Denny’s OpenBSD Newbies blog

April 3, 2010

The Last Four Months

Filed under: openbsd — Tags: , , , , , , — denny @ 9:03 pm

Four months come and gone. Sick a lot. Not much accomplished
during that time other than upgrading WordPress on the blog and
installing snapshots on my laptop extra hard drive and also on my
old Pentium 4 desktop. I did manage, also, to test a patch on Nut
(Network UPS Tools) for Stuart Henderson of OpenBSD. Got it
built okay, just never really got it running right. Going to install a new
snapshot, update everything on the box and see if I can get it running
correctly.
If you add a user to aliases as root and intend to get root’s mail, be
sure not to leave it commented out. :-) Ran into all sorts of problems
with the email on the P4 until I found my omission and fixed it. Tried to
use qtool.pl to clean /var/spool/clientmqueue but no dice.
Also tried sendmail and mailq but in the end I had to fall back on
good old rm to get rid of the trash.
Learned that wget doesn’t like wildcards, so when downloading
multiple files all on one line, I can do something like:

wget http://somewhere.com/{01.jpg,02.jpg,03.jpg}

Also started doing my rsync backups over ssh like so:

rsync -e ’ssh -ax -p xxx’ -agrtv /adir/ user@somebox:/adir

After installing a snapshot on my laptop I started adding packages
and finally got around to java. I don’t like installing it, I think it’s just
another security risk too, but I need it for some things I do so I don’t
really have a choice. When I installed the snapshot I tried out the new
auto-partitioning. I don’t necessarily like the way it turned out, since it
seems like a lot of drive space got wasted in places in isn’t needed,
like in /var and /tmp. /usr was only given 2G, so when I started
building java I ran out of space pretty quickly. Got around that by
adding some directories on a second hard drive and adding some
settings to /etc/mk.conf:

ACCEPT_JRL_LICENSE=Yes
USE_SYSTRACE=Yes
WRKOBJDIR=/data/mktemp/obj
DISTDIR=/data/mktemp/distfiles
PACKAGE_REPOSITORY=/data/mktemp/packages

The first line lets java know you agree to the JRL licensing.
The second line is to detect misbehaving Makefiles, scripts, etc.
The next three lines simply save space on the /usr partition
by using the directories on the second hard drive instead of the
standard ones underneath /usr.

That’s about it. Hope to get some more work done shortly. Waiting
on my new OpenBSD 4.7 cds to arrive soon. Then there will be
a whole lot of work to be done.

Cheers!

November 25, 2008

Fresh install and keeping /home intact

Filed under: openbsd — Tags: , , , , — denny @ 10:59 pm

You’ve installed OpenBSD and run it for the last six months.
Now the new release is out and, although you’ve done a good
backup of everything including your home directory to a second
drive or tape, it’d still be much easier to not have to copy all
your data back to /home after the the new install. I asked on
the OpenBSD miscellaneous mailing list and was told after I was in
disklabel(8) and satisified with all my existing partitions, when it
came to the part where it asks for mount points for each partition,
not to assign one for the partitions I wished to keep intact. I entered
none to be safe for my /home and /data partitions, assigned the
proper mount points for the other partions /usr, /usr/local, /var, and
/tmp and then entered done. Naturally I was warned that continuing
would destroy all existing data and it did, but only on the partitions
which I had assigned mount points to. After the install when I rebooted,
I mounted /home and /data and there was all my data! So, that
saves some wear and tear on my old box and a lot of copying time. Last time
I looked I think I had somewhere around 6Gb of stuff in my 10Gb home
directory. I hope this saves other folks the unnecessary work I used to do
and will do no longer. :-)

20081209 Addendum

I added a page on the web site on this subject with some explanatory
images along with the text.

Partitioning Tip

Cheers!

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