Re: fdisk partitions + installation + whole disk

[Philip Guenther]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 1:05 PM,   wrote:
> I noticed that when I choose the automatic installation on the whole disk,
> OpenBSD always gets in the 4th fdisk (primary) partition. As I'm curious,
> I wonder if there is a legitimate reason for this fact or is this just an
> "arbitrary" decision from the OpenBSD team?

That behavior was present in the original import in 1995 when OpenBSD
and NetBSD split and may go back to Jolitz 386BSD.

Why was it done?  My *guess* would be to be consistent between whole
disk and multi-boot installs, where the other partitions are more
likely to be used by DOS, Windows3.1, Netware, etc.  But that's just a
guess; if you want more details you should check the NetBSD source
history, its discussion archives, and then back into the minds of the
Jolitz's...


Philip Guenther

fdisk partitions + installation + whole disk

[kuniyoshi]

Hello.

I noticed that when I choose the automatic installation on the whole disk,
OpenBSD always gets in the 4th fdisk (primary) partition. As I'm curious, 
I wonder if there is a legitimate reason for this fact or is this just an 
"arbitrary" decision from the OpenBSD team?

The operating system OpenBSD is OpenBSD-current (arch: amd64).

Regards,
kuniyoshi 

Re: DigitalOcean and OpenBSD

[Patrick Dohman]

Don’t Forget BUYVM.

Regards
Patrick

> On Aug 28, 2016, at 10:07 AM, bytevolc...@safe-mail.net wrote:
>
> andrew fabbro wrote:
> ...
>> - some day in the bright shining future when vmm is done, you may be able
>> to buy an OpenBSD guest VM on an OpenBSD host...and then these piddling
>> Amazon and Microsoft Azure empires will fall as Puffy storms the net.  To
>> the cloud!
>>
>
> Those "piddling Microsoft Azure empires" may not be the best in software
development, but they are better at marketing than the OpenBSD team is, by
several orders of magnitude. And much more aggressive too.
>
> I wouldn't get your hopes up, even if vmm was capable of running complete
Windows 10+, Linux, BSD, and MacOS X installations (even if just with a little
help from a ported QEMU) by 2018.
>
> The best doesn't always win out when it comes to marketing and
mainstream/consumer use. Puffy won't be "storming the net" any time soon.

Re: DigitalOcean and OpenBSD

[Raul Miller]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 11:07 AM,   wrote:
> The best doesn't always win out when it comes to marketing and
> mainstream/consumer use. Puffy won't be "storming the net" any time soon.

Sure: gotta make sure the malware authors and anti-virus industry have
work to do.

-- 
Raul

Re: DigitalOcean and OpenBSD

[bytevolcano]

andrew fabbro wrote:
...

- some day in the bright shining future when vmm is done, you may be able
to buy an OpenBSD guest VM on an OpenBSD host...and then these piddling
Amazon and Microsoft Azure empires will fall as Puffy storms the net.  To
the cloud!



Those "piddling Microsoft Azure empires" may not be the best in software 
development, but they are better at marketing than the OpenBSD team is, 
by several orders of magnitude. And much more aggressive too.


I wouldn't get your hopes up, even if vmm was capable of running 
complete Windows 10+, Linux, BSD, and MacOS X installations (even if 
just with a little help from a ported QEMU) by 2018.


The best doesn't always win out when it comes to marketing and 
mainstream/consumer use. Puffy won't be "storming the net" any time soon.

Re: DigitalOcean and OpenBSD

[andrew fabbro]

Maybe this should be a FAQ.

You can run OpenBSD on nearly any KVM VPS provider.  I have some favorites,
but it isn't right for me to shill here.  You could visit LowEndTalk for
discussion of cheap VPSes, or WebHostingTalk for more structured discussion
of expensive ones.  Or email me and I'll share my opinions and bread crumbs.

I pay $3-5 per month to run OpenBSD on 512MB VPSes, and I also have some
$15/year 128MB VPSes that run just fine for DNS, mail, etc.  You can pay
more to get much bigger specs of course.

You need to read the vio(4) man page if you're going to run with virtio
drivers (which you will if you use KVM).

As for the "cloud" providers:

- EC2, Azure: forget it.

- Vultr: works well, officially supported

- DigitalOcean: it's an "install through FreeBSD" hack.  That said, once
setup, I've had no issues.  Note that snapshots may not work (per the
tutorial link above).

And of course there are cheap dedicated offers: OVH, SoYouStart, Kimsufi,
online.net, hertzner, etc.  If you can get the ISO presented to the
hardware, of course OpenBSD works there.

It's worth pointing out that:

- if you just need a virtualized crash place to test OpenBSD, you can use
virtualbox, etc. to do this on your PC/laptop for free

- there are specialized OpenBSD hosters, so maybe giving them some love is
appropriate

- there are specialized OpenBSD shell account providers (devi.os) if that's
all you need

- some day in the bright shining future when vmm is done, you may be able
to buy an OpenBSD guest VM on an OpenBSD host...and then these piddling
Amazon and Microsoft Azure empires will fall as Puffy storms the net.  To
the cloud!

-- 
andrew fabbro
and...@fabbro.org

Strange problem with symlink usage in apache2 / wordpress-4.5.3

[STeve Andre']

   I write this having solved the problem I was having, but I

feel weird about my solution for it.


This is an amd64 -current system compiled on Aug 8th, with

packages from Aug 9th.  An Optiplex 745 at 2.4GHz, 8G ram

using the stock GENERIC kernel.  A vanilla system for Wordpress 4.53

using PHP-5.6.23 and Maria 10.0.26v1 with apache 2.4.23.

/etc/login.conf had limits raised to infinity.  The system was updated

just before the wx changes.


Under a light load Wordpress worked as expected.  But every

once in a while, an ah00037 ( Symbolic link not allowed or link target

not accessible) error popped up.  The client would see a page not

accessible message.  Under a heavy load of wget scripts the error was

just about constant.  Going back in the browser would get things

working after a page denial, at least for a bit.  Pages that once worked

came up with the error often.  After a period of time pages would generally

not work at all.  The fix to get apache working again was to restart it, but

lots of wget scripts would ramp the problem up again.


My "fix" was to get rid of the symlink of /var/www/htdocs to /u, and

making /var/www/htdocs the main code area.  In a 4 hour test with

multiple wget scripts, it served about 113,000 pages without error,

about 8 per second.  After that test I was convinced the "fix" worked.


But why?  The basic apache/system setup was correct I pretty sure,
or wordpress would have never worked.  The problem seems like it's
load related.

If anyone can say "idiot--you forgot N Q and Z" I'd like top hear it,

but I think I have found a bug either in Apache or OpenBSD.


Ideas on the best way to test symlinks?  I haven't found any comments

on a symlink problem in apache or wrodpress.  All the ah00037 comments

talk of stuff I already verified.


I'm certainly willing to do more work on this--I'd appreciate any ideas

on what to test.  I've never seen an error like this before... Right now

I feel uncomfortably dumb.


Thanks for ideas...   --STeve Andre'