_tokens off;

    upstream backendurl {
        server unix:tmp/plackup.sock;
    }

    server {
      listen       80;
      server_name ports.perso.pw;

      access_log logs/access.log;
      error_log  logs/error.log info;

      root /htdocs/;

      location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
          rewrite ^/.well-known/acme-challenge/(.*) /$1 break;
          root /acme;
      } 

      location / {
          return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
      }
    }

    server {
      listen 443 ssl;
      server_name ports.perso.pw;
      access_log logs/access.log;
      error_log logs_error.log info;
      root /htdocs/;

      ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/ports.fullchain.pem;
      ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/ports.key;
      ssl_protocols TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
      ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
      ssl_ciphers "EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH";

      [... stuff removed ...]
    }

}

That’s all! I wish I could have find that on the Internet so I share it here.

This blog post is an update (OpenBSD 6.5 at that time) of this very same article I published in June 2018. Due to rtadvd replaced by rad, this text was not useful anymore.

I subscribed to a VPN service from the french association Grifon (Grifon website[FR] to get an IPv6 access to the world and play with IPv6. I will not talk about the VPN service, it would be pointless.

I now have an IPv6 prefix of 48 bits which can theorically have 2⁸⁰ addresses.

I would like my computers connected through the VPN to let others computers in my network to have IPv6 connectivity.

On OpenBSD, this is very easy to do. If you want to provide IPv6 to Windows devices on your network, you will need one more.

In my setup, I have a tun0 device which has the IPv6 access and re0 which is my LAN network.

First, configure IPv6 on your lan:

# ifconfig re0 inet6 autoconf

that’s all, you can add a new line “inet6 autoconf” to your file /etc/hostname.if to get it at boot.

Now, we have to allow IPv6 to be routed through the differents interfaces of the router.

# sysctl net.inet6.ip6.forwarding=1

This change can be made persistent across reboot by adding net.inet6.ip6.forwarding=1 to the file /etc/sysctl.conf.

Automatic addressing

Now we have to configure the daemon rad to advertise the we are routing, devices on the network should be able to get an IPv6 address from its advertisement.

The minimal configuration of /etc/rad.conf is the following:

interface re0 {
    prefix 2a00:5414:7311::/48
}

In this configuration file we only define the prefix available, this is equivalent to a dhcp addresses range. Others attributes could provide DNS servers to use for example, see rad.conf man page.

Then enable the service at boot and start it:

# rcctl enable rad
# rcctl start rad

Tweaking resolv.conf

By default OpenBSD will ask for IPv4 when resolving a hostname (see resolv.conf(5) for more explanations). So, you will never have IPv6 traffic until you use a software which will request explicit IPv6 connection or that the hostname is only defined with a AAAA field.

# echo "family inet6 inet4" >> /etc/resolv.conf.tail

The file resolv.conf.tail is appended at the end of resolv.conf when dhclient modifies the file resolv.conf.

Microsoft Windows

If you have Windows systems on your network, they won’t get addresses from rad. You will need to deploy dhcpv6 daemon.

The configuration file for what we want to achieve here is pretty simple, it consists of telling what range we want to allow on DHCPv6 and a DNS server. Create the file /etc/dhcp6s.conf:

interface re0 {
    address-pool pool1 3600;
};
pool pool1 {
    range 2a00:5414:7311:1111::1000 to 2a00:5414:7311:1111::4000;
};
option domain-name-servers 2001:db8::35;

Note that I added “1111” into the range because it should not be on the same network than the router. You can replace 1111 by what you want, even CAFE or 1337 if you want to bring some fun to network engineers.

Now, you have to install and configure the service:

# pkg_add wide-dhcpv6
# touch /etc/dhcp6sctlkey
# chmod 400 /etc/dhcp6sctlkey
# echo SOME_RANDOM_CHARACTERS | openssl enc -base64 > /etc/dhcp6sctlkey
# echo "dhcp6s -c /etc/dhcp6s.conf re0" >> /etc/rc.local

The openbsd package wide-dhcpv6 doesn’t provide a rc file to start/stop the service so it must be started from a command line, a way to do it is to type the command in /etc/rc.local which is run at boot.

The openssl command is needed for dhcpv6 to start, as it requires a base64 string as a secret key in the file /etc/dhcp6sctlkey.

I am happy to announce there is now a RSS feed for getting news in case of new packages available on my repository https://stable.perso.pw/

The file is available at https://stable.perso.pw/rss.xml.

I take the occasion of this blog post to explain how the file is generated as I did not find easy tool for this task, so I ended up doing it myself.

I choosed to use XSLT, which is not quite common. Briefly, XSLT allows to use some kind of XML template on a XML data file, this allow loops, filtering etc… It requires only two parts: the template and the data.

Simple RSS template

The following file is a template for my RSS file, we can see a few tags starting by xsl like xsl:for-each or xsl:value-of.

It’s interesting to note that the xsl-for-each can use a condition like position < 10 in order to limit the loop to the 10 first items.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">
    <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
        <channel>
            <description></description>

            <!-- BEGIN CONFIGURATION -->
            <title>OpenBSD unofficial stable packages repository</title>
            <link>https://stable.perso.pw/</link>
            <atom:link href="https://stable.perso.pw/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
            <!-- END CONFIGURATION -->

            <!-- Generating items -->
            <xsl:for-each select="feed/news[position()&lt;10]">
            <item>
                <title>
                    <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
                </title>
                <description>
                    <xsl:value-of select="description"/>
                </description>
                <pubDate>
                    <xsl:value-of select="date"/>
                </pubDate>
            </item>
            </xsl:for-each>

        </channel>
    </rss>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Simple data file

Now, we need some data to use with the template. I’ve added a comment block so I can copy / paste it to add a new entry into the RSS easily. As the date is in a painful format to write for a human, I added to my Makefile starting the commands a call to a script replacing the string DATE by the current date with the correct format.

