Hi Gustavo.
Sorry to know that you have these problems with your soekris.
It is certainly an unusual scenario. I have a net4801 here too
and pxebooting it is very easy and... very fast.
I would suggest looking for the throughput problem on the network
itself. Your network does not look congested, it seems worse.
Are you using home-made cables? RJ-45 cables follow two color
standards (T568A and T568B). Perhaps your cable does not follow
either T568A or T568B and signals are not following the right
twisted pairs (there are some inductive effects provoked by the
electromagnetic fields on the internal cable pairs that can be
fixed by twisting them... ok, it is a classical electrodynamics
issue, I just want to say using the wrong color scheme, no color
scheme at all, can be a nightmare on current networks).
Can you, please, check that the cable is working fine? Is the FTP
server able to transfer files quickly to other computers on the
network?
As I said, I did my first installation of OpenBSD on a soekris
using pxeboot. It worked fine and was even faster than a CD-ROM
install (ok, my CD-ROM drives here are not really fast ones!).
As my net4801 has both an internal IDE drive and a CF card,
I am now doing the installation of OpenBSD on a very different way.
I like fresh installs, not upgrades. I know that OpenBSD can be
easily upgraded, but I certainly prefer a clean install. To make
these installations simple on environments were FTP servers are
not available I made the CF on the net4801 bootable and copied
the sets to it (e.g., to a directory 4.0/i386). Just booting
from the CF ("boot 81" on the ComBIOS) starts the installation
program.
If you are really swamped with this problem, you can make a
CF bootable and copy the installation sets to it. I did just
the reverse, as I was able to pxeboot (and install) OpenBSD
on the internal HDD, I made the "bootable CF" from the OS
installed on the soekris itself. I certainly prefer upgrading
the sets and kernels on the CF before installing a new release
on the soekris.
In short:
1. you must really fix the throughput problem, do not know why
it happens but it is certainly an unusual scenario. Even if
you are able to install OpenBSD on it, you will NOT want
a 4 KB/s throughput!
2. In the worst scenario, you can move the CF to another
computer and install the OS on it. Beware, device names
will probably change when moving the CF to the soekris
again. If you want to install OpenBSD on the internal IDE
HDD, you can make a "CD-ROM like" CF and boot from it,
as I did.
A last advice, if you want to install OpenBSD on the internal HDD,
you will probably like to disable pciide* on the User Kernel Config
prompt before making the filesystems on the 2.5" HDD. Don't worry,
it is a temporary change, you will not lose performance once the
operating system is installed.
(any chance this annoying problem being fixed in a future OpenBSD
release or it is a hardware issue?)
Cheers,
Igor.
