Re: Contacts for project idea list

Dario Freni wrote:
> This can be intepreted/implemented in many ways. As Alexander said,
> this can be a "dummy" installer which formats, partitions and install
> over the network.
> 
> In my todo list, instead, there's (since at least one year) the idea
> to implement this with FreeSBIE and BSD Installer. BSD Installer was
> already ported to FreeSBIE one year ago, and the actual version of BSD
> Installer works with the new version of the FreeSBIE toolkit.
> 
> It can be nice to have a dedicated version of FreeSBIE which ships
> with a dhcp server on it and can act as a PXE server, allowing clients
> to netboot into BSD Installer. If you agree, we can start working on
> it.

Merry Christmas - Sorry for not getting back on this before.

My experiene is that PXEBoot actually works quite well: It is fairly 
easy to create a memory disk that can be fetched with tftp. The only 
thing not included in the base system is a dhcp server.

So, including such a setup on a FreeSBIE live CD should be trivial, the 
most non-trivial task I can think of is configuring dhcp for the user.

However, work can be done to make it easier to use PXEBoot to install 
multiple systems: I know I am treading into a minefield now - sorry!

1) My idea is to exploit the install scripts. Normally the install 
script is in the root of the root device, but it is cumbersome to update 
the script on a memory disk.

Instead, it would be great to have the script on the server and just 
specify a path in eg loader.rc. The install script should then be 
fetched with tftp.

2) It would be great if it was posible to create a valid install script 
from sysinstall - I know this is a completely different project, but 
maybe the idea could propagate :)

The point is that, this way it would be easier for the administrator to 
save a system configuration and clone his systems. This would be really 
useful for those maintaining a large server farm or a large number of 
workstations, also this would be useful for recovery.

Of the two items above, I think that 1) is within the scope of the 
proposed project, and maybe also the easier part :)

Just my thoughts on where I would like to go with this project.

Cheers, Erik
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