10 Years of This Blog: Looking Back at a Decade of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Tinkering

The Alarm System That Started It All

My very first post was about my alarm system running on OpenBSD. Ten years later, that's still true today. The setup I built in 2016 is still in place, and it has since been extended with several additional sensors and cameras.

That machine still runs a read-only OpenBSD system, which I upgrade every six months. Thanks to this read-only design, a power outage never damages the filesystem — it simply works, every time. And the upgrade itself remains quick and easy, made even lighter by my own adapted sysupgrade, which skips installing sets I don't need on such a small machine.

From OpenBSD to FreeBSD/ZFS for My NAS

My NAS is no longer running on OpenBSD; it now runs on FreeBSD with ZFS. With several terabytes of data to manage, snapshots became a necessity, and ZFS's built-in parity checking made yabitrot, my own bitrot scanner, unnecessary.

I still keep the concept of a remote "cold" backup, but thanks to zfs send and zfs receive, the whole process is now much faster — even if it comes with a few pitfalls worth knowing about, such as making sure the mountpoint property doesn't clash between source and destination. As a result, my old rsync-based Time Machine setup is no longer in use either.

The Hifi Bridge

I still run a small OpenBSD machine as a bridge between my NAS and my hifi installation, serving all the FLAC files hosted on the NAS. This is handled by minidla, which I have to recompile after every upgrade since sndio support isn't enabled by default by FreeBSD — and sndio is what OpenBSD's sound system requires. Like the alarm machine, this small box is also a read-only system that shrugs off hard power cuts.

Firewall: Still OpenBSD, Now in Pairs

OpenBSD, thanks to PF, remains my firewall of choice. It's robust, simple and remarkably flexible. The big change here is that I now run two machines in an active-passive pair using CARP, which lets me upgrade one firewall without ever disrupting the people using my network.

On the web server side — the machine hosting this blog — OpenBSD is still running the show. I rely on log2table, a tool I built myself, to hand out "bad points" to suspicious behaviour and ban IPs through PF once a threshold is crossed. Repeat offenders end up banned permanently. Over time, this has grown into a blocklist of several thousand bad IPs which makes me more relax.

Desktop: New Machines, New Habits

As a desktop machine, I'm still on OpenBSD, but I've also been using FreeBSD for a few years now. I've moved away from tint2 and pypanel on Openbox, and I now use pekwm on both operating systems, along with a brand-new Qt-based panel that I haven't released yet, simply for lack of time.

Speaking of pekwm, I also had my first package proposal accepted for it, which I'm quite proud of.

As a consequence, I no longer use my own network manager, nmctl, for OpenBSD. The built-in "join" feature now does the same job in a much cleaner way.

Web Server and Tooling

I still use Fapws4 as the web server for both my internal systems (hifi, firewall, alarm, and so on) and for this website. On the front end, though, pound has been replaced by nginx.

Other things that haven't changed: I'm still using nvim as my main editor, zsh as my shell on every machine, and dma as my mail agent everywhere, with Prometheus handling monitoring and Grafana turning it all into nice dashboards. One new addition: those status emails are now filtered by a Claude agent, so I only have to focus on actual errors.

FreeBSD, Jails and My Laptop-as-Lab

For a few years now, I've been using FreeBSD mainly for ZFS and bhyve, both on my NAS and on my laptop. Thanks to jails and VMs, my laptop has effectively become my personal lab.

Code Hosting: Goodbye SourceForge, Hello Got

For my code, I no longer use SourceForge, where I registered back in 2000. I now self-host everything with Got (Game of Trees) on my own server.

Conclusion: What OpenBSD Taught Me About Stability

What I really appreciate about OpenBSD is that once you've learned a piece of software, that knowledge stays useful — you can move on to the next thing without your existing expertise becoming obsolete. This is a sharp contrast with the Linux world, where entire paradigms get rewritten every few years.

I've never regretted my move to OpenBSD. Scripts relying on the ifconfig command or on /var/log/messages, written years ago, are still valid today. Could not be the same with some linux distro.

And this stability doesn't come at the cost of progress: OpenBSD keeps adding new drivers and new features to tools like ifconfig — WireGuard being a good example, now included by default. It proves that stability and evolution aren't opposites.