Automated Reinstall

Dominic Marks dominic_marks at btinternet.com
Mon Aug 12 20:05:23 BST 2002


On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:54:19AM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote:
> Good Morning (and delurk :-) )

Evening :-)
 
> I'm looking into getting FreeBSD to install (well, reinstall)  
> automatically on some dev machines - basically I want to record the
> current configuration (more or less) and create a CD for each machine that
> when inserted into the drive and booted from reinstalls the machine.

I was asked recently about installing FreeBSD on a Linux box remotely.
There was no local access so you have to get it right first time. The
best plan I could come up with was to make a pre-prepared minimal system
and then take an image of it with dd. This file could be uploaded to the
remote machine and then you write it onto the disc with the Linux box's
version of dd. You can then later expand the file systems to their
proper sizes with growfs. You'd need to do some magic with the
bootloader to make it work, but I don't think it would be too tricky.

What is probably more what you're looking for is scripting sysinstall,
all the variables you'll need are covered in `man sysinstall'.

> I was wondering if anyone could point me to some helpful documentation -
> I've seen what the handbook has to say on this, and I've seen the
> Jumpstart Guide. Basically I've got as far as realising I need an
> install.cfg file, but not finding any documentation (sans skeleton
> files) on what this should contain.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Mark.
> 
> -- 
> s''  Mark Fowler                                     London.pm   Bath.pm
>      http://www.twoshortplanks.com/              mark at twoshortplanks.com
> ';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t->Tputs(cl);for$w(split/  +/
> ){for(0..30){$|=print$t->Tgoto(cm,$_,$y)." $w";select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
> 
> 
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HTH,
Dominic




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