Flashing a Soekris 4526 Node using FreeBSD: Introduction

This how-to document is designed to walk people through the process of installing the software on a Soekris 4526 board using a PXE boot on a FreeBSD operating system. This is the kind of board you might buy from Metrix.net.

Software Requirements

• FreeBSD [OpenBSD and NetBSD commands are similar enough that proficient users should be able to translate the FreeBSD commands offered here.
• wget or links
• Cu [installed by default with Tip in FreeBSD]
• lrzsz

Hardware Requirements

• One Ethernet port
• One serial port [We found that a USB-RS232 Serial Connector worked as well.]
• One crossover cable
• One cat5e cable
• One null-modem cable
• One power-over-ethernet injector [POE]

Conventions

Three different command line prompts will be used:

• $ indicates the normal user;
• # indicates the root user; and

> indicates a prompt from the node.

All key strokes (e.g. Shift, Control, Enter, etc...) will use the following syntax: <key> [e.g. <Shift>, <Ctrl>, etc.].

VI Tutorial

For text editing, we use VI, but feel free to use whatever text editor you like. Some useful vi commands:

• <i> - enter the edit mode to change text
• <Esc> - to escape the edit mode
• :q! - to exit without saving changes
• <Shift>zz - to save changes and exit

Proceed to Step 1