Re: sysinstall, GJOURNAL and ZFS

From: Trond Endrestøl <Trond.Endrestol_at_fagskolen.gjovik.no>
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:44:27 +0200 (CEST)
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On Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:07+0300, Dan Naumov wrote:

> <Begin Installation> screen: The screen states that in order to do a
> manual installation "<SNIP> login as root, and follow the instructions
> given in the file /README". There is no indication regarding how the
> user is supposed to open the README file, at least ONE sane option
> should be suggested (for example: login as root and type "vi README"
> at the command prompt to read the instructions regarding installing
> FreeBSD manually.

Although longer to type, "less /README" would be a better alternative 
than using vi to view the contents of the file. You could otherwise 
risk the user destroying the README file due to unfamiliarity with 
this particular editor.

OTOH, why not adopt OpenBSD's afterboot(8) man page?

===

Almost completely off-topic:

An /altroot mechanism would be nice to have in FreeBSD. ;-)

There are at least two schools of thought regarding /altroot.

One school of thought would be to simply dd the contents of the root 
partition on to the altroot partition and run fsck on /altroot, 
assuming /root and /altroot have the same size. I believe this is how 
OpenBSD handles /altroot when configured to do so.

My school of thought, given a system with more than one hard drive, 
physical or virtual (as in RAID volumes), is to have /altroot appear 
as a regular root file system (partition a) on the other drive and 
thus being able to (manually) boot from the available root file 
system. Both hard drives should be made bootable with the EasyBoot 
loader placed in the MBRs and with regular boot blocks in the FreeBSD 
slices. Of course, /altroot should normally remain unmounted.

There is also the possible need of having /etc/fstab files with 
specific contents for each root file system. For instance, /'s 
/altroot should be mounted as /altroot's /. I'm not sure how to handle 
this scenario with either installers as you probably need to perform 
the installation twice, that's how I did it on a couple of recently 
installed systems, not to mention how to handle make 
install{kernel,world} for both of the two root file systems.


Just some random thoughts,
Trond.

- -- 
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Trond Endrestøl                  | Trond.Endrestol_at_fagskolen.gjovik.no
ACM, NAS, NUUG, SAGE, USENIX     |      FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE & Pine 4.64

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Received on Sun Jun 14 2009 - 13:44:41 UTC

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