automated installations

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Fri, 9 Oct 2009, Duncan Hutty wrote:

> I have looked into automating installation of freebsd using:
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/pxe/article.html
> and
> http://www.locolomo.org/pub/pxeboot/index.html
>
> to achieve a setup where a new client can PXE boot into a sysinstall scripted 
> installation process. Everything that I can find refers to i386/amd64 
> architectures.
>
> Has this also been done for sparc64? I assume that it can if I can create a 
> pxeboot loader for sparc64 as described in 
> http://www.locolomo.org/pub/pxeboot/pxeboot.html but since I'm rather new at 
> this, I thought I'd ask if anyone has tried this before I spend too much time 
> on it.

You'll also presumably need a network card that supports PXE booting on 
sparc64.  I suspect this will be a challenge - as far as I understand it, 
the boot ROM on PXE network cards contain i386 code.

However, I'm not sure why you'd want to do this.  You can easily boot from 
the network and install an OS using nothing more than the standard 
OpenFirmware interface.  Although I can't actually see any proper 
documentation of this on the FreeBSD website, 
http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/sparc64/install.html should be enough 
for you to figure it out.

Thanks,

Gavin