Install FreeBSD on a remote server

Mats Hecking freebsd-questions at mats-hecking.de
Wed Mar 22 21:18:04 UTC 2006


Hi. I have a remote server, that I can access through SSH using a Linux Rescue CD. I would like to install FreeBSD 6.0 on this system. 

First I looked at Depinguinator. I checked the script and decided that I couldn't really use that, especially because it works for FreeBSD 5.4 only.

I then proceeded this way: I have created an image the same size the hard drive in the remote server is (approx. 10GB). With qemu I installed FreeBSD
6.0 on that and copied it onto the remote server. I had to use dd for that - dump/restore won't work, since with the Linux Rescue-CD I cannot mount
UFS. 

Now I heard that copying an image with dd might give you trouble at a later point of time. Problems might be the physical constitution of the hard drive - partitions have to end at a cylinder. And since cylinders are different on different hard drives, it might give you IO-Errors. Is that true?

My next idea was to partition the hard drive on the remote system with the Linux Rescue CD (fdisk), then dd that image onto my system. With qemu I then wanted to install FreeBSD on the already partitioned image and dd it onto the remote system again. Does this sound better to you

So if you have any better ideas how to install a FreeBSD 6.0 on this server, I'll be glad for any replies! 

Thanks.

Sorry for any grammar and spelling mistakes, English is not my native language...





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