I’ve blogged about setting up a WireGuard VPN server earlier this year. It’s been running well since, but I needed to take care of some overdue maintenance tasks. Trying to log into the server this morning and I am greeted with “no route to host”. Eh? A quick check on my Vultr UI showed that the VPS had trouble booting. The error suggests a corrupted boot drive. Oops.

Guess what the maintenance task I was looking at was? Creating an Ansible script so I’d be able to stand up the server from scratch in case something like this happened. And yes, the irony of being the guy who regularly preaches to his clients about the need for backups doesn’t quite escape me.

Anyway, at least this gives me an excuse to set up my WireGuard server on OpenBSD. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while so now I have the perfect excuse for it. I realise that OpenBSD can only use the user space daemon for WireGuard rather than the in-kernel version Linux uses. This is generally good enough for my use case as I’m only looking for added security when I’m on public WiFi and don’t need really high performance.

And yes, this time I’m going to create the Ansible script either as part of the build or directly after :).