This past weekend I upgraded my home firewall, wintermute, and one of my internal servers, aragorn, to OpenBSD 4.2. aragorn was running 4.1, and wintermute was kicking ass on 3.6!

wintermute is the first computer I ever owned; a Sony VAIO PCV-90. It’s a 90MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM and an (upgraded) 3600 RPM 8GB PATA drive. aragorn is an ancient PowerEdge 1300 I bought for a contract many years ago; it’s a two-way Pentium II 400MHz box with something like 128MB of RAM and a couple of SCSI disks.

I’ve been lamenting about the too-small NAT table on my FiOS router for a while now. Fortunately, a comment posted to that article by ‘Christian’ pointed me to this article which walks through the process of converting the expensive, powerful, feature-rich Actiontek router into a dumb Ethernet-to-Coax bridge, which it exactly what I want.

I’ve previously lamented the flakiness of the uath USB Atheros WLAN driver in OpenBSD 4.1. I’m happy to report that I’ve found a suitable alternative: the Ralink 2500-based Alfa AWUS036S.

This is a post to remind myself how to build aircrack-ng on OpenBSD, since I always seem to forget.

The standard OpenBSD make tool doesn’t support $(shell ...) commands, thus the REVISION variable gets set to an empty string instead of 0. As a result, all the code that references the _REVISION macro doesn’t compile right. The failure looks like this:

# make
gcc -O2 -pipe  -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_REVISION= src/aircrack-ng.c src/crypto.c src/sha1-mmx.S src/common.c src/aircrack-ptw-lib.c -o aircrack-ng -lpthread

For reasons I wrote extensively about then lost when I accidentally navigated away from my blog posting form, I’m trying to get a USB wlan adapter going with an OpenBSD VM running kismet. I thought the Engenius EUB-362 EXT with its Atheros USB chipset would be just the ticket; after all, the new [uath(4)](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=uath&sektion=4) driver says it supports such chipsets, and the EUB-362 has an RP-SMA connector and 200mw of transmit power!

I’m trying to get three Edimax EW-7128g PCI wlan cards going under OpenBSD, since they work very poorly under Linux. OBSD detects them right away, but I’ve a problem: when I run kismet, my machine panics and has to be rebooted. A look at dmesg output offers a hint as to the problem:

uhci0 at pci0 dev 7 function 2 "Intel 82371AB USB" rev 0x01: apic 2 int 19 (irq 14)
usb0 at uhci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0 at usb0
uhub0: Intel UHCI root hub, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered

As a part of the ongoing wireless saga, I’ve grown weary of the difficultly of running the early-beta rt2x00 drivers, so I thought I’d chance OpenBSD 4.0 on hera. Though OpenBSD 4 doesn’t support WPA (a huge shortcoming IMHO) it does have famously good wireless support. Since Ubuntu is basically useless on hera, I wanted to repave her with OpenBSD 4.

Problem: hera has no LAN connectivity. She was made (c. 1997) before on-board Ethernet was invented, and the aging Intel cardbus adapter I have is very flaky.

Lately ender has taken to freezing hard every few days, requiring a reboot of the VM in which it resides. This sucks as ender is my mail server.

I hoped maybe the problem was some issue fixed in the latest -STABLE, so I updated to the latest -STABLE sources and rebuild the kernel and userland. Kernel built fine, but userland failed same as it did last time I tried:

/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/binutils/gdb/infrun.c: In function `normal_stop':
/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/binutils/gdb/infrun.c:3046: error: too many arguments to function `observer_notify_normal_stop'

Google doesn’t have anything to offer, nor do the OBSD mailing list archives. WTF is wrong and why am I the only one w/ the problem!?

I just upgraded ender to OpenBSD 3.8 using the same process I used in Upgrading Jane to OpenBSD 3.8. It was uneventful.

The next step, however, will be more complicated than it was on jane, because ender runs all my mail systems, including postfix, spamassassin, etc. I’ll need to update their ports packages accordingly.

Tired of meaningless errors from rsync, I’ve decided to pull the trigger on the upgrade to OpenBSD 3.8 for jane. I’ll be upgrading ender next week, so it’ll be good to do a dry run on a machine that doesn’t matter as much.

I downloaded the OpenBSD 3.8-Release i386 CD install image and booted it in the jane VMWare image.

The upgrade instructions are pretty straightforward. I’m not going to remove existing packages; I’ll just update them after the install.

Unfortunately, the upgrade process doesn’t seem to correctly load the network configuration from my existing installation. Though it makes an attempt to, the Ethernet interface, le1, isn’t configured.