Security Headlines with Mischa Peters

Summary:

In this podcast episode, we interview Mischa Peters which is a long time
BSD user with a background in the world of data centers and ISP’s.
One of his latest projects is OpenBSD Amsterdam which is a pure-hearted
OpenBSD virtual machine hosting provider. That is running 100% OpenBSD,
it’s even using OpenBSD’s own hypervisor. We deep dive into
OpenBSD Amsterdam, scripting with ssh, awk, and the basic tools, BSD, Hack-tic and
a lot more!

Relax and listen to it here:

https://anchor.fm/firo-solutions/episodes/Security-Headlines-with-Mischa-Peters-ek58j9

OpenBSD Amsterdam is one of the many interesting projects in the BSD space.
Being a pure hearted OpenBSD virtual machine provider.
The project launched as a hobby project by
Mischa Peters in 2018 and the first month already 40 people where
interested in spinning up a virtual machine
with OpenBSD Amsterdam.

What makes it special is that it runs OpenBSD own
Hypervisor, unlike the majority of hosting platforms that
run qemu/kvm or Xen.
So what you get is an OpenBSD virtual machine running
on OpenBSD host. So it’s OpenBSD all the way.

Mischa started playing around with this new hypervisor
project for fun and wanted to do something
bigger with it, Having a background running servers in
datacenters as well as running his on internet service
provider(High5) which he started in 1999.

In this episode, we also get to know how it was to work
for Xs4all in the 1990’ies. Xs4all is a Dutch internet
service provider that came out of the Hack-tic scene.
Which was a Dutch hacking community and magazine
that where active between 1989 and 1994.
This scene has been very active, creating conferences, being a voice
for internet activism, suing the Church of Scientology and much more.

Mischa, like many others, got introduced to SunOS Unix
systems in school and went deeper and deeper into the
Unix based rabbit hole. He ended up running Redhat and
then found the wonderful world of BSD and
was liberated from Linux through the adoption of FreeBSD.

Mischa is the kind of person that handles the juggle between multiple projects demanding projects, a
day job, a family with kids, a much more.

Finding balance is something we all struggle with and Mischa has managed to find a great balance.
Working with something he is passionate about and enjoys. Amazing!

Loving what you do is what several psychologists see as a golden key to avoiding being Burnout.

We also talk about performing automated package management
on OpenBSD, doing kernel upgrades, and automating things with simple command-line scripting.
Sometimes Ansible is just a mess and the same thing can be done simpler with just a for loop
some ssh and some basic command line hacking.

Thanks to the OpenBSD Amsterdam project, a large chunk of cash has been donated to the OpenBSD
foundation which helps the development of OpenBSD moving further.
But most important: It’s helping the adoption of OpenBSD!

Do you want to learn BSD? Host your own email? Setup Wireguard?

Then OpenBSD Amsterdam is a good start for you.

Security Headlines with Mischa Peters

Summary:

External links:

Firo Solutions Blog