On 27 June 2011 04:46, Nick Holland <n...@holland-consulting.net> wrote:
Hello Nick, > I then did a second installation, and setup OpenBSD 4.9 on wd0d, also with > a > > single / partition. > > bad. > Why is this bad? What's wrong with having 2 OpenBSD installations on a single disk? > it's an unsupported configuration -- OpenBSD boots from the 'a' > partition. Anything else...you are pretty much on your own, and your > results will probably not be portable across platforms. Things may break. > > You say this is a virtual server...why are you trying to multiboot a > virtual server? Build a new VM! Or maybe bolt a new disk onto an old > VM, if you want easy access to the old files. > It's a virtual server because I'm using it for testing. My scenario is that I have a small Soekris board running an older OpenBSD (installed on a CF card). I'd like to upgrade to a newer OpenBSD without overwriting the current setup (to use as a fallback in case something is wrong with the new install). This is why I did the second installation in wd0d. If I manually boot 4.9 from wd0d, everything just works. Why do you say that this is an unsupported configuration? I know that the convention is to use 'a' for / and the other partitions for other things, but it can't be a crime to use a 'd' partition as the root for another OpenBSD installation. > I can't think of any good reason to have different versions on the same > machine, 'specially a past version. Some people want to pretend to > develop (on -current) and use -release/-stable for production, but if > you are developing, eat your own dog food, and USE -current, you aren't > doing anyone any favor by busting -current and using something else. > The closest justification I can find is on an amd64 system, to test both > amd64 and i386 code. > I just explained that I'd like to install a new version on an existing CF card, so that I can fall back to the old version in case anything goes wrong. Actually, I know of a way to make this work, which involves moving the new 'd' partition into the place of 'a', and moving the old 'a' partition into the place of 'd'. This works, and allows for auto booting into the new installation while still preserving the old one for fallback. However, it involves the ugly step of moving partitions around inside the disklabel. Surely the ability to boot off another partition would be elegant, no? > If you really want to have multiple versions of OpenBSD on one physical > i386/amd64 machine, use some kind of boot manager program which "hides" > inactive partitions. You can do this manually using bsd.rd and fdisk, > changing the desired partition to type 'a6' and flagged active, and the > unwanted partition as some other type and NOT flagged active. However, > I've tried this, I know exactly what needs to be done, and I've made a > lot of mistakes trying to do what I know needed to be done. Mistakes > result in unbootable disks to corrupt file systems (big lesson: boot > from bsd.rd, don't try to use fdisk to change the ID of a running > system. That's the corrupted FS). Ok, so just to be clear: you're suggesting that I create *two* OpenBSD slices on a disk using fdisk, and then hide the one I don't want to boot from?
