For the past few days I’ve needed an OpenBSD machine to test some IPSec code I’m busy working on (more on that in a few days). At Jonathan’s suggestion, I toyed with using a VMware virtual machine, but this morning decided to use a spare HP B132L I have lying around instead. Unfortunately NetBSD’s hp700 port is not yet production-ready, so the machine had been running HP-UX 10.20. It’s a fairly nice mid-90s vintage machine – 133Mhz PA-7300 PA-RISC CPU, 64MiB RAM, 4GiB IBM narrow SCSI drive and Visualize-EG graphics. It could do with a bit more RAM, but 64MiB is more than adequate for my purposes.
Getting OpenBSD/hppa installed was pretty easy, but I managed to trip myself up a few times along the way:
- Plugging the wrong cable into the serial port means the console output isn’t going to be visible, no matter what the terminal settings are.
- Mixing and matching RJ45< ->DB25 adapters is not a wise thing to do when in a hurry.
To network boot the machine it was simply a matter of configuring my DHCP server to tell the HP to load the LIF image served by my tftp server. About half and hour after booting the installer I had an OpenBSD/hppa 3.8 machine on my network.
For those who enjoy such things, here’s the dmesg output.
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