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Showing posts from February, 2017

Simple OpenBSD File Server

These days, when people think of a file server, they assume that it must support Windows CIFS (a.k.a. SMB or Samba).  A few grizzled sysadmins know that NFS would be much, much simpler to set up and almost nobody would consider using FTP. Well, that is too bad, since for many situations, anonymous FTP is best and it works purrfectly on my little OpenBSD netbook. FTP is a very simple protocol, it only talks when it has to and is completely quiet otherwise.  It has none of the chattyness and incessant 'CACA' packets of CIFS.  It is extremely easy to set up and has native support in all operating systems.  Even Windows can do anonymous FTP transparently and can map a FTP server to a drive letter, thus enabling any program to connect to the server directly. Some will speak up and say that FTP is insecure.  Well, yes, but so is NFS and CIFS.  The difference is that FTP doesn't even pretend to be secure.    The joke is that nowadays, since script kiddies are unfamiliar wit

OpenBSD on a Netbook

Recently, I got fed-up with the bloated Linux distributions and wanted to try something that is secure, small and efficient and downloaded OpenBSD 6.0 from Theo De Raadt's server in Calgary.  Since Calgary is actually my old home town - why not? OpenBSD tries to be the most simple and secure UNIX system out of the box.  It is very much server oriented, but it can do anything and many architectures are supported just for fun. For example, Arm RPi and Beaglebone, Intel 32 and 64 bit and several more.  So OpenBSD is a good choice whether you want to build a server farm, a network router, or a robot. I have an old little Lenovo S10e netbook that I threatened to toss away numerous times, but it doesn't want to break.  As I feel guilty about tossing something that works perfectly well in a bin, once in a while when I run short of resources, I end up using it again.  Last year, it was pressed into service as a Linux Mirror server to install a bunch of embedded computers.