With the release of OpenBSD 4.5, it was time to upgrade the home router (the alix6b2 from another post). The OpenBSD Upgrade Guide for 4.5 details a nice way to do the upgrade without having to have console access which I thought I’d try out as well, since I couldn’t find my serial cable and decided that if things went awry I could always scrounge for a serial cable and redo it. (Note from the upgrade documentation: This is NOT the recommended process. Use the install kernel method if at all possible!)

First things first:  if you don’t yet know about PC Engines' line of single board computers, you should check out their ALIX line and decide on your next project.  ;-)

Once you’re done with that, read on to find out how I built my new home router using the alix6b2 board.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted here, my own little piece of the blagosphere.  In the beginning I thought I would just use it as a place to put technical stuff (see any of my previous posts), but now I’m thinking about using it for some of the less-technical ramblings of my mind.  I’m betting the three of you who visit this site each day won’t really mind. ;-)  Read on to read about what my home- / production- / test-environment looks like, and why I made the choices I did.

EDIT 2012-03-15: This is not my current environment. It’s here for historical reasons only.

Installing Gallery 2 on OpenBSD is a bit more involved than installing Wordpress. Gallery 2 requires a few binaries and libraries to exist within the /var/www chroot in order to function properly. After getting my “production” installation working, I took a spare machine loaded with OpenBSD 4.3 base and documented the entire installation process for Gallery 2, installing (hopefully) no more than was necessary.

Installing Wordpress on OpenBSD is a fairly straightforward process, especially since it does not need any extra binaries or libraries to exist inside the /var/www chroot environment. Initially I used the tar.gz file available from wordpress.org (version 2.6, as of this writing), but when I went through the install on a test machine in order to detail the installation process, I realized that there is also a package available in the package tree (version 2.3.3 for OpenBSD 4.3-release, 2.5 for -current). For the purposes of these instructions I installed the package available in the OpenBSD packages tree, but I will also detail how to install the latest version from wordpress.org.

As this is my first official blog post, I thought it would be fitting that I explained just how I got here…as in, how you’re actually able to read this post.  I’ll use this and the next few posts to explain how I got various web applications to run on a (more-or-less) default installation of OpenBSD 4.3, without un-jailing httpd.  I can’t say that my methods are necessarily the best methods–heck, I’m not even sure they’re good methods, but they do work.  So with that being said, if someone knows of a better way to do anything I describe, please let me know!