r/openbsd

I got this cheap laptop that doesnt have battery for small storage and torrenting some videos, but my place have shitty power and sometimes it just turn off by itself like a week or so, is there a good way beside buying UPS to preserve my disk from corruption?

Everyone says "security issues" would be caused by having /proc file system similar to Plan 9 and Linux. Are there any good places to learn more about why /proc was removed from the OpenBSD kernel? What kind of bugs did it cause before removal? Was it used for anything outside of the Linux emulator when it was part of the system? Do these issues extend to Plan 9's /proc or were they mostly a result of Linux's re-implementation of the Plan 9 /proc concept? With unveil and pledge now part of the kernel would it be possible to bring /proc back while avoiding those security issues?

In the interest of privacy, would it in the interest of privacy be theoretically /feasible , as an extension of the ungoogled-chromium , to have a cow filesystem with the wanted settings stored somewhere under user's homedir, and at every boot, mount a ramdisk drive to the dir where ungoogled-chromium expects the drive to be, copy the cow to it, so as to have tracking and tracing of the user minimized ?

Probably the ramdisk can even be skipped if we just throw away the changes to the cow fs at a shutdown?

I'm no developer, power user, or anything tech really. Classical humanities/greats artsie.

My basic needs are pretty well at the level of a Chromebook, except that I do a lot of editing, proofreading and typesetting work, in four languages.

For the last year I've worked on an OpenBSD laptop with xfce, texworks, libreoffice and chromium installed.

No issues, no troubles, no glitches, no pain.

I've even figured out how to make persistently reconnecting wifi connections in the cafes I often work at.

Thank you to the developers!! I'm not rich, but I hope my donation to the OpenBSD foundation will help keep you guys afloat for maybe six hours or so. :)

I'm daily driving OPENBSD on my laptop with amd GPU. My main pc has discrete Nvidia GPU. I know that Nvidia GPU don't work. But I'm really interested why is it so? Why deps. what Nvidia driver needs are not possible in openbsd. If there a way to help openbsd community and maybe make a situation with Nvidia a little bit better? Is it theoretically possible to port nouveau on openbsd?

I am currently evaluating a possible switch from GNU/Linux to OpenBSD or FreeBSD after using GNU/Linux for the past 20 years.

I’ve read parts of the OpenBSD FAQ and was pleasantly surprised by its clarity and accessibility. I understand OpenBSD and GNU/Linux differ in many ways and that I will need to learn new tools and workflows. I plan to start my evaluation in a virtual machine.

My hardware is: Ryzen 5 5600G, B550 chipset motherboard, and an NVMe SSD — which I expect should work reasonably well on OpenBSD. If anyone has a different experience, I’d appreciate hearing about it.

I use my PC for web browsing (Firefox), word processing (LibreOffice), OS testing with virt‑manager, and a fair amount of multimedia consumption (both local files and online streaming).

My limited OpenBSD experience makes me uncertain whether it will meet all my needs. My main concerns are support for various multimedia formats/codecs and hardware/GPU acceleration for local playback and online content.

I would be very grateful for any input from OpenBSD users.

Finally, I want to emphasize two aspects of the OpenBSD project that I particularly value: its strong focus on security and its merit‑based, non‑political approach.

Hey everyone,

Just got miniDLNA running stable on OpenBSD 7.8 after quite a battle. Sharing my findings in case others hit the same issues.

The Problem

rcctl start minidlna reports ok but immediately rcctl check minidlna returns failed. The service never creates a PID file and dies silently. This seems to be a known issue with the rc script on OpenBSD 7.8 — possibly related to the unveil/pledge restrictions in the package.

Root Causes Found

rcctl broken — minidlna's rc script doesn't work reliably on 7.8

unveil restrictions — media paths outside /var/db/minidlna are blocked when running as daemon

Don't use -d flag — it prevents self-daemonization and causes instability

Corrupt/incomplete media files — minidlna crashes scanning bad metadata

Working Solution

Create symlinks so media paths are within unveil scope:

ln -sf /data/media/videos /var/db/minidlna/videos

ln -sf /data/media/music /var/db/minidlna/music

ln -sf /data/media/photos /var/db/minidlna/photos

media_dir=V,/var/db/minidlna/videos

media_dir=A,/var/db/minidlna/music

media_dir=P,/var/db/minidlna/photos

friendly_name=MyServer

db_dir=/var/db/minidlna

log_dir=/var/log

port=8200

inotify=no

notify_interval=60

/etc/login.conf — increase openfiles limit:

minidlna:\

:openfiles=4096:\\

:tc=daemon:

cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf

/etc/rc.conf.local:

minidlna_class=minidlna

/etc/rc.local — bypass rcctl entirely:

#!/bin/sh

mkdir -p /var/run/minidlna

chown _minidlna:_minidlna /var/run/minidlna

/usr/local/sbin/minidlnad \

-f /etc/minidlna.conf \

-P /var/run/minidlna/minidlna.pid \

-u _minidlna

Key insight: Without -d, minidlna self-daemonizes with PPID=1 — stable and boot-persistent. With -d it stays in foreground and dies when the shell exits.

