Install OpenBSD on a remote server

This week-end, I was upgrading my secondary dns server from OpenBSD 6.0 to OpenBSD 6.1 on a Digi ONE server from Digicube, a french hosting provider.

Install

From the console of your hoster, you need to reboot your server in a rescue mode to get a fresh debian running in Ramdisk. When yout server is finnaly up in rescue, connect with ssh. To perform, you have to install qemu and download the miniroot61.fs.

apt-get install qemu
wget 'https://mirror.dalenys.com/pub/OpenBSD/6.1/amd64/miniroot61.fs'

You can now start the qemu virtual machine with the miniroot61.fs and the hard drive and follow the install process. On the file sets selection, add the multi-process kernel bsd.mp.

qemu-system-x86_64 -curses -drive file=miniroot61.fs -drive file=/dev/sda -net nic -net user

Don’t forget to change the interface at the end of the install, because the qemu network interface is different than the Realtek network interface.

mv /mnt/etc/hostname.em0 /mnt/etc/hostname.re0

On the first boot, run syspatch to patch the base system with ERRATA.

Troubleshooting

Syspatch - Unable to access bsd.sp

On my first run of syspatch, it couldn’t find bsd.sp. I needed to move /bsd.syspatch61 to /bsd.sp after reverting every patches.

while true; do syspatch -r || break; done
mv /bsd.syspatch61 /bsd.sp
syspatch