OpenBSD at Hetzner on AMD Athlon

OpenBSD is one of the most secure operating systems on the market. Impressive consistency and documentation through man-pages makes this OS one of the easiest to maintain too. OpenBSD/amd64 runs on AMD’s Athlon-64 family of processors in 64-bit mode. It also runs on processors made by other manufacturers which have cloned the AMD64 extensions.

Thankfully to Hetzner’s idea to reuse hardware of terminated products it is possible to find an economic yet powerful system.

Inspired by The Tor BSD Diversity Project I run a Tor relay on AMD Athlon 64 6000+ X2 processor.

The ordered server is delivered in rescue system. Connecting over SSH with tunneling of VNC port makes the whole installation easy.

# ssh root@85.10.201.218 -L 6900:localhost:5900;

Rescue System up since 2019-05-18 12:10 +02:00

Hardware data:

   CPU1: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ (Cores 2)
   Memory:  7729 MB
   Disk /dev/sda: 750 GB doesn't contain a valid partition table
   Disk /dev/sdb: 750 GB doesn't contain a valid partition table
   Total capacity 1397 GiB with 2 Disks

Network data:
   eth0  LINK: yes
         MAC:  00:24:21:2c:62:0d
         IP:   85.10.201.218
         IPv6: 2a01:4f8:a0:5163::2/64
         RealTek RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver

Note down the DNS resolvers, the default gateway, IP and IPv6 addresses, and ethernet driver.

# cat /etc/resolv.conf;
# ip route show;
# ifconfig eth0;
# lspci | grep Ethernet;

Install QEMU. It is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

# apt-get install qemu;

Download OpenBSD ISO image to install a new system from.

# wget https://ftp.eu.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.5/amd64/install65.iso;

Boot dual proccessor virtual machine with 2GB of memory and first disk attached to it. The ISO image is mounted as a CD-ROM and there is a VNC enabled.

# qemu-system-x86_64 -smp cpus=2 -m 2048 -hda /dev/sda -net nic -boot d -vnc localhost:0 -cdrom /root/install65.iso;

Connect the VNC client to localhost:6900 and continue installation normally. Refer to the official INSTALLATION NOTES for OpenBSD/amd64.

The OpenBSD installer will configure virtual network device what needs to be copied to the Realtek later.

# cp hostname.em0 hostname.re0;

Check default gateway and hostname.

# cat /etc/mygate;
# cat /etc/myname;

Verify the final SSH daemon configuration.

# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config;

Halt the QEMU virtual machine and reboot the rescue system.

Next SSH connection to the IP will offer a new SSH keys and connects to the newly installed OpenBSD.

# uname -a;

OpenBSD artoria.wilkart.online 6.5 GENERIC.MP#3 amd64