I've run an intial pilot of a Soekris net4801 with OpenBSD 4.4, using
gpioctl to turn on and off other machines and netboot them for console
installs. The notes below are a mess and there just to record until
they can be arranged to make sense:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lars/DES/des.html
The other machines automatically boot via PXE when powered on and are
connected to the Soekris via serial and via ethernet. The serial
connection allows console installations, the ethernet allows tricks with
PF.
The OpenSSH chroot environment has only a few tools, two of which are
scripts with permissions set so that each 'user' can only turn on / off
or connect via console to a single machine.
The long and the short is that it's possible to log in to the net4801,
turn on a machine and install a system. Currently, I have the following
working choices: (all i386)
openbsd 4.3
openbsd 4.4
openbsd -current
centos 5.2
debian etch
debian lenny
fedora 10
(k)ubuntu 8.04.2
(k)ubuntu 9.04alpha
The subnet has another machine with squid available.
A next step is to connect via OpenSSH vpn or maybe full OpenVPN so
access to this this can be taken outside the room.
I'll try some lab exercises with this soon so I can see what goes wrong
in a real environment.
Regards
-Lars
