Trying to build 8.0 Headless Installation Disk

Martin McCormick martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu
Fri Jan 15 17:53:09 UTC 2010


Tim Judd writes:
> ^^^  mkisofs needs to have the boot record
> -b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot

	It works! Thank you.

	Here is another question as I am still trying to reduce
the logistics of remotely rebuilding several FreeBSD systems.
The 8.0 CDROM uses mfs and opens up some interesting
possibilities. If one could get some sort of sshd server going
with password security, the install could be directed over the
network. No need to procure terminal servers which all agree are
a great idea to have but which never seem to get bought and
installed.

	Is there a way to safely run the new installer from a
sshd server that one might start with? The idea would be to have
Disk 1 that starts sshd and a kernel. You get staff at the
remote end to remove Disk 1 and install Disk 2 which is the
CDROM containing the 8.0 installation. You then run sysinstall
and it works without clobbering your ssh  connection until time
to reboot.

	The ultimate solution would be to have the installation
CDROM be capable of bringing up sshd with some sort of password
protection. Most systems these days have usb ports which may not
be  bootable, but one could stick a /etc/passwd file on a thumb
drive. When the OS saw it, it would use DHCP to get an address
and then start sshd. No usb drive or no floppy with a passwd
file on it, no network or sshd.

	Thanks.

Martin McCormick


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list