Contributed by grey on from the how-to's for OpenBSD? dept.
Hi,
I wrote a little howto on how to build your own embedded OpenBSD system using a Soekris net4801 and a 2.5" IDE HD.
This sytem has 3 100 Mbps interfaces and thus can act as a network gateway/firewall with a DMZ, in example.
The howto is available here and is provided "as is".
(Comments are closed)
By RC (4.61.199.192) on
Noise problems are solved by investing $10 in a couple decent, quiet 12v fans. The 80mm Enermax fans are very cheap, incredibly quiet, and tempurature controlled so they can move more air when necessary. If you you are competent at striping and splicing wires (or soldering conector, as I prefer to do) then you can handle replacing the noisy fan in your power supply. Otherwise, you'll need to spend a few dollars more to buy a cheap Enermax Power supply to get your computer totally quiet.
As for electricity and heat, a 600MHz system is serious overkill for a router/firewall. The best thing to do is to underclock like crazy. Once your CPU is running at 133MHz, it's barely putting out noticable heat at all. (AMD processors don't seem to underclock very well... I believe it's due to the S2K Bus Disconnect issue, but running fvcool at startup would take care of that on most AMD motherboards.)
Now then, I hope nobody minds me ranting a little bit...
It's an incredibly nice feature to be able to put "set tty com0" in boot.conf and have everything go over the serial port, despite no hardware support for a serial console. However, I've never yet seen it work completely... If you type anything in at the BOOT> prompt, the system freezes there. So, it works if you need to manually run fsck, but not if you need to force it into single-user mode, or anything similar.
It's also a bit crazy that there's no way to spin-down your hard drives while they are not in-use... They spin right back up, no matter what. Especially for uses like this, where the hard drive won't need to be accessed for at least days at a time, that's a real drawback to OpenBSD. I've been considering FreeBSD, since it can spindown drives, and now has PF...
And finally, they don't make computers like they used to... (Grumble, grumble)
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By Lionel Riem (212.254.187.22) on http://www.devrandom.ch
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By RC (4.61.194.226) on
The website says 15watts... My own x86-based system is running at just over double that. It's good, but not amazing.
I hope you are happy with your new Soekris, but I'll continue to stick with my very reliable, extremely expandable, old PC.
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By sthen (81.168.66.228) on
By alexandre (147.173.98.28) on
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By RC (4.61.194.226) on
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By Daniel (212.184.120.194) on
Yes you can. I have this working on an old 486 with a 1G Western Digital disc. The disc spins down after some time of inactivity and only spins up, when I'm logging in via ssh (this can be serveral hours later)
Don't recall ATM if this works in my desktop, if I don't put the machine to sleep with 'zzz'. But at least if I issue the latter command, the disc will spin down too after some time and spin up only if I issue some disc reading command.
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By RC (4.61.198.238) on
Sorry, but no.
I just tried it on a system of mine, and checked not only the power usage, but also the sound, and the output of: atactl wd0 status. In all cases, when using atactl idle, standby, sleep; the drive spins down only for about 15 seconds at most, then spins right back up. All tests confirm this, and there was nothing going on that would try to write to disk.
By Anonymous Coward (204.42.254.5) on
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By RC (4.61.194.226) on
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By RC (4.61.192.56) on
Anyhow, it's working fine now. Which is a major plus.
By jose (12.7.85.10) on http://monkey.org/~jose/
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By RC (4.61.194.226) on
Appreciate the attempt though.
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By grey (207.215.223.2) on
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By Anonymous Coward (209.142.209.161) on
tty00 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt100 on secure
and on machine A i tried running 'tip tty00'. This would sometimes repeatedbly echo what was happening on machine B, at other times nothing would be printed, and sometimes just the boot messages would be printed but no input accepted.
Yeah it was a little stupid mistake, and once i moved the cable to com1 on machine A, it worked a lot better.
By Kurt Miller (24.46.36.183) on
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By James Herber (217.155.229.169) jamesherbert@gmx.net on
By Anonymous Coward (67.71.119.35) on
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By RC (4.61.194.226) on
By sthen (81.168.66.228) on
By Dunceor (130.243.30.36) on
By Jim (198.62.124.245) on
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By jose (12.7.85.10) on http://monkey.org/~jose/
anyhow, mount_mfs ... make a small partition for /var and let it be ... it's in my custom /etc/rc script for my firewall device.
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By Anonymous Coward (210.239.97.65) on
Interesting is how you deal with the following problems:
1. On my system OpenBSD trying to do something in /dev during the boot time. How to stop this?
2. PF logging. It's extreamly convenient to have pf logging - IDS, antispam etc. For other log files (syslog) i can redirect them to remote logging host, but this is impossible for pflog.
3. I saw several articles describing mfs mounting, but all they was different and mostly not working. Can you post the exact line from /etc/fstab for /var mounted in mfs
Thanks in advance
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By Anonymous Coward (209.142.209.161) on
2- how about: `tcpdump -n -e -ttt -i pflog0 | logger -t pflog`
3- something like: 'swap /mnt mfs rw,-s=266240 0 0' in /etc/fstab. and it helps to also mention what you've tried, how that didn't work.
By jose (12.7.85.10) on http://monkey.org/~jose/
2. i actually wrote a small tool, pflogexport, to read /dev/pflog0 and export it via encapsulated UDP datagrams to a target box (much like netflow records). i haven't updated the version on the opensoekris CVS repo with one that works right, but it should be easy to fix. this leaves no logs locally and lets me inspect them.
3. someone else already posted a mechanism for it, mine was basically "mount_mfs -s 4096 swap /var" .... a small 4MB /var filesystem for what little i do store. works like a champ.
hope this helps.
By Stoyan Zhekov (219.101.239.103) on http://zh.yazzy.org/blog/
By Jedi/Sector One (213.41.131.17) j@pureftpd.org on http://www.00f.net
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By Johan M:son Lindman (62.119.71.140) on
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By Anonymous Coward (66.130.40.54) on
-most people outside the US speak English + their own language
-non-english speakers usually don't complain about the OS and the docs being in english, time is spent translating it instead
-nobody forced you to read this page
-do you really think your whinings are more relevant to the article then the link that was provided ?????
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By Johan M:son Lindman (213.114.133.76) on
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By SH (217.215.150.208) on
By Anonymous Coward (4.16.136.107) on
By Anonymous Coward (66.108.252.16) on
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By Lionel Riem (212.254.187.22) on http://www.devrandom.ch/
By Jimmy (68.226.139.219) on
1 Seconds to automatic boot. Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.
Using drive 0, partition 3.
Loading...
probing: pc0 com0 com1 pci mem[639K 127M a20=on]
disk: hd0+
>> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.06
boot>
booting hd0a:/bsd: 4669908+843804 [58+213376+190976]=0x5a4f48
entry point at 0x100120
Any ideas? The net4801 is configured:
> show
ConSpeed = 9600
ConLock = Disabled
ConMute = Disabled
BIOSentry = Enabled
PCIROMS = Enabled
PXEBoot = Disabled
FLASH = Primary
BootDelay = 10
BootPartition = Disabled
ShowPCI = Enabled
Reset = Hard
Thanks in advance.
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By thom (62.167.75.113) on
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By rrm3 (138.88.42.158) on