Installation is supported from several media types, including: FFS partitions Tape Remote NFS partition CD-ROM FTP HTTP If you have the OpenBSD CD-ROM distribution (and a CD-ROM drive) you can boot from it. Otherwise, you will need to create a bootable disk. This may be a floppy or a hard disk (floppy is simplest). To boot from CD-ROM: At the SRM console enter "show device" to find the device ID of your CD-ROM drive (the device ID is in the second column and should start with DKA). If your drive shows up with a drive number with trailing zeros, you will want to ignore them (unless it is DKA0). For example, if your cdrom is listed as DKA600, you want to use dka6 (device ID's are case insensitive). Insert the OpenBSD/alpha CD and enter "boot -fi 2.2/alpha/bsd.rd DEVICE" where DEVICE is the dka device. Note that the argument order is important here. If this does not work, you'll have to create a boot floppy or bootable hard disk; follow the directions below. (A boot floppy image is included on the CD-ROM as 2.2/alpha/floppy.fs.) If you have a floppy drive on your alpha: If you are using a UN*X-like system to write the floppy image to disk, you should use the "dd" command to copy the file system image (floppy.fs) directly to the raw floppy disk. It is suggested that you read the dd(1) manual page or ask your system administrator to determine the correct set of arguments to use; it will be slightly different from system to system, and a comprehensive list of the possibilities is beyond the scope of this document. If you are using a DOS PC to write the floppy image to disk, you should use the "rawrite" utility, provided in the "i386/inst" directory of the OpenBSD distribution. It will write the file system image (floppy.fs) to a disk. You can boot it using "boot dva0". Note that, when installing, the floppy can be write-protected (i.e. read-only). If you don't have a floppy drive on your alpha: If you don't have a floppy drive you can copy the floppy image onto the hard disk you intend to install OpenBSD on. Doing so will overwrite the disk's old contents, however. You must use a UN*X-like system to write the floppy image to the hard disk you will be using for OpenBSD/alpha. You should use the "dd" command to copy the file system image (floppy.fs) directly to the raw 'c' device (whole disk) of the target hard disk. It is suggested that you read the dd(1) manual page or ask your system administrator to determine the correct set of arguments to use; it will be slightly different from system to system, and a comprehensive list of the possibilities is beyond the scope of this document. Please note that this will put a floppy disklabel on your disk which will confuse the install script. To fix this you need to answer "n" to the first question when booting your disk and do "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0c count=20" assuming your booted from sd0. After doing this you will not be able to boot that disk again unless you complete the install. You can now enter "install" and start the actual install process. The steps necessary to prepare the distribution sets for installation depend on which method of installation you choose. Some methods require a bit of setup first that is explained below. To install or upgrade OpenBSD using a tape, you need to do the following: To install OpenBSD from a tape, you need to make a tape that contains the distribution set files, in "tar" format. If you're making the tape on a UN*X-like system, the easiest way to do so is probably something like: tar cf where "" is the name of the tape device that describes the tape drive you're using (possibly /dev/rst0, or something similar, but it will vary from system to system. (If you can't figure it out, ask your system administrator.) In the above example, "" are the distribution sets' directories, for the distribution sets you wish to place on the tape. For instance, to put the "base22" and "etc22" distributions on tape (in order to do the absolute minimum installation to a new disk), you would do the following: cd .../2.2 # the top of the tree cd alpha/ tar cf base22 etc22 (Note that you still need to fill in "" in the example.) Once you have the files on the tape, you can proceed to the next step in the installation or upgrade process. If you're installing OpenBSD from scratch, go to the section on preparing your hard disk, below. If you're upgrading an existing installation, go directly to the section on upgrading. To install OpenBSD using a remote partition, mounted via NFS, you must do the following: NOTE: This method of installation is recommended only for those already familiar with using BSD network configuration and management commands. If you aren't, this documentation should help, but is not intended to be all-encompassing. Place the OpenBSD distribution sets you wish to install into a directory on an NFS server, and make that directory mountable by the machine on which you are installing or upgrading OpenBSD. This will probably require modifying the /etc/exports file on of the NFS server and resetting its mount daemon (mountd). (Both of these actions will probably require superuser privileges on the server.) You need to know the the numeric IP address of the NFS server, and, if the server is not on a network directly connected to the machine on which you're installing or upgrading OpenBSD, you need to know the numeric IP address of the router closest to the OpenBSD machine. Finally, you need to know the numeric IP address of the OpenBSD machine itself. Once the NFS server is set up properly and you have the information mentioned above, you can proceed to the next step in the installation or upgrade process. If you're installing OpenBSD from scratch, go to the section on preparing your hard disk, below. If you're upgrading an existing installation, go directly to the section on upgrading. If you are upgrading OpenBSD, you also have the option of installing OpenBSD by putting the new distribution sets somewhere in your existing file system, and using them from there. To do that, you must do the following: Place the distribution sets you wish to upgrade somewhere in your current file system tree. At a bare minimum, you must upgrade the "base" binary distribution, and so must put the "base22" set somewhere in your file system. If you wish, you can do the other sets, as well, but you should NOT upgrade the "etc" distribution; the "etc" distribution contains system configuration files that you should review and update by hand. Once you have done this, you can proceed to the next step in the upgrade process, actually upgrading your system.