Coding

Having the ability to rebuild a server/router from scratch in minutes with confidence, versus slaving over all your configs, trying to get everything working is life changing. I can’t remember how many times I’ve rebuilt a computer, only to run into an issue that I KNOW I’ve fixed before… over a year ago. With ansible, all the work goes into the first deployment, giving you the ability to redeploy a server at a moments notice.

OpenBSD does require some extra options to work properly, as ansible seems to work best with Linux. Hopefully my struggles can help some of you.

Being able to take off from work, and the next morning, be able to hop back into my tmux session from the day before is truly lifechanging. I used a custom screen config for a little while before stumbling across tmux. I read into tmux one day at work, and was simply amazed at how much easier it was to configure than screen! This led me to conduct an in-depth comparison between tmux and screen. Did you know, screen has some 254 known bugs? Some go back to 2005 the last time I checked.

Tmux is an active project that is significantly easier to configure, and just as stable in my experiance.

While developing my own OpenBSD router, I stumbled across a built-in service called ifstated. Previously, I was using a cronjob to run a script every five minutes to check the status of pppoe0. However, ifstated is able to do everything that my script could, in a more powerful way.

The inspiration for this configuration file originated heavily from calomel’s tutorial. I did modify a handful of items though, to better tailor it to my own router’s design.