[Noob questions, volume I]

[hd77]

[Noob questions, volume I]
New openbsd user asking for answers ..


[synopsys]
Im the kind of guy who has been using windows and linux in multiboot for several years, now trying to experience openbsd..

[but..why?]
several reasons, which convinced me to enjoy new experience with openbsd :
a/ the challenge motivation, of a new system
b/ the reputation of a system whom the coca cola recipe looks like less protected than De Raadt servers (you can also do this comparison with the nuclear codes)
c/ the stability, reliability, simplicift, effiency, and beauty/purety of code

⇒ finally, the purpose is to have a paradox : going toward close as possible of usuals practices I have on linuxmint (very intuitive, simple and flexible) with openbsd (focused on lightweight, stability, and lot of others qualities…)

differents steps of my adventures :
a/ installation with partition and slices for / /usr etc.. was very difficult to understand
b/ drivers, almost solved with fw_update
c/ commands, term, are very different from nux (but I deal with it)

what convinced me to go ahead :
a/ to boast of regarding non-IT persons
b/ want to show that obsd is not only for cyberdefence afficianos/pros or for servers only
c/ to remind to people that free software and OSS is not only linux and penguins, but they have cousins there..

my several wonders..

a/ my wifi doesnt works, with an android AP or a normal AP, it just doesnt connect. With android usb tethering it works fine. However my intel wlan nic is well detected. With android hotspot it’s geting an IP but impossible to ping the gw. With direct to AP it just doesnt get any IP, ifconfig shows no network. But wireless essid and key are well recorded in the hostname.iwn0 and my ifconfig command.
You can remark that this wifi card works very well with windows and linux mint, but doesnt with openbsd, even after an fw_update.

/sbin/ifconfig iwn0 nwid 'iAndros 123' wpakey 'XXX'
/sbin/dhclient iwn0
then it obtain an IP, but get this…
# ping 192.168.143.1
PING 192.168.143.1 (192.168.143.1): 56 data bytes
ping: sendmsg: Device busy
ping: wrote 192.168.143.1 64 chars, ret=-1
^C

and no /etc/mygateway file…



B/ encrypt home partition was a bit hard, but I did it.. my wonders, would be : in case of disk damaged, how to decrypt on another computer ? Or in case of I want to change the password, do I have to wipe / recreate the whole /home ?


C/ is there like a whole group of needed software, as « main or giant ones » such as firefox/falkon/vlc libreoffice etc. but also some « tiny tool » recommended, such as timer, notepad, schedule.. whom are recommended software ? Plus virtual keyboard...

D/ I tried windowmaker which looks very good. .also wondering, it’s looks a lot like nextstep, is it possible to have like a macosx menubar, unified, at the top of the screen ?

E/

F/ does the « linux layer or support » really over on openbsd ? Heard an article few month ago, even if I discover puffy I had few closed software running on linux (but not bsd) …

g/ is it hard to port an OSS to oepnbsd ?

H/ I saw third part repositories, how does it works ? Is it true that some devs sells OSS they ported to openbsd, regarding differents versions ? That’s very different regarding linxu where the software version is forced to match with the distro/os release..

I/ how could I access my internal hdd partitions (ntfs, ext4..) or usb keys ?

J/ to be continued, I might have hours of research/work regarding this system, hope the skills and proudness too..

I wrote that on obsd, means somewhere I started the path..


Probe URL: https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=42eb986a58
dmesg
https://www.3hg.fr/CHATONS/Pastebin/?b86...PBTrCuqdkf
https://pastebin.alolise.org/?f1836b1c71...XHutfTW7NZ

log/messages:
https://www.3hg.fr/CHATONS/Pastebin/?a18...sRvGF8Vvr3
https://pastebin.alolise.org/?5424a8d0a6...XcVQ5peJTD
third part question :
do you think openbsd could run on embedded general public appliances such as tplink routers ?

[jggimi]

Hello, and welcome!

