Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Mihai Popescu]

A little bit late, but on topic (and very very true):

http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2005-02-28/rtfm_jd.jpg

Re[2]: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Mo Libden]

12 PQ Fredrik Staxeng :
> Once upon a time, mkfs used to make a 10-second pause before starting.
> That's the way you do it.

oh, this is B.C.! then some dork will appear on the list saying the 10 sec was
not long enough for him. when you install an OS (in all other cases too by the
way, but let's stay with the point) you need to think. that head of yours are 
not
just there to put hat on it.

program: i am going to use the whole disk there
user: ok
program: ...using...
user: WTF?! you're writing to the disk now?!

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 10:58 +0100, Fredrik Staxeng wrote:
> I think that there is a large probability that the user will spend that
> time  reading the message, and consider whether he really wants to do it. 

On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 11:22 +, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> It's a fair point that may be accepted only when a partitiono table
> was already there but I can't see anyone spending time for no gain for
> the vast majority.

The "10 seconds" proposal is supposed to address the problem, that was
the result of hitting [Enter] without reading the question. I believe
the assumption that the user who didn't read anything before hitting the
key would spend this time reading the screen is completely wrong. In the
end, he had indefinite time to read whatever he thought was worth
reading while the installer was waiting for his input.

At the same time this 10 seconds pause would be distracting for the rest
of us. Given the lack of benefit and the small but real drawback this
proposal appears to be more damaging then helpful. (Though still not as
damaging as "Are you sure you really want to hit that key" one.)

-- 
Dmitrij D. Czarkoff

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kevin Chadwick]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 08:55:03 +0100
Fredrik Staxeng wrote:

> "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff"  writes:
> 
> >So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
> >the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?
> 
> Once upon a time, mkfs used to make a 10-second pause before starting.
> That's the way you do it.
> 
> 

It's a fair point that may be accepted only when a partitiono table
was already there but I can't see anyone spending time for no gain for
the vast majority.

Also the OP wrote over his partition table and not the data.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Janne Johansson]

2012/3/12 Fredrik Staxeng :
>>> >So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
>>> >the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?
>>>
>>> Once upon a time, mkfs used to make a 10-second pause before starting.
>>> That's the way you do it.
>>
>>That is an answer to the question "How?" (actually a bad one, as if the
>>user didn't read messages before hitting [Enter], he probably won't do
>>it after doing so), while my statement implied more of "Why?" you didn't
>>address at all.
>
> I jumped into the middle here, I know. I think the 10-second delay is
> a brilliant solution. Much better than an "are you sure?" question.
> I think that there is a large probability that the user will spend that
> time  reading the message, and consider whether he really wants to do it.

And as soon as the first "I spent those 10 seconds reading the
scrollback or web comics, and now my data is gone" has occurred, we
make it 20 seconds. Then 30. And after that, thousands of
installations are delayed by minutes each just to accommodate people
that 1. don't think OS installations warrants backups when mixing and
multibooting and 2. don't read what they answer anyhow...

--
 To our sweethearts and wives.  May they never meet. -- 19th century toast

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Fredrik Staxeng]

"Dmitrij D. Czarkoff"  writes:

>On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 08:55 +0100, Fredrik Staxeng wrote:
>> "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff"  writes:
>> 
>> >So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
>> >the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?
>> 
>> Once upon a time, mkfs used to make a 10-second pause before starting.
>> That's the way you do it.
>
>That is an answer to the question "How?" (actually a bad one, as if the
>user didn't read messages before hitting [Enter], he probably won't do
>it after doing so), while my statement implied more of "Why?" you didn't
>address at all.

I jumped into the middle here, I know. I think the 10-second delay is
a brilliant solution. Much better than an "are you sure?" question. 

I think that there is a large probability that the user will spend that
time  reading the message, and consider whether he really wants to do it. 

-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: s...@hcqngr.hh.fr
This is all you need to know about vi: ESC : q ! RET

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 08:55 +0100, Fredrik Staxeng wrote:
> "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff"  writes:
> 
> >So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
> >the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?
> 
> Once upon a time, mkfs used to make a 10-second pause before starting.
> That's the way you do it.

That is an answer to the question "How?" (actually a bad one, as if the
user didn't read messages before hitting [Enter], he probably won't do
it after doing so), while my statement implied more of "Why?" you didn't
address at all.

-- 
Dmitrij D. Czarkoff

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Fredrik Staxeng]

"Dmitrij D. Czarkoff"  writes:

>So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
>the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?

Once upon a time, mkfs used to make a 10-second pause before starting.
That's the way you do it.

-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: s...@hcqngr.hh.fr
This is all you need to know about vi: ESC : q ! RET

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[timmy]

font = Droid Sans Japanese

@theo

smashing pumpkins mellon collie ... and ..

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 13:44 -0500, Kenneth R Westerback wrote:
> > That's interesting, as for me bsd.rd only creates sd0, so I have to find
> > the right sdN in dmesg and then "cd /dev; sh MAKEDEV sdN" if I want to
> > install OS there...
> > 
> 
> That strikes me as an interesting error. The install process is
> supposed to create any device needed when you select a disk. i.e.
> the 'makedev $resp || exit' line at the end of install.sub.
> 
> These days the script even automatically adjusts the list of disks
> when devices are plugged in or removed.
> 
> Can you provide more details/confirmation of the need to manually
> create devices on 5.1 or -current?

I installed OpenBSD 5.0 on the laptop where I originally spotted this
problem, and indeed I had all the inserted hardware detected right and
present in installer.

Probably I missed some changes - normally I unplug everything during
installation.

Anyway, sorry for wasting everyone's time on this.

-- 
Dmitrij D. Czarkoff

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Eric Furman]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012, at 06:55 PM, Marc Espie wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:15:08PM -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > With multiple drives, especially for bulky softraid setups, it might get
> > overwhelming pretty fast.
> 
> What's the relevant info, then ? drive names ? drive sizes ? existing
> mbr or disklabels ?
> 
> At the most, remembering you can shell out with ! and using the
> appropriate
> command to get that (hey, if you don't know any shell, you shouldn't be
> using OpenBSD anyway) is currently the best solution.
> 
> I don't see how anything else is going to help the general case.
> 
> I have the feeling you guys are all thinking in terms of the setup you're
> accustomed to running OpenBSD onto, and failing to see the generality of
> the problem...

Yes, a much more useful post than my last.
I was extremely rude. I didn't mean to aim it at you directly, Lars.
I apologize.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Marc Espie]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:15:08PM -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> With multiple drives, especially for bulky softraid setups, it might get
> overwhelming pretty fast.

What's the relevant info, then ? drive names ? drive sizes ? existing
mbr or disklabels ?

At the most, remembering you can shell out with ! and using the appropriate
command to get that (hey, if you don't know any shell, you shouldn't be
using OpenBSD anyway) is currently the best solution.

I don't see how anything else is going to help the general case.

I have the feeling you guys are all thinking in terms of the setup you're
accustomed to running OpenBSD onto, and failing to see the generality of
the problem...

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Johan Beisser  wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia 
> wrote:
>
> > With multiple drives, especially for bulky softraid setups, it might get
> > overwhelming pretty fast.
> >
> > The idea is interesting, and especially helpful if the machine was
> > previously built and the drives ordered differently in a different OS or
> > BIOS configuration, changes in hardware RAID or drive controller
> > manipulation in the BIOS, or the drives were installed in a different
> > machine.
>
> I don't see why it's hard to shell out.
>
> !
> # dmesg | grep [hs]d[0-9]
> # exit
>
If you're skilled enough to have the working interfaces and know, from
experience, how to dig it up manually, you can. That would certainly not be
lost. I was thinking it could be useful for some of the odd setups I've
encountered. When I swap hard drives to another host, it's not always
clear that I've preserved hard drive ordering. If you've never swapped IDE
controller ports accidentally when replacing a motherboard, then you've not
done a lot of hardware rebuilding.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Johan Beisser]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia  wrote:

> With multiple drives, especially for bulky softraid setups, it might get
> overwhelming pretty fast.
>
> The idea is interesting, and especially helpful if the machine was
> previously built and the drives ordered differently in a different OS or
> BIOS configuration, changes in hardware RAID or drive controller
> manipulation in the BIOS, or the drives were installed in a different
> machine.

I don't see why it's hard to shell out.

!
# dmesg | grep [hs]d[0-9]
# exit

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 3:39 AM, Lars  wrote:

> Barry Grumbine wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
> > wrote:
> >> Though OpenBSD installer is not the main feature of OpenBSD for me (it
> >> is only used to install OS anyway), I wouldn't like it to change in any
> >> way now, as I just can't think of a way to make it better.
> >>
> >
> > Sorry, hate to beat a dead horse...  There is one use case where I
> > would like to see the installer enhanced:
> >
> > I have a laptop with OpenBSD installed.
> > I want to install to a flash/USB drive, or SD card, or eSATA drive...
> > I start the laptop with boot > bsd.rd
> > Select (I)nstall
> > Eventually get to the question:
> >
> > Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> > Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> >
> > At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
> > or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.
> >
> > It would be nice if the installer would tell me a little something
> > about the available disks so I could pick the right one:
> >
> > sd0: 238418MB, 512 bytes/sector, 488281250 sectors
> > sd1: 1907MB, 512 bytes/sector, 3905536 sectors
> > sd2: 3751MB, 512 bytes/sector, 7683072 sectors
> > Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> > Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> >
> >
>
> Agree. Even the BIOS boot up screen tells you more information about your
> hard drive when the pc boots up (sometimes even the company that made the
> drive, like "samsung.." when you boot up.) Things like "sd0" are cryptic
> and don't provide much information.
>
With multiple drives, especially for bulky softraid setups, it might get
overwhelming pretty fast.

The idea is interesting, and especially helpful if the machine was
previously built and the drives ordered differently in a different OS or
BIOS configuration, changes in hardware RAID or drive controller
manipulation in the BIOS, or the drives were installed in a different
machine.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Eric Furman]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012, at 02:39 AM, Lars wrote:
> Barry Grumbine wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
> > wrote:
> >> Though OpenBSD installer is not the main feature of OpenBSD for me (it
> >> is only used to install OS anyway), I wouldn't like it to change in any
> >> way now, as I just can't think of a way to make it better.
> >>
> >
> > Sorry, hate to beat a dead horse...  There is one use case where I
> > would like to see the installer enhanced:
> >
> > I have a laptop with OpenBSD installed.
> > I want to install to a flash/USB drive, or SD card, or eSATA drive...
> > I start the laptop with boot > bsd.rd
> > Select (I)nstall
> > Eventually get to the question:
> >
> > Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> > Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> >
> > At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
> > or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.
> >
> > It would be nice if the installer would tell me a little something
> > about the available disks so I could pick the right one:
> >
> > sd0: 238418MB, 512 bytes/sector, 488281250 sectors
> > sd1: 1907MB, 512 bytes/sector, 3905536 sectors
> > sd2: 3751MB, 512 bytes/sector, 7683072 sectors
> > Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> > Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> >
> >
> 
> Agree. Even the BIOS boot up screen tells you more information about your
> hard drive when the pc boots up (sometimes even the company that made the
> drive, like "samsung.." when you boot up.) Things like "sd0" are cryptic
> and don't provide much information.
> 
> 

I think it should tell me which one will suck my dick.
Are you soo stupid to see how retarded this whole thing is
All of these questions are driven by colossal ignorance.
If you don't know what you are talking about
PLEASE STFUP!! 

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Lars]

Barry Grumbine wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
> wrote:
>> Though OpenBSD installer is not the main feature of OpenBSD for me (it
>> is only used to install OS anyway), I wouldn't like it to change in any
>> way now, as I just can't think of a way to make it better.
>>
>
> Sorry, hate to beat a dead horse...  There is one use case where I
> would like to see the installer enhanced:
>
> I have a laptop with OpenBSD installed.
> I want to install to a flash/USB drive, or SD card, or eSATA drive...
> I start the laptop with boot > bsd.rd
> Select (I)nstall
> Eventually get to the question:
>
> Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
>
> At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
> or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.
>
> It would be nice if the installer would tell me a little something
> about the available disks so I could pick the right one:
>
> sd0: 238418MB, 512 bytes/sector, 488281250 sectors
> sd1: 1907MB, 512 bytes/sector, 3905536 sectors
> sd2: 3751MB, 512 bytes/sector, 7683072 sectors
> Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
>
>

Agree. Even the BIOS boot up screen tells you more information about your
hard drive when the pc boots up (sometimes even the company that made the
drive, like "samsung.." when you boot up.) Things like "sd0" are cryptic
and don't provide much information.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Lars]

Benny Lofgren wrote:
> On 2012-03-08 17.21, daniel holtzman wrote:
>> The installation routine has been thoughtfully designed and does exactly
>> as intended. OpenBSD caters to the craftsman, not the casual user. If a
>> user is not committed to a high level of responsibility (and freedom),
>> install-time is a great time for a wake-up call. I doubt Leonardo will
>> make this same mistake again. He has learned, as we all have, to look at
>> tools from an enhanced perspective.
>
> Oh, spare us the robotic rants! (And what's with the top posting?)
>

What's with the post nazis who think there is never any use for a top post?

Although bottom posts are often useful, sometimes a top post is useful if
you aren't replying to any specific nit pick - you might just be sending a
general reply without addressing specific nits. Bottom posting or nit pick
posting (dissecting the message and picking hairs) isn't always the best
way to reply - in fact it is often an extremely critical way of addressing
someone's words which can be a turn off, whereas top posting isn't so
in-your-face.

