> Am 11.06.2016 um 11:42 schrieb "danston...@yahoo.com.hk" <danston...@yahoo.com.hk>: > > 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?
Driver man pages contain suggestions. http://man.openbsd.org/?query=wireless&apropos=1&sec=0&arch=default&manpath=O penBSD-current I use run and urtwn devices. > b. Would it be possible to write a driver for the wifi? Yes, but very, very hard. > If I want to write one, where should I look at? Probably, the existing Linux one might be a start. > 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.) I'm not aware of any Air where the SSD is not working and I own(ed) and tested various older to new(est) models. However, for recent MacBooks (not Air, not Pro) the NVMe connected SSD is not working. > d. Just to be sure: hibernate/ZZZ can be used over a softraid-crypto disk, huh? Never tried myself, but I expect it to work. > e. Some time ago, I read that RAID & encryption cannot be used altogether - Is it still true? No. AFAIK, the vnd related issues seems to be fixed in -current. > 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? Yes, but expect slow disk throughputs, due to encryption. Btw. how did you plan to add the second disk into the Air? > f. In a RAID 1 system with three disks, what happened if one read byte is not the same on all the disks? Three disks in the Air? > 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.) Makes no sense. If disk dies, both parts are gone. Just setup a proper backup instead. > 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". AFAIK, no. However, you may want to check bioctl man page and -r argument. > 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? Both can be used to achieve different goals, so it depends on the use case. > 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? Depends on how you encrypted the 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). On the Air: amd64. > 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
