Installing 8.1-RELEASE - Problems via FTP

[Teske, Devin]

On May 21, 2013, at 9:39 AM, Tim Nelson wrote:

> Greetings-
> 
> I have need to install FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE amd64 to build some packages. My usual method of installation is via the *-bootonly.iso, pulling the install from FTP. However, it appears since 8.1-RELEASE is old and deprecated, none of the mirrors have the files available anymore to use during the installer.
> 

Poppycock…

BEFORE you get to the sysinstall media selection dialog, make a detour into the "Options", use arrow-up/down to highlight "Release Name", press SPACEBAR, and change from X.Y-RELEASE to "any" (without quotes; also acceptable would be "__RELEASE" without quotes).

NOTE: This will tell sysinstall to *not* try and auto-detect the release directory path on the FTP server but instead use the exact path that you give it.

When you get to the media selection dialog, use FTP-Passive with the following URL:

	ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/8.1-RELEASE/

That should work. The "any" (or "__RELEASE") release-name tells it to not try things like "pub/FreeBSD/releases/<arch>/<relName>" (which obviously doesn't exist, given extra "-Archive" and "old-" prefixes in some of the path directory elements).


> So, how do I proceed:
> 
> 1. Does anyone have a proper URL to put into the installer? I already tried ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org but I think there is additional path info needed

Right… but you really need to make the detour into the "Options" and change "Release Name" to either "any" or "__RELEASE" to indicate that the path you are providing is absolute (otherwise, sysinstall try to intelligently find the directory based off the architecture that it booted from -- this was done to make maintenance easier).

Just go into the Options and set "Release Name" to "any" (HINT: if you were scripting sysinstall, you'd be able to do the same thing with "relName=any") and then use:

ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/8.1-RELEASE

NOTE: Replace i386 with amd64 if you want 64-bit build


> 2. Should I install from the full CD or DVDs? If successful, would I still have problems pulling the ports tree for 8.1-RELEASE?
> 

If you use the above method, you can have the CD pull the static ports collection off the FTP server. However, (and this may be what you desire) just note that the ports collection when installed from an FTP mirror is not an up-to-date snapshot of the constantly-shifting ports tree.
-- 
DevinD

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