BSDInstall ISO images

Garrett Cooper gcooper at FreeBSD.org
Sun Jan 23 18:59:15 UTC 2011


On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
> I've spent some time integrating bsdinstall into startup of install CDs,
> mostly related to building useful live-CD-based installers. An i386 image
> can be found here (other architectures may follow, as my very slow DSL line
> permits):
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110108.iso.bz2
>
> The source for this can be found at:
>
> svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/nwhitehorn/bsdinstall
>
> The bits related to live CD usage are the testsystem.sh and rc.local files.
> Instead of running sysinstall as an init replacement, I have written a small
> rc.local script that gives the user the option to either start the
> installer, open a single-user-mode style shell, or to continue to boot to a
> multi-user live CD. Also, instead of the md root used by sysinstall, this
> just boots from the CD directly. This prevents the need for sysinstall's
> media selection, since the distribution files are in the mounted root file
> system.
>
> I would appreciate any comments or test results.

Not sure if it matters anymore, but here are my comments:

NOTE: this was using
http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110118.iso.bz2
.

1. The i386 image (apparently) isn't compiled with ATACAM, etc support
so opening /dev/cd0 always fails with ENODEV.
2. There's a lot of noise at bootup related to missing files. Putting
in a dummy /etc/fstab, adding hostid_enable="NO", and setting
hostname="" to a dummy value in rc.conf will help weed out some noise.
3. The initial dialog beeped when I first pressed the right key on my
keyboard. Maybe hw.syscons.bell=0 would help?
4. Splitting up the Keyboard Menu into regions and providing human
readable names would help.

Partition Editor (I used Manual for the first try):
1. It would be helpful if the cursor was at the end of the textbox so
that I didn't have to position the cursor at the end or press the
delete key.
2. K is a bogus suffix for kilo-; k is correct.
3. Having a mountpoint for a bsdlabel partition doesn't make sense and
is confusing.
4. Backing out of the Partition Manager and going back to the previous
dialogs is impossible.
5. Noting that the values (freebsd-ufs, etc) map back to gpart driven
values would be helpful.

I exited the install and tried again on the command line. Couldn't
conjure up the right gpart commands (manpage sucks for what I was
looking for -- creating a new partition), I went back into the
partedit command that was in /usr/libexec/ and entered in data
manually . Committed my changes which threw me back into the prompt
and then hit ^d to get back into the installer proper. The first run
around failed for some odd reason (claimed it couldn't create
boot/kernel.gz, or whatever, so there might be some error checking
missing with mount, mkdir, etc).

Chose restart, walked through the process again and chose manual, made
sure the slice was properly configured for / and swap was setup, then
continued. This time the install went through properly.

Progress bar:
I think you're on the right track by simplifying the install, but it
could be polished to say:

kernel
world
distribution (in what context is distribution? Is it configuration
files, etc from `make distribution' ?)

Configuring Network (etc)

Seems like this could have been done earlier on to shrink the CD size
down a bit.

Add Users (YAY! something that finally works)

- Prompts seem ok.
- Login class - getting too specific IMO; this should be done after
the first boot.
- Home directory - /usr/home was the traditional home directory root
for BSD I thought.
- Home directory permissions - as an aside, what are the default?
- Use password-based authentication - what other options are there
other than not having a password or using a non-master.passwd backend
like LDAP, etc?
- Lock out account after creation - I would remove this; again, it
seems like something that an admin can do after first boot.

In general:

Some of the dialogs are a bit small (like the DHCP status dialog).
Enlarging them might help.

Hopefully this feedback is helpful.

Thanks!
-Garrett


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