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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by tyingq on Friday February 01, 2019 @10:30AM (#19054862)
Love articles like this, and there's lots of good info here but...

"So, how do you get around installing an operating system on a computer which has no video output nor console redirection? For Windows and most Linux distros, you can’t"

Uh, no.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by paulfurtado on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:46AM (#19055727)
For most of these, changing syslinux.cfg in the install media lets you add the console=ttyS0 option to the kernel command line and whatever option triggers the text installer for the distro. So it isn't too hard to do, albeit annoyingly non default.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by upofadown on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:33AM (#19055563)
The examples listed require the existence of a keyboard and screen. You would have to make or find a distro that used the serial console at boot. I think the whole point that the author was trying to make is that OpenBSD supports a serial console by default with the regular installation image.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by tyingq on Friday February 01, 2019 @12:21PM (#19056126)
They don't generally require anything special though. Maybe a parameter or two. He installed OpenBSD on a serial console. Here's someone installing Debian on a serial console: https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by LukeShu on Friday February 01, 2019 @09:54PM (#19060715)
The Linux kernel itself will use the serial console by default if there's no VGA device:

    If no console device is specified, the first device found capable of
    acting as a system console will be used. At this time, the system
    first looks for a VGA card and then for a serial port. So if you don't
    have a VGA card in your system the first serial port will automatically
    become the console.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/admin-guide/serial-...
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by ohithereyou on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:47AM (#19055733)
You only need a keyboard and mouse unless you modify the boot media to use the serial console for the installer, which several of those links detail. To say that Linux doesn't support it is incredibly ignorant of the author.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by yellowapple on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:37AM (#19055612)
IIRC Slackware at least also supports a serial console by default when installing (I used it to install Slackware on an Iomega NAS an old coworker of mine got rid of). Not sure about other distros.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by Fnoord on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:02AM (#19055172)
Many NICs support PXE. You use bootp and TFTP to start a Linux installation. I've installed Linux on SPARC and Alpha this way (the MIPS machines had a form of video out), as well as on a Soekris.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by sazfedjhrgnukc on Friday February 01, 2019 @06:02PM (#19059627)
"Uh, no."

Uh, yes.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by tyingq on Friday February 01, 2019 @06:27PM (#19059783)
No, really.

One example: https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by snazz on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:00AM (#19055146)
I’m impressed that there are no leaking capacitors in the pictures on this post. I have a few late-90s-to-about-2005-era machines that are leaking capacitor juice all over their motherboards.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by edoo on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:33AM (#19055556)
In case you didn't know why, it was industrial espionage that did that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by znpy on Friday February 01, 2019 @07:43PM (#19060186)
TIL
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by sebazzz on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:32AM (#19055548)
Is the electrolyte from caps corrosive or can it be cleaned up?
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by jdietrich on Friday February 01, 2019 @01:05PM (#19056640)
That depends on the chemistry of the electrolyte and the quality of the soldermask, but you'll rarely see more than superficial corrosion.

Batteries are a far bigger problem - most computers have a battery on the motherboard to power the real-time clock, which will do horrendous damage to the PCB if it leaks.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by snazz on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:41AM (#19055661)
I rarely see the electrolyte get very far from the capacitor, so I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be an issue. Once it dries, it can be hard to remove, but since it rarely makes it far beyond the capacitor itself, I haven’t needed to wipe it up. I’m also a little afraid that using a wet paper towel might just spread the stuff further around and cause a short, but I’m not sure. The biggest issue could be the fact that the capacitor itself probably doesn’t work, which might be problematic if it’s in a PSU or similar.

Since the oldest hardware I have is from the mid-90s, I suspect the problem would be more pronounced in older machines and a re-capping job might be warranted then.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by bluedino on Friday February 01, 2019 @12:33PM (#19056251)
We would drive image the old Barracuda mail appliances. The HD's would fail or the fans would get obscenely loud. You could run them in a whitebox server or VMware instance. As an added bonus they were much, much faster.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by Aloha on Friday February 01, 2019 @07:54PM (#19060215)
I worked for Fish Networks, the hardware we sold was insanely underpowered, and cheap.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by doublepg23 on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:21AM (#19055418)
Anyone here use OpenBSD in production?