Both top and bottom posting are useful depending on the situation. Bottom
posting or dissecting the message and splitting hairs is often abused to
take things out of context, snip stuff that shouldn't be snipped, and
humiliate someone by splitting hairs instead of just sending a paragraph
at the top which doesn't split individual hairs.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Steffen Daode Nurpmeso]

Henning Brauer wrote [2012-03-09 20:51+0100]:
> i hope obama never tries to scroll up. that red shiny button...

Sorry, but that knocked me out.

Good night.

--steffen

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Henning Brauer]

* Marcos Bento Luna  [2012-03-08 03:07]:
> But I wasnt careless, and choose the
> custom layout option. However, the next step wasn't very
> practical for a newbie like me to easily visualize what exactly
> I had to do, how to do it and where it would be made.

see, imo our i386/amd64 fdisk is far from optimal, very far.

isn't it nice that it is easily circumvented by accepting the default
"whole disk"? :)

seriously, since I never ever do multibooting and always use the whole
disk for OpenBSD, there is no incentive to improve fdisk for me. and
obviously it is the same for the other developers.

if you don't like that, you are free to work on that yourself and
submit a patch. that is simply how volunteer based projects work,
wether you like it or not.

> Well as you guys can see installing openbsd is a bit complicated
> for newbies like me

careful. please note that the complications you described are direct
consequences of chosing a multiboot setup.

> and I got thing done as I could.

yup. multiboot is complicated, and i believe we provide enough
documentation to master it.

> Can the installer improve?

hell, yes! I want to install right onto softraid. and guess what, I'm
certain that'll happen rather sooner than later.

> Yes. Is it a technical challenge to implement further assistance?

"are you sure" style questions are certainly not "further assistance"
but rather annoying for most. and won't protect against pressing enter
"to scroll up".

-- 
Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP
Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully Managed
Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Henning Brauer]

* Sean Howard  [2012-03-09 19:56]:
> It seems that enter was pushed (in this case) in an effort to scroll up.

sorry, but that is absurd. where does enter scroll up? do we need to
protect power- and reset-buttons as well because someone might push
them to scroll up?

i hope obama never tries to scroll up. that red shiny button...

> The big question is, is this problem one that is common?

the fact that this afaict has never come up before here in all the
years is more than just a hint.

-- 
Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP
Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully Managed
Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kenneth R Westerback]

On Fri, Mar 09, 2012 at 07:26:30AM +0100, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 16:40 -0700, Barry Grumbine wrote:
> > Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> > Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> > 
> > At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
> > or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.
> 
> That's interesting, as for me bsd.rd only creates sd0, so I have to find
> the right sdN in dmesg and then "cd /dev; sh MAKEDEV sdN" if I want to
> install OS there...
> 

That strikes me as an interesting error. The install process is
supposed to create any device needed when you select a disk. i.e.
the 'makedev $resp || exit' line at the end of install.sub.

These days the script even automatically adjusts the list of disks
when devices are plugged in or removed.

Can you provide more details/confirmation of the need to manually
create devices on 5.1 or -current?

 Ken

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Sean Howard]

Somebody claiming to be Henning Brauer wrote:
> * David Vasek  [2012-03-07 18:56]:
> > >what about this
> > >
> > >Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [edit]
> > >
> > >while the OP did make a mistake, he could modify the default to be
> > >edit the MBR. so he would be forced to pay attention while staring at
> > >the partition table. i would be paying attention to the instructions.
> > >
> > >stuart is right, there's a point where if you add confirmations, where
> > >would you stop?
> > 
> > Not confirmations, but saner defaults. No default value here is
> > another option - it doesn't take from precious floppy size.
> 
> see, I'm really not in the "OpenBSD is perfect, defend it at all cost"
> boat. there is a lot of stuff we can (and in many cases, do) improve.
> and the outside view is valuable, it is only natural that we, hacking
> on and using OpenBSD for years, become somewhat blind for some of
> these things because we're so used to it.
> 
> however, I absolutely believe our default IS sane here.
> 
> from my personal use case 'whole disk' covers 100%. and I am confident
> this is true for way over 90% of openbsd installs - even for those
> running multiple OSes, isn't some sort of (bad) virtualization the
> common way today?
> 
> I thought about the wording. In the context of an Operating System
> install, isn't "use whole disk" utterly clear? so i came to the
> conclusion that things are fine as is.
> 
> no matter what we do, we cannot work around a user who doesn't pay
> attention to the text on his screen - especially while installing an
> OS, writing to disk, working with the artition table, the risk there
> is utterly obvious, you gotta at least pay attention.
> 

It seems that enter was pushed (in this case) in an effort to scroll up. This 
was a bad decision on his part - but it is one way people have done such things 
in the past. I know I have run into problems myself because I tend to throw a 
'ls' at every single cursor I see. Sometimes causing other problems. It seems 
the user knew that his whole disk would be affected, although he did not 
realize how affected his machine would be. Likely changing the words used would 
not solve any problem.

I like Whole disk being the default, simply because it usually works for me 
personally. The big question is, is this problem one that is common? Will this 
solution solve the problem? The problem is that someone did not really spend 
much time making sure he had the write setting, since he thought he could fix 
it if he got it wrong. Happens all the time I understand. Moving the default to 
something else will still have people make those mistakes (I don't want to talk 
about the time I tried to learn fdisk through trial and error), and it will 
make things harder for a very important group (the devs).

To date I think the best solution is to put a more READ THE FAQ on the download 
page, it doesn't affect the installer - but does warn the Linux convert that 
we're not handholding here.

> -- 
> Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
> BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP
> Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully 
> Managed
> Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/
> 
--Sean

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Henning Brauer]

* David Vasek  [2012-03-07 18:56]:
> >what about this
> >
> >Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [edit]
> >
> >while the OP did make a mistake, he could modify the default to be
> >edit the MBR. so he would be forced to pay attention while staring at
> >the partition table. i would be paying attention to the instructions.
> >
> >stuart is right, there's a point where if you add confirmations, where
> >would you stop?
> 
> Not confirmations, but saner defaults. No default value here is
> another option - it doesn't take from precious floppy size.

see, I'm really not in the "OpenBSD is perfect, defend it at all cost"
boat. there is a lot of stuff we can (and in many cases, do) improve.
and the outside view is valuable, it is only natural that we, hacking
on and using OpenBSD for years, become somewhat blind for some of
these things because we're so used to it.

however, I absolutely believe our default IS sane here.

from my personal use case 'whole disk' covers 100%. and I am confident
this is true for way over 90% of openbsd installs - even for those
running multiple OSes, isn't some sort of (bad) virtualization the
common way today?

I thought about the wording. In the context of an Operating System
install, isn't "use whole disk" utterly clear? so i came to the
conclusion that things are fine as is.

no matter what we do, we cannot work around a user who doesn't pay
attention to the text on his screen - especially while installing an
OS, writing to disk, working with the artition table, the risk there
is utterly obvious, you gotta at least pay attention.

-- 
Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP
Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully Managed
Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[patric conant]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 3:08 AM, Henning Brauer wrote:

> * Leonardo Sabino dos Santos  [2012-03-07
> 19:44]:
> > That being said, I think Dave understands the problem very well. That
> > is probably the most dangerous point in the installation. It's
> > dangerous even for experienced users (anyone can get distracted and
> > screw up), but much more so for those who come from a different
> > background, and the reason for that is that it's unexpected.
>
> Let's put it that way: I have done hundreds, if not thousands, of
> OpenBSD installs and I have never run into this "problem". And it's
> not just me, we're having this for a couple of years and I don't
> remember this coming up ever before. Which pretty much indicates that
> this is just not a problem in practice.
>
> > Maybe the OpenBSD philosophy is just not for me.
>
> Maybe you just need to be a bit more open-minded and stop assuming
> OpenBSD is just another Linux.
>
> --
> Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
> BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP
> Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully
> Managed
> Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/
>
>
I very much echo these sentiments, except, I've installed hundreds or maybe
thousands of Linux boxes as well, and when I started
 using OpenBSD it was during the "If Linux had a graphical installer, it
could beat windows" madness, and most distributions were
rushing out a graphical installer (it was around OpenBSD 3.3, I believe)
and while my first thought was, "oh man, here's a very
non-graphical installer" the quality and elegance won out in a big hurry,
and it's had considerable improvements, since then.

For fun you might fire up a couple of dozen vms, and run various os
installers, and see how many you can just hold down the enter
key and eventually overwrite the mbr, and I bet your bug report would have
some folks scrambling to make installation "easier,"
"Working as intended," is probably all the  more attention your "problem:
should get.

Here, here on not treating OpenBSD like another Linux.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Wesley]

On 07.03.2012 16:26, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote: 

"Next, the
disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
on the
screen, followed by the question:

 Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR?
[whole]"

You need to read !!! All is explained in the sentence !

Sorry
to tell you that, but i never seen a better FAQ than OpenBSD FAQ !
All
is well described ! Again, you just only have to read the FAQ !! And of
course have his head on his shoulders !!

And to finish, OpenBSD
Installation is very very easy !! What you said, this is the wrong time,
that's all ! ;-)

Wesley.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Eric Furman]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012, at 01:33 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 13:05 +0100, Benny Lofgren wrote:
> > On 2012-03-08 17.21, daniel holtzman wrote:
> > > The installation routine has been thoughtfully designed and does exactly
> > > as intended. OpenBSD caters to the craftsman, not the casual user. If a
> > > user is not committed to a high level of responsibility (and freedom),
> > > install-time is a great time for a wake-up call. I doubt Leonardo will
> > > make this same mistake again. He has learned, as we all have, to look at
> > > tools from an enhanced perspective.
> > 
> > Oh, spare us the robotic rants! (And what's with the top posting?)
> > 
> > I'll give you another knee-jerk rant: "OpenBSD is, among other things,
> > known for its excellent, complete and accurate documentation." Now, while
> > that was indeed another example of the automatic rants we all know and
> > love, this one comes with an appendix that I actually used my own brain
> > to come up with:
> > 
> > The wording of user interaction steps in the installer is as much a
> > documentation matter as the FAQ, the man pages and the source code.
> > 
> > What Raimo suggests here is, in my opinion, an *improvement* to the
> > install procedure, one that even improves on an earlier suggestion
> > in this thread that also was an improvement.
> > 
> > Just because something is already good and its user base overall are
> > happy campers doesn't mean that it can't be made even better.
> > 
> > Also, just because the OP had the audacity to be irreverent and a bit
> > lacking in the grovelling department when commenting on his OpenBSD
> > "user experience", it doesn't mean there isn't a point to be taken in
> > there somewhere.
> > 
> > I've seen countless times on this list someone being bashed to a pulp
> > by the groupies, only for some of the "real devs" to later on acknowledge
> > that there was actually a problem. Keeping your finger firmly off the
> > trigger until it's actually time to fire is good advice not only for
> > soldiers...
> 
> So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
> the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?
> 
> Hell no! There is no improvement in making 100% clear statement twice as
> long just because of one user who failed to read that statement. More
> precisely, it is clear direct damage, as it makes the "text/information"
> ratio twice as high with no increase in the "information" part.
> 
> Actually, we already have a two decade-long history of gradual
> improvement of Linux in exactly this regard that many of us (or me at
> least) owe our transition *from* Linux to OpenBSD.

Please remove all references to dual-booting from the FAQ.
Thank you.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Eric Furman]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012, at 08:47 PM, Lars Hansson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
> wrote:
> > So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
> > the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?
> 
> Well, since this is the one of the few (only?) destructive actions the
> installer takes
> I can certainly see why being really clear could be considered an
> improvement.
> That said, I have never had this problem myself but maybe that's because
> I
> only very rarely install on multi-boot systems. I don't need this
> particular feature
> but it won't bother me if it is implemented either.
> 
> > Hell no! There is no improvement in making 100% clear statement twice as
> > long just because of one user who failed to read that statement. More
> > precisely, it is clear direct damage, as it makes the "text/information"
> > ratio twice as high with no increase in the "information" part.
> 
> I can remember when people said similar things about the installer in the
> early 2000's.
> Funny how it has been improved since then with all kinds of stuff, like
> not
> having to manually calculate the slice sizes and deal with LBA/CHS etc.
> 
> Cheers,
> Lars
> 
> 

Please remove all references to multibooting from the FAQ.
Thank you.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Lars Hansson]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff  wrote:
> So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
> the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?

Well, since this is the one of the few (only?) destructive actions the
installer takes
I can certainly see why being really clear could be considered an improvement.
That said, I have never had this problem myself but maybe that's because I
only very rarely install on multi-boot systems. I don't need this
particular feature
but it won't bother me if it is implemented either.

> Hell no! There is no improvement in making 100% clear statement twice as
> long just because of one user who failed to read that statement. More
> precisely, it is clear direct damage, as it makes the "text/information"
> ratio twice as high with no increase in the "information" part.

I can remember when people said similar things about the installer in the
early 2000's.
Funny how it has been improved since then with all kinds of stuff, like not
having to manually calculate the slice sizes and deal with LBA/CHS etc.

