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 -- >++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+++++++.>+++[<------>-]<.>+++[<+ +++++++++++>-]<.>++[<------------>-]<+.--------------.[-] http://www.weirdnet.nl/