OpenBSD Journal

Neat OpenBSD resources from Johan Fredin

Contributed by jose on from the tips-and-tools dept.

While looking around the net for more OpenBSD stuff, I can across Johan Fredin's OpenBSD site. Here he maintains tips and tricks, like i386 serial consoles (great for that old PC you have has a headless firewall), netbooting your Sparc, and even a script to look for new OpenBSD snapshots. His site and resources are here:

http://legonet.org/~griffin/openbsd/

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    the sparc netbooting document is totally incomplete and also labeled ``work in progress''.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      This is a fairly thorough walkthrough of setting up netbooting on sparc:
      http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~mhiltune/bsd/

      It is made for OpenBSD 2.9, but it is still very accurate for setting up 3.4... I've used it to help get 3.4 netbooting on a sparcstation myself.

  2. By RC () on

    If you have an x86 system running headless, you probably want serial port control a lot earlier on in the boot process.

    If you put "set tty com0" in your /etc/boot.conf, you will also have serial port control from the second the "boot>" prompt comes up, which is what you need when your system refuses to boot to multiuser mode for some reason (eg. fsck needs user intervention).

    Unfortunately, none of the x86 machines I've tried it on, are able to pass arguments to the "boot>" prompt. Instead, the system will freeze-up, and needs to be rebooted.

    So, on x86, you can't force the system to go to single-user mode, or to boot a different kernel, but if fsck throws you into single-user mode, you don't need to attach a monitor and keyboard just to type f-s-c-k.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Have you tried installboot(8)? Worked wonders for me in the past for when you want more control over a serial console on x86.

      Comments
      1. By RC () on

        I have used installboot before, but it had nothing to do with serial ports. You need to use it after restoring a system from a backup (to write the boot record to the hard drive).

        I have no idea how installboot would possibly help you control the boot process over a serial console. Perhaps you are confusing some other program with installboot?

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Sorry, my bad. I completely mis-understood you.

          Working 25 hours a day, 8 days a week doesn't help... ;-)

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