Creating SpamCheetah liveCD ISO from source

You need the following with you before we start:

The ISO image of OpenBSD 4.5
A CD/DVD writer
root access on the host machine on which we will be building the liveCD
An OpenBSD 4.5 machine with root access
Qemu emulator should be installed in your OpenBSD machine
A reasonably good understanding of what you are doing
You should know how to compile the OpenBSD kernel (This is very easy)
This document assumes that you are interested in creating a liveCD for i386/x86 family of machines. In case you are interested in any of the wide variety of hardware options out there you know what you need to change. Contacting support will surely help should you get stuck. OpenBSD is a great OS with consistent semantics, so you should never have any issue.

Ready? Good. Let us get started!

You should have the ISO image of OpenBSD4.5 with you. If not you can download it from one of the mirrors. You can download using HTTP, FTP or rsync.

Or simply click here for an x86 machine. Please download the ISO image, if necessary check the MD5 checksum and optionally also loopback mount and check its contents.

Next step is installing OpenBSD 4.5 into a qemu filestore. You can install OpenBSD with all the packages and dependencies into a flat file using the qemu emulator.

Create a 1G qemu flatstore. This will finish in a second.

#qemu-img create livecd.qemu.hd0 1G

Install OpenBSD 4.5 into the filestore just created by booting with the install4.5 ISO file you just downloaded. You have to install OpenBSD the usual way except that you are installing into a Qemu virtual machine. OpenBSD installation is a very fast and painless process. Install all distributions except Xwindow. This site will help you in case you are not familiar with OpenBSD installation.

This procedure could take some time as it requires manual intervention.

#qemu -hda livecd.qemu.hd0 -cdrom <path-to-install45.iso> -boot d

Please install the following packages. You can download this text file and type this command inside the qemu session(On the liveCD target virtual machine).

#  pkg_add -i `cat SpamCheetah-pkg.txt`

GeoIP
drill
ghostscript-8.63p3-a4-no_x11
ifstat
mod_gzip
p5-Compress-Raw-Zlib
p5-Compress-Zlib
p5-Crypt-SSLeay
p5-Digest-HMAC
p5-Digest-SHA1
p5-Email-Valid
p5-Geo-IP
p5-Geo-Inverse
p5-HTML-Parser
p5-HTML-Tagset
p5-HTTP-GHTTP
p5-IO-Compress-Base
p5-IO-Compress-Zlib
p5-Mail-Tools
p5-Net-DNS
p5-Net-IP
p5-RRD
p5-Time-TimeDate
p5-URI
p5-libwww
pftop
png
psutils
qdbm
rrdtool
t1utils

Next step is transferring the qemu installation as a tar file into the host machine. This can be done by loopback mounts with vnconfig(1).

 #  vnconfig svnd0 ~/livecd.qemu.hd0

 #  mount /dev/svnd0a /mnt

 #  (cd /mnt/ && tar zcpf /livecd_root.tar.gz *)

 #  mkdir -p /usr/livecd/ramdisk/dev

 #  chmod 755 /usr/livecd/ramdisk/dev

 #  tar pxzf livecd_root.tar.gz -C /usr/livecd/

 #  umount /mnt

 #  vnconfig -u svnd0

Now you have to untar the above file and create devices on the host machine in the /usr/livecd directory we created above.

This procedure could take some time as it requires manual intervention.

#  tar pxzf livecd_root.tar.gz -C /usr/livecd/

#  cp -pR /usr/livecd/{var,etc,root,home} /usr/livecd/ramdisk/

#  cp -pR /usr/livecd/dev/MAKEDEV /usr/livecd/ramdisk/dev/

#  cd /usr/livecd/dev && ./MAKEDEV all

Next step is compiling the OpenBSD kernel after modifying a single line that specifies the root filesystem.

Copy GENERIC kernel config

#  cd /usr/src/sys/arch/`uname -m`/conf && cp GENERIC LIVE_CD

Modify this line in LIVE_CD kernel config file

  
   config bsd swap generic     < - we have to change this entry

that specifies the root filesystem to:

   config  bsd root on cd0

Compile the modified kernel

 # config LIVE_CD && cd ../compile/LIVE_CD/ 
           && make clean && make depend && make

Command: Copy the compiled kernel in the root directory of livecd

 # cp bsd /usr/livecd && chown root:wheel /usr/livecd/bsd && \
    chmod 644 /usr/livecd/bsd

Now we have to create the RAMDISK directories and files. We also need to create devices with the MAKEDEV script.

