Hi guys!
I am currently thinking of buying a new MacBook Air and setting up a dual-boot
OpenBSD + MacOSX. Reading the mailing-list, I understood that OpenBSD is mostly
working well on Mac hardware, but I still have some questions:
a. I read that the wifi is not working, so I will have to buy a wifi usb
stick.
Which one is the best working with OpenBSD?
b. Would it be possible to write a driver for the wifi?
If I want to write one, where should I look at?
c. Some people reported that the SSD drive was working, others reported the
opposite.
I really would like to use a SSD drive instead of a standard hard drive. (I
am the kind of guy who drops his laptop…)
Is there a way to determine if the SSD drive gonna work or not? (I mean,
before buying the MacBook Air.)
d. Just to be sure: hibernate/ZZZ can be used over a softraid-crypto disk,
huh?
e. Some time ago, I read that RAID & encryption cannot be used altogether - Is
it still true?
I am interested in privacy and reliability. So I am thinking of combining a
mirroring discipline and an encrypting discipline: a RAID 1 system, and each
disk of the RAID 1 would contains the same encrypted data. Can I do that?
f. In a RAID 1 system with three disks, what happened if one read byte is not
the same on all the disks?
g. Is it possible to set up a RAID 1 system on a single physical drive?
(The physical drive would be split in two equal parts, and the second part
would be a copy of the first part.)
When I read
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#softraid
http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man4/softraid.4
it does not seem possible.
h. For softraid-crypto, are there multiple encrypting algorithms provided? Is
it possible to choose?
I mean something like "ssh -c cipher_spec".
i. As RAID is good but not enough, I think of using rsnapshot for backing up
data (to a remote server).
But dump(8) seems good too - Is there any cases in which dump(8) should be
used instead of rsnapshot?
j. Just to be sure: Would it make sense to back up encrypted data? Or is there
no other choice but to decrypt, back up, and then encrypt the backed up data?
k. Between the i386 and amd64 arch, which one would make more sense to use? As
far as I am concerned, I am interested in reliability and simple-ness (not
interested in speed nor coffee-and-toasts-making-features).
l. I understood that signify(1) only signs a file - It cannot encrypt it. To
encrypt a file, a software like gnupg should be used, right?
Does OpenBSD come up with any in-house software to encrypt a file? Or do I
have to use gnupg?
m. Is it possible to encrypt a disk image file? Replacing 'sd' by 'vnd' in the
document
http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man4/softraid.4
should do it, right?
n. In reading
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#MountImage
it seems like that mounting a disk image file needs to be root, true? Is
there a way so that a user could mount a disk image?
o. Finally, I am thinking of resizing a disk image file. I understood that it
can done in using disklabel(8), then growfs(8), finally fsck(8) - That's it?
Any comments that I should be aware of?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Romain
