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14 August, 2024
For the past decade, I've been building and deploying systems on AWS. Things started relatively simply, with servers running in EC2 and using storage in S3. We migrated to RDS for our databases, then DynamoDB. Load balancing moved to ELBs, then ALBs, then CloudFront. The servers eventually disappeared and were replaced by Lambdas, with SQS and StepFunctions providing synchronization. At some point, we were entirely "serverless". That also meant that we were now "AWS-only". When I left my last job, I decided to move away from AWS. I won't get into the reasons here, but it was time to get back to my roots.
Before becoming immersed in AWS, I was a system administrator. I managed mostly Linux systems, with some Solaris and Irix servers as well. A decade later, though, I'm realizing that there's a lot I've either forgotten, or just never knew. I've decided to take some time and "rediscover" UNIX. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to work with a newly-installed OpenBSD server and get reacquainted with what UNIX has to offer. I don't have a lot of experience with OpenBSD, or BSD in general. I chose OpenBSD because the built-in documentation and man pages are excellent. My goal is to learn about the system using just the tools available and without consulting the Internet, similar to what I would have done in the late '90s when I was getting started.
The next few blog posts are going to document my journey through UNIX, highlighting the utilities that I find and my progress moving services to OpenBSD. Given that I'm probably the only person who ever sees this blog, these posts will primarily serve as notes for me to look back on. I'm going to stick to the base system for now, without installing additional packages, and see what's there. Here goes!