[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.