On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 10:58:56AM +0000, James Stocks wrote:
| I use a Soekris net5501 running OpenBSD 4.6 (i386) to firewall my small
| network. I want to follow the -stable release to ensure that the system
| remains secure. From reading the OpenBSD documentation, I am left with the
| impression that:
|
| - The only way to keep OpenBSD up to date in terms of security patches is to
| build my own system from -stable.
| - Cross compiling a system is not supported.
|
| I would rather not build a release on the Soekris box because it is quite slow
| and because it doesn't presently have enough disk space to store a complete
| source tree. All my other computers are either PowerPC or AMD64, so I don't
| believe these can be used to build an i386 release.
|
| I would welcome any suggestions regarding the best way to accomplish this.
Soekris 5501s support USB2[1]. You could use a 2.5" disk attached via
USB, pre-populated with a -stable tree. This does not fix the speed
issue you mention (although 5501's are faster than some archs you can
get releases for; maybe it's an option to rebuild over night). You
only have to keep the disk connected for the duration of the build.
Otherwise, I can support the suggestion to build a release in a
virtualized environment. Works just fine.
For "important prodcution work", you should probably keep a spare
system in case of hardware failure - then you could use that for
builds. I'm guessing this is a home network though, so not really
important enough to warrant such redundancy. It is something to keep
in mind though - what do you do when stuff breaks ?
Cheers,
Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd
[1]: From my 5501's dmesg :
ehci0 at pci0 dev 21 function 1 "AMD CS5536 USB" rev 0x02: irq 7
usb0 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
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