On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 09:43:44PM +0100, frantisek holop wrote: > hi there, > > 4.0 is here so time for my second annual reinstall on my notebook. > i have come to the conclusion that it would be nice to have a > "production" system and a "development" system. i need a stable > system to work with (stable packages i don't have to manually > compile, etc, etc.) on the dev system i'd like to track current.
With MBR-partitioned architectures (i386 et. al), you can have only one OpenBSD MBR partition at a time. If you want multiple MBR partitions, a partition manager (such as ranish) can let you swap one "live" A6 partition for another. An easier way is to use disklabel level partitioning. By default, the root partition is "a" but you can easily boot with a different root partition through using the "-a" option. I started out with the multiple MBRs via a partition manager, but switched fairly quickly to disklabels instead. This had several advantages: shared swap, shared /home, and sometimes shared /var, depending, and I found it very easy to work on the test environment while production was running, just by using a chrooted shell. I could run my production /etc in test, and only change fstab.
