Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

On Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:26:33 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I should have worded it a bit differently in that I do actually think
that is true from what little I have seen and the "hopeful" bit more refers
to my being able to adopt it locally.

-- 
John Baldwin