Last spring, in the beginning of my masters’ program, I challenged myself to use OpenBSD on an ThinkPad X200 from 2008 for the duration of the semester.
OpenBSD did not have drivers for my Atheros wifi card to authenticate to my university’s PEAP wireless network, so I was basically consigned to only having internet if I could find an ethernet outlet.
(On a modern campus they are not so common.)
Even with internet access, however, the dated hardware couldn’t reliably play video (at least on OpenBSD) and it’s not like watching youtube or movies on the tiny, dim CCFL screen was that enjoyable anyway.
This is your reminder to read the Upgrade Guide before spontaneously running sysupgrade.
Post upgrade, I was curious why I couldn’t send/receive any e-mail.
After frantically scouring through man pages I realized that opensmtpd-extras,
the package I was using to read aliases/virtuals/credentials, had been deprecated!
As of OpenBSD 7.6, opensmtpd now uses the package opensmtpd-table-passwd to do this.
If I had simply read the Upgrade Guide, I would have realized this before wasting half an hour!
Thankfully, opensmtpd-table-passwd is a drop-in replacement that doesn’t need any additional configuration.
I spent the better half of an evening trying to figure out why the externalpipe patch on the suckless terminal (st) wasn’t working under OpenBSD.
Turns out it was a simple one line fix:
adding “exec” allows externalpipe to cut through pledge and deliver the contents of the terminal to your url handling script of choice.
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