remote install of 6.2

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Mar 09, 2007 at 11:39:31AM -0500, David Robillard wrote:

> >OK.   First, it was someone else who posted.  I was one of the responders.
> 
> My mistake! Sorry about this.
> 
> 
> >That can be a good way of doing it.   I have posted a list of steps
> >for doing essentially that (slightly different circumstances) a
> >couple of times in the past.
> >
> >But there is one disadvantage in this particular case.  Since the OP
> >is running 4.xx and wants to move to 6.xx, he would probably also want
> >to take advantage of the new UFS2 filesystem improvements.  But, if
> >he builds the file system using the 4.xx fdisk and disklabel (before
> >bsdlabel replaced it) then it will use the older file system missing
> >some performance and feature improvements.   So, he will want to find
> >a way to fdisk and bsdlabel using a 6.xx system if at all possible.
> >
> >Of course, it is not the end of the world to be stuck with the older
> >file system, but is less than optimal.
> >
> >It would be possible for the person to sort of double up on your
> >suggestion and do a first build with the existing fdisk and bsdlabel
> >and then restore 6.2 dumps.   Then build a 6.2 system that can run from
> >memory that includes the essentials such as fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs
> >and tink with booting to boot to that memory system, which would
> >then allow that second disk to remain unmounted or accessed anywhere
> > -- essential for building the file systems.  Then use that memory
> >mounted system to build the file systems and finally do the restores
> >from dumps.   It should work, but will take some figuring out.
> >
> >The last time I built anything resembling that was back in
> >about FreeBSD 4.9 and I made a file of it and burned it to CD and
> >did the boots from CD.   But it should be possible to get it to
> >run from a memory file system.
> 
> Indeed, you're absolutely right.
> 
> An easy way to circumvent this filesystem issue would be to mount the
> ISO image of a 6.2 install CD as a virtual filesystem and use the
> binaries from there. This shows you how to proceed:
> http://www.freebsddiary.org/iso-mount.php
> 
> Of course, you'll need a fair bit of RAM to do this.

That can work.  Make sure you check the added comments as well, although
those refer to FreeBSD 5.xxx and you are still on 4.xxx.  You will want
to know it will be different once you start running the new one.

Make sure that the ISO image is not stored on the drive to be fdisk-ed, 
bsdlabel-ed and newfs-ed.   In this person's case, the system is already 
running on another disk, and he wants to put the 6.xx system on a second 
disk, so he just has to make sure to write the ISO to that first disk
somewhere there is room and unmount anything on that second disk.


> 
> There's also this from Colin Percival that can be usefull:
> http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/

This reference is really a different subject.

////jerry

> 
> HTH,
> 
> David
> -- 
> David Robillard
> UNIX systems administrator & Oracle DBA
> CISSP, RHCE & Sun Certified Security Administrator
> Montreal: +1 514 966 0122