Alternative to sysinstall?

Peter Steele psteele at maxiscale.com
Mon Feb 23 13:51:33 PST 2009


We want to develop a system imaging process where all we have to do is insert a USB thumb drive into a system and reboot it, and some time later the system would be loaded up with whatever FreeBSD software the particular thumb drive being used is configured. We'd have different thumb drives for different flavors of systems. 

Our current approach uses a PXE boot server and sysinstall, but this is not an easily portable solution (we can't bring the boot server with us to a customer location. Plus, sysinstall scripts are not particularly to be particularly flexible. 

My inclination is simply to have our custum thumb drive configured with FreeBSD and when a system is booted with one of these USB drives, a script runs to automate a FreeBSD install onto the hard drives of the sysrem where the thumb drive was booted. I could probably do the whole thing with bash scripts, but is there some other tool that might help in doing this kind of thing. Note that we have a custom kernel that needs to be installed onto the target systems. 



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