duckland.org news (Unix)

Tale of Installs, Part 2

Don Harper — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 23:01:00 GMT

Well, as I mentioned, I was trying to install OpenBSD. Well, my main workstation died, so I have to re-purposed the OpenBSD box as my workstation running ArchLinux. I am hunting for a suitable replacement.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

dd(8) with progress

Don Harper — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 23:11:00 GMT

I needed to write an iso image to a USB key, and the typical way is with just dd(8), but I wanted a progress bar. A quick google later, and I get:

pv -tpreb isoname | sudo dd of=/dev/sdd bs=1024

Which will write the iso image to the USB stick sdd, and give me a progress bar, tell me how fast it is writing, and give me an eta when finished. Perfect.

Tale of Installs

Don Harper — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 23:11:00 GMT

So, I am starting a new personal project at the house, and I need a new server. As I was wanting to learn more about the *BSD, I started looking around at things like FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.

Since there was a security part, I started with OpenBSD. One of the things I noticed quickly while doing my research is that while there is a lot of documentation, they do not really seem to care about making it easy for new folks to join the project, nor are the trying to support new-fangled hardware, like bootable USB drives. This strikes me odd, as FreeBSD has instructions (see 2.3.5).

Since I want to use pf, I am going to stay with OpenBSD for now.