OpenBSD 3.9 remote installation

[Daniel Hartmeier]

On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 11:27:23PM +0200, Leines wrote:

> To be more exact: I have access to a shell console to this machine. I can
> "watch" while the system boots. I can logon to a ssh-encrypted connection
> and have keyboard access to the machine.
> 
> I can also reinstall Debian and some other Linux systems on demand for free
> (automatic reinstall, controlled by hosters webpage) as often as I want to.

I'm not sure writing either of the i386 images directly to disk will
boot. This is one of the ways to boot sparc (using miniroot.fs in the
swap partition), but I don't think it's supported with i386.

You could prepare an install on a local i386 machine with a smaller
disk. Use one single / filesystem, small enough to hold the system.

Then reinstall the Linux image on the remote host. Boot into it, with
its filesystems mounted read-only and with networking.

Then you can pipe the disk image of the local machine through ssh to the
remote machine and write it to the raw disk there, like

  local# dd if=/dev/wd0c | ssh remote "dd of=/dev/hda"

Then the remote machine should boot into OpenBSD. Adjust for the larger
disk using fdisk and disklabel the additional space as you like. You
can't resize existing slices, but make trailing space new slices.

Daniel