Really F*cking Useful

I spend a good deal of time hand-picking the precompiled binary packages I need after an OpenBSD install from ftp.openbsd.org. As a result, I am good friends with the FTP mget command and file globbing. "mget gettext*", for example. Followed always by "mget libiconv*". And so forth.

Well no more! You can use AFS! It's slow as hell but oh so easy. Since version 3.5, AFS is autoconfigured to run anonymously if you enable afsd. You can do this by putting one line in /etc/rc.conf.local:

  afs=YES

Reboot the machine and you can then navigate through the OpenBSD packages as though they were all locally stored on your filesystem.

  $ cd /afs/ualberta.ca/mirror/openbsd/snapshots/packages/i386
  $ pkg_add wget-1.10.tgz

This installs wget, gettext, and libiconv automatically. Takes forever, by the way, but you don't have to worry about wasting ftp.openbsd.org's precious, precious bandwidth. (You can waste Sweden's bandwidth instead. Just pick a different server than ualberta.ca.)

And, since your network interface is the ksh shell, you can use tab completion. So you can "pkg_add zip-<tab>" or "pkg_add unzip-<tab>" and go on with your life.

Wish I knew about this last weekend when I rebuilt su.bze.ro.