Re: Devops question: unattended installs of FreeBSD?

On Jan 12, 2015, at 12:24 PM, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> I had a devops person who is familiar with setting up hundreds of
> Linux nodes in cloud environment ask me what is the best way
> to do unattended installs in a cloud environment.
> Linux has kickstart installs, which are quite useful and popular.
> 
> What is the equivalent in FreeBSD?
> 
> In the sysinstall days, the sysinstall.cfg config file could be created
> which drove large parts of the installer.  Now that sysinstall is gone,
> what is the alternative?  Searching the web, I found two answers:
> 
> (1)  Write your own script
> (2)  Use pc-sysinstall from the PC-BSD project
> http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Creating_an_Automated_Installation_with_pc-sysinstall/10.0/en

bsdinstall(8) does support scripted installations, see the man page. Writing your own script is also viable, or a combination of the two. I don't have experience with scripting bsdinstall as I tend to script my own.

Vultr.com has a script that does a full installation when you first bring up a FreeBSD VM. At $work, I maintain a script which creates FreeBSD template disk images which are then cloned for new VMs. There are also now make targets in the base system to build VM-suitable disk images (but I don't recall what they are off the top of my head).

> I am trying to work with a devops team who is very experienced
> with setting up Linux environments in the cloud.  Based on the available
> docs,
> it is not clear to non-FreeBSD experts how to accomplish similar things
> with FreeBSD.

I'd be happy to provide more specific suggestions if needed. It really depends on how fully automated you want things to be and how much customization you want to include, as well as what you have available in the install environment. If you're installing on live VMs then you first have to get them booted. A custom ISO or MFS image is probably the simplest for that, though PXE is also an option. (Actually, serving an mfsBSD image via PXE is pretty straightforward.)

Then:

Set up the network if it will be needed for the install and is not already done.
Set up the disk(s), partition(s), filesystem(s), etc
Mount
Install distribution sets. Here's what I use for that:
#!/bin/sh
#...
DISTS="base kernel lib32 doc games"
for dist in ${DISTS}; do
  fetch -o - "${BASEURL}/${dist}.txz" | tar -xJ --exclude kernel/\*.symbols -C ${MOUNTPOINT} -f -
done
#...

Run freebsd-update
Populate /etc/fstab
Set a root password
Make sure you can log in to the new system (if SSH is needed then either create a non-root user or enable root login in sshd_config (not ideal))
Populate /etc/rc.conf
Run tzsetup or similar
Install 3rd-party packages
Configure bootcode

> By the way, I would be very interested in hearing from people who have
> experience
> in installing, configuring, and upgrading hundreds or even thousands of
> FreeBSD
> nodes in devops and cloud environments.  For people who are not FreeBSD
> experts,
> but who are Linux devops experts, is it easy to do, or is there a lot of
> custom scripts which need to be written?

A few tools translate over more or less directly, such as Ansible and SaltStack. Having a uniform and automated installation procedure (like it sounds like you're going for) and front-loading a lot of your customization in to that is a good starting point. Building your own packages to distribute/update configuration files or run scripts where needed is also helpful. Install that package as part of the initial system setup then have it update itself (or push out a cron job, or do mass updates when needed via Salt, etc).

Just some ideas. I don't think it's any harder/easier than running lots of Linux servers, just different in some ways. If you want custom functionality then you'll probably need some custom scripts. :)

JN