Cheers,
Lars

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 13:05 +0100, Benny Lofgren wrote:
> On 2012-03-08 17.21, daniel holtzman wrote:
> > The installation routine has been thoughtfully designed and does exactly
> > as intended. OpenBSD caters to the craftsman, not the casual user. If a
> > user is not committed to a high level of responsibility (and freedom),
> > install-time is a great time for a wake-up call. I doubt Leonardo will
> > make this same mistake again. He has learned, as we all have, to look at
> > tools from an enhanced perspective.
> 
> Oh, spare us the robotic rants! (And what's with the top posting?)
> 
> I'll give you another knee-jerk rant: "OpenBSD is, among other things,
> known for its excellent, complete and accurate documentation." Now, while
> that was indeed another example of the automatic rants we all know and
> love, this one comes with an appendix that I actually used my own brain
> to come up with:
> 
> The wording of user interaction steps in the installer is as much a
> documentation matter as the FAQ, the man pages and the source code.
> 
> What Raimo suggests here is, in my opinion, an *improvement* to the
> install procedure, one that even improves on an earlier suggestion
> in this thread that also was an improvement.
> 
> Just because something is already good and its user base overall are
> happy campers doesn't mean that it can't be made even better.
> 
> Also, just because the OP had the audacity to be irreverent and a bit
> lacking in the grovelling department when commenting on his OpenBSD
> "user experience", it doesn't mean there isn't a point to be taken in
> there somewhere.
> 
> I've seen countless times on this list someone being bashed to a pulp
> by the groupies, only for some of the "real devs" to later on acknowledge
> that there was actually a problem. Keeping your finger firmly off the
> trigger until it's actually time to fire is good advice not only for
> soldiers...

So you state that the fact that "if one chooses to use the whole disk,
the whole disk is used" needs further documentation?

Hell no! There is no improvement in making 100% clear statement twice as
long just because of one user who failed to read that statement. More
precisely, it is clear direct damage, as it makes the "text/information"
ratio twice as high with no increase in the "information" part.

Actually, we already have a two decade-long history of gradual
improvement of Linux in exactly this regard that many of us (or me at
least) owe our transition *from* Linux to OpenBSD.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Benny Lofgren]

On 2012-03-08 17.21, daniel holtzman wrote:
> The installation routine has been thoughtfully designed and does exactly
> as intended. OpenBSD caters to the craftsman, not the casual user. If a
> user is not committed to a high level of responsibility (and freedom),
> install-time is a great time for a wake-up call. I doubt Leonardo will
> make this same mistake again. He has learned, as we all have, to look at
> tools from an enhanced perspective.

Oh, spare us the robotic rants! (And what's with the top posting?)

I'll give you another knee-jerk rant: "OpenBSD is, among other things,
known for its excellent, complete and accurate documentation." Now, while
that was indeed another example of the automatic rants we all know and
love, this one comes with an appendix that I actually used my own brain
to come up with:

The wording of user interaction steps in the installer is as much a
documentation matter as the FAQ, the man pages and the source code.

What Raimo suggests here is, in my opinion, an *improvement* to the
install procedure, one that even improves on an earlier suggestion
in this thread that also was an improvement.

Just because something is already good and its user base overall are
happy campers doesn't mean that it can't be made even better.

Also, just because the OP had the audacity to be irreverent and a bit
lacking in the grovelling department when commenting on his OpenBSD
"user experience", it doesn't mean there isn't a point to be taken in
there somewhere.

I've seen countless times on this list someone being bashed to a pulp
by the groupies, only for some of the "real devs" to later on acknowledge
that there was actually a problem. Keeping your finger firmly off the
trigger until it's actually time to fire is good advice not only for
soldiers...


Regards,
/Benny

> On Mar 8, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Raimo Niskanen wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 02:43:46PM +0400, Mo Libden wrote:
>>> 08 PQ "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff" :
 On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 16:23 +, Dennis den Brok wrote:
>
> "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR?
>> [whole]"
>
> While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> one so easily...

 Don't you think it all gets too far? One should generally expect that
 choosing "use the whole disk" means that all the data on disk will be
 lost. If the user doesn't pay attention to installer, this wording won't
 help. Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
 newcomers would be reading the messages.
>>>
>>> my sentiments exactly. if they don't think about what's written, will
>>> it make it better to write some more?
>>>
>>> besides, what does exactly "writes to disk immediately" mean?
>>> ok, it writes, so what? will it change MBR? will it change
>>> something else? or will it just read sector and write it back
>>> (i.e. no actual change)?
>>
>> The point is that when you choose [W] or [Enter] the MBR is overwritten
>> with new content erasing all existing partitions but if you choose [E]
>> you get to the MBR editor, where you will have to explicitly order
>> it to write to the MBR. And the immediate action of the first choice
>> is not obvious from the installer dialogue.
>>
>> This I think shows better what your choices are:
>>
>>  (W)rite the MBR to use the whole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [write]
>>
>> Where the two operations Write and Edit have a clear contrasting meaning,
>> or:
>>
>>  Write the MBR to use the (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
>>
>> to not having to change an installer script variable name (a lesser change)
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> / Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
> 

-- 
internetlabbet.se / work:   +46 8 551 124 80  / "Words must
Benny Lofgren/  mobile: +46 70 718 11 90 /   be weighed,
/   fax:+46 8 551 124 89/not counted."
   /email:  benny -at- internetlabbet.se

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Henning Brauer]

* Leonardo Sabino dos Santos  [2012-03-07 19:44]:
> That being said, I think Dave understands the problem very well. That
> is probably the most dangerous point in the installation. It's
> dangerous even for experienced users (anyone can get distracted and
> screw up), but much more so for those who come from a different
> background, and the reason for that is that it's unexpected.

Let's put it that way: I have done hundreds, if not thousands, of
OpenBSD installs and I have never run into this "problem". And it's
not just me, we're having this for a couple of years and I don't
remember this coming up ever before. Which pretty much indicates that
this is just not a problem in practice.

> Maybe the OpenBSD philosophy is just not for me.

Maybe you just need to be a bit more open-minded and stop assuming
OpenBSD is just another Linux.

-- 
Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org
BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP
Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully Managed
Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Anonymous Remailer (austria)]

> That's interesting, as for me bsd.rd only creates sd0, so I have to find
> the right sdN in dmesg and then "cd /dev; sh MAKEDEV sdN" if I want to
> install OS there...

as somebody else said the easiest thing is to use whatever fdisk you prefer
and make an OpenBSD partition before starting the OBSD installer. The OBSD
installer usually finds that and you go right to disklabel 

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 16:40 -0700, Barry Grumbine wrote:
> Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> 
> At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
> or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.

That's interesting, as for me bsd.rd only creates sd0, so I have to find
the right sdN in dmesg and then "cd /dev; sh MAKEDEV sdN" if I want to
install OS there...

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Ted Unangst]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012, Kenneth R Westerback wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 04:40:47PM -0700, Barry Grumbine wrote:

>> Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
>> Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
>>
>> At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
>> or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.
> 
> Why not 'oh crap, hit "!", check the disks, exit, and then answer the
> question'? No need to restart when a shell is a "!" away. Exiting the
> shell reprints the last question.

I think the installer should present enough possible that escaping to
shell and restarting is the option of last resort, not standard
procedure.

> I don't think the size will let everyone identify the disks. Many of my
> setups have multiple disks with the same size.

It would have helped me a few times.  Even if it doesn't, the proposed
change isn't adding questions or interfering with existing users, so
I'd call it an improvement.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[richo]

On 07/03/12 15:27 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
>On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Russell Garrison
> wrote:
>> I am absolutely intrigued by this story despite my better judgement.
>> You were able to cook your own full OpenBSD installer on a USB stick
>> with GRUB instead of downloading an ISO or using PXE, but you failed
>> disk setup in the installer? It really would be interesting to see if
>> you can read just http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html , particularly
>> 4.5.3 and then come back to us with anything other than a mea culpa.
>
>I admit to pressing Enter at some of the questions without reading
>carefully. It simply never crossed my mind that the default action for
>the installer is to erase the whole disk without chance for review. I
>still think that's a disaster waiting to happen.

You made a stupid assumption. It bit you.

I don't see the problem here, you're in the midst of installing an operating
system, it wants to make big changes to your system. Pay attention.

--
richo || Today's excuse:

microelectronic Riemannian curved-space fault in write-only file system
http://blog.psych0tik.net

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had 
a name of signature.asc]

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kenneth R Westerback]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 04:40:47PM -0700, Barry Grumbine wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff  
> wrote:
> > Though OpenBSD installer is not the main feature of OpenBSD for me (it
> > is only used to install OS anyway), I wouldn't like it to change in any
> > way now, as I just can't think of a way to make it better.
> >
> 
> Sorry, hate to beat a dead horse...  There is one use case where I
> would like to see the installer enhanced:
> 
> I have a laptop with OpenBSD installed.
> I want to install to a flash/USB drive, or SD card, or eSATA drive...
> I start the laptop with boot > bsd.rd
> Select (I)nstall
> Eventually get to the question:
> 
> Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
> Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]
> 
> At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
> or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.

Why not 'oh crap, hit "!", check the disks, exit, and then answer the
question'? No need to restart when a shell is a "!" away. Exiting the
shell reprints the last question.

I don't think the size will let everyone identify the disks. Many of my
setups have multiple disks with the same size.

 Ken

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Barry Grumbine]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff  wrote:
> Though OpenBSD installer is not the main feature of OpenBSD for me (it
> is only used to install OS anyway), I wouldn't like it to change in any
> way now, as I just can't think of a way to make it better.
>

Sorry, hate to beat a dead horse...  There is one use case where I
would like to see the installer enhanced:

I have a laptop with OpenBSD installed.
I want to install to a flash/USB drive, or SD card, or eSATA drive...
I start the laptop with boot > bsd.rd
Select (I)nstall
Eventually get to the question:

Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]

At this point I usually say "oh crap", hit ^c, and go read the dmesg
or `disklabel sd1` to make sure I pick the right disk.

It would be nice if the installer would tell me a little something
about the available disks so I could pick the right one:

sd0: 238418MB, 512 bytes/sector, 488281250 sectors
sd1: 1907MB, 512 bytes/sector, 3905536 sectors
sd2: 3751MB, 512 bytes/sector, 7683072 sectors
Available disks are: sd0 sd1 sd2
Which one is the root disk? (or 'done') [sd0]


--- install.sub.origThu Mar  8 16:28:52 2012
+++ install.sub Thu Mar  8 16:30:24 2012
@@ -2134,6 +2134,9 @@

 # Get ROOTDISK, ROOTDEV and SWAPDEV.
 while :; do
+   for _dk in $(get_dkdevs | sed s,^$,none, ); do
+   dmesg |grep "$_dk:" |sed -n '$p'
+   done
ask_which "disk" "is the root disk" '$(get_dkdevs | sed s,^$,none, )'
[[ $resp == done ]] && exit
[[ $resp != none ]] && break

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Jan Stary]

On Mar 08 07:20:56, Nick Holland wrote:
> On 03/08/12 06:48, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> > On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:50:15 +0100
> > Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:
> > 
> >> Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
> >> newcomers would be reading the messages.
> > 
> > I had a thought last night, how worrying that my mind jumped to OpenBSD
> > in front of the TV. It occurred to me that it wasn't too long ago that
> > the installer switched from asking to partition first or had less
> > questions at the beginning and flicking through those quickly may
> > explain why the op hit enter so readily and why this hasn't come
> > up before when the first question was a more important one. Then again
> > I have doubts it will ever come up again too.
> > 
> > What was the reason for the re-order?
> 
> It was reworked so that in the most common, simplest installs, you could
> just hit ENTER for almost everything quickly and up-front, then walk
> away and let the install take place (keep in mind, while many users love
> their five-minute-install amd64 systems, a lot of developers use
> machines where a full install may take a long time.  We like to be able
> to walk away and come back to a finished install, not find out its been
> waiting for us to answer another question).

I remember this being the first selling point for me
back when I did my first install. The OS installs I did before
(various linuxes) took considerably more time (not mentioning
a certain non-open-sourced OS, whose install took hours),
and you HAD TO BE THERE ALL THE TIME AND STARE AT THE SCREEN,
just to press an occasional OK every now and then.

The feature of giving it all my input and walking away
was the very first sign that this is what I want.

Jan

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[daniel holtzman]

The installation routine has been thoughtfully designed and does exactly
as intended. OpenBSD caters to the craftsman, not the casual user. If a
user is not committed to a high level of responsibility (and freedom),
install-time is a great time for a wake-up call. I doubt Leonardo will
make this same mistake again. He has learned, as we all have, to look at
tools from an enhanced perspective.

