[xasop]

My primary hard drive has been 99.4% emptied. It's almost time to shut down Debian for the last time.

[Lord Dave]

My primary hard drive has been 99.4% emptied. It's almost time to shut down Debian for the last time.

Until you find you need it one day.

[xasop]

I ran into a problem, viz. 4 TB hard drives showing up as 2 TB in a Linux VM on OpenBSD. OpenBSD itself sees them as 4 TB, so I suspect a QEMU bug.

In any case, I'm back in Debian for now so I can do a bit more data shuffling to get all the data I need access to within the first 2 TB of each drive. Then I can reboot to OpenBSD and do the copy.

[Thork]

Yuck. You know what works right out of the box? Windows.

[Lord Dave]

Yuck. You know what works right out of the box? Windows.

Not always.

[xasop]

Yuck. You know what works right out of the box? Windows.

Why don't you tell me how well migrating just over 2 TB of encrypted data between Windows and any other OS works, Thork? You know, given that that's what I'm currently doing, and not dealing with either OS "not working".

[xasop]

Well, that's done. Let's try this again.

[xasop]

I now have my Linux system successfully booted as a VM on OpenBSD, running rsync inside to copy files over a virtual network to my OpenBSD system.

It's always nice starting clean:

Code: [Select]

-bash-4.3$ df -h /newhome/
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd4d      3.6T    470M    3.4T     0%    /newhome


[xasop]

Due to reasons, my USB audio device doesn't work correctly in OpenBSD. The technical reason for it is slightly complicated, and is a result of three concurrent conditions:

• all of my USB ports on my motherboard are actually connected to an onboard USB hub, not the root USB device;
• my USB audio device speaks full-speed USB, not high-speed USB;
• OpenBSD's ehci(4) driver doesn't have support for USB 2.0 hubs' Transaction Translators, which provide backwards compatibility with full-speed USB.

Hopefully I can work my way around the OpenBSD kernel and the USB 2.0 spec well enough to fix this. For now, I've managed to work around the problem by connecting my audio device to my Lemote Yeeloong and starting up sndiod(1) on the Yeeloong, configured to listen on a TCP port. Thanks to sndiod's network audio support, I can now seamlessly play audio by using the remote sndiod on my Yeeloong as my default audio device on my desktop.

[xasop]

So, given that the bug that caused me to abandon this effort is now fixed, I've restarted this migration, with some important differences:

 - I'm reusing my old 2 TB hard drives as temporary storage instead of a USB drive, which seems to be performing better.
 - I'm running OpenBSD as a VM inside Linux rather than vice versa, which both allows me to continue to use Linux until OpenBSD is ready, and performs better due to Linux's support for VT-x.
 - I'm copying files over an NFS mount instead of hacking an SSH-based solution on top of what is already a fairly clumsy hack.

Hopefully, my data should be fully copied over to OpenBSD by the end of the weekend. I still need to figure out what to do with my backups before I commit to migrating, though.

[xasop]

I now have automated boot working with NFS mounts from an OpenBSD VM on Linux. The way it works is thus:

1. I boot and enter my passphrase to decrypt my Linux storage.
2. Before my login prompt comes up, a console VNC client starts attached to my OpenBSD VM so I can enter my passphrase to decrypt OpenBSD's storage.
3. A script waits for OpenBSD to come onto the network and start listening for NFS connections before allowing the NFS mounts to proceed.
4. Everything continues as normal, except all my files are now on OpenBSD.

Of course, OpenBSD boots work as normal without any of this, and I still have access to the same files. I rule.

[xasop]

I am now running Linux with /home mounted over NFS. I had to put somewhat more things than expected onto local storage in order to get decent performance, and I can't watch Stargate over NFS, but we'll see how things go otherwise. Hopefully I won't be booted into Linux very often from now on.

Time to try a reboot and see if things all shut down and come back up as expected.

[xasop]

First post from my new OpenBSD installation!

Code: [Select]

steven@vader:~$ uname -a
OpenBSD vader.steven-mcdonald.id.au 5.8 GENERIC.MP#1078 amd64

[xasop]

I have finally finished migrating the last part of my data (my backups) from Linux to OpenBSD. I can now pare back my Linux installation to the things I really need it for; Steam and Ardour, mainly. The latter will stop being required after I write a port of the latest Ardour for OpenBSD.

It's been fun.

[xasop]

I'm copying some old backup increments over to the OpenBSD backup drive, something I've been meaning to do for a while. This will mean I can remove my old 2 TB hard drives from my computer again and reconnect my optical drive (my power cables aren't long enough to reach 5 SATA drives and the optical drive at the same time).

Also, due to the less efficient way incremental backups are done on OpenBSD's filesystem, I now have less than 1 TB free space on my backup drive. I'll probably upgrade to one of Seagate's new 8 TB drives for backups at some point in the next year or so.

[Fortuna]

Virtualization is the thing I love most about technology. Just thinking about it makes me feel all giddy.