Mark Peoples has a very nice write-up for using a USB Flash drive to Install OpenBSD. It uses the first 8 MB of the flash drive for an OpenBSD partition and then the rest to use for storing files (Fat32) that can be accessed by many operating systems. I highly recommend reading it.

After following Mark’s directions, stick the flash drive on a machine you’d like to install/upgrade OpenBSD on and boot to a USB drive. It should feel just like the process of using a CD or bsd.rd directly.

Updating the flash drive is easy as well: mount sd0a and download a new bsd.rd (as “bsd”) to it.

After upgrading to Firefox 3 on my OpenBSD 4.4-beta box, I noticed that I could not print anymore. I’m using the stock lpd(8) to print. When I brought up the print dialog box, it only showed “Print to File” option.

After quite a bit of googling, I found my solution.
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The OpenBSD team has released a new errata for 4.2 (014_pcb) and 4.3 (005_pcb) to fix a reliability issue with ipv6.

From the 4.3 errata page:

Some kinds of IPv6 usage would leak kernel memory (in particular, this path was exercised by the named(8) patch for port randomization). Since INET6 is enabled by default, this condition affects all systems.

I have made binpatches for 4.2 and 4.3 for i386, amd64 and sparc64.

The OpenBSD team has released a new errata for 4.2 (013_bind) and 4.3 (004_bind) to fix a security issue with bind (the name server in OpenBSD).

From the 4.3 errata page:

A vulnerability has been found with BIND. An attacker could use this vulnerability to poison the cache of a recursive resolving name server. (CVE-2008-1447)

I have made binpatches for 4.2 and 4.3 for i386, amd64 and sparc64.

Here’s another quick tip I’ve started using. Actually, I don’t normally run X with xdm and right now I can’t remember why I am on one of my boxes. But I am.

If you put xdm_flags=”" in your /etc/rc.conf.local, xdm will start automatically during the boot process. This is probably what you want nine times out of ten. But, that tenth time, it’s annoying when X starts and you didn’t want it to.
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