On Mar 8, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Raimo Niskanen wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 02:43:46PM +0400, Mo Libden wrote:
>> 08 PQ "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff" :
>>> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 16:23 +, Dennis den Brok wrote:

 "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR?
> [whole]"

 While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
 at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
 tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
 one so easily...
>>>
>>> Don't you think it all gets too far? One should generally expect that
>>> choosing "use the whole disk" means that all the data on disk will be
>>> lost. If the user doesn't pay attention to installer, this wording won't
>>> help. Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
>>> newcomers would be reading the messages.
>>
>> my sentiments exactly. if they don't think about what's written, will
>> it make it better to write some more?
>>
>> besides, what does exactly "writes to disk immediately" mean?
>> ok, it writes, so what? will it change MBR? will it change
>> something else? or will it just read sector and write it back
>> (i.e. no actual change)?
>
> The point is that when you choose [W] or [Enter] the MBR is overwritten
> with new content erasing all existing partitions but if you choose [E]
> you get to the MBR editor, where you will have to explicitly order
> it to write to the MBR. And the immediate action of the first choice
> is not obvious from the installer dialogue.
>
> This I think shows better what your choices are:
>
>  (W)rite the MBR to use the whole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [write]
>
> Where the two operations Write and Edit have a clear contrasting meaning,
> or:
>
>  Write the MBR to use the (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
>
> to not having to change an installer script variable name (a lesser change)
>
>
> --
>
> / Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Raimo Niskanen]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 02:43:46PM +0400, Mo Libden wrote:
> 08 PQ "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff" :
> > On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 16:23 +, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> > >
> > > "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR?
[whole]"
> > >
> > > While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> > > at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> > > tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> > > one so easily...
> >
> > Don't you think it all gets too far? One should generally expect that
> > choosing "use the whole disk" means that all the data on disk will be
> > lost. If the user doesn't pay attention to installer, this wording won't
> > help. Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
> > newcomers would be reading the messages.
>
> my sentiments exactly. if they don't think about what's written, will
> it make it better to write some more?
>
> besides, what does exactly "writes to disk immediately" mean?
> ok, it writes, so what? will it change MBR? will it change
> something else? or will it just read sector and write it back
> (i.e. no actual change)?

The point is that when you choose [W] or [Enter] the MBR is overwritten
with new content erasing all existing partitions but if you choose [E]
you get to the MBR editor, where you will have to explicitly order
it to write to the MBR. And the immediate action of the first choice
is not obvious from the installer dialogue.

This I think shows better what your choices are:

  (W)rite the MBR to use the whole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [write]

Where the two operations Write and Edit have a clear contrasting meaning,
or:

  Write the MBR to use the (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

to not having to change an installer script variable name (a lesser change)


--

/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[f5b]

whether
Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole] 
or
Use (W)hole disk, use the (O)penBSD area, or (E)dit the MBR? [OpenBSD]

I would like empty in Square brackets[ ], user should input w/o/e here, only 
Enter should do nothing but repeat last line.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Russell Garrison]

It really is amazing how much the install is genuinely loved on
OpenBSD. I think there are other distributions out there where the
installer is liked or even praised, but I would describe my feelings
and what I see here as love. It is always a pleasure when I have the
chance to show someone the install process for the first time or hear
their accounts of success or failure. I started out with OpenBSD
around 2.3 and the funny thing is that I am most impressed by how the
installer disk setup is improved since those days. At least I don't
have to start off the discussion about how c is the whole disk, etc.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Nick Holland]

On 03/08/12 06:48, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:50:15 +0100
> Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:
> 
>> Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
>> newcomers would be reading the messages.
> 
> I had a thought last night, how worrying that my mind jumped to OpenBSD
> in front of the TV. It occurred to me that it wasn't too long ago that
> the installer switched from asking to partition first or had less
> questions at the beginning and flicking through those quickly may
> explain why the op hit enter so readily and why this hasn't come
> up before when the first question was a more important one. Then again
> I have doubts it will ever come up again too.
> 
> What was the reason for the re-order?

It was reworked so that in the most common, simplest installs, you could
just hit ENTER for almost everything quickly and up-front, then walk
away and let the install take place (keep in mind, while many users love
their five-minute-install amd64 systems, a lot of developers use
machines where a full install may take a long time.  We like to be able
to walk away and come back to a finished install, not find out its been
waiting for us to answer another question).

The developers were very proud of and happy with this.  This "Hit Enter
a bunch of times to do the install" is a highly desired property by
those who do a lot of installs.  There have been many internal
discussions about adding questions about real options, which have been
vetoed because ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS ARE NOT DESIRED.  Again, real
operational changes are vetoed.  "Are you sure?" questions just don't
have a chance.  Sorry (but not very.  I love it).

(the new installer was also smaller, which is also a desirable trait, as
that means more devices can be added to (or more accurately, fewer
removed from) the install kernels)

Nick.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kevin Chadwick]

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:50:15 +0100
Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:

> Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
> newcomers would be reading the messages.

I had a thought last night, how worrying that my mind jumped to OpenBSD
in front of the TV. It occurred to me that it wasn't too long ago that
the installer switched from asking to partition first or had less
questions at the beginning and flicking through those quickly may
explain why the op hit enter so readily and why this hasn't come
up before when the first question was a more important one. Then again
I have doubts it will ever come up again too.

What was the reason for the re-order?

Re[2]: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Mo Libden]

08 PQ "Dmitrij D. Czarkoff" :
> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 16:23 +, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> >
> > "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]"
> >
> > While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> > at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> > tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> > one so easily...
> 
> Don't you think it all gets too far? One should generally expect that
> choosing "use the whole disk" means that all the data on disk will be
> lost. If the user doesn't pay attention to installer, this wording won't
> help. Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
> newcomers would be reading the messages.

my sentiments exactly. if they don't think about what's written, will
it make it better to write some more?

besides, what does exactly "writes to disk immediately" mean?
ok, it writes, so what? will it change MBR? will it change
something else? or will it just read sector and write it back
(i.e. no actual change)?

may be the install script may be changed so that it does
dd if=/dev/sdXc of=/tmp/sdXc.mbr count=1

so that after chosing the "whole disk" option and breaking
the install script, you still have an option to get your partition
table back.

it needs to be documented of course...

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 23:06 -0300, Marcos Bento Luna wrote:
> ...Ok, another try and I'm back staring
> at the disk partitioning tool, however I cold not guess wich was
> the correct partition I should select, because the information was
> displayed in bytes, not GBs, and the OpenBSD partition I had created
> was of similar size to another three partitions already in place.

Sorry, but didn't you notice a message about pressing "h" for help? If
you used it, you would learn that "p G" will show the gigabytes values.

> Some linux instalers i used are more straightforward and
> certainly help people like me to perform a succesfull install
> the way we want it without screwing everything up.

>From the linux world the best installer for me was that of Arch Linux,
though compared to OpenBSD's one it suffered from lack of polish (and
FWIW cfdisk is the worst partitioning tool ever).

Some years ago I also tried Ubuntu, OpenSuSE (or what is the current
capitalization?), Debian, Fedora and Gentoo, with all of them (may be
except Gentoo, where there was no installer at the time) being crappy.
Though OpenBSD installer is not the main feature of OpenBSD for me (it
is only used to install OS anyway), I wouldn't like it to change in any
way now, as I just can't think of a way to make it better.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 16:23 +, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> As there seems to be much resistance to one more (redundant) question
> in the installer, I suggest to add a simple message to that part
> of the installer, as in
> 
> "(Choosing 'whole disk' will become effective immediately.)"
> 
> or even
> 
> "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]"
> 
> While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> one so easily...

Don't you think it all gets too far? One should generally expect that
choosing "use the whole disk" means that all the data on disk will be
lost. If the user doesn't pay attention to installer, this wording won't
help. Furthermore, the more chatty installer is, the less amount of
newcomers would be reading the messages.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Raimo Niskanen]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 08:24:31PM +0100, Benny Lofgren wrote:
> On 2012-03-07 17.23, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> > On 2012-03-07, Raimo Niskanen  wrote:
> >> So I think a pronounced confirmation question before touching the disk
> >> is not a bad thing. It is what many would expect.
> > As there seems to be much resistance to one more (redundant) question
> > in the installer, I suggest to add a simple message to that part
> > of the installer, as in
> > 
> > "(Choosing 'whole disk' will become effective immediately.)"
> > 
> > or even
> > 
> > "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]"
> 
> 
> In my opinion, this is the single suggestion in this entire thread
> that's actually worth implementing. It's an easy fix, doesn't change
> the installer's handling one bit (although it consumes a few more of
> the precious bytes) and it might actually prevent someone else with
> attention deficit disorder to wreck their disk in the future.
> 
> And even if it doesn't, it should at least cool you down enough to opt
> out of embarking on a rant about it...

+1

> 
> 
> Regards,
> /Benny
> 
> -- 
> internetlabbet.se / work:   +46 8 551 124 80  / "Words must
> Benny Lofgren/  mobile: +46 70 718 11 90 /   be weighed,
> /   fax:+46 8 551 124 89/not counted."
>/email:  benny -at- internetlabbet.se

-- 

/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kenneth R Westerback]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 06:19:02PM +0100, David Vasek wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Donald Allen wrote:
> 
> >"While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> >at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> >tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> >one so easily..."
> >
> >I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
> >the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
> >approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
> >happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
> >an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
> >survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.
> 
> Except that the equipment shoudn't direct people to behave in such a
> disasterous way. And this the case.
> 
> Regards,
> David
> 

What disaster? The OP recovered his MBR with a little effort. Anyone who
couldn't do the same for a munged MBR should not be using anything 
that does not have a GUI installation process. Let alone OpenBSD, where
we pride ourselves on the amount of rope that fits on a floppy.

Think of it as evolution in action.

 Ken

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Ted Unangst]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012, Nick Holland wrote:
> On 03/07/12 18:32, Marc Espie wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 10:10:12AM -0500, Nick Holland wrote:
>>> yes, scrollback is something that was sacrificed on the installer to
>>> keep it able to fit on a floppy (contrary to another contribution to
>>> this thread).  Unfortunate, annoying, and unfortunately, I got no
>>> better ideas.
>>
>> Is it true for all images ? I figure the ramdisk_cd and bsd.rd images
>> probably have room enough for console scrollback, don't they ?
> 
> It's true for all images install images, yes.
> (and that's for i386, amd64.  Most other platforms don't have any kind
> of scrollback at all).
> 
> I would guess bsd.rd would have space, if the scrollback were to be
> separated out.  Without looking (i.e., I'm about to make a fool of
> myself), I think it is part of the "option SMALL_KERNEL", so to put it
> in bsd.rd (=cd ramdisk) would require breaking out the code...not sure
> how that would go over.

SCROLLBACK_SUPPORT (the actual relevant option) is typically only
defined if not SMALL_KERNEL, though you could add it as an option on
its own.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[R0me0 ***]

"*UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that
would also stop them from doing clever things.*"  Doug
Gwyn


Em 7 de margo de 2012 11:27, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos <
leonardo.sab...@gmail.com> escreveu:

> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Russell Garrison
>  wrote:
> > I am absolutely intrigued by this story despite my better judgement.
> > You were able to cook your own full OpenBSD installer on a USB stick
> > with GRUB instead of downloading an ISO or using PXE, but you failed
> > disk setup in the installer? It really would be interesting to see if
> > you can read just http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html , particularly
> > 4.5.3 and then come back to us with anything other than a mea culpa.
>
> I admit to pressing Enter at some of the questions without reading
> carefully. It simply never crossed my mind that the default action for
> the installer is to erase the whole disk without chance for review. I
> still think that's a disaster waiting to happen.
>
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Christer Solskogen
>  wrote:
> > What if you mistyped there as well? Do you want a "Are you REALLY
> > REALLY sure?"?
>
> Then again, partitioning your disk is a bit more serious than "What's
> your hostname?" or "What time zone are you in?". Maybe that one
> question deserves an extra confirmation, or a less dangerous default.
> Just saying.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Marcos Bento Luna]

tl:dr: yes, I agree with the OP - that step could be more informative
and it would be a good idea to include further confirmation before
effectively writing changes to the disk/MBR.
--
Hi everybody, I'm new here and I have been trying OpenBSD for
the past couple of weeks, and finally today I joined the mailing list.
It was funny (and sad at the same time) to read this unfortunate
event that happened with Leonardo, and it was particularly
interesting to me because as a newcomer to the OpenBSD world
I also struggled with the disk partitioning step and his story
could very well be mine. I also ran into a huge risk when installing
it into my computer's hard disk drive trying to achieve a dual boot setup.

Luckily, I first installed OpenBSD a dozen times on a VM to get
an idea of dealing with the OpenBSD installation, package
management, etc. After learning what I considered enough to
get my hands dirty and performing a real installation I burned
the iso into a cd and began the process. However, I had
forgotten that I would be required to create the OpenBSD partition
because every time I installed it on the VM I had choose
the whole disk option. But I wasnt careless, and choose the
custom layout option. However, the next step wasn't very
practical for a newbie like me to easily visualize what exactly
I had to do, how to do it and where it would be made. At this point
I just felt it wasn't woth the risk and then I simply power off the
machine by holdind the power button down.

Back to windows I did some googling about dual boot setups.
Found some info who said what I should do but not how to do it. What I found
was that I should use fdisk to select the desired partition and mark it
as OpenBSD partition (A6). Ok, another try and I'm back staring
at the disk partitioning tool, however I cold not guess wich was
the correct partition I should select, because the information was
displayed in bytes, not GBs, and the OpenBSD partition I had created
was of similar size to another three partitions already in place.
Back to windows I decided to use Easeus partition magic to change
the filetype of the partition I had previously created for openBSD
to ext2 for better visualization. Finished it I was back to
the openbsd install and finally could identify the correct partition I was
looking for and succeded at installing it without erasing all my data.
The final step was to go back to windows and use a tool named
EasyBCD to add the OpenBSD partition to the boot menu and
I finally had my dualboot setup in place.

Well as you guys can see installing openbsd is a bit complicated
for newbies like me, and I got thing done as I could. The possibility
to have all your data wiped
instantly because of a very simplistic installer could be, indeed, a big
turn off for new, inexperienced ( and sometimes careless) users.
Some linux instalers i used are more straightforward and
certainly help people like me to perform a succesfull install
the way we want it without screwing everything up.

