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OpenBSD on Hostigation KVM - running nicely
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OpenBSD on Hostigation KVM - running nicely

raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran
edited April 2012 in Reviews

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

  • twaintwain Member

    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?

    Thanked by 1NanoG6
  • flyfly Member

    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?

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @Bitcable said: Does it still have issues with multiple cores?

    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=1
    
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @Kairus said: Cool. Any reason to not go w/ FreeBSD since they have virtio drivers in the latest release?

    Nope - 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.

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