Posts tagged "macos":

l2tp ipsec vpn with npppd on openbsd

If you're even slightly security- or privacy-conscious, which in the present era of Big Data and tech oligarchs is a provident predilection, you should, if not already, be using a VPN (Virtual Private Network). And I don't mean one of the oft-advertised commercial offerings you see plastered about social media—but one that you control. Where every outgoing request that leaves your computer is tunneled through an encrypted private network owned and operated by you. Fortunately, the OpenBSD base tools make this a trivial task—and free if you already have a VPS. But even provisioning a new VM will likely be cheaper than the aforementioned commercial alternatives, with the added benefit of being more secure, and not only private in name but in practice; you can rest assured that only you and the endpoint will be cognizant of your traffic.

samba filesharing server on openbsd for macos client

I do most of my work on one of two MacBooks—a 2014 Air or 2018 Pro—and occasionally on an older model Lenovo ThinkPad running OpenBSD 6.5. Staying synced between the two Macs is trivial as they're both in the cloud but apart from using my own Nextcloud server on an OpenBSD VPS for storing some personal data, I wanted a seamless option for filesharing between the ThinkPad and MacBooks when at home on the local network. This was a relatively pain-free task that took all of five minutes.

time machine backups on openbsd with netatalk

Apple's automatic backup app Time Machine is a fantastic utility that does hourly, daily, and weekly backups of local snapshots. This enables you to restore the system to a previous state in the event of a catastrophic failure—a somewhat rare occurence on the ever-so-stable macOS. The caveat being that storage is limited to AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) compatible devices like the Apple AirPort Time Capsule. Fortunately, Netatalk provides an open source AFP file server that works flawlessly on OpenBSD, and setup is trivial.