subject:"Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost"

Re: SUMMARY: Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost

2014-04-16 Thread Norman Gray

Moss, hello.

On 2014 Apr 14, at 08:05, Maurice McCarthy m...@mythic-beasts.com wrote:

 Though I've only been using OpenBSD for about a year and, from reading your 
 posts, I'm clearly no where as competent as yourself, may I ask if you have 
 downloaded the necessary firmware for the athn ethernet card?

Ah, an interesting point.

No, I didn't download any firmware for the card -- it Just Worked.  If, as you 
suggest, this is to some extent unexpected, it's possibly explained by the 
machine having had Windows on it before: it _might_ be (I'm not sure I've 
necessarily convinced myself of the logic here) that this had ensured there 
were up-to-date drivers, in a way that wouldn't have been true if I'd installed 
OpenBSD onto the 'raw' machine.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

Re: SUMMARY: Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost

2014-04-16 Thread Maurice McCarthy


On 2014-04-16 09:57, Norman Gray wrote:

Moss, hello.

On 2014 Apr 14, at 08:05, Maurice McCarthy m...@mythic-beasts.com 
wrote:


Though I've only been using OpenBSD for about a year and, from 
reading your posts, I'm clearly no where as competent as yourself, may 
I ask if you have downloaded the necessary firmware for the athn 
ethernet card?


Ah, an interesting point.

No, I didn't download any firmware for the card -- it Just Worked.
If, as you suggest, this is to some extent unexpected, it's possibly
explained by the machine having had Windows on it before: it _might_
be (I'm not sure I've necessarily convinced myself of the logic here)
that this had ensured there were up-to-date drivers, in a way that
wouldn't have been true if I'd installed OpenBSD onto the 'raw'
machine.

Best wishes,

Norman



Ah so your ethernet is now working then! Yes? If so then good. I'd 
thought that one problem was that you could not connect to the internet 
using the netbook. The install script does download any firmware it 
finds necessary but, of course, if you needed to install ethernet 
firmware to do that then there is a self-defeating loop.  Maybe your 
Macbook has the same card?


Moss

Re: SUMMARY: Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost

2014-04-16 Thread Norman Gray

Moss, hello.

On 2014 Apr 16, at 14:17, Maurice McCarthy m...@sphinx.mythic-beasts.com 
wrote:

 Ah so your ethernet is now working then! Yes? If so then good. I'd thought 
 that one problem was that you could not connect to the internet using the 
 netbook. The install script does download any firmware it finds necessary 
 but, of course, if you needed to install ethernet firmware to do that then 
 there is a self-defeating loop.  Maybe your Macbook has the same card?

I was having difficulty connecting initially, because of the choice/lack of 
drivers on the floppy5x.fs images (if I recall correctly).  Booting the install 
CD on the MacMini meant that I was able to create a bootable flash disk with a 
full install, which, in particular, did have drivers enough to support the 
ethernet interface at least.  At that point, I didn't need a network at all, 
because the flash drive had the install sets on it, too, but it was necessary 
for installing packages later.

I believe that this netbook's wireless interface is incompletely supported by 
OpenBSD, but I've deliberately left that unconfigured in any case. I want this 
to be 'the secure laptop', so if the ethernet cable's not plugged in, then I 
can be confident it's not on a network at all.  I had vague plans to install it 
completely air-gapped, but that's more trouble than it's worth in my situation 
-- that would be for drill rather than need.

I remember noticing that the MacMini seemed to have the same ethernet card 
manufacturer as the netbook, but that wasn't my principal concern at that 
point, so I can't be sure.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

Re: SUMMARY: Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost

2014-04-14 Thread Maurice McCarthy

Norman, 

Though I've only been using OpenBSD for about a year and, from reading your 
posts, I'm clearly no where as competent as yourself, may I ask if you have 
downloaded the necessary firmware for the athn ethernet card?

I don't think the OpenBSD license call allow it in the core install. 
http://firmware.openbsd.org

Good Luck
Moss

Re: SUMMARY: Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost

2014-04-14 Thread Maurice McCarthy

PS

When the firmware is installed try 

# sh /etc/netstart

SUMMARY: Install 5.4 onto netbook... almost

2014-04-12 Thread Norman Gray

Greetings, all.