<feed>
<news>
    <title>www/mozilla-firefox</title>
    <description>Firefox 67.0.1</description>
    <date>Wed, 05 Jun 2019 06:00:00 GMT</date>
</news>

<!-- copy paste for a new item
<news>
    <title></title>
    <description></description>
    <date></date>
</news>
-->
</feed>

Makefile

I love makefiles, so I share it even if this one is really short.

all:
    sh replace_date.sh
    xsltproc template.xml news.xml | xmllint -format - | tee rss.xml
    scp rss.xml perso.pw:/home/stable/

clean:
    rm rss.xml

When I want to add an entry, I copy / paste the comment block in news.xml, add DATE, run make and it’s uploaded :)

The command xsltproc is available from the package libxslt on OpenBSD.

And then, after writing this, I realise that manually editing the result file rss.xml is as much work as editing the news.xml file and then process it with xslt… But I keep that blog post as this can be useful for more complicated cases. :)

This article explains how to set up a simple samba server to have a CIFS / Windows shared folder accessible by everyone. This is useful in some cases but samba configuration is not straightforward when you need it for a one shot time or this particular case.

The important covered case here is that no user are needed. The trick comes from map to guest = Bad User configuration line in [global] section. This option will automatically map an unknown user or no provided user to the guest account.

Here is a simple /etc/samba/smb.conf file to share /home/samba to everyone, except map to guest and the shared folder, it’s the stock file with comments removed.

[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   server string = Samba Server
   server role = standalone server
   log file = /var/log/samba/smbd.%m
   max log size = 50
   dns proxy = no 
   map to guest = Bad User

[myfolder]
   browseable = yes
   path = /home/samba
   writable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   public = yes

If you want to set up this on OpenBSD, it’s really easy:

# pkg_add samba
# rcctl enable smbd nmbd
# vi /etc/samba/smb.conf (you can use previous config)
# mkdir -p /home/samba
# chown nobody:nobody /home/samba
# rcctl start smbd nmbd

And you are done.

I switched from a homemade script using mblaze to neomutt (after being using mutt, alpine and mu4e) and it’s difficult to remember everything. So, let’s do a cheatsheet!

• Mark as read: Ctrl+R
• Mark to delete: d
• Execute deletion: $
• Tag a mail: t
• Operation on tagged mails: ;[OP] with OP being the key for that operation.
• Move a mail: s (for save, which is a copy + delete)
• Save a mail: c (for copy)

Delete mails based on date

• use T to enter a date range, format [before]-[after] with before/after being a DD/MM/YYYY format (YYYY is optional)
• ~d 24/04- to mark mails after 24/04 of this year
• ~d -24/04 to mark mails before 24/04 of this year
• ~d 24/04-25/04 to mark mails between 24/04 and 25/04 (inclusive)
• ;d to tell neomutt we want to delete marked mails
• $ to make deletion happen

I use ssh tunneling A LOT, for everything. Yesterday, I removed the public access of my IMAP server, it’s now only available through ssh tunneling to access the daemon listening on localhost. I have plenty of daemons listening only on localhost that I can only reach through a ssh tunnel. If you don’t want to bother with ssh and redirect ports you need, you can also make a VPN (using ssh, openvpn, iked, tinc…) between your system and your server. I tend to avoid setting up VPN for the current use case as it requires more work and more maintenance than running ssh server and a ssh client.

The last change, for my IMAP server, added an issue. I want my phone to access the IMAP server but I don’t want to connect to my main account from my phone for security reasons. So, I need a dedicated user that will only be allowed to forward ports.

This is done very easily on OpenBSD.

The steps are: 1. generate ssh keys for the new user 2. add an user with no password 3. allow public key for port forwarding

Obviously, you must allow users (or only this one) to make port forwarding in your sshd_config.

Generating ssh keys

Please generate the keys in a safe place, using ssh-keygen

$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:SOMETHINGSOMETHINSOMETHINSOMETHINSOMETHING user@myhost
The key's randomart image is:
+---[RSA 3072]----+
|                 |
| **              |
|  *     **  .    |
|  *     *        |
|  ****  *        |
|     ****        |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
+----[SHA256]-----+

This will create your public key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and the private key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Adding an user

On OpenBSD, we will create an user named tunnel, this is done with the following command as root:

# useradd -m tunnel

This user has no password and can’t login on ssh.

Allow the public key to port forward only

We will use the command restriction in the authorized_keys file to allow the previously generated key to only forward.

Edit /home/tunnel/.ssh/authorized_keys as following

command="echo 'Tunnel only!'" ssh-rsa PUT_YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY_HERE

This will tell “Tunnel only” and abort the connection if the user connects and with a shell or a command.

Connect using ssh

You can connect with ssh(1) as usual but you will require the flag -N to not start a shell on the remote server.

$ ssh -N -L 10000:localhost:993 tunnel@host

If you want the tunnel to stay up in the most automated way possible, you can use autossh from ports, which will do a great job at keeping ssh up.

$ autossh -M 0 -o "ExitOnForwardFailure yes" -o "ServerAliveInterval 30" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -o "TCPKeepAlive yes" -N -v -L 9993:localhost:993 tunnel@host

This command will start autossh, restart if forwarding doesn’t work which is likely to happens when you lose connectivity, it takes some time for the remote server to disable the forwarding effectively. It will make a keep alive check so the tunnel stays up and ensure it’s up (this is particularly useful on wireless connection like 4G/LTE).

The others flags are also ssh parameters, to not start a shell, and for making a local forwarding. Don’t forget that as a regular user, you can’t bind on ports less than 1024, that’s why I redirect the port 993 to the local port 9993 in the example.

Making the tunnel on Android

If you want to access your personal services from your Android phone, you can use ConnectBot ssh client. It’s really easy:

1. upload your private key to the phone
2. add it in ConnectBot from the main menu
3. create a new connection the user and your remote host
4. choose to use public key authentication and choose the registered key
5. uncheck “start a shell session” (this is equivalent to -N ssh flag)
6. from the main menu, long touch the connection and edit the forwarded ports

Enjoy!

The following guide is a real world example of drist usage. We will create a script to deploy munin-node on OpenBSD systems.

We need to create a script that will install munin-node package but also configure it using the default proposal. This is done easily using the script file.

