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Floppy Drive Cable

Two OpenBSD Floppies

One floppy systems are very practical, as they usually have a specific goal, which cannot be said about all Live CD's. To configure OpenBSD installed on your hard disk as router, you must make some configurations; with a floppy system already designed to work as a router no such configuration is needed (except for the most basic one like putting the proper names of network devices into configuration files). Such a diskette is portable and easy to use. You may, too, have other wishes - an MP3 player on a diskette, or even a transparent firewall.

SONaFR

There are not many one floppy OpenBSD routers or firewalls. My projects and my website usually always appears on the top in Google with keywords like: one - floppy - router - OpenBSD.

How to use SONaFR

This floppy distro has a minimal kernel. You must have two network interface cards (NIC's) in a computer where you use this floppy. To see all the network cards available on your system, type:

ifconfig

(from within SONaFR after it boots).

To see all the cards that the SONaFR kernel supports, type:

more etc/cards

The configuration scripts of SONaFR (for example, /etc/pf.conf) may be immediately used in any OpenBSD hard disk installation for firewall/router purposes; thus anybody can learn how to configure the OpenBSD packet filter.

Transparent Firewall

This thing may also be used as a transparent firewall (invisible firewall). If you have a computer with two NIC's (the third NIC may be used only for a SSH login with purpose to control such a transparent firewall) and you move data from one network card to another one via a bridge (without IP addresses), you work on the OSI layer 2 model (data link); thus, if you move data this way over firewall, the advantage is that you may put such a firewall anywhere - you can split any network segment without needing to configure anything (except for the transparent firewall). Such a firewall is very quick, as no decisions need to be made with respect to IP addresses a normal firewall always requires. Bandwidth, too, may be easily reduced (with use of ALTQ - ALTernate Queueing framework for BSD UNIX).

A good (and quick) overview of transparent firewalling in OpenBSD with tips and setup requirements can be found here: http://www.dalantech.com/fusionbb/showtopic.php?tid/71026/pid/71026/post/last/m/1/

First, you must create the bridge (type the following command from within SONaFR):

ifconfig bridge0 create

Then activate the bridge:

brconfig bridge0 add rl0 add rl2 up

(replace "rl0" and "rl2" with real network devices present on your system.)

To activate the transparent firewall, you have to run the pfctl command (for packet filtering; the /etc/pf.conf file needs to be edited if you have special requirements; SONaFR has a little editor for such a purpose, just type: mg):

pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf

The behavior of such a firewall depends on rules defined in the /etc/pf.conf file.

To run SONaFR, your minimal requirements must be at least 9,5 MB of RAM and a Pentium (486 too) computer with two network cards and a working diskette drive. However, the SONaFR's ability to detect all possible network cards (NIC's) is limited. This is because the system has a minimalist kernel.

The /etc/pf.conf file in SONaFR works immediately. If you have more requirements, look into pf (Packet Filter) Internet tutorials and edit the pf.conf file appropriately. The purpose of this distribution was to bring something quick and easy-to-use. The only thing that the user must do is to substitute the "nfe0" and "rl0" entries in the SONaFR's pf.conf file with network devices on his or her system (/etc/pf.conf):

IntIf="nfe0"

ExtIf="rl0"

KarmaBSD

I often meet with broken notebooks on which the CD-ROM or floppy drive does not work. It is a pity to discard such a notebook. If some sensitive data lies on its disk and the computer's hard drive does not boot, you will hardly find a BSD tool with use of which you can copy and save data from such a notebook's USB port to a USB hard drive (or stick). You may oppose that there is quite a number of BSD Live CD's today. But if the CD-ROM drive on such a notebook is broken, such an argument does not have any weight.

KarmaBSD supports mounting of a number of disk formats:

Type of medium: USB; CD-ROM/DVD; network

Format: NTFS; ISO9660; EXT2FS; FAT MSDOS file systems; UDF; NFS file system (network)

How to prepare a disk

KarmaBSD, too, has the OpenBSD's base system tools such as newfs, disklabel, fdisk, etc., so if the hard drive (and the CD-ROM drive, too) on your notebook is broken, you may insert a new one into it and prepare your MS-DOS partition, for example:

fdisk -e wd0

then type:

print (or help to learn more); then:

edit 0 (if 0 is the partition you want to edit); then: 04 (for DOS FAT16), or 0B or 0C (both for FAT32), or A6 (for OpenBSD), A5 (for FreeBSD), A9 (for NetBSD), 83 (for Linux), 82 (for Linux swap). After you specify the operating system, type "quit" to save changes.

Finally, the partition needs one more thing - a format. To make the FAT32 format on your hard drive, type:

newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/rwd0i

How to mount disks

To mount any drive (NTFS drive, for example), type:

disklabel wd0

or

disklabel sd0 (USB disk)

You will then see all available partitions marked with letters like j, k, l, m.

If you type:

mount_ntfs /dev/wd0j /mnt

your NTFS partition ("j") will be mounted to the /mnt directory (as read only).

Serial console

This mini BSD also supports serial console (capturing output of a remote computer's screen to the screen of the local computer over a serial cable). Type:

set tty com0

at the boot prompt when KarmaBSD starts; then on your desktop computer (not the one on which KarmaBSD runs) type:

tip tty00

This way you can control any computer that has a broken keyboard or display (a very common failure with notebooks). Instead of the command "tip tty00" you must type in another OpenBSD box, you may use Putty, a free program also available for Windows.

The most important thing - music

KarmaBSD, too, can work as a one floppy MP3 player, as the purpose of this thing was to maximally utilize broken notebooks (computers). MP3 files can be played over network, too (NFS). It is all very simple. From within KarmaBSD you just type:

1

The script ("1" for /dev/cd0a; or "2" for /dev/cd1a) will mount your CD with MP3 files, it will create a playlist in /tmp, and with use of mpg123 you will automatically listen to hours of never-ending music or audiobooks by pressing one single key (1).

How to put these floppy systems on a CD

Today, when floppy drives gradually disappear from computers, both these one floppy systems may be quite easily put on a CD; to make the ISO image of any bootable diskette, just type dd (to copy the diskette's contents to a file - floppy.fs in our case); if you download the image of KarmaBSD or SONaFR, you do not have to do this, as you will have the same image you will create with the following command, but in case you first try the floppy, it may also be handy to do it this way):

dd if=/dev/fd0a of=floppy.fs

Then run:

mkisofs -b floppy.fs -c boot.cat -R -v -o /bootableCDfromFloppy.iso .

(do not worry if "boot.cat" is not available)

The dot (.) at the end of the above mkisofs command is for the current directory, so you must run this command in the (current) directory where the floppy.fs file resides. If floppy.fs is in the /flp directory, for example (or use: dd if=/dev/fd0a of=/flp/floppy.fs), cd to it (cd /flp) and run the mkisofs command as you see above.

The two above-mentioned one floppy systems can be thus used on a CD. To use multiboot, download several of my one floppy systems in one multiboot ISO image: FreeBSD.nfo.sk

I want to thank the RootBSD team for allowing me to distribute this thing.

About the Author

I live in Europe, Slovakia; my karma is here: Juraj's karma

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