Having tried my first OpenBSD installation for a remote server with the smtpd, spamd, ntpd, httpd, etc. that it comes with, it's gone very nicely and I'm pleased with how it's working: my thanks to all those whose hard work is behind it. To now try out OpenBSD in a different way, I am thinking of replacing some of my existing old stuff at home with a new system, acting as router and perhaps also fileserver. It'd be doing packet filtering and NAT, and running pppd, nsd, dhcpd, and maybe ntpd and nfsd. I am wondering how little I can get away with spending on the experiment for something small and quiet for which I can follow step-by-step instructions.
For instance, around the USD100 mark the Ubiquiti ERLite-3 looks reasonable and there are reports that it's not difficult to install OpenBSD on it, though with significant network performance loss through not being able to use the hardware acceleration. How much of a cost that is seeing as I'm unlikely to get any more than "up to" 76Mbps from my ISP's fibre anyway, I don't know. Also, the SolidRun CuBox series looks more powerful for not much more money; perhaps even the earlier/cheaper ones might be reasonably supported by OpenBSD, though I don't find much in the way of people saying how they had easy success, and they are mostly multicore and I don't know if SMP support for armv7 may yet come along; also I guess as a router (for the wired home LAN) I'd need a USB ethernet adapter for a second port. I wonder, what kind of specs I might be able to get away with, and what good deals there are, that I could probably get OpenBSD on to without having to be too inventive and using binary blobs from odd places for bootloaders and whatnot? And, if there's anything about where current development focus / interest is that might affect what I opt for? Am I missing something positive or negative about these systems or others -- how much sense does this plan make? Last time I did anything like this, I spent rather more on a mini-ITX PC system with a loud fan (and ran Linux on it, with iptables and bind and whatnot), but I'm hoping that's overkill. (Is this the correct place to be asking this kind of question?) -- Mark