Can the installer improve? Yes. Is it a technical challenge to implement
further assistance? I dont know. What I do know is that it
would be a very nice addition to the curent installer in my opinion.

Just my 2 cents.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Nick Holland]

On 03/07/12 18:32, Marc Espie wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 10:10:12AM -0500, Nick Holland wrote:
>> yes, scrollback is something that was sacrificed on the installer to
>> keep it able to fit on a floppy (contrary to another contribution to
>> this thread).  Unfortunate, annoying, and unfortunately, I got no
>> better ideas.
> 
> Is it true for all images ? I figure the ramdisk_cd and bsd.rd images
> probably have room enough for console scrollback, don't they ?

It's true for all images install images, yes.
(and that's for i386, amd64.  Most other platforms don't have any kind
of scrollback at all).

I would guess bsd.rd would have space, if the scrollback were to be
separated out.  Without looking (i.e., I'm about to make a fool of
myself), I think it is part of the "option SMALL_KERNEL", so to put it
in bsd.rd (=cd ramdisk) would require breaking out the code...not sure
how that would go over.

um.  I am so out-of-line commenting to Marc Espie about code...  *sigh*

Nick.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Gerald Chudyk]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 4:26 AM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos
 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.
>
You would have loved an operating system called IMOS from NCR. They
had a useful command that would delete files from a disk. If you
forgot to mention which file ( by typing del) the system would
proceed to delete each file on the disk. It would politely display
each file name as it was deleted.

After the shock and the denial, one would scream at the data terminal,
and then make a mad dash for the computer room where the processor
panel required a sequence of buttons be pressed before it would reset.

Of course this could only have happened at night when no one else was
using the system, and the backups would not have been missing.

I am trying to remember who this happened to, but it was a very long
time ago and I can only recall a bitter struggle with nightmares that
plagued me around that very same time.

Hmm... I think I can even recall the button sequence on the
processor..."". Strange how
that should be engraved in my memory after all the years that have
past.

Regards,
Gerald.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Marc Espie]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 10:10:12AM -0500, Nick Holland wrote:
> yes, scrollback is something that was sacrificed on the installer to
> keep it able to fit on a floppy (contrary to another contribution to
> this thread).  Unfortunate, annoying, and unfortunately, I got no
> better ideas.

Is it true for all images ? I figure the ramdisk_cd and bsd.rd images
probably have room enough for console scrollback, don't they ?

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Marc Espie]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 07:41:47PM +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> I also agree with those who pointed out that doing experimental OS
> installs on a machine you care about is not a particularly smart thing
> to do.

It's also fairly stupid to ever do an install without first backing up
the critical parts.  You should always have a backup copy of your
partition table somewhere *else* first.

That simple rule has saved my ass more than once.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kevin Chadwick]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012 13:52:45 -0500
Sean Howard wrote:

> This error is the best error you can make. Keeps you respecting your system 
> and your own ability to control it.

Leonardo, have you ever started zeroing the wrong /dev/ with dd yet?

Backup everything important and hope it saves you more time than it
costs.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dan Farrell]

I agree with Holtzman's sentiment, the OP should consider himself lucky
that he hit a struggling point as early as he did, lest he hit a much
bigger "first brick wall" later down the road. Now he has the benefit of
respecting the OS while still getting a feel for it.
On Mar 7, 2012 3:21 PM, "daniel holtzman"  wrote:

> Let's all step back a moment: Leonardo is neither the first nor will he
> be the last person to be bitten by something in OpenBSD. I say we tell
> him we are sorry for his troubles, giggle a little bit, give him a
> hearty pat on the back, and shout,
>
>  "Welcome to the elite community of OpenBSD users! We're not all
>  geniuses, we don't have all the answers but we all sure as fsck like
>  a quality product and the opportunity for deep learning, especially in
>  a community of like-minded people."
>
> I think it's safe to say that _everyone_ who uses OpenBSD is necessarily
> curious by nature and understands the rigors of learning. We often
> fiddle with things and frequently make really foolish mistakes--that's
> how we learn.
>
> Leonardo will either "never, ever touch[ing] OpenBSD with a ten-foot
> pole again", or he'll become a satisfied and dedicated user. That is
> really up to him and his penchant for mastery and self-reliance. The
> opportunities for these things are huge in OpenBSD because the project
> sticks to its overriding mission, quality, in every aspect; including
> documentation.
>
> By side-effect or perhaps by design, the OpenBSD community weeds out
> those people who are not seriously dedicated. It may not welcome the
> naive and it may not hand-hold the inexperienced, but it certainly does
> not prevent the naive and inexperienced from learning. Lurk a lot. Grow
> a thicker skin. You can be sneered at and called all sorts of names. Do
> you want to work at mastering fascinating skills by some of the best in
> the industry or do you want a nice touchy-feely experience? Rarely, you
> can have both, but mostly, in real life, we have to make choices.
>
> When I first started using, and yes, "using"--like a drug (2.5 or 2.6),
> I was lucky enough to have a steady supply of old machines (i386, sparc,
> vax, ppc) and became install-happy. I'd love to show off how quickly I
> could do an install over the net. I figure that I did at least 100
> installs in my first 6 months; trying to get partitions/labels just
> right; messing things up and starting over; making a lot of mistakes.
> I've not found another OS, ever, that was so quick and easy to install.
> OpenBSD gave me the ability to learn a lot about installation that I
> wouldn't have otherwise had the patience to do. I learned a new way of
> thinking: where to "try" things and where to "do" things.
>
> So, if you've read this far, Leonardo, sorry you had problems. We _all_
> have been there and most of us go there more often than we'd like to
> admit :) Stick with it and you'll likely learn more than you can even
> fathom right now. If not, then good luck to you.
>
>
> On Mar 7, 2012, at 7:26 AM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.
> >
> > I'm a Linux user, but have always wanted to try OpenBSD. The last time
> > I'd tried installing it was version 4.6 and I didn't get very far.
> > That version wouldn't install on my notebook at all. The kernel
> > couldn't recognise my hard drive because of some AHCI incompatibility
> > on this notebook that I didn't have the expertise to solve, so I went
> > back to Linux for the time. Two years later, we're on version 5.0, I
> > decided to give it another try.
> >
> > So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
> > created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
> > and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
> > plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
> > actually the same notebook from two years ago.
> >
> > I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
> > password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
> > a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
> > installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
> > system later.
> >
> > Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
> > on the screen, followed by the question:
> >
> >  Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
> >
> > At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
> > scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
> > screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
> > nothing works, so I press Enter.
> >
> > And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
> > I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
> > a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
> > overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.
> >
> > What sav

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[daniel holtzman]

Let's all step back a moment: Leonardo is neither the first nor will he
be the last person to be bitten by something in OpenBSD. I say we tell
him we are sorry for his troubles, giggle a little bit, give him a
hearty pat on the back, and shout,

  "Welcome to the elite community of OpenBSD users! We're not all
  geniuses, we don't have all the answers but we all sure as fsck like
  a quality product and the opportunity for deep learning, especially in
  a community of like-minded people."

I think it's safe to say that _everyone_ who uses OpenBSD is necessarily
curious by nature and understands the rigors of learning. We often
fiddle with things and frequently make really foolish mistakes--that's
how we learn. 

Leonardo will either "never, ever touch[ing] OpenBSD with a ten-foot
pole again", or he'll become a satisfied and dedicated user. That is
really up to him and his penchant for mastery and self-reliance. The
opportunities for these things are huge in OpenBSD because the project
sticks to its overriding mission, quality, in every aspect; including
documentation.

By side-effect or perhaps by design, the OpenBSD community weeds out
those people who are not seriously dedicated. It may not welcome the
naive and it may not hand-hold the inexperienced, but it certainly does
not prevent the naive and inexperienced from learning. Lurk a lot. Grow
a thicker skin. You can be sneered at and called all sorts of names. Do
you want to work at mastering fascinating skills by some of the best in
the industry or do you want a nice touchy-feely experience? Rarely, you
can have both, but mostly, in real life, we have to make choices.

When I first started using, and yes, "using"--like a drug (2.5 or 2.6),
I was lucky enough to have a steady supply of old machines (i386, sparc,
vax, ppc) and became install-happy. I'd love to show off how quickly I
could do an install over the net. I figure that I did at least 100
installs in my first 6 months; trying to get partitions/labels just
right; messing things up and starting over; making a lot of mistakes.
I've not found another OS, ever, that was so quick and easy to install.
OpenBSD gave me the ability to learn a lot about installation that I
wouldn't have otherwise had the patience to do. I learned a new way of
thinking: where to "try" things and where to "do" things.

So, if you've read this far, Leonardo, sorry you had problems. We _all_
have been there and most of us go there more often than we'd like to
admit :) Stick with it and you'll likely learn more than you can even
fathom right now. If not, then good luck to you.


On Mar 7, 2012, at 7:26 AM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.
> 
> I'm a Linux user, but have always wanted to try OpenBSD. The last time
> I'd tried installing it was version 4.6 and I didn't get very far.
> That version wouldn't install on my notebook at all. The kernel
> couldn't recognise my hard drive because of some AHCI incompatibility
> on this notebook that I didn't have the expertise to solve, so I went
> back to Linux for the time. Two years later, we're on version 5.0, I
> decided to give it another try.
> 
> So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
> created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
> and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
> plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
> actually the same notebook from two years ago.
> 
> I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
> password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
> a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
> installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
> system later.
> 
> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
> on the screen, followed by the question:
> 
>  Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
> 
> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
> nothing works, so I press Enter.
> 
> And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
> I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
> a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
> overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.
> 
> What saved me was an Ubuntu installation CD and the wonderful tool
> gpart (http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/). With a bit of tinkering in
> gpart and some very careful work with the Linux version of fdisk, I
> managed to reconstruct the partition table and saved my system.
> 
> Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
> disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
> confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I ca

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Jay Huldeen]

On 03/07/2012 07:26, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:

Hi,

I joined this mailing list just to tell you this: Right now, I feel
like never, ever touching OpenBSD with a ten-foot pole again.


A couple of years ago I decided to get back into computing and built a 
box.  I have run through many of the Linux distros and learned a lot by 
just installing a new OS every so often and trying stuff.  That sort of 
behavior is mostly encouraged in the Linux world.


One of the things I love about OpenBSD is that if I don't know what I am 
doing, I am expected to read and follow the documentation, and the 
documentation actually works.  I am treated like a responsible adult who 
is expected to read and follow instructions if I want to use this 
operating system.  This is good encouragement for me to learn something new.


I have installed OpenBSD several times in the last year, and have been 
able to get it up and running every single time.  How did a moron like 
me do that?  I read the manual while I was installing the system.  I 
literally printed it out and followed it, and it worked!  (Try that 
with, say, Gentoo.)


The defaults in the installer are fine.  I have installed OpenBSD on its 
own disk and also in a multiboot configuration and was able to do both 
by reading the manual, and with no formal computer science training 
beyond that.


I don't really need OpenBSD for what I do, but the OpenBSD developers 
who have worked hard for many years to make a professional-grade OS are 
willing to make it available to me for free, with excellent 
documentation so I can actually teach myself how to install it and use 
it.  And instead of spending an hour to RTFM and maybe going to mutt.org 
to figure out how to set up mail so I can send this from the OpenBSD 
installation I have sitting on a disk on this box, I'd rather spend that 
hour using easy-peasy PC-BSD to look at lolcats and read about the 
script kiddies who got busted by the FBI the other day and generally 
feel smug.


So thank you for inspiring me to reboot into OpenBSD and get to work 
learning something new on my day off.  Maybe someday I'll be more than a 
hobbyist.


Sorry, list, for the noise.

--
Jay Huldeen
j...@huldeen.com

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Benny Lofgren]

On 2012-03-07 17.23, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> On 2012-03-07, Raimo Niskanen  wrote:
>> So I think a pronounced confirmation question before touching the disk
>> is not a bad thing. It is what many would expect.
> As there seems to be much resistance to one more (redundant) question
> in the installer, I suggest to add a simple message to that part
> of the installer, as in
> 
> "(Choosing 'whole disk' will become effective immediately.)"
> 
> or even
> 
> "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]"


In my opinion, this is the single suggestion in this entire thread
that's actually worth implementing. It's an easy fix, doesn't change
the installer's handling one bit (although it consumes a few more of
the precious bytes) and it might actually prevent someone else with
attention deficit disorder to wreck their disk in the future.

And even if it doesn't, it should at least cool you down enough to opt
out of embarking on a rant about it...


Regards,
/Benny

-- 
internetlabbet.se / work:   +46 8 551 124 80  / "Words must
Benny Lofgren/  mobile: +46 70 718 11 90 /   be weighed,
/   fax:+46 8 551 124 89/not counted."
   /email:  benny -at- internetlabbet.se

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Sean Howard]

Somebody claiming to be Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> 
> I have to apologize to everyone on this list for the tone of that
> first message. I was angry and venting, and I apologize if it offended
> anyone. I understand that the installer works the way it does because
> that's what's useful to the OpenBSD community and it should not change
> just because some random guy flames about it.
> 
> I also agree with those who pointed out that doing experimental OS
> installs on a machine you care about is not a particularly smart thing
> to do.
> 
> That being said, I think Dave understands the problem very well. That
> is probably the most dangerous point in the installation. It's
> dangerous even for experienced users (anyone can get distracted and
> screw up), but much more so for those who come from a different
> background, and the reason for that is that it's unexpected. As
> someone else pointed out, most Linux installers nowadays will give you
> a "big fat warning" before they do anything irreversible to your disk,
> and the users get used to and rely on these warnings. It seems to be
> different with OpenBSD. Maybe the OpenBSD philosophy is just not for
> me.
> 

My first install I wiped out my Hard drive. My second install I munged 
everything up.

