Setting up multiple FreeBSD machines

[Paul Civati]

Roger Hardiman <roger at cs.strath.ac.uk> wrote:

> > I will shortly have to set up 60 FreeBSD machines 
> Will these be 'user' machines or 'server' machines.
> 
> It would make a great press release that BT are using
> FreeBSD for some of their core business.

We're making assumptions that it is at BT :) but BT don't strike
me as the type of corporate to make a big deal out this kind of
thing unfortunately. :(

> I'll ask my collegue how she duplicates disks.

If they are of the same geometry ie. identicial then I have used
dd on Sun's quite often, just make sure it's done in single user
so that the filesystems are in a consistent state.

Other than that you can probably use GNU tar, pax or cpio.

Just watch out for special files (device and sparse).

> I know Doug Rabson made a PicoBSD disk which you
> can use to boot up each new machine and let format
> the hard drive and install the machine from
> a central tar file on an FTP server.

I have vague recollections that sysinstall has some magic in it
that allows you to create a file full of defaults that it will
use.  But I could be dreaming that, I can't remember. :/

-Paul-