1. Your pastebin links are currently empty; I think the dmesg may be helpful with your network issue A. Please also include the output of $ ifconfig.
2. If you encrypted with softraid(4), you can change the password with bioctl(8)'s -P option. If you encrypted with vnconfig(8), you will need to recreate the partition. In both cases, you will need OpenBSD to decrypt if you transfer the backing storage to other hardware.
3. There's nothing "needed" as each workstation user's requirements are unique. You could install one of the large integrated window management systems such as Gnome or XFCE, as many of these sorts of applications are included. Or, you could install individual applications, as there are thousands of third party applications in the ports/packages system.
4. I have no experience with that window manager, nor with integrated menu bars.
5. Like your pastebins, this is empty.
6. The compat_linux(8) emulation layer was removed in 2016 as a security improvement.
7. I've ported some applications which have become part of the ports tree, and still maintain a handful of them. The OpenBSD Project maintains a Porter's Handbook: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/index.html, and one of our members here, ibara, has previously taught classes in porting applications, such as https://briancallahan.net/blog/20210627.html.
8. Packages are built from ports, and ports are designed to be built on the destination system. The only package repositories I'm currently aware of are mirrors of the Project's built packages. In the past, there have been packaged development versions of Firefox made available by the lead porter for Firefox for community testing prior to committing those updates to the ports tree. The only third-party branch of the ports tree I'm aware of is to house work-in-progress ports for active porters as a supplemental tool beyond just the ports@ mailing list.
9. Mounting foreign filesystems requires more than a single paragraph to explain the "how". Very briefly: if a drive already has an OpenBSD disklabel stored on it, any recognized preexisting MBR/GPT partitions will be assigned to a disklabel partition. If a drive does not have an on-disk disklabel, then OpenBSD will scan the MBR/GPT table looking for recognized foreign filesystems and assign them in a virtual, in-memory disklabel.

[hd77]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Hello, and welcome!

thank you!

1. Originally Posted by jggimi

   Your pastebin links are currently empty; I think the dmesg may be helpful with your network issue A. Please also include the output of $ ifconfig.

   sorry, I wasnt expecting it, I reuploaded them there:
   dmesg:
   https://www.3hg.fr/CHATONS/Pastebin/...ESWEeGND2vKWLU
   
   https://pastebin.alolise.org/?d5e33b...nbzRYW6SRgLCRZ
   
   messages:
   
   https://www.3hg.fr/CHATONS/Pastebin/...61QuFXRvK15KwY
   
   https://pastebin.alolise.org/?567beb...gLqAdkcPih72SL
   
   ifco:
   https://www.3hg.fr/CHATONS/Pastebin/...xgUQv48BM5jT62
   
   https://pastebin.alolise.org/?9789b6...7MVNqhVH6sc8Up
   
   
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   If you encrypted with softraid(4), you can change the password with bioctl(8)'s -P option. If you encrypted with vnconfig(8), you will need to recreate the partition. In both cases, you will need OpenBSD to decrypt if you transfer the backing storage to other hardware.

   I guess it's softraid, hope just changing the password would be fine
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   There's nothing "needed" as each workstation user's requirements are unique. You could install one of the large integrated window management systems such as Gnome or XFCE, as many of these sorts of applications are included. Or, you could install individual applications, as there are thousands of third party applications in the ports/packages system

   I was thinking about doing so until I had two relative issues regarding it :
   -it was going to take lot of space (on little partition/slices 1GB is "a lot") for just getting tools
   -xfce looks very great but too much "heavy" on oldies devices (laptop is 8 yrs old)
   I will try to have a "directory" of little very useful software
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   .

   I have no experience with that window manager, nor with integrated menu bars.

   thank you anyway
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   Like your pastebins, this is empty.

   hope it's corrected now
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   The compat_linux(8) emulation layer was removed in 2016 as a security improvement.

   the reason for keeping multiboot
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   I've ported some applications which have become part of the ports tree, and still maintain a handful of them. The OpenBSD Project maintains a Porter's Handbook: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/index.html, and one of our members here, ibara, has previously taught classes in porting applications, such as https://briancallahan.net/blog/20210627.html.

   looks like to be an entire work, not just a "make" command
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   Packages are built from ports, and ports are designed to be built on the destination system. The only package repositories I'm currently aware of are mirrors of the Project's built packages. In the past, there have been packaged development versions of Firefox made available by the lead porter for Firefox for community testing prior to committing those updates to the ports tree. The only third-party branch of the ports tree I'm aware of is to house work-in-progress ports for active porters as a supplemental tool beyond just the ports@ mailing list.

