Re: Devops question: unattended installs of FreeBSD?

On 2015-01-13 16:10, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> 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
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> 

Martin Matuška gave a talk at AsiaBSDCon 2014 about using 'Foreman' in
addition to Puppet to manage FreeBSD instances.

Slides: http://blog.vx.sk/pdf/foreman-asiabsdcon2014.pdf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb8jB5x0OX4

So foreman does the inventory management (for physical hosts etc), and
manages network booting mfsBSD and running the scripted installation,
and boot strapping puppet, which then takes over the config management
side of things.


My self, I've looked at using zfs send|receive to deploy new hosts,
since I am deploying servers in remote data centers where I don't have
another host to PXE Boot off of.

-- 
Allan Jude