net-booting the install disks (Re: 8.x grudges)

[Adam Vande More]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Mikhail T.
<mi+thun at aldan.algebra.com<mi%2Bthun at aldan.algebra.com>
> wrote:

>
> RedHat's "kickstart <
> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/ch-kickstart2.html>"
> can do an entire install based on pre-configured rules. Implementing
> something like that for FreeBSD would, probably, take quite a bit of effort.
> But being able to just boot straight into install from a CD (or CD-image)
> across the LAN doesn't seem very complicated, considering, how close we
> already are...
>


Automated installations have existed on FreeBSD for a long time.  You can do
this either via netboot or CD based media.  Also rolling your own FreeBSD
media with custom changes is trivial compared the linux distro's I'm familar
with.  I haven't used kickstart but I will say the FreeBSD method is easier
to work with than the Debian FIA method.  Plus there are many post-install
configuration utilites like puppet to further automate stuff.

This page is pretty well out of date, but the concepts remain the same.  You
can look at the work MFSBSD has done if you interested and there are more up
to date howto floating around the www.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/pxe/article.html

You can find a sample install.cfg at
/usr/src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/install.cfg

Roll it into your media and make sure sysinstall is configed to use it.
 It's really that simple.

There may certain aspects of this type of thing which make it more
complicated, like installing custom packages, FW setup, etc. but the
framework is simpler than many other OS's IMO.

-- 
Adam Vande More