#!/bin/sh

# checking munin not installed
pkg_info | grep munin-node
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    pkg_add munin-node
    munin-node-configure --suggest --shell | sh
    rcctl enable munin_node
fi

rcctl restart munin_node

The script contains some simple logic to prevent trying installing munin-node each time we will run it, and also prevent re-configuring it automatically every time. This is done by checking if pkg_info output contains munin-node.

We also need to provide a munin-node.conf file to allow our munin server to reach the nodes. For this how-to, I’ll dump the configuration in the commands using cat, but of course, you can use your favorite editor to create the file, or copy an original munin-node.conf file and edit it to suit your needs.

mkdir -p files/etc/munin/

cat <<EOF > files/etc/munin/munin-node.conf
log_level 4
log_file /var/log/munin/munin-node.log
pid_file /var/run/munin/munin-node.pid
background 1
setsid 1
user root
group wheel
ignore_file [\#~]$
ignore_file DEADJOE$
ignore_file \.bak$
ignore_file %$
ignore_file \.dpkg-(tmp|new|old|dist)$
ignore_file \.rpm(save|new)$
ignore_file \.pod$
allow ^127\.0\.0\.1$
allow ^192\.168\.1\.100$
allow ^::1$
host *
port 4949
EOF

Now, we only need to use drist on the remote host:

drist root@myserver

Last version of drist as now also supports privilege escalation using doas instead of connecting to root by ssh:

drist -s -e doas user@myserver

Thanks to a hard work from thfr@, it is now possible to play the commercial game Slay The Spire on OpenBSD.

Small introduction to the game by myself. It’s a solo card player where you need to escalate a tower. Each floor may contain enemie(s), a merchant, an elite (harder enemies) or an event. There are three characters playable, each unlocked after some time. The game is really easy to understand, each time you restart from scratch with your character, you will earn items and cards to build a deck for this run. When you die, you can unlock some new items per characters and unlock cards for next runs. Every run really start over from scratch. The goal is to go to the top of the tower. Each character are really different to play and each allow a few types of obvious deck builds.

The game work with an OpenBSD 6.5 minimum. For this you will need:

1. Buy Slay The Spire on GOG or Steam (steam requires to install the windows or linux client)
2. Copy files from a Slay The Spire installation (Windows or Linux) to your OpenBSD system
3. Install some packages with pkg_add(1): apache-ant openal jdk rsync lwjgl xz maven
4. Download this script to build and replace libraries of the game with new one for OpenBSD
5. Don’t forget to eat, hydrate yourself and sleep. This game is time consuming :)

The process is easy to achieve, find the file desktop–1.0.jar from the game, and run the previously downloaded script in the same folder of this file. This will download an archive from my server which contains sources of libgdx modified by thfr@ to compile on OpenBSD. The script will take care of downloading it, compile a few components, replace original files of the game.

Finally, start the game with the following command:

/usr/local/jdk-1.8.0/bin/java -Xmx1G -Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=true com.megacrit.cardcrawl.desktop.DesktopLauncher

All settings and saves are stored in the game folder, so you may want to backup it if you don’t want to lose your progression.

Again, thanks to thfr@ for his huge work on making games working on OpenBSD!

This article explains how to use haproxy to add a TLS layer to any TCP protocol. This includes http or gopher. The following example explains the minimal setup required in order to make it work, haproxy has a lot of options and I won’t use them.

The idea is to let haproxy manage the TLS part and let your http server (or any daemon listening on TCP) replying within the wrapped connection.

You need a simple haproxy.cfg which can looks like that:

defaults
        mode    tcp
        timeout client 50s
        timeout server 50s
        timeout connect 50s

frontend haproxy
        bind *:7000 ssl crt /etc/ssl/certificat.pem
        default_backend gopher

backend gopher
        server gopher 127.0.0.1:7070 check

The idea is that it waits on port 7000 and will use the file /etc/ssl/certificat.pem as a certificate, and forward requests to the backend on 127.0.0.1:7070. That is ALL. If you want to do https, you need to listen on port 443 and redirect to your port 80.

The PEM file is made from the privkey concatenated with the fullchain certificate. If you use a self signed certificate, you can make it with the following command:

cat secret.key certificate.crt > cert.pem

One can use a folder with PEM certificates files inside instead of using a file. This will allow haproxy to receive connections for ALL the certificates loaded.

For more security, I recommend using the chroot feature and a dh file but it’s out of the current topic.

Hi,

In this article I will explain how to setup a gopher server supporting TLS. Gopher TLS support is not “official” as there is currently no RFC to define it. It has been recently chose by the community how to make it work, while keeping compatibility with old servers / clients.

The way to do it is really simple.

Client A tries to connects to Server B, Client A tries TLS handshake, if Server B answers correctly to the TLS handshakes, then Client A sends the gopher request and Server B answers the gopher requests. If Server B doesn’t understand the TLS handshakes, then it will probably output a regular gopher page, then this is throwed and Client A retries the connection using plaintext gopher and Server B answers the gopher request.

This is easy to achieve because gopher protocol doesn’t require the server to send anything to the client before the client sends its request.

The way to add the TLS layer and the dispatching can be achieved using sslh and relayd. You could use haproxy instead of relayd, but the latter is in OpenBSD base system so I will use it. Thanks parazyd for sharing about sslh for this use case.

sslh is a protocol demultiplexer, it listens on a port, and depending on what it receives, it will try to guess the protocol used by the client and send it to the according backend. It’s first purpose was to make ssh available on port 443 while still having https daemon working on that server.

Here is a schema of the setup

                        +→ relayd for TLS + forwarding
                        ↑                        ↓
                        ↑ tls?                   ↓
client -> sslh TCP 70 → +                        ↓
                        ↓ not tls                ↓
                        ↓                        ↓
                        +→ → → → → → → gopher daemon on localhost

This method allows to wrap any server to make it TLS compatible. The best case would be to have TLS compatibles servers which do all the work without requiring sslh and something to add the TLS. But it’s currently a way to show TLS for gopher is real.

Relayd

The relayd(1) part is easy, you first need a x509 certificate for the TLS part, I will not explain here how to get one, there are already plenty of how-to and one can use let’s encrypt with acme-client(1) to get one on OpenBSD.

