sogubsys

Awesome! I wish you great success and you'll have me as a customer.

Awesome!

Thanks Jeff!

Learned about this program when pwning Registry on HackTheBox

If you support OpenBSD in spirit and love what they do, consider making a donation to help the developers out. Most devs work for free and every little bit helps :)

https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

Thanks to all the OpenBSD developers and supporters for making another amazing release!

A quality product from a quality team. Thanks, OpenBSD project.

It is reliable, secure, well-tested, and BSD licensed.

Thanks to everyone for sharing their opinions, feedback, and help! I truly appreciate it and was not expecting my blog post to explode like it did.

I am grateful for your kindness and hope you have a great time hacking away :)

Yeah, to be clear, OpenBSD seemed to have the best support for this particular laptop.

If it had been another laptop, I'm not sure I would have done OpenBSD. I would have done the same testing with Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD and chose the best one for me from that testing.

I don't find the laptop ugly, but then again I don't truly have an opinion of how it looks. I got it to replace my old laptop, and since I couldn't decide what more expensive laptop to get yet, I'm working with this one for now. I wasn't expecting it to be performant and acceptable to me for $200, you know.

I need to run Windows workstation and server VMs, too. (In the screenshot, I show Windows).

Additionally, the Linux VM cons with vmd are off-putting, but I'll be getting them working. I even saw a blog post about running docker containers on linux on vmd. So, I'm going to try that out soon :D

To be clear, it is more than Linux virtual machines but also Windows. The VMs are for penetration testing labs and R&D.

It isn't my job, it is my hobby.

I can do my job with ssh terminals and a browser.

That may be true, my bar may be low. I started with early BSD and Linux in 1996, and have been happy with minimal, cheap, and command line ever since.

My experience or expectations others may not share. I didn't truly consider that when writing the blog post.

The stuff I complain about is probably less than 5% of the entire experience. So, almost all the time OpenBSD is out of my way and I go about doing what I did with a Linux workstation.

It is mostly web browser and terminals for me, with random apps here and there like gimp or something.

I'm learning kernel and assembly programming and penetration testing, so my use case probably differs from the average user experience, I'd guess.

I'm just a geek enjoying geeking out :)

Oh cool! I didn't know you could flash a coreboot bios and I would love to have an upgraded display! Though mostly I run apps full screen so it isn't terribly important, it would just be nice.

There's more to it. It isn't a "Use OpenBSD, everything else sucks", it was simply "I used OpenBSD on a Thinkpad T420 and let me tell you about it".

I also posted about that I tried Linux (Ubuntu), FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on the laptop before deciding on OpenBSD. It wasn't made out of stubbornness.

It was simply the right choice for me for that laptop. And I shared my experience getting it up to a state I was used to with my previous Linux workstation (that this laptop replaced).

You're correct. My complaint was about installation time.

I thought there was an instance where I saw all the access points somehow during the installer, but unsure how I did that... and I couldn't replicate it.

I suspected that I had wired ethernet configured, and then the installer downloaded firmware to configure wireless? It was just a guess, I didn't look more into it.

That's OK, I was posting about my experience without intentions to change hearts and minds of others.

I'm just a geek playing around, ya know.

From https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html

The following features are available:

    serial console access to the virtual machines
    tap(4) interfaces
    per-VM user/group ownership
    privilege separation
    raw, qcow2 and qcow2-derived images
    dumping and restoring of guest system memory
    virtual switch management
    pausing and unpausing VMs 

The following features are not available at this time:

    graphics
    snapshots
    guest SMP support
    hardware passthrough
    live migration across hosts
    live hardware change 

Supported guest operating systems are currently limited to OpenBSD and Linux. As there is no VGA support yet, the guest OS must support serial console.

I understand what you're saying but I fear you may be misunderstanding my intentions and opinions. I feel you may be injecting your own issues with things into my blog post. Please allow me explain.

The importance of having a secure and correct OS is most important to me (I feel OpenBSD is most appropriate and interesting here). I feel the value of OpenBSD outweighs the lose of two applications. I'm not part of an OS war, I frankly don't care what anyone uses. I just posted about about my experience on my blog (blogging is a new/rare thing for me and I am proud of the post, it took hours to do) and frankly didn't expect the post to HN to do anything (I posted on a whim, a coworker next to me loves the site) :)

I intended to migrate off of Evernote at some point, it is a tough band-aid to pull off after getting used to it for 10 years. Not having native VirtualBox on the machine is definitely a dislike, but isn't the end of the world. I only need it for labs. NetBSD can apparently run in vmm, too, just have to pass a boot option for the serial console (but I haven't tried it).

