On 5/10/2019 1:28 AM, cho...@jtan.com wrote:
Misc User writes:
It is theoretically possible to do that, but you'd have to do -a lot-
of work to get it to do so. It'd be much easier finding a proper
way to accomplish what you want without running single-user.
I wouldn't recommend using single user mode to do anything other than
repair but it's not true to say that doing so is a lot of work. /etc/rc
is only ~600 lines and a lot of that is unnecessary if the server is
going to run a single thing. In many cases you can probably get away
with just mount/fsck/pfctl/netstart.
There is actually no such thing as "single user mode". All there is is a
kernel which hasn't done anything yet, and everything OpenBSD's does as
it "enters multi-user mode" is described clearly and comprehensively in
/etc/rc. Duplicating what little of it you want is, literally, as simple
as copy-paste.
Matthew
What I'm saying is that it would take far more work to get something
like httpd to run at that stage than it would take to make the changes
to a fully booted, and supportable, system. Making changes to rc is
going to force the system's operator to make adjustments at every
system upgrade.
Besides, it is possible to build a very light-weight system to run a
single thing while still be secure and supportable. I have a VM
template (Wel, a sitexx.tgz file) that just contains an rc.conf.local,
a new crontab, a syslogd.conf, and a few trivial scripts. The system
weighs in at 8 MB of used RAM in normal operation and a load average of
zero. It is also trivial to upgrade, has all its protections, and I can
remotely monitor it. Took me two hours to build it, most of that spent
modifying copies of daily/weekly/monthly to output via syslog instead of
mail.
What I"m saying is that it takes less work overall to subtract from a
system in a supportable way than it is to try and handcraft an
unsupportable system.
