Security Headlines with Mischa Peters

Security Headlines

Summary:

In this podcast episode, we interview Mischa Peters which is a long time

BSD user with a background in the world of data centers and ISP's.

One of his latest projects is OpenBSD Amsterdam which is a pure-hearted

OpenBSD virtual machine hosting provider. That is running 100% OpenBSD,

it's even using OpenBSD's own hypervisor. We deep dive into

OpenBSD Amsterdam, scripting with ssh, awk, and the basic tools, BSD, Hack-tic and

a lot more!

OpenBSD Amsterdam is one of the many interesting projects in the BSD space.

Being a pure hearted OpenBSD virtual machine provider. The project launched as a hobby project by

Mischa Peters in 2018 and the first month already 40 people where interested in spinning up a virtual machine

with OpenBSD Amsterdam.

What makes it special is that it runs OpenBSD own Hypervisor, unlike the majority of hosting platforms that

run qemu/kvm or Xen.

So what you get is an OpenBSD virtual machine running on OpenBSD host. So it's OpenBSD all the way.

Mischa started playing around with this new hypervisor project for fun and wanted to do something

bigger with it, Having a background running servers in datacenters as well as running his on internet service

provider(High5) which he started in 1999.

In this episode, we also get to know how it was to work for Xs4all in the 1990'ies. Xs4all is a Dutch internet

service provider that came out of the *Hack-tic* scene.

Which was a Dutch hacking community and magazine that where active between 1989 and 1994.

This scene has been very active, creating conferences, being a voice

for internet activism, suing the Church of Scientology and much more.

Mischa, like many others, got introduced to SunOS Unix systems in school and went deeper and deeper into the

Unix based rabbit hole. He ended up running Redhat and then found the wonderful world of BSD and

was liberated from Linux through the adoption of FreeBSD.

Mischa is the kind of person that handles the juggle between multiple projects demanding projects, a

day job, a family with kids, a much more.

We also talk about performing automated package management

on OpenBSD, doing kernel upgrades, and automating things with simple command-line scripting.

Sometimes Ansible is just a mess and the same thing can be done simpler with just a for loop

some ssh and some basic command line hacking.

Thanks to the OpenBSD Amsterdam project, a large chunk of cash has been donated to the OpenBSD

foundation which helps the development of OpenBSD moving further.

But most important: It's helping the adoption of OpenBSD!

Do you want to learn BSD? Host your own email? Setup Wireguard?

Then OpenBSD Amsterdam is a good start for you.

External links:

https://openbsd.amsterdam

https://rgz.ee/m/

https://man.openbsd.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XS4ALL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack-Tic

https://why-vi.rocks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS

https://www.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/Livingston_Portmaster_3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe

https://high5.nl/gist/rdist.html