Re: Devops question: unattended installs of FreeBSD?

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 12:12 PM, John Nielsen <lists_at_jnielsen.net> wrote:

>
> 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.)
>
>
Thanks!  You provided some excellent concrete examples for how to do
unattended FreeBSD installs.

In the past 6 months, I have had two different people ask me how to:
    -> create a PXE boot server
    -> take the ISO image for FreeBSD 9.2, FreeBSD 10.1, etc.
    -> create a kickstart environment where it is possible to PXE boot a
cluster of machines, and
        have an unattended "kickstart" install take place of the various
FreeBSD versions

I have coded this kind of stuff up myself in the past and written my own
scripts.
However, it would be really nice if we had more straightforward
documentation and example scripts for doing this.
That way, the average devops engineer experienced with Linux and kickstart
can set this up with no problem, instead of having to struggle and figure
things out.

It looks like all this stuff is possible under FreeBSD.  The main problem I
see is that the
access to the documentation for doing this is not straightforward at all.

If I do a web search for "Linux kickstart", the search results I get lead
me to documentation
that is actually quite good.  I am not a Linux expert, but I can read that
stuff and figure out how to set it
up reasonably quickly.

If I do a web search for "FreeBSD kickstart", the top search results I get
lead to a few broken
web links, and some private notes from different people on the Internet.
The notes are not bad,
but not as straightforward to follow as the Linux documentation links.

Since you have some good experience with this, can we create a thread on
https://forums.freebsd.org
with the title "FreeBSD kickstart" with some step-by-step examples for
creating a "kickstart" environment?

That way over time, a web search for "FreeBSD kickstart" will show the
forum post with top-notch examples.

Thanks.
--
Craig