9.0 NFS Installs

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Sean Bruno <seanbru at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> I noted that we no longer have the disc1.iso in this release.  What
> should I use to populate a NFS rootfs for netinstalls?
>
> This was what I had been using(8.2-RELEASE) to populate NFS roots for
> netinstalls.  This allowed you to boot up into something that was
> self-contained.
>
> The other ISO's seem to have A LOT more stuff with symlinks pointing to
> absolute paths all over the f/s. This isn't quite as simple to copy over
> to a rootfs to use as a NFS target for booting.

It's just a better idea to use the payload tarballs from here:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/<uname -m>/<uname -p>/<release>/

e.g.

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/

as the basis for your system, and probably just run something like
make distribution ala mergemaster afterwards and/or use a custom
/boot/loader.conf, /etc/... .

sysinstall hacked up the system using its custom memory disk with
secret sauce binaries and pathing, s.t. it kept most things
self-contained to /stand, whereas bsdinstall hacks the system up in
different ways -- most of it pointing back to /tmp/bsdinstall_* or
similar locations.

HTH,
-Garrett