As the title so succinctly put it, welcome to my blog! I did not think I would ever write one, but here we are.

I aim to write about my experiences running an OpenBSD server and anything related to that, as well as other software-related topics that catch my interest.

I’ve long had an interest in OpenBSD due to their security focus, but did not have anything to run it on. Searching for VPS providers, I only found providers supporting some Linux distributions or maybe Windows. Digital Ocean was the most promising one I found as they supported FreeBSD and I thought it would be possible to get OpenBSD running there as well. They unfortunately ended support for FreeBSD back in 2022 so I considered that a dead end. I’ve seen various “hacks” to get OpenBSD running by installing Linux first, then booting into the recovery image, download the installer and re-format the disk, but I did not want to try that. I was looking for someone officially supporting OpenBSD by having images for it already, or at least having the option to upload a custom image for installation.

Then I came accross OpenBSD.Amsterdam which is an OpenBSD VPS provider located in Amsterdam, so I decided to give them a try. The rest is history as they say, as that is where this server is currently at.

I’ve only just gotten this server up and running with a default OpenBSD 7.6 install and I will write about that next, starting from the beginning while it’s still somewhat fresh in memory. I plan on writing about the ordering process, what the options are, what you’re getting and so on. Then as I’m sure to make my own changes to the setup I will document that as I go along.