We will write our configuration in /etc/relayd.conf

log connection
relay "gopher" {
    listen on 127.0.0.1 port 7000 tls
    forward to 127.0.0.1 port 7070
}

In this example, relayd listens on port 7000 and our gopher daemon listens on port 7070. According to relayd.conf(5), relayd will look for the certificate at the following places: /etc/ssl/private/$LISTEN_ADDRESS:$PORT.key and /etc/ssl/$LISTEN_ADDRESS:$PORT.crt, with the current example you will need the files: /etc/ssl/private/127.0.0.1:7000.key and /etc/ssl/127.0.0.1:7000.crt

relayd can be enabled and started using rcctl:

# rcctl enable relayd
# rcctl start relayd

Gopher daemon

Choose your favorite gopher daemon, I recommend geomyidae but any other valid daemon will work, just make it listening on the correct address and port combination.

# pkg_add geomyidae
# rcctl enable geomyidae
# rcctl set geomyidae flags -p 7070
# rcctl start geomyidae

SSLH

We will use sslh_fork (but sslh_select would be valid too, they have differents pros/cons). The --tls parameters tells where to forward a TLS connection while --ssh will forward to the gopher daemon. This is so because the protocol ssh is already configured within sslh and acts exactly like a gopher daemon: the client doesn’t expect the server to be the first sending data.

# pkg_add sslh
# rcctl enable sslh_fork
# rcctl set sslh_fork flags --tls 127.0.0.1:7000 --ssh 127.0.0.1:7070 -p 0.0.0.0:70
# rcctl start sslh_fork

Client

You can easily test if this works using openssl to connect by hand to the port 70

$ openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:7000

You should see a lot of output, which is the TLS handshake, then you can send a gopher request like “/” and you should get a result. Using telnet on the same address and port should give the same result.

My gopher client clic already supports gopher TLS and is available at git://bitreich.org/clic and only requires the ecl common lisp interpreter to compile.

This is the second article of the serie about iSCSI. In this one, you will learn how to connect to an iSCSI target using OpenBSD base daemon iscsid.

The configuration file of iscsid doesn’t exist by default, its location is /etc/iscsi.conf. It can be easily written using the following:

target1="100.64.2.3"
myaddress="100.64.2.2"

target "disk1" {
    initiatoraddr $myaddress
    targetaddr $target1
    targetname "iqn.1994-04.org.netbsd.iscsi-target:target0"
}

While most lines are really obvious, it is mandatory to have the line initiatoraddr, many thanks to cwen@ for pointing this out when I was stuck on it.

The targetname value will depend of the iSCSI target server. If you use netbsd-iscsi-target, then you only need to care about the last part, aka target0 and replace it by the name of your target (which is target0 for the default one).

Then we can enable the daemon and start it:

# rcctl enable iscsid
# rcctl start iscsid

In your dmesg, you should see a line like:

sd4 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0: <NetBSD, NetBSD iSCSI, 0> SCSI3 0/direct fixed t10.NetBSD_0x5c6cf1b69fc3b38a

If you use netbsd-iscsi-target, the whole line should be identic except for the sd4 part which can change, depending of your hardware.

If you don’t see it, you may need to reload iscsid configuration file with iscsictl reload.

Warning: iSCSI is a bit of pain to debug, if it doesn’t work, double check the IPs in /etc/iscsi.conf, check your PF rules on the initiator and the target. You should be at least able to telnet into the target IP port 3260.

Once you found your new sd device, you can format it and mount it as a regular disk device:

# newfs /dev/rsd4c
# mount /dev/sd4c /mnt

iSCSI is far mor efficient and faster than NFS but it has a total different purpose. I’m using it on my powerpc machines to build packages on it. This reduce their old IDE disks usage while giving better response time and equivalent speed.

This is the first article of a series about iSCSI.

iSCSI is a protocol designed for sharing a block device across network as if it was a local disk. This doesn’t permit using that disk from multiples places at once though. In this article, we will learn how to create an iSCSI target, which is the “server” part of iSCSI, the target is the system holding the disk and making it available to others on the network.

OpenBSD does not have an target server in base, we will have to use net/netbsd-iscsi-target for this. The setup is really simple.

First, we obviously need to install the package and we will activate the daemon so it start automatically at boot, but don’t start it yet:

# pkg_add netbsd-iscsi-target
# rcctl enable iscsi_target

The configurations files are in /etc/iscsi/ folder, it contains files auths and targets. The default configuration files are the same. By looking at the source code, it seems that auths is used there but it seems to have no use at all. We will just overwrite it everytime we modify targets to keep them in sync.

Default /etc/iscsi/targets (with comments stripped):

extent0         /tmp/iscsi-target0      0       100MB
target0         rw      extent0         10.4.0.0/16

The first line defines the file holding our disk in the second field, and the last field defines the size of it. When iscsi-target will be started, it will create files as required with the size defined here.

The second line defines permissions, in that case, the extent0 disk can be used read/write by the net 10.4.0.0/16. For this example, I will only change the netmask to suit my network, then I copy targets over auths.

Let’s start the daemon:

# rcctl start iscsi_target
# rcctl check iscsi_target
iscsi_target(ok)

If you want to restrict ports using PF, you only have to allows the TCP port 3260 from the network that will connect to the target. The according line would looks like this:

pass in proto tcp to port 3260

Done!

Long time I didn’t write a “port of the week”.

This week, I am happy to present you sct, a very small utility software to set the color of your screen. You can install it on OpenBSD with pkg_add sct and its usage is really simple, just run sct $temp where $temp is the temperature you want to get on your screen.

The default temperature is 6500, if you lower this value, the screen will change toward red, meaning your screen will appear less blue and this may be more comfortable for some people. The temperature you want to use depend from the screen and from your feeling, I have one screen which is correct at 5900 but another old screen which turn too much red below 6200!

You can add sct 5900 to your .xsession file to start it when you start your X11 session.

There is an alternative to sct whose name is redshift, it is more complicated as you need to tell it your location with latitude and longitude and, as a daemon, it will correct continuously your screen temperature depending on the time. This is possible because when you know your location on earth and the time, you can compute the sunrise time and dawn time. sct is not a daemon, you run it once and does not change the temperature until you call it again.

