RFC: support for "first boot" rc.d scripts

[Allan Jude]

On 2013-10-13 18:58, Colin Percival wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've attached a very simple patch which makes /etc/rc:
>
> 1. Skip any rc.d scripts with the "firstboot" keyword if /var/db/firstboot
> does not exist,
>
> 2. If /var/db/firstboot and /var/db/firstboot-reboot exist after running rc.d
> scripts, reboot.
>
> 3. Delete /var/db/firstboot (and firstboot-reboot) after the first boot.
>
> The purpose of this is to support "run on first boot" rc.d scripts.  These can
> be useful for both virtual machines and embedded systems; unlike conventional
> desktops and servers, these may have a lengthy gap between "installing" and
> "turning on" the system.
>
> As examples of what such scripts could do:
>
> * In Amazon EC2, I use a "first boot" script to download an SSH public key
> from EC2 so that users can log in to newly provisioned EC2 instances.
>
> * Now that (starting from 10.0-BETA1) it is possible to use FreeBSD Update
> to update everything on EC2 instances, I'm planning on writing a script which
> runs 'freebsd-update fetch install' when the system first boots, and then
> reboots if there were updates installed.  (I imagine this would be useful
> to other embedded / VM providers too.)
>
> * Once packages are provided (properly) for 10.0 I'd like to allow people to
> specify a list of packages they want installed onto an EC2 instance and have
> them downloaded and installed when the EC2 instance launches.
>
> I'd like to get this into HEAD in the near future in the hope that I can
> convince re@ that this is a simple enough (and safe enough) change to merge
> before 10.0-RELEASE.
>
> Comments?
>
>
>
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This looks extremely useful. Thank you.