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Now that OpenBSD 5.0 was out, I figured I would use the scratch disk space on the fourth disk (hd3 in Grub parlance) installed in crimson.
The fourth partition (FreeBSD slice 4) was 140GB in size and unused.
Seemed like a good place to experiment with an OpenBSD install. I
downloaded install50.iso, which contains all the files
needed for a non-network install,
from a local
mirror and burnt it to a CD.
The install process is pretty simple. When it came to deciding
where to install OpenBSD, I chose to edit the partition table
on wd3, making partition 3 (using zero index base) as
OpenBSD (partition id 166 or x'A6'). I took the auto filesystem
layout option and filesets installed just fine. Rebooted at
successful completion.
Crimson was booted via Grub, so I interactively booted into the new OpenBSD install using:
root (hd3,4,a) makeactive chainloader +1
The OpenBSD bootloader started, but...
Loading.... probing: pc0 com0 com1 apm mem[638K 2543M a20=on] disk: hd0+* hd1+* hd2* hd3* >> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 3.17 open(hd3a:/etc/boot.conf): Invalid argument boot> booting hd3a:/bsd: open hd3a:/bsd: invalid argument failed(22). will try /bsd booting hd3a:/bsd: open hd3a:/bsd: invalid argument failed(22). will try /bsd booting hd3a:/bsd: open hd3a:/bsd: invalid argument failed(22). will try /bsd Turning timeout off.
Hmm... Not what I was expecting. After some googling on the error message, it appeared that OpenBSD did not support booting from outside the first 1024 cylinders. I didn't think operating systems had that problem any more. I wasn't going to move the partitions around to put the OpenBSD partition within the first 1024 cylinders, so I decided to install OpenIndiana on the scratch space instead. The install went without a hitch.
A little while later, I decided to try OpenBSD again, this time
re-partitioning hd2, a 160GB drive, so that I could use a partition
at the beginning of the disk. At present it was entirely given over
to FreeBSD, but there wasn't much data, so it was easy to back up
and restore. I used the FreeBSD fdisk program to define two
partitions, the first 30GB for OpenBSD, the remainder of disk space
in the second partition for FreeBSD disk storage.
I went through the install process again. This time the boot process recognised the existing OpenBSD partition and gave me the option to use it. Nice. Everything went smoothly and I confidently rebooted. But it wouldn't - same error messages as before. Clearly the problem had nothing to do with a 1024 cylinder limit.
The disk setup appeared to fulfill all the pre-requisites for OpenBSD disks: the right signature, no overlapping partitions, OpenBSD partition marked as active:
Disk: wd2 geometry: 19457/255/63 [312581808 Sectors]
Offset: 0 Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending LBA Info:
#: id C H S - C H S [ start: size ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*0: A6 0 1 1 - 3916 59 63 [ 63: 62914257 ] OpenBSD
1: A5 3916 60 1 - 19457 64 63 [ 62914320: 249666480 ] FreeBSD
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0: 0 ] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0: 0 ] unused
I tried a variety of ways to redo the partitioning, using the
OpenBSD fdisk during the boot process, but nothing made any
difference. For some reason, the boot process refused to believe an
OpenBSD partition existed (that little asterisk after hd2 is the
clue).
Finally, I decided to zero out the MBR, since I had heard this was
occasionally required to fix weird behaviour such as this. I
used dd from FreeBSD:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad2 bs=512 count=1
I performed yet another reinstall. Fdisk told me the disk
had an invalid MBR (as expected). I used the reinit command to
obtain a clean in-memory MBR and then edited it back to the
partition setup shown above. Ok, rebooted. The first thing I
noticed was the the asterisk after hd2 had disappeared; looking
good. And it booted perfectly.
Actually much, much later. After an install of OpenBSD 5.8 on the system, over the top of DragonflyBSD, the same issue occured. This time I didn't want to zero out the MBR of hd2, as there were other partitions on the disk I didn't want to clobber. Comparing the probe messages with other, successfully booting OpenBSd instances, I noticed that all the good ones showed the probed hard drives with a trailing +.
Loading.... probing: pc0 com0 com1 apm mem[638K 2543M a20=on] disk: hd0+
The + indicates that the BIOS reports the drive supports LBA. In the BIOS of this machine all the drives were set to AUTO, so why why did hd2 not show a +? No idea, but I could force LBA mode on in the BIOS. On reboot, the OpenBSD partition was recognised. If I get some time, I might dig around in the code to see if I can find out what is going on.