After that - I learned *a lot* more respect for my own choices. This error is 
the best error you can make. Keeps you respecting your system and your own 
ability to control it. And the mistakes you make.

Sure - it sucks. Definitely sucks. But as has been pointed out a couple of 
times - it can be fixed.

You want to learn OpenBSD - learn that you can screw yourself if you're not 
careful - and soon enough you'll have the basics down - simply because you'll 
realize that the FAQ and man -k are awesome.

> Regards,
> 
>  - Leonardo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Nick Holland]

On 03/07/2012 12:55 PM, David Vasek wrote:

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Amit Kulkarni wrote:

...

Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [edit]

while the OP did make a mistake, he could modify the default to be
edit the MBR. so he would be forced to pay attention while staring at
the partition table. i would be paying attention to the instructions.

stuart is right, there's a point where if you add confirmations, where
would you stop?


Not confirmations, but saner defaults. No default value here is another
option - it doesn't take from precious floppy size.

I never had a problem with the current installer, but I really do think
that is should not direct people to disasters. Yes, people should be
careful, but only one press of Enter is too close. Defaults should be sane.


Let me explain a little part of the OpenBSD dev cycle.  Every six 
months, developers do as many installs and upgrades of as many types on 
as many systems as we can.


We do this to make sure everything works properly.

The ability to hit "ENTER ENTER ENTER ENTER" through the install and 
have things load is WHAT THE DEVELOPERS WANT.  We like to be able to 
install and test quickly.  Heck, we like being able to install and USE 
quickly.  Using an OS should not be about the installation process.


Serious OpenBSD users have the vast majority of our systems "whole disk" 
configs.  Multi-booting is for non-committed users: dabblers, resume 
stuffers ("fluent [='I installed successfully!'] in 37 operating 
sytems!") and people who have need for another OS for some reason on a 
laptop.  Hey, I have THREE laptops that multi-boot, but that's about 10% 
of the OpenBSD machines I regularly use.  A few machines have 
maintenance partitions that need to be worked around.  But for the most 
part, serious users and developers want the default exactly as it is.


I think I am far closer to removing all info on multibooting systems 
from the FAQ except for a statement of "Multibooting OpenBSD is not 
supported" than you are likely to see any change to the "whole disk" 
installation default.


Fortunately, I'm not too close to doing that.  HOWEVER, if this bullshit 
thread and nonsense suggestions go much further, I'd not be surprised to 
see a note in my inbox saying "remove it.  now".  And I will.


Nick.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Leonardo Sabino dos Santos]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Dave Anderson  wrote:
> To be fair (which is a bit difficult given the tone of the original
> message) he has identified what may be the only place in the install
> process where a single wrong keystroke can do major damage.  Everyplace
> else I can think of there's at least an opportunity to abort the
> installation after making a mistake but before the damage is done.
>
> I've no great love for 'are you sure' questions, but they may be
> appropriate where they prevent a single easy-to-make mistake from
> causing serious damage.
>
>Dave

I have to apologize to everyone on this list for the tone of that
first message. I was angry and venting, and I apologize if it offended
anyone. I understand that the installer works the way it does because
that's what's useful to the OpenBSD community and it should not change
just because some random guy flames about it.

I also agree with those who pointed out that doing experimental OS
installs on a machine you care about is not a particularly smart thing
to do.

That being said, I think Dave understands the problem very well. That
is probably the most dangerous point in the installation. It's
dangerous even for experienced users (anyone can get distracted and
screw up), but much more so for those who come from a different
background, and the reason for that is that it's unexpected. As
someone else pointed out, most Linux installers nowadays will give you
a "big fat warning" before they do anything irreversible to your disk,
and the users get used to and rely on these warnings. It seems to be
different with OpenBSD. Maybe the OpenBSD philosophy is just not for
me.

Regards,

 - Leonardo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Diana Eichert]

gawd no

it is bad enough I live in a f&%*kn' nanny state country, don't
turn my favorite OS into Linux.

when I need my hand held I'll ask my wife to hold mine.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Donald Allen]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:19 PM, David Vasek  wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Donald Allen wrote:
>
>> "While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
>> at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
>> tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
>> one so easily..."
>>
>> I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
>> the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
>> approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
>> happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
>> an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
>> survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.
>
>
> Except that the equipment shoudn't direct people to behave in such a
> disasterous way. And this the case.

I don't think so. This "equipment" provided documentation that said
"Multibooting is having several operating systems on one computer, and
some means of selecting which OS is to boot. It is not a trivial task!
If you don't understand what you are doing, you may end up deleting
large amounts of data from your computer. New OpenBSD users are
strongly encouraged to start with a blank hard drive on a dedicated
machine, and then practice your desired configuration on a
non-production system before attempting a multiboot configuration on a
production machine." Then the installer said, at the moment of truth,
"Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]". I don't see how you can
possibly think the "equipment" encouraged this problem.

I had one other thought about this. I've been following the OpenBSD
mailing lists for some years now and I don't recall ever seeing
another discussion of someone else making a hole in their foot at this
point in an install. It's possible that I'm wrong (and I don't care to
take the time to search the mail archives), but if I'm not, then this
situation is an outlier. But on the other hand, I see frequent
comments about how quick and easy it is to install OpenBSD. I think
part of the reason for that is that the installation process has been
carefully streamlined, including using well-chosen (high probability)
defaults. Changing that to address a very improbable scenario might
well amount to penalizing many to benefit a very few.

/Don

>
> Regards,
> David

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[David Vasek]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Amit Kulkarni wrote:


On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:19 AM, David Vasek  wrote:

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Donald Allen wrote:


"While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
one so easily..."

I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.



Except that the equipment shoudn't direct people to behave in such a
disasterous way. And this the case.

Regards,
David



what about this

Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [edit]

while the OP did make a mistake, he could modify the default to be
edit the MBR. so he would be forced to pay attention while staring at
the partition table. i would be paying attention to the instructions.

stuart is right, there's a point where if you add confirmations, where
would you stop?


Not confirmations, but saner defaults. No default value here is another 
option - it doesn't take from precious floppy size.


I never had a problem with the current installer, but I really do think 
that is should not direct people to disasters. Yes, people should be 
careful, but only one press of Enter is too close. Defaults should be 
sane.


Regards,
David

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Peter N. M. Hansteen]

"Dmitrij D. Czarkoff"  writes:

> "OpenBSD installer should be tuned so that hitting [Enter] all the way
> gets you to a bootable system without side effects"

My typical install is almost all hitting Enter (with a couple of obvious
exceptions9, and it ends with a bootable and very usable system. But
then I tend to want OpenBSD as the main or only system. 

Multiboot setups like the one the OP wanted requires a bit of paying
attention and is risky in general.

- P

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Daniel Bolgheroni]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 02:49:01PM +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> Sorry about the tone earlier, but I'm still incredulous that the
> install program would do something as serious as overwriting the
> partition table by default without confirmation.

An installation of an unknown OS, with no backups, answering questions
without reading it, complaining on the mailing list...

Smart move, buddy.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Amit Kulkarni]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:19 AM, David Vasek  wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Donald Allen wrote:
>
>> "While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
>> at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
>> tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
>> one so easily..."
>>
>> I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
>> the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
>> approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
>> happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
>> an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
>> survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.
>
>
> Except that the equipment shoudn't direct people to behave in such a
> disasterous way. And this the case.
>
> Regards,
> David
>

what about this

Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [edit]

while the OP did make a mistake, he could modify the default to be
edit the MBR. so he would be forced to pay attention while staring at
the partition table. i would be paying attention to the instructions.

stuart is right, there's a point where if you add confirmations, where
would you stop?

and for some daemons, there is no open source alternative to OpenBSD,
so learn it.

good luck

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Mihai Popescu]

David Vasek wrote:
>Except that the equipment shoudn't direct people to behave in such a 
>disasterous way. And this the case.

This is not the case, don't be ridiculous. There is not a disaster if
you wipe out your hardisk by mistake.
I think you got it wrong here. The developer can put anything he
consider there. It is a free product, so no obligations.
Usually, the DEFAULT option should be the one that is more often
encountered. That is, an OpenBSD true user will use its computer with
OpenBSD ONLY on the hardisk.
 The default option for timezone is Canada, but this is not
where the majority of users live. But I found out how to trick this, I
start the ntpd on install and my timezone is recognized rightaway. At
least I think it is ntpd.

I respect people developing and sending patches, but yours was funny.
Did you mean it ?

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[David Vasek]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Donald Allen wrote:


"While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
one so easily..."

I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.


Except that the equipment shoudn't direct people to behave in such a 
disasterous way. And this the case.


Regards,
David

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Richard Thornton]

Multi boot systems are definitely more risky to assemble;  I prefer use of
VM's instead.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Donald Allen wrote:

> "While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> one so easily..."
>
> I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
> the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
> approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
> happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
> an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
> survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.
>
> Had he prepared properly, backing up the system first and reading the
> documentation, he might not have made the error, due to the clear
> warnings in the docs,  and if he had, recovery would have been easy
> from the backup.
>
> Putting additional hand-holding in the installer (what part of "Use
> whole disk" was difficult to understand?) can only add to a false
> sense of safety. I think it makes a lot more sense that  limited
> development resources be devoted to real issues, as opposed to
> protecting people from their own carelessness.
>
> /Don Allen

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Donald Allen]

"While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
one so easily..."

I disagree. I think the installer is fine the way it is and it was not
the problem here. The problem was the original poster's too-cavalier
approach to something that is well-known to be dangerous. What
happened here is somewhat analogous to texting while driving or flying
an airplane drunk and, when disaster occurs, being upset (assuming
survival) that the equipment didn't prevent it.

Had he prepared properly, backing up the system first and reading the
documentation, he might not have made the error, due to the clear
warnings in the docs,  and if he had, recovery would have been easy
from the backup.

Putting additional hand-holding in the installer (what part of "Use
whole disk" was difficult to understand?) can only add to a false
sense of safety. I think it makes a lot more sense that  limited
development resources be devoted to real issues, as opposed to
protecting people from their own carelessness.

/Don Allen

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Alan Corey]

Partitioning the disk is not irreversible.  Use the Symantek/Norton 
utilities and it will make guesses and try to find Windows partitions. 
Once the newfs (formatting) starts, that's fairly irreversible.


  Alan

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Dave Anderson wrote:


On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Stuart Henderson wrote:


On 2012-03-07, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos  wrote:

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
wrote:

On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:26 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:

Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
on the screen, followed by the question:

  Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
nothing works, so I press Enter.


You were asked whether you want to edit MBR or use the whole disk, and
you chose using the whole disk. This resulted in your disk being
occupied by single A6 partition.

So, what went wrong? What kind of confirmation did you want?


I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?", or an
opportunity to review the settings before committing to the install.


The thing is, then you'll want another after you edit disklabel,
and another before running newfs (which is the first part which is
likely to be really tough to recover from). And then when the OS
is booted maybe you'll want rm to ask for confirmation, etc.


To be fair (which is a bit difficult given the tone of the original
message) he has identified what may be the only place in the install
process where a single wrong keystroke can do major damage.  Everyplace
else I can think of there's at least an opportunity to abort the
installation after making a mistake but before the damage is done.

I've no great love for 'are you sure' questions, but they may be
appropriate where they prevent a single easy-to-make mistake from
causing serious damage.

Dave

--
Dave Anderson

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Kevin Chadwick]

> > B Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

You should certainly try Ctrl-C, Esc, Ctrl-alt-del, power switch and
never enter in order to not do something.

Taking the situation of the cat jumping on the keyboard and you may
have an argument except you do have to hit [I] for install first and
should be able to guard the keyboard from the cat at this important
time. If it was changed and you started using OpenBSD then it would
start to annoy you too on your tenth install. It's very cool being able
to install OpenBSD in like 5 minutes and without any wrinkles on your
forehead at any time and more importantly not have to install a new
kernel every two weeks, in fact for years for some applications of
OpenBSD ;-).

Takes a little more time to keep firefox upto date on a single system
than Linux though.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Aaron]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Dennis den Brok  wrote:
> On 2012-03-07, Raimo Niskanen  wrote:
>> I just want to defend the OP a wee bit.
>>
>> Most installers I have encountered; Linux, FreeBSD, ... have a
>> very pronounced confirmation question just before making irreversible
>> changes to the target disk. Especially the ones that start by
>> collecting configuration information and then do the installation
>> in one pass without user interaction (SuSE comes to mind),
>> which the OpenBSD installer nowdays does more than in the past...
>>
>> So I think a pronounced confirmation question before touching the disk
>> is not a bad thing. It is what many would expect.
>
> As there seems to be much resistance to one more (redundant) question
> in the installer, I suggest to add a simple message to that part
> of the installer, as in
>
> "(Choosing 'whole disk' will become effective immediately.)"
>
> or even
>
> "Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]"
>
> While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
> at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
> tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
> one so easily...
>
> --
> Dennis den Brok
>

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.tech/28213 <-- Yay Patch!

