Title: Life with an offline laptop | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 23 August 2019 | |
Tags: openbsd life disconnected | |
Description: | |
Hello, this is a long time I want to work on a special project using an | |
offline device and work on it. | |
I started using computers before my parents had an internet access and | |
I was enjoying it. Would it still be the case if I was using a laptop | |
with no internet access? | |
When I think about an offline laptop, I immediately think I will miss | |
IRC, mails, file synchronization, Mastodon and remote ssh to my | |
servers. | |
But do I really need it _all the time_? | |
As I started thinking about preparing an old laptop for the experiment, | |
differents ideas with theirs pros and cons came to my mind. | |
Over the years, I produced digital data and I can not deny this. I | |
don't need all of them but I still want some (some music, my texts, | |
some of my programs). How would I synchronize data from the offline | |
system to my main system (which has replicated backups and such). | |
At first I was thinking about using a serial line over the two | |
laptops to synchronize files, but both laptop lacks serial ports and | |
buying gears for that would cost too much for its purpose. | |
I ended thinking that using an IP network _is fine_, if I connect for a | |
specific purpose. This extended a bit further because I also need to | |
install packages, and using an usb memory stick from another computer | |
to get packages and allow the offline system to use it is _tedious_ | |
and ineffective (downloading packages and correct dependencies is a | |
hard task on OpenBSD in the case you only want the files). I also | |
came across a really specific problem, my offline device is an old | |
Apple PowerPC laptop being big-endian and amd64 is little-endian, while | |
this does not seem particularly a problem, OpenBSD filesystem is | |
dependent of endianness, and I could not share an usb memory device | |
using FFS because of this, alternatives are fat, ntfs or ext2 so it is | |
a | |
dead end. | |
Finally, using the super slow wireless network adapter from that | |
offline laptop allows me to connect only when I need for a few file | |
transfers. I am using the system firewall pf to limit access to | |
outside. | |
In my pf.conf, I only have rules for DNS, NTP servers, my remote | |
server, | |
OpenBSD mirror for packages and my other laptop on the lan. I only | |
enable wifi if I need to push an article to my blog or if I need to | |
pull a bit more music from my laptop. | |
This is not entirely _offline_ then, because I can get access to the | |
internet at any time, but it helps me keeping the device offline. | |
There is no modern web browser on powerpc, I restricted packages to | |
the minimum. | |
So far, when using this laptop, there is no other distraction than the | |
stuff I do myself. | |
At the time I write this post, I only use xterm and tmux, with moc as a | |
music player (the audio system of the iBook G4 is surprisingly good!), | |
writing this text with ed and a 72 long char prompt in order to wrap | |
words correctly manually (I already talked about that trick!). | |
As my laptop has a short battery life, roughly two hours, this also | |
helps having "sessions" of a reasonable duration. (Yes, I can still | |
plug the laptop somewhere). | |
I did not use this laptop a lot so far, I only started the experiment | |
a few days ago, I will write about this sometimes. | |
I plan to work on my gopher space to add new content only available | |
there :) |