Hi. I'm jon.404, a Unix/Linux/Database/Openstack/Kubernetes Administrator, AWS/GCP/Azure Engineer, mathematics enthusiast, and amateur philosopher. This is where I rant about that which upsets me, laugh about that which amuses me, and jabber about that which holds my interest most: *nix.
Took the Plunge
I've run a tor relay over at Digital Ocean for a while now, and I finally decided to pull the plug on it. Digital Ocean announced up coming BSD support, and I waited with anticipation to see exactly how far they were willing to go with the BSDs...and let down that it was only FreeBSD support. (I've been running the tor node on Debian...not exactly ideal in my opinion, but it's been working well enough...I was really looking forward to switching the tor node over to OpenBSD...).
I've also been wanting to run an OpenBSD system out on the internet to handle mail for one of my domains, but most of the VPS/VM/instance hosting providers I've seen lately have been either incredibly overpriced, cut bandwidth heavily to make up for cost, don't support OpenBSD, or some other shenanigan. Digital Ocean offers a small "droplet" with 1 TB of network transfer for $5/month. Anyone in that ballpark has been similar, but with only 200-400 GB of network transfer (which for a tor relay is sorta the biggest factor).
Enter vultr.com.
$5/month? Check. 1 TB network transfer? Check. 160 GB disk (SATA option)? Check! OpenBSD? Check!!
It is sooooo on. I spun up my account and within a few minutes I had a fully functional OpenBSD VPS. I spent a few days playing around with disk layout and determining what exactly I was going to use this for, and settled on trying out OpenSMTPD for one of my domains (sorry tor, I'll get around to setting up a new relay once I'm done playing with OpenSMTPD). Once that was done (and all the relevant PGP keys were generated, signed, and distributed), I setup SPF and DKIM DNS entries. Then I configured amavisd, spamd, and spamassassin. Exchanged a few emails with a friend to ensure everything was working, and called it a day.
I've not configured dovecot, however. I decided to just ssh to the machine, where I have mutt running in tmux. I can ssh to it from wherever I want (see my previous post about ssh rate limiting, then add on the usual "hardening" of ssh (i.e. only allow one non-root user, etc...)). Since I wasn't going completely overboard (this is a personal VPS, afterall), I decided to make it a one-stop-shop for my crypto comm needs, and setup irssi-silc and tor to connect to my silc hidden service for chatting with my buddies.
I think this is nearly more than I can comprehend at the same time. I think I may have configured a machine I will get much use out of. My only fear is that I now have more running on it than the 512 MB of RAM will dutifully support.
So I checked pricing for a step up. $8/month for 2x RAM, 2x disk, and 2x net transfer?
rocket357: segfault
I've also been wanting to run an OpenBSD system out on the internet to handle mail for one of my domains, but most of the VPS/VM/instance hosting providers I've seen lately have been either incredibly overpriced, cut bandwidth heavily to make up for cost, don't support OpenBSD, or some other shenanigan. Digital Ocean offers a small "droplet" with 1 TB of network transfer for $5/month. Anyone in that ballpark has been similar, but with only 200-400 GB of network transfer (which for a tor relay is sorta the biggest factor).
Enter vultr.com.
$5/month? Check. 1 TB network transfer? Check. 160 GB disk (SATA option)? Check! OpenBSD? Check!!
It is sooooo on. I spun up my account and within a few minutes I had a fully functional OpenBSD VPS. I spent a few days playing around with disk layout and determining what exactly I was going to use this for, and settled on trying out OpenSMTPD for one of my domains (sorry tor, I'll get around to setting up a new relay once I'm done playing with OpenSMTPD). Once that was done (and all the relevant PGP keys were generated, signed, and distributed), I setup SPF and DKIM DNS entries. Then I configured amavisd, spamd, and spamassassin. Exchanged a few emails with a friend to ensure everything was working, and called it a day.
I've not configured dovecot, however. I decided to just ssh to the machine, where I have mutt running in tmux. I can ssh to it from wherever I want (see my previous post about ssh rate limiting, then add on the usual "hardening" of ssh (i.e. only allow one non-root user, etc...)). Since I wasn't going completely overboard (this is a personal VPS, afterall), I decided to make it a one-stop-shop for my crypto comm needs, and setup irssi-silc and tor to connect to my silc hidden service for chatting with my buddies.
I think this is nearly more than I can comprehend at the same time. I think I may have configured a machine I will get much use out of. My only fear is that I now have more running on it than the 512 MB of RAM will dutifully support.
So I checked pricing for a step up. $8/month for 2x RAM, 2x disk, and 2x net transfer?
rocket357: segfault
Total Comments 0