Hi, I rarely post about external links or other people work, but at FOSDEM 2019 Vincent Delft had a talk about running OpenBSD as a full featured NAS.

I do use OpenBSD on my NAS, I wanted to write an article about it since long time but never did it. Thanks to Vincent, I can just share his work which is very very interesting if you plan to make your own NAS.

• Link to the slides
• Link to Vincent blog post (contains extra comments)
• Link to Video recording

Videos can be downloaded directly with following links provided by Fosdem:

• WebM/VP9 version
• MP4 version

In this third Tor article, we will discover the web browser Tor Browser.

The Tor Browser is an official Tor project. It is a modified Firefox, including some defaults settings changes and some extensions. The default changes are all related to privacy and anonymity. It has been made to be easy to browse the Internet through Tor without leaving behing any information which could help identify you, because there are much more informations than your public IP address which could be used against you.

It requires tor daemon to be installed and running, as I covered in my first Tor article.

Using it is really straightforward.

How to install tor-browser

$ pkg_add tor-browser

How to start tor-browser

$ tor-browser

It will create a ~/TorBrowser-Data folder at launch. You can remove it as you want, it doesn’t contain anything sensitive but is required for it to work.

If you are using opensmtpd on a device not always connected on the internet, you may want to see what mail did not go, and force it to be delivered NOW when you are finally connected to the Internet.

We can use smtpctl to show the current queue.

$ doas smtpctl show queue
1de69809e7a84423|local|mta|auth|so@tld|dest@tld|dest@tld|1540362112|1540362112|0|2|pending|406|No MX found for domain

The previous command will report nothing if the queue is empty.

In the previous output, we see that there is one mail from me to dest@tld which is pending due to “NO MX found for domain” (which is normal as I had no internet when I sent the mail).

We need to extract the first field, which is 1de69809e7a84423 in the current example.

In order to tell opensmtpd to deliver it now, we will use the following command:

$ doas smtpctl schedule 1de69809e7a84423
1 envelope scheduled
$ doas smtpctl show queue

My mail was delivered, it’s not in the queue anymore.

If you wish to deliver all enveloppes in the queue, this is as simple as:

$ doas smtpctl schedule all

In this second Tor article, I will present an interesting Tor feature named hidden service. The principle of this hidden service is to make available a network service from anywhere, with only prerequisites that the computer must be powered on, tor not blocked and it has network access.

This service will be available through an address not disclosing anything about the server internet provider or its IP, instead, a hostname ending by .onion will be provided by tor for connecting. This hidden service will be only accessible through Tor.

There are a few advantages of using hidden services:

• privacy, hostname doesn’t contain any hint
• security, secure access to a remote service not using SSL/TLS
• no need for running some kind of dynamic dns updater

The drawback is that it’s quite slow and it only work for TCP services.

From here, we assume that Tor is installed and working.

Running an hidden service require to modify the Tor daemon configuration file, located in /etc/tor/torrc on OpenBSD.

Add the following lines in the configuration file to enable a hidden service for SSH:

HiddenServiceDir /var/tor/ssh_service
HiddenServicePort 22 127.0.0.1:22

The directory /var/tor/ssh_service will be be created. The directory /var/tor is owned by user _tor and not readable by other users. The hidden service directory can be named as you want, but it should be owned by user _tor with restricted permissions. Tor daemon will take care at creating the directory with correct permissions once you reload it.

Now you can reload the tor daemon to make the hidden service available.

$ doas rcctl reload tor

In the /var/tor/ssh_service directory, two files are created. What we want is the content of the file hostname which contains the hostname to reach our hidden service.

$ doas cat /var/tor/ssh_service/hostname
piosdnzecmbijclc.onion

Now, we can use the following command to connect to the hidden service from anywhere.

$ torsocks ssh piosdnzecmbijclc.onion

In Tor network, this feature doesn’t use an exit node. Hidden services can be used for various services like http, imap, ssh, gopher etc…

Using hidden service isn’t illegal nor it makes the computer to relay tor network, as previously, just check if you can use Tor on your network.

Note: it is possible to have a version 3 .onion address which will prevent hostname collapsing, but this produce very long hostnames. This can be done like in the following example:

HiddenServiceDir /var/tor/ssh_service
HiddenServicePort 22 127.0.0.1:22
HiddenServiceVersion 3

This will produce a really long hostname like tgoyfyp023zikceql5njds65ryzvwei5xvzyeubu2i6am5r5uzxfscad.onion

If you want to have the short and long hostnames, you need to specify twice the hidden service, with differents folders.

Take care, if you run a ssh service on your website and using this same ssh daemon on the hidden service, the host keys will be the same, implying that someone could theoricaly associate both and know that this public IP runs this hidden service, breaking anonymity.

Tor is a network service allowing to hide your traffic. People sniffing your network will not be able to know what server you reach and people on the remote side (like the administrator of a web service) will not know where you are from. Tor helps keeping your anonymity and privacy.

To make it quick, tor make use of an entry point that you reach directly, then servers acting as relay not able to decrypt the data relayed, and up to an exit node which will do the real request for you, and the network response will do the opposite way.

You can find more details on the Tor project homepage.

Installing tor is really easy on OpenBSD. We need to install it, and start its daemon. The daemon will listen by default on localhost on port 9050. On others systems, it may be quite similar, install the tor package and enable the daemon if not enabled by default.

# pkg_add tor
# rcctl enable tor
# rcctl start tor

Now, you can use your favorite program, look at the proxy settings and choose “SOCKS” proxy, v5 if possible (it manage the DNS queries) and use the default address: 127.0.0.1 with port 9050.

If you need to use tor with a program that doesn’t support setting a SOCKS proxy, it’s still possible to use torsocks to wrap it, that will work with most programs. It is very easy to use.

# pkg_add torsocks
$ torsocks ssh remoteserver

This will make ssh going through tor network.

Using tor won’t make you relaying anything, and is legal in most countries. Tor is like a VPN, some countries has laws about VPN, check for your country laws if you plan to use tor. Also, note that using tor may be forbidden in some networks (companies, schools etc..) because this allows to escape filtering which may be against some kind of “Agreement usage” of the network.

I will cover later the relaying part, which can lead to legal uncertainty.

