OpenBSD on Thecus N2100

New updates at bottom.

Yesterday, I received a Thecus N2100B for purposes of working with OpenBSD/armish. Following the installation instructions was very straight forward. The hardest part was creating a serial console cable in order to access the unit's RedBoot prompt. I will document what I did with some pictures and add those soon.

After getting OpenBSD up and running, I was disappointed to find out that the firmware installed on the N2100 does not utilize the boot script option in RedBoot. Instead, it just follows a preset command that boots its version of Linux. That means that you have to manually connect into the unit each time you reboot it and type Control-C to get to the RedBoot prompt and then load OpenBSD from there. This is very unfortunate.

After the installation was finished, I followed some instructions that show how you can setup OpenBSD's RAIDframe to get a very nice software RAID setup. I followed the instructions more or less except for the part about installboot which is only applicable to i386 and amd64 as far as I know. After compiling a new kernel with RAIDframe support, I got everything up and running. You can look at my dmesg.

Initially, the Thecus N2100 comes with 128 MB of RAM. That is enough for many things but I thought that since I was going to use RAIDframe and such things that it would be a good idea to get some more memory. A very good web site on the Thecus products mentions using a 512 MB DDR400 RAM chip from Corsair with part number VS512MB400. This is what I ordered and it seems to work just great.

I can also confirm that the Western Digital RAID Edition 160 GB hard drive (WD1600YS) works beautifully in the N2100. I really like this hardware platform and I would probably run some light server tasks on it if it would autoboot properly. Unfortunately, it seems that the version of firmware that came with this unit completely ignores the startup script. That was quite a disappointment. Maybe it will be resolved soon. We shall see.