Monday, March 24, 2025

RaspberyPi 4 network boot from TFTP - does it work?

Hi,

I'm considering a netbootable device for a project and RPI 4
documentation claims to support network boot. Some posts suggest that
booting over PXE is supported.

Before I dump money on hardware, does anyone have experience with
autoinstall on RPi 4 (or Compute Module 4) over network and could
confirm that it works or doesn't work?

Best regards,
Chris Narkiewicz

Re: Comment on /etc/myname vs /etc/hostname

Hi otto,

We're happy to see you have found OpenBSD and that you are exploring the system.

Welcome!

But please keep in mind that your assumptions about what is intuitive or
proper were formed by whatever other systems you have encountered earlier
(I suspect GNU/Linux).

When you are exploring a different system, it is better to explore and
look into the sources of information that are available.

In contrast to eg Linux systems, OpenBSD is in fact generally quite well
documented. And it has a fairly long history.

On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 02:40:47PM +0000, otto.cooper wrote:
> # Q1
>
> Suppose you want to change the host name.

I'll be snipping most of this.

The /etc/myname and /etc/mygate have been in OpenBSD for as far back as I can
remember tinkering with the system, and it would not surprise me a whole lot
if the naming was decided back in the CSRG days or possibly even earlier.

> To understand where the host name is written in OpenBSD, you need to read hostname(1).

Yes, reading man pages on OpenBSD is generally recommended. The FAQ at
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html is recommended too, and you may find
that document (really a collection of documents) a little less demanding read.

But anyway: once you find out what the local convention is, it is easy to remember
and most definitely is easier to just go along with, rather than demanding that
every existing OpenBSD system be changed to suit your preference.

> # Q2
>
> Let now consider /etc/hostname.if, where "if" stands for "interface" and has nothing to do with the conditional statement.

I was about to write a longish explanation, but no.

Please just read the FAQ https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html, and reading the
relevant man page (https://man.openbsd.org/hostname.if) can't hurt either.

Once again, changing from an easily learned and long established convention
to a different one is just not a reasonable suggestion here.

Now if you want some further light reading that might have a small chance
of proving enlightening, you could do worse than turn to my stuff, such as
this piece - https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_every_it_person_needs_to_know_about_openbsd.html
(also published elsewhere, links therein)

--
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
https://bsdly.blogspot.com/ https://www.bsdly.net/ https://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.