Getting OpenBSD on the ALIX used to be quite an effort. You had to figure out what your CF card looked like, enter the right drive parameters, and hope. Now it’s dead easy:
-
Download the flashrd binary image. I used flashimg.i386.wd0.com0-20120531.gz, which is root wd0, com0 38400 console. This matches the Alix BIOS default, which also spits out 38400 serial.
-
Unzip the image with gzip -d
-
Write the image to the CF card. I have Cygwin installed, so I was able to use dd. Since I’m running this on Windows 7, I had to open my Cygwin shell as Administrator. The command I used:
dd if=flashdist.i386.wd0.com0-20120531 of=/dev/sdd bs=128kI was pleasantly surprised that dd worked. (I found the device by doing sfdisk -l /dev/sda, then sdb, then sdc, until I found a partition table that looked like my 4 GB flash drive.) I picked 128k as the block size because the image was evenly divisible by that. I don’t know if it makes a difference, but I figured why risk it.
-
Next I hooked up a DB9 F/F mini null modem to my PC serial port, connected that to the Alix serial port, ran hypertrm (which I had to get from an earlier Windows release) and was talking to OpenBSD. Root password was “root” (no quotes).
-
At this point I reset the password:
rw passwd root rorw is the flashrd way to say “mount the file system read/write”, and ro says “mount the file system read-only”. flashrd boots up read-only (which saves wear on the flash card) so you need to set it to read/write if you want to do pretty much anything.
That’s all there is to it!
(This post is part of [Building an ALIX firewall](/blog/2012-06-20 23:11:44 GMT-7-building-an-alix-firewall))