   I think I understand a bit, even if it looks like another world compared to the nux..
   
   

   Originally Posted by jggimi

   Mounting foreign filesystems requires more than a single paragraph to explain the "how". Very briefly: if a drive already has an OpenBSD disklabel stored on it, any recognized preexisting MBR/GPT partitions will be assigned to a disklabel partition. If a drive does not have an on-disk disklabel, then OpenBSD will scan the MBR/GPT table looking for recognized foreign filesystems and assign them in a virtual, in-memory disklabel.

Im in efi/gpt with ntfs/ext4 partitions, what type of command might I enter to see if obsd can detect or mount them?


I thank you vm for the time taken to answer my questions

[jggimi]

Your WiFi issue

You have configured a trunk(4) in failover mode, with only a single subordinate NIC: iwn0. When you use a trunk(4), the subordinate NICs should not be configured with any IP addresses -- IP addresses are configured at the trunk(4), as described in the trunk(4) man page. Apparently, your iwn0 driver has been provisioned to be autoconfigured. You can see some of this in the messages you posted: there is a dhclient(8) executed on iwn0, and there are ARP failures on the trunk. At the same time, the iwn0 driver is not connected to a WiFi network, as can be seen from your ifconfig(8) output.

I recommend eliminating the trunk(4), and ensuring you have the correct WPA2 key in your hostname.iwn0 file. If the key contains spaces, the passphrase should be quoted, and if the key is hexadecimal, it should have a leading 0x in front of the hex string.

Once you have a working WiFi configuration, then you can consider whether a trunk(4) solution would be useful.

Foreign filesystems

EXT4 filesystems have limited support. They can only be mounted read-only, and only when the EXT4 "64bit" option was not selected during formatting. They appear to be EXT2 filesystems when mounted successfully.

NTFS filesystems have read-only native support, and can be mounted read/write through the use of the ntfs_3g package. This latter solution works for read/write, but as it uses File System in Userspace (FUSE) for I/O, performance is limited.

When OpenBSD inspects a drive and does not find an OpenBSD disklabel on it, it scans the MBR or GPT partition table and places any known filesystems discovered into a virtual disklabel, starting with partition "i". If that virtual disklabel is later written to disk -- such as during installing OpenBSD on it -- these partitions will be in the on-disk label and already present.

Once a drive has an OpenBSD disklabel on it, OpenBSD will not scan the MBR or GPT partition table again. So any change to size, location, addition, or deletion of those partitions will not be "seen" by OpenBSD. You would have to revise the disklabel manually to keep the disklabel synchronized with the GPT or MBR partition table.

You can "see" what OpenBSD thinks is on a drive with the disklabel(8) command, which will show you either the on-disk disklabel if there is one, or a virtual disklabel if one doesn't exist on the drive.

[jggimi]

One correction on disklabels -- you can force a rescan of the MBR or GPT table with the disklabel(8) -d option. The output will not contain any existing on-disk disklabel informaion.

[hd77]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Your WiFi issue

You have configured a trunk(4) in failover mode, with only a single subordinate NIC: iwn0. When you use a trunk(4), the subordinate NICs should not be configured with any IP addresses -- IP addresses are configured at the trunk(4), as described in the trunk(4) man page. Apparently, your iwn0 driver has been provisioned to be autoconfigured. You can see some of this in the messages you posted: there is a dhclient(8) executed on iwn0, and there are ARP failures on the trunk. At the same time, the iwn0 driver is not connected to a WiFi network, as can be seen from your ifconfig(8) output.

I've tried several things... but tonight I just moved /etc/hostname.trunk (I guess I had this trunk from the isotop project for laptops initiated on the following page :
https://si3t.ch/Logiciel-libre/OpenB...t-install.html ) to /root/ to make it inactive. After a reboot, the ifconfig shows the iwn0 not concerned by trunk anymore.
however, even in /etc/hostname.iwn0 or in my created wifi script :
ifconfig iwn0 down
ifconfig iwn0 up
ifconfig iwn0 nwid "very long essid" wpakey "mylongpassphrasewithorwithoutspaces"
dhclient iwn0
=> means two different (conflicted?) conf files?
doesnt connects the wifi to it.

