OpenBSD Journal

a2k17 hackathon report: Antoine Jacoutot on syspatch, rc.d improvements and more

Contributed by rueda on from the syspatching in dropbear country dept.

Next up in our series of a2k17 hackathon reports is this one from Antoine Jacoutot, who writes:

For once I did not try and plan anything for this hackathon because I wanted to take the time to think over few things and talk with a few fellow developers.
First stuff I started to work on was syspatch(8), our upcoming "binary" patch tool. Besides a few simplication in the code, we are now running all network related actions as well as crypto verification as a separate unprivileged user (_syspatch) just like our installer does. We had a somewhat lengthy discussion with deraadt@ and rpe@ about how we wanted our tools to use a common place to know where to fetch the operating system components: we settled on having an /etc/installurl file (created by the installer if the system is installed through an official mirror) that would only include a mirror top level URL. e.g. https://ftp.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD syspatch(8) is already using it to fetch the patches and so is the installer to be able to display your "favorite" mirror. pkg_add(1) will come next.

On another topic, I kept working on a small yet important rc.d(8) improvement: be able to catch hanging daemons at startup, be able to catch "bg" (`&') daemons failure and eventually get rid of the rc_bg variable altogether (less knobs). I started this work in Cambridge and I think it's now ready to be committed. While the diff ended up being relatively small it does change how the rc.d "start" action works and as such I'm waiting for the 6.2 release cycle to begin before putting it in.

When I was starting to feel tired, it was the time for updating a few ports here and there... business as usual.

I also took some time to enhance my AWS AMI creation script so that the image matches a standard OpenBSD installation. It now creates a 4G image, with all standard partitions except the ones used to build (/usr/obj and /usr/src). i.e. /, /tmp, /var, /usr, /usr/X11R6, /usr/local and /home The size are the minimal advised by the autopartition disklabel(8) (no need to over provisionon these on Cloud instances) except for /var/ which has been extended a bit to store upcoming syspatch(8) rollback tarballs. If you need more disk, you can easily extend the underlying EBS (or even add one) and either add a partition or growfs(8) /home.

Other than that, I really enjoyed meeting Shelob and the Dinosaurs

Thanks a lot to dlg@, jmatthew@ and the OpenBSD Foundation for making this event a blast!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (185.92.223.3) on

    s/lenghly/lengthy/

    Comments

Credits

Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]