OpenBSD on Digital Ocean

http://www.tubsta.com/2015/04/openbsd-on-digital-ocean/

by jorgecastillo • 11 years ago

105 22 11 years ago

tubsta.com

jlgaddis• 11 years ago

Okay, I know someone here is trying this... success or failure?

wtn• 11 years ago

I used these instructions a few weeks ago and they worked. You will need to download miniroot58.fs (not miniroot57.fs).

eloy• 11 years ago

True indeed, the article was written a week before the release of 5.8...

dougb• 11 years ago

I got it installed, but there were problems. A lot of programs fail with SIGILL, illegal instruction. OpenSSL fails in OPENSSL_ia32_cpuid() Anybody get past this ?

geographomics• 11 years ago

I also get coredumps from openssl, ssh-keygen, and smtpctl on the first boot. The common factor for all of these is the XGETBV instruction - unfortunately it looks like DigitalOcean's setup of KVM doesn't support it.

This was just on amd64 though - installing OpenBSD for i386 seems to work okay, apart from sometimes hanging on boot (not sure why this is).

api• 11 years ago

This also probably works on other cloud providers if they support a virtualization layer that OpenBSD will work with. I've heard of successes here too: https://vultr.com/

Just be sure you use miniroot58.fs -- OpenBSD 5.8 wasn't released when this was written.

chrismsnz• 11 years ago

5.8 is still currently in development/snapshot - not for amateur users.

5.7 is the latest official release. 5.8 is due on Nov 1.

wooger2• 11 years ago

Worth noting though that if you use the release, you get no updates, security or otherwise, till the next release in 6 months.

And using -stable (release + patches) is a hassle of manually applying patches and re-compiling - no binary updates are available.

If running snapshots is not for amateurs, neither is running stable.

aaron_m04• 11 years ago

Vultr allows installing from ISO, so no need to shim. I can verify that OpenBSD 5.7-stable will run with no issues. One thing to watch out for is that outgoing TCP connections to port 25 are blocked until you ask them to open it up.

protomyth2• 11 years ago

"connections to port 25 are blocked until you ask them to open it up"

Thanks for that info, that seems like a fairly reasonable policy.

walterbell• 11 years ago

What is the technical blocker to installing OpenBSD without a FreeBSD shim, e.g. is there incompatible code in the OpenBSD installer?

TheDong• 11 years ago

On digital ocean you get a very limited set of boot options. You can't provide them your own installer, boot image, kernel, iso, or any of that jazz.

You also don't get a pre-boot console.

For linux, they don't even let you provide your own kernel in userland or the like, so there's actually no way to install a BSD from a linux shim on DO.

FreeBSD on DO is the only way to get an instance that is capable of booting anything non-linux, so it's necessary to start from freebsd.

Edit: It looks like the kernel limitation has been lifted for some linux instances too. See: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upda...

fxlv• 11 years ago

If yoy want to run your own kernel you can always use kexec (not ideal, but works): https://gist.github.com/cpuguy83/6143347

elchief• 11 years ago

Tangentially related at best...anybody here succeed doing PXE with virtualbox's tftp and openbsd? I get an unhelpful error msg.

laumars• 11 years ago

I have done a few bits with PXE booting inc OpenBSD, so I might be able to help if you can provide more detail. (I do feel your pain as PXE error messages are largely pretty vague, but not posting the error message is even less helpful).

voltagex_• 11 years ago

VirtualBox's PXE implementation is... interesting. I know it sucks, but try using a CD image of iPXE.

OpenBSD on Digital Ocean

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