bsdinstall to jail aborted (9.0-RELEASE-p3, amd64)

[Darren Baginski]

28.07.2012, 13:46, "Matthias Petermann" <matthias at d2ux.net>:
> Hello,
>
> currently I experienced an unexpected behavior of the FreeBSD bsdinstall installer. Some weeks ago I could use it sucessfully to create a jail environment with
>
> # bsdinstall jail /jails/myjail
>
> Today I tried to repeat this on another system(2) and it fails after the selection of the to-be-used mirror. Also re-trying it on the original system(1) leads to an error but a different one. Since then I upgraded from 9.0-RELEASE to 9.0-RELEASE-p3 using freebsd-update.
>
> Here are the symptoms:
>
> (2) FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE-p3 amd64: After typing "bsdinstall..." it brings me directly to the mirror selection list, but after selecting a mirror it aborts with an error message "An installation step has beeen aborted. Would you like to restart the installer or exit the installer?"
>
> (1) FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE-p3 i386: After typing "bsdinstall..." it brings me to the distribution select dialog. After selection of the distribution set, it shows the mirror selection dialog. After selecting a mirror it aborts with a fetch error "Error while fetching /base.txz: Invalid URL scheme"
>
> I tried different mirrors, too. And they all seem to be basically online - pointing an FTP client to them showed no errors.
>
> So what am I doing wrong? Does bsdinstall maintain some hidden configuration file which may influence its behavior? The environment variables mentioned in bsdinstall(8) are not set on both systems. Or is there a known issue with 9.0-RELEASE-p3 which appears different on amd64 and i386 systems?
>
> It would be great if anyone could validate this.

I did a quick test on 9.1-PRERELEASE,  ant bsdinstall trying to fetch 9.1-PRERELEASE files, which it surely can't find.
There must be an option like 'TARGET' to specify exact version to fetch like it's the case for Debian debootsrap.

>
> Kind regards,
> Matthias
>