Creating a custom install disk
Ted Mittelstaedt
tedm at toybox.placo.com
Tue Mar 4 06:56:00 UTC 2008
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Doug Hardie
> Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2008 6:16 PM
> To: freebsd-questions
> Subject: Creating a custom install disk
>
>
> I have a number of servers that I am going to be updating to FreeBSD 7
> from 6.2. I have built a new base system with all the configurations
> and ports and local code that I need. This process takes about 2 days
> from the distribution CDs. I need a way to clone this machine and
> install on the others.
>
> My first idea was a custom install disk. The make release process
> does not appear to do what I want. It would install a GENERIC kernel
> and take the config files from the distribution.
>
> LiveCD was tried, but it fails with numerous attempts to write to
> directories that do not exist. I expect I could manually create those
> directories, but I am not sure what it would actually install since it
> too builds a new GENERIC (but slightly modified) kernel.
>
> I tried creating a dump file of the new machine and restoring it on
> the old one. I did root first and was going to then do /usr, but the
> alterations to root were such that the system just couldn't keep going
> through the process. That what I had expected, but it was worth a try.
>
> I have not tried this, but perhaps it might work. Creating the dump
> files on the new machine, booting the old from the live filesystem cd,
> recreating the filesystems on disk and then restoring from the dump
> files on the new system. That would require a good net connection
> between the 2 machines.
>
> Is there a better way to do this?
Yes:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/
Ted
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