Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

From: Daniel O'Connor <doconnor_at_gsoft.com.au>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2011 13:14:57 +1030
On 19/02/2011, at 20:04, grarpamp wrote:
> 1 - I used install.cfg's on floppies to clone systems, a lot. Hands
> on the box were needed with that. Operators skills were in question,
> so having them use the dialog menus properly was a pain and often
> resulted in non-zeroed disk or half built systems. And though all
> else was cloned, it needed a separate <host>.cfg for each box due
> to:
> 
> fqdn, gateway, ip/mask
> interface - sometimes changed
> root disk - sometimes changed
> 
> Would have killed for a simple console shell script to ask those
> questions of the operator, per machine.

Not to get into the whole "wishlist for sysinstall Mk II" (aka second system syndrome in full effect)..

You can do this with sysinstall already (although it isn't very clean).

Also, you don't need floppies, you can do the whole install off a FAT32 USB stick with the aforementioned install.cfg file and a script run from that.

I do this at work to do a partition & minimal install, then untar a pre-populated FS generated from a chroot. It also asks various questions afterward for final tuning.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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Received on Sun Feb 20 2011 - 02:24:20 UTC

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