An Elegant Weapon

“an elegant weapon for a more civilized age”

Behind the scenes this site is running a simple yet effective setup for a simple website and blog.

The setup goes like this:

• Operating System: OpenBSD
• Webserver: HTTPD
• Static site generator: Hugo (running on my laptop)
• Content publication process: scp
• Firewall: PF

this couldn’t be simpler which is a lovely feature.

In previous attempts at blogging, i tested WordPress, Ghost and possibly other CMS and never got to be comfortable with the setup. CMS needs constant vigilance as security vulnerabilities are constantly discovered. I wanted as much peace of mind as it could be reasonable to expect with publishing content on a server connected to the Internet. Which brought me back to an OS I’m very fond of and a Hugo setup using markdown (Hugo simply gets the job done).

While I am very familiar with OpenBSD, I hadn’t used it in a long, long time. I recall buying my first CD (version 2.6) at a local store in Montreal. I was curious and found the artwork fun. Version 3.7 seems to be the last version i used (based on my CD stack) which dates back 18 years (yikes!). Kudos to me to have kept those artifacts but in all honesty, I didn’t want to throw out as to keep all those stickers that came with those CDs.

Anyhow, it felt appropriate to lightly touch on OpenBSD as a first topic for this blog as this operating system was so useful to me early in my career. Coming back to it today feels like home and makes computing more human than just running services on the giant cloud service providers.

This is a different setup that i recall running, as i was using the OS for dedicated VPN appliances, Databases, IDS devices (IPS wasn’t a thing yet) and layer 2 bridges. I might dig further in my memories at some point as it was an interesting time building a SOC. it’s funny how simply booting an OS i haven’t used in a long time brings back memories.