A reliable workhorse is a fine thing. For years, an aging desktop drudge performed faithful service for daily internet browsing, small administrative tasks, and the occasional compilation of ports under OpenBSD. It is an HP Compaq Pro 6300 SFF (manufactured around 2012).

Here is the complete kernel log (dmesg) of the old HP system for reference:

“All hands on deck, Scotty?”

Anyone familiar with openHAB knows that the learning curve is steep, but the possibilities are incredibly vast. You quickly realize that rigid schedules don’t make a house truly smart. A real smart home needs to know who is on board to intelligently manage life support systems (heating, lighting, security).

As a long-time Trekkie, the design for my dashboard was a no-brainer: the classic TOS (The Original Series) crew would represent our family of five. When a crew member is on board, their avatar lights up in full color on the UI widget. If they leave the ship, the display switches to grayscale, signaling their “Away Mission” status.

My home automation setup runs entirely on OpenBSD, providing a rock-solid, secure, and stable foundation for managing the household. However, even on a secure operating system, managing internal family logistics can be a challenge—especially when your kids discover they can turn off the living room TV from their tablets or accidentally fiddle with the master thermostat settings.

As my own smart home slowly expands, I face a clear necessity: I needed to hide certain equipment and sensitive controls from my children while keeping full visibility for the adults.

If you’ve been following my previous adventures in home automation, you know I’ve been sliding down the Zigbee rabbit hole for a while. It all started with getting my hands dirty tracking frames in Zigbee-Sniffing unter OpenBSD: Deep Dive mit dem TI CC2531. Out of curiosity, I got myself a Zigbee Coordinator and wrote about connecting it to an automation platform in Zigbee Home Automation auf OpenBSD: Sonoff Dongle-M und openHAB.

Recently, I picked up a batch of surplus thin clients that turned out to be the absolute perfect fit for a dedicated home controller. Here is how I built a robust, isolated smart home gateway using OpenBSD 7.9-snapshot, Zigbee2MQTT, Mosquitto, and openHAB.

It has been a busy two weeks in the OpenBSD ports tree. Between major toolchain updates in base causing some fallout, expanding our Software Defined Radio (SDR) ecosystem, updating my repository of GNUstep app wrappers, and performing long-overdue dependency pruning for some popular web scanners, there is plenty to cover.

Here is a comprehensive breakdown of the updates, new imports, and maintenance work happened over the last fortnight.

The LLVM 22 Upgrade & GNUstep Fallout

The update of LLVM to version 22 in OpenBSD base was a fantastic milestone, but as with many major compiler jumps, it introduced a wave of stricter compilation constraints and deprecations. As the maintainer of a significant portion of our GNUstep ecosystem, I watched the build infrastructure light up with failures.

I spent a chunk of time this week on a focused OpenBSD ports updating sprint, putting a number of other projects a bit to the side to finally tackle this overdue activity. As it usually goes, what started as a few simple bumps quickly turned into a giant domino effect of interconnected dependencies—especially in the Ruby and Python ecosystems ;)

It’s not worth listing every single minor bump explicitly, but here is a breakdown of the major updates that just hit the tree.