#  cp -pR /usr/livecd/{var,etc,root,home} /usr/livecd/ramdisk/

#  cp -pR /usr/livecd/dev/MAKEDEV /usr/livecd/ramdisk/dev/

#  cd /usr/livecd/dev && ./MAKEDEV all

#  cd /usr/livecd/ramdisk/var/anjal/dev && ./MAKEDEV all

Now download the code for the web interface and other helper scripts from sourceforge.

 
$pwd
  /home/foobar/cvs
$cvs 
 -d:pserver:anonymous@spamcheetah.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/spamcheetah
  login 
 (Press enter)

$cvs -z3 
 -d:pserver:anonymous@spamcheetah.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/spamcheetah  
   co -P ramdisksrc

Next step is setting up the RAMDISK image files which will be uncompressed at boot. Then we copy over the bootrecords for the ISO image /usr/mdec/cdbr and /usr/mdec/cdboot. They will be found on all OpenBSD machines.

#  cd /home/foobar/cvs/ramdisksrc/ramdisk-src && \
  tar pzcf /usr/livecd/ramdisk/var.tar.gz var && \
  tar pzcf /usr/livecd/ramdisk/etc.tar.gz etc && \
  tar pzcf /usr/livecd/ramdisk/dev.tar.gz dev && \
  tar pzcf /usr/livecd/ramdisk/home.tar.gz home && \
  tar pzcf /usr/livecd/ramdisk/root.tar.gz root && \
  mv /usr/livecd/etc/{rc,fstab,group,passwd,boot.conf,login.conf}\
          /usr/livecd/ && \
  rm -rf /usr/livecd/{root,home,var,etc}/* && \
      mv /usr/livecd/{rc,fstab,group,passwd,boot.conf,login.conf}\
          /usr/livecd/etc/ && \
  rm -rf /usr/livecd/ramdisk/{var,etc,dev,home,root}
  cd /usr/livecd/ && \
  chmod 700 root && \
  chmod 755 {var,etc,dev,home,ramdisk} && \
  chmod 1777 tmp && \
  cp /usr/livecd/usr/mdec/{cdbr,cdboot} /usr/livecd/
  mkdir /usr/livecd/persist
  cp \
   /home/foobar/cvs/ramdisksrc/scriptfiles/whitelist_table.txt \
   /usr/livecd/persist

Now copy the SpamCheetah specific perlscripts.

#  cd /home/foobar/cvs/ramdisksrc/ && 
  $ cp perlscripts/usr/local/sbin/greyscanner  \
                 /usr/livecd/usr/local/sbin
  $ cp perlscripts/usr/local/bin/askintf /usr/livecd/usr/local/bin
  $ cp perlscripts/usr/local/bin/nwcfg /usr/livecd/usr/local/bin

Now create the ISO image for burning to CD/DVD.

#  /usr/local/bin/mkisofs \
    -no-iso-translate \
    -R -T \
    -allow-leading-dots \
    -l -d -D -N -v \
    -V "SpamCheetah LiveCD OpenBSD${vers}" \
    -A "SpamCheetah LiveCD OpenBSD${vers}" \
    -p "Your Name <your.mailaddress.>" \
    -publisher "Your Name <your.mail@address.>" \
    -b cdbr -no-emul-boot \
    -c boot.catalog \
    -o /home/SpamCheetah.iso \
    /usr/livecd/

You can optionally test that the ISO is booting properly with qemu.

#  qemu -cdrom livecd.iso -boot d

You can burn the ISO with cdrecord(1) if your medium is a CD or growisofs(1) if your medium is a DVD. Remember that growisofs is part of the package dvd+rw-tools under OpenBSD.

#  cdrecord [-speed=16] [-overburn] -data livecd.iso

#  growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/rcd1c=livecd.iso

Please contact support should you have any problems!

Best of luck and have fun with SpamCheetah!