POSTS

Installing OpenBSD On Rackspace Public Cloud

For the longest time I wanted to see OpenBSD on Rackspace Public Cloud. With their boot.iso you are able to attempt to boot into a pxe environment and boot OpenBSD 5.7, but it lacks the necessary drivers for xen. I gave up for a while. but tried with the release of OpenBSD 6. I am happy to report, that you CAN and it WORKS! To do so, you boot into a linux distro, download bsd.rd, add it to grub, and boot off the RAM disk. Things to note:

  • Get ALL the ip information from the box, you will need to setup IPs statically (I just copy /etc/sysconfig/network-settings eth0/eth1 configs to a temp file to read later)
  • You will be doing this via a console session, which means you have to use a browser that supports java.

For the purposes of this demonstration, I will be using their Fedora 24 PVHVM image using their General Purpose flavor.

  • Boot a Fedora 24 image into the size that you want.
  • Login to the server.
  • Download the freebsd installer that we will boot from {% highlight bash %} wget http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.0/amd64/bsd.rd mv bsd.rd /openbsd.rd {% endhighlight %}
  • Modify /etc/grub.d/40_custom and add: {% highlight bash %} menuentry “Install OpenBSD from RAM disk” { set root=(hd0,1) kopenbsd /openbsd.rd } {% endhighlight %}
  • Edit /etc/default/grub and change GRUB_TIMEOUT=1 to GRUB_TIMEOUT=30
  • I remove extlinux and use grub2, because reasons (I like grub2) {% highlight bash %} dnf -y remove syslinux-extlinux rm -f /boot/extlinux.conf dnf -y install grubby grub2 grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg {% endhighlight %}
  • Issue the fantastical “reboot” command. It makes the unicorns appear
  • Connect via their web interface to a console session of your server. It should be stuck at the grub menu
  • Choose “Install OpenBSD from RAM disk”
  • At the install screen choose (I)Install
  • default keyboard is fine
  • set your hostname
  • xnf0 will correspond to eth0 settings (public interface). Configure that interface OpenBSD network config
  • enter the ip address and netmask. You can enter in your ipv6 info if you feel you can not typo anything (copy/paste does NOT work for me in this virtual console java session)
  • choose done (you can configure xnf1 later)
  • enter in your default route (gateway)
  • enter in your hostname and nameservers
  • the rest should be self explanatory. I did not change my console to com0, Timezone I chose US/Easten
  • wd0 is the root disk
  • I did the auto layout
  • for name(s) sets, I did not do anything with X (use - to deselect). Choose done when done
  • reboot and enjoy your new system! OpenBSD complete