scripting sysinstall for pxeboot

[Christopher Cowart]

Hello-

I'm working on a project to netboot servers and perform a custom
installation of FreeBSD. I have pxeboot working with tftp, providing an
mfs image over the network.

sysinstall runs as init and attempts to follow my install.cfg. However,
when running my mediaSetFTP command, sysinstall errors with:
"The fxp0 device is not configured. You will need to do so in the
Networking configuration menu before proceeding."

However, I did set tryDHCP=YES. DHCP is working because 1) it just
netbooted from it; and 2) I tried with the installation CD. It doesn't
appear to be honoring my request that it try DHCP.

If I take sysinstall over manually, specifying the network information,
it works just fine.

I want the installation to work with DHCP. Does anyone have any
suggestions for debugging sysinstall in this way?

On a not-a-show-stopper note, is there any way to get around specifying 
the hostname and/or net device? I'd rather not specify the hostname so 
that I can have one generic script for many machines. Further, what if 
a some other machine has a different kind of NIC? By hardcoding these 
values into install.cfg, the solution becomes much less maintainable. 
Why can't it obtain the hostname from DHCP? Any thoughts on this? 

Thanks for your help,
Chris

===

My install.cfg:

# This is the installation configuration file for our rackmounted FreeBSD 
# cluster machines

# Turn on extra debugging.
debug=YES
nonInteractive=YES
noWarn=NO
tryDHCP=YES
noConfirm=YES
releaseName="6.0-RELEASE"


################################
# My host specific data
#hostname=firefly
#domainname=rescomp.berkeley.edu
netDev=fxp0
hostname=firefly
_ftpPath=ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
#nameserver=169.229.70.164
#defaultrouter=169.229.70.1
#ipaddr=169.229.70.170
#netmask=255.255.254.0
#################################

################################
# Which installation device to use 
####RC####
##Need to set this!
##########
#nfs=MyNfsServer:/export/ari_scratch2/gallatin/freebsd-dist

mediaSetFTP
#mediaSetNFS
################################

[[SNIP]]


===

-- 
Christopher Cowart
Unix Systems Administrator
Residential Computing, UC Berkeley
"May all your pushes be popped"
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