Note: as torsocks is a bit of a hack, because it uses LD_PRELOAD to wrap network system calls, there is a way to do it more cleanly with ssh (or any program supporting a custom command for initialize the connection) using netcat.

ssh -o ProxyCommand='/usr/bin/nc -X 5 -x 127.0.0.1:9050 %h %p' address.onion

This can be simplified by adding the following lines to your ~/.ssh/config file, in order to automatically use the proxy command when you connect to a .onion hostname:

Host *.onion
ProxyCommand='/usr/bin/nc -X 5 -x 127.0.0.1:9050 %h %p'

This netcat command is tested under OpenBSD, there are differents netcat implementations, the flags may be differents or may not even exist.

The default OpenBSD partition layout uses a pre-defined template. If you have a disk more than 356 GB you will have unused space with the default layout (346 GB before 6.4).

It’s possible to create a new partition to use that space if you did not modify the default layout at installation. You only need to start disklabel with flag -E* and type a to add a partition, default will use all remaining space for the partition.

# disklabel -E sd0
Label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
> a
partition: [m]
offset: [741349952]
size: [258863586]
FS type: [4.2BSD]
> w
> q
No label changes.

The new partition here is m. We can format it with:

# newfs /dev/rsd0m

Then, you should add it to your /etc/fstab, for that, use the same uuid as for other partitions, it would look something like 52fdd1ce48744600

52fdd1ce48744600.e /data ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2

It will be auto mounted at boot, you only need to create the folder /data. Now you can do

# mkdir /data
# mount /data

and /data is usable right now.

You can read disklabel(8) and newfs for more informations.

Simple command line to display your installed packages listed by size from smallest to biggest.

$ pkg_info -sa | paste - - - - | sort -n -k 5

Thanks to sthen@ for the command, I was previously using one involving awk which was less readable. paste is often forgotten, it has very specifics uses which can’t be mimic easily with other tools, its purpose is to joins multiples lines into one with some specific rules.

You can easily modify the output to convert the size from bytes to megabytes with awk:

$ pkg_info -sa | paste - - - - | sort -n -k 5 | awk '{ NF=$NF/1024/1024 ; print }'

This divides the last element (using space separator) of each line twice by 1024 and displays the line.

Following a discussion on the OpenBSD mailing list misc, today I will write about how to manage the priority (as in nice priority) of your daemons or services.

In man page rc(8), one can read:

Before init(8) starts rc, it sets the process priority, umask, and
resource limits according to the “daemon” login class as described in
login.conf(5).  It then starts rc and attempts to execute the sequence of
commands therein.

Using /etc/login.conf we can manage some limits for services and daemon, using their rc script name.

For example, to make jenkins at lowest priority (so it doesn’t make troubles if it builds), using this line will set it to nice 20.

jenkins:priority=20

If you have a file /etc/login.conf.db you have to update it from /etc/login.conf using the software cap_mkdb. This creates a hashed database for faster information retrieval when this file is big. By default, that file doesn’t exist and you don’t have to run cap_mkdb. See login.conf(5) for more informations.

In this article I will show how to configure OpenSMTPD, the default mail server on OpenBSD, to relay mail sent locally to your smtp server. In pratice, this allows to send mail through “localhost” by the right relay, so it makes also possible to send mail even if your computer isn’t connected to the internet. Once connected, opensmtpd will send the mails.

All you need to understand the configuration and write your own one is in the man page smtpd.conf(5). This is only a highlight on was it possible and how to achieve it.

In OpenBSD 6.4 release, the configuration of opensmtpd changed drasticaly, now you have to defines rules and action to do when a mail match the rules, and you have to define those actions.

In the following example, we will see two kinds of relay, the first is through smtp over the Internet, it’s the most likely you will want to setup. And the other one is how to relay to a remote server not allowing relaying from outside.

/etc/mail/smtpd.conf

table aliases file:/etc/mail/aliases
table secrets file:/etc/mail/secrets
listen on lo0

action "local" mbox alias <aliases>
action "relay" relay
action "myserver" relay host smtps://myrelay@perso.pw auth <secrets>
action "openbsd"  relay host localhost:2525

match mail-from "@perso.pw"    for any action "myserver"
match mail-from "@openbsd.org" for any action "openbsd"
match for local action "local"
match for any action "relay"

I defined 2 actions, one from “myserver”, it has a label “myrelay” and we use auth <secrets> to tell opensmtpd it needs authentication.

The other action is “openbsd”, it will only relay to localhost on port 2525.

To use them, I define 2 matching rules of the very same kind. If the mail that I want to send match the @domain-name, then choose relay “myserver” or “openbsd”.

The “openbsd” relay is only available when I create a SSH tunnel, binding the local port 25 of the remote server to my port 2525, with flags -L 2525:127.0.0.1:25.

For a relay using authentication, the login and passwords must be defined in the file /etc/mail/secrets like this: myrelay login:Pa$$W0rd

smtpd.conf(5) explains creation of /etc/mail/secrets like this:

touch /etc/mail/secrets
chmod 640 /etc/mail/secrets
chown root:_smtpd /etc/mail/secrets

Now, restarts your server. Then if you need to send mails, just use “mail” command or localhost as a smtp server. Depending on your From address, a different relay will be used.

Deliveries can be checked in /var/log/maillog log file.

See mails in queue

doas smtpctl show queue

Try to deliver now

doas smtpctl schedule all

I wrote a script generating a RSS file from the content of the page https://www.openbsd.org/faq/current.html

This allow to be notified when a big change is made in -current.

The file is available at this place : https://perso.pw/openbsd-current.xml

Today I will cover a specific topic on OpenBSD networking. If you are using a laptop, you may switch from ethernet to wireless network from time to time. There is a simple way to keep the network instead of having to disconnect / reconnect everytime.

It’s possible to aggregate your wireless and ethernet devices into one trunk pseudo device in failover mode, which give ethernet the priority if connected.

To achieve this, it’s quite simple. If you have devices em0 and iwm0 create the following files.

