Aug 29th, 2007.	OpenBSD on a Q950

Sadly this box was "re-cycled" in the summer of 2006 as part of a general office cleanup instigated by my wife.

For a year or two this box ran a version of Squeak that ran a Swiki that served up my comments page. I had been running Linux 2.0.38 on it but I wanted to explore some features of WebDav since it is supported under Mac OS-X 10.1, let alone apply some security patches. However I found it was impossible to find a binary or to upgrade via source RPMs to a version of Apache that supported the current version of WebDav. But in my consideration about what to do I noted the fact that support for a Q950 was mostly there with OpenBSD 2.9. It seems the only thing lacking is keyboard support and pseudo-dma for SCSI (which is there for NetBSD 1.5.2).

So I switched, after all I have an FreeBSD box, some OS-X boxes (bsd), and three OpenBSD boxes (see the SE/30 info below).

This was going to be painless, I thought, but fate interrupted and I proceeded to trash my backups of the box (a long story). But let's look at the install (first let's tar up /home and scp somewhere). Really all I did was follow the mac68k installation instructions for OpenBSD. I did have some trouble getting the tar files off the CD, and I downloaded them from the FTP instead.

Since the machine had a 1GB drive it in with 1 partition for Linux, 1 for Mac OS-8.1 and 64MB for swap I took the easy way out and redefined the ext2fs as a BSD partition, did a newfs, and proceeded to install all the files to that partition using the mac installer, yes I should have multiple partitions but I wanted a quick migration. Installation of the software took a few hours.

After the installation I hooked up a serial cable between it and another mac (ok find another mac with a serial port, sigh). Reboot and up it comes, but problem I couldn't seem to get the logon prompt. Some fiddling enabled me to boot into single user mode which did allow me to use ZTerm to make sufficent changes to /etc to enable me to get the box onto the intranet. Mmm some problems with SCSI. This turned out to be an issue with the SCSI mode pages and some adjustements to the error recovery mode page 1 fixed things.

I had to change myname, mygate, hosts, resolve.conf, correct localtime, add hostname.s0 and make a password for root . Then I mounted the disk as r/w and booted back to multiuser mode and connected via the net. Then an adduser and some adjustments to sysctl.conf, syslog.conf , rc.securelevel, rc, and rc.conf. Now we have an new up todate apache server. Generate some ssh keys and scp some public keys around and the box is good. Ok don't forget to mount a current OPENBSD2_9 stable /usr/src and recomple the kernel and the world to ensure I don't have any security exposures.

For good measure I added the package ntp-4.0.99k23 (network time protocol) since I have a box that serves up the correct time in the intranet. Also as noted the clock drift is lousy but I've found that setting tickadj -t 16674 -a 50 seems to ensure time is kinda synced, but under real level load it will break down and required cron to do ntpdate from time to time. Under Linux this software would cause a kernel panic so I was one step ahead now.

For Squeak I visited the ports tree and found a 3.0pre2 port. This made the package squeak-3.0.pre2 and installed gettext-0.10.36, and gmake-3.79.1. It took a few hours to run, but run it did.

I then downloaded and installed Comanche to replace the old Swiki software and went to restore my tar of Linxu2.0.38/home which was where? where? Ok I found out an interesting thing about scp, if you don't get the target name quite right then you don't get the file to where you want it, if you fail to confirm that by cross checking then you are screwed. Sigh the backup backup was old, very old, this happens to be the only box I've got that didn't quite get into an offsite backup strategy. Sigh, bed beckons.

Later the next day I realized that I had just overritten 700MB of linux stuff with 300+MB of OpenBSD. So those bits are there somewhere, it's not as if I zeroed each track! A little bit of reading enabled me to use DD to transfer the 1GB partition to my server. Once there I wrote a small Squeak Application to hunt for the Swiki change log tags and reassemble the historical changes. This took all night to run, but resulted in the recovery of most of my data, mmm I bet I could locate the tar file too if I really wanted to spend some time at it.

The other issue was Comanche was quite different from the original pluggable swiki and I had a webcam that required some unique fiddling, which I now needed to retro-fit . That required a few hours of reading and tinkering to enable me to setup the HTML and the Comanche server so that pictures come up correctly.

So it's back, all the software is new, and it's somewhat faster and certainly a much cleaner base that the original 2.0.38 Linux base, mind I never worried about i386 buffer overflows on this box!

A side note about OpenBSD on a SE/30.

Somehow I manged to pickup an SE/30 for $90 a few years back that had 32MB of memory in it, a 24bit color card and 230MB of disk space. What a deal, when I started my business in the later part of 1988 I had to convince my bank to loan me the $7000 to buy a discounted SE/30 with a couple of MB of ram and 80MB of disk space.

It too ran Linux 2.0.38, but in the fall of 2000 I upgraded my firewall to OpenBSD and decided to upgrade the SE/30 too and use it to run our internal intranet name server. Note the install of the software took about 24 hours to pull from the CDROM to the hard disk.

This SE/30 is now running OpenBSD 2.7 stable branch. Installation follows the standard docs but beware if you attempt to install into a 160MB partition, with X-window support, you will find it is a very very tight fit, very tight, things like the man pages get deleted, etc. I did compile the unix version of Squeak 2.7 on it using the unix install tar, running that as an X-window application is kinda interesting. However I'm going to research the feasibility of using the Ports tree next to get a 3.0pre2 version up and running.

I must say upgrading from the orginal 2.7 to the latest stable branch via the standard procedures takes a long time! A long time, lets say the compile of the world could take about a week to do, but this doesn't interfer at all with it's primary task of being a domain name server. A VERY reliable box! It's had an uptime of over a year.