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Renzo Fabriek]

On Wednesday 07 March 2012 15:27:51 Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Russell Garrison
>  wrote:
> > I am absolutely intrigued by this story despite my better judgement.
> > You were able to cook your own full OpenBSD installer on a USB stick
> > with GRUB instead of downloading an ISO or using PXE, but you failed
> > disk setup in the installer? It really would be interesting to see if
> > you can read just http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html , particularly
> > 4.5.3 and then come back to us with anything other than a mea culpa.
> 
> I admit to pressing Enter at some of the questions without reading
> carefully. It simply never crossed my mind that the default action for
> the installer is to erase the whole disk without chance for review. I
> still think that's a disaster waiting to happen.
>
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Christer Solskogen
>  wrote:
> > What if you mistyped there as well? Do you want a "Are you REALLY
> > REALLY sure?"?
> 
> Then again, partitioning your disk is a bit more serious than "What's
> your hostname?" or "What time zone are you in?". Maybe that one
> question deserves an extra confirmation, or a less dangerous default.
> Just saying.
>

When a OpenBSD partition is present than that is the default choise. Better? :)

But i have to agree with you. It is a dangerous point.
I think a patch for a blank default choise if no OpenBSD partition is present 
would make more chance to be accepted than a "are you sure" patch.
But... it will add an extra keystroke (W/E + enter) to save the newbees. I 
suspect that will be the main argument against this. But then again it would 
only be with fresh disks. (MBR without an OBSD part is also fresh in this case)

Another thing is that the instal script is a part of the install files... 
(duhh) Those files still has to fit on a floppy disk. So adding to much would 
make it harder to put them together.
As others said before, OpenBSD is not about handholding although they do a 
pretty good job already. You will discover that once you start using OBSD,

And if I may blabbermouth a bit more. Representing the info when choosing whole 
disk is almost useless. It is done correctly. If it is not done correctly, then 
you start again and find out what is wrong or different in your case. There is 
no harm done cause you wanted  to use the whole disk anyway. The only reason in 
this case is to save someone from a wrong keystoke which could be solved by 
giving no default when no OBSD partition is available. But that is for the  
team to decide.
In case you edit the MBR by hand, representing your changes is the same as 
reading and chekking twice before you save and quit fdisk.

gr
Renzo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dennis den Brok]

On 2012-03-07, Raimo Niskanen  wrote:
> I just want to defend the OP a wee bit.
>
> Most installers I have encountered; Linux, FreeBSD, ... have a
> very pronounced confirmation question just before making irreversible
> changes to the target disk. Especially the ones that start by
> collecting configuration information and then do the installation
> in one pass without user interaction (SuSE comes to mind),
> which the OpenBSD installer nowdays does more than in the past...
>
> So I think a pronounced confirmation question before touching the disk
> is not a bad thing. It is what many would expect.

As there seems to be much resistance to one more (redundant) question
in the installer, I suggest to add a simple message to that part
of the installer, as in

"(Choosing 'whole disk' will become effective immediately.)"

or even

"Use (W)hole disk (writes to disk immediately) or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]"

While the FAQ is indeed clear, the installer's simplicity appears
at that point a little deceptive, in that one (I know I was) is
tempted to think that such a user-friendly installer would not harm
one so easily...

--
Dennis den Brok

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dave Anderson]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Stuart Henderson wrote:

>On 2012-03-07, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos  wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
>> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:26 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
 Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
 on the screen, followed by the question:

   Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

 At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
 scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
 screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
 nothing works, so I press Enter.
>>>
>>> You were asked whether you want to edit MBR or use the whole disk, and
>>> you chose using the whole disk. This resulted in your disk being
>>> occupied by single A6 partition.
>>>
>>> So, what went wrong? What kind of confirmation did you want?
>>
>> I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
>> seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
>> like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?", or an
>> opportunity to review the settings before committing to the install.
>
>The thing is, then you'll want another after you edit disklabel,
>and another before running newfs (which is the first part which is
>likely to be really tough to recover from). And then when the OS
>is booted maybe you'll want rm to ask for confirmation, etc.

To be fair (which is a bit difficult given the tone of the original
message) he has identified what may be the only place in the install
process where a single wrong keystroke can do major damage.  Everyplace
else I can think of there's at least an opportunity to abort the
installation after making a mistake but before the damage is done.

I've no great love for 'are you sure' questions, but they may be
appropriate where they prevent a single easy-to-make mistake from
causing serious damage.

Dave

-- 
Dave Anderson

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 14:49 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
> seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
> like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?", or an
> opportunity to review the settings before committing to the install.
> 
> Sorry about the tone earlier, but I'm still incredulous that the
> install program would do something as serious as overwriting the
> partition table by default without confirmation.

That was a confirmation. And I fail to get an idea of the statement
about unexpectedness of OS installer overwriting the MBR. When you
install operating systems you should generally expect to deal with
partitioning, which should result in overwriting MBR in most cases
(unless you specifically made some changes to MBR before invoking
installer, but in this case you have to pay even more attention to the
installer as you want to make sure that it accepted your layout or at
least found the place you wanted the OS to land onto).

That's not to mention the fact that it is generally wise to back up at
least MBR when you install some OS for the first time, as you should
generally expect that some problem could arise from lack of familiarity
with OS  on your account.

Overall, your complaint boils down to the statement:

"OpenBSD installer should be tuned so that hitting [Enter] all the way
gets you to a bootable system without side effects"

which is quite contrary to the OpenBSD's user interaction practices, as
long as this system is specifically targeted at users with the opposite
approach to using PC.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Nick Holland]

On 03/07/2012 07:26 AM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:

Hi,

I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.

I'm a Linux user, but have always wanted to try OpenBSD. The last time
I'd tried installing it was version 4.6 and I didn't get very far.
That version wouldn't install on my notebook at all. The kernel
couldn't recognise my hard drive because of some AHCI incompatibility
on this notebook that I didn't have the expertise to solve, so I went
back to Linux for the time. Two years later, we're on version 5.0, I
decided to give it another try.

So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
actually the same notebook from two years ago.


i.e., you rolled your own install process on your first install.


I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
system later.


you did your first test install on a multi-boot machine.  again, quite 
contrary to the recommendations.




Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
on the screen, followed by the question:

   Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
nothing works,


yes, scrollback is something that was sacrificed on the installer to 
keep it able to fit on a floppy (contrary to another contribution to 
this thread).  Unfortunate, annoying, and unfortunately, I got no better 
ideas.



so I press Enter.


oops.



And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.


if you chose "Whole disk", yes...because next step is sub-partitioning, 
which can't be done until the last step is completed.



What saved me was an Ubuntu installation CD and the wonderful tool
gpart (http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/). With a bit of tinkering in
gpart and some very careful work with the Linux version of fdisk, I
managed to reconstruct the partition table and saved my system.


funny thing here.  IF you understood OpenBSD...the OpenBSD tools to fix 
this would have been MUCH easier than the Linux tool of the week.



Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I can
barely believe it. This is not about being an expert user or knowing
what you want to do, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. This
is about incredibly stupid user interface design. Sorry, it's just too
unbelievable that someone would think that this is actually a good
idea.


I'm sorry, I've worked with many many different OSs over decades. I can 
think of no OS installer that hitting "Enter" at the wrong time with the 
wrong set of conditions can't end up blowing away large amounts of work.


There's a reason I tell you multibooting is not a trivial task and that 
new users are encouraged to use a dedicated computer for their first 
install, and to PRACTICE a multi-boot install on non-production hw 
before doing it on their production machine with existing data.  You 
have proved the documentation correct.



I joined this mailing list just to tell you this: Right now, I feel
like never, ever touching OpenBSD with a ten-foot pole again.


I would say, based on your critera, yes, you and OpenBSD aren't a good 
fit.  That's ok.


Personally, I've found the OSs I have worked with (which include several 
BSDs, every version of Windows and DOS, and quite a few Linux distros, 
among others) all give you opportunities to blow away data during the 
install process.  And later.  If you really want something that double 
and triple checks every command you give it and everything you ask it to 
do...I'd suggest a Mac.  But don't start me on the old Macintosh, "this 
disk needs minor repairs, want me to fix it?"  [click yes]  "Formatting 
disk"  um.  that wasn't minor.


The first machine I installed OpenBSD on was a very old Compaq EISA 
machine, with a dedicated maintenance partition.  It got blown away 
three times before I got the math right on the partition tables...and I 
can assure you, the repair process was quite painful and time consuming 
(involving at least three floppy disks, as I recall).  Result: I know 
disk layout REALLY well now, and I LOVE the simple, fast, ea

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Donald Allen]

"Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I can
barely believe it. "

Doing an installation on a machine that you obviously care about, with
two existing OS installs at risk, in the casual manner you apparently
did also defies belief. *Any* install can result in disaster if not
done with proper respect for the process and no UI tweaks in the
installer will save someone who doesn't read carefully and prepare
carefully. Did you do a full backup before starting this exercise? Did
you read the FAQs on installation and multi-booting? The latter warns
you, in no uncertain terms, that what happened to you can happen to
you if you aren't careful.

/Don Allen

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Otto Moerbeek]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 03:57:10PM +0100, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:

> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 15:27 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> > Then again, partitioning your disk is a bit more serious than "What's
> > your hostname?" or "What time zone are you in?". Maybe that one
> > question deserves an extra confirmation, or a less dangerous default.
> 
> Sorry, but you wrote that you tried to scroll your screen before hitting
> [Enter]. Do you really want to say you didn't read the text?

AFAIK, the very minmal install kernel does not support VT scrolling.

-Otto

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 15:27 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
> Then again, partitioning your disk is a bit more serious than "What's
> your hostname?" or "What time zone are you in?". Maybe that one
> question deserves an extra confirmation, or a less dangerous default.

Sorry, but you wrote that you tried to scroll your screen before hitting
[Enter]. Do you really want to say you didn't read the text?

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Stuart Henderson]

On 2012-03-07, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos  wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:26 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
>>> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
>>> on the screen, followed by the question:
>>>
>>>   Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
>>>
>>> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
>>> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
>>> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
>>> nothing works, so I press Enter.
>>
>> <...>
>>
>> You were asked whether you want to edit MBR or use the whole disk, and
>> you chose using the whole disk. This resulted in your disk being
>> occupied by single A6 partition.
>>
>> So, what went wrong? What kind of confirmation did you want?
>
> I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
> seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
> like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?", or an
> opportunity to review the settings before committing to the install.

The thing is, then you'll want another after you edit disklabel,
and another before running newfs (which is the first part which is
likely to be really tough to recover from). And then when the OS
is booted maybe you'll want rm to ask for confirmation, etc.

In my experience people used to having to answer lots of "are you
really sure" options just keep hitting enter without thinking.
This is not a useful mindset to have on a Unix system.
You can think of this as encouraging good habits from the start :)
Sure there will be some "oh fsck did I really just do that"
moments without the warnings, but these will happen with warnings
too - there are all sorts of creative ways you can break things
without triggering a warning, often when there is significantly
more data on the system.

> Sorry about the tone earlier, but I'm still incredulous that the
> install program would do something as serious as overwriting the
> partition table by default without confirmation.

Just looking at the installer prompts is not really enough for a
new user of OpenBSD, it is really expected that people will have to
take note of the documentation. There's a clear warning in exactly
the place that we'd expect somebody wanting to multiboot to look..
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Tomas Bodzar]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos
 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.
>
> I'm a Linux user, but have always wanted to try OpenBSD. The last time
> I'd tried installing it was version 4.6 and I didn't get very far.
> That version wouldn't install on my notebook at all. The kernel
> couldn't recognise my hard drive because of some AHCI incompatibility
> on this notebook that I didn't have the expertise to solve, so I went
> back to Linux for the time. Two years later, we're on version 5.0, I
> decided to give it another try.
>
> So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
> created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
> and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
> plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
> actually the same notebook from two years ago.
>
> I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
> password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
> a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
> installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
> system later.
>
> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
> on the screen, followed by the question:
>
> B Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

So you work with GRUB for years, have Windows and Linux on that disk
already and still don't know what MBR is for and what means 'Whole
disk'?

>
> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
> nothing works, so I press Enter.
>
> And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
> I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
> a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
> overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.
>
> What saved me was an Ubuntu installation CD and the wonderful tool
> gpart (http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/). With a bit of tinkering in
> gpart and some very careful work with the Linux version of fdisk, I
> managed to reconstruct the partition table and saved my system.

Any disk tool can "save" you after your own fault. It doesn't need to
be Ubuntu-like

>
> Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
> disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
> confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I can
> barely believe it. This is not about being an expert user or knowing
> what you want to do, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. This
> is about incredibly stupid user interface design. Sorry, it's just too
> unbelievable that someone would think that this is actually a good
> idea.

Ubuntu does the same, but just in GUI. And there was question which
needed your confirmation in OpenBSD CLI ;-)
BTW you obviously skipped
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#InstDisks (world is not just
Linux) and probably this one as well
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting

>
> I joined this mailing list just to tell you this: Right now, I feel
> like never, ever touching OpenBSD with a ten-foot pole again.
>
> Regards,
>
> B - Leonardo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[James Shupe]

> So I think a pronounced confirmation question before touching the disk
> is not a bad thing. It is what many would expect.

I didn't know that the devs were in the business of holding hands.

OpenBSD has the best installer of any OS, hands down. It's tiny,
scriptable, to the point, and does exactly what you tell it to. The OS
is by the devs, for the devs, and if you're fortunate enough to be able
to use it, good for you. But don't complain about user friendliness
being at the bottom of their list.