/etc/hostname.em0

up

/etc/hostname.iwm0

join "office_network"  wpakey "mypassword"
join "my_home_network" wpakey "9charshere"
join "roaming phone"   wpakey "something"
join "Public Wifi"
up

/etc/hostname.trunk0

trunkproto failover trunkport em0 trunkport iwm0
dhcp

As you can see in the wireless device configuration we can specify multiples network to join, it is a new feature that will be available from 6.4 release.

You can enable the new configuration by running sh /etc/netstart as root.

This setup is explained in trunk(4) man page and in the OpenBSD FAQ as well.

Old article

Hello, it turned out that this article is obsolete. The security used in is not safe at all so the goal of this backup system isn’t achievable, thus it should not be used and I need another backup system.

One of the most important feature of dump for me was to keep track of the inodes numbers. A solution is to save the list of the inodes numbers and their path in a file before doing a backup. This can be achieved with the following command.

$ doas ncheck -f "\I \P\n" /var

If you need a backup tool, I would recommend the following:

Duplicity

It supports remote backend like ftp/sftp which is quite convenient as you don’t need any configuration on this other side. It supports compression and incremental backup. I think it has some GUI tools available.

Restic

It supports remote backend like cloud storage provider or sftp, it doesn’t require any special tool on the remote side. It supports deduplication of the files and is able to manage multiples hosts in the same repository, this mean that if you backup multiple computers, the deduplication will work across them. This is the only backup software I know allowing this (I do not count backuppc which I find really unusable).

Borg

It supports remote backend like ssh only if borg is installed on the other side. It supports compression and deduplication but it is not possible to save multiples hosts inside the same repository without doing a lot of hacks (which I won’t recommend).

This article will explain quickly how to bind a folder to access it from another path. It can be useful to give access to a specific folder from a chroot without moving or duplicating the data into the chroot.

Real world example: “I want to be able to access my 100GB folder /home/my_data/ from my httpd web server chrooted in /var/www/”.

The trick on OpenBSD is to use NFS on localhost. It’s pretty simple.

# rcctl enable portmap nfsd mountd
# echo "/home/my_data -network=127.0.0.1 -mask=255.255.255.255" > /etc/exports
# rcctl start portmap nfsd mountd

The order is really important. You can check that the folder is available through NFS with the following command:

$ showmount -e
Exports list on localhost:
/home/my_data               127.0.0.1

If you don’t have any line after “Exports list on localhost:”, you should kill mountd with pkill -9 mountd and start mountd again. I experienced it twice when starting all the daemons from the same commands but I’m not able to reproduce it. By the way, mountd only supports reload.

If you modify /etc/exports, you only need to reload mountd using rcctl reload mountd.

Once you have check that everything was alright, you can mount the exported folder on another folder with the command:

# mount localhost:/home/my_data /var/www/htdocs/my_data

You can add -ro parameter in the /etc/exports file on the export line if you want it to be read-only where you mount it.

Note: On FreeBSD/DragonflyBSD, you can use mount_nullfs /from /to, there is no need to setup a local NFS server. And on Linux you can use mount --bind /from /to and some others ways that I won’t cover here.

If you have enough memory on your system and that you can afford to use a few hundred megabytes to store temporary files, you may want to mount a mfs filesystem on /tmp. That will help saving your SSD drive, and if you use an old hard drive or a memory stick, that will reduce your disk load and improve performances. You may also want to mount a ramdisk on others mount points like ~/.cache/ or a database for some reason, but I will just explain how to achieve this for /tmp with is a very common use case.

First, you may have heard about tmpfs, but it has been disabled in OpenBSD years ago because it wasn’t stable enough and nobody fixed it. So, OpenBSD has a special filesystem named mfs, which is a FFS filesystem on a reserved memory space. When you mount a mfs filesystem, the size of the partition is reserved and can’t be used for anything else (tmpfs, as the same on Linux, doesn’t reserve the memory).

Add the following line in /etc/fstab (following fstab(5)):

swap /tmp mfs rw,nodev,nosuid,-s=300m 0 0

The permissions of the mountpoint /tmp should be fixed before mounting it, meaning that the ==/tmp== folder on ==/== partition should be changed to 1777:

# umount /tmp
# chmod 1777 /tmp
# mount /tmp

This is required because mount_mfs inherits permissions from the mountpoint.

Frequently asked questions (with answers) on #openbsd IRC channel

Please read the official OpenBSD FAQ

I am writing this to answer questions asked too many times. If some answers get good enough, maybe we could try to merge it in the OpenBSD FAQ if the topic isn’t covered. If the topic is covered, then a link to the official FAQ should be used.

If you want to participate, you can fetch the page using gopher protocol and send me a diff:

$ printf '/~solene/article-openbsd-faq.txt\r\n' | nc dataswamp.org 70 > faq.md

OpenBSD features / not features

Here is a list for newcomers to tell what is and what is not OpenBSD

See OpenBSD Innovations

• Packet Filter : super awesome firewall

• Sane defaults : you install, it works, no tweak

• Stability : upgrades go smooth and are easy

• pledge and unveil : security features to reduce privileges of software, lots of ports are patched

• W^X security

• Microphone muted by default, unlockable by root only

• Video devices owned by root by default, not usable by users until permission change

• Has only FFS file system which is slow and has no “feature”

• No wine for windows compatibility

• No linux compatibility

• No bluetooth support

• No usb3 full speed performance

• No VM guest additions

• Only in-house VMM for being a VM host, only supports OpenBSD and some Linux

• Poor fuse support (it crashes quite often)

• No nvidia support (nvidia’s fault)

• No container / docker / jails

Does OpenBSD has a Code Of Conduct?

No and there is no known plan of having one.

This is a topic upsetting OpenBSD people, just don’t ask about it and send patches.

What is the OpenBSD release process?

OpenBSD FAQ official information

The last two releases are called “-release” and are officially supported (patches for security issues are provided).

-stable version is the latest release with the base system patches applied, the -stable ports tree has some patches backported from -current, mainly to fix security issues. Official packages for -stable are built and are picked up automatically by pkg_add(1).

What is -current?

It’s the development version with latest packages and latest code. You shouldn’t use it only to get latest package versions.

How do I install -current ?

