002-install

Tues Sept 21, 2021

I'm a huge fan of OpenBSD. The simplicity of the system, the cohesive feel it has, the proactive stance on security... when we decided we'd set up a tilde, I knew I wanted it to be on OpenBSD.

The only problem? My preferred registrar (Linode) doesn't support it!

Fortunately there's a comprehensive post on the Linode forum of how to do it 1.

It took us ~45m, the longest OpenBSD install I've had since I first flashed it on an old thinkpad. 40m of that was waiting for the node to boot and reboot, etc (we kept messing up the configuration).

1. Create a New Linode (any OS will do)
2. Once booted, shut it down
3. Under the "Storage" tab delete the ext4 partitions
4. Create two new disks, both "Raw" format:
   • One labeled "install", 1GB (could do less)
   • One labeled "os", the rest of the space
5. Boot in "Rescue" mode
6. In the serial console, wget the minirootXX.img
   • Check the sha256 against the SHA256 file
   • Check the signature using signify (on a different machine that has signify)
7. Find the install disk with lsblk
8. Flash the img using: dd if=minirootXX.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
9. In the Configurations tab, create a new one:
   • Full Virtualization
   • Select a Kernel > Direct Disk
   • /dev/sda - os
   • /dev/sdb - install
   • boot from sdb
10. Reboot into configuration, install OpenBSD from serial console
11. Halt/shutdown, and change configuration to boot from sda
12. Rejoice!

In our case, our main problem was that we skipped the "Direct Disk" kernel step so we were booting a Linux kernel and trying to load the img... it panic'd every time! Took us a few boots to figure that out :)