Creating a custom install disk for Freebsd?

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 8:45 PM, Steve Lake <steve.lake at raiden.net> wrote:

>        Hi all.  I'm looking at trying to create a custom install disk for
> Freebsd based off an existing install to make reinstallation quick and
> painless, similar to how apt-on-cd works for Linux.  The reason behind this
> is I'm looking at going overseas for a couple years and will be leaving a
> bsd server in my brother-in-law's care.  Since he's a hardware guy, if the
> server fails, he can easily fix it and get it back up.  But he will be
> clueless as to how to reinstall the server itself and get it running
> afterwards (assuming the failure was caused by the HD failing).
>
>        So I want to leave behind a cd that's setup in such a way that all
> he has to do is pop it in, boot it up, and maybe answer a couple questions
> prior to install.  After that the cd does the rest.  And when it's finished,
> the system ends up with a fresh copy of the server as it was when the
> snapshot was created, including all settings and applications.
>


> ...



>
> Steven Lake
> Owner/Technical Writer
> Raiden's Realm
> www.raiden.net
> Bringing Linux and BSD to the World
>
>

The following is not an answer to your question but only to suggest a
possible installation step to be able to use in such an instance and many
repeated installations .


There is such a facility in Mandriva Free 2008 ( www.mandriva.com  ) .
 During installation it is possible to use a diskette to save all of the
responses of the user for the installation .
Then , for a new installation on another PC , when this diskette is
submitted to the Mandriva installer , it is not asking any question about
installation and it is using the parameters stored in that diskette .

I wish that the FreeBSD is also applies such a step . It would be very
useful  for the installers because re-entry of all of the parameters for a
new install of the same operating system on the same machine or a similar
another machine really is very time consuming  .

Even such a facility may use XML files to make it usable for different
successive releases with a possible update of the XML files .

Instead of diskette , a USB stick may also be used because diskette drives
are disappearing slowly .


Thank you very much

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk