FreeBSD 9.3R installation question(s)

[William A. Mahaffey III]

I will be bringing 2 new boxen online in the next few days/weeks. Both 
were originally intended to run CentOS6 (I even have kickstart files 
prepped & ready to go), however in view of recent success using 
VirtualBox (& in stark contrast to *serious* issues w/ same last year 
this time) & desire to reduce the .... aaaah .... dirversity of boxen on 
my LAN, I decided to use FreeBSD 9.3R on both. Both are AMD A-series APU 
based, 1 w/ 8 HDD's, to become my dev-box, the other w/ 2 HDD's to be 
used as a home-theatre box w/ MythTV. I would like to optimize usage of 
disk space as much as possible on both boxen, so I am planning to 
partition the drives, then RAID the partitions, RAID1 for root, RAID0 
for others, notably /home, where the preponderance of data will reside 
on both boxen. Both setups are similar, but slightly more complex than 
this box, also 9.3R, w/ 4 HDD's, but root on a plain UFS partition, /usr 
on a 3-partition RAID0 (striped), & /home on a 4-partition RAID0. I am 
planning on RAID1 (mirrored) root drive for both boxen, both probably 
created from 16 GB partitions of 2.5" 1 TB HDD's, w/ 16 GB swap 
partitions, & /home getting the rest (*very* similar to how the drives 
on this box are setup). I had a fair amount of noob-ish issus w/ the 
setup of this boxen almost exactly a year ago, as was dramatically 
chronicled onlist. I eventually got everything going, w/ very good, 
patient, & necessary onlist help. Hoping to avert as much drama this 
time around as possible, I am planning to script the installs, to both 
reduce fat-fingered errors & to allow accurate documentation of the 
proceedings in case onlist help is needed. I have created 2 scripts for 
the MythTV box, culled from an online source which I downloaded last 
year, but can't recall immediately (I'll dredge it up if needed, but I 
*think* it was good, although slightly different from my setup). Both 
are designed to be called from appropriate points in the install 
process. I attach them below & have a couple of questions. The 
'setup...' one is to be run before/during the partitioning process, & 
the other at the end, as indicated in comments. The online handbook 
indicates that bootcode can be installed on the mirrored root RAID after 
creation, & before newfs calls. Does this apply for both MBR & FreeBSD 
boot code ? The manual illustrates using MBR code, but the gpart 
man-page seems to imply either should work, comments please. Also, that 
script mounts both newly-created RAID partitions (root & /home) under 
/mnt before returning to the installer, is that proper ? In the 
'finish...' script, the fstab file is written to '/tmp/bsd_install_etc', 
is that correct, or should it be written to the mounted newly-created 
root drive (or both) ? TIA & have a nice labor day.


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.