OpenBSD Home Server - Background 04 Sep 2020
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A few years back, after getting frustrated with the latest of many cheap
home routers that I've had the misfortune of relying on, I decided to
just build my own. I went a bit overboard.
The main component a SuperMicro motherboard with 4 built-in gigabit
NICs, an Atom C2000 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 120GB Intel SSD drive,
all packaged up in a sleek black HTPC case. A small 5-port switch and a
Ubiquiti AP rounded out the hardware.
For software, I installed ESXI with three OpenBSD guests: one to act as
a gateway / firewall, another to act as a local DNS caching server, and
another general-purpose guest that I ended up not really using for much.
The ESXI hypervisor was a bit of a PITA, but otherwise it was an awesome
router. Once everything was set up, I don't recall having to reboot it
except to install updates. When we moved out of that apartment, I used
the same set up in our new house for about a year, until AT&T started to
offer gigabit fiber service in our neighborhood.
I started out trying to use the Pace gateway that the AT&T installer
had set up as just a dumb modem with my router behind it, but it was
harder to set up that way than it should have been, and when I did get
it working, it was much slower than I'd expected. So I gave up, and
just used the Pace gateway as AT&T clearly intended.
It wasn't too bad, actually. After I had a couple of ethernet lines
run to each room, I was regularly getting 850+ Mbps on speed tests
from my main computer upstairs. And the wireless AP was much faster
than the old Ubiquiti had been. The service was reliable. And my old
router that I had been so proud of has just sat on a shelf, collecting
dust for the last two years.
Well, no longer. Yesterday, I pulled it down from the shelf, dusted it
off, and installed OpenBSD 6.7 (no ESXI - just bare-metal Unix). I may
not need it as a router any more, but there's other work it can do. In
particular, I'm interested in two things:
- A caching DNS server with ad blocking (think Pi-Hole, but OpenBSD).
- A VPN server that my wife and I can use with our phones and laptops
when we're away.
Beyond that, who knows? I'll get started this weekend.