OpenBSD FAQ about current

• download the latest snapshot install .iso or .fs file from your favorite mirror under /snapshots/ directory
• boot from it

How do I upgrade to -current

OpenBSD FAQ about current

You can use the script sysupgrade -s, note that the flag is only useful if you are not running -current right now but harmless otherwise.

When you fetch OpenBSD src or ports from CVS and that you want to save bandwidth during the process there is a little trick that change everything: compression

Just add -z9 to the parameter of your cvs command line and the remote server will send you compressed files, saving 10 times the bandwidth, or speeding up 10 times the transfer, or both (I’m in the case where I have differents users on my network and I’m limiting my incoming bandwidth so other people can have bandwidth too so it is important to reduce the packets transffered if possible).

The command line should looks like:

$ cvs -z9 -qd anoncvs@anoncvs.fr.openbsd.org:/cvs checkout -P src

Don’t abuse this, this consumes CPU on the mirror.

Today I will explain how to do traffic limit with OpenBSD and PF. This is not hard at all if you want something easy, the man page pf.conf(5) in QUEUEING section is pretty good but it may disturbing when you don’t understand how it works. This is not something I master, I’m not sure of the behaviour in some cases but the following example works as I tested it ! :)

Use case

Internet is down at home, I want to use my phone as 4G router trough my OpenBSD laptop which will act as router. I don’t want the quota (some Gb) to be eaten in a few seconds, this connection allow to download up to 10 Mb/s so it can go quickly !

We will limit the total bandwidth to 1M (~ 110 kb/s) for people behind the NAT. It will be slow, but we will be sure that nothing behind the NAT like a program updating, cloud stuff synchronizing or videos in auto play won’t consume our quota.

Edit /etc/pf.conf accordigly to your network

internet="urndis0"
lan="em0"

# we define our available bandwidth
queue main on $lan bandwidth 100M

# we will let 1M but we will allow
# 3M during 200 ms when initiating connection to keep the web a bit interactive
queue limited parent main bandwidth 1M min 0K max 1M burst 3M for 200ms default

set skip on lo

# we do NAT here
match out on egress inet from !(egress:network) to any nat-to (egress:0)

block all
pass out quick inet

# we apply the queue here on EVERYTHING coming from the internet
pass in on $lan set queue limited

This ONLY defines queue for DOWNLOADING, you can only set the queue on the lan interface, this won’t work on egress (network interface having internet) because you can’t limit what go in your interface, it’s already there when you want to limit.

Per protocol ?

You can define queues per remote port by creating new queues and doing something like this:

pass in on $lan proto tcp port ssh set queue ssh
pass in on $lan proto tcp port www set queue web

Per host ?

As before, you can apply queues on IP host/range rather than protocols, or you can even mix both if you want.

Warning

The limit function changed in OpenBSD 5.5, everything you can read on the internet about ALTQ isn’t working anymore.

Today OpenBSD 6.1 has been released, I won’t copy & paste the change list but, in a few words, it gets better.

Link to the official announce

I already upgraded a few servers, with both methods. One with bsd.rd upgrade but that requires physical access to the server and the other method well explained in the upgrade guide which requires to untar the files and do move some files. I recommend using bsd.rd if possible.

Hello,

I have a pfsense appliance (Netgate 2440) with a usb console port, while it used to be a serial port, now devices seems to have a usb one. If you plug an usb wire from an openbsd box to it, you woull see this in your dmesg

uslcom0 at uhub0 port 5 configuration 1 interface 0 "Silicon Labs CP2104 USB to UART Bridge Controller" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 7
ucom0 at uslcom0 portno 0

To connect to it from OpenBSD, use the following command:

# cu -l /dev/cuaU0 -s 115200

And you’re done

Let’s encrypt is a free service which provides free SSL certificates. It is fully automated and there are a few tools to generate your certificates with it. In the following lines, I will just explain how to get a certificate in a few minutes. You can find more informations on Let’s Encrypt website.

To make it simple, the tool we will use will generate some keys on the computer, send a request to Let’s Encrypt service which will use http challenging (there are also dns and another one kind of challenging) to see if you really own the domain for which you want the certificate. If the challenge process is ok, you have the certificate.

Please, if you don’t understand the following commands, don’t type it.

While the following is right for OpenBSD, it may change slightly for others systems. Acme-client is part of the base system, you can read the man page acme-client(1).

Prepare your http server

For each certificate you will ask a certificate, you will be challenged for each domain on the port 80. A file must be available in a path under “/.well-known/acme-challenge/”.

You must have this in your httpd config file. If you use another web server, you need to adapt.

server "mydomain.com" {
    root "/empty"
    listen on * port 80
    location "/.well-known/acme-challenge/*" {
        root { "/acme/" , request strip 2 }
    }
}

The request strip 2 part is IMPORTANT. (I’ve lost 45 minutes figuring out why root “/acme/” wasn’t working.)

Prepare the folders

As stated in acme-client man page and if you don’t need to change the path. You can do the following commands with root privileges :

# mkdir /var/www/acme
# mkdir -p /etc/ssl/acme/private /etc/acme
# chmod 0700 /etc/ssl/acme/private /etc/acme

Request the certificates

As root, in the acme-client sources folder, type the following the generate the certificates. The verbose flag is interesting and you will see if the challenging step work. If it doesn’t work, you should try manually to get a file like with the same path tried from Let’s encrypt, and try again the command when you succeed.

$ acme-client -vNn mydomain.com www.mydomain.com mail.mydomain.com

Use the certificates

Now, you can use your SSL certificates for your mail server, imap server, ftp server, http server…. There is a little drawback, if you generate certificates for a lot of domains, they are all written in the certificate. This implies that if someone visit one page, look at the certificate, this person will know every domain you have under SSL. I think that it’s possible to ask every certificate independently but you will have to play with acme-client flags and make some kind of scripts to automatize this.

Certificate file is located at /etc/ssl/acme/fullchain.pem and contains the full certification chain (as its name is explicit). And the private key is located at /etc/ssl/acme/private/privkey.pem.

Restart the service with the certificate.

Renew certificates

Certificates are valid for 3 months. Just type

./acme-client mydomain.com www.mydomain.com mail.mydomain.com

Restart your ssl services

EASY !