When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2019, in one comment.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
1 HN user recommended this in 2019, in one comment.
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
If you want to use Ubiquiti hardware but not Vyatta, OpenBSD supports the Octeon processor [1]. In particular the edgerouter lite can be swapped to OpenBSD [2] for the cost of the right USB stick [3] and a console cable [4].
Some people find the ERL's performance isn't sufficient to pass packets and also host services such as radius or that the passive heat management on the edgerouter isn't sufficient. In that case Protectli.com [5] makes appliances with monster heat sinks on top and despite running an old ATOM processor can push data at gigabit speeds [6] thanks to onboard Intel NICs.
Finally you can just grab any refurb wintel box, add a couple of Intel NICs and throw away the windows license.
The great thing about OpenBSD is particularly for its typical roles of firewall, load balancer, edge gateway, authentication server, etc it doesn't require much CPU or storage.
I recently rebuilt a laptop with Windows from a USB 3 stick to an Intel M.2 NVME SSD. It took less than 5 minutes to go from booting to install to reboot. OpenBSD's footprint is so small you'll see similar build times particularly when you leave off X Window.
[1] https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html
[2] https://codeghar.com/blog/openbsd-network-gateway-on-edgerou...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B013CCTM2E/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N0LMWGQ/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_...
[5] https://protectli.com/4-port/
[6] https://tech.mangot.com/blog/2018/11/08/showing-a-gigabit-op...