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Hello All,

A recent Bare Metal Restore (BMR) of a OBSD 4.0 system failed! Why? To
get this particular BMR job done i needed three hard disks in the
machine at the same time . This meant that i needed devices /dev/wd1*
and /dev/wd2*. Guess what? The OBSD boot/rescue floppy (or CD) after
release 3.8 or so lost those devices in the /dev directory. You either
make them manually, or use a copy of release 3.6 which has the devices i
needed in the /dev directory. Why were devices wd1*, wd2* and wd3*
dropped in more recent versions?

After i figured out that i should be using release 3.6 to do a restore
job, i ran into another issue. Restore needs the /tmp directory as
working storage. When i restore a large system, the /tmp directory in
RAM fills up instantly. To solve this problem, the restore man page
says to set environment variable TMPDIR=/some_large_mounted_directory.
Fine. When i do this, the restore does not recognise the environment
variable properly, and the restore fails as /tmp fills up. Yet, it
shows up as set when i ask for it via "set". Is this a known problem?

To work around it, i just delete the RAM based /tmp directory, and set a
soft link to /some_large_mounted_directory, usually on the hard disk
partition that holds the dumps i am restoring from.

Any comments?

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Regards / JCH