Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

On Saturday, February 19, 2011 4:34:11 am grarpamp wrote:
> Sysinstall is fine, as I'm sure any replacement will be. So I'll
> just note a few things I'd like to see in any such replacement...
> 
> 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.

Actually, you can do that if you are a bit creative (add a few more tools to 
the mfsroot, and use the 'system' command in install.cfg to invoke a shell 
script that then generates a foo.cfg you later include via loadConfig, but 
I've covered that at multiple conferences by now).  That said, I'm hopeful 
that the new installer will be more flexible in less hackish ways while 
letting you do things like PXE boot to a shell where you can use mfiutil to 
create a RAID-5 volume and then invoke the installer on that, etc.

-- 
John Baldwin