25 Sep 2010, 6:56pm

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10 comments

flashrd

flashrd 20120826 is ready for OpenBSD 5.0, 5.1, 5.2

flashrd is now on github: Source Repository, Wiki, and Issue Tracker

The earlier releases this year fix operation on amd64. This release adds flexibility and ease of configuration with root disk auto-detection and onetime.tgz config file overwriting (for upgrades).

OpenBSD 5.2 improves support for various devices, increases IPsec and L2TP compatibility, makes MPLS more robust and increases speed of certain operations.

The main flashrd web site is here: http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/

Use this area for discussion about flashrd

I’ve started using flashrd for 4.8 and now I am wondering how to efficiently upgrade to 4.9. Ideally, I’d like to do it by replacing the kernel /flash/bsd and storing new image to /flash/new/openbsd.vnd and rebooting. Copying openbsd.vnd from soekris box running 4.8 to other OpenBSD system and mounting the slices went fine but the untarring from base49.tgz failed because I reached the capacity of the /usr slice in the openbsd.vnd image.

the FAQ lists some simple upgrade methods, get openbsd.vnd from a 4.9 image and it would be fairly easy

you have to configure the kernel image for sd0 if you don’t use wd0 as your default disk device

What is the default operation of the syslog daemon on flashrd? Does it differ from the standard OpenBSD configuration?

Russell

From the point of view of syslogd, nothing should be different at all. However, /var is writeable in the default flashrd setup but it’s also transient, unless you save it on shutdown.

I think I asked about this before but cannot find an answer. My openbsd.vnd has cca 273 MB and the /usr slice within is running out of space, had to exclude man pages for the system to fit. How to resize/grow it ? The underlying storage has enough space left.

17 Feb 2012, 11:47am
by nickbeee


@vlad – I edited the flashrd script. Look for the lines

export vnddirs="root bin etc sbin usr" # must match vnddirs= in stand/rc and fstab
#export vndsize="102400 auto 102400 auto auto"

which show the mappings between the dirs and the vndsize. Change the appropriate parameter in vndsize. For mine I made a 1GB /usr

export vndsize="102400 auto 102400 auto 2097152" # 1GB /usr partition tweak

I’ve not investigated how flashrd creates the auto sizes yet though.

Thanks for this package Chris. Been playing around with OpenBSD for a while now and this will be useful for a diskless ipv6 router project.
I managed to install to CF using my Mac OSX 10.6 – firstly I built flashrd in a OpenBSD 5.0 Virtual Box VM then exported the image back to the Mac via sftp (OpenBSD VM wouldn’t recognise my USB cardreader).

Under OSX I put the CF in an external USB cardreader where it appears as /dev/disk1.

macbookpro:flashrd nickb$ mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s1 on /Volumes/FLASHRD (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

I then unmounted the disk from the OSX filesystem -

macbookpro:flashrd nickb$ diskutil unmount /Volumes/FLASHRD
Volume FLASHRD on disk1s1 unmounted

Finally I wrote the image file to the flash card using dd -

macbookpro:flashrd nickb$ sudo dd if=flashimg.i386-20120126 of=/dev/disk1 bs=64

Finally I installed the CF card using a CF to 3.5IDE adapter bought on Ebay.

Correction to the above – dd command should end with

BS=64k

(WP doesn’t allow me to preview before submitting :cry:

Looks like you are hitting a bug in PF. Why do you have two “persist” tables, one const and the other not? Perhaps the parser shouldn’t be allowing this.

To answer your original question, how do you debug this further, you’ll have to make /var a persistent dir that you keep in read/write status. Set it up under vnddirs and mark it rw in your fstab.Then you should get normal crash dumps.

 

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