Nostalgia for OpenBSD self-hosting
In my first blogpost I mentioned how I used to self-host more than a decade ago and then I found a picture of that OpenBSD server which became a little trip down memory lane.
While looking through my old files to find some information about this server, I stumbled upon a plain HTML backup of a blog I had back in 2003 and 2004 on Blogspot. Which I had completely forgotten about. In that I wrote on the 6th of July 2005, that I had acquired a small server and it was now running OpenBSD 3.7. The specs were fairly modest with a Pentium III 600MHz and 196MB RAM. The hostname was voroth.sysctl.dk named after the Voroth Sea on the planet Vulcan from Star Trek. It came to host my own email and later the WordPress blog on science fiction I had for a couple of years.
Thankfully, OpenBSD is the absolute most stable and consistent server operating system I have ever worked with. OpenBSD has a predictable release schedule every 6 months and the upgrade process was easy to do, and as long as you followed the guide there were rarely any issues. Every release even comes with a catchy song! I shut it down in July 2011, mostly because hosting your own email server at home was starting to become too problematic. I started with version 3.7 and ended with 4.9. Disregarding hardware issues, I am sure it could have continued indefinitely.
Now I just have a standard VPS running Ubuntu and that is fine. I probably wonβt use any BSD system again for hobby purposes and likely not professionally either, given how things have evolved with system administration (now called devops or cloud engineering) in the last decades, but the simplicity of OpenBSD still has some appeal.
The voroth server when it was decommissioned on the 22nd of July 2011