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Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer
- pnutjam 8y agoThere 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.
- cpach 8y agoWhy not just Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora?
- pnutjam 8y agoNone 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 8y agoLove 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.
- ohithereyou 8y agoFedora: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/system-administrators-guide/kernel-module-driver-configuration/Working_with_the_GRUB_2_Boot_Loader/#sec-GRUB_2_over_a_Serial_Console https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/system-admin... Red Hat Enterprise: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/system_administrators_guide/sec-grub_2_over_a_serial_console https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... Slackware: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:serial_installation https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:serial_installati... Debian: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s03.html.en https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s03.html.en Ubuntu: https://clinta.github.io/bionic-on-apu2/ https://clinta.github.io/bionic-on-apu2/ So basically every mainstream distro.
- paulfurtado 8y agoFor 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.
- Fnoord 8y agoMany 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.
- upofadown 8y agoThe 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.
- ohithereyou 8y agoYou 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.
- yellowapple 8y agoIIRC 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.
- tyingq 8y agoThey 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-serial-console-apu-board/ https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...
- sazfedjhrgnukc 8y ago"Uh, no." Uh, yes.
- tyingq 8y agoNo, really. One example: https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over-serial-console-apu-board/ https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...
- peterwwillis 8y agoReminds 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)
- snazz 8y agoI’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.
- sebazzz 8y agoIs the electrolyte from caps corrosive or can it be cleaned up?
- snazz 8y agoI 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.
- jdietrich 8y agoThat 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.
- edoo 8y agoIn case you didn't know why, it was industrial espionage that did that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
- znpy 8y agoTIL
- openloop 8y agoWhat sort of sorcery is this?
- doublepg23 8y agoAnyone here use OpenBSD in production? I've used it off-and-on it always felt prickly, even with the excellent documentation.
- yellowapple 8y agoI used it for one of our onsite DNS servers (as a VM). Seems to be working well.
- sverige 8y agoThere's some interesting new stuff in that area on OpenBSD. https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190128061321 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190128061321
- yellowapple 8y agoOooo 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).
- snazz 8y agoIt’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.
- bluedino 8y agoWe 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.
- Aloha 8y agoI worked for Fish Networks, the hardware we sold was insanely underpowered, and cheap.
- Damogran6 8y agoDid 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