How to Install Blocky on OpenBSD

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure blocky">Blocky on OpenBSD.

Prerequisites

You will need the following:

• OpenBSD installed on your system
• Root access to the system
• Basic knowledge of using a terminal

Steps

Step 1: Install Required Packages

First, we need to install the required packages on OpenBSD. We will use the built-in package manager pkg_add to install the following packages:

pkg_add go git

Step 2: Download and Compile Blocky

Next, we will download and compile Blocky from the official GitHub repository. We will use the git command to clone the repository and the go build command to compile Blocky.

git clone https://github.com/0xERR0R/blocky.git
cd blocky
go build

Step 3: Configure Blocky

Now that we have compiled Blocky, we need to configure it. To do this, we will create a configuration file called blocky.yaml.

touch blocky.yaml

Open the blocky.yaml file using your favorite text editor and add the following configuration:

listen: ":53"
upstream:
  - https://1.1.1.1/dns-query
  - https://1.0.0.1/dns-query
cache:
  type: memory

The above configuration tells Blocky to listen on port 53 and use Cloudflare DNS as its upstream resolver. It also enables the caching feature using memory.

Step 4: Start Blocky

We are now ready to start Blocky. To do this, run the following command:

./blocky -c ./blocky.yaml

Blocky should now be running and listening on port 53. You can confirm this by trying to resolve any domain name using dig command.

dig google.com @127.0.0.1

You should see the DNS resolution output.

Step 5: Setup Systemd Service (Optional)

If you want to run Blocky as a service, you can create a Systemd service unit file. Create a new file /etc/systemd/system/blocky.service:

touch /etc/systemd/system/blocky.service

Open the blocky.service file using your favorite text editor and add the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Blocky DNS Proxy

[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/blocky -c /path/to/blocky.yaml

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Replace /path/to/blocky and /path/to/blocky.yaml with the actual path of the blocky binary and its configuration file. Then, enable and start the Blocky service:

sudo systemctl enable blocky.service
sudo systemctl start blocky.service

Blocky should now be running as a service, and it will start automatically at boot time.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to install and configure Blocky on OpenBSD. Blocky is a powerful DNS proxy server that can help you improve your online privacy and security.

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