I just want to ensure, does the AP could be incompatible with the openbsd laptop? means just the android AP can be compatible, not the "common AP" router

also, does add /sbin/ifconfig could make mistakes if it's not just "ifconfig"?

[jggimi]

You were following a third-party guide that recommended using trunk(4), in order to have both a wired NIC (em0, in their example) and a wireless NIC (iwm0, in their example) share the same IP address, assigned via the trunk. In that guide, neither the wired nor WiFi NIC are configured with IP addresses. The trunk is configured with "inet6 autoconf" and with "dhcp" which is short for "inet autoconf", so the guide shows a correct trunk use-case. However, your workstation does not have a wired NIC. A trunk(4) solution offers you no value, and has only provided additional opportunity to mis-configure network settings.

IPv4 autoconfiguration changed significantly with OpenBSD 7.0-release. The dhclient(8) utility is still available but is not normally used. Instead, the release came with a new service, dhcpleased(8), which automatically looks for NICs provisioned for IPv4 autoconfiguration.

I cannot tell from the information provided so far why your WiFi network is not connecting. All that I can see is your ifconfig(8) output. If dhcpleased(8) has not been disabled, it would discover the NIC has IPv4 autoconfiguration provisioned as one of its flags. But it will not send DHCP packets until the status changed from "no network" to "active". Reposted from your pastebin here, with your MAC address redacted:

iwn0: flags=808943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,AUTOCONF4> mtu 1500
     lladdr <redacted>
     index 1 priority 4 llprio 3
     trunk: trunkdev trunk0
     groups: wlan     

media: IEEE802.11 autoselect     

status: no network     

ieee80211: nwid "WIFI ESSID" wpakey wpaprotos wpa2 wpaakms psk wpaciphers ccmp wpagroupcipher ccmp

[jggimi]

Oh, yes. # ifconfig iwn0 scan will show you broadcast SSIDs, if the NIC and driver are working. If this doesn't work, it is likely because the 3rd party firmware has not been installed. You can download the firmware to a USB stick from another OS and install it with fw_update(8)'s -p option.

[hd77]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Oh, yes. # ifconfig iwn0 scan will show you broadcast SSIDs, if the NIC and driver are working. If this doesn't work, it is likely because the 3rd party firmware has not been installed. You can download the firmware to a USB stick from another OS and install it with fw_update(8)'s -p option.

thank you for answers!!

https://www.3hg.fr/CHATONS/Pastebin/...f12uumtobCGMgg

https://pastebin.alolise.org/?7a207b...AQ3ziTfqAQDbvp

[jggimi]

Scan works, so we know your NIC and the driver are both working. Your problem is a configuration issue, not missing firmware.

[hd77]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Scan works, so we know your NIC and the driver are both working. Your problem is a configuration issue, not missing firmware.

yes, but I dont know why.

how to simply configure the wifi?

could it be a problem from the AP? why this same AP works fine with wind/mint?
is there any clue in dmesg or log/messages?

I can't use the laptop withut the wifi nic...

pleaase

[jggimi]

Temporarily set your AP to be an open, public network.

• If you are able to connect to it without a passphrase, you will know your problem is your passphrase provisioning.
• If you are unable to connect to it without a passphrase, you will know your problem is your SSID provisioning.

[hd77]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Temporarily set your AP to be an open, public network.

• If you are able to connect to it without a passphrase, you will know your problem is your passphrase provisioning.
• If you are unable to connect to it without a passphrase, you will know your problem is your SSID provisioning.

Hi,,
thank you again for helping,
just try with the
ifconfig iwn0 nwid "SFR WiFi FON"
an opened network
it worked immediately, no dhclient to launch, IP has been immediately obtained
so I don't know if it's a long essid name or simpy the key, because obsd is the only one to not be able to connect to it. Can browse the portal.
Im wondering abut how to connect it to internet without usb device..


edit: tried with "bbox-something" ap, with a long key too, but with no space, it works too.
means obsd have a problem with long essid with spaces ?

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by harrollld

...means obsd have a problem with long essid with spaces ?

No, just with non-ASCII printable characters. Per the ifconfig(8) man page, an nwid id or join id can be either a printable ASCII string up to 32 bytes, or up to 64 hex digits preceded by 0x.