On 2014 Apr 6, at 18:09, Norman Gray nor...@astro.gla.ac.uk wrote:

I'm trying to install the released OpenBSD 5.4 onto a old-ish netbook
without an optical drive. I thought I could do this via
install54.iso; I can see where I need to get to, and can almost get
there, but I can't find the last step.

Thanks, everyone, for your various strands of advice.

In the end, I installed 5.4 onto the netbook by booting a Mac Mini
(the only optical drive I have available) from a burned install54.iso
image, using that to install OpenBSD onto a flash drive, and then copy
the install sets onto the flash drive, and then booting the netbook
from the flash drive. This specific route was first suggested, in
that particular form, by Brett Mahar, but there a fair bit of overlap
between the various suggestions, and I've learned a lot. For your
edification and delight, I've included the dmesg output below (and
also sent it to dm...@openbsd.org, of course).

This route does allow the install to happen without the netbook ever
being connected to a network. But when it comes time to add other
packages atop the base, it'd clearly be possible, but a pain in the
neck, to do that without a network.

I used 5.4 rather than 5.5-current, because when it came to add
packages it turned out that (if I'm reading the runes correctly) the
'python' package within 5.5-current requires /usr/lib/libssl.so.20.0,
but 5.5-current installs /usr/lib/libssl.so.21.0.

I did try installing OpenBSD into a Virtualbox instance hosted on OS X
(as Martin Brandenburg suggested). That mostly worked, but I seemed
unable to mount the flash drive on the virtual machine, even after
being sure (as Martin noted) to eject the device from the OS X side
beforehand. I didn't investigate where the problem really was.
Again: close, but not quite, and I moved on to booting the Mini from
the CD.

Below are more detailed instructions (aka brain-dump), for the benefit
of anyone going the same route.

Boot the Mac Mini (or whatever) from the install CD, with the flash
drive in place. The install process will let you select the flash
drive as a target. After that's finished:

# mkdir -p /mnt/5.4/i386
# cd /mnt/5.4/i386
# ftp http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/OpenBSD/5.4/i386/SHA256
...and so on, including each of the INSTALL.i386, bsd* and *.tgz files
# halt

(or whatever mirror you prefer). If you do this right after
installing from the CD, the network is in place, and the flash drive
mounted. If (as a result of more faffing around) the network isn't up
or the drive isn't mounted, then you might need one or more of

# ifconfig # find your ethernet interface
# dhclient interface-name

To mount the flash drive:

# sysctl hw.disknames # show available disks
# disklabel sd0 # show the partitions on device sd0
# mount /dev/sd0a /mnt # mount partition 'a' onto /mnt

Then put the flash drive into the netbook, and boot it with

boot b hd0a:/bsd.rd

This again boots to the install script, which lets you install onto
the netbook's hard drive (finally!).

Gotcha: even if you don't plan to use X on the target machine (I
imagine it would be a fairly unpleasant experience), you _do_ need to
select and install at least xbase54, xetc54 and xshare54 (so you might
as well just install the lot!). This is because ports and packages
aren't tested in the no-X configuration, and at least one of the ports
I wanted to install did indeed fail to build until I went round the
whole cycle again and included them in the install onto the flash drive.

I also installed the OS onto an encrypted filesystem (so that there
isn't necessarily a problem if this machine gets lost or stolen).

There are very good instructions for doing this at
http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/fde. Useful things to know:

1. # sysctl hw.disknames # shows the available disks; sd0 is my hard disk

2. I configured a swap of 3MB (which is a round number slightly
larger than the amount that the automatic layout decided to give
to it).

3. With the devices on this hardware, I had to use
# bioctl -c C -l /dev/sd0a softraid0
This reports the crypto device being sd2.

Back to the installer and, as suggested, use the Whole of the crypto
device (so sd2 in my case), and create a custom layout with everything
in partition a.

Added '/dev/sd0b none swap sw' to the end of the fstab

So...

Thanks again to jordon, Tomas, Martin, Stuart, Moss, Brett and Jan
(and of course a modest number of EUR to the Foundation).

Best wishes,

Norman

dmesg:

OpenBSD 5.4 (GENERIC.MP) #44: Tue Jul 30 12:13:32 MDT 2013
dera...@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC.MP
cpu0: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz (GenuineIntel 686-class) 1.60 GHz
cpu0:
FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,DTES64,MWAIT,DS-CPL,EST,TM2,SSSE3,xTPR,PDCM,MOVBE,LAHF,PERF
real mem =

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