FreeBSD remote install

[Bill Moran]

Colin Percival wrote:
>   As you are all aware, many computer systems around the world are
> possessed by evil penguins.  It would be nice to exorcize these
> evil spirits, but this can be difficult if we don't have physical
> access to the machines in question.
> 
>   I've put together some code for remotely installing FreeBSD over
> existing i386 Linux systems.  In short, I use NetBSD's makefs tool
> to build a FreeBSD disk image which boots entirely into memory,
> sets up the network, and sets a root password.  Providing that the
> beginning of the machine's drive is quiescent (ie, if the first
> partition is swap, and you've disabled swapping), you can write
> this image to disk with dd, reboot, and ssh into FreeBSD.
>   Once you've got a complete FreeBSD filesystem running in memory,
> you can slice and partition your drives and install FreeBSD
> however you like; this has the added side effect of making vinum
> installations much easier.
> 
>   For the code and more details, see
> http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/

I just wanted to comment that this is _very_ cool!

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com