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Tech stuff

This site will detail all the (or, well, most of the) tech that I use personally and also what I use to host my websites. My websites are running entirely on OpenBSD and (almost) entirely hosted using tools available in the base installation of OpenBSD, namely acme-client, httpd and relayd (though things like birds.bateleur.org require a Ruby installation). I have a VPS from obsda.ms running OpenBSD with relayd and httpd. Connected to this VPS via WireGuard are the OpenBSD VM on the mini PVE node and the OpenBSD ThinkCentre. relayd handles TLS connections and load balancing, balancing the load between itself and the two VMs connected to the VPS via WireGuard. They used to run on Debian but I moved everything over to OpenBSD in March 2025; you can read more about that in the blog series.

Other than that, I mostly use various Linux distributions on my computers and have recently (April 2025) started using FreeBSD on desktop as well. I also use Proxmox for running various VMs and my NAS. I have two M-series MacBooks, one of which is running Asahi Linux with the other one (my MacBook Pro) running on macOS.

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Desktop

My desktop has been through a handful of iterations since I built it back in April 2024. It initially had a Ryzen 5 5600G and a Radeon RX 6600 which I quickly found out was not quite adequate for 1440p gaming which is why I sold it to a coworker and bought a Radeon RX 6750 XT instead. When, after a few months, one of my partners also wants to have his own gaming PC, I decided to give him the RX 6750 XT and 5600G and buy an RX 7900 GRE and 5700X3D for myself. This is the system I am still using at the moment (March 2025) and the one that I believe I will continue using for quite a while as this setup is more than adequate for what I do.

Laptops

I have had numerous laptops over the years, most of them having been various ThinkPads. Once Apple released their first MacBook powered by Apple Silicon, I was honestly very impressed by the performance and its low power usage (resulting in great battery life) which is why I ended up buying a base-model M1 MacBook Air that I was using as my main laptop until November 2024 when I bought the new 14” M4 MacBook Pro (also base model). I use the MacBook Pro as a sort of desktop replacement (unless I want to play games) as it is very fast and not very power hungry. I still use the MacBook Air quite frequently, however, and I have installed Asahi Linux on it. I still have one ThinkPad but I am using it for work at the moment (working from home).

Servers

In the summer of 2024 I started getting into self-hosting a bunch of stuff and have acquired a bunch of servers for doing so since then. I am currently running three servers at home with the average power consumption of all servers combined being around 55 W with the main PVE Node using around 30 W and the ThinkCentre using around 20-30 W on average. These are measurements from a wattmetre to which all nodes are connected.

I am now hosting a whole bunch of stuff myself, from my websites to a GoToSocial server, to my own XMPP and a whole bunch more. I am also planning on adding even more things to self-host at some point, but we shall see. I also have a bookmark managing tool that I self-host, but that is still running on one of my older VPS and I want to move it over to my home server(s).

(Eagle) Main PVE Node (self-built)

This was my very first server initially intended as merely a NAS build. My main concern with this one was that it had a very low power consumption and after asking around a bit, I was recommended the Intel Core N100 as a perfect CPU for this use case. It officially supports only 16 GB of RAM, but I managed to make it run very stably even with 32 GB of DDR4 memory (but without XMP). As this was the first time I had ever done anything like this, my setup is, unfortunately, less than ideal and the NAS performance could definitely be better. Nevertheless, it works perfectly fine for what I am doing with it and even runs a bunch of other things, such as a Nextcloud installation and Immich so that the photos I took on my phone are automatically uploaded and saved on my NAS.

(Falcon) OpenBSD ThinkCentre

The newest addition to my family of servers, I even wrote a blog post about it. I got it off eBay to have a separate physical server for all of my OpenBSD stuff and to figure out how viable using OpenBSD as a VM host would be for my purposes; as it turns out, it is actually very viable despite most posts on Reddit telling me otherwise. The VM functionality of OpenBSD with vmm / vmd is definitely not as advanced as something like Proxmox, but for a lot of what I need VMs for, this is more than adequate, easy to configure and lightweight (blog post soon!). Thus far, two VMs running on this server are connected to relayd on my VPS for load balancing (all of my websites, basically with one VM being for regular websites and the other VM having a Ruby installation).

Photo

Other PCs

Aside from those, I have a bunch of other computers I use for various tasks.

ThinkStation P300

Old stock from my dad’s company, this one is currently running FreeBSD. I really like this one not only because I love the design, but because it’s an older Xeon with an iGPU (not something I’ve seen all too often) that can easily run my 120 hz 1440p monitor without struggling! This is one of the main PCs I use quite a lot because it has a comparatively low power draw (compared to the gaming PC at any rate) but still has enough performance for most tasks I typically perform on a desktop computer; and it’s really quiet as well.

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I don’t quite remember why I even bought this PC but I ended up not using it for the purpose I had bought it for and it was just collecting dust in some drawer so I decided to install Proxmox on it and create a cluster, combining it and my other node (Eagle) together into one thing. It is now, however, no longer part of my Proxmox cluster (which has been reduced to just a single PVE node, namely “Eagle”) because it had a tendency to be both very loud and also very warm, despite having only a very low CPU usage. I have moved the services running on this machine over to Falcon and Eagle. I am still keeping it around for various random things I want to try.

Cameras and lenses

I also love photography and have a bunch of cameras and lenses, though I have sold a lot of my older ones I barely used anyway! I mainly use the Canon EOS R10 for bird photography because I am very much a fan of the automatic autofocus it has, it makes focussing on birds much easier than it was with my Canon EOS 70D I had before. The Sony α6000 I use for basically everything else and the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II gets used only rarely because I don’t actually have many lenses for it (only the one). My favourite lenses are the Sigma 18-50 mm and the Sony 50 mm (in that order). The E PZ 16–50 mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS is honestly kind of trash, don’t get that one, it’s just the kit lens.

Cameras

Lenses

Misc