A few more Soekris notes
The Soekris I installed a few months ago has been working well, so I’m setting up a second for another location. Mostly setting it up the same as before, and collected the following notes along the way.
- I’d forgotten how to figure out the Soekris’ MAC address, which is needed for the DHCP server config. Turns out it’s shown when you tell the soekris to try netbooting via
boot f0. - The ubuntu (& presumably debian) tftpd configures itself without the
-sflag, which allows pxeboot’s requests for files like /bsd to be found in the/srv/tftp/directory - Despite rediscovering the above, I ended up reinstalling onsite from my macbook. Got most of the way thanks to tfpd tips here and the ISC dhcp server from MacPorts. However, as launchd was involved, there was much unhappiness getting tftpd to actually serve the files in question. Had just about thrown up my hands when I figured out that the
-sflag actually works the same as it does in debian, not the way the OS X manpage says it does. - After close to 10 years of being confused about why OpenBSD’s installer often pukes when trying to use a local ftp or http connection, I finally thought to look at my local webserver’s access log, and saw that the installer was trying to get an index.txt file. Creating one with the name of the relevant files did the trick.
- I thought to plug the Soekris into a Kill a Watt while installing, and never saw a draw of over 4 watts while formatting the CF, copying over the install set, or writing the files. Not bad! Idles at 2 watts.
Rather than taking Michiel’s exact approach with the memory filesystem, I decided I’d use the memoryfs for the commonly-changed files, but leave the root writeable, which has the benefit of allowing ports to be installed and configuration changes to be made on the fly.