Now I had a bootable OpenBSD system, I could begin the process of setting it up. First impressions where that OpenBSD was pretty lean compared to FreeBSD. Compare the OpenBSD disk usage to FreeBSD:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd2a 1005M 39.5M 915M 4% / /dev/wd2l 11.8G 1.3G 9.9G 12% /home /dev/wd2d 1.9G 6.0K 1.8G 0% /tmp /dev/wd2f 2.0G 365M 1.5G 19% /usr /dev/wd2g 1005M 166M 789M 17% /usr/X11R6 /dev/wd2h 4.2G 417M 3.6G 10% /usr/local /dev/wd2k 2.0G 2.0K 1.9G 0% /usr/obj /dev/wd2j 1.4G 801M 595M 57% /usr/src /dev/wd2e 3.0G 6.5M 2.9G 0% /var
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ad0s1a 989M 379M 531M 42% / devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev /dev/ad0s1g 19G 2.2G 16G 12% /home /dev/ad0s1h 44G 2.6G 38G 7% /rep /dev/ad0s1e 496M 1.5M 455M 0% /tmp /dev/ad0s1d 5.8G 3.2G 2.2G 59% /usr /dev/ad0s1f 989M 32M 878M 4% /var procfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /proc devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /var/named/dev
Admittedly, the FreeBSD root partition has two kernels on it, but even so, the disparity in disk usage between the two OS's is striking. It's a bit like being back in FreeBSD 4.11.
Packages are added using the pkg_add command. One has to
specify a mirror as the download target, either on the command line
or via the PKG_PATH environment variable. I
set PKG_PATH to:
PKG_PATH=http://www.mirrorservice.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.0/packages/i386/
pkg_add supports an -i switch, which prompts you
to choose between packages if there is an ambiguity in the
name. This was a nice feature, which I used when installing the
following packages:
python py-libxml emacs rsync gmake chromium
which left me with this lot installed:
ORBit2-2.14.19p0 high-performance CORBA Object Request Broker atk-2.0.1 accessibility toolkit used by gtk+ bzip2-1.0.6 block-sorting file compressor, unencumbered cairo-1.10.2p1 vector graphics library chromium-12.0.742.122 Chromium browser cups-1.4.7p0 Common Unix Printing System dbus-1.4.12v0 message bus system dbus-glib-0.94v0 glib bindings for dbus message system desktop-file-utils-0.18p0 utilities for dot.desktop entries emacs-23.3p2 GNU editor: extensible, customizable, self-documenting gamin-0.1.10p12 gamin file monitoring server gconf2-2.32.4 configuration database system for GNOME gdk-pixbuf-2.23.5 graphic library for GTK+2 gettext-0.18.1p0 GNU gettext glib2-2.28.8p1 general-purpose utility library gmake-3.82 GNU make gnome-icon-theme-2.30.3p3 base icon theme for GNOME gtk+2-2.24.5p0 multi-platform graphical toolkit gtk+2-cups-2.24.5 gtk+2 CUPS print backend hicolor-icon-theme-0.12p1 fallback theme of the icon theme specification jasper-1.900.1p1 reference implementation of JPEG-2000 jpeg-8c IJG's JPEG compression utilities libIDL-0.8.14 IDL parsing library libcroco-0.6.2p1 generic CSS parsing library for GNOME project libexecinfo-1.1p2 clone of backtrace facility found in the GNU libc libgamin-0.1.10p4 file and directory monitoring system libgcrypt-1.4.6p1 crypto library based on code used in GnuPG libgpg-error-1.10 error codes for GnuPG related software libiconv-1.13p2 character set conversion library libogg-1.2.2 Ogg bitstream library librsvg-2.34.0p2 SAX-based render library for SVG files libungif-4.1.4p1 tools and library routines for working with GIF images libusb-0.1.12p4 USB access library libvpx-0.9.6 Google VP8 video codec libxml-2.7.8p2 XML parsing library libxslt-1.1.26p2 XSLT C Library for GNOME nspr-4.8.7 Netscape Portable Runtime nss-3.12.9 libraries to support development of security-enabled apps pango-1.28.4p2 library for layout and rendering of text pcre-8.12p0 perl-compatible regular expression library png-1.5.4 library for manipulating PNG images py-libxml-2.7.8p2 Python bindings for libxml python-2.7.1p9 interpreted object-oriented programming language rsync-3.0.8p0 mirroring/synchronization over low bandwidth links shared-mime-info-0.90 shared mime database for desktops speex-1.2rc1p0 patent-free speech codec sqlite3-3.7.5 embedded SQL implementation tiff-3.9.5 tools and library routines for working with TIFF images xdg-utils-1.0.2p12 utilities to assist desktop integration tasks
OpenBSD includes apache (based on 1.3), which by default is chrooted
into /var/www. Since I need python for the websites, I
turned the default off by adding the following
to /etc/rc.conf.local:
# use -u to disable chroot, see httpd(8) httpd_flags="-u" # for normal use: "" (or "-DSSL" after reading ssl(8))
and edited the /var/www/conf/httd.conf file to use my
normal file locations.
