Just like my last employer where I spent a lot of time finding the simple things the developers didn't do (but would cause havoc with Google if we let it launch in that state)
Why would anyone even have them be two separate machines with the same content?
They are in different locations. openbsd.org is updated first and in the same (physical) location as the CVS servers, build equipment, etc., and www.openbsd.org and the other mirrors are mirrors with much more bandwidth.
I'm not sure that matters either. It's not really a priority and I respect that.
Apparently the cited excuse for why they don't support USB bootable media is because it's hard because some computers only support floppy emulator or don't support it, and there are many bugs in USB boot for older BIOS.. But that doesn't keep every other operating system of this day and age supporting it
I have had numerous problems on older Dell/HP machines with USB booting anything so it's reasonable. I buy the official media even though I rarely use it.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#noflopcd
Can this easily be done from any Linux distribution? AFAIK it can not, instead they waste resources creating USB installs and images.
Let's see...
> Network boot, using PXE (i386 or amd64) or diskless(8) (other platforms).
Red Hat and Fedora had this for ages. Also the installa media can be on a FTP, HTTP or NFS server.
> External USB CD-ROM or USB floppy, if your machine can boot from one.
This should work with most Linux distributions, too.
> USB Flash disk or hard disk
The same.
> Worst case, if none of the above is suitable, you can usually pull the disk out of the target system, use suitable adapters to install it in a "normal" computer, install OpenBSD, then replace the disk back in the target system.
Again this should be possible with most Linux distributions.
Now does OpenBSD have an automated installer?
Yes. You can use expect with /install easily and you can simply add your own local "site set" tgz which can be hosted on a local HTTP/FTP server to apply any local customisations.
However, if you're provisioning lots of machines, it's very easy just to "restore" filesystems off a bootable USB stick, mount them, set the hostname then tell ansible/puppet to do the rest. Don't need kickstart or any of that crap.
Personally though I'd just netboot lots of systems off PXE/TFTP, NFS mount all filesystems and have local swap disk only. I used to do that with Sun systems. We had 50 SPARCstation 5's booting off a SPARCserver 1000E on Solaris and it worked nicely. OpenBSD works pretty much the same. Linux is a piece of crap to netboot.
Plenty of ways to skin that cat.
You can netboot Linux. Knoppix [1] offers Terminal Server which configures DHCP, TFTP and NFS so that you can boot Knoppix from the local network.
There is an official solution in -current that involves DHCP but I don't know the details.
I love OpenBSD as a piece of software, but I don't understand it's developers or community at all.