[earlz]

No, and being able to download all the FAQs easily is cool but there are things where it actually impacts me. For instance, I have a netbook without a cdrom drive or floppy disk. So, to install OpenBSD on it, I had to first install OpenBSD onto another PC computer, and then run makeboot and such on my USB drive and copy over the ramdisk.

Apparently the cited excuse for why they don't support USB bootable media is because it's hard because some computers only support floppy emulator or don't support it, and there are many bugs in USB boot for older BIOS.. But that doesn't keep every other operating system of this day and age supporting it

[okasaki]

That can't be true. I used to run OpenBSD on a netbook and I'm pretty you can just dd the cdrom image onto a usb stick and boot that.

[csmuk]

Yeah I do the same with the USB stick as its easier than CD media. I have a vbox VM ready to roll for such occasions.

I have had numerous problems on older Dell/HP machines with USB booting anything so it's reasonable. I buy the official media even though I rarely use it.

[retzkek]

You can cut out one step by directly installing OpenBSD on the USB drive, and then when you boot on the target machine enter "bsd.rd" at the boot prompt.

[calvin_]

If you use GRUB, try copying bsd.rd to /boot, and running kopenbsd bsd.rd - it's really neat, no external media necessary!

[itwontdie]

I ran into this problem as well at first. The issue is easily overcome as described at the following URL.

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#noflopcd

Can this easily be done from any Linux distribution? AFAIK it can not, instead they waste resources creating USB installs and images.

[ciupicri]

> Can this easily be done from any Linux distribution?

Let's see...

> Network boot, using PXE (i386 or amd64) or diskless(8) (other platforms).

Red Hat and Fedora had this for ages. Also the installa media can be on a FTP, HTTP or NFS server.

> External USB CD-ROM or USB floppy, if your machine can boot from one.

This should work with most Linux distributions, too.

> USB Flash disk or hard disk

The same.

> Worst case, if none of the above is suitable, you can usually pull the disk out of the target system, use suitable adapters to install it in a "normal" computer, install OpenBSD, then replace the disk back in the target system.

Again this should be possible with most Linux distributions.

Now does OpenBSD have an automated installer?

[csmuk]

> Now does OpenBSD have an automated installer?

Yes. You can use expect with /install easily and you can simply add your own local "site set" tgz which can be hosted on a local HTTP/FTP server to apply any local customisations.

However, if you're provisioning lots of machines, it's very easy just to "restore" filesystems off a bootable USB stick, mount them, set the hostname then tell ansible/puppet to do the rest. Don't need kickstart or any of that crap.

Personally though I'd just netboot lots of systems off PXE/TFTP, NFS mount all filesystems and have local swap disk only. I used to do that with Sun systems. We had 50 SPARCstation 5's booting off a SPARCserver 1000E on Solaris and it worked nicely. OpenBSD works pretty much the same. Linux is a piece of crap to netboot.

Plenty of ways to skin that cat.

[ciupicri]

Do you need to modify the install media in order to use expect? I'd like to read more about the process.

You can netboot Linux. Knoppix [1] offers Terminal Server which configures DHCP, TFTP and NFS so that you can boot Knoppix from the local network.

[1] http://www.knoppix.org/

[csmuk]

Yes you do but you usually netboot to do large installations so this is just a case of adding a new root device with some extra tools on it on your netboot server.

There is an official solution in -current that involves DHCP but I don't know the details.