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OpenBSD on Hostigation KVM - running nicely
raindog308
Administrator
I've been wanting to spin up an OpenBSD VPS for a while and finally got around to doing it yesterday.
Tried spinning up a 4.x last fall and there were some KVM issues. But 5.0 worked out of the box like a charm on a 128MB KVM from Hostigation.
The Realtek network interface is not supported under OpenBSD (you get constant "re0 watchdog timeout" errors), but the Intel PRO/1000 nic works just fine.
Next steps:
- use config to lean/mean-icize the kernel to strip out unneeded drivers. On a bigger box I wouldn't bother but with only 128MB of memory, I'd like to squeeze out some megabytes.
- pull out the pf manual to configure the firewall
- modify /var/log partition to be append-only
- I might play with immutable files once I get things setup the way I want. immutable files are a very nice *BSD feature - you set a kernel level so that the files cannot be changed without booting into the console. Typically used for core config files, firewall rules, etc.
- play some more :-)
dmesg:
OpenBSD 5.0 (GENERIC) #43: Wed Aug 17 10:10:52 MDT 2011
[email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6) ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 3.40 GHz
cpu0: FPU,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PSE36,CFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,CX16
real mem = 133742592 (127MB)
avail mem = 121569280 (115MB)
Comments
I might actually get one of these and try netbsd..
great man. openbsd is awesome. after you play with config do you mind posting a tutorial on how to get it as low memory as possible?
yeah i'd like to see what you did
Does it still have issues with multiple cores?
Cool. Any reason to not go w/ FreeBSD since they have virtio drivers in the latest release?
I don't know - however, the mpbios disable is no longer necessary. My VPS only has 1 CPU assigned to it:
$ sysctl hw hw.machine=i386 hw.model=QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6) ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) hw.ncpu=1 hw.byteorder=1234 hw.pagesize=4096 hw.disknames=wd0:85495ac120017c1b,cd0:,fd0:,fd1: hw.diskcount=4 hw.cpuspeed=3393 hw.vendor=Red Hat hw.product=KVM hw.version=RHEL 6.2.0 PC hw.uuid=c6086629-8700-4199-f104-6876b4a0d9b8 hw.physmem=133742592 hw.usermem=133730304 hw.ncpufound=1 hw.allowpowerdown=1Nope - just wanted to play with OpenBSD.
FreeBSD is definitely easier if you want a more up to date web server (OpenBSD's default is a modified/hardened Apache 1.3), more interested in performance, etc. I was interested in having a very secure central administrative box for my far-flung VPS empire (ha!) so OpenBSD seemed like a good fit.