Verify it's running correctly:

ps -p $(pgrep minidlnad | head -1) -o pid,ppid,command

# PPID should be 1

Hope this saves someone the hours I spent on it!

OpenBSD 7.8 · miniDLNA 1.3.3

Hi is there any news about the 7.9 release I just asking because I am very excited about it.

Hacker stole or got gmail password, changed it, and recovery account email so i cant recover it.

I want to make sure this never happens again. i'm switching back to open bsd and changing all passwords to unique ones & adding yubico key.

any other suggestions to make sure this never happens in future?

(i think someone found a recycled password from one account and tried it, but im still not sure)

thank you!

Is there a way to get a terminal only session but not limited to 80 chars wide (I have a 4k monitor). Is there such a thing as the terminal frame buffer? Should I nevertheless use a "terminal only" window manager? Does it exist?

I have an Acer desktop (details below) with an SSD for the OS, data and programs and a SATA disk (WDC WD10EZEX-21W) for movies, backup etc. I ran OpenBSD snapshots on it, but installed Fedora Workstation 44 (Linux localhost-live.home 7.0.4-200.fc44.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC x86_64 GNU/Linux) on the SSD. Still in OpenBSD I copied all the stuff I needed from the SSD to the SATA disk. Now I'm trying to mount the disk under Fedora. I made a mount point (/mnt/ffs), ran

sudo modprobe ufs

(which was successful)

and

sudo sfdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 119.24 GiB, 128035676160 bytes, 250069680 sectors

Disk model: HFS128G39TND-N21

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Disklabel type: gpt

Disk identifier: 1E7167E1-FB76-42C6-A315-A30CDC51E87D

Device Start End Sectors Size Type

/dev/sda1 2048 1230847 1228800 600M EFI System

/dev/sda2 1230848 5425151 4194304 2G Linux extended boot

/dev/sda3 5425152 250068991 244643840 116.7G Linux filesystem

Disk /dev/sdb: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors

Disk model: WDC WD10EZEX-21W

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Disklabel type: dos

Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type

/dev/sdb4 * 64 1953520064 1953520001 931.5G a6 OpenBSD

then I ran:

sudo mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd,ro /dev/sdb4 /mnt/ffs

and got:

mount: /mnt/ffs: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

Output of sudo dmesg|rg ufs\|sdb

[    0.691069] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[    0.691073] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 4096-byte physical blocks
[    0.691094] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[    0.691096] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[    0.691107] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[    0.691126] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Preferred minimum I/O size 4096 bytes
[    0.724453]  sdb: sdb4
                sdb4: <openbsd: sdb5 >
[    0.724837] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[ 9104.581483] ufs: ufs_fill_super(): fragment size 8192 is too large

System info:

Acer product: Aspire X3-780

Mobo: Acer model: Aspire X3-780(KBL) Firmware: UEFI

vendor: American Megatrends v: R02-A3 date: 05/26/2017

CPU:

Info: quad core model: Intel Core i5-7400 bits: 64 type: MCP arch: Kaby Lake rev: 9 cache:

L1: 256 KiB L2: 1024 KiB L3: 6 MiB

Is this enough info to be helpful? I can of course post a full dmesg and other details. Needless to say any pointers are warmly welcome, thanks in advance.

[[ cross posted to r/Fedora ]]

I always download to /tmp and despise having ~/Downloads. I have the following in user.js but the directory still gets created.

user_pref("browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel", false); user_pref("browser.download.dir", "/tmp"); user_pref("browser.download.folderList", 2); user_pref("browser.download.lastDir", "/tmp"); user_pref("browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir", true);

~/Downloads is commented out in /etc/firefox/unveil.{content,main}

I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when it's created but if I delete it while FF is running, it will recreate when I quit.

Any chance there's a way to not allow FF to create it?

I just wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to the OpenBSD developers.

​I’ve recently built a few firewalls using pf, and they have performed flawlessly. After years of dealing with various systems, I keep coming back to OpenBSD for the "sane by default" philosophy and the sheer elegance of the base system.

It is rare to find a project that maintains such high standards of code correctness and documentation while keeping things so simple to manage.

​To show my appreciation, I’ve just made a contribution to the OpenBSD Foundation.

It’s a small way to say thanks for the incredible work you guys put into this.

Thank you.

Hello folks,

I need your wisdom here. I'm planning to buy a new machine to use with OpenBSD on my daily basis. I had a good experience with Thinkpads t60 and x220, I must say but I'm wondering if is there any modern hardware sucessor ( in terms of compatibility and functionality ) to these machines.

So, what recommendations of laptops ( or even PCs ) you have for comfortable experience ( stable ) with OpenBSD in 2026 ?

I want to use a small desktop as a second router behind my virgin router to separate a home lab from my other devices at home. I was looking at refurbished Lenovos with the intention of adding a usb ethernet adapter.

It will be the first time I've tried this and so don't want to spend a fortune.

Can anyone recommend anything that is known to work well? and doesn't cost a fortune.