On Sat, 25 Oct 2025 at 17:41, <[email protected]> wrote: > is there an equivalent of the Depenguinator tool for OpenBSD, which > allows installing the system remotely using only SSH access to the > server? Something that is production-ready and can create an encrypted > install?
I'm not aware of anything prebuilt to do this, but it is possible to take the same approach and overwrite the disk with installation media, for example [1] or [2] outline some approaches. The second approach where a Linux tmpfs is used is slightly more "production-ready" as it avoids one potential for the running Linux system to conflict with the install, but I wouldn't call any production-ready, the better approach is to upload a custom image, which most providers do support (and if you want something production ready it feels like using something the provider isn't supporting isn't going to end well, just use a provider that supports OpenBSD to start with). If you do really want to do this, I've done something like this for testing... (based on those two blog posts): mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G none /tmp cd /tmp [on a remote system:] scp install77-serial.img ubuntu@remote:/tmp [busybox-static is a Linux static busybox binary to reduce dependency on the running system.] scp busybox-static ubuntu@remote:/tmp [back on the VM; force the running system disk to be read-only, using Linux sysrq "u", avoids the potential for the running system to overwrite the image being written to disk.] sync echo u > /proc/sysrq-trigger exec /tmp/busybox-static sh # now running an sh off tmpfs too dd if=install77-serial.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M That install77-serial.img image is modified to use serial per [2], but it's also possible to modify bsd.rd and use autoinstall(8), which could setup an encrypted install, or configure install.site(5). [1]: https://gduale.com/posts/openbsd-on-a-scaleway-vm/ [2]: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=162962869305286&w=2 and https://anirudh.fi/openbsd-oci