I've used it off-and-on it always felt prickly, even with the excellent documentation.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by protomyth on Friday February 01, 2019 @02:57PM (#19057867)
Yeah, I pretty much use it for all our internet services, except the ones where you need a large file system or the government / vendor is dictating what I can use. It works well, is pretty easy to upgrade every six months, and patching is a whole lot easier these days.

For the big file system I use FreeBSD with ZFS, and we have a VMWare server to hold all the evil I am required to keep in my server room. The fact I have some damn government vendor who hasn't validated their product on anything past Windows Server 2003 is a little annoying.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by snazz on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:50AM (#19055756)
It’s the only OS on my primary laptop and desktop machine now! Everything feels well-engineered and mostly very consistent. Compared to Linux and FreeBSD, stuff like suspend/resume, brightness/volume hotkeys, etc. not only work, but work on the console and with a plain window manager (no desktop environment). The classic example is how Wi-Fi, even autojoining (as of recently), works without the mess of ifconfig+wpa_supplicant+NetworkManager. OpenBSD’s ifconfig supports all this without wrappers upon wrappers.

It’s still a very niche market, though, so you have to stick to relatively well-tested technologies to avoid running into inconsistencies and issues.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by doublepg23 on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:54AM (#19055810)
That's great, I do like using `ifconfig` for everything - it just makes more sense.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by smhenderson on Friday February 01, 2019 @12:59PM (#19056558)
I use it as my primary laptop at home. And I have a laptop at work I use to test things on it.

I really like the lite-weight http server that comes with it. I've used it to complete a few internal only web sites for automating tasks around the office (importing data from other systems into our accounting system, firing off email confirmations to customers, etc.)

I have had very few issues with it and when I did it was generally me assuming I knew what I was doing because of my Linux experience. Once I learned to read the manual and look for subtle differences between BSD and GNU I found I was able to pick it all up pretty quick. Their manual pages are actually one of the best perks!

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by sverige on Friday February 01, 2019 @03:02PM (#19057918)
It's been my daily driver on desktop and laptop for eight years, and I've got a couple small servers running it for about six years. It just keeps getting better and more friendly as time goes on, too.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by yellowapple on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:39AM (#19055638)
I used it for one of our onsite DNS servers (as a VM). Seems to be working well.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by sverige on Friday February 01, 2019 @03:05PM (#19057953)
There's some interesting new stuff in that area on OpenBSD.

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190128061321

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by yellowapple on Monday February 04, 2019 @12:49PM (#19078636)
Oooo neat. Doesn't really factor into that particular OpenBSD deployment, but if I ever go back to OpenBSD on my work laptop (which I'd like to do at some point; the previous constraint was that I needed Linux for various tools at work, but I think I can make do with a second laptop and/or using vmm to run virtualized Linux X clients), then this looks like it'd be pretty handy (especially since my work network uses a captive portal now, so I'd want something smart enough to handle that, which sounds exactly like what unwind is supposed to achieve).
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by Damogran6 on Friday February 01, 2019 @02:55PM (#19057847)
Did the same thing with a CS-Mars SIEM, many moons ago. The only things that made it a Cisco appliance was the faceplate and a funky IDE-CF flash disk adapter
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by peterwwillis on Friday February 01, 2019 @10:50AM (#19055046)
Reminds me of when I replaced Windows NT with Linux on a Dell NAS. Used extra PCI slot to slap in a SATA controller, then built an external hot swap array for off-site backups. A NAS and backups for less than $2K! (yeah it's not tape backup, meh)
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by pnutjam on Friday February 01, 2019 @10:28AM (#19054844)
There are good linux distributions for console only x86 machines. I use voyage linux, which is a bit dated. Alpine linux is also a good choice, but a bit more difficult.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by cpach on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:07AM (#19055253)
Why not just Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora?
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by pnutjam on Friday February 01, 2019 @07:36PM (#19060149)
None of these have good support for serial port only devices. Fedora and Ubuntu take some tweaking to get them to pass real text to serial. Debian would probably work ok.

The biggest issue is they aren't designed for read-only partitions which is necessary for certain types of flash memory.

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