Moving to openbsd.amsterdam hosting

Prior to moving home recently, i ran a personal OpenBSD server on my share house's LAN; the modem router was set up to port-forward to the services it was running, to wit, instances of Nextcloud, Prosody and Bitlbee. At my new place, however, this setup no longer works, as i can only get wireless broadband, and that's double-NATted. So no externally-accessible IP address for me.

i'd been considering moving to hosting with openbsd.amsterdam for a while, so that i no longer had to worry about hardware maintenance and availability issues. At my old place, there would occasionally be net and power blackouts - sometimes brief enough that a basic UPS would have been able to handle them (although i'd never got around to buying one), but sometimes much longer, which would mean that my server wasn't available to myself and others.

i liked the idea of openbsd.amsterdam in particular not only because, well, they're a hoster actually providing OpenBSD VMs, but also because of their community-orientation - a not-insignificant portion of the money one pays them for a VM goes to the OpenBSD Foundation[a].

openbsd.amsterdam

i sent a request for a VM at around 2pm local time, not expecting a response for at least 24 hours, particularly given timezone differences. i received a reply within two.

So my instances of Nextcloud and Bitlbee - which i use for accessing Facebook messaging without needing to use some variant of Messenger - are now running in an OBSD.A VM. i've not moved the Prosody instance across, because basically no use of it has been made of late, and Nextcloud's Talk app seems to suffice for now. Gigabytes of data that aren't regularly accessed haven't been moved to the VM, but are instead available as Nextcloud external storage, via SFTP, through a Wireguard tunnel, using OpenBSD's wg(4) driver[b].

Wireguard

wg(4) man page

i'm very happy with openbsd.amsterdam so far. :-)

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🏷 ict

Glossary

Gemlog Home

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[a] Who i occasionally donate to anyway, as my way of saying thanks for quality software that i use regularly.

[b] 2021-10-11: A WireGuard-on-OpenBSD tutorial by Solène:

Full WireGuard setup with OpenBSD