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Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

I found out that http://openbsd.org is not the same as http://www.openbsd.org (one is much lower bandwidth) and apparently it's intentional that one doesn't redirect to the other. And that's not even to mention the website not using a static generator or CSS (despite http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/ actually being modern and good looking). From what I understand is the reason it's not changed is because it'd be too much work because it's duplicated everywhere, but they won't accept contributions to change it.

I love OpenBSD as a piece of software, but I don't understand it's developers or community at all.

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openbsd.org is a different machine than www.openbsd.org. Why are you using openbsd.org? Who gave you a link to it? Tell them to stop.

I think I'm getting a little glimpse of the community here

Yeah, god forbid people having actual tasks to do instead of micromanaging their online presence like a SF web monkey.

As if it's very hard to make a redirect to the www domain. It takes only a couple of minutes.

Takes a couple of seconds.

What you actually mean is to lazy to do their job properly.

Just like my last employer where I spent a lot of time finding the simple things the developers didn't do (but would cause havoc with Google if we let it launch in that state)

One more tiny glimpse of the community!

It's hard to fault someone for going to a base domain, especially when it's content is identical to the www domain.

I just went to AOL keyword OPENBSD. Or it's not 1998 anymore and it's just common sense to type domain.org instead of www.domain.org.

Why would anyone even have them be two separate machines with the same content?

> Why would anyone even have them be two separate machines with the same content?

They are in different locations. openbsd.org is updated first and in the same (physical) location as the CVS servers, build equipment, etc., and www.openbsd.org and the other mirrors are mirrors with much more bandwidth.

To be honest I've been using it for about 7 years and I didn't know that.

I'm not sure that matters either. It's not really a priority and I respect that.

No, and being able to download all the FAQs easily is cool but there are things where it actually impacts me. For instance, I have a netbook without a cdrom drive or floppy disk. So, to install OpenBSD on it, I had to first install OpenBSD onto another PC computer, and then run makeboot and such on my USB drive and copy over the ramdisk.

Apparently the cited excuse for why they don't support USB bootable media is because it's hard because some computers only support floppy emulator or don't support it, and there are many bugs in USB boot for older BIOS.. But that doesn't keep every other operating system of this day and age supporting it

Yeah I do the same with the USB stick as its easier than CD media. I have a vbox VM ready to roll for such occasions.

I have had numerous problems on older Dell/HP machines with USB booting anything so it's reasonable. I buy the official media even though I rarely use it.

You can cut out one step by directly installing OpenBSD on the USB drive, and then when you boot on the target machine enter "bsd.rd" at the boot prompt.

I ran into this problem as well at first. The issue is easily overcome as described at the following URL.

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#noflopcd

Can this easily be done from any Linux distribution? AFAIK it can not, instead they waste resources creating USB installs and images.

> Can this easily be done from any Linux distribution?

Let's see...

> Network boot, using PXE (i386 or amd64) or diskless(8) (other platforms).

Red Hat and Fedora had this for ages. Also the installa media can be on a FTP, HTTP or NFS server.

> External USB CD-ROM or USB floppy, if your machine can boot from one.

This should work with most Linux distributions, too.

> USB Flash disk or hard disk

The same.

> Worst case, if none of the above is suitable, you can usually pull the disk out of the target system, use suitable adapters to install it in a "normal" computer, install OpenBSD, then replace the disk back in the target system.

Again this should be possible with most Linux distributions.

Now does OpenBSD have an automated installer?

> Now does OpenBSD have an automated installer?

Yes. You can use expect with /install easily and you can simply add your own local "site set" tgz which can be hosted on a local HTTP/FTP server to apply any local customisations.

However, if you're provisioning lots of machines, it's very easy just to "restore" filesystems off a bootable USB stick, mount them, set the hostname then tell ansible/puppet to do the rest. Don't need kickstart or any of that crap.

Personally though I'd just netboot lots of systems off PXE/TFTP, NFS mount all filesystems and have local swap disk only. I used to do that with Sun systems. We had 50 SPARCstation 5's booting off a SPARCserver 1000E on Solaris and it worked nicely. OpenBSD works pretty much the same. Linux is a piece of crap to netboot.

Plenty of ways to skin that cat.

Do you need to modify the install media in order to use expect? I'd like to read more about the process.

You can netboot Linux. Knoppix [1] offers Terminal Server which configures DHCP, TFTP and NFS so that you can boot Knoppix from the local network.

[1] http://www.knoppix.org/

Yes you do but you usually netboot to do large installations so this is just a case of adding a new root device with some extra tools on it on your netboot server.

There is an official solution in -current that involves DHCP but I don't know the details.

That can't be true. I used to run OpenBSD on a netbook and I'm pretty you can just dd the cdrom image onto a usb stick and boot that.

If you use GRUB, try copying bsd.rd to /boot, and running kopenbsd bsd.rd - it's really neat, no external media necessary!

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