On Tue, 7 Jun 2011 15:56:44 +0200 Benjamin Nadland wrote: > I got a cheap VPS without out-of-band access (only ssh or similar) > and wanted to install OpenBSD on it. > > According to the archives yaifo would be an option in this case, > but the last version seems to be a year old and doesn't compile for me > (with 4.8-release). The yaifo mailing list seems discontinued aswell. > There is a 4.9 version of yaifo in cvs. The ramdisk kernel works but the .fs installer built but failed at boot for me, but you could give it a try on a test system, though I'm not sure that's even safe, the .fs seemed to work on my test system when using OpenBSDs dd but not debians dd and on my server it failed with OpenBSDs install cd too, weird!! The yaifo .rd kernel always worked.
> Another idea would be to make a local install and dd it directly to the > remote hardisk via a rescue system. > Yep, I hope you've got decent upload bandwidth though. Alternatively you could make a minimal install image with ssh, like yaifo, but a few more files for ssh etc. and then download the rest onto the server afterwards or add the yaifo.rd set to boot assuming the so far unexplained yaifo.fs problem doesn't hit, I don't see how it could but it is unexplained. You could also ask someone at the host to whack openbsd on and give you the pass so you can ssh in and boot yaifo.rd or build up the system via http from there.
