sysinstall and mfs Great News and another Question

[Martin McCormick]

J65nko writes:
> IMHO it is easier to to install FreeBSD without using sysinstall at all.
> 
> See the "FreeBSD Install Without Sysinstall" guide at
> http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=1538

	This looks very possible with a couple of changes. Am I
right in my reading of the man page of mdconfig that the memory
disk image will gobble up at least as much RAM as the image,
itself? In this case, that's about 600 times more than I have
available. mfsbsd seems as solid as a rock as long as you don't
do something that needs lots of buffer space as there is only
about a megabyte or two left over. tar works fine and I can copy
either an iso image or a tar ball made from the file system over
to the newly-formatted drive where it can be unpacked.  It may
be necessary to run chroot /mnt so as not to munch mfs when
running the install.sh scripts but I think this should install
the system.

	I really have given up on sysinstall for this purpose.
It is hard to script and it appears that if you use the custom
installation, you almost get a system but the effort is hardly
worth it. One still has to install the kernel and many of the
configuration files like /etc/rc.conf. I don't know why but
another artickel I read on remote installation of FreeBSD that
uses sysinstall describes this so I know it isn't just me doing
something stupid. I feel kind of stupid spending almost 3 weeks
finding out what doesn't work.

	When using mfsbsd, one already has enough information in
the interface configuration and resolv.conf to populate /etc/rc.conf,
/etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf to match the present network
configuration. The local time zone is a copy of one of the rule
sets for computing time placed as /etc/localtime. In the middle
of the United States, it is /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago
copied, not linked, to /etc/localtime.

	The goal is to run the script I will build under mfsbsd
and then boot the system in working order as if it had been
installed via sysinstall by someone sitting at a console.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group