Why is sysinstall considered end-of-life?

[Howard Jones]

Jay Chandler wrote: 
> I've been trying to script an install for FreeBSD since I just had a
> bunch of servers dropped on me-- may I ask how you did yours?
Roughly speaking, I started with this document:
   http://www.tnpi.biz/computing/freebsd/pxe-netboot.shtml
and this document:
  
http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html

and the example install.cfg in /usr/src/(wherever it is)/sysinstall

and used pkgmaker.sh to make my own post-install package. The package is
essentially my own copies of rc.conf.local, plus any extra config files,
and a 'post' shell-script that uses sed & friends to make modify the
other mods I want (mainly things like enabling serial console, remote
syslog, disabling ssh password logins). The install.cfg pulls any
standard packages you want from the central server. You might need to
"make package" or download additional packages for some stuff, and
update the INDEX appropriately. I also had to mess around a little to
make myself a qmail package, since that's actually not allowed to be
distributed. Mostly though, it's just a copy of the -RELEASE CD with the
INDEX run through some basic awk.

What I have now is a DHCP/TFTP/NFS server with a list of MAC addresses
and IPs that it's allowed to install to (so it doesn't accidently
re-install a machine that gets it's BIOS boot order screwed up). When we
get new systems, boot them once to get the MAC address, then a second
time to start the PXE install. They're ready to go in about 6 minutes,
and mail me to tell me they've completed their first boot.

It wouldn't be much harder to add machine-specific scripts, although I
don't bother. It helps to standardise hardware, so that it's always em0
and da0s1 that you want to configure/format.

The most annoying parts were finding good PXE support on the original
servers I tried this with (HP LPrs), and getting my install.cfg *just
right*. The first one was solved by EOLing our LPrs, and the latter by
swearing and reading the source code for parts of sysinstall. My main
wish for improving it is to be able to make my own sub-releases with
current patches and current packages and still be able to use
freebsd-update somehow, which I think is not possible.

I could write it up, but it's very close to the two docs I mentioned up
there.

Howie