remote install of 6.2

[David Robillard]

> OK.   First, it was someone else who posted.  I was one of the responders.

My mistake! Sorry about this.


> That can be a good way of doing it.   I have posted a list of steps
> for doing essentially that (slightly different circumstances) a
> couple of times in the past.
>
> But there is one disadvantage in this particular case.  Since the OP
> is running 4.xx and wants to move to 6.xx, he would probably also want
> to take advantage of the new UFS2 filesystem improvements.  But, if
> he builds the file system using the 4.xx fdisk and disklabel (before
> bsdlabel replaced it) then it will use the older file system missing
> some performance and feature improvements.   So, he will want to find
> a way to fdisk and bsdlabel using a 6.xx system if at all possible.
>
> Of course, it is not the end of the world to be stuck with the older
> file system, but is less than optimal.
>
> It would be possible for the person to sort of double up on your
> suggestion and do a first build with the existing fdisk and bsdlabel
> and then restore 6.2 dumps.   Then build a 6.2 system that can run from
> memory that includes the essentials such as fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs
> and tink with booting to boot to that memory system, which would
> then allow that second disk to remain unmounted or accessed anywhere
>  -- essential for building the file systems.  Then use that memory
> mounted system to build the file systems and finally do the restores
> from dumps.   It should work, but will take some figuring out.
>
> The last time I built anything resembling that was back in
> about FreeBSD 4.9 and I made a file of it and burned it to CD and
> did the boots from CD.   But it should be possible to get it to
> run from a memory file system.

Indeed, you're absolutely right.

An easy way to circumvent this filesystem issue would be to mount the
ISO image of a 6.2 install CD as a virtual filesystem and use the
binaries from there. This shows you how to proceed:
http://www.freebsddiary.org/iso-mount.php

Of course, you'll need a fair bit of RAM to do this.

There's also this from Colin Percival that can be usefull:
http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/

HTH,

David
-- 
David Robillard
UNIX systems administrator & Oracle DBA
CISSP, RHCE & Sun Certified Security Administrator
Montreal: +1 514 966 0122