OpenBSD - Create & Burn ISO's

This is a subject that confused me early on, so I thought it might help someone to gather some common facts and links in one spot.

After you've got your sources in place, in my case
/data/user/openbsd4.0/i386
you can create your iso image. Here's what I did:

cd /data/user/openbsd4.0/
mkisofs \
-v \
-r \
-T \
-J \
-V "OpenBSD-4.0-Release" \
-b i386/cdrom40.fs \
-c boot.catalog \
-o /data/user/OpenBSD-4.0-Release.iso \
-A "OpenBSD 4.0 Release" \
.

Don't forget that last dot. It'll befuddle you
and kick your butt if you do!

Now you're ready to burn the iso image to a cd.
I like to use a cd rewritable the first time just
in case I screw things up, so I don't waste a cd.
This is what I did:

sudo cdrecord blank=fast dev=/dev/cd0c:0,0,0
(your hardware configuration may differ)
sudo cdrecord -v dev=/dev/rcd0c /data/user/OpenBSD-4.0-Release.iso

My cd is setup in /etc/fstab. Yours might not be.
Here's how mine is setup:

/dev/cd0a /mntcd1 cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0

I mounted it like so to check if everything got burned right:

sudo mount /mntcd1

Everything checked out, so the cd's ready to boot from
and start the upgrade process. In case you don't have
your cd in /etc/fstab, using my hardware config as an
example, I could mount it like so:

sudo mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/cd0a /mntcd1
or
sudo mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0a /mntcd1

Here are some links you can check out:

How to make a bootable OpenBSD CD
OpenBSD Upgrade Guide
OpenBSD 4.0 Installation Guide

As a last thought, I know there were a lot of sudo's
in my examples. Setting up individually permitted tasks
in /etc/sudoers can be a chore. As an alternative, root
can choose to allow everyone in the wheel group to do just
about anything by changing the following:

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel     ALL=(ALL)     ALL
(Uncomment means to remove the leading #)

And, if root really wants to live dangerously:

# Same thing without a password
# %wheel     ALL=(ALL)     NOPASSWD: ALL

Always check your man pages. Everyone hates to be told
"RTFM you damned lazy troll newbie" or something to that
effect. ;) In the preceding example, you could read up on:
"man sudo" or "man sudoers"
Hope the preceding helps someone out along the way.
Please leave a comment if I've screwed something up here.
I have been known to do that on occasion. ;) And, please
leave a comment if it helped you. It's encouraging, from
time to time. That's it for today.

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