[Soekris] Best way to install openbsd

[Stuart Henderson]

On 2006/11/06 21:42, wkeen at blowthebridge.net wrote:
> can anyone reccomend a good way to install openbsd without too much work? 

Just do a standard install. USB-CF, PCMCIA-CF, IDE-CF, or pxeboot(8).
OpenBSD pxeboot is simple and adequately documented in the manpage. For
Soekris boards don't forget 'set tty com0' in /tftpboot/etc/boot.conf
or boot> prompt.

> I've got a 4801 and need openbsd with some utils (bind, openvpn, etc) to
> be installed, and i'd like all the normal things to be installed too like
> man pages, but worry about getting a ramdisk running as this 'll be my
> first time playing with ramdisks on openbsd.

You probably don't _need_ to worry about ramdisks unless you're writing
large files on a regular basis. Things like bind/openvpn/pf aren't really 
a problem (you might like to investigate syslogc if you want to have
openvpn logging turned up high enough for useful debugging but that's
not really likely to be a problem either).

I've got some EPIA boxes with cheap ~5 year-old 64MB CF cards writing
DNS zones pulled from a master server every half-hour and still work
(I dread to think what the motherboard capacitors look like though!).
Modern CF cards should handle more write/erase cycles than old ones.

The main benefit of mounting partitions read-only on this type of system
is avoiding fsck, if you think this may be useful there are various ways to
populate the ramdisks to cover RW requirements (mainly /dev and /var),
but on OpenBSD the builtin mount_mfs -P flag is just right for this.
You can specify it in /etc/fstab so the copy is done early in the boot
process. For a read-only root, notice the `mount -uw /' in /etc/rc.

> Any words of advice from anyone? - or a cf card image perhaps? - the cards
> i have are 512mb

Different "512mb" cards are often different sizes. DIY is usually the
easiest way. If you have to build a number of them, siteXX.tgz may save
work (and it's easier to change things for the next release than dd'ing
images across).