OpenBSD firewall applicance - Intro

OpenBSD firewall applicance - Intro

History Since some time our company Eurospider was using home-grown firewalls based on OpenBSD. Our administrator at this time (Mihai Barbos, https://github.com/mbarbos) decided to use Portwell NAR-2054 hardware with 3 up to 5 ethernet ports and run a customized OpenBSD on it. Now the company firewall is a Soekris net6501 as the Portwell firewalls started to become a little bit rusty. There is still one Portwell left in use for a control network serving access to remote management consoles of our servers.
Web search for my homepage

Web search for my homepage

Intro I wanted to add a search function to my web page. As the website is built with Hugo as a set of static HTML pages onto a read-only web server, standard approaches didn’t work like a LIKE-query in Mysql as many CMS are implementing search. The big logo gives it away, it’s done with the strusWebService from the Strus project. The basic idea is that the author of the web pages can build a search index locally with the markdown version of his content and then push it to a web service dedicated to search only.
Offsite Backup with Bacula

Offsite Backup with Bacula

Intro Into the category of “What can I possibly do useful with a Raspberry PI?” falls the idea of origanizing a backup server using the Bacula backup software. Details I use an old USB disk and a USB hub as external storage for the Bacula volume data and for the catalog (stored in PostgreSQL). For full-filling the off-site requirement the jobs are copied with a ‘Migration Job’ to an external FTP server.
Website done with StaticGen Hugo

Website done with StaticGen Hugo

Some years ago I decided to write my personal web page as a bunch of static HTML pages using only server-side includes to cope with the repetitive elements like footer, header, menus. When I installed a Wordpress just for the blog I intended to start, I thought: why can’t this be done statically too? In fact, it can be done: the following web pages show an explosion of tools for static HTML site generation:
A NAS tale

A NAS tale

In August 2009 I decided it was time to replace my old Pentium II serving 5 old SUN storage disks (the white boxes, enormously noisy, for those who remember) with a modern NAS system. I bought a QNAP TS-439 Pro. The integrated firmware (aka customized Linux) gave me the creeps from a software design point of view, but it did the job. Almost exactly a year later there was a fatal event and my software RAID (RAID 5) decided not to assemble anymore.
OpenBSD firewall and securityrouter.org

OpenBSD firewall and securityrouter.org

Found a really nice new router appliance based on OpenBSD 6.0, http://securityrouter.org. I’m still missing some features like a split-horizon DNS, so I will not abandon the script-based project http://git.andreasbaumann.cc/cgit/OpenBSD-firewall just for now.

Mission Statement

This is a personal blog. I intend to post on technologies and ideas currently on my mind. Take everything I write with a grain of salt.. ;-)