Custom Build

[Maarten Sanders]

You could try to see if:
/usr/src/tools/tools/nanobsd/ or
/usr/src/release/picobsd/ or
www.tinybsd.org fits your needs
as well as checking man sysinstall for the scripting options.

Good luck and post a nice tutorial somewhere on the web if you have some
time spare (also nice for your organization if 'the next guy' is not
there anymore).

Maarten

On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 20:36 -0500, Jack Barnett wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> How this is the correct list to post this to, if not, please point me to a
> more apporiate list.
> 
> What I want to do is make a custom automated build for FreeBSD.  Basically,
> create a build, burn it to CD-ROM, go stick it into a server and it
> automatically configures to the correct hardware, auto sets up the file
> system (1 hard drive per server) and then reboots.  When it comes back up, I
> have a full functionaly customized FreeBSD install.
> 
> The only interaction that should happen during the install, is putting in
> the hostname, select static or dynamic ip and then [for non-FreeBSD app]
> select to save to local or network drive.  I'm good with perl/bash, etc, so
> I know how to create a script to automate the install for our application.
> 
> I need to do this on a lot of servers, so doing a manual install would take
> weeks.  Each server has 1 hard drive, all the data is stored on a very
> robust file server that gets backed up, if the hard drive fails, we just
> replace, rebuild and contiune where we left off.  During the install, it
> should just partion off 512 for swap, then use rest of disk for root
> directory.   Each disk may be a differant size, but they will all be more
> then 2 gigs.
> 
> The build I want to create would be a "mini-FreeBSD", just the kernal, some
> basic programs and 1 non-FreeBSD application.  The only port that would be
> open is for SSHD and all servers would sit behind a firewall in there own
> seperate subnet (firewall only routes http requests to upload data and
> incoming ssh connections).
> 
> We're currently using a very old custom Linux build, it's less then 10 megs
> total.  The problem we are having with this, is that it doesn't support all
> the newer hardware we use (the build is about 4-5 years old) and FreeBSD is
> our "standard operating envoriment" (as far as servers goes), the admins
> here are more famlair with FreeBSD so it makes sense to switch to  FreeBSD
> since we have to update the build anyways (the guy that made the build isn't
> here any more and the rest of us are FreeBSD fan-boys :P )   All the other
> FreeBSD servers that aren't in the cluster/grid are manually installed.
> 
> Could someone point me in the right direction or to some documentation or
> other resources?
> 
> Regards,
> Jack
> 
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