Archive for the ‘OpenBSD’ Category

Fix for Bowlfish 2.1 on a Soekris net6501

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

Bowlfish assumes that after it boots, the single hard disc in a system will be wd0a.  Not true on a Soekris net6501 when using a USB volume.  It’s sd0a.  You need to update /etc/fstab to mount / from sd0a instead of wd0a.  You can do that with a site.tgz file, or just mount and edit the disc before you boot.  Or mount -o rw,noatime /dev/sd0a /mnt on the booted system, make the change to /etc/fstab, and then mount -o rw /dev/sd0a. (more…)

Quirk installing Bowlfish 2.1 for OpenBSD 4.9.

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

I use a tool called Bowlfish to build OpenBSD images which run with the drives mounted read-only. This lets me use cheap Compact Flash or USB drives in a Soekris single board computer instead of a real disc or a more expensive SSD.

Bowlfish has been a lifesaver and has worked perfectly for years. The current version, however, didn’t. I was shocked.  Then I fixed it! (more…)