Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

On 02/22/11 06:45, John Baldwin wrote:
> 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.

This is something that I very explicitly built in to the design of 
bsdinstall. When the installer starts (as well as at several other 
points), you are offered an option to bring up a shell specifically to 
do things like this. Scripted installs are just shell scripts instead of 
a configuration file, so it is trivial to interleave complicated things 
like this.
-Nathan