It seems that the old YaifO site is down. You can download the latest (as of the last time I checked) from from my site.

Additionally, I’ve applied some patches to it that fix some of the problems I had with it (including not working under 3.8 and 4.0). Other fixes include the ability to compile the yaifo kernel ramdisk with your ssh_host_keys so you don’t have to muck with your ~/.ssh/known_hosts when upgrading. And my favorite patch: use ${SUDO} where ever needed (if defined) so you don’t have to run “make” as root.

See my other posts explaining YaifO and how I’ve used it.
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As I mentioned before, YaifO (Yet another installer for OpenBSD) is fantastic. I’ve used it to upgrade several servers from 3.7 to 3.8 and a couple servers from 3.6 to 3.8. I still feel that pre-heart attack feeling when typing “sudo reboot”, but this is much better than what I was doing before…

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Previously, my process to update OpenBSD was a manual one. Before, you couldn’t upgrade installed packages and I didn’t know of a way to easily upgrade /etc. Enter two things: 3.8-current’s "pkg_add -u" and taking the time to test mergemaster.

My old upgrade method included running “sudo cp -Rp /etc /var /home/backup”, formatting and installing the new version (leaving the /home partition unformatted during install). Then, manually updating /etc, re-adding accounts and re-installing all packages.

Today, I upgraded my -current (well, a snapshot, really) desktop running X.

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YaifO 0.2 has been released. This extremely cool tool allows you to remotely install/upgrade to OpenBSD.

I used it for the first time today to upgrade a file server at home. It was running OpenBSD 3.7. On my desktop (running OpenBSD 3.8 with the source tree in /usr/src). I downloaded and extracted YaifO to my desktop and changed into its directory. Copied my authorized_keys file there and edited the config file in that directory. Then, I ran “make obj” and “sudo make”. The only modification it made to my desktop system was to install the crunchgen utility that’s used to make boot floppy images. Then, it builds a setup boot disk called yaifo.fs and a ramdisk image called yaifo.rd.

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