For Evernote, I had to ask myself what I'm actually using Evernote for. I'm solely using it for having minimally rich text and website scrapes stored in notebooks, and all notes being searchable. And I want it available wherever I am. I don't use OSR, non-text notes, pro features, related notes, etc. So, I question why I'm still paying for it, entrusting a vendor with all my data, and dealing with non-standard clients outside of windows/mac. Doing something just because I've always done is a terrible pattern. Time to re-evaluate and fix. That's what I did, and now I have an extremely portable and flexible solution that doesn't cost me anything but time, which I'm OK with.

I make a living with Linux for high traffic web applications, I use NetBSD and Linux for my personal servers, and OpenBSD for my workstation. I enjoy operating systems and I'm comfortable in all of them. Each one has their own character, their own quirks and pros and cons. One size fits all, for me, is a fool's game. No matter what you choose, there's some price to be paid for what you get.

And to be crystal clear: I'm not trying to change hearts and minds, or influence others, or be part of some cool kids club. Ultimately, I'm selfish with my hobbies, which this is, and so I do what solely is interesting to me. If I was able to help others, that's great and I'm happy for that, but I have no expectations.

Thank you. I hope we can be on the same page now, and I hope I was not too verbose. Be well.

An update to the article too about VMs: Note that for VMs I'm now using Oracle (non-distro provided) Virtualbox with their VRDP active, which is RDP for the VM instance and not the VM OS itself, so can RDP to the VMs on the network much better than libvirt. So, it is good enough. VirtualBox is mainly for intensive labs or monkeying with NetBSD kernel development, which 99% of the time I'd do at home.

I do like the keyboard on this T420, it is a pleasure.

Indeed, it was recommended by several people that I add that and noatime. That's active on my mount points.

I wish I knew more about the specifics of the hardware differences. Thinkpads are new to me. I just discovered the Thinkpad subreddit several days ago, so accidental sub-community of old Thinkpad folks, but haven't dove into the details of hardware upgrades (like IPS screen!).

I was looking for a cheap replacement to my Samsung R580, and found that T420 laptop online on eBay. It had good specs and was priced well (I had to order a new battery that came in today). Originally, I was thinking if it didn't work out, it would hold me over until I decided what higher end would work better (like Matebook or Dell XPS), but the T420 seems to be alright for me. The keyboard is incredible.

Firefox does get sluggish with like 20+ tabs open though. I did start making modifications to it based off https://www.privacytools.io/browsers/ so may that helps (disabling canvas, webrtc, tracking, etc)

I didn't notice anymore delay than normal on other machines, browsers take a bit to start up, but I didn't time it. It is just a perceived speed.

The speed isn't insane or what may be called super fast, but for $200, nothing is slow for me. I mostly live in terminals and browser, and now with Zim.

You're right, my mistake in communication there.

Speed is not a concern for me because it is fast for everything I use the laptop for. I didn't hit snags where things were slow.

I'll update the post later for clarity. Thank you for pointing it out.

Will check that one out. I only have a rough idea of what a red team is (abstract, some books, etc), but no practical experience with it.

Thanks for that recommendation and advice, I appreciate it. Yeah, I'd definitely prefer to find and propose fixes for exploits over full pentesting (reporting/client work).

I've browsed a few times the assembler courses on Pentester Academy. I'm not sure I'm up for being a pentester but I do like the particulars of assembler and CPUs.

Would you recommend those courses in particular (looking as amd64 and arm ones)?

It was always serious.

I think there's a bit of a difference in that NetBSD project itself (kernel and userland) run on all the platforms/architectures, and Linux (the kernel) supports a lot of platforms/architectures itself, you need to find userland that matches... usually finding a distro that is well supported.

NetBSD supports all architectures as part of itself as a whole, no need for distro searching.

One of the cool things about BSD is that kernel and userland are bundled/tightly-coupled together as one single unit. With Linux, you need to find the appropriate distro to help you outside of the few major platforms.

Apples and oranges comparison.

http://netbsd.org/about/portability.html

Maxime Villard gives us another awesome gift :) Thanks!

From a general generic user perspective, you're right that that would be useful. As a user, I also understand that frustration.

Basically, it comes down to having very little money, if any, to fund these tasks and most of the work is done by volunteers. It is much easier and faster to work with the local environment than manage kernel portability issues between different BSDs and even Linux.

The cool thing is that anyone is free to help with the project and port things if they choose. It is truly an issue of funding and finding folks willing to do the work (and maintain it).

It is a lot of work and specialized knowledge across different kernel domains.