-- 
James Shupe

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Todd]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 6:26 AM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos
 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.
>
> I'm a Linux user, but have always wanted to try OpenBSD. The last time
> I'd tried installing it was version 4.6 and I didn't get very far.
> That version wouldn't install on my notebook at all. The kernel
> couldn't recognise my hard drive because of some AHCI incompatibility
> on this notebook that I didn't have the expertise to solve, so I went
> back to Linux for the time. Two years later, we're on version 5.0, I
> decided to give it another try.
>
> So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
> created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
> and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
> plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
> actually the same notebook from two years ago.
>
> I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
> password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
> a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
> installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
> system later.
>
> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
> on the screen, followed by the question:
>
>  Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]

For the sake of the archive:
I have performed similar installations where multibooting OpenBSD with
one or more other operating systems already installed.  The safest way
seems to be to change the partition type of the partition that you
intend to install OpenBSD on to a6 (using fdisk in linux)prior to
starting the OpenBSD installer.  Then when you get to this step in the
installer the default is to only use the a6 partition.


An example of what the disk should look like prior to starting the
installation from pub/OpenBSD/5.0/i386/INSTALL.linux
Device BootStart  End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1 1  211   850720+   6  DOS 16-bit >=32M
/dev/hda2   212  273   249984   83  Linux native
/dev/hda3   274  992  2899008   a6  OpenBSD


> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
> nothing works, so I press Enter.
>
> And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
> I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
> a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
> overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.
>
> What saved me was an Ubuntu installation CD and the wonderful tool
> gpart (http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/). With a bit of tinkering in
> gpart and some very careful work with the Linux version of fdisk, I
> managed to reconstruct the partition table and saved my system.
>
> Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
> disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
> confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I can
> barely believe it. This is not about being an expert user or knowing
> what you want to do, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. This
> is about incredibly stupid user interface design. Sorry, it's just too
> unbelievable that someone would think that this is actually a good
> idea.
>
> I joined this mailing list just to tell you this: Right now, I feel
> like never, ever touching OpenBSD with a ten-foot pole again.
>
> Regards,
>
>  - Leonardo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Anonymous Remailer (austria)]

> So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
> created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
> and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
> plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
> actually the same notebook from two years ago.

Not very smart trying to install another OS on a disk that has anything else
you want on it. I think you took a silly risk. Did you see the part where it
says you're supposed to have a good backup?

> password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
> a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
> installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
> system later.

Big mistake, as you found out later.

> And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.

Yeah, BSD spares us the endless hair pulling OK "confirmation" dialogs that
come standard with Windows and BSD users appreciate that. No, we demand it.

> I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
> a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
> overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.

It's pretty offensive when software does what you tell it, is that what you
are saying?

> What saved me was an Ubuntu installation CD and the wonderful tool
> gpart (http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/). With a bit of tinkering in
> gpart and some very careful work with the Linux version of fdisk, I
> managed to reconstruct the partition table and saved my system.

Great. Do that a few more times and you'll have the know-how to multiboot a
new OS. BTW many Linux distros will do the same thing to you. No intelligent
person adds a new OS to an existing disk with important stuff on it unless
he knows what he is doing.

For you, VirtualBox or VMWare would have made alot of sense. It still would
except from your whining I don't really think you're cut out for
OpenBSD. Ubuntu would be good for you, probably.

> Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
> disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
> confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I can
> barely believe it.

Try installing another copy of Windows on the same disk and let us know how
you make out. Even better, try OS/2. It will nail every disk you have.
Actually so will most Windows, they write bootloaders on every disk they
find, without asking you and with no confirmation dialogs.

> This is not about being an expert user or knowing what you want to do,
> because I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Maybe, but you had no idea *how* to do it. Critical difference there buddy.

> This is about incredibly stupid user interface design. Sorry, it's just
> too unbelievable that someone would think that this is actually a good
> idea.

Well honestly the BSD installers are mostly old and cranky but we know how
they work pretty well by now and they very seldom do anything but what you
tell them. You're coming from Windows and hand-holding "OS" and you got a
taste of a serious OS. You can't really blame the installer for believing
you meant what you typed.
> 
> I joined this mailing list just to tell you this: Right now, I feel
> like never, ever touching OpenBSD with a ten-foot pole again.

Have a nice day luser! I didn't even have to join the list to say that.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Leonardo Sabino dos Santos]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Russell Garrison
 wrote:
> I am absolutely intrigued by this story despite my better judgement.
> You were able to cook your own full OpenBSD installer on a USB stick
> with GRUB instead of downloading an ISO or using PXE, but you failed
> disk setup in the installer? It really would be interesting to see if
> you can read just http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html , particularly
> 4.5.3 and then come back to us with anything other than a mea culpa.

I admit to pressing Enter at some of the questions without reading
carefully. It simply never crossed my mind that the default action for
the installer is to erase the whole disk without chance for review. I
still think that's a disaster waiting to happen.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Christer Solskogen
 wrote:
> What if you mistyped there as well? Do you want a "Are you REALLY
> REALLY sure?"?

Then again, partitioning your disk is a bit more serious than "What's
your hostname?" or "What time zone are you in?". Maybe that one
question deserves an extra confirmation, or a less dangerous default.
Just saying.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Raimo Niskanen]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 03:04:33PM +0100, Christer Solskogen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos
>  wrote:
> > I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
> > seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
> > like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?",
> 
> What if you mistyped there as well? Do you want a "Are you REALLY
> REALLY sure?"?
> It reminds me of the installer of WindowMaker (I belive, I might be
> mistaken) who did that. Asked you multiple times if you where sure
> that you have done everything correctly. And the last question was
> "Are you lying?" :-)

That's a nice one. But there is a point in that, it forces the user to
alternate from pressing "y" to pressing "n", which increases the
possibility for the reply being thought through.

I just want to defend the OP a wee bit.

Most installers I have encountered; Linux, FreeBSD, ... have a
very pronounced confirmation question just before making irreversible
changes to the target disk. Especially the ones that start by
collecting configuration information and then do the installation
in one pass without user interaction (SuSE comes to mind),
which the OpenBSD installer nowdays does more than in the past...

So I think a pronounced confirmation question before touching the disk
is not a bad thing. It is what many would expect.

> 
> 
> -- 
> chs,

-- 

/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Warriner, Benjamin]

And you didn't read the FAQ because?
The OpenBSD Installation Guide is easily found at
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html
People wrote this documentation so other people would actually read it and
not have your unfortunate experience.
Your inability or unwillingness to do your homework before starting on
this task ultimately means you are solely responsible for what happened.

-Ben Warriner

On 3/7/12 6:31 AM, "Leonardo Sabino dos Santos"
 wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I want to tell you about my experience with OpenBSD.
>
>I'm a Linux user, but have always wanted to try OpenBSD. The last time
>I'd tried installing it was version 4.6 and I didn't get very far.
>That version wouldn't install on my notebook at all. The kernel
>couldn't recognise my hard drive because of some AHCI incompatibility
>on this notebook that I didn't have the expertise to solve, so I went
>back to Linux for the time. Two years later, we're on version 5.0, I
>decided to give it another try.
>
>So I downloaded all the package files, wrote them to a USB stick,
>created a bootable image with GRUB, booted into the OpenBSD installer
>and off we go. Now, this computer already had Windows 7 and Linux,
>plus about 16 GB of unpartitioned space where OpenBSD is going. It's
>actually the same notebook from two years ago.
>
>I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
>password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
>a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
>installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
>system later.
>
>Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
>on the screen, followed by the question:
>
>  Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
>
>At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
>scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
>screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
>nothing works, so I press Enter.
>
>And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
>I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
>a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
>overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.
>
>What saved me was an Ubuntu installation CD and the wonderful tool
>gpart (http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/). With a bit of tinkering in
>gpart and some very careful work with the Linux version of fdisk, I
>managed to reconstruct the partition table and saved my system.
>
>Distributing an installation program that can wipe out the user's hard
>disk instantly on a single wrong keystroke, without so much as a
>confirmation prompt is so shortsighted and irresponsible that I can
>barely believe it. This is not about being an expert user or knowing
>what you want to do, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. This
>is about incredibly stupid user interface design. Sorry, it's just too
>unbelievable that someone would think that this is actually a good
>idea.
>
>I joined this mailing list just to tell you this: Right now, I feel
>like never, ever touching OpenBSD with a ten-foot pole again.
>
>Regards,
>
> - Leonardo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Zak Elep]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos
 wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Zak Elep 
> wrote:
>>
>> Too bad, a thorough reading of FAQ Chapter 4[0] could have saved you a
>> LOT of trouble.
>>
>> [0]:   http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html
>
> I had actually read chapter 4 of the FAQ before. That's part of the
> point: reading won't save you from a wrong keystroke.

Nope, _paying attention where due_ is.

If you were unsure, you could have just Ctrl-C and it will drop you
back to a root shell, then you could either invoke reboot to get out,
or run the "install" script to try again, once you are sure and
prepared.

--
Zak B. Elep || orangeandbronze.com
1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1  F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Christer Solskogen]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos
 wrote:
> I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
> seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
> like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?",

What if you mistyped there as well? Do you want a "Are you REALLY
REALLY sure?"?
It reminds me of the installer of WindowMaker (I belive, I might be
mistaken) who did that. Asked you multiple times if you where sure
that you have done everything correctly. And the last question was
"Are you lying?" :-)


-- 
chs,

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Peter Hessler]

On 2012 Mar 07 (Wed) at 13:26:41 +0100 (+0100), Leonardo Sabino dos Santos 
wrote:
...
:I'm not actually paying
:a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
:installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
:system later.
:

You should always pay attention to an *installation* program.
Especially one that installs an *OS*, which is likely to erase your
drive.


:Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
:on the screen, followed by the question:
:
:  Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
:
:At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
:scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
:screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
:nothing works, so I press Enter.
:
:And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.


The confirmation was the part that you quoted.  Sorry, but you *do* need
to read what the installation program tells you.  That is the entire
point of having instructions on the screen.


-- 
I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Leonardo Sabino dos Santos]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff 
wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:26 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
>> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
>> on the screen, followed by the question:
>>
>>   Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
>>
>> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
>> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
>> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
>> nothing works, so I press Enter.
>
> <...>
>
> You were asked whether you want to edit MBR or use the whole disk, and
> you chose using the whole disk. This resulted in your disk being
> occupied by single A6 partition.
>
> So, what went wrong? What kind of confirmation did you want?

I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of
seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something
like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?", or an
opportunity to review the settings before committing to the install.

Sorry about the tone earlier, but I'm still incredulous that the
install program would do something as serious as overwriting the
partition table by default without confirmation.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Zak Elep 
wrote:
>
> Too bad, a thorough reading of FAQ Chapter 4[0] could have saved you a
> LOT of trouble.
>
> [0]:   http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html

I had actually read chapter 4 of the FAQ before. That's part of the
point: reading won't save you from a wrong keystroke.

 - Leonardo

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant)

[Russell Garrison]

I am absolutely intrigued by this story despite my better judgement.
You were able to cook your own full OpenBSD installer on a USB stick
with GRUB instead of downloading an ISO or using PXE, but you failed
disk setup in the installer? It really would be interesting to see if
you can read just http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html , particularly
4.5.3 and then come back to us with anything other than a mea culpa.

There are always going to be stumbling points in computing, but the
question is do we learn from them or just reject them and act like
they are not the great opportunities for growth that they are.

Re: My OpenBSD 5.0 installation experience (long rant) (even longer)

[Mo Libden]

07 PQ Leonardo Sabino dos Santos 
:
> I start answering the installer's questions. Keyboard layout. Root
> password. Configuration of network interfaces. I'm not actually paying
> a whole lot of attention to the questions as this is just a test
> installation and I figure I can always explore and configure the
> system later.

you can go paying a little attention when you do it for 101st time.
when you're doing installation of a new OS for the first time,
having you're sane, you're expected to pay attention.

> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
> on the screen, followed by the question:
> 
>   Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
> 
> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
> nothing works, so I press Enter.

well, you know what? it is exactly the same key combination as it is in
linux: Shift-PgUp / Shift-PgDn. even if it wasn't, you can interrupt the
installation any time by pressing obvious ^C and start again, paying
attention at the parts you missed earlier.

> And my partition table is gone. Poof! Instantly, with no confirmation.
> I immediately realized what had happened and rebooted. Too late. I got
> a "No OS" message. It seems that the OpenBSD installer actually
> overwrites the partition table the instant you press Enter.

man, you're miserable! I remember when I installed OpenBSD 2.1
(if memory serves), in 1996 off twenty-something floppy disks.

at that time README used to suggest having paper/pencil/calculator
handy. at that time you needed to do calculations and know exactly
what are those sectors, cylinders, heads. it was even better if you had
knowledge about hard disk partitioning and all that stuff.

i knew that stuff, i printed and carefully read README.i386 few times,
i had all those things handy and yet on my first install I f*cked up my
disk having my Windows for workgroups 3.11 disk suffer lost directories
and files, along with broken file content. i never complained about it,
i did my homework and did proper installation.

these days you're relieved of these things. installation procedure is
condensed, fdisk is much better, disklabel editing goes without vi,
you're asked just few question, but the main thing about OpenBSD
remains unchanged: YOU NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.

if you don't, you're probably best off without going there. But being
asked if you want to use the whole disk for OpenBSD, confirming
that and expecting it not to overwrite the partition table?

what kind of logic is that?