Install from CVS?

[Damian Wiest]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 04:11:51PM -0800, Jay Chandler wrote:
> Is it possible to install (instead of upgrading) FreeBSD from my local 
> CVS repository?  Looking to find a good way to automate installations, 
> and figured I'd start there.
> 
> -- 
> Jay Chandler
> Network Administrator, Chapman University
> 714.628.7249 / chandler at chapman.edu
> Today's Excuse: emissions from GSM-phones 

I really need to do the same sort of thing for the *BSD systems I admin.
You may want to look at Ghost 4 Unix, although for the record I have
not yet tried it.  Our Solaris installs have been automated using 
Jumpstart and cfengine, but we haven't worked out a similar system for 
the BSDs.

A quick and dirty hack that's worked for me thus far is to mirror your
primary disk with gmirror, then pull the second drive and just insert
it into a new system.  You'll then want to modify the typical files
with the new IP, hostname, etc.  If you end up using gmirror on the new
system, be sure you do a "gmirror forget" to erase the metadata stored
at the end of the disk.  If you forget to do this, you'll run into some
issues when to try to create the new mirror.

-Damian