The “Oh, DUH!” moment came today when I realized (after much mucking about with pulling various programs I needed from other OpenBSD boxes with more complete installs and running into various issues with version differences) that I could just download base43.tgz from an OpenBSD ftp mirror onto my Mac, unzip it, and sftp what I needed over to the flashdist machine, no other OpenBSD box needed.  Once I’d copied ldd over to the flashdist machine, I could even find out what libs I needed to copy over, too.

This means, of course, that I now have dhcpd and BIND running on my Alix.

Speaking of OpenBSD boxes, the Alix seems to be much closer to usable than I’d expected now, having restarted from a newer pre-built flashdist image.  The hokey thing I’d forgotten about is how few of the standard basic *nix command programs are in the base flashdist, so I end up copying over program after program from another running OpenBSD box.  I’m hoping to get BIND and dhcpd up and running soon, get pf all set up for router/NAT/firewall use, and try it out with a DSL modem before the weekend is up.

And, with a little luck, by the end of the weekend, all these various devices will be self-updating the various common config files (BIND zones, dhcpd.conf, etc.) from a common server.  I’ve already got a shell script that can check for an update to itself and replace itself with the newer version; I just have to make it check for and retrieve updates for the actual config files.