jcs

The best tested so far happens to be the huawei matebook X and certain lenovo laptops

This guy does a lot of testing https://jcs.org/

I'd be really interested to hear if any arm64 or other RISC architecture laptops are useable! M1 is a step in that direction, it would be really surprising to me if it worked well beyond basic support yet however. Asahi linux took like over a year to get to that point but it sounds from reading that link that they're pretty gung ho on getting it working for 7.1 which is amazing to hear. It sounds like other hardware support in those laptops is the big thing.

Fun miscellaneous stuff: SMP on intel architecture is disabled on openbsd for security reasons, so looking at alternatives to make things go fast with guarantees for that is big right now.

If you don’t want to deal with breadboards, there are lots of cheap (under $50) programmable Z80 computers out there; here are a few I’ve collected:

* Timex-Sinclair 1000 (American ZX81 with double the RAM — an entire 2KiB!)

* TI 81-86 graphing calculators

* Verifone Tranz 330 https://www.bigmessowires.com/mozart-tranz-330/

* Cidco MailStation https://jcs.org/2019/05/03/mailstation

Also, for a bit more money, there are lots of new hobbyist computers out there, including the RC2014, Stephen C. Cousins’ “SC___” series, and the MinZ / eZ-Tiny series. You can solder them together and program however you like, oftentimes including booting CP/M off of ROM, MicroSD, Compact Flash, or floppy.

http://m5hosting.com and http://singlehop.com are two that i'd recommend.

one thing to watch out for with dedicated hosting providers is that the networks are sometimes not so great. you may get a great deal on hardware and tons of bandwidth, but if it drops packets all the time, it's not worth it.

make sure they segment you off onto a vlan (see http://jcs.org/mitm for why), make sure they are well peered, make sure they actually have staff at or near the datacenter they're running things from, and make sure they have the ability to block certain traffic from reaching you if you need them to (see http://jcs.org/sip for why) so it doesn't count towards your bandwidth total.

Asahi is pretty cool, any chance you've tried it on m2? I checked out the feature matrix. As I understand the CPU is doing the work currently and the GPU is unsupported, which leads to quite a bit of battery consumption. Very excited to try it nonetheless.

The m2 is a great piece of kit, I never realized how disruptive heat, vibration, and fan noise was until they were gone. I'm actively trying to put together a fanless desktop similar to the openbsd fanless desktop that is posted here from time to time. https://jcs.org/2021/07/19/desktop

Yep. It supports several "integrations" [0], but I typically just send notifications (to my mobile devices) from shell and Python scripts running on my machines -- they even have examples on their front page.

It supports acknowledgements (for "emergency" messages, at least) but I'm not sure about arbitrary "responses" (although you can include clickable links in the notifications).

Pushover's awesome -- and made by @jcs [1] who, among other things, works on OpenBSD.

--

[0]: https://pushover.net/apps

[1]: https://jcs.org/

I was thinking of doing something similar. But I was thinking of starting on a virtual machine or shell account before trying to install on real hardware. I don't know much about OpenBSD but my guess is that finding a laptop that runs OpenBSD flawlessly is not easy. So odds are you're going to be spending a lot of time troubleshooting and debugging. If that's ok with you, then that's great.

ThinkPads might be your best bet. Someone here has cataloged their experience with OpenBSD on laptops: https://jcs.org/openbsd-laptops