Anyone who has been around the world of Unix security firewalls and minimalist server systems for a while remembers the grey-green or dark cases from Soekris Engineering with a certain nostalgia. For years, the Soekris net5501 🛒Affiliate Link: I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you when you buy via this link. A way to support my work. was the gold standard for highly reliable, fanless embedded routers and network appliances running OpenBSD.

Over the course of a few years, several Fujitsu Futro S920 units served as reliable, silent servers for various local network services in my homelab. I have since gradually upgraded the infrastructure and replaced the old instances with newer Futro S9010 models.

Before these decommissioned S920 devices find a new home on eBay 🛒Affiliate Link: I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you when you buy via this link. A way to support my work., here is a practical overview covering their hardware, power consumption, and OpenBSD compatibility. Even though the architecture isn’t cutting-edge anymore, these thin clients still make fantastic, power-efficient nodes.

It was about time: The last major upgrade sprint in the OpenBSD ports tree was quite a while ago, and a backlog of packages needing some serious TLC had accumulated on my to-do list. Anyone familiar with the OpenBSD ports ecosystem knows that such an update rarely consists of merely bumping a version number in a Makefile. Instead, it is a lively journey of discovery through dependency trees, build and test changes, compilation errors, and more.