OpenBSD uses the ksh (based on pdksh) as the
default shell, so to ensure that my web site Makefile scripts worked
properly, I had to explictly export the shell PWD environment
variable, otherwise it was not visible to gmake. The
.profile contains:
# $OpenBSD: dot.profile,v 1.4 2005/02/16 06:56:57 matthieu Exp $ # # sh/ksh initialization PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/ local/sbin:/usr/games:. export PATH HOME TERM ENV=./.kshrc; export ENV
while ~/.kshrc contains:
# Interactive ksh initialisation script: mpw # invoke standard ksh interactive shell initialisation . /etc/ksh.kshrc # set prompt PS1="[\u@\h:\w]$ " # use GNU make by preference alias make=gmake # export PWD for access by gmake for building web sites export PWD
Now I have a functioning web server, based on OpenBSD.
Another nice feature: in test building the btree library, warnings about unsafe functions are displayed:
/tmp//ccwkPynO.o(.text+0x61): In function `strsave': : warning: strcpy() is almost always misused, please use strlcpy() ./lib/libbt.a(butil.o)(.text+0x1d): In function `itostr': : warning: sprintf() is often misused, please use snprintf() cc -pedantic-errors -Wall -Wno-long-long -I./inc -DREADLINE -o kcp ./src-main/kcp.c -L./lib -lbt -lreadline -lcurses ./lib/libbt.a(btcrtr.o)(.text+0x1dc): In function `btcrtr': : warning: strcpy() is almost always misused, please use strlcpy() ./lib/libbt.a(butil.o)(.text+0x1d): In function `itostr': : warning: sprintf() is often misused, please use snprintf() cc -pedantic-errors -Wall -Wno-long-long -I./inc -DREADLINE -o bigt ./src-main/bigt.c -L./lib -lbt -lreadline -lcurses ./lib/libbt.a(btcrt.o)(.text+0xcb): In function `btcrt': : warning: strcpy() is almost always misused, please use strlcpy() /tmp//cckiblFP.o(.text+0x2b5): In function `main': : warning: sprintf() is often misused, please use snprintf() cc -pedantic-errors -Wall -Wno-long-long -I./inc -DREADLINE -o bigtdel ./src-main/bigtdel.c -L./lib -lbt -lreadline -lcurses ./lib/libbt.a(btopn.o)(.text+0xbf): In function `btopn': : warning: strcpy() is almost always misused, please use strlcpy() /tmp//cc6At5T1.o(.text+0x1f1): In function `main': : warning: sprintf() is often misused, please use snprintf()
A little bit of work to do before the next release, I think.
In order to run an NFS server on OpenBSD, the following lines need
to be added to /etc/rc.conf.local:
portmap=YES nfs_server=YES nfsd_flags="-tun 4"
The NFS exported file systems are, as usual, listed
in /etc/exports:
# $OpenBSD: exports,v 1.2 2002/05/31 08:15:44 pjanzen Exp $ # # NFS exports Database # See exports(5) for more information. Be very careful: misconfiguration # of this file can result in your filesystems being readable by the world. # NB export line needs newline at end or mountd won't start /home/mark -network=192.168.0.0 -mask=255.255.255.0
I tested the setup by starting the daemons manually, as specified in the FAQ:
# /usr/sbin/portmap # echo -n >/var/db/mountdtab # /sbin/mountd # /sbin/nfsd -tun 4
Yep, I could mount the exported filesystem on another machine.
However, when I rebooted, mountd and nfsd would
not start. This turned out to be caused by a missing newline
character on the single line with the exported filesystem
in /etc/exports. The rc_pre check
that mountd uses, validates that /etc/exports has
something useful in it by counting the non-comment lines by wc
-l. wc counts lines by counting newline characters,
so that's why mountd did not start.
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