Life with an offline laptop

• Author: Solène
• Date: 23 August 2019
• Tags: openbsd life disconnected

NILHello, this is a long time I want to work on a special project using an

offline device and work on it.

I started using computers before my parents had an internet access and

I was enjoying it. Would it still be the case if I was using a laptop

with no internet access?

When I think about an offline laptop, I immediately think I will miss

IRC, mails, file synchronization, Mastodon and remote ssh to my servers.

But do I really need it all the time?

As I started thinking about preparing an old laptop for the experiment,

differents ideas with theirs pros and cons came to my mind.

Over the years, I produced digital data and I can not deny this. I

don't need all of them but I still want some (some music, my texts,

some of my programs). How would I synchronize data from the offline

system to my main system (which has replicated backups and such).

At first I was thinking about using a serial line over the two

laptops to synchronize files, but both laptop lacks serial ports and

buying gears for that would cost too much for its purpose.

I ended thinking that using an IP network is fine, if I connect for a

specific purpose. This extended a bit further because I also need to

install packages, and using an usb memory stick from another computer

to get packages and allow the offline system to use it is tedious

and ineffective (downloading packages and correct dependencies is a

hard task on OpenBSD in the case you only want the files). I also

came across a really specific problem, my offline device is an old

Apple PowerPC laptop being big-endian and amd64 is little-endian, while

this does not seem particularly a problem, OpenBSD filesystem is

dependent of endianness, and I could not share an usb memory device

using FFS because of this, alternatives are fat, ntfs or ext2 so it is a

dead end.

Finally, using the super slow wireless network adapter from that

offline laptop allows me to connect only when I need for a few file

transfers. I am using the system firewall pf to limit access to outside.

In my pf.conf, I only have rules for DNS, NTP servers, my remote server,

OpenBSD mirror for packages and my other laptop on the lan. I only

enable wifi if I need to push an article to my blog or if I need to

pull a bit more music from my laptop.

This is not entirely offline then, because I can get access to the

internet at any time, but it helps me keeping the device offline.

There is no modern web browser on powerpc, I restricted packages to

the minimum.

So far, when using this laptop, there is no other distraction than the

stuff I do myself.

At the time I write this post, I only use xterm and tmux, with moc as a

music player (the audio system of the iBook G4 is surprisingly good!),

writing this text with ed and a 72 long char prompt in order to wrap

words correctly manually (I already talked about that trick!).

As my laptop has a short battery life, roughly two hours, this also

helps having "sessions" of a reasonable duration. (Yes, I can still

plug the laptop somewhere).

I did not use this laptop a lot so far, I only started the experiment

a few days ago, I will write about this sometimes.

I plan to work on my gopher space to add new content only available

there :)